I played the first game of irl Hearthstone Commander!
This will be a really long post. TLDR: It was fun!
Introduction
Last night, during our usual MTG Commander Night hangout we ended up trying out this little pet project I’ve been working on for a while: Hearthstone, but on paper. I’ve been playing Hearthstone since 2014, with some on and off periods, but my friends haven’t touched the game for over 8 years. We do play a lot of Commander, though, so I thought it’d be fun if we tried the format using the good ‘ol Hearthstone cards and quirks.
In this post I’ll try to make a rundown of how it works and what the game looked like. How I adapted certain things, what worked and what needs some fine tuning. This is more of an ‘experiment diary’, for those who might find interest in it. All I know for now is that we’ll be playing again soon!
What is Magic the Gathering Commander? Commander is the most popular format of the most popular card game. It’s a (mostly) casual 4-player free-for-all game in which players have 100 card singleton/highlander decks that are ‘commanded’ by a Legendary creature which the player may cast at any point of the game by paying its cost. The format lends itself to very thematic and synergistic decks that often create wacky and memorable situations.
Paper Hearthstone: How?
When I first started to look into adapting the game to a physical format, even if I knew we’d end up playing Commander, I focused on making the actual game work on the classic Hearthstone 1v1 format. Being a completely digital game, Hearthstone obviously has many mechanics that only make sense in that context, like card generation and random effects. But I was sure that there was much more Hearthstone beyond that, so what I did at the start is take a look at the collection and note all the cards and mechanics that could translate to paper completely unchanged.
Note: The guys over at the Cardmarket youtube channel already made a video showcasing paper Hearthstone once, a video that I had seen before but that I totally forgot about until writing this post. I just rewatched it and it looks fairly similar.
What got cut
There are many cards that do not make sense in a paper setting no matter what you do. This involves most instances of the word ‘random’ in a text box, although not all of them. I’m mainly referring to cards that say “Add a random spell to your hand” or “Summon a random minion”. It’s just not feasible nor does it make sense for this, so they just got ignored completely. Discover has similar problems but I will discuss it later.
Hand and Deck Tracking is another big one. Most TCG players do not grasp the idea of handbuffs, because that’s not something that exists in cardboard. How do you track which minions were in your hand or deck when you played the buff? You don’t. The same is true for set cost reductions like “Reduce the cost of a minion in your hand/deck by (1)” or “If you’ve done X while holding this…” they are hard to translate without gameplay changes, so both of those get cut too.
Another thing you can’t do on paper is generate cards that don’t exist. And with this I’m not saying you can’t copy stuff on board, Magic and other games do it, or use cards that get you other specific cards that you can account on before the game, like First Flame giving you a Second Flame. I mean cards that say “Add a copy of this minion to your hand”, which minion? Depends a lot on the situation, it’s not reliable. The same goes to “Copy your hand” or Dead Man’s Hand effects. You can add specific cards to your hand, but you can’t add any card to your hand. Copying effects on board is easier and more manageable with tokens.
Not all cuts are due to gameplay impossibility, some are for simplicity. A good chunk of cards with random targeting got the boot as well. Deciding the random target of a Deadly Shot is easy enough with a dice roll, but how do you determine what hits your 27 attack C’thun? Do you make 27 dice rolls? Probably not. That’s an extreme case, but the work vs reward of cards like Arcane Missiles make them a bad gameplay experience.
Then there’s shuffling cards into decks. There are two different cases for this. Shuffling stuff into your opponent's deck is off the table since these games are played with sleeves that are often of different colors, maybe it isn’t the end of the world but I decided to ignore it for now. The same goes for Cast When Draw cards, in the videogame those are forced actions that happen automatically, but here would need the player revealing that they drew it to resolve them, which can lead to some intentional missed triggers that I don’t want to deal with. Not only for “negative effects” like plagues and bombs, but cards you shuffle intentionally into your deck can lead to contentious situations that I’d rather tackle in the future. These are not impossible mechanics per se, but very low priority for me.
