As someone who's never played any of the Warcraft games, and only a little bit of World of Warcraft, I absolutely adored the Book of Heroes. It was a great way to discover the backstory for all the main Hearthstone protagonists!
It would be great if they looked at the alternate hero skins like Nemsy and Mecha-Jaraxxus once the Book of Mercenaries is done.
Just to give a bit more info, with the introduction of the Core set, Blizzard added two pack types in the Shop:
- Standard packs (red cover) which appear last in the section entitled "Standard Packs and Cards".
- Wild packs (red cover with vines) which appear first in the section entitled "Other Packs". This section is just before all the wild sets separated by year.
First, thanks to Fluxflashor for the reminder about the lack of duplicate protection for golden cards!
I only got the standard bundle, and it was definitely worth it in my case: I went from 16 missing cards to 9 for United in Stormwind, including 4 legendaries (2 from the promo and 2 in packs).
I know Specialist isn't particularly well-liked by the audience, but I also know a lot of the GM players were fine with it in small doses (remember that Blizzard gets their input before choosing the structure of the season), so I'm a little bit surprised it was removed completely for this season.
Also, with two players named on a variation of "Luna" in the Americas, I wonder if the casters will get into the habit of calling them by their full user name.
Speaking of which, do we know who will replace Frodan at the Americas desk? My first pick would be Jia -- her analytical skills are top notch, and I like her subtle sense of humour. On the other hand, I don't think her style would mesh with TJ.
All the theorycraft streamers I watched came to the same conclusion: this deck is weak to aggro, but excellent against any other deck. For that reason, I expect to see it A LOT in tournaments where you can weed out your bad matchups. Season 2 of 2021 Grandmasters is in only 10 days -- I assume we'll see a fairly refined version of the deck at that time.
All the "For the rest of the game" effects are exactly that, so they've been present for a few years (maybe even going back to the very beginning if you consider original Jaraxxus). They were first used in a broad way in One Night in Karazhan (they were 2-3 encounters which had portals on one or both sides), and came back in wide use for all the Un'goro quests, and again for the hero powers during Frozen Throne.
Kotaku today posted an in-depth investigation about the goings-on related to the "Cosby Suite", which was a hotel room used by Blizzard employees during BlizzCon 2013.
Up to now, no one on the Hearthstone team had been mentioned in the allegations. This is no longer the case:
Quote From Kotaku article
Another image from the same Facebook album shows a screenshot of a 2013 group chat called the “BlizzCon Cosby Crew.” In it, former Blizzard designer David Kosak writes, “I am gathering the hot chixx for the Coz.”
“Bring em,” replies Afrasiabi. “You can’t marry ALL of them Alex,” Kosak writes. “I can, I’m middle eastern,” responds Afrasiabi. Jesse McCree, currently a lead game designer at Blizzard, then writes, “You misspelled fuck.”
This makes me profoundly sad. I had hoped Team 5 wouldn't be involved in this affair because it was too small and isolated in its early years, as well as being led by Ben Brode (can you imagine Ben condoning ANY kind of demeaning behaviour? Neither can I).
As I explained in my preamble, I had a limited time to watch the streams, and I didn't see enough games played with the missing classes to form an opinion.
Side note: Regis Killbin has just released this video where he ranks the various questlines based on his own experience during the theorycraft streams.
One of the best analyses I've seen on this site, and sorely needed since we had a limited amount of time to view the whole set.
To go a little bit further following your final paragraph, here are a few of my impressions after watching the theorycrafting streams yesterday (overall, I watched four live over 3 hours yesterday, and two more VODs over 2 hours this morning):
- Warlock quest: Excellent against midrange and slower decks, but very weak to aggro. Don't bother with Neeru Fireblade; just pack your deck with removal and board clears (such as Entitled Customer), as well as healing (Spice Bread Baker) and burst opponents with your own fatigue damage once you exhaust your deck.
