Betting on the next Hearthstone

Legends of Runeterra was just launching and I thought it had a real shot at Hearthstone-level scale. I grabbed a premium .gg domain and built a full companion platform — card database, deck browser, tier lists, and a custom card maker where players could design and share their own cards.

The site was engineered as an SEO machine: I programmatically generated hundreds of pages targeting every permutation of search terms, so every combination of region, playstyle, card type, and mana cost got its own optimized page. The play was to capture long-tail search traffic first, then build into a direct-traffic brand over time.

Thousands of players ended up using it and it picked up solid organic traffic. But the game never quite reached the scale I was betting on, and my attention drifted to other projects, so I let it go. I wasn't even a huge player of the game — I was just fascinated with building gaming platforms at the time and saw an opportunity worth swinging at. Still proud of how that site turned out.