Well, i hate it. It looks generic as hell, only thing that it has it the blizzard characters. It's cartoony time waster for phone, so it will be their most profitable game in a year, cause kids. Probably unpopular opinion but i'd for at least one serious warcraft spinoff. Not cartoony fun non stop. Everything new warcraft related feels like a parody of what the world once was (including WoW itself)
Honestly i love the Kazakusan change, as he fits much better now thematically. And you can put him in a dragon deck that isn't completely exclusive dragons, opening up a ton of options.
How. Seriously how. I've played this deck for the past 2 hours, over 30 games in total. i've lost more games than i won, i counted. You draw the boar or darkness very often, about as often as finding switcheroo. Thrive in Shadow and Shadow Visions help but more than often give you other things than Switcheroo. And with each cards you draw you have higher and higher chances of getting boar or darkness.
I personally like high synergy cards and a clear package for a type of deck, than just getting a bunch of random cards and maybe 2 or 3 work together. I like my decks to have a goal, to have a theme and an identity. Shoving all good cards and calling it a deck feels disjointed to me. I'm actually fairly disappointed that these big package sets have failed for the most part. Frost shaman and Shadow priest for example had clear cut ideas behind them but only 2 or 3 cards saw any real play. The decks became a thing but without half of the cards meant to be inside them.
If i'm to take a guess i'll say murloc warlock will be bad, simply because handbuffs and hyper aggro don't work. In wild paladin has a shit ton of draws that let it function but warlock needs to tap each turn. Murlocs are cheap and swarmy by nature so you'll just run out of cards in your hand, thus you'll only handbuff like 1 or 2 guys at a time.
Maybe it's just me but this feels like MTG the Board Game kinda. Which isnt bad, the game looks solid, it's just a question of how appealing and popular it will be with the masses. Pretty bold move to commission over 400 art pieces for this project. That shit's expensive as hell.
I'm not sure what kind of twist you can really do on meta decks. My whole philosophy is that of: little Timmy wants to play the game but doesn't want to get crushed by everyone. Everybody complains about OP decks like Shudderwock Shaman, Beast Druid, Shadow priest, Ping Mage, but he has no idea what those words mean. He gets what it probably refers to but druid has many beasts, mage has many hero power related cards. He is a casual player who probably doesn't know about or can't afford highly specialized meta tracking services.
So that is imo what you guys should strive to do. Teach someone who has no idea about meta, what is meta right now. What cards are core to a deck, what cards aren't. Things you can slot in if you don't have less essential cards. Tech against other meta decks. What is Beast druid? What does it consist of? it doesn't necessarily have to be a full fledged in depth 1500 words guide. A quick summary of the idea of the deck would suffice.
Meta decks. I believe this is the most important thing of all to have as a Hearthstone Content site. You already do Standard ones, we should have the wild side on the regular too.
After that, fun Deck ideas like mentioned above is a great one. Each month perhaps we could have a theme and people would put their own spin on the idea. For example, Dragon Priest could be a tempo thing, control thing, pair it with Seek Guidence, go thief priest, so on. A little community event to inspire experimentation.
And I think this answers Basil's question about why there is a finalist vote to begin with.
No, not really. Of course downvoting your competition is a problem and risk, but there is no real way to combat that maybe outside a mod manually checking the votes to see if anyone was unfair.
My gripe with finalist stage is, again, abysmal number of votes compared to the main voting stage. This comp we had 17-34 votes per card in the main stage, and only 12 in finalists. In Make your own Luck it was 23-38 to 14. In Goons of Galakeond we had 15-37 votes to 14-17 in finals. Trend is consistent, about half of people who are interested in this thing dont partake in the most important moment of the comp. That makes finalist votes be much more biased due to a low number of votes.
A trend to notice when seeing the reports is also that the top finishers in the voting phase is almost always those with fewer votes received. It shows that as more people vote, the "fairer" your card is judged and more it drags towards 2.5 ish score. While top of the scoreboard is those with fewer votes, but if those fewer votes they have higher score ones. Basically, post late and hope the few people that see it like it a lot.
