All content from Out of Cards is still here and will still continue to be here. All we did was effectively rename the site. If something was available on Out of Cards, it will still be available on Out of Games.
Card database update is slowly being worked on. Ultimately, it's a very tiny issue compared to everything else that is going on.
I wish I could say the same. I'm a sucker for cosmetics and so limited-time mount trophy, sign me up.
It didn't take too long to get to level 20. I might not play Sorc this time around though because of the chain lightning nerfs so that'll decrease the speed I expected.
Hearthstone card data no longer tries to reload on non-deckbuilder and non-collection pages.
Dev Note: A previous site update caused card data to be stored local to users to improve the speed of certain tasks on the site. This was a net-positive for many users with a few exceptions: slowdowns on some devices and connections throughout the day as fresh data was pushed onto clients and folks using locked-down firefox installs would have issues loading the card data at all. The result of this is that the deckbuilder takes additional time to load than it has in recent times but it should work for all users in all scenarios.
Fixed an issue where the Festival of Legends icon was failing to load for some users.
General
Removed Snow 3 from the navigation.
Dev Note: The event has only been over for 3 months.
That is my assumption with the current info from Twitch. Which is good because the one stream was definitely not enough time for both packs for everyone lol.
Blizzard with these TBD countdowns going into reveals can seriously fuck off. No one has seen any reveals from what I've been able to see and we're now half an hour after the reveal time.
That is true, but that doesn’t stop them from playing Standard, Wild, and BG’s. Why not throw the players who pay to play the game a bone and give them something that makes them keep playing?
Yeah that's my thing with a rotating format. Every format doesn't have to be for every person; Wild certainly doesn't cut it for most and Duels is in the same boat. Standard is there to keep players engaged without a huge investment so give old cards a chance to shine again in a rotating format.
Hell, I'd even be okay if they wanted to make a format where you could optionally rent the card pool for the rotation. $10 or 1000 gold gets you access to all the cards in that season's pool. It lets people who have huge collections take advantage of them but newer players can go try something new too. Maybe they dump a pass for it in the pre-order too. So many ways they could go about boosting engagement, but I believe that no matter what, they're going to be super concerned about standard queues declining so we'll get nothing.
Blizzard will half-ass it like they did with the release of Classic (they had zero plan outside of make Classic a thing again) and then cite poor engagement as a reason to stop updating it. All they had to do was push Naxx into Classic 2 months in, and then Goblins vs Gnomes a couple months after that and they could have had repeated engagement.
Expansions launch, 2 months later a mini-set launches. The perfect time to do something like a Classic swap is between those two events and between a mini-set and the next expansion. Why they don't rotate Duels even on a more regular basis blows my mind. They've made so many improvements and they finally figured out their cosmetics pipeline (which took an embarrassing amount of time) so what's up with the part that matters - playing the game.
Also, no new Tavern Brawls ever when it is probably one of the easiest modes to do shit with is beyond hilarious.
Push out Brawl Blocks once a month. There's a rotating format every 4-5 weeks and the engagement potential is huge. It requires minimal effort to think of the theme too.
I’m going to disagree, mainly because it’ll cost more money on a yearly basis. That wouldn’t bother me if Hearthstone had more ways to play with the cards I have (I know you’ve heard this from me before), but we don’t. Standard, Wild, Duels which I consider a waste of dev time, Tavern Brawl which only stays around because players would have a meltdown if they couldn’t get their weekly free pack, are the only modes in which our cards matter.
Standard rotates every year and Wild where broken decks exist (sometimes) are the main two formats. There are literally thousands of cards in the collection manager but the devs waste time on Mercenaries, Duels, and yet another forgettable Tavern Brawl, instead of giving us formats that fully utilize our collections. Not to mention I don’t think it has dawned on some of them that if they gave actual reasons for players to buy more packs, they’d buy more packs because they wanted to, not just to keep up with expansions/metas
I also can’t say Hearthstone is actively dying but rather it’s almost to the point where the majority of players who call it their ‘main game’ are the people fully invested, similar to the players who kept WoW alive when it had a few bad expansions (I’ve only heard good things about Dragonflight).
