Sometimes it isn’t in the cards.
I should introduce myself: I am a Hearthstone player — battletag “craptasm” — and I lose. A lot. This makes me utterly unremarkable. This is the one thing that the greatest of the game have in common with tryhards and Dad Legends and memers and casuals alike: If you play a lot, you lose a lot.
Not everyone, though, is equally good at it. It is a common topic of conversation across the entire ecosystem of Hearthstone content: the mental game, how to avoid tilt, how to play at your best. The most common approach to this topic, though, has one key flaw: It proceeds from the assumption that learning how to lose is a path to winning. It couches the handling of losses as a way to avoid losses, and as such feeds into the fantasy, harbored for the most part unconsciously, that every game of Hearthstone is a game you are entitled to win.
There is a certain utility to this mindset. We all lose games that the best players would not. If with every loss, we merely threw up our hands and hit the button again, it would be difficult to improve. And, anyway, we mostly recognize that just hitting the button again is not a manifestation of not-caring, but instead a manifestation of tilt. Because it is generally not possible — certainly not on a game-to-game basis — to lose without it having some emotional effect. It is possible to “appreciate” a loss in a hard-fought or particularly crazy game, but not possible to like it, exactly. Or not without effort.
It is absurd, to be sure, to have your feelings about yourself bound up in the outcomes of a digital card game, but we are absurd beings, and it is best to get that out of the way: Losing is hard. This is why you have to work at it. And you will never, really, be good at it, or do it exactly right. Losing is an art.
Like any art, losing is not bound by rules and can only be vaguely explained to would-be practitioners in the form of vague guidelines which some of its greatest virtuosos routinely flout or seemingly ignore. Losses are the personal performed publicly. As such, I cannot tell you how to lose, but I can at least suggest models of losing that, while they naturally cannot prevent losses in your future, can one hopes provide inspiration for your further pursuit of the aesthetic ideals of losing.
1. Shikata ga nai
This, my favorite Japanese phrase, translates more or less as “there is nothing to be done.” This applies of course to the fact of losing itself, but more importantly to many (not all) particular losses.
I owe my own, dare I say it, accomplishment in losing to having played bridge as a teenager long before I took up Magic: the Gathering or Hearthstone, since neither existed at the time. For those unfamiliar with it, bridge is a card game built around the fact that usually one partnership will have good cards, while the other will have more or less total ass. The partnership with the good cards strives to get as much as they can out of them; the other strives to foil their plans and screw them up. But the game is also one of a great deal of information: As the hand plays out, each player can see half of the remaining cards, and by the time the hand is done, every card from every hand has been revealed. In reviewing a hand, it is very often correct to conclude that there was literally nothing else that one partnership or the other could have done to change the outcome.
When you review your Hearthstone games, it is sometimes possible to identify a shikata ga nai game, but it is much more difficult. The chains of contingency and accumulation of unknowns makes it difficult to determine whether a different action on turn three — or, even worse, the mulligan — would have led to a different outcome. Did you make a bad play? Perhaps so, and this is something you can register and in future, perhaps, correct. But you make bad plays in wins, too. Not every bad play is determinative.
For every shikata ga nai game you can identify, there are likely at least five others — perhaps more — that you cannot. Many, many of your losses fall in this category. Most players seem in some way to recognize this: They will rail against getting queued into this or that bad matchup or an opponent’s nut draw or any old thing and somehow let it get them upset, when they should instead let it free them.
2. The Hearthstone Uncertainty Principle
This applies specifically to the process of setting and achieving goals in the game. Hearthstone players are for the most part smart, competitive, and driven, much as some of them might deny it. We set goals for ourselves, even (especially) ones we do not share with others. It can create discipline around the game, a reason to play, but if done badly it can become self-abuse.
The Hearthstone Uncertainty Principle is that you can specify the what — the specific milestone you wish to achieve — or the when — the period of time over which you want to work on making progress — but not both. If your goal is “I will qualify for this specific Master’s Tour” when you have never qualified before and have attempted neither the ladder grind nor the qualifier grind before, you are likely setting yourself up for failure. And, to be clear, failure is not losing: Losing is an essential part of doing nearly everything in the game; failure is a loss that, you believe, tells you something about yourself.
As I mentioned above, Hearthstone is a game that involves chains of contingency. As your goals become more ambitious, there are more steps necessary to attain them: Look at how many qualifiers even former Grand Masters, the very best players in the game, must enter in order to make it into a Master’s Tour; look how much success these same players then must have after that to enter Grand Masters. You have to lose tremendously to reach those heights.
Too, progress in Hearthstone is not linear. Leaving aside the fact that you may reach plateaus, or seem to progress in fits and starts, there are simple distributional facts to contend with. If you, like me, are accustomed to being a 2–5k Legend player, then top Legend players are very, very substantially better at the game than we are. GM’s are substantially better at the game than that. Improvement in this regard feels like diminishing returns not because the returns are actually diminishing, but simply because a given amount of improvement jumps you past ever fewer players as you improve.
Have things you are working on; have things you are working toward; but don’t make them one and the same.
3. Find the fun
A wise podcast once said, “Hearthstone is a game, and games are supposed to be fun.” My favorite word in that sentence is “supposed.” There are many ways it can be interpreted, from the “are we having fun yet?” laden with irony to the “you’re doing it wrong” that might spring to a viewer’s mind watching a streamer who rages at RNG or Demon Hunter or whatever else in the game they have chosen to let upset them.
I take it as an indication that finding the fun is, and should be, a positive effort. Fun does not fall off the tree of Hearthstone like a shiny, delicious apple as you sit under it while admiring the fall weather. Nor is it prized from the jaws of some horrid beast that wants to devour you. It is not given or taken. It is made.
We are surrounded with people, with communities, who make it. Some stream, some make videos or podcasts, some play tournaments or chat in Discord or meme on Twitter or even, yes, Reddit (enjoy at your own risk). Hearthstone is not really about pressing the button, and less still about what happens to your MMR as a consequence.
Find your fun, make it, and if you want to, you will find that the charm of the game boils down to the fact that we are all losing together.
