Magic: The Gathering Arena and Hearthstone are both popular online digital collectible card games, but they share few similarities. MTG Arena is a digital adaptation of the popular physical card game Magic: The Gathering, with a player base that spans both physical and digital games. Hearthstone, on the other hand, is a League of Legends game developed by Riot.
Both games have the same basic mechanics: players draw creatures/spells from a deck and have a resource pool. However, Hearthstone has a key difference in its interaction system, as players cannot cast spells on their opponent’s turn. This makes interaction slightly different from Magic.
MTG is more complicated than Hearthstone, with more mechanics, mana, and rules. Hearthstone offers a more streamlined and accessible experience compared to MTG, with quick matches and simpler rules. However, it may not hold a candle to Magic in terms of complexity.
In summary, Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering are both popular card games with similar gameplay mechanics and mechanics. While Hearthstone offers a more streamlined and accessible experience, it may not be as popular among players who prefer traditional card games.
📹 Stop Playing Hearthstone Start Playing MTG
📹 Can a Magic Deck Beat a Hearthstone Deck?
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Reason 1 is precisely why I will always defend the existence of lands in MtG, no matter how many times I lose to mana screw/flood, no matter how many people say “yeah MtG is a great game but lands kinda suck”. Lands are the necessary evil that gives life to the MtG color pie, making every single combination of colors possible.
I’ve been a long-time hearthstone player for a few reasons: it’s (in most metas) more tempo focused as a 4/4 can’t just completely shut out several 3/3s, there are some nice digital-only mechanics such as discover, and there’s 0 chance of mana flood/screw. There are absolutely upsides to MTG – notably the wonderful commander format – and as such I play both games, but I will generally pick hearthstone over mtga personally.
I did the switch last summer from Hearthstone to MTG and haven’t looked back since. My problem was i couldn’t crack under 1500 in legend to get the 11x star bonus, been very close many times (1600,1550, etc…). Its just so frustrating to spend many hours on the game grinding ladder, doing it for almost 2 years then never hitting it cuz time decay bumped my rating up or i go on a fat losing streak towards the end and cant recover. Now I’m just a filthy casual playing commander and I love it.
I quit playing when they banned all the fun cards but let ODD Paladin exist for the longest time. Shudderwock wasn’t a problem and anyone who disagrees is wrong. It took forever to set up in a game and countered control decks so they thought a deck that was at it’s absolute best B Tier was the problem when ODD Pally had a 60% WR for the entire meta and than they also allowed The DK Hero Warlock and Cube Druid to exist forever and did nothing.
I unironically re-downloaded the game the other day after ~3 years without playing it, and now it has like four or five different games within the game, and all of them are more entertaining to play than the main game of, you know, Hearthstone. And looking into it, it seems it’s a quite popular opinion too, the game is literally better if you don’t play the game.
Welll after the whole 30th anniversary debacle with magic people arent to happy with the game and wizards of the Coast at the moment, so some would say that magic is not really good right now but I’m not one of those people Per say but wizards is making alot of bad decisions business wise but I will still play the game cause I like it and my deck is pretty expensive I just put survival of the fittest in my meren edh deck if that gives and insight on how much money is in my deck
i have a tinfoil hat theory that the devs don’t nerf the broken shit because they enjoy playing it. the power creep has gone way too far and after playing runeterra for a bit ive realized how restricting hearthstone is and at the same time allows so much freedom it just leads to completely broken builds. and nowadays thats all you see or the waves of bots that is yet another problem they dont deal with. lately all the news surrounding the game has been pretty negative. sucks to see man
I think you could actually make a semi-fair format out of MtG vs HS with just a little setting of base rules. 1) MtG cards that refer to “color” refer instead to class cards. Druid or Hunter = Green, Mage or Shaman = Blue, Priest or Paladin = White, Warlock, Rogue, or Death Knight = Black, Warrior = Red, and Demon Hunter could be put where ever you want based on if you want to count physical color or philosophy more. Neutral cards are colorless, as established. 2) Equivalencies must be established. Weapons are Artifact – Equipments and vice versa. HS Spells are Sorceries, while magic Instants and Sorceries are HS Spells. Minions and Creatures are synonymous terms. Maybe Secrets and Locations are Enchantments and vice versa, an Enchantment can be treated as a Secret or as a Location. 3) There are a handful of keywords based on the attacking/targetting/blocking procedures of both games, which would need reworked if the other game’s targeting rules are used. To be honest, I think either system could work. – 3A: If both players use MtG style attacks, attacks are declared all at once and the defender chooses blockers. The keywords Taunt and Rush would need reworked to stay relevant – Taunt could be converted to Reach without much issue. Rush could be a trigger, “when this enters the battlefield, it may fight target creature.” IDK. – 3B: If both players use HS style attacks, then attacks can be declared at any time, one at a time, with targets chosen freely. The keywords Flying and Menace would need reworked to stay relevant as well as Unblockable which may or may not be a keyword, I forget.
