Introduction
With the recent pack price increase announcement, I’ve figured out that it might be a good time to write it now. To be perfectly fair, Hearthstone is not really “f2p” game – it’s a freemium game. Even though you have a solid card collection without spending money (after all you’re capped at around 150g per day from Constructed, not to mention Arena), you have to spend tons of time instead. It’s not easy for casual players to keep up with all the new releases and keep their collection fresh.
In this article, I will share a few advice on how to get most out of your gold & money, I will talk about disenchanting and whether it’s worth it or not and also talk a bit about which packs you should buy when you play Standard format. I know that most of those things might be already known to you, but if you’re a new player or you didn’t think about it before, it might be useful.
Quests
I’ll start with Quests, as they’re the main source of Gold for casual players. If you aren’t aware of that (I hope that’s not the case), you can reroll up to 1 Quest per day if you find the one you get either hard to finish or just not fitting your taste. Let me start by bringing one figure – 53g. That’s the average gold you’re getting from the quest, counting every quest possible. It means that, in theory, if you want to maximize your gold gain over long run, you should reroll the the 40g and 50g quests. But it’s not exactly correct because of the 2 other things.
First of all, there is a hidden cooldown on the Quests which most of people don’t know about. As far as I remember, the cooldown has been tested to be 3 days, but it might be higher for the 100g quests (since they’re rare, it’s much harder to test it). It means that if you recently got a higher Gold quest (60g+) your chances to get a new one will be slightly decreased before the cooldown goes off. The more high gold quests you’ve finished in the last 3 days, the harder it will be to get a new one. It brings the real average closer to 50g than 53g.
Another thing is the gold gain per 3 wins. Every 3 wins, you get extra 10 gold, which makes it on average 3.3g per win. So, in theory one 50g quest can be much more profitable than another 50g quest. Let’s say one Quest is to play 10 Pirates. It can be easily accomplished when playing Pirate Warrior, a deck with a high win rate. So let’s say you finish it after 2 games with Pirate Warrior and you win one of them – you got 53.3g in total. But let’s look at another quest, like Play 10 Enrage minions. Now, since Enrage minions aren’t that strong and they aren’t really played in any strong deck (you can play Bloodhoof Brave + Grommash Hellscream in Control Warrior, but the deck is really weak right now and it will take you a lot of games to finish the quest) you will probably have to just throw in a random deck with every Enrage minion you have and take it to the Casual ladder, probably losing 2-3 games in the progress. Not only it might take longer, you don’t make any ladder progress, but you also don’t get the extra gold for the wins.
So in the end, if you want to maximize your Gold gain from quests, it’s always worth it to reroll the 40g quests. When it comes to 50g quests, it’s 50/50 – if you get something you can accomplish easily, with a viable deck, it’s not worth to reroll it. But then if you get something that you need to finish with a wonky casual deck that was made specifically for that quest – it’s generally not worth it and it’s better to reroll it.
Also, remember that you don’t have to finish every quest each day. You can keep 1 or 2 quests in your log and don’t finish them if you rerolled into something you don’t want. Let’s say that you reroll a 50g quest into a 40g quest. Now you can wait and try to reroll it yet again next day.
But is it worth it in the end? If you take the most efficient approach with your quests and rerolling, you can get up to like 10-15g more per day. It doesn’t seem like much, but that translates to 35-50 extra packs per year. Like I’ve mentioned, it’s a tactic that helps in the long run – you won’t feel like you’re gaining anything, but trust me, you are, just very slowly.
P.S. I wouldn’t recommend putting fun over maximizing gold gain, though. For example, if you get a 60g quest that you just don’t want to finish (e.g. Play 50 cards from a class you don’t play), feel free to just reroll it. There is no point in forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to just to gain 10 or 20 more gold in a video game.
Disenchanting
The disenchanting tool isn’t really the most efficient one – it usually takes a few cards to craft one. But if you squeeze everything out of it, you actually might be able to find a lot of extra Dust. When it comes to disenchanting, the main question is – how much are you willing to sacrifice? If you want to completely maximize your Dust gain (and thus collection progress towards the strong decks), you should do the following:
Disenchant Gold cards. Just like that, get rid of your Gold cards. They’re completely pointless from the gameplay perspective. If you don’t care about shiny things and cosmetics, they’re like a Dust factory. The truth is that Gold cards are worth A LOT more than the regular ones, especially Commons. Normal Common disenchants for 5 Dust, Golden one for 50. That’s 10 times more, most of all the rarities. Golden Commons & Rares are relatively easy to get, as they’re seen in the packs pretty often. I did that when I first started playing Hearthstone and that’s the main reason why I could enjoy competitive decks very quickly even though I was f2p player.
Just to give you an example – I didn’t need to Disenchant Golds from Mean Streets of Gadgetzan, because I had enough Dust anyway. But if I got through my MSOG collection and disenchanted only Gold Commons & Rares, that would give me a whooping 2.050 Dust. That’s enough for a Legendary + an Epic just for getting rid of cosmetics I don’t need anyway. And if I ever run out of Dust (I probably will considering the 3 expansion per year) I will just get rid of my Golds.