Finally there are all the wacky virtual-only effects that only make sense in a videogame. I’m talking Yogg’s Wheel, splitting cards in half with Mes’Adune or Jerry Rig Carpenter, cards that reference wild as “cards from the past”, transforming your minions with Evolve or Lady Prestor… Hopefully I covered everything, there’s a lot to talk about and this is a long post.
What didn’t change
Not all is bad news. The stuff that remains the same is probably the biggest percentage of the game, but also the more obvious one, so I will just glance over it. Combat, Mana, Hero Powers, Turn Structure… Most of the fundamentals of the game are still there, so it will be easier explaining the stuff that did have to change.
Beyond the core of the game, this list of keywords can also be translated one-to-one from virtual to paper without any change: Battlecry, Charge, Combo, Deathrattle, Divine Shield, Dredge, Echo, Elusive, Finale, Freeze, Frenzy, Honorable Kill, Immune, Inspire, Lifesteal, Magnetic, Manathirst, Overheal, Overload, Poisonous, Reborn, Rush, Silence, Spell Damage, Spellburst, Stealth, Taunt, Windfury. The rest may need from small tweaks to major reworks in order to work.
Then there are some mechanics that are also implemented unchanged but only a selection of cards that make sense. For example, the Titan keyword functions the same, but cards like Norgannon or Yogg-Saron, Unleashed aren’t playable since they involve casting random spells or secrets. Besides that, the main problem they have is that all their abilities aren’t shown on the card itself, but they are cool and iconic enough that having some reference aids isn’t the end of the world.
There’s a pretty similar case with Galakrond and the Invoke mechanic. There’s nothing wrong with Invoke by itself, since the only thing it does is trigger a Hero Power and upgrade Galakrond, which is easy to resolve and track. The problem are some of the effects of the Hero Cards and Hero Powers. Priest’s adds random minions to your hand. Rogue’s reduces the set cost of cards. Warlock’s summons random Demons and Warrior’s gives handbuffs to minions drawn. All of these have some of the mechanics I stated as cut. The only exception would be Shaman’s Galakrond, whose Battlecry and Hero Power are perfectly fine by these restrictions.
The last thing worthy to mention here is the Temporary keyword. The mechanic of “this card must be played this turn or otherwise is discarded” is perfectly fine, but only doable if your opponent has knowledge of it, so a card like Throw Glaive would be okay but Deadline would not. Again, the list of playable cards is curated to account for these quirks. With these “Core” mechanics that are completely unchanged, about 55% of Hearthstone is already playable.
Mechanics that had to be adapted or tweaked
Before, I covered everything that didn’t need any change or that had to be straight-up cut. These following aspects mostly work in a paper setting but needed either some clarification, reinterpretation or amount of reworking for them to feel better here.
Start of Game effects, Deck Requirement effects and Quests
Start of Game: Mechanically unchanged, just here to point out that due to the non-digital nature of this, it is the player responsibility to announce the Start of Game effect, shuffle the card into the deck and, most importantly, make sure the deck complies with the restriction, since there’s no automatic check from the game deckbuilder. Also note that currently the only qualifying Start of Game cards are Baku, Genn and Darkbishop Benedictus.
Deck Requirement effects: This refers to cards that check if your deck has no Duplicates, Minions, X-Cost cards, Neutral cards, Even/Odd cards… Normally, this requirement is only checked the moment the card is played, so you could, for example, play some minions in an all spell deck. Here, though, the conditionality would have to be met from the start, since there’s no reliable way to make sure the requirements are being met dynamically during the game.
Quests: Also mechanically unchanged, the only difference is that you’d have to announce before the mulligan that you are playing a Quest and that it is starting in your hand, so it can be left apart before shuffling.
Other conditional triggers
With conditional triggers I’m referring to cards that require either other specific cards or game actions in order to make their effect, and which requirement would usually be hidden information for your opponent. The basic examples are “If you’re holding X, do Y.” and “Draw a card, if it’s X, do Y.”, which come in a variety of flavors. In the game client, these effects resolve automatically without revealing any information to the opponent about the card that fulfilled the restriction. On paper, that doesn’t really work, the card that resolves the effect would need to be revealed to the opponent to ensure the condition is being met.
