I know that, years from now, when I finally get 500 wins with my chosen Priest class in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, I’m going to feel proud. But I’ll also feel very slow.
That’s because Russian Hearthstone player Shtan Udachi (ШтанУдач) has already reached 20,000 wins in publisher Blizzard’s popular card battler. Not only that, he racked up exactly 10,000 Play Mode and Arena Mode wins at the same time. He shared a screenshot of his time-consuming accomplishment:
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Above: That’s a lot of Hearthstoning.
Let’s put this in perspective. An average game of Hearthstone takes around 10 minutes, but let’s just say that it’s only nine minutes. That would mean that Shtan has spent 180,000 minutes battling people in Hearthstone … only in games he won.
Put another way, Shtan has played Hearthstone matches for the equivalent of approximately 125 days.
That doesn’t even count the time spent matchmaking or building decks, or — likely — the days worth of time spent playing in matches that he lost.
Even crazier, Shtan claims he has never spent any real money in the game ever. Despite that, he has a gold version of every card that is commonly played by the top players. To craft those gold cards, it requires a ton of the in-game item dust. But I guess you can get a lot of that after 10,000 wins in the Arena mode alone.
Shtan is also well known in the Hearthstone community for developing the Malygos Warlock deck that quickly rose to popularity among the game’s top players. He has reached the top rank in the ranked mode on the European Union server multiple times, and viewers of his Twitch stream are regularly treated to seeing him get the maximum of 12 wins in Arena.
And that’s a good thing, because I would find it depressing if he still stunk at the game after 20,000 wins.