Out of Games Recommits to the Future of Hearthstone

Greetings!

Over the past few weeks we've been hard at working pushing out large updates to the Out of Games platform.

Last year, you will have noticed that the site got a brand new look for our Homepage, Articles and Guides, the most popular portions of the site over the past few years. This was a major undertaking and to be completely honest, overwhelming because of how many moving parts there were. This move though allowed us to modernize the frontend of the website, with performance being the number one concern followed by improved readability on all devices.

Back in January, we pushed out another set of improvements aiming at further converting pages on the website to our new format. This continued the truly long and painful process of redesigning and re-engineering Out of Games from the ground up and I'm happy to report, we're closing in on getting things done.

I'd like to talk about the major updates we've been pushing out, and how we're recommitting to the future of Hearthstone on Out of Games.

Hearthstone's Future on Out of Games

Hearthstone was the game that brought us all together. Not only as a team, but as a community. In the past few years, the quantity and quality of Hearthstone content we have produced has decreased, the tech debt that we had with our systems caused problems, and changes to even just how deckbuilding works in the game itself meant our deckbuilder was not up to the task of delivering a top tier experience to our team and the greater Hearthstone community.

Something had to change, and that was not an easy task to just start things over.

Through the past three years, Out of Games internally has gone through a dozen new iterations of design. Never pushed out to the public, it was a very difficult decision to push forward with a new identity for the website and due to the complex nature of the systems on the website, any major update was going to take a long time so getting it right was of most importance. With how busy the world of gaming is, and real life as well, spending time on building out fresh systems meant being unable to deliver as much new content. It also meant that the public would never get to see all the hard work behind the curtain because it was going to be months of development time.

Out of Games got its humble start as a public alpha called HearthStation.

This website's goal was to test the new community platform which was written from scratch and to begin building out the ideal Hearthstone community website. We shut it down at the end of the month-long test and when we came back, Out of Cards rose from the ashes. Hearthstone had been starting to decline for a while at that point, and with the team all playing several different card games, it made sense to rebrand and take us in a direction of being a card game focused community instead of just a Hearthstone one. It gave us more opportunities for revenue, and revenue is the most important piece of a puzzle when wanting to keep a large website online. Servers are not cheap.

HearthStation came online on March 11, 2019, Out of Cards released on May 28, 2019, and then we rebranded to Out of Games on May 1, 2023. Hah, Out of Games was supposed to finally bring in a Dark and Light theme for the website, which is hilarious to look back on because while it was certainly an achievable goal, things got a little bit too busy to make that a reality.

Hearthstone though, what is the future of it on Out of Games? With us now approaching 7 years of supporting Hearthstone, we're bringing it back in full swing. Now live on the website is several major updates to key existing features including a completely brand new deckbuilder. Our deckbuilder needed a massive overhaul and had been in the works for a couple of years. Several rewrites to really get it to a point where I was personally happy with it included. The deckbuilder was essential to our continued support of Hearthstone because we needed a good tool to create content for the game.

Another big thing we needed? Better ability to publish guides for Hearthstone. Guides are one of those things that content websites absolutely require. We've had a guides system on the website for many years, but it wasn't until we did our latest redesign that they truly became something special. It has been difficult to cross-promote guides in a way that isn't a massive pain to our writing staff and now, now we have better flows in place to make it easy.

This is going to allow us to launch guides that will be updated on a consistent basis with new Hearthstone decks! A major driver of traffic in the past, we're going to be able to tackle this better than ever and with Cataclysm's release on its way alongside the Year of the Scarab, you'll see us hitting this hard.

Here's what we've been doing for Hearthstone.

New Deckbuilder

Out with the old and in with the new! Go visit our new Hearthstone Deckbuilder to check out the new flow.

• Start by choosing your class now, or importing a deck code from Hearthstone.

• After you choose your class, the format is essential.

• Better filters

  • Our new filtering system has easier to use dropdowns and we have a more visual addition for rarity and mana costs

• Improved navigation

  • Previously we could only show you cards for your chosen class and neutral.

