Thankfully I know HS's complete card collection pretty much immediately when I see each card's artwork, so it didn't take as long as you'd expect.
As I said, there's different ways of counting them as soon as you don't just search for the string of letters "random", and there will be no right answer. For transparency, I tried to count everything that would use a random number to determine what happens, including effects which are themselves deterministic, but lead to random effects further down the line (e.g. Sindragosa). The only effects that could be considered random but I left out were those that pulled/used a card from your own deck (e.g. Mad Scientist, the recruit keyword, or things like Deadly Arsenal). The reason for that choice was that I couldn't distinguish between that randomness and the randomness in the order of cards in your deck.
As for only counting competitively used cards, the issue with that is how do you define it? Do they have to be competitive right now, or just at some point in the past? And how do I count the cards that we have now but will only become competitive in the future? The line between a competitive card and a weak one is so much thinner than people often think. So desiring to avoid imposing arbitrary constraints, looking at the entire collection is the sensible route.
I know you weren't being serious with the 75%, but I had time to kill so I has a look for myself. I went further than just the word 'random' and included things like discover and adapt, but when you do that there becomes a lot of choices on what effects you consider random, and hence everyone will get a different number. Nevertheless, if we are being serious, it looks like cards in HS that have a random element make up less than 20% of collectible cards.
A lot of it is actually a controlled sort of random (e.g. something like Resurrect), where it only uses the word random because HS has chosen to limit the number of actions possible to the player (looking in a graveyard/discard pile in this case). That might look like it dumbs the game down and makes it less skill-based, but that's not entirely true. The reduction of choice means you need to be a better player to control it at both the deck-building stage and during a game, and you often need to be dynamic in making decisions to seize control of supposedly random effects.
In the end, RNG goes both ways for testing skill. I generally consider RNG that puts things into the hand - and therefore gives players control of what to do with them - to actually increases the skill required to navigate a game (at least on average) because you have to be able to devise new plans as the game progresses. RNG that goes straight to the board is often the opposite, although there are a few instances where it can be a test of skill, such as knowing there's a chance to get a Doomsayer out of your opponent's Piloted Shredder.
RNG fiesta Tavern Brawls are actually a good place to see this in action. In the most RNG heavy ones where decisions are dwarfed by variance I'll have about a 50% win rate, but in the mild RNG brawls my win rate is way higher (I'll often only lose with 1 or 2 of the 10 classes as I cycle through them) thanks mostly to having so much experience with burgle rogue that I'm more adept in those situations than most players.
- Whether the rewards will give out unwanted rewards like packs from previous expansions in lieu of gold. If blizz thinks a previous expansion pack is worth 100 gold, then they seriously need a stern clip across the ear. Also, I don't need arena passes, tavern passes, or the new duel passes. I need gold, and that's always preferable to others.
It's going to be very difficult to say anything here. If a pack is a reward at a level, has it replaced gold or does it just meant there's more levels squeezed into the same amount of XP, at which point it's just a purely good bonus pack?
Personally I'd throw away this question completely since it is only ever answered implicitly by another of your questions: If we get as much (or more) gold than before then those 'unwanted rewards' can be counted as bonuses, but if we get less gold then they have replaced gold.
I guess like Joust it will fail if the mana costs are equal. That might actually be quite relevant, especially in a class that doesn't need any more card draw.
Please say they've taken the low-hanging fruit and gone for Wild with a set rotation (once a month, or maybe even less ideally). They asked about whether people would be interested in it earlier in the year, it's super easy to do, and will make thousands of cards have a chance at being relevant again.
Come one Blizz, I know doing the easy and obvious thing that is guaranteed make the players happy doesn't always come naturally to you *cough* rogue hero portraits *cough*, but you can do it this time surely?
I like Valeera as much as anyone, and will happily collect the fifteen thousand variants of her I'm sure will appear over the next year or so. But the devs are well aware the community has been waiting on another rogue character for ages because they told us near the start of the year. So to pass some of the few prominent rogue characters WoW has to offer, only to be handed throwaway skins like Horseman Uther or those only tangentially related like N'Zoth, makes you wonder what twisted process they go through when deciding which skins to make.
