Also, what rogue draw do you speak of? Card generation sure, but their current card draw pool isn't something that couldn't be replaced by some of the new cards. Sprint is too expensive, shiv and fan of knives are too weak and cards like stowaway or candle breath are deck-specific. Greyheart sage requires a specific deck too, but not many rogue cards can draw 2 for 2 mana like dirty tricks. It may be suboptimal as the card draw is delayed, but I can't think of why any of the cards mentioned above would be better in the general case.
Frosty covered the first part. I too had to think about the the card draw perspective and realized that he meant Galakrond and Toggwaggle.
True, running those two I have on occasion come up against a full hand, because the only low drops I can play are targeted (Sap, Backstab) on an empty board or card generating themselves (damn you inconvenient Dranconic Lackey!) But both of those are fairly late game scenarios. Not sure that I agree with the broader opinion.
Is there a weird wrinkle here with respect to Standard vs. Wild? Played to Rank 1 in Standard last month (three wins short, grrr....), and came in this season at 10x multiplier. Clicked over to Wild, which I have never in my life played -- and have a 6x multiplier. I guess the question is... how? Do they have Standard performance "predict" a Wild MMR as well?
Content aside: some of these new portrait choices seem... bizarre? I like the Diamond league being represented by the League of Explorers and EVIL. But, like, why is Eviscerate -- a spell, not a minion -- even an icon? Why is Alexstraza after C'Thun? Why is Zul'jin, a hero card, in the same category as Doomsayer and Big Game Hunter?
What was the Clever Disguise bug? I randomly decided to start playing Quest Rogue at Rank 5 — with bizarre levels of success — but didn’t immediately notice anything.
I’ve tried 5 times and lost each. The thing that most of my co-players also haven’t realized is that there’s value in leaving most of the minions on the board rather than trying to chip away like 2 damage. His “targets up to 3 enemies ability” just goes face that much more often if he’s playing against an empty board.
Beyond holding Loremaster Cho and Millhouse for a big late turn when ideally the Mage has Pyroblast, having the Mage play Brann with other bigger minions around also helps you milk the most out of the effect, including from Tournament Vendors.
Had this on my mind lately, but held off posting since it felt like it was destined for Front Page treatment. Somewhat self-explanatory. I've mained either Hunter or Rogue since at least Kobolds and Catacombs, bouncing back and forth when the playstyle of one or the other becomes boring or oppressive. So I've spent a considerable amount of time recently thinking what Leeroy's imminent Hall of Faming means for the go-to closer of a huge proportion of decks.
I'd be interested in two questions:
1) For those of you who can barely imagine life without Leeroy, what are you thinking of as a replacement? Reckless Rocketeer, for 1 more mana with 1 less damage, obviously isn't a worthwhile substitute.
2) Do you anticipate any shifts in the meta in response to Leeroy's removal? The number of times that I have either won or lost purely because Leeroy delivered the exact amount of damage required to end the game is almost hysterically high: whether the matchup is Mech Paladin or Galakrond Warrior, you can play a near perfect game and get suffocated by a well-timed Leeroy at the end. One of the interesting variables I see here is the timing of the Hall of Fame patch. With only half a week until the end of the season, a lot of more aggro decks will have to orchestrate a quick pivot within a fairly compressed window before new cards can fill the void.
But Flik would only target them if they were already on the board, so it’s kind of a moot point. Unless the opponent has a way of “hiding” the original 3, their deaths by Flik would trigger the effect, copies or no copies.
With that in mind, I’m kind of more interested in the defensive responses to this. Opponent plays Magtheridon. Rogue Shadowsteps a Warden. Magtheridon sleeps forever. There’s also a kind of cool interaction where you could play Maiev to imprison a warden, thereby preventing its death temporarily.