The only reason for the finalist stage that I can see is to avoid last minute posts and this luck I explained. But instead of a finalist stage we could just extend the voting only stage to 1 more day.
My proposal which i believe is most fair is to not allow voting at all in the submission stage! Instead 5 days we submit and they are hidden, then 2 days for voting where all are revealed at the same time. Perhaps post it on the main Hearthstone news page when that happens to attract more people into this thing, because let's be honest here, it's just the same 15ish guys over and over. A bit of publicity wouldn't hurt. And I don't believe the argument that "people dont wanna see custom content" is good, as we have a post comp summary where we announce the winner!
I second the reduction of finalist spots proposal. There shouldn't be a fixed number of spots but a percentage of the initial number of participants.
Almost all competitions lately have been getting around 12 entries, and 8 finalist spots. That's... just eliminating the bottom 4. It's too little, the "finalist" stage feels more like "semi finals". I'd argue to keep it to 25% of initial entries, to really make it about the top brass since that's what the finalist stage is about.
Or, we could ditch the finalist stage entirely. I'm not sure why it exists honestly, the number of voters is always so so much lower than the initial 2 stages. It only lasts 1 day and so many of would be voters forget, dont know about it, are locked out of it as pointed above, or dont care enough to vote another time if their entries didnt make it.
Bit late to the party but here's my idea. It's a more powerful, but more tricky to use Shadowstep. Rogue has a lot of card draw so it is possible to pull it off in the same turn but that uses up the 2 mana you save using this over Shadowstep.
Yeah, i don't like hearthstone's arena, i thought it was pretty clear. Runeterra was f2p and i said it's ok in that case. Hearthstone's has a ton of annoying problems in it's design.
I'm not sure why you went off the rail there, you were the one to accuse me first of bias, i just pointed out you have it too. We both do, like all humans. I'm just stating my opinion, no need to fluff out your feathers like i'm attacking your prized egg.
All card games have RNG built in but there are different levels of RNG. In constructed you pick the cards, so a random draw from your deck doesn't feel bad. In drafted you will have at least a couple of really awful cards that when you get you feel bad. Card games are almost always built on synergy between individual cards, drafted cannot have synergy unless... well, RNG blesses you. I'm not hating the idea of the format in general, duels is a version of drafted i love because you can lessen the initial RNG by having a base of your choice to build on. All my "whining" is towards HS Arena.
In Runeterra you can add more cards as the run goes, in Arena you're stuck with the initial 30 cards. Arena has a mandatory barrier of entry that by it's very existence changes the mode from something fun into something "high stakes". No one plays arena for fun cause now you have a sunk cost into it and if you do bad you lose currency. Unless you're one of the few that considers it their main mode but even they have a pressure to get to a certain number of wins to go infinite. Perhaps you can get 10k gold with ease each expansion but i guarantee the average player only gets 4 or 5k.The vast majority of runs end very early and only 10% make it past 6 wins i think. For sure only like 1% get it to 12. That means the vast majority of players draft bad decks, only the lucky or Arena enthusiasts get good decks and even they do so rarely.
And i think everyone hates when you get 15 gold or 25 gold, a subtle push to play more Arena to fix your gold count.
Please don't talk about biases when you're defending your favorite mode.
You absolutely can have a random Op card in your deck that carries you just like the opponent yes, and that is the problem. In that case it's the enemy who gets frustrated. You do everything right yet loose purely because of rng. And you're not being "creative and judicious with your cards", you're just picking the obvious best one of the ones offered, rarely maybe trying to go for some synergy.
And again the game mode is fine on its own but a 150g barrier is honestly unacceptable in these days. The vast majority of players hoard gold for the new expansion/miniset, so you paying for a pack of the current expansion is disadvantageous unless you pump money into the game. If they had a free option with no rewards like duels has, it would be much more popular.
