Hearthstone's Rules

In the Beginning

Before there were card games, there was Magic: the Gathering. Every card game exists in Magic's shadow, so if I'm going to talk about Hearthstone, then I have to talk about Magic. Magic didn't start off with well designed cards, but by being first it has the best rules. It's by comparing Hearthstone's rules to Magic's that we can understand what makes them fun.

Digital

Magic is not a great video game. I've played it, even been hooked by it. The UI is awful, the mechanics are clunky, the price is ridiculous, and it can't compete with other computer games. It's not meant for digital.

Hearthstone optimised its digital experience by setting some ground rules:

• 
  No turn phases 
• No decisions on your opponent's turn 
• No decisions during abilities 
• No decisions where you select: 
• yes/no
• multiple objects 
• cards
  
• numbers 
• words
• ordering 
• No objects except minions, weapons, and secrets
• Mana can only be used to play cards & hero powers
• Minions can only be told to attack
• Hand size limit 
• Minion number limit
• Short text 
• Short games
• Simple imagery

These restrictions do come at a cost, but being able to just execute your turn without clunky popups or waiting for your opponent is a godsend. Discover was a nice addition, but anything else that breaks these rules is just doing it for the sake of doing it.

Video games have strengths over tabletop games. I love chatting to people over board games, but sometimes you just want them to be an NPC with better AI. Video games are cheap and convenient. No waiting for cards in the mail, no need to resolve rules disputes, no need to schedule your games.

Most of tabletop's strengths are about freedom. Play with weird rules, fake cards, custom cards, new formats, old formats, banned cards, multiplayer, no timers, and take back mistakes. Hearthstone doesn't have anything approaching the quality of Scryfall. Like playing with old cards? Hearthstone has no vintage cube, no EDH, even Wild has to make do with the nerfed cards. Want to try Old Auctioneer vs Caverns Below? Good luck.

Digital is great for design because digital players actually play the damn game. So much of Magic discussion takes place with people who haven't played with the cards they're talking about. Cube forums are swimming with people trying to tell if a cube is fun without playing a single game. Drawback mechanics like Overload and Bittertide Hydra never took off because how they look is more important than how they feel. I used to play 3 matches of Modern a week, and somehow that was more than most players.

This is also part of why Magic has so much more discussion and writing. Hearthstone players are busy playing the game.

Mana

In Magic, some of your cards produce mana and the rest of them consume it. Draw them in the wrong ratio and you die. Other card games don't even consider using this system. It's easy to describe what's bad about it and difficult to describe what's good about it.

I'm not going to pretend that getting mana screwed is good. No matter how bad you are at Magic, there's no satisfaction in watching your opponent take zero game actions as you obliterate them. This is even worse in a tabletop game, as you watch them visibly stop caring about the game.

The cool part is when someone gets just a few more or less lands than they want. Sometimes you have lots of things to do and not enough mana to do all of them, so you have to stall for time and decide which ones are most important. Sometimes you start running out of things to do and have to either end the game ASAP or juice your last cards for every drop. If you draw the perfect ratio, you'll run out of cards quickly. None of these situations are necessarily a disadvantage, it's just a different role you are assigned.

In a more technical aspect, it means that you don't draw a relevant card every turn. Magic has a very structured narrative; first you make mana, then you use that to play cards, then you use those cards to kill your opponent. At some point you have to stop playing new cards and focus on the ones that are in play. Drawing cards also gives you more mana, so card draw won't stop you from running out of things to do.

Hearthstone takes the obvious divergent path by just giving you a land every turn. This solves the visible problems and makes some subtler ones.

The increased consistency is dangerous. Your 4 mana cards are always coming down on turn 4, and a 2-drop on turn 3 is transparently undesirable. Hearthstone has to minimize the gap between each mana cost so that a 3-drop is not that much better than a 2-drop. In Magic, sometimes your 3-drop is useless against 4-drops, but your opponent only plays a 4-drop 3 turns later, so it's not that bad.