You do get the full crafting value, so you would get 4800 dust. But if you had to lose 3200 dust to get it than you are only making profit of 1600 dust.
then theres a profit... i have the normal Leeroy and im about to craft the gold one so i get the 1600k net dust from dusting it aftetwards
If your only goal is to maximize dust as profit, you aren't generating any additional resources by crafting a golden version if you have the normal one. You only get the dust refund for your "highest value cards that can be included in a single deck." In your case -- and mine, for what it's worth -- that means taking no action would generate 1,600 dust for the value of the normal Leeroy, and then another 400 for the "regular" value of disenchanting it, for a grand total of 2,000 dust. Meanwhile, if you craft golden, you're spending 3,200 up front, gaining back the same 3,200, and then gaining the "regular" value of disenchanting both.... for a grand total of, again, 2,000 dust. It's the same result either way.
Well. Time has passed and it is clear that they have nerfed the animation as i mentioned. Heroes are not worth my money anymore. Case closed.
This is a really embarrassing take, honestly. The animation isn't 'nerfed', it's broken. This clearly isn't an intentional change; only one of the layers of the animation is showing right now.
Your initial post was equally embarrassing. Yes, China is definitely to blame for a completely innocuous animation not working. They're definitely censoring those sexy, sexy interlocking mechanical parts. Just talking about it gets me all steamy.
I did begin to suspect that something was up with the meta when I posted a Highlander deck only to discover that its crafting cost was 20,660 dust. Most of the non-SOU legendaries weren’t a product of crafts, but just the fact that the first legendary I opened was Antonidas, the first free dragon was Alexstrasza, and I’ve weirdly rolled into the Mage legendaries in each of the last expansions. (And here I’d been hoping to play Deathrattle Rogue.) So yes, while the costs have clearly crept up, I do think that it’s slightly fitting that in a “reboot” of an old expansion the reintroduction of singleton mechanics have created a reward structure for people who have older unplayed cards sitting around collecting dust. (Pun originally not intended...
This feels like it was a step away from a Zephrys fail, so I’m curious if anyone else has experienced this scenario.
Playing Highlander Mage. Opponent has 10 health. I have a Frostbolt in hand and Kalecgos on the board. After whittling down the board I have 7 mana left. There is a 2-health taunt minion in the way.
I play Frostbolt first on the taunt minion to use Kalecgos’s “free” cast. I run Kalecgos into face. With opponent now at 6 health, Zephrys correctly offers Fireball for lethal. (And weirdly Arcanite Reaper, in case I wanted to toy with him for another turn...?)
My concern at the time was whether or not Zephrys “knew” about Kalecgos’s effect. Without Kalecgos, I wouldn’t have had enough mana (just 5) to play both Frostbolt and Fireball in the same turn. Had I played Zephrys right away, would he have seen the potential lethal, or would he have offered me The Black Knight?
I actually like the card MORE because I had to do the work, but I can see why it would be subject to possible misunderstandings.
Also Im very against the “perfect card” phrase on the card... the card is a scam.
The card text says “wish for” the perfect card, and his summoning audio is “your wish is my suggestion” instead of the more familiar “your wish is my command.” This isn’t false advertising. (Perhaps what you’re feeling is buyer’s remorse?
This is proof about how the Wild format isn't a dumpster for all the broken crap. Wins my confidence. Next time they sell a wild pack I'm ready to pony up. LOL not
However, I can say that Standard isn't a money grabber... Except, not.
Doesn’t Wild just mean that you’ve been giving Blizzard your money for longer?
I was intrigued to scroll through HS Replay and to find that the archetype currently running in Tier 2 as “Big Spell Mage” is 99% made up of Highlander decks, where the “bigness” is simply the payoff for the slow burn of the deck.
I’m currently flirting with a derivative of this archetype, below, that incorporates Raid the Sky Temple, which I’m calling Skylander (eh, get it?!). Despite how down everyone is on Quest Mage, no Highlander deck that I’ve seen has a Turn 1 play, and you drop enough random spells along the way to complete the quest at some point.
The trick simply is to not rush to complete the quest, and to just play as normal. Even if you only get one or two uses out of the hero power, it’s more use than you’ll get out of a Turn 8+ ping. And although it might seem counter-synergistic with King Phaoris, you can always drop Naga Sea Witch to round the lower mana cost spells back up to 5 for beefier bodies on the next turn. Seems like this would be the thread to solicit feedback if anyone has thoughts :)
Touché. But Shiv over Swipe or whatever still holds. Cenarius could be a better option for what I described than Tirion. (Or Alexstrazsa.