Let’s use good ol’ Wrathion as an example. The card reads: “Battlecry: Draw cards until you draw one that isn't a Dragon.” So, you would draw a card, before it enters your hand you may decide to reveal it, if it’s a Dragon, you repeat the process until you aren’t able to reveal a Dragon or decide not to do so.
Secrets
Following the topic of hidden information, Secrets may need a slight revision, especially for a 4-player commander format (even if I’m focusing on adapting regular Hearthstone and multiplayer is an afterthought for now). Normally you’d play a Secret and the first time during your opponent’s turn that it’s condition is met, it automatically triggers. On paper stuff doesn’t trigger automatically, it needs player input, and I’d hate if the outcome of a game changed because of a missed trigger from a face-down card, intentionally or unintentionally.
In spirit, Secrets are Hearthstone’s way of interaction during your opponent’s turn, there’s no instant speed or reactive effects that you can choose at any time. But on paper we are not limited by the game boundaries and interactions. This is why I believe Secrets should be able to trigger at any time their condition is met, regardless if it’s the first time or not, leaving it up to the Secret owner. This obviously pushes the powerlevel of Secrets, but it’s probably a price worth paying in sake of a better game flow. Especially for this hypothetical Commander format with four players, it would be pretty terrible design if most of the Secrets were triggered by the player sitting right after you. This change both boosts player agency and strategy while trying to remove feelbad interactions. If Secrets end up too strong and it becomes a problem, I can always reconsider alternatives.
Player agency over targeting
This next adaptation follows the same philosophy behind the Secret change. Basically, whenever a card prompts an action that usually the game resolves randomly by default, here the player would have the option to make a choice instead (as long as the card doesn’t state explicitly that the result is chosen randomly). What do I mean by this? If I play Animate Dead with the effect “Resurrect a friendly minion that costs (3) or less.”, normally the minion I got would be random among the possible options, but the card doesn’t say it must be a random one, so on paper we would be able to choose our preferred target for the spell.
This accomplishes two things: giving more agency and strategic depth to the player and also reducing the amount of dice rolls and other ways to determine random outcomes as often as possible. Basically, if the card doesn’t say it’s random, you can now choose the target of the effect. Being it resurrection, discarding a card, buffing a minion. This mainly impacts Deathrattle effects that had to be resolved randomly since you couldn’t choose during an opponent’s turn. Again, more of a quality of life change rather than an impossible mechanic that needed to change.
Positioning still matters
The board still has seven minion spaces, and their relative position among each other is still important. When you summon a minion you need to decide if you place it to the right or left of your other minions, since it may impact the targeting of some effects, just as the actual game. The only thing that changes here is that you can now choose in which position you want to summon minions created by the effects of spells, other minions or Hero Powers, like a Shaman’s Totem or a Silver Hand Recruit. We aren’t limited by the simplified processes and boundaries of the client, so it’s another QoL change.
Tokens created by spells and minions
Magic has a pretty neat rule regarding tokens that I did not appreciate enough before working on this. When a token leaves the battlefield, a token being any minion that didn’t start in your deck, it is removed from the game. It does not go to the graveyard, it can’t be bounced to your hand and cannot be shuffled into a deck. It just stops existing, does not even count for resurrection effects. This removes a lot of headaches in so many ways that it would be too long even for this already extremely lengthy post.
The only difference between this and Magic is that in Magic there are no cards (that I can recall right now) that create cards in your hand. For example, a Fire Fly adding a 1/2 Elemental. In this situation it would still be treated as a token, but it can remain in your hand until it is played. If an effect would force you to shuffle your hand into your deck, that token would be removed instead.
Discovers and Tutors
Finally, the big one. How does one handle the Discover keyword playing on paper? This is the first major rework I’ve done, but I believe the approach makes sense thematically, mechanically and encourages deckbuilding in a different and interesting way.