Edit: I mean hell, Tournament mode, formats, guilds. Basic things they can add within a year each and they choose not to do it but instead try to sell us more cards
That is why I said provided they don't increase the overall cost the same. If they effectively increase the price of playing by 33% with the additional set, that's a super hard pass from me.
They really do just need to stick another format in the game. Rotate the sets in it every couple of months and it'll be a breath of fresh air. I suspect they are too afraid to do it because it might end up making Standard look like a joke and we certainly can't have that happen! The best part is if they rotate content on a good enough schedule, you never need to balance anything! You could do card bans to keep the super annoying stuff out but that's fairly low effort.
I think this game is too expensive for most people in the world.
It’s too expensive period, even for a whale like myself. With rumors (and pretty much a downright confirmation) that Hearthstone will go from three expansions a year to four, I’d imagine a good chunk of us will jump ship and be done with it. The expansions, more importantly the cards, are worthless since Team 5 limits us on how we can play with them. So why buy more of them?
Yeah, honestly, I haven't played Hearthstone at all in like 2 years. The last expansion pre-order I bought was Sunken City and I still haven't opened the card packs for it. I was hoping to get back into it, but nothing really intrigued me. The year before that, there were a few games played during expansion launched, but hardly what I'd consider playing the game to be.
And I know I'm not alone in that. My close friend group, everyone played Hearthstone for years. Everyone slowly dropped out of the game though and people that did return would do so for at most a week during a new set. It took Blizzard too much time to figure out a decent cadence for game updates. I think 4 expansions will be a net positive for the game, provided that they keep the overall cost the same.
Bonus points for Bobby Kotick in that scenario because when they announce cheaper pack bundle prices, people that aren't clued into why that is happening (4 sets vs 3) they'll come back and buy cards.
I still think one of the worst things they ever did was give classes 2 legendaries each expansion. The power level of them due to them being unique to classes is just disgusting. The neutrals they were at least forced to tame them down a bit so they weren't all instant includes for all classes.
^ Though I'm sure someone can find me saying otherwise, because there was a point in time where I thought it was a positive from the "they'll be able to push at least two archetypes per class per expansion now", but I still viewed the cost increase as the big downfall.
Digital card games fucking suck. Riot has a pretty decent model but the game itself feels too jank to me. Give me a Hearthstone, minus 70% of the RNG, and a model closer to what Riot is doing with Legends of Runeterra, and I think that would make a solid card game. I'd make it myself if I had the time! True story, there was a point in time where it was planned to have a card game on Out of Cards itself.
Oh, it was quite a drama. When Fandom acquired Curse they announced that they will close (or rather put to read-only) a lot of Curse's sites including Hearthpwn. I think Flux offered to buy hearthpwn, but they refused. So everyone expected that hearthpwn will be gone but then out of the blue it was announced that it'd been sold to some company no one heard about before.
The same happened to mtgsalvation, i.e. Fandom promised to close it but then suddenly sold it to the same folks.
It wasn't even sold, they gave the properties away to Magic Find. The deal was that they'd run Curse/Fandom ads on the sites for 3 years so Fandom would get a cut of the revenue. That was never an option for us.
And then Magic Find sold the whole company to Mobafire for 12 million USD.
The folks who founded Magic Find are slimy and people I distanced myself from long ago.
hi I was wondering if it was possible to delete my account, which in the settings I can't find any way to do it, and if it wasn't to change my username to "KingSlime420"
Username changed. It may take a minute to go through across the entire site
I don't think VR will ever really be at a point where it truly blows up. We're still primarily only seeing experiences out of it rather than full games and the cost is just so high to get into it. Sure, the Quest series from Meta/Oculus has been a great way to do budget VR, but they are quite far behind what is available on PC and Playstation. Cost will come down overtime, but you also need a lot of AAA games to push into the realm of VR to have a chance at it working out. People can't as easily play a VR title for hours on end though, and accessibility with VR is kinda trash too which further limits the interest. It's a shame because I love VR. I'd kill for a GOOD VR MMO. I'm also totally just content with VR Racing though because that be fun as hell when you got a nice wheel.
