Oohh, Diamond Cards was the Spell Locked item from Phase 1. Don't get me wrong, I'm always hyped for a new expansion, but I don't expect anything to be discussed beyond that and Battlegrounds. Hope I'm wrong.
Although, there was something "Spell Locked" from Phase 1, and I don't remember if that was ever revealed (it's not Mercenaries).
I find it disappointing that Arena doesn't even warrant a little icon like "Duels Update" or "Tavern Brawls." I would really like to see Tavern Tickets (not to be confused with the Tavern Pass) become a tracked in-game currency, and have them regularly awarded to players (Three wins in Tavern Brawl each week gives you one? Incentivize multiple modes at once?). There needs to be a better incentive to get players into Arena and Heroic Duels. It's either that or make Arena and Duels strictly casual. As it is right now, the player base for all three modes (Arena, Casual Duels, Heroic Duels) feels too small. But they're great game modes! Blizzard just needs to actually direct players' attention to them.
Zeddy claims to have inside info that it's not coming out until November at the earliest. He could be wrong, but consider the survey about the "battlepass" (Rewards Track and Tavern Pass) was leaked in August 2020. I think we're at least a full quarter from initial release, and November, in advance of the third expansion (beta access with purchase of a pre-order???), seems very realistic.
This looks great, really great. However, it brings me back to ideas (not complaints) I had during the outrage around the launch of the Rewards Track. 1) How do different game modes get supported and incentivized. 2) Is the business model of a pack-opening simulator, modeled after IRL MtG, even relevant anymore? If not, what replaces it? 3) What self-imposed limitations is Blizzard putting on the game?
1) I used to be an avid Arena player, but I find it frustrating because it feels like the player-base has progressively shrunk since Battlegrounds came out. Duels is even worse, with the player-base split between Casual and Heroic. I'm a near-daily player, and I find myself mostly tinkering in Standard (hitting Legend about every other month) because a) it has the best XP rewards; b) I'm saving 2000 gold after each release for the mini-set - the gold spent on the mini-set is enormously more valuable than gold spent on packs which distorts the Arena/Duels rewards into being even less valuable. This isn't a straight complaint. To Blizzard's credit the Rewards Track is giving me more gold each cycle and the mini-set is a great deal. The issue is that the other game modes don't have the same incentives (why is identical gameplay worth less XP in Arena and Duels???). It's definitely a concern going forward with Mercenaries as well. I'm not complaining about more free content, but I'm already a casual whale (near-daily player). I want these modes to be rewarding, and the modes I already play to be properly supported.
2) Which maybe gets at the business model as a whole. I'm so tired of opening packs. It's not a particularly fun or exciting experience. More and more I don't understand the need for collecting to be part of the game, and Battlegrounds and Mercenaries (and Arena) all demonstrate that Blizzard understands this as well. More importantly, why is gatekeeping cards healthy for player engagement and the game? I'm already at Level 130 on the Rewards track without the Tavern Pass, I hit Level 180 last cycle, and I'm missing 7 Forged in the Barrens legendaries and 6 Darkmoon Faire legendaries. They're not the particularly great Legendaries so I'll probably never get them. The XP rewards on their achievements certainly don't justify crafting them or buying additional packs, but I WOULD experiment and play with them if I had them. I don't have a great solution to propose here, but again, Blizzard is putting enormous resources into Mercenaries, a game mode that doesn't depend on your collection. It begs the question of whether constructed modes should depend on your collection or not either. I haven't played Runeterra since Beta, but my understanding is that it's relatively straightforward to earn an entire expansion through free-to-play before the next one comes out. That seems like the minimum, and I'd like to see more creative ways to monetize games without gatekeeping core gameplay for millions of players.