Players now have a 10-card “Discoveries deck”. Think of it as a sort of sideboard which you don’t access between games, but rather during one. It’s an extra deck from Yu-Gi-Oh, or, in Hearthstone terms, one very big E.T.C. The big difference is that each Discover card searches for specific cards among your Discoveries deck, some of them get you weapons, other spells that cost (3) or less, other Murlocs... You need to craft this utility deck in a way that makes sense for your gameplan. This extra deck would still be limited by regular deck restrictions, so if you're already running two Ice Blocks, you can't add additional ones here. Of course there are cards that make this mechanic completely busted, you could just stuff your extra deck with 10 good spells and get a bunch of “Discover a spell” effects that get you the best option every time, so there may need to be some balancing around that. Perhaps limiting it to only the weaker Discover cards, like “Discover a 1-cost card”, it’s less powerful but still versatile. But I think it’s a way to salvage a lot of cards that would be locked behind random generation and at the same time creating new interactions and decisions for this paper format. In any case, I opted to not use the Discoveries deck for this first playtest, since the players already had a bunch of new stuff to learn, but we will be trying it out the next chance we have.
Then, there's Discovering cards from other classes. I am yet to give the proper thought to this, but in theory you'd just add cards from these other classes to your Discoveries deck and only have access to them when prompted correctly, so "Discover a spell" wouldn't work but "Discover a spell from an other class" would. This would open the door for archetypes like Thief Rogue to do pretty nasty things, it can either be really fun or too unbalanced, I'll work on it.
But Hearthstone uses the Discover keyword not only for generating cards from outside the game, but also for searching cards from your deck or graveyard. This is pretty straight-forward, if regular Discover lets you choose a card from your extra deck, this would let you choose any card from your deck or graveyard you want as long as it complies with the restriction (eg: Discover a friendly Deathrattle minion that died this game). Yes, this does make Tracking the most busted card ever, we’ll deal with that eventually.
Those are the “direct tutors”, cards that you play and search whatever card you want from among the options. But there are other “soft tutors”, more akin to Hearthstone's current approach. When you have a card that says “Draw a spell”, the game just gets you a random spell from your deck. Here those cards would work in the same way, but since you can’t magically draw a card that meets those criteria, what you need to do is reveal cards from the top of your deck until you get one that matches, then shuffle the rest back into your deck. It is worse since you may be giving a lot of knowledge of your deck that you normally wouldn’t ingame, but it’s a more accurate translation of the mechanic than what we had to do with Discover, so I’m fine with it.
Now there’s only one thing left regarding tutoring cards: Recruit. If “Draw a spell” is the soft tutor version of “Discover a spell”, then “Summon a minion from your deck” is the soft tutor version of “Recruit a minion”. It has always bugged me how the Recruit mechanic has been handled, it should have probably been an evergreen keyword or not have been a thing at all. So here when you recruit a minion you get to choose the minion you want from your available options. It pushes the mechanic a bit while creating the parallel with Discover.
With these changes, a bit over 60% of Hearthstone becomes playable on paper, and hopefully provides a smooth play experience while still feeling like playing Hearthstone in its essence.
Planned keywords
These are mechanics that are technically doable with little to no rework, but that I haven’t yet given them the proper thought and so I have left out for this first game, especially since I wanted to keep things simple for my rather inexperienced players.
Excavate: This can be implemented alongside the Discover mechanic. When you Excavate, you grab an excavated treasure from the Discoveries deck with the respective rarity. Not hard to conceive with the current version of Discover.
Miniaturize and Twinspell: Even if not impossible to implement, since they just create a specific card in hand, I decided to ignore them for now for simplicity’s sake.
Quickdraw: Has the problem of being a hand-reliant mechanic that is hard to track, but perhaps is feasible since Magic has a very similar mechanic in Miracle. They are different though, in Hearthstone you can activate a Quickdraw effect at any time as long as that card entered your hand this turn, while Miracle cards must be played only if they are the first card you drew this turn and immediately as you drew it, before it even enters your hand. This is to avoid shuffling these cards around your hand. If I checked correctly all the Quickdraw cards are compatible with a similar translation of the mechanic, although they would probably be worse.