Still, as you said, most people hate draft modes. That means there is something inherent about this format that does not appeal to most people, and in my opinion is very simple. People don't like to be forced to play with bad cards.
Because majority of the time you lose to random bullshit. Literally that. Random. Bullshit. Enemy deck can have anything in it, at any point in time they can whip out a perfect card to destroy all your hard earned lead. And your deck majority of the time is made of shitty cards. For every ok deck you'll draft 10 garbage ones.
Expeditions were f2p so it was ok, but i'm not gonna waste 150g in hearthstone for a near guaranteed frustration.
The nerfs. Quest hunter was hard to beat, he removed everything you played pretty well. Warrior also cleared you easily with the bullshit luck of their second questline rewards. And no more mages that otk on turns 5 or 6. Basically only slow decks remain besides pirate warrior who also got slowed down.
Use this site: https://hearthstone-decks.net/wild-deck/ Unlike hearthcards and other such "professional" services this is just plainly free. It updates nearly daily with decks top players tweet they used to get to high legends. Even if you don't want to "netdeck" it's good to know your enemies, the top meta.
Play a lot. Took me 20 days to get to legend from diamond 5 this month, worst month ever. Just super bad luck. Don't play for more than 3 games if you keep losing or start getting frustrated.
Play fast decks. If you can do 4 games in the same time it takes a c'thun druid to do 1 game, you'll progress much faster.
Pray. You need just luck most times too. Mirror matches are the most horrible, when they get exactly what you'd wanna have in hand and they beat you with plain luck.
I love how absolutely stupid this card is. Sadly, there should be enough worthless cards for both players to end up with a full hand of unplayable cards until one of them dies of fatigue, so I'm afraid it's not Brawl material
Well to be fair no card from the classic and basic sets are truly unplayable, only the weapon buffs perhaps. If the brawl makes you play as rogue that's easily fixed. Also "worst cards" usually means just something unfitting the situation. Like a high mana cost minion on early turns, a board clear when the enemy has no board, a Silence when only you have minions on board, a heal when the enemy is low hp, stuff like that. It's a silly, and perhaps not very replayable brawl, but you wouldn't get 10 never playable cards in hand and die from fatigue for sure.
Well, i hate it. It looks generic as hell, only thing that it has it the blizzard characters. It's cartoony time waster for phone, so it will be their most profitable game in a year, cause kids. Probably unpopular opinion but i'd for at least one serious warcraft spinoff. Not cartoony fun non stop. Everything new warcraft related feels like a parody of what the world once was (including WoW itself)
We're back! Here's something simple this time around. Feedback soon.
Honestly i love the Kazakusan change, as he fits much better now thematically. And you can put him in a dragon deck that isn't completely exclusive dragons, opening up a ton of options.
How. Seriously how. I've played this deck for the past 2 hours, over 30 games in total. i've lost more games than i won, i counted. You draw the boar or darkness very often, about as often as finding switcheroo. Thrive in Shadow and Shadow Visions help but more than often give you other things than Switcheroo. And with each cards you draw you have higher and higher chances of getting boar or darkness.
I personally like high synergy cards and a clear package for a type of deck, than just getting a bunch of random cards and maybe 2 or 3 work together. I like my decks to have a goal, to have a theme and an identity. Shoving all good cards and calling it a deck feels disjointed to me. I'm actually fairly disappointed that these big package sets have failed for the most part. Frost shaman and Shadow priest for example had clear cut ideas behind them but only 2 or 3 cards saw any real play. The decks became a thing but without half of the cards meant to be inside them.
If i'm to take a guess i'll say murloc warlock will be bad, simply because handbuffs and hyper aggro don't work. In wild paladin has a shit ton of draws that let it function but warlock needs to tap each turn. Murlocs are cheap and swarmy by nature so you'll just run out of cards in your hand, thus you'll only handbuff like 1 or 2 guys at a time.
