It's all fun and games until we realise this probably means more pirates in warrior and yet another mage skin for the pre-order (I'm looking at you Azshara).
I don't know, I think with enough effort you can put together a decent analysis of both and come to some conclusions on who wins with different amounts of them around (at least at a broad archetype level). I think combo wins overall when both are common since both expedite reaching their big turn.
Aggro and control have more complex relationships with them: aggro loves endless resources it can vomit onto the board (which is awful design in current HS imo) but probably prefers mana cheat didn't exist since they don't really need it and it mostly helps slower decks catch up; while control can easily end up overdrawing, but doesn't necessarily want mana cheat around to resolve that since they essentially want games to be slowed down, not sped up.
Overall I agree you can't just hone in on one of them and expect to get a nice answer, but they are not so closely tied together that such an approach is hopeless.
But... the recruit mechanic is already in Standard, even if the keyword itself isn't. Why would it returning as a keyword be a problem for you? The only real issue I see with it is that it is a form of consistent card draw, and we should be cutting back on that, not adding more.
They can - and should - let us craft portraits with excess coins, but that alone doesn't really solve anything. Sooner or later we'd get all the portraits of a given character (if we don't have them already, especially with rares) and then we're back to square one. If they want to avoid letting us convert coins (even at crummy rates), they'll have to introduce a whole new way of spending them that won't just get maxed out itself. Maybe an entrance fee to something fancy, like Arena does?
I meant 'burgle rogue' as a class identity feature as well as the archetype itself. Nothing says a burgle card cannot be independently strong and used outside of a dedicated burgle deck, and it won't be creating new class identity issues for doing that.
I can't even count the number of times that Wand Thief gave my opponent lethal or prevented me from winning the game with cards they had no right to play. Breaking class identity to its fullest, we can say.
With burgle rogue existing, and having received tools all the way back to GvG, I would say rogue has every right to play any card. That IS part of their class identity and Wand Thief was a super elegant merger of how rogue and mage's value generation works.
However, those two forms of value generation are very different. Burgle rogue is like rolling a D100 and embracing how often the value changes, while casino mage is like rolling a D6 and injecting some randomness, but in a fairly repeatable way. That sort of consistency is not really part of burgle rogue, and hence why Wand Thief straddles the line of rogue's class identity. (Note it is not so much the size of the pool of mage spells - I'm pretty sure Keywarden Ivory's discover pool is smaller - as the amount of redundancy in it, making specific effects easy to find even if specific cards are not.)
FWIW: as a burgle main I love Wand Thief, but agree her time in Standard should come to an end.
Kazakusan basically has ruined the meta, either you play him or you beat him, there's no inbetween. I'd be shocked if he doesn't get nerfed again post-rotation.
Is the problem Kazakusan, or is the problem Lightning Bloom and Overgrowth? Those are the two that are turboing Kazakusan out. There have been plenty of games where I put on enough pressure so that the Druid can't spend 8 mana doing nothing. It's just you can't do that when their 8 mana is on turn 4.
Depends on whether you thiink a Control deck without Kazakusan could beat a Control Warrior deck with kazakusan. The answer is no. It cannot.
That's an overly simplistic analysis. The question is never "does (card) improve win rates against the mirror?", but "does (card) improve win rates against the meta as a whole?" Kazakusan in control warrior might well answer yes to the latter, but not so clearly that it is obviously a problem card anymore.
Agreed, I think I even wrote a little essay/long forum post on the problems with outcast. Despite that, it is thematically interesting and diversifies pretty well: outcast itself is very limiting, but left-/right-most mechanics don't need to be. See Zai, the Incredible and Kurtrus Ashfallen for good examples that don't punish you for using expensive cards.
Elementals are very midrange-y by design, so if they plan to return to that style of HS then they would be a good way about it. The 4 elemental lords also seem very plausible as characters to (re-)introduce into the Core set, although I don't much like the thought of a year of Rag RNG annoying me like it did back in the day.
