HHL has a small but dedicated community and it's how I and lots of other people learned to play. I encourage beginners to visit the YouTubers and find ones you like, as well as visit the [Discord](https://discord.com/invite/vZzJGRp) or Reddit for deck advice.
Sick of just playing the same old ladder/friendly matches/events? The community frequently organizes tournaments on Discord, many geared toward newer players with smaller collections. There are in-game prizes of gold and/or cards!
Register an account to avoid losing data when you change phones or want to cross-platform to PC.
Sign up for the newsletter, they give you a copy of **Remembrancer Order**, a good legendary.
Starting Out with Loot Boxes[]
Earn gold by playing in ladder and opening boxes.
Focus on collecting a single set of lootboxes at first. Go for 100gp boxes, not 200.
Collect from the same set until you get a legendary, and then do another set, as you will get a legendary at least once every 30 boxes per set, and you will set up a good collection that way in the long run.
The best “neutral” legendary cards are spread across multiple sets. You can see what set a card is in based on the matching watermark of the card’s text.
Basic Deckbuilding[]
Pack doubles of whatever card that you find is working. Even if you don't really need two, the consistency will prove helpful. **A really good starter deck has 15 actual cards in it.** I see way too many starting players playing decks of 30 singles. This is exposing you to needless RNG.
Cards have four rarities: Common, Rare (Green), Epic (Orange), Legendary (Yellow). You can pack x2 of any card into a deck except legendaries.
All factions have common, rare, and epic staples.
Just because it’s common doesn’t mean it’s bad, quite the contrary, it could be critical.
Legendaries are nice but you don't need them at all to advance to Terra/2500 Elo, the “end game” of HHL’s Elo system.
Not every legendary is going to help every warlord.
Neutral legendaries are often going to provide more value than legion-specific legendaries, simply because you can use them in more decks.
It is easier to build aggro decks, as most aggro cards are common and/or in neutral sets.
Most decks want:
* Hard removal (destroy troops)
* Board wipe (does damage to all enemies in play)
* Card draw
* Enough low energy cards to have at least a passable early game.
You don't want to be topdecking into your empty hand each turn or bricking, in which you have nothing in hand you can actually play.
If you want to know what's considered most competitive, visit the meta report on the sidebar.
Spending Money[]
You can spend real money on the game if you want to support it, get alternate art, and unique cardbacks, but many of the vets got where they are just from doing their dailies for months and months.
The best values are the $19.99 primarch deck offers, as primarchs are the rarest cards, pretty much all of them are good, and their decks have other rare cards.
Shopping in the In-Game Store[]
Cards in the store cost gems, earned when you unbox a card you already have at 1/4th the card’s gem cost.
The store cycles based on the faction and which legendaries were available the last time that faction was in the store.
If you log in once every day for at least a week, you will have access to the “veteran” store.
There's no crafting system, so if the card is not in the store you have to randomly unbox it. There's a lot of working with what you have in this game while searching for your white whale.
Legendaries are 1,600 gems, epics 400, rares 100, and commons 20.
It’s generally not worth it to spend gems on commons or rares in the store.
We have a shop guide that posts *every day* where people give takes on what shop cards are best.
Legendary warlords are almost never in the store. You can go six months or more between seeing the same legendary warlord show up.
PVP Events[]
There is a new PVP event about every month. These are deck drafting events with limited sets of factions and warlords.
It’s a change of pace from the game’s overall meta, but event meta is often one-sided.
You get boxes back from an event according to the number of tickets you spent (1 or 10), and the quality of the boxes increases based on how many games you won before dropping three, to a maximum of 12 wins.
To start with, do 10x ticket runs in the Event system, not 1x. Even if you bust out and win no games you will get a bunch of cards.
You should definitely join a lodge (clan) to rake in more rewards from events. The total take increases based on the lodge's combined performance. Joining a nearly-full one that can consistently do at least 7,500 points is usually best.
PVE Campaigns[]
There’s a revolving PVE event system with a different storyline about every three weeks, focusing on a different faction each time.
Your mission is to complete each of the three warlords' storylines by defeating a series of CPU warlords.
Each time you defeat a warlord, you can draft a new card pack.
You get an upgrade to your deck after the third match.
* These are passives that affect your entire deck, like -1 cost to all troops or your warlord always has bloodthirst.
* Picking the right one is critical to your overall success.
Completing the event with each of the three warlords is a good way to earn loot boxes that will mostly have a scramble of stuff from the faction, as well as some XP for your account.
After you clear the third series, the super secret end guy shows up, a primarch with its whispers/reckoning already activated.
* If you lose to the "secret boss," you can re-attempt it with any of the three warlords, but must do their entire series again first. When you do so, you gain a second upgrade after the fifth match.
* Defeating the boss gives you a unique cardback. There is no other reward.
You do not get more loot boxes for completing the same warlord series twice, but you do get more XP.
With the advent of the PVE campaign in-game archive, it looks like we are coming to the end of new PVE campaign content, or if not, at least the point where they are replayable.
There are 30 factions in the game, including all 18 astartes legions.
Every faction has at least five warlords: One rare, two epic, and one legendary (often a primarch), and at least one additional warlord currently locked to events (drafted decks).
A warlord’s rarity does not correlate to how competitive they are in the game’s meta, so don’t worry about that. There are some really good rare and epic warlords.
Three of the factions are “neutral” (Chaos, Imperial, Mechanicum) and their cards can be used in (almost) any deck.
In-faction cards are typically higher value than most neutral cards (slightly better stats or effects), encouraging their use and therefore encouraging you to play to the faction’s overall style. Mixing and matching your faction with certain neutrals, particularly epics and legendaries, is wise, however.
Neutral warlords can only use neutral cards. This limits their capabilities, but as a tradeoff, most neutral warlords have very powerful abilities.
Each faction that I'm about to discuss has an overall style, but each warlord will play it a little differently. Playing aggro in a control-oriented faction is possible, for example, and there's more than enough room to play some off-the-wall decks.
