hearthstone Interview with Mamytwink - The 45 Hour Hearthstone Turn

[Odinn 95]

 

After completing the world-record setting 45 hour, 18 minute, and 24 second Hearthstone turn, Mamytwink spoke to us about the setup, future challenges, and some of the technical problems posed by the limitations of the game client

 
Mamytwink is a French YouTube use who started out producing guides for World of Warcraft twinks (hence the name). He has since expanded into Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm. Working alongside him is Zecharia, who did the interview with us and works on all of Mamytwink's websites and projects.
 
The record turn was achieved using 9 Arcane Missiles cast with a board full of Velen's Chosen-buffed Prophet Velens (apropos!), so that each individual spell cast would fire 26,752 missiles. The setup obviously required a Priest vs. Mage game, and took long enough that Mamytwink worried they would run into European maintenance on Wednesday morning.

 

http://www.twitch.tv/mamytwink/v/3940340

A video of the setup process for the eventual 45 hour turn.

 

Here is the complete interview transcript between Damien of Icy Veins and Zecharia: 
 

1. Why did you do that?

We like the concept of testing the game's limits and discovering how far we could go with Hearthstone. We try to do things that seem impossible to see if we can break the game’s limits. We have a Youtube playlist dedicated to videos, which we call “défis inutiles” (French for “useless challenges”) and in which we illustrate that concept. This time around, we felt that a livestream format would work better, given the duration of the challenge.

2. So, you have other challenges lined up for the coming weeks?

Yes, although we will most likely not stream them and release them directly on Youtube, as we usually do. I don’t want to give any spoiler, but I can give you an example of one thing we had in mind. We wanted to do a sort of OTK Jaraxxus, with 10 Jaraxxus in the hand and 4 Demonic Portals on the board, and then you can play all 10 Jaraxxus and attack with them (yes, it’s possible). We discovered that this is no longer possible, because Blizzard reduced the duration of a turn.

2.a So the turn no longer lasts long enough to do all the action?

That’s exactly that. Before, the turn lasted 90 seconds, leaving enough time to play all the animations, but now the turn lasts 70 seconds and we cannot play all the cards. No one really noticed that the turn duration had changed, except for people like us.

3. How did you set up everything? In theory, it is easy to understand that you had 7 Prophet Velen, all buffed with numerous Velen’s Chosen, but you can only play so many cards per turn and there are only so many turns you can play before you die to fatigue. So, how did you manage to play all these Prophet Velen and Velen’s Chosen?

There were several phases.

The first phase is buffing one Prophet Velen. So, we played Velen, Lorewalker Cho, and we buffed him with spell power through Velen’s Chosen (but not too much, we had an attempt with so much + spell power that the game crashed before the first Arcane Missiles could fire its first missile). At the same time, the Mage played its Ice Block and a copy of it was given to the Priest by Lorewalker Cho. Then, Cho is killed and the Priest plays its Ice Block, and another Cho is played (both decks are running their own copy). This way, Ice Block, which is needed for the Priest to remain alive during the Arcane Missiles turn, is out of the way.

The second phase consists in duplicating Prophet Velen with Faceless Manipulators. The idea is for the Mage to have 7 copies of Faceless Manipulator, which is achieved through Lorewalker Cho and Mind Vision. Once this is done, the 7 Faceless Manipulators are played in successive turns to copy the Priest’s buffed Prophet Velen.

The third phase is all about accumulating Arcane Missiles in the Mage’s hand, which is done through Mind Vision (with which the Priest copies Arcane Missiles) and Lorewalker Cho (which gives Mage another copy of Arcane Missile when Priest plays it). We managed to get 9 copies, but I think that if we had tried some more, we could have gotten 10.

The last phase is the launching of the missiles. The Arcane Missiles must be played in quick succession, in such a way that they are all played before the animation of the first one starts and prevents the Mage from doing anything else.

We needed about a dozen attempts, but that’s because we are very used to this kind of setup for our other challenges. We had a previous failed attempt where we had the right setup and Mamytwink misclicked when trying to change the sound volume for the stream and he conceded the game. We have a video that shows the entire setup process (it shows Mamytwink going back and forth between 2 PCs, but that’s because I had to leave after the good attempt where he mistakenly conceded, so he had to set the game again all by himself).

The main problem we faced with the setup was drawing an Arcane Missiles in the early turns. It made using Mind Vision much more complicated.

4. Which decklists did you use?

(Editor's note: We don’t have the deck lists yet, but were given the following comment.)

The idea is that, besides the required cards, the decks should be filled with 1 health minions that can easily trade against one another or be killed with the Mage’s Hero Power. Obviously, that excludes Clockwork Gnome, because of the Spare Part he gives.

5. The Guinness World Records logo, is that something official or just for laughs?

At the beginning, it was just for fun. We even made a fake Guinness logo by adding the Hearthstone logo in it. Mamytwink tried to get in touch with them to submit an application. I don’t know if this will lead to anything, though.

 
What kinds of challenges would you be interested in seeing in the future?

 

UPDATE: Mamytwink has provided us with links to the decks he used over on www.hearthstone-decks.com (note: These sites are in French):

 

Priest: http://www.hearthstone-decks.com/deck/voir/tour-de-45-heures-8415

Mage: http://www.hearthstone-decks.com/deck/voir/tour-de-45-heures-9157
 

And you thought Control Paladin mirror matches took a long time - read our interview with Mamytwink about the 45-hour Hearthstone turn.

[Peelyon 416]

Love stuff like this - entirely pointless but fun none the less!

 

Trust the French eh Damien ;)