In this post I talk about Hearthstone (and last night's workout!)

I went to last night's Goalbusters class despite being a little sore after doing yardwork most of the day Sunday, and I'm glad I did. Class was good and I think it helped work out some of the soreness I picked up from crawling around under the deck pulling weeds and killing ivy.

Class was a little different than normal, and we're getting into the middle of the run where the warmup is getting tougher. We opened with our normal medicine ball, jumping jacks, split squats, wall pushups and then got into 3 sets of 50 squats. Ouch. the circuit itself alternated between strength training exercises and cardio, 1 minute each as we went back and forth between the equipment and mat stacks... at the mat stacks we partnered up and did waves against each other with the heavy ropes... wow that was a workout. By the 6th time around, I was ready to set those ropes on fire.

Instead of filling up all this space talking about specific exercises and weights and reps though, I'm going to talk about Hearthstone. This is a new CCG that Blizzard has put out, and it just came out for iPad. I played in the closed Beta and wasn't a big fan off the game, to be honest.

Now, though? I really, really enjoy it. They've balanced a lot of cards, the 9 different heroes all feel very different, and with it no longer being a beta release, the player base is much larger... which means it's easier to find people around your skill level.

Thrall vs Uther, early in the match

There are four basic ways to play, first off, you should play against the computer itself. You'll start out playing Mage decks in a tutorial, and it teaches you the game really well. After you finish playing the Mage tutorial, you should play 'Practice Mode'. Here, you can beat all of the 9 heroes and unlock their decks. My suggestion is to unlock all the heroes, and then use their basic decks to play against the basic and expert AI... get every class up to level 10, playing against a variety of Expert AI heroes. As you do this you'll earn free packs, gold, and cards. Don't spend any of that though.

Once you've gotten all 10 classes up to level 10, you can then check out the Arena (card drafting, you'll get to play with awesome rares, epics, and legendaries... but it costs you gold to play, and you can't keep your deck). It costs 150 gold to play Arena, but you always get at least 100 gold back in the form of a pack. Unless you hate drafting, I would never spend gold on packs in the store, I'd always play Arena, as if you get 3 or more wins, it should pay for itself, and even with 0-2 wins, it's a good deal and gives you great experience.

Finally, there's Play mode. Here you play a constructed deck from your collection. You'll need to make decks from the cards and packs you've won, and you can play against other people. Hearthstone removes 99% of all player communication, so you won't have to deal with jerks calling you names when you play.

One final word of note: play Ranked, not Casual. This sounds crazy, but you'll start at Rank 25 and play against others that are newbies in Ranked, and you'll have good games. If you play Casual, you're going to face people with massive collections of rare and gold cards that have insane decks that will destroy you. Don't do it!

The game is fun, free (unless you want to spend real money), and has amazing graphics, sound, and feels very 'tactile'. I highly recommend it.

If you're playing, feel free to friend me on Battle.net! I'm Arsh#1939