Murlocs? Err... please no. By all means give shaman and paladin their share of them (maybe even scatter some more into DH), but I would be pretty annoyed if most classes are suddenly being pushed to play murlocs when they are mechanically misaligned. And let's be honest here, there's no point in trying to diversify murloc decks much. At that point you might as well make cards for other tribes that make more sense.
I have to admit that as a rogue main I'm pretty apathetic towards big tribe themes. Beyond pirates (which also seem to have been forgotten in Standard) the class never makes much sense with them, and only ever gets them incidentally.
I think I'll pick Zai as well since my golden copy made it into all my DH decks, in a vain attempt to inject some shenanigan-ry into a class that I know has never been designed with shenanigans in mind. Zai gave me hope that DH could do something silly one day, but Illidan has remained characteristically serious thus far.
It wouldn't be the the first time a meta fits your description. I recall times people complained about how polarised everything was, then Blizz pointed to deck diversity and called it a success, demonstrating very different definitions of a 'successful meta' exist.
My own 8 years of experience tells me the least polarised match-ups usually involve a midrange deck (as the Jack-of-all-trades archetype, they have a decent shot at beating everything, but at the cost of it never being a hard counter), while the others tend to have sharper strengths and weaknesses. So maybe its an absence of midrange decks driving the polarised match-ups?
If so, hopefully the set rotation can help push things back to having more of a board focus, and allow midrange to resurface in greater numbers.
Ben Lee joined the Hearthstone Team back in December 2018 after working at CD PROJEKT RED, Funcom and Jagex. Since his time at Blizzard, and being at the helm of the Hearthstone team, we've seen some huge improvements to Hearthstone. One of the most notable improvements Hearthstone saw in his time there was the addition of card pack duplicate protection. That single update to the game made it more accessible to players and it no longer felt awful to open up three of the same Legendary card because… it wasn't possible anymore.
Pedant mode activated: wasn't legendary duplicate protection introduced with the Frozen Throne (2017)? Under the old rules you could still open the same legendary multiple times before owning all of them if you dusted it, but you'd just hold onto them 'til you had finished opening packs for that expansion to avoid that issue.
The extension of the duplicate protection to lower rarities was very welcome though, I can't deny that.
I think you're over-stating how big a difference it is. It's on average -1/-1 on each minion summoned by Smuggler, which is significant, but not often game losing when it only applies to a couple of minions in the mid game (when stats start to matter less). Ultimately quest rogue has plenty of routes to victory without ever drawing a Smuggler, so it'll do just fine.
It's effectively a nerf, sure, but it's also not actually a nerf. So the dust refund is setting a precedent for all future cards that have a bug that makes them more powerful. In the grand scheme of things, that precedent is the bigger deal imo.
Quest rogue has always been competent at tempo (it is rogue after all), and pretty good overall, so Smuggler being corrected isn't going to be that big a deal. I think the more noteworthy part of the change is that they are offering a full dust refund after a bug correction.
I am strugling with The General in BRM. Watched videos and tried different setups but no luck so far. Losing mercs before i am even there as well. I have the idea i need more maxed out mercenaries for this to get it done.
Am i right in this or what do you suggest to get it done?
You can try some general-purpose strategies to trivialise it. In particular, if you have Scabbs and/or Valeera you can keep trying 'til one of them gets the Assassinate 2 treasure from an Elite encounter. That will insta-kill one of the 3 boss characters at the start, making things a lot easier.
To get there without mercs dying, it helps to bring Gruul with his fire resistance equipment. Even if it's not maxed out, having any fire resistance will save you a lot of health and make it safer to put casters out against Fire Sworn.
I have a serious rogue bias here, but it's definitely Shadowjeweler Hanar for me (post nerf. 5 health was definitely too much). The trap room was one of the most notorious bosses in Dungeon Run, and it was so fun to play the other side to it. It's one of very few cards that can pretty much single-handedly win entire games by itself, but its also presents no immediate threat so the opponent has tons of time to try to find a hole through the wall of secrets.
