Hearthstone Players!

I finally lost a couple games with the Totem.dec, to Quest Shaman and Mass Res Priest. The Priest player twice used Forbidden Words to kill my totems, so I think he had the god draw. I got through one Mass Res and then he did the other one and I was spent.

Still on a 10 game win streak with Zoo, though. Latest victim was Control Warrior. See if you can pick out where I missed lethal: hsreplay.net/replay/j8hZhtEHijBa3jyQNjxQmC

Leeroy draws should always hit the pause button. Toughest thing was making room! I'm playing with such big creatures in Priest that I can miss lethal if I am not stopping to look around here and there. I'm swinging for 8 and 9 sometimes and I need to give myself a minute to see if they are just dead instead of my automatic board clear mode.

Resurrected!
I know most everyone quit by now, however....

Dragon expansion is OP nutty sh*t.
Battlegrounds is highly addictive.

That is all

I didn't quit, I just have Blizzard on a six month ban.

Battlegrounds looks really cool, and I am very happy to see Educated Collins tearing up those leaderboards. He was always amazing at Arena and thus, utterly forgotten. This makes him stand out.

Haven't looked at the new set, it might rotate away before I return. I did see they brought a lot of old cards back to Standard and made the meta a shitpile. That must be a blast, bleeeaarg.

The Desert Hare + Mogu + Evolve combo for Shaman is degenerate nonsense and I'm glad it's going away soon, same goes for the N'Zoth decks (though those are much less common).

I've spent most of this expansion playing Quest Rogue. It's not the best, it gets stomped if the generated cards are bad or if the quest is slow to completion, but I'm enjoying the clown fiesta and I've won more often then not (only for dailies, though, I haven't laddered in months). The other day I was at 2 HP against a Mage who had an empty hand so I needed to generate a card to survive lest his hero power finish me off. I went Fan of Knives into EVIL Miscreant, which gave me an Ethereal Lackey. The best choice it offered was Call of the Void, which gave me Jaraxxus. I felt pretty dirty after that one. I also ran into a rare Control Warrior and I ended up getting and playing Dr. Boom. I'd forgotten that playing Tess after that also replays all your Rogue cards, so between that, the fact that they'd already used all their removal, and the fact that they only had a few cards left (and it also didn't hurt that I'd played King Krush very early so I got another one of those) resulted in a quick concession. I also had a goofy game against a Quest Druid that went to fatigue and Tess was the last card in my deck. I ended up playing Puzzlebox twice (once regularly, once with Tess) but the second time was a Hail Mary against his mostly-full board and all it did was draw me into lethal fatigue damage.

I'm also enjoying my janky Wild Quest Warlock deck (Supreme Archaeology, not the garbage one). I don't have Dorian so I cut Betrug from the list and added more taunts and clears, as well as Rin. I've only had it happen a couple times, but if you can complete the quest after getting Rin killed off you can expedite the seals by playing them alongside whatever minion and/or taunt you just played for 0 mana. It's a slow, greedy deck that aims to stall until it can outvalue the opponent. I recently added Sathrovarr to the deck which is surprisingly good at adding a little more tempo to close out games late.

I have, indeed, quit. I'm not interested in supporting Blizzard anymore. Looked at the cards on Hearthpwn out of curiosity. I don't find anything particularly compelling.

I never gave up. Blizzard are full of hot shit, but since I never spend a penny on Hearthstone and don't play any other Blizzard games, I figured at this point I'm actually costing them money so I might as well carry on.

I didn't care for Battlegrounds. I mean it's actually quite fun but it's not for me: the games just go on too long. If there was more payout for the main game in terms of gold or cards or whatever, I'd play it more.

Evolve Shaman made me do something I never thought I'd do which is switch to Wild. My main reason for avoiding it, Highlander decks, seem to have fallen out of fashion there and SN1P-SN4P decks are all up at legendary. I'm actually ranking much higher than I ever did in Standard, mostly playing Mage decks.

I don't pre-empty expansions as you never know how they're going to shake out the meta a month down the line. I'll take it as it comes.

Anyone else opening expansion packs? Popped 32 so far, one legendary. Pretty poor.