If Carl is gonna cheese and say “minions aren’t creatures”, then Thoralf should have answered that in hearthstone only SPELLS are SPELLS. Minions and equipaments are not creature spells… But they aren’t non-creature SPELLS eighter hehe I think the hearthstone minions shouldn’t be able to attack the FLYING creature. PS: Warlock hero power is considered by far the best one.
Two things that I think probably should be considered for if you guys do this again, which you probably won’t. 1. Minions don’t count as non-creature spells because they aren’t spells. 2. The rules being largely hearthstone dominated definitely gives a disadvantage to the magic deck. It may be a bit more complicated, but I think Hearthstone attacking into Magic needs to deal with Magic rules for blocking, while Magic gets the advantage of choosing who they attack in hearthstone, with flying, islandwalk, etc, all reading ‘ignore taunt’
Using the Hearthstone attack rules both ways didn’t really feel fair, but you have to make judgment calls on these crossovers. Having different attacking rules would make the one using Hearthstone mode much powerful since they get to pick their targets. I wonder how it’d go if they both used Magic rules. That would also have the advantage of not making all evasion ability worthless.
Phrasing Hearthstone’s opening three card opening hand as “a seven card hand, but four of the cards are lands,” because of the consistent mana generation, is such a fascinating perspective. I love how Carl essentially recreated the old Bolf+Jailer combo by sacrificing the rest of his cards to give one creature the power to tank all the damage.
As a fan of both MTG and hearthstone I really loved that vide. You rock guys! I just want to point something for the viewers that have not played hearthstone during that period – the warlock deck Thoralf played in the last game was actually really oppressive to the meta so the inital quest got nerfed twice, it originally required the player to take 6 damage to progress to the next phase rather than 10. Also the final rewarda is a creature that basically makes it so until the end of the game any damage the warlock takes on their turn is instead dealt to the opponent. If that was the version played in the article, Carl would have been defeated much faster.
There are some phrasings that you could use to make Hearthstone conform with Magic nomenclature. For example: Minions (and Titans) are Creature Spells. Buffs are basically token creature enchantments (which can be removed by Silence effects). Locations, for namesake reasons and lack of interactability are lands which take up a board slot. Secrets and Sigils could be treated as enchantments. Spells are obviously sorceries. Combat basically works like: “The opposing player chooses the minions/creatures you block with, they have to choose creatures with taunt” Also because the graveyard barely matters for Hearthstone players, spell cards can just be treated as creature enchantments for display purposes. There are a bunch of other effects that can represented, like: Stealth being Hexproof, also applying to combat declaration “Elusive” (not really a keyword, but recurring), being Shroud
Thoralf had actually made his homework! Even shaman is a tier 1 deck and Questline Warlock is a respectful strong deck right now (probably like tier 2). Both decks are from wild (the equivalent to legacy), but despite the starfish, neither deck was taylormaid to match the mtg decks, which surprised me how well they got around the Carl’s shady workarounds
I’m not certain that a grounded hearthstone minion would be able to attack a creature with flying directly given the nature of the ability difference. I honestly might have interpreted that as pseudo-stealth that doesn’t go away after attacking given the nature of how the two abilities work in their respective games.
I ran paper hearthstone at Blizzcon one year for a pre-con event before it is suuuper interesting…love the article! I remember trying to figure out everything needed to represent the game state so this was a bit of a nostalgia trip. I still have the tokens I used for effects kicking around somewhere I think (I’ll share a photo on Twitter if I do). There was maybe a few things I would of changed interaction wise but it’s very tough when deciding how things work I’m sure. Super smart sideboards 😉
11:20, there are auras in Hearthstone. They are usually from creatures, like “Tundra Rhino”, “All friendly beasts gain charge” is its aura. There are also other permanent auras like “Barnabus” ‘s battlecry, “All minions you summon cost for the rest of the game”. Lastly, there are auras that you cast, which effect your boardstate, like a card from Fractured in Alterac Valley, “Dun Baldar Bridge”, which is “After you summon a minion, give it +2/+2. Lasts 3 turns”. So there are many different types of auras
This is a very interesting experiment but because of how some other rulings were made it feel like rush should not let you attack creatures as it specifies minion. But it was decided that creature =/= minion. Also because minions are not spells in Heatthstone as shown by them not being affected by counterspell technically the artificer would not have triggered and caused a card draw.