Right now, the best bang-for-the-buck is PSVR2. The console + headset is about 1100-1200 EUR, which isn't cheap, but is only marginally more expensive than the Valve Index (and that's just the headset, no console). The biggest issue right now is the game library, which is tiny compare to PC VR, so it'll be a while.
Yeah, PSVR2 is incredible value. I'm hopefully going to pick-up a headset soon to play Gran Turismo 7 with my wheel.
I sincerely hope that the OoC community (members and experience) is kept alive in whatever shape or form, because I have had a blast since arriving on this wonderful site from the very start and I think it would be a terrible shame if this would disappear altogether.
Agreed.
It saddens me that this awesome site isn't getting the traffic is deserves but I do understand this game is almost 10 years old and things are not what they used to be.
Yeah, aging games kinda sucks. It was very difficult to gain any traction due to the age of the space plus Hearthstone as a whole doesn't give you many things to talk about. Cards, decks... that's about it. Mercenaries gave us a huge traffic boost since we were able to put a database together for it (even with its flaws) and unfortunately the mode just had zero staying power. Battlegrounds, we never really gave a huge push into but I don't think we'd have been able to do much with it anyway since we don't have a way to collect stats and Auto Chess games really need that stats push. Duels always gave us some decent traffic too though, but lack of staff members playing at a decent level harmed content potential.
i hope everything will work out ok and that out.of.everything will take off :D
Same!
What's the next big trend to chase? We had digital card games. Battle Royales. VR's ramping up. Movie games?
I don't think VR will ever really be at a point where it truly blows up. We're still primarily only seeing experiences out of it rather than full games and the cost is just so high to get into it. Sure, the Quest series from Meta/Oculus has been a great way to do budget VR, but they are quite far behind what is available on PC and Playstation. Cost will come down overtime, but you also need a lot of AAA games to push into the realm of VR to have a chance at it working out. People can't as easily play a VR title for hours on end though, and accessibility with VR is kinda trash too which further limits the interest. It's a shame because I love VR. I'd kill for a GOOD VR MMO. I'm also totally just content with VR Racing though because that be fun as hell when you got a nice wheel.
I wish I had a crystal ball to know what would be the next big thing though. Riot's MMO will definitely be up there but I don't see that bringing forth a new wave of MMOs like we saw with the FPS boom thanks to the birth of Battle Royale.
I'll address the elephant in the room. Yes, our updates regarding Hearthstone on Out of Cards are not as great as they have been in the past. There are several factors right now that are at play here:
At the start of the year, more than half the staff was let go. There are numerous reasons why certain people are no longer here. Having less people on the team has in turn harmed our coverage. Shit, having people take an assignment for an article that should go up quickly and then dick around for 4-5 hours before getting it up has harmed coverage too. I've always been someone that takes pride in the fast lane, and over the past year we've been sitting in some rough traffic.
I like to think that over the years I set us up for success by telling people what kind of content needed to be created to give us an edge. Breaking news is one thing, but the bread and butter of any site covering a card game is talking about decks, which not many were ever particularly enthusiastic about covering. The number of times people were hesitant to posting decks on our homepage because "the meta hasn't changed" or similar stupid remarks has been severely disappointing.
On Specific Content
Tavern Brawl is a big oops. Though, these typically provide very minimal traffic anyway because the mode isn't all that interesting so it wasn't the worst thing that has happened. Not to say that was okay, because covering everything possible is still important, but a couple of slip ups with late brawl posts or the one completely missing one definitely isn't the end of the world.
Regarding us not covering the fact an expansion announcement was coming, I agree, this should have been headlined and this is really bad that we missed this or if someone did see it, no one made an article for it. It would have been some great views and organic search traffic too!
