You have to specifically draft them in order to put them in your deck. Prioritizing lands is pretty important whenever drafting a snow deck to make sure you can actually benefit from your snow nonland cards.
While I think it is undeniable that firewalling yourself to get extra turn time gives a tremendous advantage to some builds, like APM pirates or chadgar brann shenanigans, it's the type of thing that's a necessary evil for the time being. This is because depending on how long combat takes, a player can get more or less time in their turn. If you are playing a build that's reliant on having a long turn timer, this can just ruin your chances to win simply because the opponents are playing a build that has deathrattles/tokens.
This ties back into the age-old issue that animation times are way too slow for a lot of things. While certain cases of this in the past that people complained about, like the ysera portals and other cast when drawn cards aren't a huge deal, I do believe that Battlegrounds should have a whole "skip combat" button, so that way the people playing apm reliant builds can still properly play the game and those who aren't can enjoy the combat phase since most builds aren't going to need an extra 30-40 seconds to spend all their gold.
This decklist was for an article featuring some of our favorite decks over the years, with this specific one coming from Boomsday. The Hunter's Mark nerf that pushed it up to 2 mana happened later that year during Rastakhan's Rumble. Sorry about any confusion.
Maybe for standard, but a lot of older formats have already been running a lot of snow cards, so it wouldn't surprise me if Kaldheim surprises us with a few good ones. Not to mention there really isn't much of a downside for running snow lands, besides a few cards that hose them. The mechanic as a whole is much less rigid than something like Party is.
They look really good for the most part. Half off packs are great if you need to just pad out a little bit of the set/get closer to getting some more wildcards, Gem deals are the best as it helps pay for future battle passes if you don't grind them enough or if you just want to buy packs. Finally, the player draft token is pretty big given that both traditional and premier drafts cost either 250 gems or 1000 gold more than what the token is being offered at.
The gem deal is a no brainer, same with the draft token if you are a fan of limited. The packs are still very good, but much more collection dependent.
Don't worry, as the event goes on its certain that the comment section of this thread is going to be loaded up with clues so hopefully you'll be able to get atleast some of them!
Unfortunately, the Wolf doesn't work with Ozolith as it just blows it up. That being said I do feel like the card might be able to find a sweet spot since it's basically just Pernicious Deed on a stick, which is a very nice card already.
As for Kaya, she's super cool but I also am not sold on her viability-wise. I hope she's playable because I love the whole ghostform mechanic. Unfortunately again, it doesn't work favorably with the Ozolith given that the whole existence of the counters is to remind players of the revive thing.
I imagine that writing for a Forum could be Fun! Though, outside of some Comments here and there, I don't have any Samples of similar Work that I could offer...
I'm speaking of Card Art!
The only Time People talk about it, is when there's Changes or a Controversy. Which is kind of a Shame, cause there's just so much more to it! On YT alone, there's quite a lot of Essays, like the ones from Rhystic Studies, some Tutorials, and even some Work Processes by Artist.
Maybe you could write about how Games handle the Portrayal of Characteristics (like Colors in MtGA, Classes in HS,..), look at the Storytelling on and between Cards, Themes of Expansions, etc. One could also look at the Process of creating Card Art or put the Spotlight on a certain Artist and their Works.
If you don't have any samples of similar work, you can always just make a sample article and submit that!
As for the whole card art stuff, specifically for magic, I would love to cover more about the whole portrayal of characteristics as well as story telling in them! Infact, the multiverse lore guides that are already up do focus on the story telling on and between cards, since thats the main way that MTG tells its story for the most part. I do plan on continuing these, as well as doing a more indepth on what the colors stand for, but they just take a bit of time and I've been too busy to start picking one up.
If played correctly the winrate should be way higher than 52%.
That's a very common thing with control decks, even the more oppressive ones. Longer games lead to more opportunities for an average player to misplay resulting in a loss. I think one of the best cases of this was with Patron Warrior, which while arguably not a control deck, never was close to having a 50% winrate in ladder yet it warped the entire metagame around itself due to being so absurdly powerful.
Looking back, the ETC deck is basically just modern-day Patron Warrior, which is pretty cool since Patron Warrior was the first big deck i really was able to get behind.
Haha yeah I totally didn't call a specific 5 drop bad only to literally have it be one of the most important cards in my legend climb this season haha >_>.
Most important part of climbing to legend (and within legend to get a better rank) is to just keep calm and play to your outs. Getting stressed out obviously won't help so just play at your own place and remember that ultimately, there is no rush since next month always exists. I remember the first time i reached the equivalent of rank 3 back in 2016, I got incredibly nervous about hitting legend, and ended up deranking all the way down to 4 before I just cut my losses.