No disrespect to the N'Zoth skin - it's probably one of the better ones - but it's standing in someone else's shoes and I was so much more interested in the person he took them from.
OK, so I rarely join a chorus of memes or complaints, but as a rogue main this is really starting to bug me: how is the pre-order hero still not for rogue? N'Zoth is cool and all, but surely Silas in rogue would have been a better representative of Darkmoon Faire?
Why bother with Akama when we can give shaman their 4th non-Thrall hero in Vashj? And sure, let's just skip Lilian Voss as a zombie for Hollows End and give pally their 4th extra hero in the form of Horseman Uther, without even having the good grace of just using the Headless Horseman who was a paladin anyway.
I didn't expect to get salty over this, especially as I really like both the existing Valeera skins (and that Valeera you can choose at level 50 in the battle pass looks awesome), but the needless inequality of it is getting really annoying.
--------------------------------
In other news, I like dungeon run and I like constructed, so duels should be good fun. I really hope they keep the number of sets you can choose from limited, so weaker cards remain viable options.
With the no duplicate rule in place, it is probably best to spend most of the gold at the start, and keep a bit back for the mini expansion. That way you can easily get the commons and rares efficiently. The higher rarity cards might not be worth overthinking it for, since whales are the only people who really get all of them anyway.
How much more expensive it all ends up is difficult to say until we've tried out the battle pass.
Flavour-wise, you might consider making the first Sylvanas card represent her living self as ranger-general of Silvermoon. Her titles of Banshee Queen and leader of the Forsaken apply to the same era of her (un)life.
Also be aware that the basic heroes (Anduin included) are never used for minions, as demonstrated when the Classic Illidan Stormrage card got re-skinned as Xavius, though they can be hero cards (e.g. the Death Knight heroes).
Power-wise, the first stage of Anduin is way too strong, even before its deathrattle is taken into account. It is a permanent freeze effect on a well-statted minion. See Maiev Shadowsong, which costs more with similar stats for what is basically a 2-turn freeze. The first stage of Anduin should be weaker than that.
Another useful reference for power is Pyros, which is an existing card that works off a similar idea but only offered 3 slightly under-statted bodies with the elemental tribe. You can definitely make cards a bit stronger than Pyros, but not by as much as your current designs.
"Back to the office!" If you want to win it's usually bad to trigger that inspire effect, but the accompanying voiceline always puts a smile on my face, and isn't that what gaming is all about?
It's an interesting idea, but since it would rely quite heavily on your ally having some idea of what your deck includes, it would probably be even more biased against people making home-brews than constructed is. Since my biggest hope is just that I can make use of my favourite old weak cards again (one day, Coliseum Manager, one day...), that would be a huge turn off for me.
Not in the sci-fi sense sadly, but if you have a rocket that can travel near the speed of light you can exploit the 'twin paradox' to spend less time to reach the future. If you can get really close to the speed of light you could get there in a literal jiffy!
Avoiding death at every step on the way will be tough, but it will all be worth it. Surely?
I am indeed saying RNG in Mana Cyclone (and Evocation for that matter) is more acceptable, at least to me. There's a huge difference between RNG putting something into your hand and RNG doing something straight onto the board, particularly with regards to:
The choice given on when to play them and, if relevant, what to target.
This both reduces the total RNG (targets aren't chosen randomly), and returns control to the player, even allowing them to demonstrate a modicum of skill if they are able to make good use out of something tough to use.
They are played at full mana cost if put in hand.
This reduces the variance in how swingy a turn is since more powerful cards tend to cost more mana, and so you can do less alongside them. Hence, if you are given something strong, the opponent has time to respond appropriately.
I guess you could put it on a spectrum of RNG: card order in deck -> RNG in hand -> RNG on board.