Achievement guides. Yeah. I'm not impressed by what happened with those for the last expansion. I get it, they take a lot of work to put together and Avalon did a pretty good job at it. The monetary incentive though was clearly not worth powering through them in a quick fashion.
Revenue Decline
Man, ads fucking suck. It's a rough situation because the more ads you ad to your site to boost revenue, the less people want to visit or the more people that put on adblock which then means you want to find more places to put advertisements and the vicious cycle repeats itself.
This, plus the decline of Hearthstone, the game we put the majority of our dedication to, results in poor traffic and even worse revenue. Spending a few hours on an article to make a couple of dollars doesn't exactly pay for your time. Moving into this year we had to decrease the amount of revenue share on staff for ad impressions to pay for our server costs.
Hearthstone is so beyond dead, it's actually hilarious. Card games as a whole have been on a decline -
Wizards of the Coast is killing their own game with too much content.
Riot never really figured out Legends of Runeterra - oh boy did we spend a lot of time with the game. Oops.
Blizzard has to be the worst company in gaming with how fucking garbage their communication is. They used to have an amazing community team for each one of their games. World of Warcraft has joke comms and Hearthstone, all they care about is posting a weekly meme on Twitter and giving handouts to streamers. They couldn't even be bothered to schedule a tweet for the 9th birthday of the game... but they quote tweeted someone the day before saying omg we're about to be 9. Blizzard isn't on a downward trend because of some of their employees being sexual predators (that's really bad though), but it's because they have no fucking idea what they are doing with their community.
Marvel Snap has some good gameplay but the game is a huge whale situation. I'm unsure about its staying power tbh.
Which leads me into something people probably don't want to hear but we were going to announce it at some point anyway so here goes make that transition less jarring.
"Shutting Down" Out of Cards
But, we're not. Thonson above linked to Out of Games and previous to that, Crusader2010 pointed out about diversification. Out of Cards failed to gain any big traction because the original site our staff came from, HearthPwn, didn't shut down. We were supposed to end up with a banner at the top of the site after it was shut down and put into read-only mode which would redirect the community over to "the new site" (Out of Cards) which would have been huge. We would have immediately been able to have a budget through some ads and that would have given us solid momentum to build the site out. Instead, we've always been behind. We've had some incredible content created throughout our years that never took off (a point dapperdog made prior).
Now, we're not going anywhere but we're giving ourselves a better chance at making this all work. Nox and Nirast stopped posting on Out of Games at the start of February because it was decided that we'd be merging the two sites. It doesn't make sense for us to have two properties when having one solid one will allow us to, hopefully, gain a bit more traction on the card game side of things since we'll be able to boost our overall website impact by talking about more than just card games.
The end game right now is to rebrand Out of Cards into Out of Games. There's still stuff being figured out behind the scenes to make that actually happen, so with myself being more dedicated to that and us having fewer staff members than before, it puts us in a "fun" situation of fewer updates on the site. If I spend more time towards updates, which aren't getting much traction anyway, it further delays the move.
None of this has been a particularly fun situation.
May 15, 2019 is when I purchased the domain name, when we decided to move away from the HearthStation beta. We're just under 2 months away from that anniversary and seeing Out of Cards as a brand, one of my favourite brand names I've been a part of, going away is quite sad.
I still want to keep Out of Cards around in some form on Out of Games because I want there to be familiarity there for people that only care about Hearthstone or only care about card games (we will have a way for people to effectively have an "Out of Cards experience" on Out of Games). We made this site to fit a niche and it's important we keep that around - it'll just be on a different domain name.
Once we get closer to moving the domain, I'm going to be doing a round of staff recruiting. There's still a lot of stuff to figure out for staff, because I want people that are all going to be on the same page and I want people that are willing to cooperate. I want to find people that want to create content unlike the big gaming sites (who all just write really bad super-SEO-driven nonsense). I want to rebuild the community aspect of the site. We've got a solid chance at making a community interested in general gaming work unlike what we were able to do with Out of Cards, and that's big because it should, in theory, only help the card game side of it.
