# Category Archives: HearthSim

## Inspire Mechanic

The Grand Tournament is coming soon, so it’s a good time to start looking at how the new mechanics introduced in the expansion will perform. As a starter, let’s look at the new mechanics: Inspire. Inspire is an effect that triggers when you play a hero ability. There are various effects available, but in general,… Read More »

## Soulfire

Soulfire is a card that was recently nerfed from 0 mana cost to 1 mana cost. It used to work really well as a cheap removal or a finisher, and the fact that Warlock can just life tap to replenish its card negated the downside of the card to a large degree. I want to… Read More »

## HearthSim Miscellaneous — Number of Possible Moves

The HearthSim AI employs a brute-force search of (potentially) all possible moves that it can make in a given turn to determine the best sequence of moves that it can make each turn. This defers from the more heuristic approaches taken by most bots out there (remember… HearthSim is not a bot and does not… Read More »

## Azure Drake vs Sludge Belcher

Lately, Sludge Belcher has become a really popular card. It seems like almost every deck out there, besides the zoo decks, are playing Sludge Belcher, and it has caused the games to slow down quite a bit. No doubt, Sludge Belcher is a good card at the 5 mana spot. But, before the Naxxramas expansion… Read More »

## Hero Battle

In this post, we are going to take a look at how each hero’s ability affects their performance. In Hearthstone, there are 9 different hero classes. Each hero has a hero ability that cost 2 mana Setup We will once again take the all minion super basic deck and have the deck played with different… Read More »

## HearthSim — Card Draw

Hearthstone is a turn based card game. The more cards you (the player) has in your hand, the more options you have, and your chance of winning increases dramatically. It stands to reason, then, that any mechanics that draws extra cards from your deck should provide you with a sizable advantage. How big is this… Read More »

## HearthSim — Modeling Unpredictable Outcomes

We have so far employed an AI strategy similar to how modern day chess or go AIs work: working out all possible outcomes of all possible actions that the player can perform and picking out the best series of actions. In games such as chess, the strategy works out well (witness recent computer vs humans… Read More »

## HearthSim: Divine Shield Modeling — Part 2

This is part 2 of our Divine Shield modeling. Setup Let’s take our Super Basic Deck, with a generic no-good Hero (with no hero abilities), and pit it against an opponent with the same deck with Scarlet Crusader replaced by Magma Rager. We will call the player with Scarlet Crusader Player0, and the opponent Player1.… Read More »

## HearthSim: Divine Shield Modeling — Part 1

Let’s take a look at how we might go about modeling Divine Shield. Recall that the AI scoring function is given by $$S = S_{\rm b} + \tilde{S}_{\rm b} + S_{\rm c} + S_{\rm h} + \tilde{S}_{\rm h}$$ (see the original post). In particular, for each minion that one has on the board, the… Read More »

## HearthSim: Super Basic Deck for Testing

Here’s the first real deck that I’ll be using for testing HearthSim in the next couple of posts. Goldshire Footman × 2 Murloc Raider × 2 Bloodfen Raptor × 2 Frostwolf Grunt × 2 River Crocolisk × 2 Ironfur Grizzly × 2 Scarlet Crusader × 2 Silverback Patriarch × 2 Chillwind Yeti × 2 Oasis… Read More »