Hearthstone is more complex than Magic The Gathering according to MTG champion

Digital card games – whether collectible or trading – have generally speaking not been very popular with the masses. Sure, Magic The Gathering achieved a pretty large fanbase over the years but it’s still far from being among the most popular games around. This is a genre that comes with a lot of complexity, which is why it doesn’t appeal to many groups of people. Then, there’s the gameplay. You’re just playing with cards at the end of the day, what’s so interesting about that? Well, Blizzard managed to create a card game that’s very interesting and is in fact one of the most popular games around. No, I’m not talking about the World of Warcraft TCG. The game in question is of course Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft.

More than 20 million people have already played this game and many think its popularity comes form the fact that it’s less difficult than most other card games out there. While Hearthstone does indeed do a great job at welcoming players in and helping them learn the game, it’s actually a more complex title than something like Magic The Gathering and this is according to MTG champion Stanislav Cifka.  “From my point of view, Hearthstone is more complex than Magic. You have more choices,” he said during an interview at Dreamhack Bucharest. “Let’s say you’re playing Handlock and you can cast five different spells and at the same time attack five different creatures, it makes it more difficult. In Magic, the deckbuilding is more complex because you have more cards to choose from but playing HS is more difficult, or at least for me. Maybe I’m not that experienced yet.”

Interestingly, Cifka also says that Hearthstone has less RNG than Magic The Gathering. This is a very strange thing to say because MTG actually doesn’t have any RNG-based cards while Hearthstone is full of them and there are a lot more on the way with the Goblins vs Gnomes expansion. But the champ goes on to explain the reasoning behind his statement and it definitely makes sense when you think about it. “In MtG, you lose every fifth or tenth game by getting mana screwed or mana flooded (having too few lands to cast your spells or having too many lands and not enough spells to cast). It doesn’t happen in Hearthstone, that’s why the game is so good.“

Going back to popularity, Hearthstone is currently one of the most popular eSports games around, a feat that Magic The Gathering was never able to achieve. The reason? In short, Hearthstone is simply a lot more fun to watch. “Hearthstone is more exciting for the viewers than Magic. In Magic, you can get into a situation where both players play lands three turns in a row and nothing happens. In Hearthstone, every turn something happens – a card is played or hero power is activated. Even control match-ups are more dynamic, you don’t get the “land, go” for ten turns in a row and that’s more interesting for the audience.”