Hearthstone is a curious game. It’s an online card game that has attracted a huge following of casual and competitive players. There are over 40 million world-wide players and the World Championships this weekend had a $1 million prize pool. The game is kind of like poker and chess combined, with a lot of strategy around trading pieces and a bit of luck with card draws and other random effects. I like it because the games only lasts 5-15 minutes and there is a lot of strategy and thinking involved. Most online games require fast reaction times, but Hearthstone is turn-based and you get 75 seconds each turn to plot your moves.

There are a few game modes, but the most popular is the ranked ladder. You start the game at Rank 25 and play against other players with the same rank. As you win games, your rank improves, lose games and your rank gets worse. The ultimate goal is to progress beyond Rank 1 to Legendary status. Every month the ranks reset. I’ve never gotten beyond Rank 5 and I had to play a lot of games to get that high.

Getting to Legend status is about consistently playing well (above 50% win rate) and grinding out a lot of games. How many? That depends on the deck win rate. I wrote a script (below) to simulate how many games it would take to reach Legendary depending on your win rate.

If you’re only winning  50% of your games you play, you can make it to Legendary but be prepared to play around 1440 games. With a 55% win rate, a pretty good result in competitive Hearthstone, it would take on average 483 games to reach Legendary status (at least 15 games a day). Even if you could consistently win 60% of the games you played, an impressive feat, it would take 287 games a month to reach Legendary. I thought I played a lot of Hearthstone, but I don’t have that kind of time.

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