This just felt weird, every call was made against mtg. Thoralf was playing wild vs Carl playing Modern, flying and protection were ignored while taunt and all hs effects got to take place. Felt like some more equal rules could have been used, or at least not an mtg deck that mainboards multiple ignored mechanics
I’d like to see this again with the MTG player having a more basic deck to better see how the core mechanics interact. The attacking rules would end up being a lot more meaningful that way, e.g. if the Hearthstone player attacks face the MTG player would have the option to block, while if the MTG player attacks face the Hearthstone player can’t block, so playing a more creature focused MTG deck would really change the dynamic. And, as Carl mentioned, there aren’t instants in Hearthstone, so playing a more instant-heavy MTG deck would also make interactions more interesting.
Objection: MtG has a blocking system that was just never engaged with. Hearthstone has a similar system with Noble Sacrifice and other effects that redirect attacks, so any time the hearthstone deck attacked, blockers would have needed to be declared. For similar reasons, while Taunt would prevent MtG creatures from attacking (because MtG has no system to just attack creatures normally in combat), Hearthstone would also be unable to declare blockers against any MtG attacks.
Okay, Hearthstone minions should really count as mtg creatures. They are definitely in the spirit of creaturehood. On the flipside, though, how does a kobold librarian attack a flying creature? I guess you’re treating all Hearthstone attacks like the “fight” keyword? This is the first of these where I think crossplaying the two systems could actually be fun with a few rules.
This makes me want to see a Magic deck go up against a Pokemon deck just because of how silly the gap in damage and HP values would be and the fact the Pokemon player could win by simply killing six of your creatures while you can only win by either milling their library or killing ALL of their Pokemon.
I think an interesting fight would be between Magic and Legends of Runeterra, they both have similar gameflow. Both games have different speeds of spells, assigning blockers and equipment, which I feel would even the playing field a little bit more. Some keywords just couldn’t be played, like Lurk that have a hard time being emulated in an physical card game, but I think It would still be interesting to look into.
will have been fun to see a degen wild deck from history like barns into 10/10 turn 3 or Neptulon with his 1/1 that summons 2 4/2 windfury and Neptulon letting us kill turn 3/4 or the many other super early killing decks or full combo 18:38 should have been finished already has the raise dead dealt 3 to him and finished it already making the next questline of that turn 12/10 (then the last questline part activates) so nothing changed for the turn but worth noting 😀
Great article, but Thoralf is wrong with saying warlock hero power is the worst, when in actuality it is the single best hero power. Warlock’s class identity is probably the most tied to its hero power, and for a long time in the history of hearthstone, Warlock always got slightly weaker cards due to the strength of Life Tap.
11:20 well there technically are auras in hearthstone, whether that be hearthstones own version of aura which just attaches to the hero itself and gives some sort of buff to minions or card advantage. But aura thats like magic would be like a “blessing of wisdom” which is basically a spell you put onto a minion and whenever it attacks draw a card.
ouch. heartstone all minions basically being targeted removal by attacking (also reusable if not dying), against magic which is “based” around that creatures can’t be targeted without specification, seems problematic. (imagine playing a mana dork deck) also heartstone guaranteed to never have a dead land draw, but always something playable each turn. thats hard. guess you have to play a creature less strategy, or general a deck that wins without really interacting with your opponents board and combo wins. maybe in a rematch, make the combat so, that the magic player may chose the attack target. and the heartstone attacks just swing at the player, and blockers can be chosen. basically, attacking into the heartstone field brings you into the heartsone battlefield and therefore heartstone combat rules apply. and vise versa.
Thoralf was dead wrong about warlock’s life tap hero power being the worst. It might be a bit weaker now that everyone has pretty good card draw in every class but the reason “zoo-lock” was so insane for years was because you could empty your hand, then draw an extra card each turn to keep the aggro pressure on. Also life tap was very strong in control decks and combo decks. And bringing the demon seed to fight Carl is super not fair. The demon seed was banned in standard and nerfed at least twice and really important tech pieces of the deck were also nerfed and it’s still a tier one deck in wild.
I would have played walls and blocked them when they attacked since damage clears at the end of the turn and being able to block creatures that choose to attack you is a Magic mechanic. It would have been very hard to do some of the 0/5 damage requirements in a single turn. And if they had even a little bit of power, it would have killed things eventually.
Great article. Seems like the magic player has no reason to run creatures if they can be targeted by attackers. They should play constellation since there is no enchantment removal. In fact, Solitary Confinement just wins for the magic player unless the hearthstone player has like Mechathun or some other specific things.