If you happen to use a decktracker, like HSreplay, checking your own replays can be very beneficial as hindsight can be very useful. Granted, learning from hindsight can lead to picking up messy habits, but I believe reviewing them can be helpful. If you want some help with that, feel free to DM me or just post them here and I'm sure some people will help you break down the game.
Getting to legend is 100% just a mindset, keep calm, focused, and you'll get there if you have enough determination. Once you hit it a couple times, it'll become a lot easier and it won't be much of a hassle anymore to reach it. Good luck!
First off, don't worry about your English, its perfectly fine!
As for the actual battlepass, its very easy to just say that Blizzard dropped the ball on this one, because they did. While I think that with some tuning, this system can become significantly better than the prior one, some numbers definitely need to be tuned to make rewards still feel good. In most cases, The best case of this can be seen with the XP per hour thing. The fact the system currently doesn't reward you for actually winning is incredibly dumb and encourages a bunch of people to bot since having an AI that just plays odd warrior and presses the button every turn is just as effective as playing an actually difficult deck and having a solid winrate with it. The actual rewards from the pass feel weird as well. I can understand the increasing amounts of XP per level, but spending a ton of time only to unlock a pack from one of last year's sets just feels bad. Even though in most cases, the pack is going to be the same amount of dust as whatever the player is going to open with 100 gold, the lack of choice hurts.
As for the paid path, putting on better rewards feels like it can be a good idea, but it also feels like a great way to open the reddit floodgates to throw another hissyfit about the game getting two expensive. Hearthstone's current battle pass is very much like Legends of Runeterra's pass, that only consisting of cosmetics. Issue is that Runeterra is also a much more f2p friendly game than Hearthstone and so the similar system just doesn't work. I do think that the tavern pass can be more enticing, including a couple more skins or giving battleground perks or something of that sort, but I don't think adding a ton of gold or arena tickets would be great.
The main things that need to be done to fix the current system is to make change XP per hour to actually reward good players, and some form of smaller rewards in between levels because later on it just sucks to only get a pack or two every couple of days.
There are a couple decent anti-aggro tools in the set, like Darkmoon Dirigible, Sword Eater, and Snack Run, but for the most part I do agree that the set feels a bit lopsided towards needlessly large minions. The last set felt this lopsided towards big heavy creatures was WotG, which had also been in a time when Reno was in standard, and the game was significantly more mid range. All that said, I'm still optimistic that we'll get to have some fun with the Old Gods, and if not then hopefully we can atleast get some fun toys to enjoy.
There is absolutely a ton of stuff we don't know about the new progression and achievement systems. The issue is that Blizzard still hasn't talked a whole lot about them. As far as I'm aware, beyond the initial announcement stream and the subsequent articles posted that day, they haven't talked any more about it.
Once we can finally get our hands on them, you can absolutely expect the progression and achievement guides to be updated.
I'd love to get another neutral aggro legendary, but in my opinion, it feels like it's easier to design slower legendaries because you can more often put on a flashy effect to give the card some 'wow' factor. Things like the Kazakus or any of the three Renos are a lot more flashy and cool for less enfranchised players than something like Leeroy and Patches, who are both great cards but are essentially just a more expensive neutral fireball and a 1/1 that comes into play when you play a pirate.
All that being said, we technically got a neutral aggro legendary in the form of [Hearthstone Card (Lorekeeper Pokelt) Not Found], who's good in both forms of Aggro hunter, but that definitely feels like a copout. Especially when you consider the fact it also sees play in a lot of other style of decks because the effect is just a good one.
Yeah it's losing the 4 mana 4/2 that equips a truesilver and the 7 mana 7/7 that gives you 5 paladin cards. The latter doesn't matter a ton since it's only a 1-of if even, but the 4/2 is one of the strongest cards of the deck so losing it will definitely weaken the archetype.
All that being said, this isn't the first time an almost rotating theme gets support at the last second, most notably with the Kabal getting highlander support the expansion before Reno rotated. There's always a chance Paladin can stumble upon enough class cards to make this thing relevant again in standard, or it'll just get more support, who knows to be honest.
As the resident Zilliax hater, this card bears too much resemblance to that robot so I already am not a fan of this card and refuse to change my stance on it at all in the future.