3) How many limits are self-imposed on Hearthstone by Blizzard because it's a mobile game? The UX, historically one of Blizzard's strengths, is a mess. Every design decision has to work for PC and mobile. It's already a multi-gigabyte app, and adding game modes and features, let alone even simple patches and updates, is an excruciating process. But most importantly, WHERE ARE THE MODS? Here you have a community that has been making custom cards for nearly a decade. You have single-player content, Dungeon Runs, Battlegrounds, Duels, and now Mercenaries that show that this CCG engine is actually versatile enough to simulate other genres of games that it wasn't originally built for, just like WCII, SC, WCIII, and SC2. I'm showing my age, but creating a baseball diamond/game mod in WCII(2!) with my older brother was a formative video game experience that probably made me a lifelong Blizzard fan. Don't want to put the dedicated resources into a tournament mode? Let the community create their own! Now, I have a huge bias here as I'm a PC player and not a mobile player. But the PC client should simply have more features. PC and mobile can have very different UX without hurting continuity. Want to create a match where players are limited to 5 very specific expansions? Create a custom game in a lobby like StarCraft, and wait for a player to join. That's not feasible on mobile, but could be on PC. With the release of Forged in the Barrens and announcement of Mercenaries they've talked about Hearthstone as a platform. That platform will continually be hobbled if it's limited by what's only possibly on a mobile touchscreen.
Four Oh My Yogg! nerf suggestions with brief commentary on my logic:
Secret: After your opponent casts a spell, cast a random one that costs less. [AFTER; Doesn't trigger on 0-cost spells; Can't cast a 10-mana spell]
Secret: After your opponent casts a spell, summon a random minion that costs less. [AFTER; AFTER; Doesn't trigger on 0-cost spells; Can't summon a 10-mana minion]
Secret: When your opponent casts a spell on a minion, cast it on a new target. [Weaker Spellbender instead of a more powerful Counterspell]
Secret: When your opponent casts a spell, summon random 1-cost minions equal to the spell's cost [WHEN; Doesn't trigger on 0-cost spells; A good board clear will kill the 1-cost minions; 1-cost minions often have good good battlecry effects rather than stats; Encourages testing small spells without a huge punish]
I believe this is the only site I have whitelisted for ads. I know it's not much, but I do visit daily, often multiple pages. The whole team here is fantastic, and this is still just the beginning.
I've been playing Menagerie Paladin, and while I'm near-certain subbing Mutanus would make the deck worse, it would still work decently because the deck runs Animated Broomstick. I think any deck that runs brooms can safely run Mutanus for fun and still win some games.
Primal Dungeoneer is easily the best of the three. It's exactly what Shaman needs (draw!), but no idea if it'll be enough. I think they're still one good draw mechanic away from being competitive given the draw-strength in other classes.
Snakes and Pilgrims? Lady Anacondra into Germination? Into Solar Eclipse/Germination/Arbor Up? I don't see it working. Lightning Bloom is wildly more flexible, basically the same effect for for 0. Looking forward to a MarkMcKz OTK with it though.
I hard agree with an Oh My Yogg! nerf. We have terrible data on how effective it is since the HSReplay data focuses on Mulligan win-rate and played win-rate, and it's always going to be a superior win-rate when it's cheated out by Sword of the Fallen. Another decent target would be bringing Northwatch Commander's health down to 3.
I think the meta is decent right now, but it's telling that neither Blizzard nor OoC has had a good "off-meta decks to try" article in awhile. It's not that the class balance is that bad (except Paladin and Shaman on the extremes), but it doesn't feel like there's any room for experimentation. If you're not running THE most effective decklist it just falls apart in this meta because the good decks are so over-tuned.
Still, it's pretty hilarious that Paladin was the main target of the nerfs and it's win-rate actually went up. I got massively downvoted a month or so ago for saying that Aldor Attendant should be reverted to a 2-mana 2/3, but that's exactly what should happen.
Almost all of the buffs were fine, but none were really worth any hype. Is it weird though that I think the Lillypad Lurker buff went too far even though the mechanic, archetype, and class are still unplayable? It's these kinds of decisions that really confuse the community. Everyone knows card draw is the main problem in Shaman, followed by an inconsistent/unsynergistic hero-power, followed by Overload being poorly balanced (Blizzard has gotten much better on this final issue with the Core Set buffs). So they release two buffs to the elemental archetype that address none of these concerns. Honestly though, I'm fine with Shaman sucking until the next Core Set rotation (maybe an updated/new hero power??) because giving it ridiculous cards to counterbalance the problems with the entire class is a recipe for disaster.
