Voletic Tackles Ranked Hearthstone – Video

Voletic Tackles Ranked Hearthstone – Video

Hearthstone is the next big thing in the ‘eSports’ scene. Combining the competitive environment of trading card games such as Magic: The Gathering with the accessibility of video games and tablet titles, Heartstone is going from strength to strength. Vince plans to attack the ranked ladder with the cheapest competitive deck available. Will he find success? Or will he be crushed by other more powerful internet wizards? Time will tell.

 

Only this past weekend did we see the biggest prize payout to date for a Hearthstone tournament – $10,000. Of course, a prospering competitive scene wouldn’t be complete without its professionals, establish meta-game, theory crafting and occasional controversies.

I myself have taken to the ranked ladder with a popular deck archetype called ‘Zoo’. In the coming weeks I shall be recording my progress, trials, tribulations and with a little bit of luck (or skill?), successes. These recordings will make up a Lets Play series called “Adventures in Zoo” which I will be posting to the site, with updates on my ladder climb.

The origin of the term ‘Zoo’ can once again be traced to Magic: The Gathering; here a Zoo deck often describes a hyper aggressive aggro deck designed to destroy your opponent before they can reach their mid or late game win conditions. In Magic, the deck utilises the most cost-efficient self boosting creatures available to apply aggression, while a solid suite of removal and burn rounds out the deck with answers and reach needed to finish a player off. The namesake comes from the assortment of creature types, from cats and apes, through to the more unusual oozes and lhurgoyfs that the deck uses.

Hearthstone’s equivalent is again an incredibly aggressive deck built primarily of low cost and efficient creatures. It plays fewer spells than its Magic cousin, instead utilising the powerful and cheap creatures as their own form of removal. Although an aggro deck designed to profit from early aggression, the deck is more controlling than the straight up ‘rush’ strategies such as Murloc decks. Disregarding notions of card advantage for the most part, Hearthstone’s Zoo decks are designed to capitalise on the concept of ‘tempo’, curving out correctly and making use of mana more efficiently than your opponent in order to pressure them. Retaining board presence while never allowing the opponent to get a foothold is the main line of strategy here. Going longer than turn 8 will cause the game to slip out of our hands, often ending in defeat.

Warlock Zoo was birthed and made popular by Reynad, a former ‘up and coming’ MTG pro who switched to Hearthstone after some controversy surrounding possible cheating. Regardless of previous controversy, it is evident that Reynad is a great Hearthstone player, his theorycrafting is fantastic and his influence cannot be denied. Arguably, the main reason for the deck’s popularity is its cost. It is dirt cheap in terms of real money. Many other decks in the meta make use of many Legendaries and Epic Rares which are costly to craft, and often come as a result of heavy grinding or real world monetary investment into packs. Zoo throws this out of the window, fielding only a handful of actual rares; the majority of the deck is commons and standard cards. To date, I have spent absolutely nothing on Hearthstone, and plan to keep this up for as long as possible while still being competitive.

In future, and especially if successful, I may publish a decklist and explain the deck’s plan in more detail. But in the meantime, check out the below video playlist for a brief overview and some games on the ladder. Remember, I am no pro. I am here to show you what a scrub can do with a cheap deck, and have some fun. Enjoy.

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