Competitive Failing

Blizzard's Hearthstone is a virtual cardgame developed by Blizzard interactive. In the game, each player plays as a class of hero from the MMO World of Warcraft and battle with cards corresponding to their class in a Magic-the-Gathering-like arena. The gameplay consists of each player starting with a hand of cards and one mana to play cards. Each turn, they accumulate one mana and draw one card. The objective of the game is to play cards that in turn reduce your opponents health to zero from the starting thirty. Some of the cards have a certain mechanic that grants you additional benefits from playing at the cost of some of your own health. This mechanic soon came to represent one of the most eccentric trends in competitive gaming. The objective was simple: who could reduce their hero to zero health points faster than their opponent? Both heroes would use damage cards aimed at their own face while using health cards on each other to keep their opponents above starting health. What began as a simple game mode between friends with a mutually agreed upon premise soon inspired a competitive following: the anti-Hearthstone. Tournaments were convinced with prize money offered. The rules were simple: no conceding. To win, you had to be the first to go down. The game mode acts as kind of a subversion of the format, where the players must abuse the mechanics to win. The harkens back to Magic the Gathering, where in casual play, players would often see cards taken out of circulation and forgotten by the game developers come back into play for a game-abusing deck. This was the player's way of abusing game mechanics to conceive of a new game concept. This abuse-ability is in a way a failure of the game developer's to not account for game balance. Similarly, the game Hearthstone did not intend for players to play in the format described above, and cars were as such not balanced in that way. By playing completely orthogonal to the game developer's original design, the player develops a new sense of creativity and exploration unachievable by following the game designer's original design.