New Year’s Resolutions/Challenges – Hearthstone Edition

Introduction

Think positive, find a better job, hit the gym, stop smoking… We all know those, don’t we? All the “new year, new you”, promising to be a better person just because the new year starts. I mean, what’s the better time to start improving yourself?

But we also know that most of them turn out to be empty promises. In the end most of them are meaningless and you’re just back to your bad habits. So I’ve figured – why not take a step down and make the resolutions you can keep? Hearthstone resolutions. It’s hard to quit smoking, but in comparison, how hard it is to quit playing Pirate Warrior? With Hearthstone resolutions, you can make your own and possibly even everyone’s ladder experience better!

I will give you a few ideas for a fun Hearthstone resolutions or challenges you can make. You can pick each one of them, some of them or you can just ignore it and move forward. It’s ultimately up to you, but I hope that you will find at least some of them fun!

Play Some Non-Meta Decks

Okay, it’s easy to understand. Everyone wants to win. But since tomorrow is the first day of the new season, ranks don’t matter that much yet. You will have whole month to grind stuff back. So maybe instead of taking part in this rat race back to where you were (no matter if you want to grind back rank 15, 5 or Legend), stop for a bit and play something unusual.

Meta decks are the decks we face all the time. Aggro Shaman, RenoLock, Miracle Rogue etc. There is nothing wrong with them – they’re so popular because they are strong and/or fun for the people who play them. But let’s be honest, it gets really boring to see the same decks all the time. Meta has already stabilized after Gadgetzan’s release (month is a lot of time in Hearthstone) and we tend to see the same decks all the time. When a few most popular decks make 80% of the ladder, everything is predictable and stale.

So why won’t you (and you, and you) try to change that by playing non-meta decks? Decks that – obviously – aren’t that strong as the top tier ones, but can make up for that if you’re good enough with them or even with the surprise factor. In a stabilized meta, surprise is really strong weapon – if you play a deck that your opponent doesn’t expect, they can mulligan or play incorrectly.

Tomorrow I will have another article ready – this time around with my deck recommendations for the New Year. It will include some non-meta decks you can try out and see for yourself that playing something that no one plays can be fun.

Play Your Favorite Legendary* In Your Own Deck

*Legendary that doesn’t see any competitive/meta play.

Okay, here is the thing. You know that one card you really, really love and you would like to play around with it, but it doesn’t actually see any competitive play? It might be bad, it might be out of the meta right now, but you would like to play it somewhere.

Just play it. Open the deck building screen, pick a class and put that card in the deck. Then build the rest of your deck yourself. It can be built around it, it can be something completely different, just do it yourself – no netdecking, no copying card for card from other decks. If you want, you can build a wonky deck to play in casual. But you can also try your best, make a semi-competitive deck and try it on the ranked ladder. Because why not? It doesn’t matter if it’s Wild or Standard, just pick the Legendary, play the deck and have fun.

For example, I really like Rhonin. I’ve experimented with the card A LOT when TGT came out and I’ve always really liked it. Adding 3 extra cheap spells to your hand makes the Archmage Antonidas or Malygos synergies really amazing. So I’m going to build my own version of Reno Mage including those synergies. Sure, it’s really late game heavy and it will probably fail against a lot of the decks, but I really love the Malygos-centered decks and killing someone with 3x Arcane Missiles from almost full health is a great feeling!

A Blast From The Past

This one is mostly for the players who play Standard format, but it’s also possible for the Wild players (if they didn’t do it already). Last one was about the favorite Legendary cards, now it’s all about your favorite deck. Favorite deck ever, not right now. Meta is changing every expansion and sometimes even the decks that were strong last month aren’t really good right now. But let’s go even further. What about the deck you’ve loved to play 6 months ago? Maybe 2 years ago? Well, you still CAN play it.

Build a deck in a Wild format (it works best in there) and just try to recreate the deck you’ve liked to play most. Maybe you’ve liked the play style of Egg Druid? Flooding the board, buffing all your small minions, constantly refilling your hand and finishing the game off with Savage Roar. Or maybe you’ve enjoyed the good old Fatigue/Grinder Mage? Playing slow, high value cards, putting a Taunt wall, duplicating your minions, winning most of the games by completely running your opponent out of resources. If that deck was fun back then, maybe it’s still fun right now? You won’t know until you try it.

If the deck is no longer playable in the form it was, e.g. Patron Warrior (RIP Warsong Commander), you can remake it slightly or just pick a different deck.