Starship: Not currently contemplated but they probably could without changing anything. Haven’t given them much thought and kind of ignored them due to personal bias, to be honest.
These would introduce just around 77 cards, which is less than 2% of the total cards in the game.
Keywords not implemented
These are mechanics that would need some amount of rework in order to work on paper.
Adapt: Not currently implemented, quite low priority. It is hard to do so not only because of the random aspect of it, but due to the long and often unintuitive list of possible adaptations. Perhaps it could be simplified to “get +1/+1 or a Bonus Effect of your choice” which is more manageable to remember and maybe even pushes the mechanic a bit. But since this is quite the rework and Adapt is by itself an irrelevant mechanic I decided to ignore it for now.
Corrupt: This has the same issue as most effects relating to your hand, like handbuff and set cost reductions, which is tracking card changes on hand while the information is hidden. The only way this could work without a major rework would be that, the moment you play a higher cost card you may reveal the Corrupt card from your hand, indicating to your opponent that that specific card is upgraded now. It’s not clean, I don’t really like it, so I’m leaving it out for now.
Forge: Same problem as Corrupt.
Infuse: Same problem as Corrupt, perhaps even worse. A possible change that would entail a major rework of the keywork could be to remove minions from your graveyard equal to the Infuse cost. This would make it very similar to the Corpse mechanic, which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing.
Outcast: This is the big one. If the other mechanics that involve your hands already have challenges, this one is straight up impossible. It’s not viable to track the position of cards in your hand while playing on paper. This will need a major rework and it will need to be a good one since it’s one of Demon Hunter core mechanics. If you have any idea I’d love to hear it!
I believe around 70-75% of Hearthstone can be adapted to paper without any card text changes, just by the reinterpretation and rework of some mechanics. The main thing is to make changes that still make those mechanics feel like Hearthstone and work with the rest of the game without major trouble.
Hearthstone’s Commander Format
We now have a pretty strong basis for Hearthstone as a cardboard game. So it’s time to get the commander specific mechanics rolling.
Normally, the player who goes second in Hearthstone starts the game with an extra card and a Coin, but Commander is a 4-player game mode, is everyone getting a Coin? That feels too much, so for this first game we tried the first player starting with three cards and the rest with four, with no coins. This may change.
Then there are the decks and life total. Magic uses 100 card decks and 40 life for each player. That amount of life seems fine, since in Hearthstone we’ve had it with effects like Prince Renathal and is a known amount that works for longer games. Where we will differ is in deck size. Around 40% of a commander deck in Magic are lands, in other words, Mana. We don’t need that. So a 60-card deck, twice as big as a normal one, feels like a good place to start trying numbers. Commander is also a Highlander format, and we like Highlander here, so we will keep that as well. I’ll avoid using Highlander cards for now, since they are really easy to slot in if you’re forced to play singleton anyways (and we don’t really want four people playing Reno Jackson on a set 40 life total).
Finally, the namesake of the format. The Commanders. A Commander must be a Legendary minion and you will have access to it during the game by paying its Mana cost to summon it from a special area called the Command Zone. In Magic your commander determines which cards you can put in your deck, but Hearthstone already has that with classes. A restriction I will use for this game is that all commanders will be class-cards, so no neutral legendaries, this may also change but it feels on flavor.
One of the key aspects of your commander is that you can replay it multiple times even if it dies. Any time your Commander would be removed from the battlefield, be it by dying, getting shuffled or (we’ll add this for Hearthstone specifically) transformed, you may return it to the Command Zone instead. In Magic, you can then recast it again by paying an extra and cumulative 2 Mana, known as the Commander Tax. Here, though, we’ll tweak that idea, since Hearthstone’s Mana is capped at 10 and many minions would become unplayable quite fast. Instead of a Mana Tax, a Commander that dies for the first time goes Dormant to the Command Zone for a turn, if it dies again then it’s Dormant for two turns and so on. This takes advantage of a key feature of Hearthstone to enhance the gameplay, which I honestly love.
