Identifying the Resources
Before we can discuss how to manage the available resources in Hearthstone, let's identify what they are. First, and perhaps most obviously, there is mana.
Hearthstone has an interesting system for accumulating mana whereby both players, save for a few niche cases, have the same available mana each turn. This is effected by cards like the coin, innervate, and wild growth, but generally speaking each player will have parity with their opponent's available mana on a given turn.
The next resource I would like to point out is that of cards. Anyone who has played other collectible card games (CCGs), such as Magic: The Gathering, is probably very familiar with this resource, and perhaps with the concept of card advantage. If you are not, then don't worry; we will come back to this concept later.
Another important resource in Hearthstone is life. You often don't think of it as a resource, because you generally don't "spend" it directly to perform most actions. However, indirectly, different decision might cause you to lose different amounts of life. There are also cases where you do directly spend life, such as the Warlock hero power, or with the Warlock class card Flame Imp. Obviously, this is an extremely important resource because if you run out of your limited resource pool here, you lose the game.
Damage is another resource that you have available to you. Some forms of damage are persistent, or at least recurrent, such as minions, weapons, and hero powers. Other damage sources, in the form of spells, are single use. There are exceptions to this description. An example would be the card Headcrack, which is a spell that can be a recurrent source of damage.
The final one I want to mention is that of tempo. This is a less tangible resource, but because of the way the combat system in Hearthstone works, it is typically more relevant than in other CCGs. I will define tempo here as your relative power/impact on the board. That is, on any given turn, do you have more or less in play than your opponent, or can you effect the board state with spells? It is closely tied to your mana because you use mana to alter the board state. If you generate a very efficient conversion of mana to a dominant board state, then you are generating tempo. This can indirectly result in more efficient management of all your other resources, though is less intimately tied to these resources than mana.
Resource Interplay
Although I made an attempt to relate tempo to your other resources, in reality, they all can have interactions with one another in a given situation. Making the play that is more mana efficient might be less card efficient or result in you taking more damage. This interplay is extremely important. At any given moment you have to decide which resources need prioritiy. Clearly, it is never the correct decision to move life to such a low priority that you are considering spending more than you have, because that results in losing the game. The tricky part is figuring out whether the life you "spend" now by making a given decision will leave you with zero life the next turn, or five turns from now.
This interplay is important because it also effects future turns. Perhaps spending more life now by making a given play will result in saving life in the long run because it will result in tempo advantage, which means board control, more efficient minion trading, and less damage coming at your face. Maybe your opponent is playing an aggressive deck, and that kind of investment in future turns isn't an option because you will be dead two turns from now, so a payoff five turns from now is irrelevant. Maybe your opponent is playing a more control oriented deck and your life total is under very little pressure, but they can win the attrition battle by making you run out of cards while they hold several.
These are all simply examples that, I hope, illustrate the point that these resources are very transient. Using one more efficiently might mean sacrificing efficient usage of a different resource now, or on future turns. Conversely, proper management of resources can perpetuate efficient usage of different resources. Sometimes there is even a synergistic effect, such as when you generate lots of tempo through a high mana efficiency, and it sets you up for efficient usage of all other resources.
Mana
Mana, once again, is probably the most obvious available resource. You have a certain amount that you can use each turn, and there is no carryover of unused mana to the following turn. Thus, any mana you don't use is lost forever. If you repeatedly fail to efficiently use your available mana, and your opponent succeeds in this task, then they are most likely going to generate tempo. The only exception would be if the quality of your cards is absurdly high compared to your opponent.
Thus, it behooves you to try and use as much mana as possible each turn. Of course, this has to happen within reason. Being a slave to mana efficiency at the expense of all other resources is typically a bad idea, unless you're very certain the tempo generated by this efficient use of mana is your primary route to victory. A very common example of this would be using all your mana efficiently, only to have you opponent use an AOE spell to nullify all of the tempo these mana efficient plays gained you.
Typically, decks where you are in the more aggressive role care a bit more about mana efficiency. If you don't efficiently use your mana for the first several turns, then you are a lot more likely to lose because mana efficiency tends to matter a bit less as the game goes on, and mana is a less constrained resource. As well, because your card quality and power tends to be lower, and thus the mana cost of your cards also tends to be lower, it becomes very hard to continue to use your mana efficiently late into the game because you don't have the cards to spend it on. There are certainly exceptions in the form of tempo decks with fantastic draw engines (e.g. most Rogue decks). Nonetheless, mana efficiency, to some extent, is important no matter what style of deck you are playing or what your win condition might be.
Cards
Ah card advantage, one of the most consistently important aspects of any CCG. This is simply the idea that you only have 30 cards, and in any given game, you might see only a fraction of those. If you can play more cards, or require your opponent to use multiple cards to nullify a single card you play, then your opponent will no longer have the card resources to make plays while you are still putting on the pressure.
Examples of cards that generate card efficiency are cards that draw multiple cards (e.g. Arcane Intellect), minions that replace themselves (e.g. Azure Drake), or cards to nullify multiple opponent cards (e.g. Flamestrike). These are generally considered to be powerful effects, but you can also see that they are mostly negative tempo plays, save for the exception of a well timed AOE spell. Even then, they don't typically provide you with tempo, but merely nullify the tempo advantage that your opponent has gained thus far.
Card efficiency tends to be more important in longer games. The example that epitomizes the importance of card efficiency is if one player runs out of cards. If this happens, they WILL lose the game in the vast majority of situations (Fatigue damage could still theoretically win you the game if your opponent has cards in hand but can't draw any more). Thus, card advantage tends to be the hallmark of the control deck archetype. They want to make the game go long, and force you to expend a lot of cards to nullify their individual cards, thus starving you in the long run. It's a cruel, slow, painful death, and that's one of the reasons control tends to be my favorite archetype.