None of this is a comment on power, and I am well aware the trio of cards I listed can be as harmful as they are good. It is more about whether I feel the player using these cards (myself included) earns it when they win with them, and if I ever answer 'yes' to that, it is entirely based on the other cards they play. The issue is not helped by there being 3 of them in Standard at the same time, so to beat highlander mage with a slow deck it fells like you have to survive 2 waves of possible BS from PuzzleBox and Solarian, then deal with Reno casting anything between Totemic Might and Plague of Death each turn.
Edit: I'm a burgle rogue player much more than a cyclone mage player. Both are based in RNG in hand, but the mana cost and 'when to play them' comments do apply a little differently. Mostly that's Sorcerer's Apprentice's fault, which is outside the discussion on types of RNG, so I chose to ignore her here.
6 years in, I guess I should give up waiting for the day Sorcerer's Apprentice is identified as the root problem. I'm guessing they don't want to kill the Exodia mage dream. Hopefully she is moved to the Hall of Fame in the big Classic set overhaul next year.
As for Solarian Prime: Good, I guess. I don't feel particularly strongly about the power of the card, but I do group it with Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron and The Amazing Reno as the trio of cards that pull undeserved wins out of nowhere by casting random spells with no control. It's because of those three cards that I really dislike the state of mage at the moment.
Plus I have a golden Solarian, so that's another reason to be happy about it.
In fairness, the tiny snippet of the War of the Ancients in the AoO prologue barely scratches the surface of Illidan's story. If you actually want to know who he is during the events of the actual Warcraft games, I would say those missions were nowhere near enough.
Wherever you stand on that, at least he's been put at the back of the queue so he's not getting in the way of those whose stories have not yet been told at all.
Lol, who else in the entire horde uses traps, bear traps no less, and Rexxar himself didn't even comment on it.
And besides, since the trap didn't switch places, I would naturally assumed that either Misha wanted to kill herself or that by beating her we sort of 'tame' (honestly that Rexxar didnt cringe from saying those words baffle me) her. Should've at least have stated that he needed to take out that trap (if he did, well, I didn't see it)
No I fully agree, all the best friendship stories begin with one of them sitting back and watching the other bleed out in a trap. It really demonstrates how Rexxar considers beasts as equal (superior even) to the humanoid races. Wait, hang on...
Seriously though, I think that mission in particular was a great success. You either role play as Rexxar the first time around, or learn the hard way that Rexxar is an animal lover (that's not a sexual term, in case it gets lost in translation).
The answers are no and no: you are not guaranteed a legendary in the first pack, and there isn't even the usual 10 pack guarantee because they are classified as rare/special packs.
Thankfully I know HS's complete card collection pretty much immediately when I see each card's artwork, so it didn't take as long as you'd expect.
As I said, there's different ways of counting them as soon as you don't just search for the string of letters "random", and there will be no right answer. For transparency, I tried to count everything that would use a random number to determine what happens, including effects which are themselves deterministic, but lead to random effects further down the line (e.g. Sindragosa). The only effects that could be considered random but I left out were those that pulled/used a card from your own deck (e.g. Mad Scientist, the recruit keyword, or things like Deadly Arsenal). The reason for that choice was that I couldn't distinguish between that randomness and the randomness in the order of cards in your deck.
As for only counting competitively used cards, the issue with that is how do you define it? Do they have to be competitive right now, or just at some point in the past? And how do I count the cards that we have now but will only become competitive in the future? The line between a competitive card and a weak one is so much thinner than people often think. So desiring to avoid imposing arbitrary constraints, looking at the entire collection is the sensible route.
I know you weren't being serious with the 75%, but I had time to kill so I has a look for myself. I went further than just the word 'random' and included things like discover and adapt, but when you do that there becomes a lot of choices on what effects you consider random, and hence everyone will get a different number. Nevertheless, if we are being serious, it looks like cards in HS that have a random element make up less than 20% of collectible cards.
A lot of it is actually a controlled sort of random (e.g. something like Resurrect), where it only uses the word random because HS has chosen to limit the number of actions possible to the player (looking in a graveyard/discard pile in this case). That might look like it dumbs the game down and makes it less skill-based, but that's not entirely true. The reduction of choice means you need to be a better player to control it at both the deck-building stage and during a game, and you often need to be dynamic in making decisions to seize control of supposedly random effects.
