What was everyone's first experience with Hearthstone?

I'd love to hear story's from everyone from your first experience and what made you fall in love with Hearthstone!

I'm pretty sure it was watching TotalBisuit (R.I.P.) playing closed beta and proclaiming himself lord of the arena. Good times.

I joined in when open beta rolled around, with the first deck I made being a heal warlock using my first epic: Pit Lord. As you'd imagine it didn't do too well, but is the reason I have always had a soft spot for Lightwarden, and I was pleased when the heal-based zoo-lock eventually caught up with my early creativity.

I was planning to stop playing very early on though, until I opened Sylvanas Windrunner as my first legendary and gave me something flashy to do. Naturally she made it into all my decks for a very long time. Next up was Edwin VanCleef, who kicked off my love for the rogue class. After that I opened a golden Tirion Fordring, followed only 1 pack later by Harrison Jones. How could I leave after laughing my head off at Harrison drawing me 8 cards from my opponent's unused Doomhammer?

Truth be told I miss the days when opening packs was that exciting. Now that's a first world, veteran player problem for you!

I was at my best friends house and he gave me one of his beta codes. I remember telling him, Let me try it out on your account first just in case I don't like it. I played a few games as warrior and a few as hunter and I was hooked. I stayed up until 6 am and slept during the day so I could get more games in without being bothered LOL.

I remember getting my first legendary Onyxia I was so stoked! She went into all my decks. My favorite Legendary in the game Is Tirion Fordring hands down because of the memories I had with playing him on my friends account. I remember loving hunter and warrior so much and that was all I played for a while. I took a break after Nax because life got busy. I then came back at LoE and played non stop until Frozen Throne(This was when I fell in love with shaman). Took a break and came back at ROS and haven't stopped since and I don't plan to. 

I agree with you though. I miss opening packs and being super excited! I plan on not looking at spoilers for the next set even though I know it's going to drive me insane! I want to experience it all as a surprise! 

my gpu had burned, and HS was the only thing i could play back in 2014. I could not see the golden cards, they had a black hole instead of the art.

And i always loved Warcraft.

My brother was pretty heavily playing WoW at that time and I found it interesting. Due to RL I did not want to start WoW myself and HS looked kind of innocent with regards to time committment in comparison. Fast forward to today my brother is long out of WoW and I am still playing HS. I can't remember my actual first Legendary but one of the first was Leeroy Jenkins which I found pretty bad initially and only learned to value later on. My favorite expansion is KFT (yes I know) and I loved the old adventures (the difficult ones).

Quote From Thraxus

My brother was pretty heavily playing WoW at that time and I found it interesting. Due to RL I did not want to start WoW myself and HS looked kind of innocent with regards to time committment in comparison. Fast forward to today my brother is long out of WoW and I am still playing HS. I can't remember my actual first Legendary but one of the first was Leeroy Jenkins which I found pretty bad initially and only learned to value later on. My favorite expansion is KFT (yes I know) and I loved the old adventures (the difficult ones).

I loved KFT. My favorite adventure was One Night in Karazhan.

Quote From Ticomon

my gpu had burned, and HS was the only thing i could play back in 2014. I could not see the golden cards, they had a black hole instead of the art.

And i always loved Warcraft.

I had no idea that was a thing

I saw a classmate play at college. I think HS was in beta back then. I really liked the idea behind the game, since I loved TCG as a kid and Warcraft III as a teenager. Oddly enough, I didn't start playing until a couple of years later, when TGT had just launched. 

My ex-girlfriend introduced me to the game, which was sometime around the middle of the Knights of the Frozen Throne expansion (so maybe Sept or Oct 2017). She wanted me to play Hearthstone because it could be another activity we could do together, and for a while, it was. She wasn't a serious player though, we just fooled around with off-meta decks composed mostly of basic and classic cards. She eventually grew tired of the game (and tired of me a few years later lol). 

I didn't really take the game too seriously until around the end of the Kobolds and Catacombs expac; I decided to ditch being F2P and bought the Witchwood bundle, and I've been a whale ever since (I'm trying to cut back on my expenses now though). Once I took it seriously, I grew to love the game much more. 

So while my relationship with my ex didn't survive, my relationship with Hearthstone did, and it's as strong as ever. It sounds pretty sad when you put it that way, but that's how it shook out lol

I watched hearthstone all the way from the beginning, from the unofficial world champion till now, but I didn't actually start playing until the old gods expansion.

My initial idea was to play arena, because the idea was good and its significantly less expensive than ranked. Those were pretty much the dark days of hearthstone in terms of f2p; you start with basic cards, you get like 10 classic packs if you finish off all the quests, beyond that there wasn't anything else. I couldn't even play face hunter until ungoro started, that was how bad it was.

Hearthstone only became better for me once I actually had all the rares from classic and can play up ranked for once. Did took all the way to K&C though. And its been fun for me ever since.

My brother introduced the game to me, and one of my fondest memories of the game was seeing my opponent play Al’akir for the first time. Being a noob, I had no idea what was happening and thought it was an insane card because of all the keywords… also Goldshire Footman in every deck.

