'Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft' - First Impressions

I recently was lucky enough to get an invite for the 'Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft' Beta card game - it's very similar to Magic: The Gathering if you've played that instead :)

Personally, I find it a lot more appealing than Magic (please don't kill me Magic fans :P), just because I have a more deeper understanding of the lore and characters from the World of Warcraft universe. Fortunately, there's no NDA surrounding the beta at all, so screenshots and video's are very welcome, and Blizzard have encouraged people to show their games off and the like :D

So after installing Hearthstone with the new Battle.net app (also in Beta as of this blog post), I was ready to play ^_^

After a brief introduction to the game via the Hearthstone official trailer, we were launched right into the game proper, playing a familiar Alliance mage by the name of Jaina Proudmoore :)

My first battle was against a gnoll named Hogger, who for those familiar with WoW, is one of the bosses in the lower level dungeon 'Stormwind Stockade'.

As any first battle goes, it was very easy to send Hogger packing, not to mention I could play any card I wanted - the tutorial introduction of Mana (aka Land), was shown to me in the 2nd battle :)

The beginning levels of Hearthstone against NPC controlled characters (there's 6 of them), are very fun to play, each giving me one of their usual taunting lines. For example, I used a Beast creature against Hemet Nesingwary (the Safari hunter from WoW), and he commented that he wanted to skin it haha :D It's small details like that, that make the game more fun to play ^_^

Right now, I'm fighting against the last of the 6 NPC's, and somehow knowing he would appear last, I was overjoyed and excited to fight Illidan Stormrage himself ^_^

Turns out I wasn't prepared to fight him - he makes sure you know that at the start of the battle too :P

I'm finding Hearthstone very fun to play, and so far as beta games go, it's doing a great job! The only downside so far that I've found, is that everytime Battle.net disconnects via the Bnet app, the game essentially quits itself :S Hopefully, they either fix this annoyance, or remove it so it's much like WoW and won't quit the game on you :)

Anyway, I'm back to beating Illidan, though to be honest, I don't think I have the strength to be victorious against him, since he is my videogame idol ^_^