Fireside gatherings aren't real.

Yes, they are. They even have a cardback for attending one .


Hearthstone has tournaments, fireside gatherings, and a lot of other events. It's also really easy to hook up and play with people over the internet, because you don't have to meet in person and play with physical objects. ....... This is before we mention the standard internet activities such as twitch, reddit, etc.

Just because you have not really exercised the social aspects of the game, that doesn't mean they aren't there. The only thing we are missing is an in-game chat with randoms, which to be honest is a bad idea for a whole mess of reasons. And since no one can claim MTGO is anything but a pile of dog ****....... I'm sorry but it's gotten to the point where it's Duels too. And the WOTC forums.



In fact, I like Hearthstone better because I don't have to be there in person to play with my friends. I think it's much easier to set up some casual games than it ever was with Yugioh, Duel Masters, MTG, etc. And I can reasonably expect them to have decks capable of at least doing almost as well against me as I do against them, which isn't true of our MTG collection in any way shape or form.

Fireside Gatherings aren't real.

I have the card back. It does nothing to promote Hearthstone. It's literally, "play a game with at least 2 other people logged onto hearthstone near you". Which is trivially easy to get at a college and doesn't really encourage meeting new people to play Hearthstone with (especially since it's a one time thing).

blizzard tries to foster community interactions in a variety of ways. whether they're effective or not is another question. hearthstone has a lot more memes than magic afaik.

Interaction doesn't equal depth.

A game where the objective is to program an AI to compete with other AIs has zero interaction with other players. All the gameplay decisions are made by yourself before the game begins, but the game clearly has the potential to have a lot of depth.

I've played card games where all of the decision making occurs in the deckbuilding phase and your deck plays itself automatically. I don't consider those games to necessarily have less depth than card games where you can respond to your opponents moves.

Chess potentially has more depth than a version of chess where both players are allowed to move pieces whenever they want, which essentially makes the game an atheletic competition rather than a strategic one. Increased interaction in this scenario decreases depth.

Not to say that HS necessarily has more or less depth than magic, just that the argument you made doesn't seem valid to support your claim.

Decks don't play themselves automatically. In fact, from the mulligan phase to lethal, several decks are complicated enough that a lot of people making a living on this game can't play them correctly all of the time.

In Magic if I have 3 creatures and the opponent has 2, I have 8 choices about how to attack (this includes not attacking at all).

In Hearthstone I have 64 choices.

But I find the deckbuilding to be better in Magic than Hearthstone.

decks don't play themselves automatically in hearthstone, that was a different game. The point was that you couldn't determine the depth of a game by looking at the number of decisions.

You have 64 choices but about 90% of them will be bad.

attacking is probably even more obvious in magic than it is in hearthstone.

that's levied by strategic emphasis in other portions of the game though.

I find it way easier in hearth because combat tricks dont exist.

In my experience, combat in Magic is a lot more nuanced because a) the board is likely to be more complicated (75% of the time in hearthstone, somebody's is empty and the other person is keeping it that way at all costs); b) You have to take your opponent's decision-making into account; and c) combat tricks exist on both sides, adding in a lot more variables and the possibility of hidden information.

I dislike Hearthstone because I am a big fan of resource accumulation, which Heathstone's combat system fundamentally conflicts with. Cards feel terribly fungible in Hearthstone and I feel pushed forward instead of moving forward at my own pace.

The plus side of this is that you don't have to deal with those epic games where two people just amass an army and stall out the board until someone has lethal.

Lots of people like that.

Creature stalemates aren't very fun, so it's good that you can't really get them in hearthstone. But sometimes the board goes from full to empty three times before someone wins so it sort of feels like nothing that happened for the first 80% of the game had an impact on the final outcome.

The problem with that is that a turn 2 Shielded Minibot has far more effect on the game than most turn 10+ plays.

Yeah, I like those kind of games, and Magic gives you plenty of options to avoid that from happening.

I'm a fan o epic games. It's probably why my proclivities have slowly slid to EDH

I don't mean "epic" as in an epic battle where someone summons Emrakul and that's how it ends after a really close game.

I mean everyone has an army of 2/2's and no one can attack, so we all summon the equilent of walking corpse everyturn until ten turns down the line someone has had bad enough draws that the other person can actually risk an attack on what has become a board that is as stalled as ****.

^ 80% of magic games I have played have been either that or a complete steamroll (this includes mana screw/flood). Or one person summoning creatures while the other person plays draw-go. I'm not really a fan of any of those.