- Warrior quest: Forget assumptions about pirate warrior being aggressive; The Juggernaut is an infinite value engine that makes this deck the perfect midrange deck. Keep a low curve to finish the quest as quickly as possible while answering early threats. Once your boat is on the board, just grind your opponents down.
- Druid quest: Inconsistent quest completion, which points to not having enough support for it, at least for now. The reward is also underwhelming. (*I just remembered something important: There seems to be a bug with Guff that causes the opponent to disconnect, although it's not instantaneously apparent -- you need to mouse over the board to notice it. Kibler ran into this multiple times, which caused him to lose precious time during crucial turns. Presuming Blizzard doesn't correct this by launch day, players who want to cheese a few wins might want to try this quest).
- Priest quest: Early turns tend to be decent, but often struggles in the mid-game by having limited options in the high-mana slots (for example, playing a Lorekeeper Polkelt on turn 7 because the player needed to play a 5-drop).
- Rogue quest: While the gizmos are more powerful than lackeys or spare parts (each has an effect worth about 2.5 mana), they are only the support section of your deck, not its main focus. Overall power level is equivalent to current tempo rogue.
- Mage quest: Best as a variation on Incanter's Flow mage, with the same matchup stats.
This is my favourite kind of Brawl, because it's perfect to complete "play X class" quests, and even some other specific ones (Beasts? Choose hunter or druid. Murlocs? Choose paladin or shaman).
One thing that would be nice would be to show you your whole deck before you start, so that you could see any synergies that you should look out for. For example, I had Kor'vas Bloodthorn in my demon hunter deck, along with two Illidari Studies and one Eye Beam. The Kor'vas clones came back as 2/2s in my hand, and would generate additional clones once played. In short, the situation just snowballed once I got them into play.
Looks like the theorycrafting streams will act as the final reveal for this expansion. These will occur on the contracted streamers' (the usual crew of high-profile HS players like Regis Killbin, Alliestrasza, Thijs, Brian Kibler, etc.) individual Twitch channel at 9 a.m. Pacific today.
Their reasoning is the same as Brian Kibler, Alliestrasza, Lieutenant Eddy and TrumpSC: Card reveal videos and discussions could be seen as an attempt at distracting the public away from the lawsuit and its allegations. These people would prefer it gets all the attention it can. The Hearthstone team feels the same way, which is why they cancelled their own internal card reveals. They obviously couldn't force the community creators which received cards to reveal to follow suit, but it wouldn't surprise me if many creators came to the same conclusion.
I honestly don't see a place for this card. Realistically, this will come down on turn 4 or 5, and if you're lucky, it'll connect once with your opponent before being removed.
I think you hit the nail on the head: this doesn't fit into existing decks. If it was part of the Nature school, it would at least be chosen once in a while with Nature Studies (and it would synergize with Guff, which would be nice thematically since it is his mount!).
I suspect this was created as a follow-up to midrange taunt druid that never really got off the ground.
So, bottom line: excellent value, great for midrange decks, but doesn't replace existing cards in the current environment.
I thought the Uldum approach to quests was ideal: they were achievable within a reasonable time frame, and triggered automatically once you'd fulfilled their condition.
These new quests seem like a step back, in that I expect that over 90% of the games, you won't have time to complete them. In particular, I'm highly dubious of the mage questline -- even if you do have the right mix of spell types in your hand, how can you make sure that the spells are actually relevant for the current board state?
The warlock questline looks more promising, especially since it combines very well with the self-sacrifice cards from Forged in the Barrens. I'm still not sure there's enough healing to compensate for all the damage you'll take, however.
I agree on all your points! I haven't had time to play a lot this week, so I'm still on the "Play 10 Shaman games" step of the Fire Festival questline. What's even better is that the Nozdormu quest works in Wild, so it's a perfect fit for aggressive Baku decks like paladin and demon hunter. Took me about 15 minutes to get 150 g (I completed 2 weekly quests at the same time), so quite efficient!
