Review of video game Hearthstone by Chandler Wang

 Hearthstone is a free-to-play online card game, and despite multiple shortcomings, I've had a lot of fun with it and have come back to it after years. Its design is based off of and fairly similar to Magic: The Gathering. Each player starts with 1 mana per turn, increasing by 1 per turn until 10 mana. Cards cost mana, and there are minions and spells. You can control up to 7 minions, and can use them to attack your opponents' minions or just attack your opponent directly. They have attack and health stats, and often unique effects that can occur when they die, when they are played, continuously as long as they stay alive, or upon a certain condition. The game has multiple classes, each with their own unique cards and a "Hero power" that can be used once per turn for 1 or 2 mana depending on the hero. There are lots of various cool and unique decks, and you can have a lot of fun experimenting with different cards and heroes. However, being free-to-play, it's pretty difficult to put together competitively viable decks without paying any money. You may find yourself losing to decks with harder to get cards, which can be frustrating, but I never played Hearthstone super competitively or seriously, and despite not paying money, I can usually put together some fairly effective decks. Hearthstone also has multiple game modes, and some of them are more fair for free-to-play players. In the Arena, you draft a deck, picking one of three random cards to build a full deck to play with. In Battlegrounds, you use an entirely different system, where minions automatically attack and you buy minions with gold and can sell them back for gold. In the tavern brawl, which changes weekly, there's a different way to play each time, often giving players a deck instead of having them create one. The game itself is notoriously luck-based. Card games necessarily are, since you're drawing random cards from a deck, but Hearthstone fully embraces luck in a way that only an online card game can. There are cards that add random cards to your hand, cards that summon random minions, cards that cast random spells on random targets, and more. Often games will turn into "fiestas," with one player's randomly-generated threats being countered by the other's randomly-generated answers, and vice-versa. This makes the game perhaps frustrating, but especially as a free-to-play player, I kind of enjoy the vast randomness. It makes the game interesting, and no game is the same, even with the same deck. Especially as a free-to-play player, I feel like I always have a chance because of all the unpredictability and randomness. I also enjoy free-to-play games where you can get more items in the game as you play more, and although it's pretty difficult to get card packs in Hearthstone, the arena rewards you gold based on how well you do, requiring an entry fee in return. Since the arena doesn't discriminate against free-to-play players, it's a fun and rewarding way to grind the game for me, especially since I've gotten good enough to do well in it consistently. Overall, I really enjoy Hearthstone and it's a great, casual free-to-play game for me despite its randomness and pay-to-win mechanics. 9/10.