Maybe it's just me but this feels like MTG the Board Game kinda. Which isnt bad, the game looks solid, it's just a question of how appealing and popular it will be with the masses. Pretty bold move to commission over 400 art pieces for this project. That shit's expensive as hell.
I'm not sure what kind of twist you can really do on meta decks. My whole philosophy is that of: little Timmy wants to play the game but doesn't want to get crushed by everyone. Everybody complains about OP decks like Shudderwock Shaman, Beast Druid, Shadow priest, Ping Mage, but he has no idea what those words mean. He gets what it probably refers to but druid has many beasts, mage has many hero power related cards. He is a casual player who probably doesn't know about or can't afford highly specialized meta tracking services.
So that is imo what you guys should strive to do. Teach someone who has no idea about meta, what is meta right now. What cards are core to a deck, what cards aren't. Things you can slot in if you don't have less essential cards. Tech against other meta decks. What is Beast druid? What does it consist of? it doesn't necessarily have to be a full fledged in depth 1500 words guide. A quick summary of the idea of the deck would suffice.
Meta decks. I believe this is the most important thing of all to have as a Hearthstone Content site. You already do Standard ones, we should have the wild side on the regular too.
After that, fun Deck ideas like mentioned above is a great one. Each month perhaps we could have a theme and people would put their own spin on the idea. For example, Dragon Priest could be a tempo thing, control thing, pair it with Seek Guidence, go thief priest, so on. A little community event to inspire experimentation.
No, not really. Of course downvoting your competition is a problem and risk, but there is no real way to combat that maybe outside a mod manually checking the votes to see if anyone was unfair.
My gripe with finalist stage is, again, abysmal number of votes compared to the main voting stage. This comp we had 17-34 votes per card in the main stage, and only 12 in finalists. In Make your own Luck it was 23-38 to 14. In Goons of Galakeond we had 15-37 votes to 14-17 in finals. Trend is consistent, about half of people who are interested in this thing dont partake in the most important moment of the comp. That makes finalist votes be much more biased due to a low number of votes.
A trend to notice when seeing the reports is also that the top finishers in the voting phase is almost always those with fewer votes received. It shows that as more people vote, the "fairer" your card is judged and more it drags towards 2.5 ish score. While top of the scoreboard is those with fewer votes, but if those fewer votes they have higher score ones. Basically, post late and hope the few people that see it like it a lot.
The only reason for the finalist stage that I can see is to avoid last minute posts and this luck I explained. But instead of a finalist stage we could just extend the voting only stage to 1 more day.
My proposal which i believe is most fair is to not allow voting at all in the submission stage! Instead 5 days we submit and they are hidden, then 2 days for voting where all are revealed at the same time. Perhaps post it on the main Hearthstone news page when that happens to attract more people into this thing, because let's be honest here, it's just the same 15ish guys over and over. A bit of publicity wouldn't hurt. And I don't believe the argument that "people dont wanna see custom content" is good, as we have a post comp summary where we announce the winner!
I second the reduction of finalist spots proposal. There shouldn't be a fixed number of spots but a percentage of the initial number of participants.
Almost all competitions lately have been getting around 12 entries, and 8 finalist spots. That's... just eliminating the bottom 4. It's too little, the "finalist" stage feels more like "semi finals". I'd argue to keep it to 25% of initial entries, to really make it about the top brass since that's what the finalist stage is about.
Or, we could ditch the finalist stage entirely. I'm not sure why it exists honestly, the number of voters is always so so much lower than the initial 2 stages. It only lasts 1 day and so many of would be voters forget, dont know about it, are locked out of it as pointed above, or dont care enough to vote another time if their entries didnt make it.
The new raptor mount spell also gives 2 health for 2 mana, cheaper than totemic reflections.
Bit late to the party but here's my idea. It's a more powerful, but more tricky to use Shadowstep. Rogue has a lot of card draw so it is possible to pull it off in the same turn but that uses up the 2 mana you save using this over Shadowstep.