Beyond secret rogue, I have to admit I never liked AoO very much. I found it quite uninspired mechanically, with Libram pally being one of the few things to interest me at the start, but I've been bored sick of that for over a year now. I also felt the whole Rusted Legion theme somehow got lost beneath the shadow of DH, despite DH only having a minority of cards.
I like to think of it a bit differently and say there are basic rules established from the start of the game:
Turn order, starting hand size and who gets the coin.
Decks are shuffled with random card order (both before and after the mulligan).
Draw a card and gain a mana crystal each turn. (Start with 0 mana crystals before turn 1.)
Each turn lasts 90 seconds (plus minor modifications for turns 1 and 2, and going down to 15s if you're AFK).
Max hand size is 10 and mana cap is also 10.
You have a hero power that is refreshed each turn and an associated hero that starts at 30 health.
All cards and hero powers cost a specified amount of mana.
Card types do the following:
Spells are 1-time effects.
Weapons are hero attack modifiers on that player's turn.
Minions are... actually too much to bother explaining the rules for here.
Hero cards are glorified spells that always give you a new hero power and some armour.
I'm gonna be honest: half of why I wrote all these out was so I could justify calling hero cards glorified spells. I refuse to put them on a pedestal until they get something other than a battlecry/choose one/combo effect and they are no longer just complicated 1-time effects.
A bunch of rules for keywords that no one has time to go into fully. Secrets (and maybe quests) are the only ones that really need special rules, the rest are all just shorthand.
I'm sure I missed some, but you get the point. That all defines 'Hearthstone'. Tavern Brawls, Duels and solo stuff can change some rules of course.
What's important is that nowhere does it say what card and hero power effects can and cannot do, including changing the original rules. In a sense there are no rules for card effects, there are only limitations on what the code is equipped to handle, at which point we can debate whether any red lines even exist to be eroded.
To speculate which basic rules change next, I don't actually see much that hasn't been messed with already. Even the distinction between card types has been blurred (albeit lightly) with Felsteel Executioner. Pretty much all that remains sacred so far is that weapons don't provide attack on your opponent's turn and secrets don't trigger on your own (but even that was different back in beta). I could believe they will one day print a weapon that's active on your opponent's turn, so long as it loses durability. The question is, is that actually useful enough to be worth making a card for it?
Yeah, it's pretty awkward. Looking through the many synonyms of 'attack', I'm surprised at how few could be viable alternatives for fairly non-specific physical attacks. 'Strike' would be a decent alternative, but that's about it, and even that can be synonymous with spell attacks.
You can use 'ability' most of the time. Context will normally make it clear whether it is a damage dealing one or (in Pokemon terminology) a 'status move'.
Admittedly I have not quite got there yet, so I was just parroting what looked to be the solution others had said since your comment, and was also consistent with my understanding of usual task 'rules'.
I'll happily admit my mistake if Chi-Ji isn't the required part of it. Heck, if Chi-Ji isn't needed, I'll even argue further against Blizz and their dumb use of "complete" if it isn't even consistent!
It's all fun and games until we realise this probably means more pirates in warrior and yet another mage skin for the pre-order (I'm looking at you Azshara).
Perhaps not, but the Wandering Isle don't care :P
I don't know, I think with enough effort you can put together a decent analysis of both and come to some conclusions on who wins with different amounts of them around (at least at a broad archetype level). I think combo wins overall when both are common since both expedite reaching their big turn.
Aggro and control have more complex relationships with them: aggro loves endless resources it can vomit onto the board (which is awful design in current HS imo) but probably prefers mana cheat didn't exist since they don't really need it and it mostly helps slower decks catch up; while control can easily end up overdrawing, but doesn't necessarily want mana cheat around to resolve that since they essentially want games to be slowed down, not sped up.
