It was the winter of 2013. I’m in grad school, deeply depressed, and bored out of my mind. I was browsing Twitch, and I spotted someone play “Hearthstone.” It intrigued me — scratched that itch to dive into a collectible card game like I had enjoyed back in my youth (“Pokémon,” “Yu-Gi-Oh,” “Magic,” and the like). I figured out how to score an invite to the closed beta, and 12 years later, it’s continued to be an almost daily activity for me.

That is, with two massive exceptions.

There was an entire year, 2017-2018, where I just stopped playing because they implemented a controversial system called Quests. Around that time, “The Witcher 3” spun off “Gwent” into its own release, and I became obsessed with that before that got completely ruined, and crawled back to “Hearthstone.” The second time was “United in Stormwind,” which is arguably the worst set in the game’s history for just how broken and poorly designed it was.

I’d also say “The Grand Tournament” was an all-time weak period for the game with under powered and weird cards nobody liked that diminished its popularity, but that’s a different article entirely.

But the set from 2017, called “Journey to Un’Goro,” introduced legendary spells to each class called Quests, and it continues to be a massive thorn in the side of both Blizzard and for us HearthStoners. “United in Stormwind” introduced basically the same thing with Questlines — just another version of the spell. They start in your hand, cost one mana, and you’re tasked with completing in-game objectives to unlock a special reward.

It sounds fine on paper, but the execution in reality was so incredibly, wildly irresponsible that all quests printed to date are either so game-warping it causes existential breakdowns on both ends of the developer/player dichotomy or they’re completely worthless from tip to tail. There is no inbetween with Quests or Questlines.

Now, coming out on July 8, 2025, is “The Lost City of Un’Goro,” a return to the “Jurassic Park” jungle-themed expansion and cards, but also Quests. Boy, am I not looking forward to this shit!

Let’s go over the problems the community and I both share with Quests, their history, and some of the new aspects coming soon to a game I might uninstall later this summer.

Issue #1 — They’re Way Too Easy

You wouldn’t expect this, but Team 5 wants its paying customer base and loyal, dedicated fans to play their game, complete the quests, and have fun with their new cards! And there’s just zero resistance to playing a quest, and inevitably getting an uber-powerful reward for very little deck building restrictions.

Issue #2 — There Is No Real Counter

This one makes sense (in a bizarre way) since “Hearthstone” is not known for being a game with a lot of counter play. You kind of just play solitaire, and once you executed your game plan, you win. Either that, or you either get comboed to death in one turn OR rushed down early from aggro/zoo decks. There aren’t any other strategies available.

Control and mid-range got phased out along the way for flashy combos, minion swarm, and fatigue/infinite games with cards I loathe. Looking at you, Kil’jaeden.

Issue #3 — They Start In Your Opening Hand

Guaranteed play one, card one, turn one. It defeats the purpose of drawing a hand and mulliganing options away. You’re guaranteed a curve with a Quest on one, hero power on two, a playable card on three, and so on. It’s very broken for a game without any other types of cards that do that, unlike say Quicksilver in “Marvel Snap.” Nope, quest decks get that sweet, sweet curve each and every game — boosting its win rates and upping the salt that flows through my veins.

Issue #4 — Quests Rarely Get Nerfed

We’ll get into this later, but I’ll just say play-testing and balancing are not Team 5’s strong suits. They’ve improved drastically in the past decade in terms of responding to feedback and designing cards each expansion, but man were Quests just a shitshow from day one.

Issue #5 — The Rewards Are Wack

And that shit is just not fun to play against dozens of times a week! It becomes autopilot, you know what the opponent is going to do and what is going to happen. It’s demoralizing, knowing such polarizing match-ups exist and there’s just an inevitability that lingers when Quests are the meta. They aren’t dominant, no, they’re the meta until the nerf bat comes and gets swung around a bit.

The Demon Seed, Open the Waygate, and The Caverns Below

For my money, these three were at various points the best card in the game, and every other Quest was complete shit. None of this time in the game’s history was balanced properly whatsoever. Warlocks had The Demon Seed, a card that was, by my count, nerfed a whopping four times (that has to be some kind of record). It got to the point where the life steal was so bananas that it got temporarily banned in the Wild format — a first for the game.

Open the Waygate is just the most headache-inducing, eye-rollingly evil shit you’ve ever seen. It allows you to skip your opponent’s turn, and take two in a row. It quickly got abused, and was banned from Duels (also nerfed to complete its reward of the Time Warp, but still not enough for my taste).

Finally, we must discuss the card that was patched, hot-fixed, banned from Arena, and then ended up getting nerfed several times: The Caverns Below. You could complete this Quest so fast that the entire game just had you facing waves of 5/5 minions. It was unstoppable. What a mistake that shit was.

So ask any “Hearthstone” fan, any lifelong player, competitive or casual, what they think of Quests. There’s bound to be a lot of hate out there because only assholes like quests, and they’re coming back! With a vengeance!

What is this shit? Two Quests and rewards? I don’t like the sound of “Death’s Touch” at all, is that some kind of auto-win thing?

Bone Terror? No, sir, you can count me out. I already know this is going to be busted. After all, Death Knight is a nightmare itself right now. If this is the kind of stuff we have to look forward to for the next year and a half, I’m fine playing other card games instead. No thank you.

At least this one is bad! Hunters always get the worst Quests. Bullet dodged!

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Image credit: “Hearthstone,” Blizzard Entertainment