And then if Blizzard finally kills Hearthstone, we're also not completely fucked.
We don't reliably render them which is why we don't have more recent ones. Getting these to work sometimes requires card-specific code because our method of creating them isn't great.
All content from Out of Cards is still here and will still continue to be here. All we did was effectively rename the site. If something was available on Out of Cards, it will still be available on Out of Games.
Card database update is slowly being worked on. Ultimately, it's a very tiny issue compared to everything else that is going on.
Login issues should be resolved. Sorry about that!
I wish I could say the same. I'm a sucker for cosmetics and so limited-time mount trophy, sign me up.
It didn't take too long to get to level 20. I might not play Sorc this time around though because of the chain lightning nerfs so that'll decrease the speed I expected.
Zelda on the backburner though feels awful.
You've had quite a few negative comments here over the past few weeks since you've made your account. Enjoy the vacation.
Hearthstone
General
That is my assumption with the current info from Twitch. Which is good because the one stream was definitely not enough time for both packs for everyone lol.
It seems like they didn't communicate this very well.
The packs from this drop also include the theorycrafting streams. It was too good to be true, getting 5 packs.
Blizzard with these TBD countdowns going into reveals can seriously fuck off. No one has seen any reveals from what I've been able to see and we're now half an hour after the reveal time.
Yeah that's my thing with a rotating format. Every format doesn't have to be for every person; Wild certainly doesn't cut it for most and Duels is in the same boat. Standard is there to keep players engaged without a huge investment so give old cards a chance to shine again in a rotating format.
Hell, I'd even be okay if they wanted to make a format where you could optionally rent the card pool for the rotation. $10 or 1000 gold gets you access to all the cards in that season's pool. It lets people who have huge collections take advantage of them but newer players can go try something new too. Maybe they dump a pass for it in the pre-order too. So many ways they could go about boosting engagement, but I believe that no matter what, they're going to be super concerned about standard queues declining so we'll get nothing.
Blizzard will half-ass it like they did with the release of Classic (they had zero plan outside of make Classic a thing again) and then cite poor engagement as a reason to stop updating it. All they had to do was push Naxx into Classic 2 months in, and then Goblins vs Gnomes a couple months after that and they could have had repeated engagement.
Expansions launch, 2 months later a mini-set launches. The perfect time to do something like a Classic swap is between those two events and between a mini-set and the next expansion. Why they don't rotate Duels even on a more regular basis blows my mind. They've made so many improvements and they finally figured out their cosmetics pipeline (which took an embarrassing amount of time) so what's up with the part that matters - playing the game.
Also, no new Tavern Brawls ever when it is probably one of the easiest modes to do shit with is beyond hilarious.
Push out Brawl Blocks once a month. There's a rotating format every 4-5 weeks and the engagement potential is huge. It requires minimal effort to think of the theme too.
That is why I said provided they don't increase the overall cost the same. If they effectively increase the price of playing by 33% with the additional set, that's a super hard pass from me.
They really do just need to stick another format in the game. Rotate the sets in it every couple of months and it'll be a breath of fresh air. I suspect they are too afraid to do it because it might end up making Standard look like a joke and we certainly can't have that happen! The best part is if they rotate content on a good enough schedule, you never need to balance anything! You could do card bans to keep the super annoying stuff out but that's fairly low effort.
Yeah, honestly, I haven't played Hearthstone at all in like 2 years. The last expansion pre-order I bought was Sunken City and I still haven't opened the card packs for it. I was hoping to get back into it, but nothing really intrigued me. The year before that, there were a few games played during expansion launched, but hardly what I'd consider playing the game to be.
And I know I'm not alone in that. My close friend group, everyone played Hearthstone for years. Everyone slowly dropped out of the game though and people that did return would do so for at most a week during a new set. It took Blizzard too much time to figure out a decent cadence for game updates. I think 4 expansions will be a net positive for the game, provided that they keep the overall cost the same.