Early signs are this expansion is as overpowered as many were suggesting. Normally when an expansion hits existing decks work fine for a week or two while the meta adjusts. But even the tentative initial builds I'm seeing are steamrollering my old stuff.

I don't think I'm going to like it. The invoke mechanic and side quests reward slow, defensive play which isn't my thing at all.

Still on my ban over here, but my normal pack process is: spend all my gold on the initial buy. I'm guaranteed 1 Legendary in the first ten packs. I would normally have say 50 to 70 packs. Then keep spending all the gold I get one more Legendary, and then start saving again for the next set. Focus on Rares that are deckbuilding options/bombs for crafting. As I accumulate Dust, watch the meta for chase Epics/Legendaries that align with my playstyle(s).

I'm still not playing and may never play a Blizzard game again, unless some radical about-face takes place vis-a-vis policy toward the Chinese government, but I still keep tabs on the game, as I like to watch Kibler's and Chump's videos from their respective Twitch streams. With that in mind, I thought it'd be interesting to look at the Priest changes in the next expansion, as it undergoes the overhaul that people have thought it needed since, oh, the closed beta or so.

www.hearthpwn.com/news/7288-all-card-cha...me-and-priest-coming

They're removing Northshire Cleric, Divine Spirit, Auchenai Soulpriest, Holy Fire, Shadowform, and Velen.

Northshire Cleric is probably the most surprising, since it's been the only early minion included in every Priest deck since the beta and the main source of Priest card draw. But that's the problem. It's always included as the most efficient method of winning the game (i.e. drawing cards) and Priests often face a duality: if it lives, they win. If it dies or they don't draw it, they lose. It's just too stark to be workable and inhibits a lot of design space.

Why Divine Spirit and not Inner Fire? Because Fire can still be an interesting reaction card and it's the Spirit (and many cards that use mathematical adjectives ("double"), rather than integers) that makes the OTK a reality if you don't clear the Priest's board every turn. It's stupid and they're finally getting rid of it, six years too late.

Auchenai Soulpriest and Shadowform are relics of the attempt to include the class' Shadow spec in Hearthstone. Problem is, Shadowform annuls the majority of cards in the Basic/Classic set (which were already largely terrible), which forces you to design your deck around drawing a copy of Shadowform. If you don't, you're neutered. Auchenai wasn't quite as bad, but they've been pushing the class away from direct damage (which can spiral out of control very quickly; see Shadowreaper Anduin) and this is the final step. Similarly, Holy Fire is also part of that shift. The card was dismissed as useless for most of the game's history and had only found renewed interest in the last year or two, oddly.

Velen has too powerful an effect ("doubles"; adjectival) to be given a smaller cost and too high a cost to be effective in most decks. He's a "surprise win" of the type that Team 5 is trying to veer away from.

They're being replaced with Natalie Seline, Shadow Word: Ruin, Kul Tiran Chaplain, Power Infusion, Psychic Conjurer, and Scarlet Subjugator.

First thing to notice is that three of those cards are early game minions; the type of card that Priest has always lacked and which has inhibited the class for the game's entire existence. The only one it had that was usable in the B/C set was... Northshire Cleric, which they often didn't want to play early, knowing it would instantly be destroyed and their draw would go with it. Psychic Conjurer is a 1/1 for 1, draw a card, which is decent. It's from your opponent's deck, which can be brilliant or can be useless. But it replaces itself with something. Kul Tiran Chaplain is a duplicate of any number of solid minions that have done the same thing, albeit a little sturdier as a 2/3. Scarlet Subjugator is probably the best, since it sets up good trades and is, thus, playable not just as an early 2/1 who may trade for free, but also usable later in the game. Power Infusion is the unused Power Word: Tentacles. It could be a decent inclusion in what remains of Inner Fire decks. Shadow Word: Ruin is the Anduin effect and a perfect Priest card. Natalie Seline is a vast improvement over Velen, since she can not only knock out a big target but also heal the Priest for a significant amount. THAT is a class legendary.