  • Now we can showcase Multiclass cards and if you add a tourist to your deck, a brand new tourist section will open up.

  • The latest expansion's cards will always be accessible via a dedicated tab as well!

• Added a mulligan tester so you can test your card draws and make a mulligan choice with your deck.

  • This feature is also on all deck pages

• Added a new guide feature to create guides for decks

  • The experience now gives you a solid starting point for creating a great Hearthstone guide.

  • If you don't like our template, you can wipe it out and write your own guide from scratch.

• Special deckbuilder rules based on cards

  • These features were the most important ones that we needed to support to build the ultimate deckbuilder for Hearthstone.

    • And the best part is that our system will allow us to trivially support more rules in the future as Hearthstone evolves.

  • Tourists now allow you to pick cards from their associated classes

  • ETC Band Manager now allows you to add an extra 3 cards to your deck

  • Reno Jackson and other Highlander cards warn you about duplicates

  • Genn and Baku add Odd and Even rules to make valid card filtering automatic and easier

  • Fabled cards now add in their associated tokens to your deck automatically

Most importantly though, our deckbuilder technology is more generic at the core, which is going to allow us to better support more deckbuilders on the website which will give us the ability to better support more communities.

I 100% expect that there are bugs with the new builder that we did not find. Head on over to the deckbuilder and see what you can break and let us know about it!

New Card Pages

Not only do we have a brand new card listing page, where you can find stuff like all the Year of the Scarab cards, but we also have new pages for the cards themselves. Let's look at our new buddy in Cataclysm, Morchok.

You can now see a new and improved page that breaks down cards into their different attributes. We've left commenting available (and highly recommend everyone talks about the new cards on card pages now!), made popular decks a bit easier to find, and introduced a Legality section so everyone can better understand where cards are legal and if they are banned in certain formats.

Though, we're still working on categorizing all the cards on a card-by-card basis where it may be required. With a new year, upon us, its a great time for us to revalidate all of our card data.

We will also be using card pages in the future to showcase special functionality on a card-by-card basis. As a great example, one of my favourite cards from Knights of the Frozen Throne is Deathstalker Rexxar. The plan is to push tools into these card pages to allow you to build a zombeast as a fun experience. Are there any cards you think would do well with a custom tool on them?

Card listings are also freshly painted, so here's what they look like.

New Deck Pages

Hearthstone Decks have been a cornerstone of Out of Games (and our previous iterations) though they have fell into dark times with our deckbuilder being quite broken. We have had several members of the community making deck pages and not importing their card strings, since they were broken which means we have several decks on the website that aren't very visually useful to everyone.

Well, that's fixed going forward. We still need to go back and automatically try and fix older decks to make sure they get their visual lists, but for now you can see all new decks created on the site, and the much older ones, with a renewed appearance that matches the new theme. We've also moved to a wider page format for hearthstone decks, which makes it easier to read guides and to view the cards.

Here's ChristianHearthstone's latest druid deck as an example, Best Taunt Druid for 13.0.

The deck pages also feature a mulligan tester, just like our deckbuilder, that works underneath the card list.

Everything else about deck pages, and the deck listing, and those sweet deck embeds we use in articles have also been given an overhaul. Who else remembers Echo's Deathrattle Hunter from The Boomsday Project when we did an article about our favourite hearthstone decks of all time?

[BDP] Deathrattle Hunter

Wild · Deathrattle Hunter · by Echo · 5 years, 2 months ago

• 1 Candleshot x 2
• 1 Hunter's Mark x 2
• 1 Play Dead x 2
• 1 Tracking x 2
• 2 Prince Keleseth x 1
• 2 Terrorscale Stalker x 2
• 3 Devilsaur Egg x 2
• 3 Gluttonous Ooze x 1
• 3 Spider Bomb x 2
• 4 Flanking Strike x 2
• 4 Houndmaster Shaw x 1
• 5 Carnivorous Cube x 2
• 5 Mind Control Tech x 2
• 5 Zilliax x 1
• 6 Deathstalker Rexxar x 1
• 7 Charged Devilsaur x 2
• 8 Kathrena Winterwisp x 1
• 9 King Krush x 1
• 10 Ultrasaur x 1

12,680 Dust 2,099 3 Copy Deck Code

Do note that "your cost" calculations are currently not working as intended. Our next major lift for Hearthstone is revamping the collection manager which is a work in progress and this is when we will see this re-implemented. Your patience is appreciated! This is a larger lift than the deckbuilder itself and I'm looking forward to putting it inside of everyone's hands.

