Hearthstones is a game of knowledge, power, and a little bit of luck. Cian A. Bailey-Mathis, the leader of the hearthstones team, was very expressive about how the game works. He is a fifth-year student with a major in history and creative writing. He explains that the game is a card game that has a three-on-three death match. The objective of this game is to get cards on the field and deal damage to your opponent directly.

Bailey-Mathis was one of the co-founders of the Esports team with six others. The primary game he wanted to play was overwatch but moved to hearthstone because they needed more people on that team. He says, “in order to get into this game you need desire.” When he first started five years ago his captain was terrible. He says he was always missing practices and not taking them seriously, so they never did good in the tournaments. Currently, he has two other people on his hearthstone team named Adam and Chris. According to Bailey-Mathis, he says that he has in-person practice on Tuesday and Thursday from six to eight, and the players are expected to play at least two hours a day outside of the team and experiment with different decks.

Tournaments were a big topic we talked about as everyone wants to know who’s winning and what they are winning. Bailey-Mathis broke down tournaments for me in a bracket. First, the tournaments for hearthstones were very different than the other Esports games. They do all their tournaments online because the teams they face are all over Michigan and part of Canada. The money they can win is from two thousand to one hundred from first to fifth place. Every game has to be streamed because there are not enough referees to watch all one hundred games. Unfortunately, the hearthstone team has only made it to the top thirty-one but that is still impressive seeing that there is one senior and two freshmen on the team. You can watch them on twitch under the name SHUesports and follow them on Twitter @SHUsports.