Yeah, i don't like hearthstone's arena, i thought it was pretty clear. Runeterra was f2p and i said it's ok in that case. Hearthstone's has a ton of annoying problems in it's design.
I'm not sure why you went off the rail there, you were the one to accuse me first of bias, i just pointed out you have it too. We both do, like all humans. I'm just stating my opinion, no need to fluff out your feathers like i'm attacking your prized egg.
All card games have RNG built in but there are different levels of RNG. In constructed you pick the cards, so a random draw from your deck doesn't feel bad. In drafted you will have at least a couple of really awful cards that when you get you feel bad. Card games are almost always built on synergy between individual cards, drafted cannot have synergy unless... well, RNG blesses you. I'm not hating the idea of the format in general, duels is a version of drafted i love because you can lessen the initial RNG by having a base of your choice to build on. All my "whining" is towards HS Arena.
In Runeterra you can add more cards as the run goes, in Arena you're stuck with the initial 30 cards. Arena has a mandatory barrier of entry that by it's very existence changes the mode from something fun into something "high stakes". No one plays arena for fun cause now you have a sunk cost into it and if you do bad you lose currency. Unless you're one of the few that considers it their main mode but even they have a pressure to get to a certain number of wins to go infinite. Perhaps you can get 10k gold with ease each expansion but i guarantee the average player only gets 4 or 5k.The vast majority of runs end very early and only 10% make it past 6 wins i think. For sure only like 1% get it to 12. That means the vast majority of players draft bad decks, only the lucky or Arena enthusiasts get good decks and even they do so rarely.
And i think everyone hates when you get 15 gold or 25 gold, a subtle push to play more Arena to fix your gold count.
Please don't talk about biases when you're defending your favorite mode.
You absolutely can have a random Op card in your deck that carries you just like the opponent yes, and that is the problem. In that case it's the enemy who gets frustrated. You do everything right yet loose purely because of rng. And you're not being "creative and judicious with your cards", you're just picking the obvious best one of the ones offered, rarely maybe trying to go for some synergy.
And again the game mode is fine on its own but a 150g barrier is honestly unacceptable in these days. The vast majority of players hoard gold for the new expansion/miniset, so you paying for a pack of the current expansion is disadvantageous unless you pump money into the game. If they had a free option with no rewards like duels has, it would be much more popular.
Still, as you said, most people hate draft modes. That means there is something inherent about this format that does not appeal to most people, and in my opinion is very simple. People don't like to be forced to play with bad cards.
Because majority of the time you lose to random bullshit. Literally that. Random. Bullshit. Enemy deck can have anything in it, at any point in time they can whip out a perfect card to destroy all your hard earned lead. And your deck majority of the time is made of shitty cards. For every ok deck you'll draft 10 garbage ones.
Expeditions were f2p so it was ok, but i'm not gonna waste 150g in hearthstone for a near guaranteed frustration.
I really like that you guys decided to also make a Wild POV of this miniset!
The nerfs. Quest hunter was hard to beat, he removed everything you played pretty well. Warrior also cleared you easily with the bullshit luck of their second questline rewards. And no more mages that otk on turns 5 or 6. Basically only slow decks remain besides pirate warrior who also got slowed down.
Unlike hearthcards and other such "professional" services this is just plainly free. It updates nearly daily with decks top players tweet they used to get to high legends. Even if you don't want to "netdeck" it's good to know your enemies, the top meta.
It's activated!
Well to be fair no card from the classic and basic sets are truly unplayable, only the weapon buffs perhaps. If the brawl makes you play as rogue that's easily fixed. Also "worst cards" usually means just something unfitting the situation. Like a high mana cost minion on early turns, a board clear when the enemy has no board, a Silence when only you have minions on board, a heal when the enemy is low hp, stuff like that. It's a silly, and perhaps not very replayable brawl, but you wouldn't get 10 never playable cards in hand and die from fatigue for sure.