Bonus points for Bobby Kotick in that scenario because when they announce cheaper pack bundle prices, people that aren't clued into why that is happening (4 sets vs 3) they'll come back and buy cards.
I still think one of the worst things they ever did was give classes 2 legendaries each expansion. The power level of them due to them being unique to classes is just disgusting. The neutrals they were at least forced to tame them down a bit so they weren't all instant includes for all classes.
^ Though I'm sure someone can find me saying otherwise, because there was a point in time where I thought it was a positive from the "they'll be able to push at least two archetypes per class per expansion now", but I still viewed the cost increase as the big downfall.
Digital card games fucking suck. Riot has a pretty decent model but the game itself feels too jank to me. Give me a Hearthstone, minus 70% of the RNG, and a model closer to what Riot is doing with Legends of Runeterra, and I think that would make a solid card game. I'd make it myself if I had the time! True story, there was a point in time where it was planned to have a card game on Out of Cards itself.
It wasn't even sold, they gave the properties away to Magic Find. The deal was that they'd run Curse/Fandom ads on the sites for 3 years so Fandom would get a cut of the revenue. That was never an option for us.
And then Magic Find sold the whole company to Mobafire for 12 million USD.
The folks who founded Magic Find are slimy and people I distanced myself from long ago.
That's it for reveals today. 10 new cards in total.
March 20 2023
Mana, Attack, Health :P
Really, it should be 23-02-20 YY-MM-DD is the superior format, with YYYY-MM-DD being even better.
Username changed. It may take a minute to go through across the entire site
Yeah, PSVR2 is incredible value. I'm hopefully going to pick-up a headset soon to play Gran Turismo 7 with my wheel.
Agreed.
Yeah, aging games kinda sucks. It was very difficult to gain any traction due to the age of the space plus Hearthstone as a whole doesn't give you many things to talk about. Cards, decks... that's about it. Mercenaries gave us a huge traffic boost since we were able to put a database together for it (even with its flaws) and unfortunately the mode just had zero staying power. Battlegrounds, we never really gave a huge push into but I don't think we'd have been able to do much with it anyway since we don't have a way to collect stats and Auto Chess games really need that stats push. Duels always gave us some decent traffic too though, but lack of staff members playing at a decent level harmed content potential.
Same!
I don't think VR will ever really be at a point where it truly blows up. We're still primarily only seeing experiences out of it rather than full games and the cost is just so high to get into it. Sure, the Quest series from Meta/Oculus has been a great way to do budget VR, but they are quite far behind what is available on PC and Playstation. Cost will come down overtime, but you also need a lot of AAA games to push into the realm of VR to have a chance at it working out. People can't as easily play a VR title for hours on end though, and accessibility with VR is kinda trash too which further limits the interest. It's a shame because I love VR. I'd kill for a GOOD VR MMO. I'm also totally just content with VR Racing though because that be fun as hell when you got a nice wheel.
I wish I had a crystal ball to know what would be the next big thing though. Riot's MMO will definitely be up there but I don't see that bringing forth a new wave of MMOs like we saw with the FPS boom thanks to the birth of Battle Royale.
Good luck!
I'll address the elephant in the room. Yes, our updates regarding Hearthstone on Out of Cards are not as great as they have been in the past. There are several factors right now that are at play here:
At the start of the year, more than half the staff was let go. There are numerous reasons why certain people are no longer here. Having less people on the team has in turn harmed our coverage. Shit, having people take an assignment for an article that should go up quickly and then dick around for 4-5 hours before getting it up has harmed coverage too. I've always been someone that takes pride in the fast lane, and over the past year we've been sitting in some rough traffic.
I like to think that over the years I set us up for success by telling people what kind of content needed to be created to give us an edge. Breaking news is one thing, but the bread and butter of any site covering a card game is talking about decks, which not many were ever particularly enthusiastic about covering. The number of times people were hesitant to posting decks on our homepage because "the meta hasn't changed" or similar stupid remarks has been severely disappointing.