I’ve got a article idea for you guys, not sure if it’s good or not: Normal magic, but players can only make decks from cards that are banned or reserved in any format. 821 cards to choose from. Since these decks might get expensive, feel free to opt to do proxies lol. Scryfall search: “banned:standard or banned:future or banned:historic or banned:timeless or banned:gladiator or banned:pioneer or banned:explorer or banned:modern or banned:legacy or banned:pauper or banned:vintage or banned:penny or banned:commander or banned:oathbreaker or banned:standardbrawl or banned:brawl or banned:alchemy or banned:paupercommander or banned:duel or banned:oldschool or banned:premodern or banned:predh or is:reserved”
Really needed to be playing control or maybe some sort of combo deck here against a HS deck. The ability to play things in response to your opponent is the greatest weapon the Magic deck would have and it was a little under-utilized. Needed some instant-speed removal. Also a boardwipe or 3 would have been pretty clutch, I guess he figured he wouldn’t need them since HS can “only” have 7 minions and they can’t block but their power can still get quite out of hand, and with being behind on life from the start you need more time to build up mana. There’s definitely better decks that could be played.
The fact he was using a mono white magic deck proves he was giving the Hearthstone decks a severe advantage. Pit a shaman deck against a red deck, and the outcome would be wildly different. Most mono blue control decks could probably beat most hearthstone decks. It’d be interesting to see a warlock deck go up against a mono black deck. Especially if the black deck is mainlining Necropotence, or Yawgmoth’s Bargain, or whatever the Modern equivalent of those standard breaking black enchantments is these days.
Still waiting for that YGO versus Magic rematch. You basically put a YGO Starter deck vs a MtG deck made to beat Yugioh. On the topic of YGO vs Hearthstone, I think something like Dark World with Grapha could do great, since the innate strategy tears apart the opponent’s hand, & has lots of recursion, which seems like it could be hard for Hearthstone to deal with. Anyway, fun article! Thanks for uploading!
I feel like “whenever a creature enters the battlefield deal 1/2/3/4/5/X damage to that creature” decks would DESTROY hearthstone decks. They would just end up doing nothing till mid game with no ramp. But also. Wouldn’t fogs and repeatable fogs destroy hearthstone. Rhystic study. Fast mana. Etc? Like I feel like dropping something like MILL would also beat them. Don’t they only have 30 card decks? Isn’t it a ramping debuff tho. Heck Indestructable lifestealers would DESTROY hearthstone balance. Counterspells. Etc. Man I feel like hearthstones combat is VERY lenient for the attacker not so much the defender. omg…MANA drain and short style effects. The instant counter, and drain means you get to ramp INSANELY which is good, because you can then spend turn 3 casting a bunch of draw/mill to instantly kill the 30 card deck. Seems like hearthstones got a draw 2 cards per turn style effect because of no lands. But they also can’t react to mana short, every turn. They just lose turns. Also damage sticking means EXTRA TURN effects ALSO act as burn. Some weird things going on there. I can see tons of ways to abuse the rules for MTG to come out on top. Combat is just SOOOOO great in hearthstones favor. Ironically Healing probably still isn’t great. As they are balanced around 30 life. Mana dorks just can NOT survive in hearthstones world. Such coolness.
Quite an important error in the first game. Hearthstone has an equivalent of “indestructible”. It’s called Immune. It means that it cannot be targeted directly under most circumstances, and cannot be damaged by any means. Spells and minion effects which destroy minions randomly or destroy a set of minions can still destroy Immune creatures. HOWEVER! In Hearthstone, no minion with Immune can also have Taunt. If it is given taunt, all characters may continue their attacks as if it does not have it. Taunt is like “this minion is permanently blocking”. This is because, as you can see, it can simply “brick” the game. “Hero immortal. Minion immortal and in the way. Now you suffer.” So, Hearthstone would simply ignore the indestructible minion and kill the opponent anyway.
Hearthstone has a class of card called spell, so Esper Sentinel should only draw off of that, minions and weapons aren’t spells in Hearthstone. Also Hearthstone did have a similar combo to the one Carl used. There was a card called “The Jailer” who would mill the rest of your deck and make your minions immune for the rest of the game (Immune is protection from everything basically). In Hearthstone you don’t lose from drawing from an empty deck, you just take progressively more damage, so with a minion that redirects damage your opponent can’t win unless they have a board wipe and most decks wouldn’t draw them by the time you beat them down.
I would think you’d need, at minimum, a Legacy deck to contend with a Hearthstone deck. Not for power reasons, but just to even the playing field of the simple rules of Hearthstone. MTG Creature decks just lose to a Hearthstone deck. You need something combo-y or something that very reactive or removal heavy. Basically, what I’m saying is Modern White/X Hammer is, like, the worst f*ckin’ deck ever against a Hearthstone deck. Play Legacy Doomsday. Doom their day on turn two with a Thassa’s Oracle.