Disenchant unplayable Legendaries. One Legendary can be turned into 4 Rares, 1 Epic or 1/4 of another Legendary. It’s not a great rate, but it’s 400 Dust after all. This one gets more risky, because it’s really hard to define an “unplayable” Legendary. For example, we might get some terrible Legendary in Un’Goro. Should you disenchant it? Right now, yes, it would be worth it. But we still have few expansions before the card rotates into the Wild. More synergies might pop out, a bad card might actually turn out to be good. Sure, there are some lost cases like The Boogeymonster which you can safely disenchant no matter what, but the truth is that most of the “bad” Legendaries can be good some day. Then, if you care about the Wild format, the card will stay there forever. Maybe 5 years from now it will actually dominate the meta. I mean, at this point you probably won’t be playing the game or you will have enough Dust to recraft it, but my point is – you get the initial Dust, but you risk that one day the Legendary might actually be good. If you’re willing to take that risk, here is the list of the cards that can be disenchanted relatively safely.
Disenchant the Wild cards. Okay, this one is only for people who are 100% sure that they will never play the Wild format. Remember that Blizzard has announced making it more accessible and adding more Wild events, so think carefully before committing into it. See, the thing is – if you never play the Wild format, but you have some Wild cards, disenchanting them means free Dust. It also means that you will never really be able to get back into the Wild unless you’re willing to recraft all the stuff again. Here is the thing – I have played maybe a dozen of Wild matches since the formats were introduced, I don’t think I will ever focus on the mode, but I’m keeping all the cards, because I’m not sure what the future will bring. However, that is undoubtedly a way to get tons of Dust. If you were playing since the game’s release and have a solid collection from GvG, TGT and Naxx, BRM and LoE bought (those will be the Wild-only expansions very soon), you can probably get at least 20k Dust for getting rid of everything.
Use Amazon Coins
When it comes to real-money purchases, make them with Amazon Coins. As simple as that. It’s just not worth to buy something straight from the store, because you can – depending on the current Amazon offer – save up to like 40% on the packs. Here are all the information about Coins, the ongoing promotion etc. I also made a guide on how to buy Amazon Coins in the countries that have no official access to Amazon. I’ve been buying Coins like that from Poland since TGT and it has been working for me & my friends. However, it apparently doesn’t work for everyone – a lot of people are having problems. I don’t know if it’s because they made a mistake somewhere along the way (the method is a bit complicated) or maybe it depends on other circumstances, but remember that it might not work for you.
However, it still should be 100% safe to try. Even if you end up buying Coins but won’t be able to spend them, you can always get a full refund from Amazon Customer Support (they’re really great!)
Buying Order
Sure, you know how to get the Gold/Dust/Coins most efficiently, but what are the best cards to spend them on?
If you plan to play Wild mode, the order actually doesn’t matter. You want to buy packs from the expansions that you’re missing most crucial cards from and you want to craft the most powerful cards from the decks that you want to play. Easy. However, in Standard it matters much more which pack or adventure you buy.
Each Standard year consists of up to 2 years worth of expansions (this year & previous year). It means that this year (2017) once the first expansion comes out, the new Standard Year will start and cards from 2015 will rotate out. Classic cards will always stay in the Standard, besides the ones that rotate into “Hall of Fame” set (but you’re going to get refund for those, so it doesn’t matter), so the safest pack will always in Classic pack. There are tons of Classic cards that are still going to see play, so if you’re a new player, you should invest in Classic packs first. However, if you have a decent Classic collection already, if you want to maximize the value of your cards (how long they’re in Standard), you should always buy packs from the latest Standard year.
For example, right now buying TGT pack would be pointless if you plan to play Standard. The set will rotate out in less than a month and no matter what card you get, it won’t be playable soon. Buying packs / adventures from 2016 is much safer, as they will stay in Standard for one more year. However, if you want to be most efficient, you should wait a bit for the new expansion and buy packs from that. Journey to Un’Goro won’t rotate out of Standard until 2019, giving you full 2 years worth of value from your cards.
Also, remember that it’s worth to buy at least 30-40 packs from each expansion. Your first packs are worth most – since you have 0 cards, you open A LOT of Commons and Rares you don’t have. There was no expansion yet that didn’t have a bunch of powerful or at least playable Commons & Rares. The more cards you open, the less value you’re gaining from your packs. Once you have most of the Commons & Rares, the pack’s value goes down significantly – the chance to open an Epic or Legend you want is really low. So if you need some cards from the older expansions (e.g. Whispers of the Old Gods), I’d recommend stopping at around 40 packs and then crafting the Epics & Legends you need and focus on opening packs from the latest expansion instead.
Closing
If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comment section below. And if you want to be up to date with my articles, you can follow me on Twitter.
Good luck on the ladder and until next time!
