Seriously though, I like trading card games like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh but the idea of having to drop large amounts of money on little bits of paper really turns me off. That's why this kind of thing in video game format is so appealing; I get to play the game but don't have to drop as much money on it. However Yu-Gi-Oh games tend to be full of stupid crap and I find the Magic: The Gathering games to be extremely limiting.
Then Hearthstone comes along, which to most TCG snobs may be rather simplistic but it's fast, fun and best of all completely free. All you have to do is download some Battle.net thing and you're pretty much good to go from there, just log in and get playing.
The game of Hearthstone is rather simple. You pick a character based on a class from World of Warcraft and use your deck of minions and spells to drain their health from 30 to 0. Each card has a mana cost from 1 to 10 and each hero has a special skill that costs 2 mana to perform. For example the Mage can cast a fireball that will deal 1 damage which is great for a little DPS boost if you have some spare mana at the end of your turn.
Every single card available in the game is available for free, there is no jumping through pay gates to get more cards in Hearthstone. For 150 in game gold you can buy a booster pack that contains 5 cards. If you want to buy more packs at the same time it costs money, but the game doesn't limit you to how many packs you can buy. It's a little annoying that you can't stack gold purchases but it's a small inconvenience. You earn this gold by just playing the game, there is no way to buy gold from the in game store. Every 3 wins in normal play mode, ranked or not, nets you 10 gold. This sounds like getting a booster is a slow process but the game gets around this by providing the player with "daily quests". A daily quest may be something like "win 2 games with X class" or "Kill X Minions" and each completed quest nets you 40 gold.
On top of that you can spend 150 gold to enter The Arena to get even better prizes such as more gold, boosters or dust for crafting. You keep playing games until you hit either 12 wins or 3 losses, whichever comes first and you have to do it with a deck built out of randomly selected cards. Even if you don't own the card you can use it in arena mode if you get lucky with the drafting, so really it's up to luck but your rank or anything like that is unaffected and the prizes are really good so it's worth doing.
Finally you can craft cards using some weird crafting system that I've not really used much since I started. Basically you can disenchant cards you don't want into dust and then use that dust to craft new cards that you do want. I've not yet played the game long enough to know what specific cards I want for my deck but I imagine this system will become very useful to me later.
So if you like card games I'd absolutely recommend Hearthstone. Even if you don't like Warcraft, the game itself is fun to play so if you can get over the theme there's a good game here. Best of all, you have absolutely nothing to lose. You can play the game for hours and hours and spend 0 money like I have or you can drop a few bucks and get a nice handful of extra cards, but don't be disappointed if those cards don't give you much of an advantage.
Easily one of my favourite games of the year so far.
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