Metagaming in Competitive Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft

This extended abstract, presented at DiGRA 2018, examines metagaming practices among competitive players of the digital collectible card game Hearthstone, focusing on live tournaments in the United Kingdom such as Insomnia Gaming Festival and local Manchester events. Drawing on the author's completed PhD ethnography of video game events, the work argues that competitive Hearthstone players engage in metagame practices that extend well beyond gameplay itself, and that the frequent patch-driven changes to the game and inconsistent tournament rules create a dynamic environment for negotiation and community identity.

Building on Garfield's (2000) original metagaming framework from the trading card game Magic: The Gathering, the paper identifies Hearthstone equivalents of practices such as opponent analysis, note-taking during matches, scouting opponents between games, and reputation-building among regular "familiar faces" in tournament brackets. It also notes that some events ban note-taking and that in-game disputes, such as disconnections and "screen-shot wars," reveal the influence of physical and technological environments on play. The author adapts Boluk and LeMieux's (2017) fourfold typology of metagames as occurring "about, within, around and without" games, providing examples from Hearthstone's use of World of Warcraft characters, loophole exploitation, player psychology and audience reactions, and external espionage and markets.

The study's scope is qualitative and centered on UK live events, with Hearthstone's reported scale cited from industry sources (over 8 million monthly active users, a prize pool above $5 million annually, and over 20 million monthly hours watched). The paper is a work in progress; its methodology is ethnographic and observational rather than based on a formal survey or sample, and its conclusions are framed as preliminary.