I think we have a good handle on what the nerfs will be (Crabrider and Mankrik for sure) and what they won't be (Tickatus, Illucia, Il'Gynoth).
Ten buffs is A LOT, and I would guess five of them are the Caravans. My favorite suggestion I've seen is redistributing the stats from 1/3 to 0/4. That makes killing them on curve very difficult, but not impossible.
Predicting the other five buffs is nearly impossible, so I'm going to select five cards from the Core set to buff with some reasonable suggestions and some outlandish suggestions:
Is a 2-mana 0/2 Mana Tide Totem too broken? Lack of draw is the class' biggest problem. I think Vashj Prime is fine how she is. I just never seem to draw her.
I agree with the entire article except about Paladin cards (I agree with the Crab Rider nerf). There are three extremely strong archetypes - Secret Paladin, Secret Libram Paladin, and Aggro Paladin. Conviction (Rank 1) is only run in one of those archetypes. The WR data on First Day of School is overwhelming. 70%+ Mulligan WR across all archetypes. Make it 1-mana. It may kill the card, but it's had its time to shine. The minion pool is too small and powerful. Un-nerf it when it rotates to Wild.
Now, don't pile-on the downvotes for bringing up a discussion, but the other Paladin card I think needs to be addressed is Oh My Yogg!. I don't have the data/stats to back this up though. It's usually cheated out by Sword of the Fallen so it's a bad Mulligan selection, and the "played" data is also distorted. But it's on a completely different power-level than the other Paladin secrets. Counterspell is perfectly balanced, and this is a 1-mana version (or 0-mana through Sword) that sometimes wins the game on its own through RNG. Paladin has an easy time getting on the board (First Day of School), and Oh My Yogg! shuts down early-game board clears for 0-1 mana, and might end up buffing the exact things you were trying to kill. Even if it's not as OP as I'm suggesting here, I'd argue the card falls into the same un-fun category as Tickatus, Illucia, and Il'gynoth.
But I'm not sure how you nerf such a unique and complicated effect as Oh My Yogg!. Here's my best suggestion. "Secret: After your opponent plays a spell, cast a random one that costs less."
That means The Coin won't trigger it because spells can't cost less than 0. That means a board clear won't get disrupted, nor any other spell, the Paladin just gets a random free spell afterwards. That means if the opponent plays a 10-mana spell the Paladin can't also get a 10-mana spell, it'll randomly cast a spell that costs between 0-9 - thus avoiding some of the pitfalls of the smaller spell pools at each mana-cost. There's still huge potential game-busting upsides to a 1-mana secret like this, but it won't shut down your opponents' game plan. It'll just make crazy stuff happen, in the true spirit of Yogg.
Memory unlocked: One of my friends on the group project drew this fantastic cartoon of Jonathan Edwards nearly falling off of cupped hands over a pit of fire for our poster presentation.
This isn't going to be a point by point rebuttal of what you wrote, but some things to consider in response to the points you raised assuming they're made in good faith.
I'm in my late 30s, and I'm blessed to be in a position where I hire people now and again. Assuming you do the necessary work to reach a large applicant pool you're going to have way more qualified people applying than positions open. Our culture has a weird obsession with meritocracy, finding the "best," as if such a thing is easily objective let alone real. Odds are several people would do an excellent job in a given position. Filtering out the unqualified is easy. It's deciding between the many deserving applicants that is difficult. And in that process I do think about gender balance and other demographic considerations because I'm in a public-facing department in a very large city. I would be a fool to build my team in a way that appeared to be exclusionary. And if I NEVER hired women or people of color because I was ALWAYS able to find a qualified white man (which I AM) that would clearly be bad, even as I'd very easily be able to hide behind the excuse that they were the "best" applicant for the job. What does best mean? It's undefined, but I'm appealing to the authority of process and meritocracy. But someone who ends up hiring only white men is exercising their judgment and discretion just as much as I am in my example.