All that being said, this card can clearly be incredibly good in pure paladin, Zilliax with +4+3 for only 3 more mana seems great. The biggest issue though is just whether its still worth to run pure paladin over pen paladin, which has shown to be the much more dominant over the last couple of weeks. I'm hesitant to say that this card alone will give pure the extra push to be better than pen, given that both already have fairly decent aggro matchups, but it's nice to have more of an incentive to go the 'lesser' build now.
You have to specifically draft them in order to put them in your deck. Prioritizing lands is pretty important whenever drafting a snow deck to make sure you can actually benefit from your snow nonland cards.
While I think it is undeniable that firewalling yourself to get extra turn time gives a tremendous advantage to some builds, like APM pirates or chadgar brann shenanigans, it's the type of thing that's a necessary evil for the time being. This is because depending on how long combat takes, a player can get more or less time in their turn. If you are playing a build that's reliant on having a long turn timer, this can just ruin your chances to win simply because the opponents are playing a build that has deathrattles/tokens.
This ties back into the age-old issue that animation times are way too slow for a lot of things. While certain cases of this in the past that people complained about, like the ysera portals and other cast when drawn cards aren't a huge deal, I do believe that Battlegrounds should have a whole "skip combat" button, so that way the people playing apm reliant builds can still properly play the game and those who aren't can enjoy the combat phase since most builds aren't going to need an extra 30-40 seconds to spend all their gold.
Cupcake was my top as well, unfortunately, a lot of people on the staff just don't have good taste in cardbacks :/.
This decklist was for an article featuring some of our favorite decks over the years, with this specific one coming from Boomsday. The Hunter's Mark nerf that pushed it up to 2 mana happened later that year during Rastakhan's Rumble. Sorry about any confusion.
Maybe for standard, but a lot of older formats have already been running a lot of snow cards, so it wouldn't surprise me if Kaldheim surprises us with a few good ones. Not to mention there really isn't much of a downside for running snow lands, besides a few cards that hose them. The mechanic as a whole is much less rigid than something like Party is.
There are snow basic lands. They were revealed during the stream on the 7th.
They look really good for the most part. Half off packs are great if you need to just pad out a little bit of the set/get closer to getting some more wildcards, Gem deals are the best as it helps pay for future battle passes if you don't grind them enough or if you just want to buy packs. Finally, the player draft token is pretty big given that both traditional and premier drafts cost either 250 gems or 1000 gold more than what the token is being offered at.
The gem deal is a no brainer, same with the draft token if you are a fan of limited. The packs are still very good, but much more collection dependent.
Don't worry, as the event goes on its certain that the comment section of this thread is going to be loaded up with clues so hopefully you'll be able to get atleast some of them!
Unfortunately, the Wolf doesn't work with Ozolith as it just blows it up. That being said I do feel like the card might be able to find a sweet spot since it's basically just Pernicious Deed on a stick, which is a very nice card already.
As for Kaya, she's super cool but I also am not sold on her viability-wise. I hope she's playable because I love the whole ghostform mechanic. Unfortunately again, it doesn't work favorably with the Ozolith given that the whole existence of the counters is to remind players of the revive thing.
If you don't have any samples of similar work, you can always just make a sample article and submit that!
As for the whole card art stuff, specifically for magic, I would love to cover more about the whole portrayal of characteristics as well as story telling in them! Infact, the multiverse lore guides that are already up do focus on the story telling on and between cards, since thats the main way that MTG tells its story for the most part. I do plan on continuing these, as well as doing a more indepth on what the colors stand for, but they just take a bit of time and I've been too busy to start picking one up.
That's a very common thing with control decks, even the more oppressive ones. Longer games lead to more opportunities for an average player to misplay resulting in a loss. I think one of the best cases of this was with Patron Warrior, which while arguably not a control deck, never was close to having a 50% winrate in ladder yet it warped the entire metagame around itself due to being so absurdly powerful.
Looking back, the ETC deck is basically just modern-day Patron Warrior, which is pretty cool since Patron Warrior was the first big deck i really was able to get behind.
Haha yeah I totally didn't call a specific 5 drop bad only to literally have it be one of the most important cards in my legend climb this season haha >_>.
Most important part of climbing to legend (and within legend to get a better rank) is to just keep calm and play to your outs. Getting stressed out obviously won't help so just play at your own place and remember that ultimately, there is no rush since next month always exists. I remember the first time i reached the equivalent of rank 3 back in 2016, I got incredibly nervous about hitting legend, and ended up deranking all the way down to 4 before I just cut my losses.
If you happen to use a decktracker, like HSreplay, checking your own replays can be very beneficial as hindsight can be very useful. Granted, learning from hindsight can lead to picking up messy habits, but I believe reviewing them can be helpful. If you want some help with that, feel free to DM me or just post them here and I'm sure some people will help you break down the game.
