How to play as Forest Lord Cenarius in Hearthstone Battlegrounds

One of the two newest heroes in Hearthstone Battlegrounds, Forest Lord Cenarius, has what seems like a straightforward hero power that doesn’t look too strong at first — but the key to succeeding with this hero is to know how and, more importantly, when to hit that hero power button. Spoiler alert: “econ” is king!

So read on to learn how to play as Forest Lord Cenarius, with a handy step-by-step guide for the first few turns of the game — which are the most important ones if you want to succeed with this hero.

Hit your Hero Power every single turn for the first three turns

There are some unwritten rules that apply to card games, roguelikes, and other types of games that have “economies” you need to pay attention to. One of those rules is that, especially in the early game, “econ is king.” And that’s the case with playing this hero: your hero power is all about boosting your economy by giving you more gold on every future turn at the cost of losing some gold right now — and that’s the kind of action that’s best taken as early on as possible.

Turn 1

Players start with three gold, so we’ll want to just hit our hero power, which also costs three gold. We’ll have an empty board, same as heroes like A. F. Kay or Ambassador Faelin, but it’s not a huge deal.

However, the most important part of turn 1 is: if we see a 2-cost spell in our initial tavern, we have to make sure to freeze it. We’ll have the opportunity to use it on turn 2, which might ensure our board doesn’t stay empty.

Turn 2

We have five gold, and we’ll spend three on our hero power. That leaves us with two, which is not enough to level up our Tavern — but it’s okay; we’ll just pretend we’re joining the ranks of heroes like Arch-Villain Rafaam, who don’t usually level up on Turn 2 either.

If we were able to freeze that 2-cost spell on Turn 1 — or if we find one now — let’s nab it, and hopefully get a minion to populate our sad, empty board. If not, we might buy some 1-cost spell to save for later.

Turn 3

Now we have seven gold, and it’s only turn three — so we’re starting to understand where the power of this hero comes from. But the strategy is very straightforward: level up our tavern for three, spend three more on hitting our hero power, and we have one leftover gold, which we might use to grab another spell.

From turns four to six, keep hitting your hero power — but assess the situation

This is the stage of the game where we need to start worrying about getting something on our board, lest we fall behind too much. We still want to boost our economy — there’s no better time to do it than right now — but we also need to consider our long-term survival.

Turn 4

At this point we’re on Tavern Tier 2, we have nine gold to spend, and leveling to Tavern Tier 3 costs six gold. By default, we want to level up and hit our hero power again. But there are some rare cases where we might see some very good minion, and our board might be completely empty. In those situations, consider buying the minion — assuming it’s something that will give you some tempo and you can build around, at least for a while, and you feel like you’ll fall behind too much if you don’t. But in most cases, we still just use our hero power.

Turn 5

Let’s be real: we’re definitely losing most of our battles and by now we’ve taken enough damage to lose all of our armor. Things will get ugly if we don’t do something immediately.

Thankfully, we have a lot of gold.

Resist the urge to level up again: it’s way too risky. Just hit your hero power — you’ll have eleven gold (or ten if you bought a minion last turn) and fill up your board with the strongest minions you can find. Don’t worry too much about building a coherent composition: right now, our goal is survival, and survival alone, so buy the strongest minions you can.

Turn 6

This is the end of our early game economy-boosting strategy. Trinkets are in the lobby right now, and we might have to spend some gold on one of those — let’s hope it’s a good one. With whatever gold we have left, we probably want to hit our hero power one last time, unless things are looking extremely dire and we have no real board to call our own. Other than that, we just fill up our warband with the strongest minions we can, and by this point, we’re really looking for some direction — that is, which composition are we playing? We can’t just spend our hard-earned gold on whatever.

You’ll have plenty of gold for the rest of the game, so you can mostly ignore your hero power from then on — or not

For now, we enjoy the cap of 14-16 gold our early-game sacrifice has earned us, and we fill up our board with good minions. This is a considerable advantage to have for the midgame, and that’s what makes Forest Lord Cenarius strong: we have all the means to not only catch up to our adversaries, but surpass them by buying a greater amount of strong minions and spells before they can.

Some players will decide to keep hitting their hero power every turn, but this is only really an option if you were able to hit it every turn (or nearly every turn) on the first six turns, which is why they’re crucial. You can’t really “catch up” on your economy with this hero: by itself, the hero power is simply not strong enough. All of its value comes from the fact that every time you increase your maximum amount of gold, that increase counts for every future turn, so the earlier you get that extra gold, the more total gold you’ll get to spend for that game. The only way to maximize its value is to get it as soon as possible.

Hopefully this strategy will work for you, and may the forests — and the stonks — guide you!