And with that we’re ready to play a game! (I hope)
Our first Commander game
As I said, my friends haven’t played the game in a while so I decided to build pretty straightforward decks. I tried to avoid any set-specific mechanics and overly-complicated interactions. I didn’t want to be stopping the game for every card they played, especially since Hearthstone text doesn’t always explain what the card does. Explaining “What does Dredge or Tradeable do?” is easy enough, though. We also played without Discovers and with very few Tutors, just to decrease the number of decisions and deck knowledge required, but we’ll be trying them at another time. The decks aren’t particularly good or optimized, I just picked a theme and ran with it. I also tried to make different styles of gameplay, some more Aggro-ish, more Tempo and Control, to see what worked best in the format.
The Decks
Player 1 - Totem Shaman ft. The Stonewright: This was intended to be the more aggro-ish list, with the added benefit that the longer the game went the more you get to scale your Totems. The main problem the deck has is that with a 60-card highlander deck the density of Totem cards is a bit too low.
Player 2 - Dragon Druid ft. Fye, the Setting Sun: This is just the basic ramp Druid package with a bunch of Dragons stuffed into it. Druid has four options for a Dragon Commander, and Ysera and Rheastrasza aren’t available right now, so it was either Fye or Topior. Topior does look pretty good as a Commander since you can stack Battlecries, but Fye felt better as a dragon spam payoff.
Player 3 - Deathrattle Hunter ft. Gorm, the Worldeater: This is probably the most out there deck but I love the concept behind Gorm and I wanted to see if making it reliable and recursive would help it become more viable. The plan is simple, play a bunch of eggs and sac rewards and get the big 12/12 out as soon as possible.
Myself - Control Paladin ft. High Priest Thekal: I ended up with this deck since conceptually might be the more complicated one to grasp. The idea is to take advantage of the base 40 Health of the format to: play Thekal on 3, spend the next few turns healing up with spells and lifesteal minions and then repeat, to effectively have twice or thrice the health of the other players while you control the board.
How the game went
First I’ll make a quick retelling of the events of the game and afterwards I’ll provide an insight about how it felt gameplay-wise.
The Hunter deck had the most explosive start. It got to play a few eggs in the first turns and sac them with Gorm, which created a pretty threatening board early on. Shaman made the widest board, but didn’t draw enough totem support so it didn’t apply as much pressure. The Druid played exclusively ramp for what it felt like half the game and doubled the mana of the other players. I, with Paladin, played Thekal early and started healing back up with a small board presence, which just a bit later became a pretty big presence once I started playing some buffs and auras.
But the first turning point of the game was once Gorm was awakened. Even starting with 40 health you don’t really want to get smacked on the face with 12 damage every turn. So there was a bit of politicking until I dropped my Argent Braggart and copied the 12/12 statline. Now there were two big threats on the board, the Druid still had an empty board and the Shaman had taken some non-favorable trades that left him with barely any minions.
Then the Druid used the not often seen Origami Dragon to steal my Braggart stats and then naturalized Gorm so suddenly they were in charge of the game with a huge Divine Shield and Lifesteal dragon. The Origami Dragon eventually traded with the Hunter’s big Scavenging Hyena and he would fall behind for the rest of the game. I was able to restabilize with Kotori Lightblade casting a double Blessing of Authority. Meanwhile Shaman’s cards just felt like a minor inconvenience for the other players, without ever feeling like he had a path to victory.
Long story short, Hunter and Shaman die and becomes a 1v1 between the Druid and myself. The Druid had assembled a pretty big board of big dragons which were still somewhat bigger than my buffed dorks. But perhaps I could race him since I had about twice as much Health thanks to my Commander. But a well timed Alexstrasza ended my life before I could finish the job.
This is also quite a simplified and dramaticized version of the game, everyone got to do “their thing” at some point and it felt swingy in a good way.