Unless the game is hostile to expensive cards, the best draw will always be 1 of every mana cost to 'curve out' until you're playing multiple 5-drops. This creates its own extreme variance, as decks are under pressure to both find 2-drops in their opening hands and to play as few as possible to make room for more expensive cards. Sometimes you'll curve out by playing multiple cards a turn; a 2-drop, then 3, 4, 2+3, 6, 3+4. In Magic, it's physically impossible to do this because you'd run out of cards. Lands are a type of rubber-banding.

It is refreshing to have this reliability. Where 5-drops are usually unplayable in Magic, it's nice to be able to play 8 mana cards that don't immediately end the game. Hearthstone's combat and base set were hostile enough to expensive cards that you didn't have to curve out.

Without lands, you have more cards on later turns. If you're playing situational cards or waiting for specific combinations, odds are you drew something else you can play instead. With combos easier to assemble, there's less pressure on them to be powerful, and they can exist without warping the game around them. Hearthstone's combat prevents all these extra cards from getting overwhelming, and the flexibility it provides is good.

Overall, how fun is it? In terms of first impressions, it's a huge improvement over Magic. The incentives and implications of it are troublesome, but Hearthstone has shown it can deal with them through smart card design and combat systems. While I've enjoyed Magic's system more, there's no way lands would make it out the door under modern design paradigms.

Combat

Magic has the best combat. Card games have explored every alternative path but they always come back to power and toughness. Power and toughness lets you make minions that are different but equal in strength, is easy to understand, and both stats are important for different reasons. Usually the minions that you want to keep alive (high toughness) are also the most impactful (high power), which makes you care about both while allowing for designs that lean more into one than the other. Trading a 5/1 for a 5/5 feels good. 

Magic's attacking and blocking system is tricky to learn, but is a good balance where you can stop your opponent's creatures without obliterating everything they play. Its tendency towards stalemates is a great narrative structure; Player A starts winning, player B drags the game down to a stalemate, the game pauses for a tense moment as player A tries to break the stalemate before player B can win. Stalemates change the value of cards, so good players will start valuing their cards differently when they see one approaching. It takes careful card design to prevent endless stalemates, and more than half of Magic sets failed to do this.

Hearthstone keeps power and toughness but again starts from the obvious divergence; attacking and blocking sucks in digital, so we'll let the attacker make all the decisions.

Combat systems that involve minions fighting minions come down to a fundamental problem. When 2 minions fight, it will always benefit one player over the other. When one player is deciding which minions fight, they're going to choose pairings that benefit them. These fights usually result in minions dying, which means the losing player has less agency over future fights, which leads to a cascading advantage where one player continually prevents the other from making any decisions. This is especially bad with the mana system, which expects players to have minions of many different costs and sizes to exploit.

Magic's solution to this is to reward players for giving their opponents agency. Attacking lets your opponent decide the pairings, but attacking is how you win the game. This same principle of trading agency for advantage is found in all competitive games, because choosing exactly how much agency to give up is a great test of skill.

Hearthstone does a similar thing by letting you damage your opponent instead of choosing pairings, but stunlocking your opponent lets you slowly kill them anyway. Hearthstone therefore needs to make players concerned with winning quickly. Sweepers, expensive haymakers, Hail Mary plays, combo kills, burst damage/burn, and life as a cost all tell players to get the game over with. The decks full of cheap cards that typically gain board control early need to cash it in for damage before they get buried by more expensive haymakers.

The limit of 1 attack per minion helps. Usually your attacks are denying your opponent attacks, so you don't mind, but trying to kill 4 1/1s with a 5/5 is not worth it. This naturally gets more important as creature get bigger over time, since an 8/8 is much better at killing your opponent than maintaining board control.

Divine Shield and Deathrattle are Hearthstone's greatest mechanics (up there with Magic's Flying), forcing opponents to spend 2 attacks to kill 1 minion. Players are incentivised to ignore sticky minions, which allows the losing players to have some agency without completely giving them board control. Minions buff in the base set never grant more than 1 toughness outside of Paladin, so players aren't punished too much for letting their opponents have minions.