Overall I agree you can't just hone in on one of them and expect to get a nice answer, but they are not so closely tied together that such an approach is hopeless.
But... the recruit mechanic is already in Standard, even if the keyword itself isn't. Why would it returning as a keyword be a problem for you? The only real issue I see with it is that it is a form of consistent card draw, and we should be cutting back on that, not adding more.
They can - and should - let us craft portraits with excess coins, but that alone doesn't really solve anything. Sooner or later we'd get all the portraits of a given character (if we don't have them already, especially with rares) and then we're back to square one. If they want to avoid letting us convert coins (even at crummy rates), they'll have to introduce a whole new way of spending them that won't just get maxed out itself. Maybe an entrance fee to something fancy, like Arena does?
I meant 'burgle rogue' as a class identity feature as well as the archetype itself. Nothing says a burgle card cannot be independently strong and used outside of a dedicated burgle deck, and it won't be creating new class identity issues for doing that.
With burgle rogue existing, and having received tools all the way back to GvG, I would say rogue has every right to play any card. That IS part of their class identity and Wand Thief was a super elegant merger of how rogue and mage's value generation works.
However, those two forms of value generation are very different. Burgle rogue is like rolling a D100 and embracing how often the value changes, while casino mage is like rolling a D6 and injecting some randomness, but in a fairly repeatable way. That sort of consistency is not really part of burgle rogue, and hence why Wand Thief straddles the line of rogue's class identity. (Note it is not so much the size of the pool of mage spells - I'm pretty sure Keywarden Ivory's discover pool is smaller - as the amount of redundancy in it, making specific effects easy to find even if specific cards are not.)
FWIW: as a burgle main I love Wand Thief, but agree her time in Standard should come to an end.
That's an overly simplistic analysis. The question is never "does (card) improve win rates against the mirror?", but "does (card) improve win rates against the meta as a whole?" Kazakusan in control warrior might well answer yes to the latter, but not so clearly that it is obviously a problem card anymore.
Agreed, I think I even wrote a little essay/long forum post on the problems with outcast. Despite that, it is thematically interesting and diversifies pretty well: outcast itself is very limiting, but left-/right-most mechanics don't need to be. See Zai, the Incredible and Kurtrus Ashfallen for good examples that don't punish you for using expensive cards.
Elementals are very midrange-y by design, so if they plan to return to that style of HS then they would be a good way about it. The 4 elemental lords also seem very plausible as characters to (re-)introduce into the Core set, although I don't much like the thought of a year of Rag RNG annoying me like it did back in the day.
Murlocs? Err... please no. By all means give shaman and paladin their share of them (maybe even scatter some more into DH), but I would be pretty annoyed if most classes are suddenly being pushed to play murlocs when they are mechanically misaligned. And let's be honest here, there's no point in trying to diversify murloc decks much. At that point you might as well make cards for other tribes that make more sense.
I have to admit that as a rogue main I'm pretty apathetic towards big tribe themes. Beyond pirates (which also seem to have been forgotten in Standard) the class never makes much sense with them, and only ever gets them incidentally.
I think I'll pick Zai as well since my golden copy made it into all my DH decks, in a vain attempt to inject some shenanigan-ry into a class that I know has never been designed with shenanigans in mind. Zai gave me hope that DH could do something silly one day, but Illidan has remained characteristically serious thus far.
It wouldn't be the the first time a meta fits your description. I recall times people complained about how polarised everything was, then Blizz pointed to deck diversity and called it a success, demonstrating very different definitions of a 'successful meta' exist.
My own 8 years of experience tells me the least polarised match-ups usually involve a midrange deck (as the Jack-of-all-trades archetype, they have a decent shot at beating everything, but at the cost of it never being a hard counter), while the others tend to have sharper strengths and weaknesses. So maybe its an absence of midrange decks driving the polarised match-ups?
If so, hopefully the set rotation can help push things back to having more of a board focus, and allow midrange to resurface in greater numbers.