All that said, worrying about finding the BEST is even more laughable in this specific context. How many people crap all over Kripp every time he's invited to a constructed event because he's been a Battlegrounds exclusive player for over a year now? I love Kripp and I've been one of those people! @lunaloveee8 and @AvellineHS are extremely good players that have viewership and metrics equal or greater to others invited. But beyond that, this isn't the GM circuit, it's an event specifically designed to promote the game to the broader HS community. This IS a casual game with millions of women players. There are dozens of qualified women to play alongside the men. They have been utter fools to not be inviting more women players and content creators to these kinds of casual events from the very beginning. I can't believe it took community outrage for them to do the right thing.
So I reject the entire framing of "positive discrimination" which are the same tired arguments that have been used against affirmative action for 80 years and probably longer. If you have personal anxiety around whether or not YOU, an individual, will lose out on opportunities because of affirmative action, please know that there is already a line of equally or more qualified people - that look just like you - that you may also lose out on opportunities to. Life is hard, society isn't fair, but how we treat other people, including how we think about them, is key. "Everything worthwhile is done with other people."
That's what I thought when it was announced, and I'm not overly interested in the mode, but Vicious Syndicate had an interesting meta report that indicates that Classic may not have been as solved as we thought. It's still mostly solved though. I started playing a month or two after Naxx released and the oppressive meta I remember was Undertaker Hunter and Undertaker Zoolock. It seems that Hunter and Zoolock are much weaker in Classic than folks remember. Miracle Rogue also apparently has a negative win-rate at lower ranks, but has an insane WR at Legend ranks. Which is sort of a cool self-challenge - play the decklist and measure your WR over time since the ceiling is very high. I'm pleased enough with the mode even if I don't play it often, and for me it's a proof-of-concept of separate ladders with separate pools of "identical" cards. They can get a lot more creative with these modes in the future (but man do I hope they redesign the UI of the game chest).
Oohh, Diamond Cards was the Spell Locked item from Phase 1. Don't get me wrong, I'm always hyped for a new expansion, but I don't expect anything to be discussed beyond that and Battlegrounds. Hope I'm wrong.
Looked back at the Year of the Gryphon road map, and there's nothing exciting to discuss from Phase 2.
https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/news/23622607/welcome-to-the-year-of-the-gryphon
Although, there was something "Spell Locked" from Phase 1, and I don't remember if that was ever revealed (it's not Mercenaries).
I find it disappointing that Arena doesn't even warrant a little icon like "Duels Update" or "Tavern Brawls." I would really like to see Tavern Tickets (not to be confused with the Tavern Pass) become a tracked in-game currency, and have them regularly awarded to players (Three wins in Tavern Brawl each week gives you one? Incentivize multiple modes at once?). There needs to be a better incentive to get players into Arena and Heroic Duels. It's either that or make Arena and Duels strictly casual. As it is right now, the player base for all three modes (Arena, Casual Duels, Heroic Duels) feels too small. But they're great game modes! Blizzard just needs to actually direct players' attention to them.
I won on my second attempt using the 1/1 freeze guys. Prioritize face, only trade/freeze when necessary (poison/lifesteal).
Can't remember the last time I lost one of these battles, but A Party of Adventurers did me in.
Zeddy claims to have inside info that it's not coming out until November at the earliest. He could be wrong, but consider the survey about the "battlepass" (Rewards Track and Tavern Pass) was leaked in August 2020. I think we're at least a full quarter from initial release, and November, in advance of the third expansion (beta access with purchase of a pre-order???), seems very realistic.
This looks great, really great. However, it brings me back to ideas (not complaints) I had during the outrage around the launch of the Rewards Track. 1) How do different game modes get supported and incentivized. 2) Is the business model of a pack-opening simulator, modeled after IRL MtG, even relevant anymore? If not, what replaces it? 3) What self-imposed limitations is Blizzard putting on the game?
1) I used to be an avid Arena player, but I find it frustrating because it feels like the player-base has progressively shrunk since Battlegrounds came out. Duels is even worse, with the player-base split between Casual and Heroic. I'm a near-daily player, and I find myself mostly tinkering in Standard (hitting Legend about every other month) because a) it has the best XP rewards; b) I'm saving 2000 gold after each release for the mini-set - the gold spent on the mini-set is enormously more valuable than gold spent on packs which distorts the Arena/Duels rewards into being even less valuable. This isn't a straight complaint. To Blizzard's credit the Rewards Track is giving me more gold each cycle and the mini-set is a great deal. The issue is that the other game modes don't have the same incentives (why is identical gameplay worth less XP in Arena and Duels???). It's definitely a concern going forward with Mercenaries as well. I'm not complaining about more free content, but I'm already a casual whale (near-daily player). I want these modes to be rewarding, and the modes I already play to be properly supported.