The rule of thumb is any of the following is considered a "nerf", and therefore eligible for a full dust refund:
Anything else is considered a "buff", and is not eligible for a refund.
As someone who's never played any of the Warcraft games, and only a little bit of World of Warcraft, I absolutely adored the Book of Heroes. It was a great way to discover the backstory for all the main Hearthstone protagonists!
It would be great if they looked at the alternate hero skins like Nemsy and Mecha-Jaraxxus once the Book of Mercenaries is done.
Just to give a bit more info, with the introduction of the Core set, Blizzard added two pack types in the Shop:
- Standard packs (red cover) which appear last in the section entitled "Standard Packs and Cards".
- Wild packs (red cover with vines) which appear first in the section entitled "Other Packs". This section is just before all the wild sets separated by year.
First, thanks to Fluxflashor for the reminder about the lack of duplicate protection for golden cards!
I only got the standard bundle, and it was definitely worth it in my case: I went from 16 missing cards to 9 for United in Stormwind, including 4 legendaries (2 from the promo and 2 in packs).
I know Specialist isn't particularly well-liked by the audience, but I also know a lot of the GM players were fine with it in small doses (remember that Blizzard gets their input before choosing the structure of the season), so I'm a little bit surprised it was removed completely for this season.
Also, with two players named on a variation of "Luna" in the Americas, I wonder if the casters will get into the habit of calling them by their full user name.
Speaking of which, do we know who will replace Frodan at the Americas desk? My first pick would be Jia -- her analytical skills are top notch, and I like her subtle sense of humour. On the other hand, I don't think her style would mesh with TJ.
Does that also hold for heroic Duels?
All the theorycraft streamers I watched came to the same conclusion: this deck is weak to aggro, but excellent against any other deck. For that reason, I expect to see it A LOT in tournaments where you can weed out your bad matchups. Season 2 of 2021 Grandmasters is in only 10 days -- I assume we'll see a fairly refined version of the deck at that time.
All the "For the rest of the game" effects are exactly that, so they've been present for a few years (maybe even going back to the very beginning if you consider original Jaraxxus). They were first used in a broad way in One Night in Karazhan (they were 2-3 encounters which had portals on one or both sides), and came back in wide use for all the Un'goro quests, and again for the hero powers during Frozen Throne.
This is my submission for the giveaway, and also the deck I'm most excited to try out!
Kotaku today posted an in-depth investigation about the goings-on related to the "Cosby Suite", which was a hotel room used by Blizzard employees during BlizzCon 2013.
Up to now, no one on the Hearthstone team had been mentioned in the allegations. This is no longer the case:
This makes me profoundly sad. I had hoped Team 5 wouldn't be involved in this affair because it was too small and isolated in its early years, as well as being led by Ben Brode (can you imagine Ben condoning ANY kind of demeaning behaviour? Neither can I).
Not really. It would work like Duels or Arena where you have an intermittent step after selecting your class that would show your deck list.
As I explained in my preamble, I had a limited time to watch the streams, and I didn't see enough games played with the missing classes to form an opinion.
Side note: Regis Killbin has just released this video where he ranks the various questlines based on his own experience during the theorycraft streams.
One of the best analyses I've seen on this site, and sorely needed since we had a limited amount of time to view the whole set.
To go a little bit further following your final paragraph, here are a few of my impressions after watching the theorycrafting streams yesterday (overall, I watched four live over 3 hours yesterday, and two more VODs over 2 hours this morning):
- Warlock quest: Excellent against midrange and slower decks, but very weak to aggro. Don't bother with Neeru Fireblade; just pack your deck with removal and board clears (such as Entitled Customer), as well as healing (Spice Bread Baker) and burst opponents with your own fatigue damage once you exhaust your deck.
