EPTWell it has been a while since I made one of these blogs, if you have not remembered from my last blog I was not enjoying SC2 much. A lot has happened since then.
I still ended up with Rank15 on the KR ladder at the end of the season. I was playing 2 wins a day just to spend some bonus pool beat some high master/low GM feel good about myself. I just did this to end my final season(for a long time at least)
I attended WCS Finals in Toronto, which was a pretty cool experience, except for the seating/vision/venue bullsh*t issues. But regardless, I noticed that I enjoy watching at home > watching live.
Watching live WCS sucks to be honest. I like chilling on my bed/couch with my gf/alone and watching starcraft. Maybe the seats were uncomfortable, but it just sucked to sit 6-8 hours and watch starcraft non-stop. Might as well though, paid to be there. I think I would enjoy it more if I lived in Korea and went to the GOMTV studio to watch. Couple hours and you can go home. You were pretty much stuck in this venue for the entire weekend, not my kind of thing.
I got a hearthstone key 23 days ago and have been playing/streaming it non-stop since. When I streamed SC2 I got 80-100 viewers, on a good night. While I was keen on streaming starcraft, just not playing it competitively, Destiny started streaming at the same time slot I had found(turns out streaming starcraft late at night was perfect, seems destiny also did the same research) which pretty much cut my viewership in half or more. I had to find a new out.
Its hearthstone time:
Thankfully I had gotten a hearthstone beta-key when Destiny had returned (actually alot because I have multiple bnet accounts) and to be honest I fell in Hearth with Hearthstone. Absolutely amazing game with HUGE HUGE potential. Blizzcon cemented my opinion about the game when it was getting more viewers than SC2 at some points, and thewierd part is that Hearthstone is a CLOSED-beta currently, most people are not even playing it!(even though 1mil+ betakeys have been sent out)
If you haven’t noticed I made the complete switch to hearthstone and never been happier. I have a very very very long history in TCG’s. TCG’s has pretty much been my entire life for 14 years. I was pretty good in the Pokemon TCG attending World Championships 5x , and my skill have transferred over pretty well. In a matter of 6 days I was Rank Master 3 in constructed(with 77% win rate) under 80 games. A lot of people think it’s a pay2win game(especially in constructed) and it is not by ANY means.
But EggY HS is pay2win:
My top3 decks are very cheap and 90% of them are cards that you get for free when you level up a Hero. You may need 1-3 rares per deck(costs 100 dust to get you get about 95 dust per booster pack) and prob 1 epic per deck(costs 400 dust) and the epics aren’t usually necessary, but nice to have.
Totalbiscuit showed it is not pay to win also by crafting a full legendary deck(which would cost sosososos much money) and it sucks really bad.
But listen here. If you want to play for free. YOU CAN. I’m guessing people who want to just turn on the game play some, earn some gold/booster packs its really really easy, and you can get to a high level doing so.
If you want to be competitive be prepared to spend some money, it’s a card game after all and to be honest if you’re playing SC2 and want to be seious or anything, you buy a keyboard/mouse/headset right? If you really want to be “good” for competitive Hearthstone buy 50-100$ worth of boosters will be more than enough a good percent of the time, and you can earn booster packs if you want to.
Closing Thoughts:
What’s next for me? Streaming and Hearthstone. The community for hearthstone is really amazing and fresh, it reminds me of the World of Wacraft community when I played a few years ago. Nice great people. Personally the SC2 community has become just really butt-hurt/angst/angry/mean and I just don’t care for it anymore. Even one of the guys I had “beef” with still brings up our drama 1+ year later, doesn’t even compute in my mind to be honest, well technically I am bringing it up too right now but I
guess I had bring some proof to my previous claim. I’ll still watch a tournament if foreigners play, I love to see them excel, I could really careless for personality-less Koreans and maybe I will play a little.
My stream is really booming and I hope that soon enough I can become a personality/pro. I am having really great support from my regular viewers.
I have recently been signed to IvD gaming(SC2 team with Puck, Apop, Massan) for their hearthstone division. I feel they are the first E-sports team to sign a hearth stone division and are moving in the correct way. So thank you to their sponsors MSi, Twitch, and Natverk Teknik.
I don’t know if there ever will be such a thing as a hearthstone pro. Maybe. 100k+ viewers at blizzcon shows it has potential to be an esport. But the community and blizzard have a while to go before we get to that stage. We will see what this year hold for us and the Hearthstone community. Its it just a HYPEstone effect?(see what I did there) Will it the closed-beta Hype fizzle out once it released? Are we all just hoping that this becomes big so Blizzard can make a comeback on the Esport page?
I don’t know, but you know I’ll be playing.
Until next time
