Hearthstone: Heroes of Free to Play is a series in which I document my adventures starting off fresh with a new account and playing the game without ever paying any real money. Previous parts: One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

Egg Druid

As I said last time, I spent the last couple of weeks grinding out the gold to purchase more adventure wings and to craft a budget Egg Druid deck. While grinding the gold wasn’t fun, playing the deck certainly was.

I made one subtle change to the featured deck’s list: I replaced Echoing Ooze with Jeweled Scarab. Because of the announcement about the Standard format, I decided to scrap my efforts at obtaining the remainder of Naxxramas and decided to instead start obtaining the best expansion in Standard that we currently know about: League of Explorers. I was able to purchase almost the entirety of the expansion with the gold I’d gathered.

The implications of a Standard format are good for both new and continuing free to play accounts. It is still easy to remain competitive due to the Classic base set always being in Standard while the rotating format allows new players to quickly obtain the cards they need to stay competitive instead of having to craft many legendary minions from each expansion. In addition, since old adventure rewards will be available to craft and dust, it will be easy to replace old cards that fall out of Standard with newly rotated cards.

Anyways, Egg Druid was a pretty solid deck in lower ladder. While playing it, I faced trouble against all sorts of Control decks but dealt well with Midrange and less aggressive Zoo decks. Overall, it was a blast to play the deck on ladder, even when losing.

For the next time, I plan to continue massing gold to buy the last wing of League of Explorers and then to buy the Blackrock Mountain expansion. Until then, I’ll continue playing Egg Druid and Zoo Warlock on ladder, even if they don’t get me all the way to legend.