2) Which maybe gets at the business model as a whole. I'm so tired of opening packs. It's not a particularly fun or exciting experience. More and more I don't understand the need for collecting to be part of the game, and Battlegrounds and Mercenaries (and Arena) all demonstrate that Blizzard understands this as well. More importantly, why is gatekeeping cards healthy for player engagement and the game? I'm already at Level 130 on the Rewards track without the Tavern Pass, I hit Level 180 last cycle, and I'm missing 7 Forged in the Barrens legendaries and 6 Darkmoon Faire legendaries. They're not the particularly great Legendaries so I'll probably never get them. The XP rewards on their achievements certainly don't justify crafting them or buying additional packs, but I WOULD experiment and play with them if I had them. I don't have a great solution to propose here, but again, Blizzard is putting enormous resources into Mercenaries, a game mode that doesn't depend on your collection. It begs the question of whether constructed modes should depend on your collection or not either. I haven't played Runeterra since Beta, but my understanding is that it's relatively straightforward to earn an entire expansion through free-to-play before the next one comes out. That seems like the minimum, and I'd like to see more creative ways to monetize games without gatekeeping core gameplay for millions of players.
3) How many limits are self-imposed on Hearthstone by Blizzard because it's a mobile game? The UX, historically one of Blizzard's strengths, is a mess. Every design decision has to work for PC and mobile. It's already a multi-gigabyte app, and adding game modes and features, let alone even simple patches and updates, is an excruciating process. But most importantly, WHERE ARE THE MODS? Here you have a community that has been making custom cards for nearly a decade. You have single-player content, Dungeon Runs, Battlegrounds, Duels, and now Mercenaries that show that this CCG engine is actually versatile enough to simulate other genres of games that it wasn't originally built for, just like WCII, SC, WCIII, and SC2. I'm showing my age, but creating a baseball diamond/game mod in WCII(2!) with my older brother was a formative video game experience that probably made me a lifelong Blizzard fan. Don't want to put the dedicated resources into a tournament mode? Let the community create their own! Now, I have a huge bias here as I'm a PC player and not a mobile player. But the PC client should simply have more features. PC and mobile can have very different UX without hurting continuity. Want to create a match where players are limited to 5 very specific expansions? Create a custom game in a lobby like StarCraft, and wait for a player to join. That's not feasible on mobile, but could be on PC. With the release of Forged in the Barrens and announcement of Mercenaries they've talked about Hearthstone as a platform. That platform will continually be hobbled if it's limited by what's only possibly on a mobile touchscreen.
Four Oh My Yogg! nerf suggestions with brief commentary on my logic:
Secret: After your opponent casts a spell, cast a random one that costs less. [AFTER; Doesn't trigger on 0-cost spells; Can't cast a 10-mana spell]
Secret: After your opponent casts a spell, summon a random minion that costs less. [AFTER; AFTER; Doesn't trigger on 0-cost spells; Can't summon a 10-mana minion]
Secret: When your opponent casts a spell on a minion, cast it on a new target. [Weaker Spellbender instead of a more powerful Counterspell]
Secret: When your opponent casts a spell, summon random 1-cost minions equal to the spell's cost [WHEN; Doesn't trigger on 0-cost spells; A good board clear will kill the 1-cost minions; 1-cost minions often have good good battlecry effects rather than stats; Encourages testing small spells without a huge punish]
All the core mechanics? Where's my 2/2 Adventurerer with Overload (1)?
I believe this is the only site I have whitelisted for ads. I know it's not much, but I do visit daily, often multiple pages. The whole team here is fantastic, and this is still just the beginning.
I've been playing Menagerie Paladin, and while I'm near-certain subbing Mutanus would make the deck worse, it would still work decently because the deck runs Animated Broomstick. I think any deck that runs brooms can safely run Mutanus for fun and still win some games.