Mistakes Made: 1- Carl doesn’t draw a card when Thoralf plays a weapon. In Hearthstone, weapons aren’t spells. 2- Thoralf’s quest was on 9/10 when he cast Raise Dead, so the Kobold Librarian counted toward the second stage of the quest. 3- Because of mistake 2, Thoralf completed stage 2 of his quest when he cast the Spirit Bomb. He should now be on stage 3, so the Crystalizer counts toward stage 3, putting Thoralf on 5/10. 4- Backfire dealt damage to Thoralf on his turn, so he’s at 8/10.
“In Hearthstone Warlocks heropower is actually the worst.” Oh come on Thoralf, don’t lie like that. WL’s HP is the single best base heropower in the game. The “worst” is arguably either: Priest (2 mana heal two – only helpful situational) or Druid (+1attack for your hero for one turn / +1armor – as you still take damage when attacking creatures you’ll hurt yourself more than a Mage (can simply shoot one damage at any target of their choice), costs you 2 mana instead of 1 for Demon Hunter (they don’t gain the armor) you need to cast it every turn to deal damage instead of every two like a Rogue (Rogues gain a 1/2 weapon, so can use it for two turns), and one armor is only half of the Warriors (they gain 2 armor but no attack) / somewhat Priests benefit – it’s just the worst of all worlds, the idea is that it’s a mix of different benefits but since hero powers are low impact to begin with cutting both benefits in half makes it loose even more of it’s already small impact)
Maybe I’m wrong (I’ve played magic a lot of time ago, so i don’t remember how the wording goes) but if you tap Seasoned Hallowblade to attack can you still tap to use his ability or tapping isn’t strictly required to use it’s ability? And still there’re a lot of ways in heartstone to deal with a minion with that type of effect, maybe not in that deck 😂😂
its kinda wild to think how much the demon seed got nerfed, and it STILL SEES PLAY. to those who dont play hearthstone – each step usually were 6 dmg taken not 10 – they didnt consider here but in hearhtstone losing armor does count for quest progress – the final reward of the quest is making it so all damage you take on your turn becomes dmg to your opponent instead. so now every drawback card is even spicier and while on this funny clash of games format it might lose to some decks from MtG, you just completed the quest so fast and killed your opponent so fast in the end
People commenting that Warlock hero power is the best in Hearthstone probably haven’t played in the past 3-4 years. In a vacuum and early Hearthstone, Warlock hero power was the best, especially when class identity was much more defined and games were far slower. However the modern game saw the slow loss of class identity and incredible increase in overall power. Every class now has access to damage from hand AND strong draw. Running people out of cards is no longer a real option, and the loss in tempo of using your hero power is no longer feasible in both Standard and Wild. The arguable best hero power in the modern game is Death Knight’s, due to the actual corpse synergy that is spread across all three runes and the flexibility of use. Demon Hunter’s gets an honorable mention for being 1 mana. However, neither are ideal and you’d rather use different, far more efficient cards that have been printed.
Magic decks that focus on instants or graveyard sinergies have a better chance of beating the hartstone ones. If you dont take advantage of the unique aspects of each game then hartstone has 10 more healt one free land each turn, one extra “card” in the hero power and no risk of mana floding or mana screw in Exchange for demage to creatures in the form of 0/-1 markers.
It really seems like the match is stacked against the Magic player. The Magic player can’t select targets with which to block, even though the HS player can’t block. The HS player can choose targets to attack. Feels like it needs to be tilted slightly in favor of the Magic player in this regard to feel more balanced.
Bit weird that the premise of the article is “beating a HS deck with a Magic one” and then using a Modern deck. If it’s a power level issue because Vintage and Legacy would crush HS unilaterally, why not do three games with three different formats (could do Modern, Vintage, and why not Duel Commander for fun or Pauper) against three different HS decks rather than a bo3 match? Also as always the inconsistency in the systems used. For example in the combat, if the HS cards can choose what they attack according to their own rules, then shouldn’t Taunt not do anything, because you can’t attack creatures in Magic? And when Carl attacks, shouldn’t Thoralf be able to block because at this point it’s using Magic combat?
Yeah uh… this is why I’d be playing boros tokens. Even the standard version. If I can get out like a Warleader’s Call, my things are overall more damage and I can make them faster than they can. Case of the Uneaten Feast? I’m probably gaining 3 life per turn if not more. Have fun with Anim Pakal and my immortal Mondrak