With players winning thousands, we asked ‘What is Hearthstone?’

Many will have heard of Blizzard entertainment’s flagship product ‘World of Warcraft’ and the recent ‘Warcraft’ movie based on it’s lore. South Park satirical episode ‘Make love not warcraft’ poked fun at the game and cemented it’s place as part of popular culture.

Since then, Blizzard have gone strength to strength releasing games like Heroes of the Storm, Starcraft, and more recently Overwatch to monopolise the competitive gaming market. However, Hearthstone has become their biggest revenue maker with Blizzard reportedly claiming they have 50 million unique players and has been averaging $20 million revenue since June 2015.

Minions have attack and life points with certain traits

Some of us may have never of even heard of the World’s biggest card game. So what the hell is it?

Well, it is basically a card game based on the World of Warcraft lore. Players have a set amount of ‘Mana’ and each card has a mana cost. The more powerful the card, the more mana you spend to use it. And you have to defeat your opponent by removing all of their life using minions and spells.

The original decklist had 457 cards. Since then, Hearthstone has had 6 expansion packs adding new cards, game modes, card and game board skins, and new playing techniques that has pushed the decklist up to 1641. The game was originally released for PC but has now been developed as a mobile app so people can play wherever they go. 

The game is originally free to play and costs nothing to download. However, it is highly encouraged to buy ‘card packs’ to get the best cards. Each player can create decks of 30 cards to fight against other. Players can choose hero classes that are available in the ‘World of Warcraft’ game. Gameplay changes depending on what class you choose, from either being a Warrior class who benefits from generating armour and having damaged minions, or being a Druid that has the unique ability of generating more mana so they can cast more powerful cards quicker.

It sounds extremely nerdy, but it is very popular. Even with those who have never experienced the Warcraft lore.

It is also pretty easy to pick up, and with different cards having different effects you can chain cards together to create ‘synergy’ to make some powerful moves. Hearthstone began in 2014 but was not the first card game based off the World of Warcraft lore. Upper deck entertainments owned the rights to ‘World of Warcraft trading card game’ but was discontinued in August 2013. In March 2014 Hearthstone was released taking a lot of inspiration from the previous game.

How is it that this simple game has blown up to dominate the E-sport, twitch streaming, and YouTube world? We spoke to Kripparian, a professional Hearthstone player with over 780,000 subscribers on YouTube and has made a career playing Hearthstone.

Octavian ‘Kripparian’ Morosan is one of the biggest names in the Hearthstone community

‘I was sent a beta invite on the first day you were allowed to stream the game. It was very well timed as I was looking for a new game to play. Being a Blizzard game, I was very excited to learn everything about it and it seemed I was not alone with this mindset. Over the years I’ve maintained my spot as the biggest name in Hearthstone by being the most consistent, and putting out high quality content. We don’t take time off, we don’t take vacations, and we certainly don’t take it easy when things are going well. We do our best every single day.’

When asked about how big Hearthstone has grown in E-sports, Kripparian claims it is very hard to keep up with everything that is now happening:

‘With many new organizers and Blizzard taking a much more serious initiative in eSports for all of their games, tournaments happen so often that it is hard for fans to keep track and watch them all. While it seems public interest in the eSports side of Hearthstone grows, it can be hard to measure this growth with so many events often competing for the audience of each others’.

Kripparian is not the only player who has made a living from Hearthstone, Jeffery ‘Trump’ Shih has taken part in many different tournaments with his biggest take home prize was $16 000 for winning first place. Trump also uploads on YouTube and says:

‘I (used to) stream Hearthstone 1-7PM Pacific everyday (6 hours).  Accounting for maybe missing 60 hours a month of Hearthstone, 6*30=180-60-120.  120 Hours of Hearthstone, perhaps?  (and many hours of other games)’ 

The Hearthstone world championship had $250 000 up as prize money with 1st place taking home $100 000. Many have seen the opportunity to capitalise on the game’s popularity and have taken to Twitch to stream their gameplay hoping that they create a career.

The entertainment industry has taken a revolutionary turn towards video gaming in which there are millions of fans world wide supporting different teams.  A new breed of celebrity has been born, and who knows what could be in store for the future? Could we perhaps see more gaming events on TV?