Primal Dungeoneer is easily the best of the three. It's exactly what Shaman needs (draw!), but no idea if it'll be enough. I think they're still one good draw mechanic away from being competitive given the draw-strength in other classes.
Snakes and Pilgrims? Lady Anacondra into Germination? Into Solar Eclipse/Germination/Arbor Up? I don't see it working. Lightning Bloom is wildly more flexible, basically the same effect for for 0. Looking forward to a MarkMcKz OTK with it though.
I hard agree with an Oh My Yogg! nerf. We have terrible data on how effective it is since the HSReplay data focuses on Mulligan win-rate and played win-rate, and it's always going to be a superior win-rate when it's cheated out by Sword of the Fallen. Another decent target would be bringing Northwatch Commander's health down to 3.
I think the meta is decent right now, but it's telling that neither Blizzard nor OoC has had a good "off-meta decks to try" article in awhile. It's not that the class balance is that bad (except Paladin and Shaman on the extremes), but it doesn't feel like there's any room for experimentation. If you're not running THE most effective decklist it just falls apart in this meta because the good decks are so over-tuned.
Still, it's pretty hilarious that Paladin was the main target of the nerfs and it's win-rate actually went up. I got massively downvoted a month or so ago for saying that Aldor Attendant should be reverted to a 2-mana 2/3, but that's exactly what should happen.
Almost all of the buffs were fine, but none were really worth any hype. Is it weird though that I think the Lillypad Lurker buff went too far even though the mechanic, archetype, and class are still unplayable? It's these kinds of decisions that really confuse the community. Everyone knows card draw is the main problem in Shaman, followed by an inconsistent/unsynergistic hero-power, followed by Overload being poorly balanced (Blizzard has gotten much better on this final issue with the Core Set buffs). So they release two buffs to the elemental archetype that address none of these concerns. Honestly though, I'm fine with Shaman sucking until the next Core Set rotation (maybe an updated/new hero power??) because giving it ridiculous cards to counterbalance the problems with the entire class is a recipe for disaster.
N'Zoth wasn't meta, but he was played in Clown decks to activate Clown. Feels like a nerf to Clown decks. Clown move Blizzard, clown move.
I think we have a good handle on what the nerfs will be (Crabrider and Mankrik for sure) and what they won't be (Tickatus, Illucia, Il'Gynoth).
Ten buffs is A LOT, and I would guess five of them are the Caravans. My favorite suggestion I've seen is redistributing the stats from 1/3 to 0/4. That makes killing them on curve very difficult, but not impossible.
Predicting the other five buffs is nearly impossible, so I'm going to select five cards from the Core set to buff with some reasonable suggestions and some outlandish suggestions:
Mana Tide Totem - Reduce cost to 2.
Tidal Surge - Reduce cost to 3.
Lightspawn - Change stats to 3/4. Text: Whenever this minion is healed, gain +1/+1.
Natalie Seline - Reduce cost to 6.
Menagerie Warden - Rush (just to Warden, not the minion it summons).
Is a 2-mana 0/2 Mana Tide Totem too broken? Lack of draw is the class' biggest problem. I think Vashj Prime is fine how she is. I just never seem to draw her.
I like the Paglevan suggestion. 0/4 is the right kind of annoying.
I agree with the entire article except about Paladin cards (I agree with the Crab Rider nerf). There are three extremely strong archetypes - Secret Paladin, Secret Libram Paladin, and Aggro Paladin. Conviction (Rank 1) is only run in one of those archetypes. The WR data on First Day of School is overwhelming. 70%+ Mulligan WR across all archetypes. Make it 1-mana. It may kill the card, but it's had its time to shine. The minion pool is too small and powerful. Un-nerf it when it rotates to Wild.
Now, don't pile-on the downvotes for bringing up a discussion, but the other Paladin card I think needs to be addressed is Oh My Yogg!. I don't have the data/stats to back this up though. It's usually cheated out by Sword of the Fallen so it's a bad Mulligan selection, and the "played" data is also distorted. But it's on a completely different power-level than the other Paladin secrets. Counterspell is perfectly balanced, and this is a 1-mana version (or 0-mana through Sword) that sometimes wins the game on its own through RNG. Paladin has an easy time getting on the board (First Day of School), and Oh My Yogg! shuts down early-game board clears for 0-1 mana, and might end up buffing the exact things you were trying to kill. Even if it's not as OP as I'm suggesting here, I'd argue the card falls into the same un-fun category as Tickatus, Illucia, and Il'gynoth.