In the end, RNG goes both ways for testing skill. I generally consider RNG that puts things into the hand - and therefore gives players control of what to do with them - to actually increases the skill required to navigate a game (at least on average) because you have to be able to devise new plans as the game progresses. RNG that goes straight to the board is often the opposite, although there are a few instances where it can be a test of skill, such as knowing there's a chance to get a Doomsayer out of your opponent's Piloted Shredder.
RNG fiesta Tavern Brawls are actually a good place to see this in action. In the most RNG heavy ones where decisions are dwarfed by variance I'll have about a 50% win rate, but in the mild RNG brawls my win rate is way higher (I'll often only lose with 1 or 2 of the 10 classes as I cycle through them) thanks mostly to having so much experience with burgle rogue that I'm more adept in those situations than most players.
It's going to be very difficult to say anything here. If a pack is a reward at a level, has it replaced gold or does it just meant there's more levels squeezed into the same amount of XP, at which point it's just a purely good bonus pack?
Personally I'd throw away this question completely since it is only ever answered implicitly by another of your questions: If we get as much (or more) gold than before then those 'unwanted rewards' can be counted as bonuses, but if we get less gold then they have replaced gold.
I guess like Joust it will fail if the mana costs are equal. That might actually be quite relevant, especially in a class that doesn't need any more card draw.
Please say they've taken the low-hanging fruit and gone for Wild with a set rotation (once a month, or maybe even less ideally). They asked about whether people would be interested in it earlier in the year, it's super easy to do, and will make thousands of cards have a chance at being relevant again.
Come one Blizz, I know doing the easy and obvious thing that is guaranteed make the players happy doesn't always come naturally to you *cough* rogue hero portraits *cough*, but you can do it this time surely?
I like Valeera as much as anyone, and will happily collect the fifteen thousand variants of her I'm sure will appear over the next year or so. But the devs are well aware the community has been waiting on another rogue character for ages because they told us near the start of the year. So to pass some of the few prominent rogue characters WoW has to offer, only to be handed throwaway skins like Horseman Uther or those only tangentially related like N'Zoth, makes you wonder what twisted process they go through when deciding which skins to make.
No disrespect to the N'Zoth skin - it's probably one of the better ones - but it's standing in someone else's shoes and I was so much more interested in the person he took them from.
OK, so I rarely join a chorus of memes or complaints, but as a rogue main this is really starting to bug me: how is the pre-order hero still not for rogue? N'Zoth is cool and all, but surely Silas in rogue would have been a better representative of Darkmoon Faire?
Why bother with Akama when we can give shaman their 4th non-Thrall hero in Vashj? And sure, let's just skip Lilian Voss as a zombie for Hollows End and give pally their 4th extra hero in the form of Horseman Uther, without even having the good grace of just using the Headless Horseman who was a paladin anyway.
I didn't expect to get salty over this, especially as I really like both the existing Valeera skins (and that Valeera you can choose at level 50 in the battle pass looks awesome), but the needless inequality of it is getting really annoying.
--------------------------------
In other news, I like dungeon run and I like constructed, so duels should be good fun. I really hope they keep the number of sets you can choose from limited, so weaker cards remain viable options.
Sure, but that doesn't preclude pally and shaman using it... if they can piece together a slow deck anyway.
I could imagine slow pally and shaman decks get good use out of it, since they can just pass a 1/1 or a totem.
With the no duplicate rule in place, it is probably best to spend most of the gold at the start, and keep a bit back for the mini expansion. That way you can easily get the commons and rares efficiently. The higher rarity cards might not be worth overthinking it for, since whales are the only people who really get all of them anyway.
How much more expensive it all ends up is difficult to say until we've tried out the battle pass.
Flavour-wise, you might consider making the first Sylvanas card represent her living self as ranger-general of Silvermoon. Her titles of Banshee Queen and leader of the Forsaken apply to the same era of her (un)life.
Also be aware that the basic heroes (Anduin included) are never used for minions, as demonstrated when the Classic Illidan Stormrage card got re-skinned as Xavius, though they can be hero cards (e.g. the Death Knight heroes).