Gameplay analysis
The game actually ran smoothly and we had so much fun. In no moment it felt like “we could just be playing Magic”, it felt distinctly like Hearthstone but in a way I’ve never experienced before. The game lasted a little over an hour, which is about the same time we take for a Commander game, but also taking into consideration that the players had to take extra time understanding the cards and mechanics they weren’t familiar with.
Regarding the tracking of health changes, stat buffs and other game actions… We did use A LOT of dice, but surprisingly not an unmanageable amount. Health tracking was what scared me the most about playing Hearthstone on paper, but I have definitely seen more dice in some MTG games. If you’re used to playing TCGs or roleplaying games you should be set for a game of this.
Board wipes and removal felt strong and swingy, but that also happens in Magic, which is why there’s a ‘social contract’ against wiping the board repetitively. Hearthstone does have a lot of such removal, and quite efficient at that, so that’s something to keep an eye on. Even so, when the board did get wiped players were able to rebuild almost every time. The one time Hunter and later Shaman weren’t able to do so, they died that same turn, which feels like natural game flow. They weren’t stuck for a few turns topdecking like it often happens in grindy Magic games.
And like I said before, the decks I built weren’t especially strong and also varied in playstyle. I had a hunch that the slower and heavier decks would do better in a gamemode like this, where decks are inconsistent and players have a lot of health. Which is why the main thing I’m unsure of after this first playtest are the deckbuilding rules. Perhaps forcing highlander isn’t what Hearthstone needs, due to a few different reasons. First is deck consistency, Hearthstone does not have the density of cards to support certain archetypes with a single copy of each card, perhaps removing the singleton clause would open the door at faster gameplans. The other reason is that Hearthstone already has many highlander payoffs, right now those cards would be autoincludes in every deck (which is why I didn’t include them in any deck, particularly Reno Jackson), I guess I’m just unsure if it makes as much sense as in Magic. I’m open to hearing thoughts.
We did not play with the Discoveries deck, but we did use Discover for cards that check the graveyard and deck. The one that got played was Hunter’s Nine Lives. Getting to search and choose the card you want felt fine, it encourages deckbuilding in a different way that we’re used to in Hearthstone and opens design space. Tutor cards in the sense of targeted draw like “draw a spell” also felt like a good implementation, in some situations you may need to reveal a bunch of cards before you hit the right card, but those I’m game actions that I’m used to from Magic as well.
We didn’t get to seemany Secrets before the Hunter died. Just ZOMBEEEES!!! and Emergency Maneuvers, which were used to support Scavenging Hyena rather successfully. They felt cool to use but I am still a bit wary of them, mainly for mage. But I will reconsider them once I see them in other contexts.
There are a few cards that got way stronger due to the nature of a 4-player format. For example cards that check the whole board like Sea Giant and Mogu Fleshshaper, which can get out for much cheaper than usual (neither of them had a big impact on the game, but it was a neat interaction). But certainly the card that got the greatest glow up was Cornelius Roame, which now can draw many, many more cards per turn if it goes unanswered. At first I thought that Divine Favor would be the card draw that would be pushed the most, but after playing Roame I never had the need to even cast it. Roame will be on the radar if it looks like it’s an autoinclude in every commander deck.
And finally there’s the Commander mechanic. It honestly felt amazing. They pushed the decks without feeling overwhelming. Going dormant on death felt balanced and appropriate. I believe each player got to cast their Commander three times. A home run, in my very biased opinion.
Final thoughts
You’re still reading? Really? If any of you actually did read it, I want to thank you and hope you found it interesting. I had a lot of fun working on this and I feel like my friends enjoyed it too, so mission accomplished for me. We may be playing in the future, so let me know if any of you would like to hear how that goes. I’d also appreciate any feedback or ideas.
Hopefully I didn't miss anything or assumed something important as obvious, this text is stupidly long already. Also obligatory comment about how English isn't my first language so I probably misspoke a bunch!
I know some people might find it pointless to play a game such as Hearthstone outside of a computer. But I love this game, even if it has its ups and downs, and I love playing with my friends, so this felt like a great inbetween.