card games by a mage's candlelight - gen returns to hearthstone

honestly was considering penning this under the "gen's thoughts" title, but this falls under more freeform musing than rambling about my opinions and thoughts on things. i don't know why i need to stick nearly everything under specific categories; it's not like this site even follows a specific trend or theme to the things i write about. :y

at the start of the month, i've gotten myself back into playing Hearthstone, a digital collectible card game spinoff of the Warcraft series. which is also free for windows/mac and iphones and tablets if you wanna try it out. the microtransaction/free-to-play stuff is pretty fair, too. buy packs and adventure parts with either money or earned ingame gold which is fairly easy to get.

i initially got into Hearthstone around April or March of 2014 when the game was released to the public. played it for a while, got a few card packs out of it, and got a nifty pandaren-themed card back from ranked play. while i did enjoy it, i soon retired from HS for greener pastures, which naturally meant i missed out on a lot of cool card backs from the following months up to now. ah well. such is how life goes, i guess.

wasn't to say i wasn't interested in coming back to the game at some point in the future. my younger brother still plays Hearthstone as of this writing, and of course i had a ton of fun just watching him blow opponents to dust with cheeky tactics. just didn't have the proper incentive to actually play the game again myself. which, knowing me, that incentive most likely involved either more variety to cards, more cosmetic stuff, more content, or tauren. preferably tauren.

'course, we got new card set expansions and adventures and new modes, and i even followed the official Hearthstone twitter, but i wasn't coaxed into coming back until my brother let me know about the latest shaman-themed card back for the current ranked season.

as someone who played shaman in both Hearthstone and World of Warcraft, that was what got me back into the game. got myself to rank 20 now so i'm guaranteed to get the card back after this month, but now i've found myself enjoying the game even more; not solely because of the new cards and content (tavern brawl is fun as hell, i should mention!), but for more poignant reasons. not really the sappy kind of poignant, just stuff that just kinda draws me into the game in a different aspect.