Pack Opener Revamp

Our Hearthstone card pack opener or card pack simulator has been a community favourite since it was introduced many years ago. With some packs even seeing over 100,000 packs opened, clearly we needed to give this a fresh coat of paint.

They aren't incredibly more exciting, but animations on the pack opening experience has been slightly improved, and they work a lot better on mobile.

We still need to fill in some of the more recent card packs, and Cataclysm will be joining us once the entire set is finished being added to the database and we know which golden cards need to be excluded from the packs. So we hope you'll join us in opening some Cataclysm packs in the simulator while we wait for the full release of the set very soon.

Introducing the Secrets Calculator

Okay, no one actually asked for this one, but I created a secrets calculator in the past for another website and it just felt like an appropriate addition to Out of Games while we are pushing increased access to video game tools.

The concept behind a secrets calculator for Hearthstone is that during a game, you can open it up to understand what secrets your opponent may have put into their deck. If they play a secret and it is triggered, you can keep count of which secrets have been played and then which ones you still need to play around.

In modern Hearthstone, this isn't as useful as it used to be because there are just so many ways to generate cards, including secrets, so its much easier to obtain more than 2 secrets being played at once. At the very least, I hope someone finds it useful just to see what secrets exist for each class at a quick glance.

And More

If its a page on the website for Hearthstone, we've brought it over to the new theme and made some updates to it to improve its visual appearance and access to the important knowledge you, hopefully, want to gain from it. We know that there are going to be more, smaller updates that will come in the future to help tweak the Hearthstone experience here on Out of Games and I know we have a lot of content to produce for Cataclysm and beyond to really prove to you that we want to continue to build our Hearthstone community up.

Our card backs gallery will be updated with all the missing data once the next major Hearthstone patch hits and we get to do all the fun datamining surrounding it. Speaking of, our datamining pipeline has seen some improvements as well which will make it faster to get data onto the website for patches and in the future I'm expecting that we'll be redoing all of our fun data compilation tasks to bring out some brand new looks at Hearthstone's data to keep everyone in the know.

It has been a long road with plenty of bumps along the way, but I hope by modernizing the website we are helping to smooth out the path forward. No matter how large or small Hearthstone is, it will always have a place here on the Out of Games community.

Happy Early Birthday

We're a couple of days away from the birthday of Out of Games, so Happy Birthday to us and to the community. You can look forward to more announcements just around the corner...

Looking For More

If you've ever wanted to create content for your favourite games to help out gamers around the world, we're always looking for more folks to join our team. Whether you're more interested in covering news, or you love to create Hearthstone decks, or if in-depth guides about games are more your jam, we'd love to add some more members to our team.

Out of Games rewards our staff members with a revenue sharing model based on the ad revenue content generates. We aren't rich, this isn't even all of our full-time jobs though that would certainly be rad, we're all doing this out of a passion for creating content surrounding video games.

Please note that we are not looking for people who create content with LLMs/"AI". Out of Games as per our editorial standards does not publish AI-generated articles, reviews, or opinion pieces, and that includes guides. We do make use of generative systems to help us ideate, transcribe, brainstorm headlines, check grammar, and give us skeletons to build off of to help with optimizing for search engines, but the meat of our content is crafted by humans, as it should be.

If you're interested in helping us make Out of Games the best that it can be, hit me up via email: [email protected]! Tell me about yourself, what you'd love to do on Out of Games, and if you have any samples of previous work I'd love to see them.

More Changes

I've put together a thread over in our site feedback forums that details all the changes that have taken place since our last patch notes release. It's absolutely massive, so if you're interesting in getting through it, go make yourself a warm drink and get cozy because its a long one!