You can even make a connection between this and the last one – you can play your favorite Legendary in your favorite deck from the past. I might play my favorite Legendary of all time (now out of Standard) – Kel’Thuzad in what might not be my favorite deck ever, but the one that I remember to this day really well. It was a wonky Deathrattle/Ancestral Spirit/Reincarnate Shaman. I dislike the Shaman class in general, it had no real appeal to me, but this one deck I’ve really enjoyed. That’s why even though it’s not my favorite deck, it’s the one I remember best. I can even upgrade it now with all the new cards, maybe even try to make it playable on the Wild ladder!

Out With The Old, In With The New

Look at the names of the decks you have saved in your game. Write them down somewhere. Now, delete each one of them without looking. Wait, what? What’s the point?

Now, try to recreate each one of those decks by using only the names, from your memory, without looking anywhere. In theory, you probably have the same decks you had before. But in practice, it’s nearly impossible to not make a mistake here and there. Add a card that wasn’t in the deck. Maybe remove something that you forgot about. After playing them for a bit, you might realize that, but the early experience should feel much more fresh. When playing one of the decks, you will constantly try to remember if that card REALLY was there or you just put it right now. Maybe you will actually remember that you’ve put a wrong card in there, but that card will win you the game. Maybe the deck will get weaker, maybe it will get stronger, who knows?

Outside of the fun factor, it’s also a good memory game. I did it a few times before, with only one deck instead of my whole collection and I’ve still ended up with a few mistakes each time. If you like the deck building part of the game, you will enjoy the part of being forced to be innovative when you end up with 10 cards you don’t remember and you have to patch those holes.

Fit Body, Fit Mind

While being a HS resolution/challenge, it might have a great outcome on the rest of your life. It’s somewhat close to a drinking game, but instead of drinking you, well, exercise. Every time something happens, you do something small. It will kill two birds with one stone – you will exercise AND you will have a way to immediately blow some of your steam off in case something rage-inducing happens.

First, you need to set yourself some “triggers” and then the things you want to do. Triggers can be, for example:

• Losing a game.
• Your opponent playing Patches the Pirate/Reno Jackson/Flamewreathed Faceless/(insert a card you dislike here).
• Winning a game thanks to the topdeck.
• Opening a higher quality card in a pack (Epic/Legendary). Or vice versa – opening a 40 Dust pack.
• Your opponent dealing more than 20 damage in a single turn.

Those are just a few examples. You can add whatever you like to the list. Now, each time one of those happen, you need to do something. This one should be adjusted individually, depending on your body capabilities. But for example, you can do between 2 and 5 push-ups depending on the trigger. It’s not much, but it will pile up over time.

Don’t Reroll The Quests

I mean, if you’re doing it to maximize your gold gain, because you’re a F2P player I understand. But if you do that because you don’t feel like doing something, don’t do that!

I know people that might reroll a quest a few times before it ends up with one of the classes they play most. Right now it’s not only about classes, because the quest pool got much larger, but that’s even better. Challenge yourself to play something you normally don’t instead of simply rerolling.

Let’s say you get “Play X Secrets” quest. You might just immediately reroll it, because you don’t play any decks with Secrets. But it might be a great opportunity to let your inner deck builder out and make a Secret Mage deck with the new synergies we’ve got from Gadgetzan. “Play X minions with Divine Shield”? I got this quest recently and I’ve made a Midrange Paladin based around Divine Shield synergies. It wasn’t the best deck ever, but it was really fun to play and I’ve actually won 2 games in a row against meta decks. In Legend! Of course, the deck was really bad, but first building a deck around a certain theme and then taking it to the ladder and actually winning something feels amazing.

A lot of the new quests give you an opportunity to do that. But it’s not only about the new quests – old ones, like “Win X games with Y/Z Class” are also fine. Pick a class you don’t usually play and try to make it work. Overcome your weaknesses and expand your class pool. And you might find out that you actually like to play something you didn’t play before, who knows.

Closing

Oh how fun would the ladder be if people would stop the meta train, even for just one day per month. Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against those, everyone wants to win and if you want to have fun, you can play Tavern Brawl. Well. you won’t stop everyone else from doing that, but you can play something else yourself.

What do you think about those resolutions/challenges? Will you try any of those? Maybe you have your own ideas? If you do, please share in the comments – if they’re fun, I will definitely add those to the list!

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!

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