But I'm not sure how you nerf such a unique and complicated effect as Oh My Yogg!. Here's my best suggestion. "Secret: After your opponent plays a spell, cast a random one that costs less."
That means The Coin won't trigger it because spells can't cost less than 0. That means a board clear won't get disrupted, nor any other spell, the Paladin just gets a random free spell afterwards. That means if the opponent plays a 10-mana spell the Paladin can't also get a 10-mana spell, it'll randomly cast a spell that costs between 0-9 - thus avoiding some of the pitfalls of the smaller spell pools at each mana-cost. There's still huge potential game-busting upsides to a 1-mana secret like this, but it won't shut down your opponents' game plan. It'll just make crazy stuff happen, in the true spirit of Yogg.
Memory unlocked: One of my friends on the group project drew this fantastic cartoon of Jonathan Edwards nearly falling off of cupped hands over a pit of fire for our poster presentation.
This isn't going to be a point by point rebuttal of what you wrote, but some things to consider in response to the points you raised assuming they're made in good faith.
I'm in my late 30s, and I'm blessed to be in a position where I hire people now and again. Assuming you do the necessary work to reach a large applicant pool you're going to have way more qualified people applying than positions open. Our culture has a weird obsession with meritocracy, finding the "best," as if such a thing is easily objective let alone real. Odds are several people would do an excellent job in a given position. Filtering out the unqualified is easy. It's deciding between the many deserving applicants that is difficult. And in that process I do think about gender balance and other demographic considerations because I'm in a public-facing department in a very large city. I would be a fool to build my team in a way that appeared to be exclusionary. And if I NEVER hired women or people of color because I was ALWAYS able to find a qualified white man (which I AM) that would clearly be bad, even as I'd very easily be able to hide behind the excuse that they were the "best" applicant for the job. What does best mean? It's undefined, but I'm appealing to the authority of process and meritocracy. But someone who ends up hiring only white men is exercising their judgment and discretion just as much as I am in my example.
All that said, worrying about finding the BEST is even more laughable in this specific context. How many people crap all over Kripp every time he's invited to a constructed event because he's been a Battlegrounds exclusive player for over a year now? I love Kripp and I've been one of those people! @lunaloveee8 and @AvellineHS are extremely good players that have viewership and metrics equal or greater to others invited. But beyond that, this isn't the GM circuit, it's an event specifically designed to promote the game to the broader HS community. This IS a casual game with millions of women players. There are dozens of qualified women to play alongside the men. They have been utter fools to not be inviting more women players and content creators to these kinds of casual events from the very beginning. I can't believe it took community outrage for them to do the right thing.
So I reject the entire framing of "positive discrimination" which are the same tired arguments that have been used against affirmative action for 80 years and probably longer. If you have personal anxiety around whether or not YOU, an individual, will lose out on opportunities because of affirmative action, please know that there is already a line of equally or more qualified people - that look just like you - that you may also lose out on opportunities to. Life is hard, society isn't fair, but how we treat other people, including how we think about them, is key. "Everything worthwhile is done with other people."
That's what I thought when it was announced, and I'm not overly interested in the mode, but Vicious Syndicate had an interesting meta report that indicates that Classic may not have been as solved as we thought. It's still mostly solved though. I started playing a month or two after Naxx released and the oppressive meta I remember was Undertaker Hunter and Undertaker Zoolock. It seems that Hunter and Zoolock are much weaker in Classic than folks remember. Miracle Rogue also apparently has a negative win-rate at lower ranks, but has an insane WR at Legend ranks. Which is sort of a cool self-challenge - play the decklist and measure your WR over time since the ceiling is very high. I'm pleased enough with the mode even if I don't play it often, and for me it's a proof-of-concept of separate ladders with separate pools of "identical" cards. They can get a lot more creative with these modes in the future (but man do I hope they redesign the UI of the game chest).