Smite goes to 3 damage but only minions. Again, removing DD capability from Priest.
Holy Nova goes to 4 mana and might be up to the level of a mildly scorned B/C card.
PWS goes to 0 mana but no longer draws. This is just a design space issue. They wanted people to use new cards.
Shadow Madness going to 3 mana is a door opener. This is a powerful effect, but never felt like it was worth the cost assigned. Now there's room to add good cards for it.
SWD going to 2 is where it always should've been, like SWP. It's funny to look back on how awful Priest was in the beta. SWD replaced a card called Fade, which gave all your minions Taunt. It was named after an awful spell in WoW that no one used. The conditional nature of the Shadow Words is why people stopped using them in recent years. Making SWD cheaper is at least something.
Thoughtsteal has fallen from grace as classes have been pushed more into their respective zones by the devs. It's more and more likely that you end up with worthless cards from an opposing class, so it makes sense to drop it to 2 mana, since it was never as good as AI at the same cost. With Conjurer, at least you get an early minion to go with your potentially worthless card.
The changes to Temple Enforcer are about making it possibly viable, even in new player decks, where it simply never has been.

Overall, the changes are about making the class with the least useful B/C set at least approach usability and not have to rely on huge swings with each expansion or be confined to a single deck type (control), where all other classes have at least two, if not more.

As for the rest of it, the HoFing of Leeroy, Mountain Giant, and Mind Control Tech are way overdue. I'm a little surprised at the loss of Acolyte and Spellbreaker, but recognize that design space issues are the focus there.

I love Natalie Seline; it's like the bastard offspring of Blade of C'thun and Vol'jin (and I've always advocated for Vol'jin to replace Velen as Priest's class legendary). I'm glad to see SW:R since they can finally quit including board clears for Priest in each expansion, but Wild Priest players will have to make due with the paltry 17 that already exist. /s

Acolyte being HOF'd was a surprise for me, but in retrospect it's a no-brainer if you're trying to enforce the "not much card draw" for certain classes. It almost always draws for two, and it can be fairly ridiculous in decks like Galakrond Warrior with its board-damaging effects.

Other news of note: They've revamped ladder to be more like other games. Each rank is a flat three stars with stars gained calculated with a multiplier based on your previous month's finish, where your multiplier decreases the closer you get to your previous rank.

And they're extending the no more duplicates rule - previously applicable to only legendaries - across all card rarities. So no more 14 of one rare while not having any of six others.

Seline is great. It's a powerful effect, but with a potentially narrow window. If you're playing a swarm deck, she's not much use. But if your opponent builds into a big finisher (or multiples, like Druid), you have a good response to keep the game doing. However,

SebastianBludd wrote: And they're extending the no more duplicates rule - previously applicable to only legendaries - across all card rarities. So no more 14 of one rare while not having any of six others.

I don't know what this means.

It means that if you have 2x of any common, rare or epic, you won't get a third of that card until you have 2x of all the others of that rarity.

So if you have 2x Doomsayers you won't pull another one until you have 2x Gorehowl, and 2x Big Game Hunter, and 2x Avenging Wrath, etc.

SebastianBludd wrote: It means that if you have 2x of any common, rare or epic, you won't get a third of that card until you have 2x of all the others of that rarity.

So if you have 2x Doomsayers you won't pull another one until you have 2x Gorehowl, and 2x Big Game Hunter, and 2x Avenging Wrath, etc.

That is a good change, as cost considerations had continued to ramp up with each expansion that went by, especially when you consider Quest decks, which have always been bad for that, since you're looking for one, specific card to even play the deck at all, not a lesser version of it.

However, said good change still sucks for people that only play particular classes, like I was. If I get a ton of slots maxed out in Rogue, Warrior, and Mage, what does that mean to me? It means I won't get more of those cards that I don't want, but it also means I got a ton of cards that I didn't want that are now unusable to me even as shitty returns on the dust economy. I can't dust them. If I get legendaries for Druid and Hunter, that's just lost opportunity to me, since I won't want to dust them for fear of getting them again. So, they just sit there until a new expansion comes and I'm getting new packs that no longer have that "risk". Then, they can become horrible returns on dust.

So, yeah. I think it's a positive change, but it's still masking the real problem: the cards simply aren't worth what you're paying for them.

Problem solved.

There's a caveat here: once you receive a card, you'll have it marked for "collected" purposes. So if you disenchant a card you've received, it's still considered "owned." So you can't exploit the refund system that way. There's a great benefit to this though: If you don't like a particular card or class, you can disenchant them and not have to worry about getting them in future packs.