How can I make a fun Hearthstone deck?

January 31, 2015 5:33 PM

I'd like to make a real, paper deck of Hearthstone cards that would be personalized, as a gift for a partner who loves the game. I've played a little but not enough to know what might make the cards fun. Aside from wanting to include friends and family as characters, I haven't any idea where to start.

I have been thinking about this project for a while, but don't know enough about the game to make it fun. What ideas do you have that would make this work? What is a minimum number of cards to include? Is there anything to avoid in crafting cards?

It will mostly be sentimental, so if it's not great cardplay, that's okay, but it'd be great if we could actually play and have fun. Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

posted by robertthebruce to Grab Bag (6 answers total)

A friend made this for me and another friend and it was hilarious. He took a blank card template and substituted the title, image and description of cards in hunter and warrior decks to be jokes about us, and subbed out the image and title on the identity cards. He also tried to keep the same abilities (list here) on the cards. The completed decks had the same progression of mana and attack/defense so it sort of worked (but was mostly just fun.)

Jokes included plays on funny quotes from the past, references to what we do for a living, children, interactions between us, and so on.
posted by michaelh at 6:07 PM on January 31, 2015

A lot of the best decks are about synergy. If you are going for a theme, you could look into synergies that have a corresponding theme.

Say your group is very caring, maybe go for a priest healing buff synergy deck.

If you have a lot of kids or pets running around, consider a zoo with lots of little guys that overwhelm your opponent.

Icy veins and hearthpwn have lots of example decks to build on so there can be something thematic but fun. Most of them do a pretty good job of explaining why you want cards, rather than just being a laundry list.

I'm no hearthstone expert, but me-mail me if google fails you w/r/t the specialized terms and strategies involved.
posted by poe at 6:09 PM on January 31, 2015

I'd say you'd really only need 5-6 "unique" cards to really have the deck feel like it's own thing, the rest you could pretty much just reskin existing ones, with the same mechanics and just different names, art, flavor text, etc. Most decks really only hinge mechanically on about half a dozen specific cards, the rest are effectively generic.

I think you'd want to make a deck that plays in a way that would synergize with the Hero ability for whichever class you're going for, whether invent one out of whole cloth or just reskin something from an existing class. I'd definitely make your partner the Hero, though, instead of a card.

You wouldn't be able to play unless you also cooked up some standard Hearthstone decks on paper, but that should be easy enough. I'd just go for a couple of the starter decks. Apparently China has your back if you don't want to mess around with Kinko's or whatever.
posted by The Master and Margarita Mix at 8:29 PM on January 31, 2015

In addition to what others have said, I'd recommend playing the game some more with your project in mind. It's (mostly) free and the games are short, so it's not a huge investment to get the tone and humor of it right.
posted by Koko at 10:46 PM on January 31, 2015

Riffing on what "The Master and Margarita Mix" wrote just above. Couple of questions that would help us respond. First of all, did your partner *also* play a lot of World of Warcraft? And, if so, did they always play a certain class or have a favorite class (like Warlock or Druid or Mage)? Second, does your partner tend to play one class in Hearthstone? A common theme/source of complaint is that every time the game is expanded or the rules change (in WoW or Hearthstone), some class is now OP (over powered) and other classes have been "nerfed". Some of the cards in Hearthstone can be played by any class and some can only be played by a specific class. One theme for you if you are creating new cards or modifying existing cards is to build the ultimate "OP" deck for your partner. One way to do this is to repurpose cards from another class; the cards don't show an indicator of what class can play it, but sometimes the action of the card is easy to guess/match up with a class. Cards also require a certain amount of "mana" to play, your amount of mana increases as you play a match and there is a lot of drama around late game cards (that require a bunch of mana) turning the tide of the game. Reskinning to make a powerful card "cheap" to play would also be fun for your partner. Cards have a rarity value that corresponds roughly to WoW: cards can be common, rare, epic, or legendary. The epic and legendary cards are hard to come by, so including those would be fun (they have either a purple or orange "gem" in the center of the card). Finally, some of the cards are just funny because of the tie-in with World of Warcraft mobs. As TMaMM said, usually decks are mostly generic with a few class specific cards that work together. You can see examples of decks that are currently in play at Hearthstats; here is an example of a popular mage deck. I hope this is helped, on preview it appears I've written a wall of jargon.
posted by kovacs at 9:07 AM on February 1, 2015

Response by poster: These are great suggestions and info! I don't know if partner has played much WoW, but possibly. Having the info on how the cards work will help make this a special gift. Thanks mefites!
posted by robertthebruce at 8:43 PM on February 22, 2015