Hearthstone Minion Averages and Radar Charts

My educational background and work experience thus far has allowed me to work with data all the time and has showed me how to evaluate things with numbers. While using numbers typically have a work or research-related application, numbers have been increasingly used to look at hobbies. I decided to look at some basic numbers with stats involving Hearthstone minions.

For this exercise, I just decided to look at averages for minion cost, attack, and health.

Hearthstone minions by class

What this tells you is that the average minion in Hearthstone is a 4 mana 3.5 / 4. The average neutral minion also has a similar cost and stat distribution as all overall cards.

It is pretty obvious that Druids have the highest cost minions, and biggest minions, consolidating their status as the ramp class. Rogue cards are the cheapest and have the lowest health. Shamans have a low attack total, tainted by 0-attack totems.

Hearthstone minions by set

The Basic set are clearly the weakest cards around, as they are the cards you get for free. Naxx and GvG were known for ushering aggro into dominance, as evidenced by their relatively low costs. BRM was a set that had a lot of beefy dragon minions.

Hearthstone minions by rarity

Finally, a view of rarity, which primarily has implications in the arena. You see a clear linear trend in the upward slope of cost, attack and health, as a card gets rarer.

Radar charts

I was doing some work on Microsoft Excel when I realized that Excel could create radar charts. Intrigued about this, I thought about what possible visual applications radar charts had on conveying information. This all led to me creating some Hearthstone-related radar charts.

For minions, I decided to categorize all class minions into “what they did.” To account for all the different types of effects, I had to put them into broad bins of what they did.

• Spellpower – Pretty clear, e.g. Kobold Geomancer
• Taunt – Pretty clear, e.g. Frostwolf Grunt
• Damage – Something that deals extra damage, e.g. SI: 7 Agent
• Charge – Pretty clear, e.g. Kor’kron Elite
• Buff Self – Something that only helps itself, usually continuous, e.g. Lightwarden
• Buff Other – Helps other minions, e.g. Blood Imp
• Reinforcement – Summons something to the board, e.g. Dr. Boom
• Cost Mod – Reduces or increases costs, e.g. Shadowfiend
• Mana Mod – Affects mana crystals somehow, e.g. Grove Tender
• Minion Mod – Affects minions in a non-damage way, e.g. Water Elemental
• Hero Mod – Affects own heroes in a non-damage way, e.g. Fallen Hero
• Cycle – Draws cards from deck, or gets you new cards in hand, e.g. Tomb Spider
• Heal – Heals hero or minons, e.g. Earthen Ring Farseer

The graph of all classes is a mess, but if you look at individual classes, like Paladin, you see their minions focus on buffing each other (Argent Protector), and minion modification (Aldor Peacekeeper).

Also for minions, I looked at basic stat distribution, and classifying them as aggro minions (more attack than health), defensive minions (more health than attack), or even.

Very aggressive minions, those than have 2 or more attack than health are quite rare. You see Rogue class minions almost always have more attack than health or are even. Shamans and Warlocks have minions that typically have more health than attack.

Priests seemingly have no card that has 2 more attack than health.

Finally I made some graphs for the spells of Hearthstone, and what they do.

Paladin spells are primarily focused on buffs, and have all but one source of hard removal.

Meanwhile, Warlock spells are all about doing damage, but have some areas of decent hard removal and AOE.

All in all, this was just to help me learn to use radar charts to display visual data for Hearthstone. In the future, I may incorporate such charts when analyzing certain decks or even arena runs.