Pedant mode activated: wasn't legendary duplicate protection introduced with the Frozen Throne (2017)? Under the old rules you could still open the same legendary multiple times before owning all of them if you dusted it, but you'd just hold onto them 'til you had finished opening packs for that expansion to avoid that issue.
The extension of the duplicate protection to lower rarities was very welcome though, I can't deny that.
I think you're over-stating how big a difference it is. It's on average -1/-1 on each minion summoned by Smuggler, which is significant, but not often game losing when it only applies to a couple of minions in the mid game (when stats start to matter less). Ultimately quest rogue has plenty of routes to victory without ever drawing a Smuggler, so it'll do just fine.
It's effectively a nerf, sure, but it's also not actually a nerf. So the dust refund is setting a precedent for all future cards that have a bug that makes them more powerful. In the grand scheme of things, that precedent is the bigger deal imo.
Quest rogue has always been competent at tempo (it is rogue after all), and pretty good overall, so Smuggler being corrected isn't going to be that big a deal. I think the more noteworthy part of the change is that they are offering a full dust refund after a bug correction.
You can try some general-purpose strategies to trivialise it. In particular, if you have Scabbs and/or Valeera you can keep trying 'til one of them gets the Assassinate 2 treasure from an Elite encounter. That will insta-kill one of the 3 boss characters at the start, making things a lot easier.
To get there without mercs dying, it helps to bring Gruul with his fire resistance equipment. Even if it's not maxed out, having any fire resistance will save you a lot of health and make it safer to put casters out against Fire Sworn.
Good luck!
I have a serious rogue bias here, but it's definitely Shadowjeweler Hanar for me (post nerf. 5 health was definitely too much). The trap room was one of the most notorious bosses in Dungeon Run, and it was so fun to play the other side to it. It's one of very few cards that can pretty much single-handedly win entire games by itself, but its also presents no immediate threat so the opponent has tons of time to try to find a hole through the wall of secrets.
Beyond secret rogue, I have to admit I never liked AoO very much. I found it quite uninspired mechanically, with Libram pally being one of the few things to interest me at the start, but I've been bored sick of that for over a year now. I also felt the whole Rusted Legion theme somehow got lost beneath the shadow of DH, despite DH only having a minority of cards.
I like to think of it a bit differently and say there are basic rules established from the start of the game:
I'm sure I missed some, but you get the point. That all defines 'Hearthstone'. Tavern Brawls, Duels and solo stuff can change some rules of course.
What's important is that nowhere does it say what card and hero power effects can and cannot do, including changing the original rules. In a sense there are no rules for card effects, there are only limitations on what the code is equipped to handle, at which point we can debate whether any red lines even exist to be eroded.
To speculate which basic rules change next, I don't actually see much that hasn't been messed with already. Even the distinction between card types has been blurred (albeit lightly) with Felsteel Executioner. Pretty much all that remains sacred so far is that weapons don't provide attack on your opponent's turn and secrets don't trigger on your own (but even that was different back in beta). I could believe they will one day print a weapon that's active on your opponent's turn, so long as it loses durability. The question is, is that actually useful enough to be worth making a card for it?
Yeah, it's pretty awkward. Looking through the many synonyms of 'attack', I'm surprised at how few could be viable alternatives for fairly non-specific physical attacks. 'Strike' would be a decent alternative, but that's about it, and even that can be synonymous with spell attacks.
You can use 'ability' most of the time. Context will normally make it clear whether it is a damage dealing one or (in Pokemon terminology) a 'status move'.
Admittedly I have not quite got there yet, so I was just parroting what looked to be the solution others had said since your comment, and was also consistent with my understanding of usual task 'rules'.
I'll happily admit my mistake if Chi-Ji isn't the required part of it. Heck, if Chi-Ji isn't needed, I'll even argue further against Blizz and their dumb use of "complete" if it isn't even consistent!