Hearthstone, Blizzard’s terrifyingly addictive online game of card battles, just launched. It’s been a bit of a fixture around the digital PCGN office since closed beta, worming its way into our lives and making it rather hard to work. It’s not our fault, I say; we’re just weak.
If you weren’t fiddling around with it during the beta phase, you can hop on in now pretty easily. You can sign up and download Hearthstone for free here.
Despite being deceptively easy to get into, Hearthstone has hidden depths that go right down to the Earth’s core, so you might want a quick primer.
Sure, the tutorial teaches you the basics, but you could also browse Nick’s guide to deckbuilding. He’s put up two deck builds for each class, one for beginners that you can put together once you hit level 10 (which takes less than an hour and can even be done without facing a human opponent), and another more advanced deck that includes rarer cards that you can craft or find in purchased packs.
The launch patch brings with it bug fixes, balancing, ranked play improvements and the new golden portraits and powers which you can attain by winning 500 ranked matches.
You can feast your eyes on the full patch notes here.
What are you waiting for?