- Warrior quest: Forget assumptions about pirate warrior being aggressive; The Juggernaut is an infinite value engine that makes this deck the perfect midrange deck. Keep a low curve to finish the quest as quickly as possible while answering early threats. Once your boat is on the board, just grind your opponents down.
- Druid quest: Inconsistent quest completion, which points to not having enough support for it, at least for now. The reward is also underwhelming. (*I just remembered something important: There seems to be a bug with Guff that causes the opponent to disconnect, although it's not instantaneously apparent -- you need to mouse over the board to notice it. Kibler ran into this multiple times, which caused him to lose precious time during crucial turns. Presuming Blizzard doesn't correct this by launch day, players who want to cheese a few wins might want to try this quest).
- Priest quest: Early turns tend to be decent, but often struggles in the mid-game by having limited options in the high-mana slots (for example, playing a Lorekeeper Polkelt on turn 7 because the player needed to play a 5-drop).
- Rogue quest: While the gizmos are more powerful than lackeys or spare parts (each has an effect worth about 2.5 mana), they are only the support section of your deck, not its main focus. Overall power level is equivalent to current tempo rogue.
- Mage quest: Best as a variation on Incanter's Flow mage, with the same matchup stats.
This is my favourite kind of Brawl, because it's perfect to complete "play X class" quests, and even some other specific ones (Beasts? Choose hunter or druid. Murlocs? Choose paladin or shaman).
One thing that would be nice would be to show you your whole deck before you start, so that you could see any synergies that you should look out for. For example, I had Kor'vas Bloodthorn in my demon hunter deck, along with two Illidari Studies and one Eye Beam. The Kor'vas clones came back as 2/2s in my hand, and would generate additional clones once played. In short, the situation just snowballed once I got them into play.
Looks like the theorycrafting streams will act as the final reveal for this expansion. These will occur on the contracted streamers' (the usual crew of high-profile HS players like Regis Killbin, Alliestrasza, Thijs, Brian Kibler, etc.) individual Twitch channel at 9 a.m. Pacific today.
Their reasoning is the same as Brian Kibler, Alliestrasza, Lieutenant Eddy and TrumpSC: Card reveal videos and discussions could be seen as an attempt at distracting the public away from the lawsuit and its allegations. These people would prefer it gets all the attention it can. The Hearthstone team feels the same way, which is why they cancelled their own internal card reveals. They obviously couldn't force the community creators which received cards to reveal to follow suit, but it wouldn't surprise me if many creators came to the same conclusion.
I honestly don't see a place for this card. Realistically, this will come down on turn 4 or 5, and if you're lucky, it'll connect once with your opponent before being removed.
Overall, very weak for a legendary.
I think you hit the nail on the head: this doesn't fit into existing decks. If it was part of the Nature school, it would at least be chosen once in a while with Nature Studies (and it would synergize with Guff, which would be nice thematically since it is his mount!).
I suspect this was created as a follow-up to midrange taunt druid that never really got off the ground.
So, bottom line: excellent value, great for midrange decks, but doesn't replace existing cards in the current environment.
I thought the Uldum approach to quests was ideal: they were achievable within a reasonable time frame, and triggered automatically once you'd fulfilled their condition.
These new quests seem like a step back, in that I expect that over 90% of the games, you won't have time to complete them. In particular, I'm highly dubious of the mage questline -- even if you do have the right mix of spell types in your hand, how can you make sure that the spells are actually relevant for the current board state?
The warlock questline looks more promising, especially since it combines very well with the self-sacrifice cards from Forged in the Barrens. I'm still not sure there's enough healing to compensate for all the damage you'll take, however.
I agree on all your points! I haven't had time to play a lot this week, so I'm still on the "Play 10 Shaman games" step of the Fire Festival questline. What's even better is that the Nozdormu quest works in Wild, so it's a perfect fit for aggressive Baku decks like paladin and demon hunter. Took me about 15 minutes to get 150 g (I completed 2 weekly quests at the same time), so quite efficient!