How to be crafty - the Hearthstone guide to card crafting

Are you still playing Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft? You should be.

Three months after its mobile release, it remains an excellent game that I play almost every day. Those of you who are similarly ensnared will no doubt have acquired a fairly hefty collection of cards by now. We've already covered how you should be combining them to build your deck. Now it's time to look at what to do with the leftovers.

Any card can be disenchanted for an amount of "dust", which you can then use to create cards. If you go into 'My Collection' and then tap the 'Crafting Mode' button in the top left, any non-basic card you select can be either disenchanted or created using a rather larger quantity of dust.

If you've obtained more than two copies of any particular card, you'll see a 'disenchant extra cards' button lit up. Press it, and the game will automatically dismantle anything you've got more copies of that you can use.

The auto-disenchant doesn't take any notice of gold cards, treating them as separate copies. So, if you've got two copies of a card and two more gold copies of that card, it won't disenchant them for you.

But if you want dust, gold cards are worth a lot more than their drab counterparts and should therefore be the first things that get disintegrated in spite of their appealing animated images. Fortunately, Crafting Mode has a helpful 'Show Only Golden Cards' setting so you can locate your gold copies and melt them down.

Those of you who've already been doing this for a while will have noticed the obvious and alarming discrepancies in the dust you pay for different cards. A common costs forty, while a rare costs a hundred. Don't even think about the eye-watering price of Epic and Legendary cards.

But here's the thing: by those maths, a common is worth two and a half rare cards. In practice, though, only roughly one in four cards is rare or better.

So, the first piece of advice is easy. For maximum value, don't enchant anything except rare cards unless you really, really need to.

Epic and Legendary cards take too long to save for, while common cards just don't give you the same return for the dust spent. Besides, you're odds-on to get the ones you need from boosters sooner rather than later.

The next big question is whether you should be aiming for class-specific cards or neutral cards. It might seem obvious to go for neutrals that you can use with all your classes. In practice, however, most neutral cards work best with a small sub-set of classes anyway, and most solid decks are built around powerful class-specific cards that can't easily be substituted with inferior replacements.

If you're lucky, the collection you've amassed so far will point you strongly in the direction of one or two deck styles or classes.

If so, deciding on the class-specific cards you want is relatively easy. If not, then you need to start thinking in terms of value again. Certain classes can build a powerful deck cheaply much more easily than others, and if you don't have an obvious steer in a particular direction, these are the ones to pick.

For the real-budget concious, the only choice is Hunter. Once you've ponied up for a pair of Savannah Highmane cards, you can build a highly competitive deck with nothing else but basics and commons.

Oh, if you look at popular builds, you'll see other rare cards like Flare and Explosive Shot and Stampeding Kodo, but they're only very marginally better than Tracking, Multi-Shot, and Tundra Rhino.

A long way behind in second play is Warlock. You'll probably have seen the term 'zoo' or 'zoolock' bandied about, but it's just shorthand for a particular style of deck that's full of cheap creatures with one or two heavy hitters.

There are a lot of ways you can play about with this concept. In the main, though, the big monster in the mix is the Doomguard, since its two-card discard penalty isn't a big deal if all your other cards are so cheap you can easily empty your hand.

Another big distance behind in the value stakes are Warrior and Druid. Cheap builds for these classes are much less reliant on class-specific cards than many others, but if you're in the market for one of these classes, you won't go far wrong investing in Frothing Berserker or Nourish, respectively.

You can also build Mage decks at a very reasonable cost - and they don't need any class cards at all.

So, that brings us on to neutral cards. I'm going to spend a bit of time on this and select five rare cards you should consider enchanting, based not only on their power but also on their utility across a variety of classes. As we count down, then, we'll look at how these choices can slot in to a range of different deck styles.

The first selection is Azure Drake. At first glance, this doesn't look like much at all - a 4/4 creature for four mana seems pretty poor value. But look at those extra powers: you get an extra draw when it comes into play. And while it lives (likely to be for a few turns with that four health), you get bonus spell damage. What build isn't going to benefit from those? If you're putting together a new deck and you need a utility card to pad out the space, there are few better choices than Azure Deck.

One of the few that might be is Gadgetzan Auctioneer. It's another 4/4 minion but this one costs five mana to play (because of its superlative special power that grants an extra card draw every time you cast a spell). While not a terrific pick for minion-heavy decks, for obvious reasons, if you're packing a lot of spell power, the Auctioneer effectively gives you a card back every time you cast one. This will give you a massive edge in the mid- to late game when hands are running low. Plus, the lovely chink of coins when his power is activated makes you feel like you're playing for real money rather than pretend gold.

A while ago, Argent Commander would probably have been the top neutral pick for pretty much any player. It might cost a whopping six mana but a 4-attack charging creature with divine shield is almost certain to deal a minimum of eight points of pain to your opponent and his minions before biting the dust. However, the Commander got too popular for his own good and Blizzard nerfed his health down to two. That means most of the common quick damage or area of effect cards will kill Argent Commander, but he's still an impressive investment for the times he sticks around.

Knife Juggler might be my personal favourite rare card in the whole game. There are plenty of other 3/2 summons for two mana, but the Knife Juggler's edge is that he deals a point of damage to a random target whenever you play another minion. So dangerous is this ability that I'm not sure I've ever seen a situation where I coined a first turn Knife Juggler and the little menace survived to turn two. Potentially useful in all decks, he's particularly devastating with Shamans and Paladins who can summon every turn.

Last but not least, I've got a double pick: Defender of Argus and Sunfury Protector. It might seem a cheat to pick two but they do almost identical things, giving taunt to adjacent minions. Defender of Argus just gives them a weak buff as well. While there are plenty of taunt minions in the deck already, the ability to throw up two at once, based on any minions you have in play, is incredibly powerful and easily a potential instant game winner.