My brother played Hearthstone's Beta in 2013 and later in 2014, which got me introduced to the game. We played together until One Night in Karazham, and he was more consistent in getting more cards, whereas I remember crafting golden Ysera by mistake, as I already had the normal one - damn greed. He would later buy MSoG and Un'Goro preorders on his account, which was by that point taken by me.

Now I play on my own account I made back then, mostly Battlegrounds and in process of getting to build Galakrond Rogue.

In the long past I played Magic: The Gathering and I have many fond memories of that game, but it got really expensive. Also, less and less friends played it which lead me to stop playing as well. I figured out that I liked card games a lot and I was looking for a decent digital replacement/alternative ever since.

Fast forward to 2014, my brother introduced me to HearthStone and I liked the animations and the fact there is a steadily growing mana curve. I did not take the game serious at all and as a noob I dusted my Leeroy Jenkins to craft a freaking Pyroblast. Such ignorance. Then I suddenly stopped playing the game for a few seasons, which is why I missed out on a few of the seasonal cardbacks. It was only since Blackrock Mountain when I really started to play HearthStone seriously.

The fondest HearthStone memory I have was to reach Legend for the very first time with Machine Gun Priest back in January 2018 just before the ranked ladder got revamped. I had noone around me to share this personal milestone achievement immediately with, but it was such an amazing feeling back then and even remembering it now still makes me fill with joy 🥳

I heard that my acquaintance play this game, but I didn't communicate with him, so I didn't know what this game is about. After a while I saw the video on YouTube and decided to see. Since I like a Warcraft 3 TFT from my childhood, I liked the game. But I still not downloaded it. Later I hired to work where I had a lot of free time, but I could play only on the phone. Met with one of the employees, he was played Hearthstone and I finally decided to download the game.

It was during the beginning of the KoFT set. Made a couple of games, bought an initial set for a quick start and made the best from cards that I had at that time - a hunter deck. I really liked Karazhan and KoFT sets. I played every day for several hours, I donated sometimes, but not much. I fell in love with the Secret Mage deck and it's still this my favorite archetype.

Now I live in a place where a veeeeery very very bad internet and I can't play online games, watch online videos, etc. There is a company that carries optic cable to our region, but it's not known yet, will they bring it to where I live or not.

Something like that.

I was looking for something free to play. Found some Disguised Toast videos on building cheap Hunter decks.

Played a bunch of arena, because it was a good way for me to build up my card collection. Right from the start I refused to dust my cards until absolutely necessary. And as soon as I learnt that balance changes to cards meant full refunds, I hoarded cards until I could make use of that.

Achieved arena 12 win and Legend on my F2P before the ladder changes. 

I tend to not play during the hype of new releases because there's a lot of high rolling from new epics and legendaries. Wait for it to settle down.

My best win-streak is 94-10 in a whacky scenarios that I don't think anyone will ever be able to repeat. Not that I don't think someone can achieve 94-10 - but that I did it without getting Legend.

I unfortunatly don't really know how i got introduced to hearthstone back in the day. When i first tried the game out it was around the time NAXX was OUT. But i quit shortly after because: 1, i didnt find the game to be that enjoyable. And 2: I couldnt really afford playing the game back then. Too high cost of entry at the time, and i never considered free 2 play back then. Back then i felt like obtaining gold for Adventure Wings felt way too slow. Add to that the fact i barely had a collection of classic cards, and it created quite a bad feeling.

But i do FONDLY remember when i got re-introduced to hearthstone. After i initially quit, a LONG time went by and i only got re-introduced to Blizzard thanks to Overwatch. And during my first Blizzcon i saw the new hearthstone trailer which was for the Kobolds and Catacombs expansion, and the trailer looked AMAZING! Not only that, but i saw the reveal of DUNGEON RUN. A fully Free to play way of playing HS, which i enjoyed a LOT. Thanks to dungeon run i gave HS a second chance, and i never stopped playing since then. I started playing casual and ladder shortly after, but only thanks to Marin the Fox. Marin the Fox was such a fun card, and i auto-included him in every deck i played. Which was easy back then, because i hardly had a collection of cards. Which is why i love seeing the free legendaries every expansion, after all that free legendary can be "the Marin the Fox" for someone else! Also i remember when witchwood came out. (My first expansion after Kobolds) I Never really looked at any of the revealed cards at the time. But once i unpacked Tess Greymane and tried her out, rogue quickly became my favorite class for a looooong time. 

It was shortly after launch. It was free, and I had enjoyed both MtG and WoW off and on, so I figured why not?

I spent a very long time completely ignorant of the meta or even how to play well. Eventually, I decided to try to get good at Arena, which improved my skills a lot. (Any amount would have been a lot.) I got tired of Arena before getting super good, but at that point I could at least play Ranked without completely embarrassing myself. I remember loving Druid the most, I think? The versatility of the class always appealed to me.

I think what I liked about the game overall was the possibility of coming up with new ways to use underappreciated cards and pushing classes in unexpected directions. Now, of course, I see how such efforts are actively thwarted by the game's design, but I still like to mess around with off-meta stuff once I've ranked up as far as I care to go in a given season. (Yes, I'm the guy you run into at Diamond 5 or 10 trying to make Sheldras Moontree work. Spoiler alert: It doesn't.)