On Specific Content
Tavern Brawl is a big oops. Though, these typically provide very minimal traffic anyway because the mode isn't all that interesting so it wasn't the worst thing that has happened. Not to say that was okay, because covering everything possible is still important, but a couple of slip ups with late brawl posts or the one completely missing one definitely isn't the end of the world.
Regarding us not covering the fact an expansion announcement was coming, I agree, this should have been headlined and this is really bad that we missed this or if someone did see it, no one made an article for it. It would have been some great views and organic search traffic too!
Achievement guides. Yeah. I'm not impressed by what happened with those for the last expansion. I get it, they take a lot of work to put together and Avalon did a pretty good job at it. The monetary incentive though was clearly not worth powering through them in a quick fashion.
Revenue Decline
Man, ads fucking suck. It's a rough situation because the more ads you ad to your site to boost revenue, the less people want to visit or the more people that put on adblock which then means you want to find more places to put advertisements and the vicious cycle repeats itself.
This, plus the decline of Hearthstone, the game we put the majority of our dedication to, results in poor traffic and even worse revenue. Spending a few hours on an article to make a couple of dollars doesn't exactly pay for your time. Moving into this year we had to decrease the amount of revenue share on staff for ad impressions to pay for our server costs.
Hearthstone is so beyond dead, it's actually hilarious. Card games as a whole have been on a decline -
Which leads me into something people probably don't want to hear but we were going to announce it at some point anyway so here goes make that transition less jarring.
"Shutting Down" Out of Cards
But, we're not. Thonson above linked to Out of Games and previous to that, Crusader2010 pointed out about diversification. Out of Cards failed to gain any big traction because the original site our staff came from, HearthPwn, didn't shut down. We were supposed to end up with a banner at the top of the site after it was shut down and put into read-only mode which would redirect the community over to "the new site" (Out of Cards) which would have been huge. We would have immediately been able to have a budget through some ads and that would have given us solid momentum to build the site out. Instead, we've always been behind. We've had some incredible content created throughout our years that never took off (a point dapperdog made prior).
Now, we're not going anywhere but we're giving ourselves a better chance at making this all work. Nox and Nirast stopped posting on Out of Games at the start of February because it was decided that we'd be merging the two sites. It doesn't make sense for us to have two properties when having one solid one will allow us to, hopefully, gain a bit more traction on the card game side of things since we'll be able to boost our overall website impact by talking about more than just card games.
The end game right now is to rebrand Out of Cards into Out of Games. There's still stuff being figured out behind the scenes to make that actually happen, so with myself being more dedicated to that and us having fewer staff members than before, it puts us in a "fun" situation of fewer updates on the site. If I spend more time towards updates, which aren't getting much traction anyway, it further delays the move.
None of this has been a particularly fun situation.
May 15, 2019 is when I purchased the domain name, when we decided to move away from the HearthStation beta. We're just under 2 months away from that anniversary and seeing Out of Cards as a brand, one of my favourite brand names I've been a part of, going away is quite sad.
I still want to keep Out of Cards around in some form on Out of Games because I want there to be familiarity there for people that only care about Hearthstone or only care about card games (we will have a way for people to effectively have an "Out of Cards experience" on Out of Games). We made this site to fit a niche and it's important we keep that around - it'll just be on a different domain name.
Once we get closer to moving the domain, I'm going to be doing a round of staff recruiting. There's still a lot of stuff to figure out for staff, because I want people that are all going to be on the same page and I want people that are willing to cooperate. I want to find people that want to create content unlike the big gaming sites (who all just write really bad super-SEO-driven nonsense). I want to rebuild the community aspect of the site. We've got a solid chance at making a community interested in general gaming work unlike what we were able to do with Out of Cards, and that's big because it should, in theory, only help the card game side of it.
And then if Blizzard finally kills Hearthstone, we're also not completely fucked.
We don't reliably render them which is why we don't have more recent ones. Getting these to work sometimes requires card-specific code because our method of creating them isn't great.