Buying Hearthstone Packs with Amazon Coins

What are Amazon Coins?

Amazon Coins are an Amazon-specific currency that can be used to make purchases on eligible apps, games, and digital in-app items. The dollar:coin ratio is quite simple: 1 dollar = 1 Amazon coin. However, you can often buy Amazon Coins at a discount (e.g., 2% discount when you buy 500 coins; up to a 25% discount when you buy 50,000 coins).

Amazon and Hearthstone

If you have any doubt about the close connection between Amazon and Hearthstone, you need only look at Amazon’s Hearthstone guide.

The key thing that you must know in order to leverage Amazon coins for buying cheap Hearthstone packs is that you will need to download the Hearthstone app through the Amazon Appstore. You can see their page for more details.

But, You Don’t Have an Android Device?

No worries! Neither do I.

But I did download an Android emulator to my PC. From there, it was a piece of cake to access the Amazon Appstore, download Hearthstone, make my Amazon coin purchase, and then buy Hearthstone packs in the app running in the Android emulator.

The greatest thing is that once that is complete, you don’t need to fire up the emulator again (until you’re ready to make more purchases, that is!).

Just How Much Can You Save?

I am going to walk you through my one time using this method. Your actual savings will differ from mine since it depends on a few variables:

what discounts are available through the Amazon store at the time you purchase
what percent “kickback” you receive when you make your purchase
whether your state requires tax on digital items purchased through the Amazon store. This tax occurs when you spend the coins, not when you purchase them. Four states do not have to pay this tax: Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon.

Here is the steps I took:

I purchased 10,000 coins through the Amazon website at a cost of $81.00 (as of August 5, 2017, this same purchase would cost you $87.00); this equates to .81 cents per coin.
I went to the card shop in the Hearthstone app and elected to purchase 50 Un’Goro packs ($49.99)
I chose Amazon coins as my payment method (remember….for this option to be available, you must log into the Hearthstone through the instance downloaded from the Amazon store).
The purchase cost me 5,349 coins: 4,999 for the packs and 350 for tax (7% rate).
I received a kickback of 250 coins (5% of my purchase)

In total, I effectively spent (using the 1 coin = 1 dollar exchange rate) $41.30 for 50 packs. Or, $0.826 per pack. Not a bad discount compared to the normal cost.

Downsides

You almost always will end up with extra coins. If you buy a lot of in-app items (Hearthstone or other apps), then this may not be a problem to you. But, for me, I tend to only make purchases once per expansion. So, I will eventually use the coins, but the money is tied up for a few months.
For anyone who is not using an Android device, you will have to spend some time downloading the app and an emulator. I did not find this too difficult, but your mileage may vary.

Need a Visual?

I found Hearthstone player Reynad’s video useful when I was researching how to make my first purchase.

Ready to Buy?

Awesome! Just click the link: