The Longest Turn Ever in Hearthstone Is Happening Right Now

Right now, a potential world record is being set in Hearthstone, and you can watch it as it takes place.

The record is for the longest Hearthstone turn ever. Usually, a single turn in the popular online card game takes about a minute and a half per player. But part of the Blizzard game’s charm is the animations that accompany the different cards, and if a turn ends with an animation still in progress, the game will let everything play out before ceding control to the other player.

Even if it takes 40 hours.

The Hearthstone players attempting the feat, Florian “Mamytwink” Henn and Julien Aubrée, have a history of attempting things that Blizzard’s card game wasn’t supposed to do.

“We like to do ‘useless challenges’ in Hearthstone,” Henn told WIRED. “For example, winning on turn one, or playing 144 cards in a single turn.”

For this particular challenge, Henn and Aubrée used a combination of cards to generate a massive amount of spell power, channeling that energy into nine copies of the card “Arcane Missiles.” This card fires three projectiles, plus one for each additional spell power. Using a combination of cards that multiply the effects of other cards, Henn and Aubrée figured out a way to add not one, not two, but almost a quarter of a million extra projectiles.

How’d they do it? By doing something that Hearthstone opponents rarely do: Scheme together.

“Lorewalker Cho” is a legendary creature card that alters the rules so that when either player casts a spell, it puts a copy of that spell into the other player’s hand. And “Mind Vision,” when played, copies a random card in your opponent’s hand and puts it in your hand. If both players work together using these cards, they could generate many additional copies of cards that normally would be limited to a single use.

Blizzard“Prophet Velen” is another legendary card, one that doubles the damage and healing power of your spells. You can’t have more than one of them—unless you use the card “Faceless Manipulator,” which transforms into a carbon copy of another creature when it comes into play. Generate multiple copies of those, then use them in sequence, and you’ve got seven copies of Prophet Velen. Now make a whole stack of the special card “Velen’s Chosen,” which buffs Velen up even more.

By the time they were ready to start the attack, Henn had nine copies of the card “Arcane Missiles” and 209 spell power, meaning that each copy of the card would shoot 209 individual projectiles, taking up about 0.67 seconds of animation time each.

But each of the Prophet Velen cards doubled the attack power. And it stacked. And Henn had seven Prophets. Doubled seven times, that means that each Arcane Missiles card would shoot 26,752 projectiles. And with nine cards in play, that means that 240,768 missiles were heading for Aubrée’s face. (And he couldn’t have been happier.)

By Henn’s calculations, the turn should take around 45 hours to complete—if Hearthstone could handle it, that is.

BlizzardOne of the biggest obstacles in Henn and Aubrée’s “useless challenges” is not the cards at their disposal but the architecture of Hearthstone itself. When dealing with the massive numbers Henn throws at it, sometimes Hearthstone can’t handle it and simply crashes.

It’s the reason he stopped at around 30 uses of the “Velen’s Chosen” buff this time around—this wasn’t his first attempt at a super-long turn, but previously Velen was buffed so much that the game couldn’t handle the calculation for such a massive amount of damage.

The first bit of drama during the in-progress turn came when Henn set the play into motion. Simultaneously operating two computers in the same room, he cast the nine Arcane Missiles cards. But while the primary account seemed to be running fine, the other computer crashed. If it wasn’t back up within 15 minutes, the whole operation would be a bust. Luckily, it came back online and everything seemed to be running smoothly.

Another snafu happened around 10 hours in: The Twitch channel broadcasting the world record attempt mysteriously went down. And Henn wasn’t sure what was wrong. He had left the game running in his office, and wouldn’t be able to check on it for another eight hours. It was entirely possible the game was still running, and only the stream had gone down. But perhaps the game had crashed altogether.

Luckily, everything was still running smooth when he clocked in the next morning. The stream came back up just before crossing the 19-hour mark, and the longest turn ever continued burning on.