I think Tour Guide is a very good tempo card (you never lose tempo by playing it unless you save your hero power for a later turn) and this has direct synergy with it. Will that make it good in something that isn't Demon Hunter? Probably not, because you'll still be using two cards to draw one and that's just really inefficient.
I could see this being run in face hunter as a way to trigger your [Hearthstone Card (Leper Gnome) Not Found]s immediately, but that's a fringe case and I don't really see it fitting in anything else.
In every way possible, yeah. New keywords and mechanics that were either completely useless or completely broken on a case-by-case basis, and other cards that didn't use those mechanics ended up being some of the strongest cards in the set by far. Not only that, but both sets were also pretty forgettable (at least in my opinion, to the point where I had to think pretty hard to remember what RR even stood for).
Oh yeah I guess they were both arena/tournament themed as well.
Ah yes, Half-Life Alyx isn't a Half-Life game, how could I be so naive? God forbid a company tries new things. You say they should concentrate on what made them the company they are today as if they aren't already doing that.
Valve is a company built on innovation, first and foremost. Their flagship titles (Portal, Half-Life, Team Fortress, and Counterstrike) all revolutionized their respective genres. They created the single most used PC game platform available at a time when the concept didn't even exist. Just recently they've developed some of the most revolutionary VR technology alongside an amazing game and open-source engine to go with it.
They created Artifact not just because they wanted to cash in on the card game craze, but because they wanted to innovate, and you can't possibly say that Artifact didn't innovate when Legends of Runeterra's gameplay format is essentially just a simplified Artifact.
Now they want to right their wrongs. They realized that Artifact was a failure in its current state, and instead of just abandoning development on it like most big companies would do, they buckled down and spent the last two years rebuilding the game from the ground up to make it up to those like myself who really enjoyed the gameplay but had their experience ruined by the pay-to-win nature of the game.
As far as I know, you still buy the base game but you won't have to buy cards anymore. Who knows though, maybe they'll make it free to play and just make their money off of cosmetics like they do with Dota and Underlords.
I'll admit it could be bias talking, but I think so long as the game is good the price tag shouldn't be an issue. CSGO still had well over 300k concurrent players at a $20 price tag before going free to play. Even before that, PUBG had the single largest concurrent player base on Steam at over 1 million players for a few months in 2018, despite a $30 price point.
Granted, both of those games are shooters, which are generally more accessible, but both were also fairly complex ones compared to similar games of the time.
I'm actually super excited for this. I loved Artifact but it went on to prove that physical card game monetization does not work in a digital setting, and that fact had a big hand in ruining the game.
I still wish Rolling Fireball got a more unique animation. Like, have the fireball fall from the sky and then actually roll to adjacent minions, rather than just the vanilla fireball effect bouncing back and forth
Having the Zixor package in there feels like it would just make the deck less consistent, since your Scavenger's Ingenuity could hit that or his prime. Now that we've seen all of the hunter cards, it would probably be better to replace those with Scrap Shot and something else.
Hunting Party also feels too slow now that we know we can get more than one +3/+3 on Krush, meaning you could OTK with as little as two if you hit all three buffs
The feeling I get when seeing these is the same feeling I got when I saw Scargil: disappointment that they forewent anything interesting and resorted to murlocs instead.
Except it's worse this time because at least murlocs fit shaman flavour-wise. I've never understood why Paladin is a murloc class
I think Tour Guide is a very good tempo card (you never lose tempo by playing it unless you save your hero power for a later turn) and this has direct synergy with it. Will that make it good in something that isn't Demon Hunter? Probably not, because you'll still be using two cards to draw one and that's just really inefficient.
Sounds convincing enough to me, but as you said, Team 5's thought process can be completely unpredictable at times so speculation can only go so far.
I could see this being run in face hunter as a way to trigger your [Hearthstone Card (Leper Gnome) Not Found]s immediately, but that's a fringe case and I don't really see it fitting in anything else.
So it's Wild Pyromancer + Equality on one card for half the cost?
And I can also run it in my Control Warrior?
Say less!
It says "Whenever," so yes.
Seems a bit early to make that kind of claim considering we haven't seen even a third of the cards yet.
In every way possible, yeah. New keywords and mechanics that were either completely useless or completely broken on a case-by-case basis, and other cards that didn't use those mechanics ended up being some of the strongest cards in the set by far. Not only that, but both sets were also pretty forgettable (at least in my opinion, to the point where I had to think pretty hard to remember what RR even stood for).
Oh yeah I guess they were both arena/tournament themed as well.
That's what I usually do, then once all of the cards are revealed I re-evaluate my ratings
Ah yes, Half-Life Alyx isn't a Half-Life game, how could I be so naive? God forbid a company tries new things. You say they should concentrate on what made them the company they are today as if they aren't already doing that.
Valve is a company built on innovation, first and foremost. Their flagship titles (Portal, Half-Life, Team Fortress, and Counterstrike) all revolutionized their respective genres. They created the single most used PC game platform available at a time when the concept didn't even exist. Just recently they've developed some of the most revolutionary VR technology alongside an amazing game and open-source engine to go with it.
They created Artifact not just because they wanted to cash in on the card game craze, but because they wanted to innovate, and you can't possibly say that Artifact didn't innovate when Legends of Runeterra's gameplay format is essentially just a simplified Artifact.
Now they want to right their wrongs. They realized that Artifact was a failure in its current state, and instead of just abandoning development on it like most big companies would do, they buckled down and spent the last two years rebuilding the game from the ground up to make it up to those like myself who really enjoyed the gameplay but had their experience ruined by the pay-to-win nature of the game.
As far as I know, you still buy the base game but you won't have to buy cards anymore. Who knows though, maybe they'll make it free to play and just make their money off of cosmetics like they do with Dota and Underlords.
they literally just released a half-life game
I'll admit it could be bias talking, but I think so long as the game is good the price tag shouldn't be an issue. CSGO still had well over 300k concurrent players at a $20 price tag before going free to play. Even before that, PUBG had the single largest concurrent player base on Steam at over 1 million players for a few months in 2018, despite a $30 price point.
Granted, both of those games are shooters, which are generally more accessible, but both were also fairly complex ones compared to similar games of the time.
I'm actually super excited for this. I loved Artifact but it went on to prove that physical card game monetization does not work in a digital setting, and that fact had a big hand in ruining the game.
How is making Torrent cost 1 worse than making it cost 2?
I still wish Rolling Fireball got a more unique animation. Like, have the fireball fall from the sky and then actually roll to adjacent minions, rather than just the vanilla fireball effect bouncing back and forth
Just a correction here, you can't play Germination on Winged Guardian because it can't be targeted by spells
Did you read the post? They obviously are
I think it's better this way than adding a bunch of trash neutral epics that you would never want to open, like they usually do
Having the Zixor package in there feels like it would just make the deck less consistent, since your Scavenger's Ingenuity could hit that or his prime. Now that we've seen all of the hunter cards, it would probably be better to replace those with Scrap Shot and something else.
Hunting Party also feels too slow now that we know we can get more than one +3/+3 on Krush, meaning you could OTK with as little as two if you hit all three buffs
The feeling I get when seeing these is the same feeling I got when I saw Scargil: disappointment that they forewent anything interesting and resorted to murlocs instead.
Except it's worse this time because at least murlocs fit shaman flavour-wise. I've never understood why Paladin is a murloc class