Life
Life is one of the most tricky resources to manage in Hearthstone. You literally don't care about expending all of your life except for one. As long as you have one life left when your opponent has zero, you win. You don't sort of win, or get more points for having more life when you finish them off, so winning with 30 life is the same as winning with three. As such, converting life into other resources, such as tempo or cards, is always the best decision if you are extremely confident you have enough life to last until you can execute your game plan and win. It also the most dangerous and unforgiving resource to mismanage. If you run out of cards in your hand, then you can always top deck really well while your opponent bricks. If you waste a bunch of mana, then you might be able to make mana efficient and powerful plays later in the game with your hand full of unused cards. If you run out of life... you're fucked.
Aggressive decks prey on the critical importance of properly managing this resource. They hope to force you to make decisions that are inefficient with respect to other resources, because they know you have to value your life total above everything against their lightning fast onslaught of face damage (note: Fuck you Hunter players; I hate you all, you degenerate scum).
In contrast, because aggressive decks plan to win the game very quickly, they tend to value their own life total far less than other decks. They only need their life pool to last them the first several turns of the game under most circumstances. A control deck might need their life pool to last them 20 turns before they can finally win. This is why you typically see no little to no cards to gain you life in an aggressive deck, but some amount of life gain in a more control oriented strategy.
Damage
Damage is one of the more forgiving resources that one can manage in Hearthstone. Because of Hearthstone's focus on minion based combat, and the fact that minions represent recurrent sources of damage, allowing yourself the tempo advantage of having board dominance can mean you can to deal a huge amount of damage using one card, and for a low mana investment. For example, if your opponent never gets to kill the Leper Gnome you played turn one because you keep playing bigger threats, then it might deal 14 damage over the course of several turns.
With that said, damage efficiency is still very important. Management of this resource is more difficult in decks that run lots of fragile minions capable of dealing damage quickly, but not likely to live multiple turns. An example of this is the card Wolfrider, which is something you see in extremely aggressive decks. Thus, damage efficiency is more important in decks that need to execute their plan quickly, or rely on a lot of spell damage, which isn't recurrent. Control decks can be a lot more frivolous with their damage efficiency, but as always, deciding when you need to be damage efficient is extremely contextual. It can be important regardless of the archetype.
An example of a situation where the importance damage efficiency is epitomized is when a spell based Mage decks plays a control Warrior deck. If they don't deal damage in a very efficient way, then it will be extremely hard to end the game because of the massive amount of extra life a warrior can generate. Mage decks relying on spell damage often don't plan to be able to deal 50 damage, even if 30 is relatively easy.
Tempo
As mentioned, tempo is the least easily quantified of all aforementioned resources. However, it may be the most important in Hearthstone. Once again, because you get to have minions attack other minions directly, having dominance of the board which allows you to do this is extremely advantageous. You get to make the most efficient attacks, and your opponent can do very little to stop you. As a result, tempo can result in more efficient use of your cards, damage, and life. By default, if you have tempo advantage, you are very likely managing your mana better than your opponent.
Often times, lower cost cards are great at providing tempo and being efficient in terms of damage output. However, these same cards tend to be less card efficient. For example, Fireball is a card that deals six damage for four mana, while Pyroblast is a card that deals 10 damage for 10 mana. Thus, Pyroblast does more damage per card, but does less damage per mana. As such, Fireball is a card that provides tempo because it can have a larger impact on the board per mana spent. With that said, this can impact the available resources on later turns. Casting Fireball on a taunt minion that you would have had to sacrifice minions to kill will net you more damage in the long run because it allows you to attack more times with those minions.
Again, this interplay of resources is always important to consider. If using a card that "does less," but at a greater mana efficiency, results in more efficient conversion to other resources later, then it indirectly becomes a card that "does more."
Matchup Specific Resource Management
One of the keys to efficiently using all these resources is to recognize what your opponent is trying to accomplish, and thus, how you can beat that strategy. If your opponent is trying to execute an aggressive strategy, then life becomes a substantially more valuable resource, unless your strategy is to simply kill them faster. As well, the delayed impact of making really value oriented plays that sacrifice tempo for card efficiency are not worth it most of the time. You will not have the time to realize the benefit of this investment. It's like investing money in stocks when you know the world is going to end in two weeks. You won't have time to reap the benefits of the accumulated value on the initial investment because you'll be dead.
If your opponent is trying to win a war of attrition by making really card efficienct plays and draining you of resources, but you know you can't compete with their card quality, then tempo and damage efficiency are what you have to prioritize. Don't try to beat him at his own game; win on a level where you a better suited to generate value. Force the opponent to make inefficient plays because they are forced to value their life total over their card value.
I only referenced a couple of examples, but I hope it paints the picture. There are a lot of variables that will help you decide which resources are most important. However, once you get used to identifying what resources are important, you will be able to more accurately and effectively do so, and adjust this level of importance based on game state.
Wrapping Up
There are too many variables and possible situations for me to analyze all of them. There are endless factors that contribute to how managing these resources will alter your game plan. The bottom line is that you should always be evaluating which resources are most important in the overall matchup and at any given moment within that matchup, if you can efficiently convert a less important resource into a more important resource, and if you have time to make plays that result in a delayed gratification of invested resources.
I hope this information proves useful and nets you some extra wins on your next ladder climb. Feel free to comment below if you have anything to contribute to this set of ideas, or if you just want to tell me I'm a raging douche bag. Cheers!
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