This cascading advantage is good in small doses. It rewards players for making sub-optimal plays to gain board control and correctly evaluating its importance. It tells players to engage with the game from turn 1, which keeps a good pace and encourages playing cheap cards.

Hearthstone's combat is as good as it can be for how simple it is. The haymakers, sweepers, and Hail Marys needed to manage it have their problems, but are also appealing and satisfying to play.

Deckbuilding

Magic decks are 60 cards with a maximum 4 copies of each card. Hearthstone decks are 30 cards with a maximum 2 copies of each card.

What's the difference? Imagine you've drawn the first 20 cards of your deck. You're hoping to draw a specific card that you haven't drawn yet but are running as many copies as you can. In Magic, each draw is a 10% chance to find it. In Hearthstone, each draw is a 20% chance.

Want to slam your C'Thun down on turn 10? You've got a 43% chance in a 30 card deck, 38% for 60 cards. Did you wait 5 more turns? Now it's 60% vs 51%.

This effect of drawing from a small deck is subtle, but always more fun. It gels with the way we (incorrectly) expect probability to work, where nobody can be unlucky forever. It allows for the randomness of card games while keeping the range of possible draws more constrained.

You can see the effect of this in Magic formats with different deck sizes. 40 card limited decks have noticably more consistent performance than their equivalent 60 card decks. 100 card decks will get mana flooded no matter what. Would there be as many complaints about Magic's land/spell system if everyone played with 30 card decks?

2 is also a great copy limit. It's reasonable to track if your opponent has used all their copies of a card. It's simpler to decide how many copies to play. Want it as often as possible? 2 copies. Want to have access to it sometimes? 1 copy. New players tend to handicap themselves playing 1 copy of all their cards, which in Hearthstone is not that bad. Hearthstone also stops new players making 200 card monstrosities.

Got a sweet card you want to make a deck around? You only need one more copy, or not even that for Legends. The need for 4 copies makes it unreasonable to build Magic decks out of cards you get from packs.

Hearthstone's deckbuilding rules are an absolute home run.

Mulligans

For how important they are, mulligans are a tragically neglected aspect of card games.

The basic premise is that you get some influence over your starting hand, but not too much. You need to punish bad deckbuilding, but it's hard to distinguish between deckbuilding and luck. Magic is essentially unplayable without them, while Yugioh doesn't need them at all.

Magic lets you replace your whole hand as many times as you like, but you start with one less card each time. This feels awful. You mulligan a mediocre hand, get a bad hand, mulligan that into a completely garbage hand, and lose. The experience of mulliganing into a worse hand is so viscerally unpleasant that people just refuse to engage with the mechanic. Losing more games is a small price to pay.

Changes to make mulligans less punishing have been added, but somehow the idea that mulligans are not fun never enters the conversation. What sucks about them?

• Sometimes they don't work
• You have to make a decision without knowing the outcome
• Sometimes you lose because you made the 'right' decision
• You start the game with an obvious disadvantage
• You have to put back cards you were excited to play with

Hearthstone does a decent job of fighting these. The penalty of mulliganing lots of cards is subtle. It's not visible if you started disadvantaged. You're never forced to send back cards you like. My ideal mulligan rule for both games would be "Draw 3 extra cards, then put back 3 cards". Hearthstone is the same thing but in a different order, so I think it's solid. Silver medal.

Mulligans are also just not that important in Hearthstone. So many of your plays come off the top of your deck, plus between hero powers and the absence of lands, there's a much wider range of playable draws.

The Coin

Absolutely brilliant. Helps balance out first-turn advantage in a consistent and intuitive way. Playing with the coin adds so much strategic depth. Few turn-based games get this close to first-turn parity.

Conclusion

From a rules perspective, how does Hearthstone shake out? Pretty well. There aren't any simple changes I could suggest or flaws that have come to surface. Blizzard was known for their polish, and nothing that could be described as experimental made it out the door.

Next time is the real test: how did Hearthstone do with its first round of cards?