Power-wise, the first stage of Anduin is way too strong, even before its deathrattle is taken into account. It is a permanent freeze effect on a well-statted minion. See Maiev Shadowsong, which costs more with similar stats for what is basically a 2-turn freeze. The first stage of Anduin should be weaker than that.
Another useful reference for power is Pyros, which is an existing card that works off a similar idea but only offered 3 slightly under-statted bodies with the elemental tribe. You can definitely make cards a bit stronger than Pyros, but not by as much as your current designs.
I hope this helps :)
"Back to the office!" If you want to win it's usually bad to trigger that inspire effect, but the accompanying voiceline always puts a smile on my face, and isn't that what gaming is all about?
It's an interesting idea, but since it would rely quite heavily on your ally having some idea of what your deck includes, it would probably be even more biased against people making home-brews than constructed is. Since my biggest hope is just that I can make use of my favourite old weak cards again (one day, Coliseum Manager, one day...), that would be a huge turn off for me.
Not in the sci-fi sense sadly, but if you have a rocket that can travel near the speed of light you can exploit the 'twin paradox' to spend less time to reach the future. If you can get really close to the speed of light you could get there in a literal jiffy!
Avoiding death at every step on the way will be tough, but it will all be worth it. Surely?
I am indeed saying RNG in Mana Cyclone (and Evocation for that matter) is more acceptable, at least to me. There's a huge difference between RNG putting something into your hand and RNG doing something straight onto the board, particularly with regards to:
I guess you could put it on a spectrum of RNG: card order in deck -> RNG in hand -> RNG on board.
None of this is a comment on power, and I am well aware the trio of cards I listed can be as harmful as they are good. It is more about whether I feel the player using these cards (myself included) earns it when they win with them, and if I ever answer 'yes' to that, it is entirely based on the other cards they play. The issue is not helped by there being 3 of them in Standard at the same time, so to beat highlander mage with a slow deck it fells like you have to survive 2 waves of possible BS from PuzzleBox and Solarian, then deal with Reno casting anything between Totemic Might and Plague of Death each turn.
Edit: I'm a burgle rogue player much more than a cyclone mage player. Both are based in RNG in hand, but the mana cost and 'when to play them' comments do apply a little differently. Mostly that's Sorcerer's Apprentice's fault, which is outside the discussion on types of RNG, so I chose to ignore her here.
6 years in, I guess I should give up waiting for the day Sorcerer's Apprentice is identified as the root problem. I'm guessing they don't want to kill the Exodia mage dream. Hopefully she is moved to the Hall of Fame in the big Classic set overhaul next year.
As for Solarian Prime: Good, I guess. I don't feel particularly strongly about the power of the card, but I do group it with Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron and The Amazing Reno as the trio of cards that pull undeserved wins out of nowhere by casting random spells with no control. It's because of those three cards that I really dislike the state of mage at the moment.
Plus I have a golden Solarian, so that's another reason to be happy about it.
The defensive answer: it won't be the third part of the year until December, so there is plenty of time yet.
The sympathetic answer: with Covid around, delays can be forgiven.
In fairness, the tiny snippet of the War of the Ancients in the AoO prologue barely scratches the surface of Illidan's story. If you actually want to know who he is during the events of the actual Warcraft games, I would say those missions were nowhere near enough.
Wherever you stand on that, at least he's been put at the back of the queue so he's not getting in the way of those whose stories have not yet been told at all.
No I fully agree, all the best friendship stories begin with one of them sitting back and watching the other bleed out in a trap. It really demonstrates how Rexxar considers beasts as equal (superior even) to the humanoid races. Wait, hang on...
Seriously though, I think that mission in particular was a great success. You either role play as Rexxar the first time around, or learn the hard way that Rexxar is an animal lover (that's not a sexual term, in case it gets lost in translation).
The answers are no and no: you are not guaranteed a legendary in the first pack, and there isn't even the usual 10 pack guarantee because they are classified as rare/special packs.
So you got very lucky. Congrats!