Getting to legend is 100% just a mindset, keep calm, focused, and you'll get there if you have enough determination. Once you hit it a couple times, it'll become a lot easier and it won't be much of a hassle anymore to reach it. Good luck!
First off, don't worry about your English, its perfectly fine!
As for the actual battlepass, its very easy to just say that Blizzard dropped the ball on this one, because they did. While I think that with some tuning, this system can become significantly better than the prior one, some numbers definitely need to be tuned to make rewards still feel good. In most cases, The best case of this can be seen with the XP per hour thing. The fact the system currently doesn't reward you for actually winning is incredibly dumb and encourages a bunch of people to bot since having an AI that just plays odd warrior and presses the button every turn is just as effective as playing an actually difficult deck and having a solid winrate with it. The actual rewards from the pass feel weird as well. I can understand the increasing amounts of XP per level, but spending a ton of time only to unlock a pack from one of last year's sets just feels bad. Even though in most cases, the pack is going to be the same amount of dust as whatever the player is going to open with 100 gold, the lack of choice hurts.
As for the paid path, putting on better rewards feels like it can be a good idea, but it also feels like a great way to open the reddit floodgates to throw another hissyfit about the game getting two expensive. Hearthstone's current battle pass is very much like Legends of Runeterra's pass, that only consisting of cosmetics. Issue is that Runeterra is also a much more f2p friendly game than Hearthstone and so the similar system just doesn't work. I do think that the tavern pass can be more enticing, including a couple more skins or giving battleground perks or something of that sort, but I don't think adding a ton of gold or arena tickets would be great.
The main things that need to be done to fix the current system is to make change XP per hour to actually reward good players, and some form of smaller rewards in between levels because later on it just sucks to only get a pack or two every couple of days.
There are a couple decent anti-aggro tools in the set, like Darkmoon Dirigible, Sword Eater, and Snack Run, but for the most part I do agree that the set feels a bit lopsided towards needlessly large minions. The last set felt this lopsided towards big heavy creatures was WotG, which had also been in a time when Reno was in standard, and the game was significantly more mid range. All that said, I'm still optimistic that we'll get to have some fun with the Old Gods, and if not then hopefully we can atleast get some fun toys to enjoy.
There is absolutely a ton of stuff we don't know about the new progression and achievement systems. The issue is that Blizzard still hasn't talked a whole lot about them. As far as I'm aware, beyond the initial announcement stream and the subsequent articles posted that day, they haven't talked any more about it.
Once we can finally get our hands on them, you can absolutely expect the progression and achievement guides to be updated.
I'd love to get another neutral aggro legendary, but in my opinion, it feels like it's easier to design slower legendaries because you can more often put on a flashy effect to give the card some 'wow' factor. Things like the Kazakus or any of the three Renos are a lot more flashy and cool for less enfranchised players than something like Leeroy and Patches, who are both great cards but are essentially just a more expensive neutral fireball and a 1/1 that comes into play when you play a pirate.
All that being said, we technically got a neutral aggro legendary in the form of [Hearthstone Card (Lorekeeper Pokelt) Not Found], who's good in both forms of Aggro hunter, but that definitely feels like a copout. Especially when you consider the fact it also sees play in a lot of other style of decks because the effect is just a good one.
Don't worry Assassinate is almost strictly better than this card with Grand Archivist
Yeah it's losing the 4 mana 4/2 that equips a truesilver and the 7 mana 7/7 that gives you 5 paladin cards. The latter doesn't matter a ton since it's only a 1-of if even, but the 4/2 is one of the strongest cards of the deck so losing it will definitely weaken the archetype.
All that being said, this isn't the first time an almost rotating theme gets support at the last second, most notably with the Kabal getting highlander support the expansion before Reno rotated. There's always a chance Paladin can stumble upon enough class cards to make this thing relevant again in standard, or it'll just get more support, who knows to be honest.
As the resident Zilliax hater, this card bears too much resemblance to that robot so I already am not a fan of this card and refuse to change my stance on it at all in the future.
All that being said, this card can clearly be incredibly good in pure paladin, Zilliax with +4+3 for only 3 more mana seems great. The biggest issue though is just whether its still worth to run pure paladin over pen paladin, which has shown to be the much more dominant over the last couple of weeks. I'm hesitant to say that this card alone will give pure the extra push to be better than pen, given that both already have fairly decent aggro matchups, but it's nice to have more of an incentive to go the 'lesser' build now.