These examples are just taken off the top of my head without the sets open in front of me. But for an AI that DOES have those options coded into its programming, the possibilities ought to be more diverse.
You can not play him and Alexstraza on the same tur
Still doesn’t address Cenarius. Or Shiv in the prior example.But, uh, ...Healing Touch? What do you want from me!? I’m vaguely interested in why the bulk of this thread has now been devoted to sniping at me and the OP. Are we genuinely convinced as a community that Zephrys is indeed “perfect?”
I’d be equally open to using this as a forum for finding out where Zephrys’s AI is restricted by human error. Perhaps the turn before lethal just isn’t the time you should use him? Great! But that doesn’t seem to be the conversation others are interested in having.
Touché. But Shiv over Swipe or whatever still holds. Cenarius could be a better option for what I described than Tirion. (Or Alexstrazsa.
These examples are just taken off the top of my head without the sets open in front of me. But for an AI that DOES have those options coded into its programming, the possibilities ought to be more diverse.
I think the answer to the original scenario then is found above: Zephrys is "too" hard coded to offer lethal, since Swipe, Fireball, and Eviscerate are all literally different flavors of the same thing. (Beyond which, the OP mentioned that this happened twice, so it's actually SIX flavors of the same thing.) If the point of the "Discover" mechanic is meant to be variety, the AI should only offer one of those options, and then provide two other cards for some other scenario that the human player might anticipate but that Zephrys doesn't know.
If others are willing to look beyond the OP's framing to the broader question, I would be interested in what other scenarios people have seen go awry. One thing I've noticed in playing against Zephrys is what seems like a fairly limited card pool. If I'm a turn away from lethal, my opponent almost always plays Tirion Fordring the same turn as Zephrys. But one thing that the AI clearly doesn't weigh -- but that the human player should -- is that I'm playing Rogue, so have numerous ways to get Tirion out of the way or to ping off his Divine Shield. Sap? Game over. Fan of Knives, Lackeys, SI:7 Agent, whatever. So I'd say there were two separate problems that the Tirion scenario draws out:
1) Lack of awareness of opponent's class identity. The AI doesn't need to know exactly what cards I'm holding to know whether I'm more or less likely to have answers based purely on the spells available to my class (in Standard at least).
2) General lack of options. Like I said, Tirion is produced literally every time. But objectively, even something like Khartut Defender something else might be a better option if you're a turn away from certain death. (I mean, even in the OP's scenario, if the other player was at 1 HP, why even offer Swipe, Fireball, and Eviscerate? Why not Shiv?)
The single biggest surprise for me is that a mechanic that theoretically slows down the game for 4-5 turns (Quests) has also coincided with the extinction of aggro decks like Mech Hunter or Murloc Shaman.
I know guys, I didn't mean to be so salty here. Was the first time I even saw the quest and that happened.
Op I am glad you took the correct message from that post 😂. It is literally a steamroll or a get rekt deck with no inbetween.
Not to continue derailing this thread further but, I mean, if he can heal that much through 5 turns.... isn’t that sort of on you? He played the quest so you know what his goal is. The early counter is to not make plays that produce damage without removing targets from the board entirely. Instead conserve resources to make a more concerted push. Priest is the only quest that — with the exception of Wild Pyromancer combos — is utterly reactionary.
ANYWAY... back on topic, given all the fuss, I’ve found Deathrattle/Mechathuun Rogue to be surprisingly inert this expansion. The combo is still technically easy to execute. It’s just that I’ve typically already won by the time it would be viable.
Frosty covered the first part. I too had to think about the the card draw perspective and realized that he meant Galakrond and Toggwaggle.
True, running those two I have on occasion come up against a full hand, because the only low drops I can play are targeted (Sap, Backstab) on an empty board or card generating themselves (damn you inconvenient Dranconic Lackey!) But both of those are fairly late game scenarios. Not sure that I agree with the broader opinion.
Is there a weird wrinkle here with respect to Standard vs. Wild? Played to Rank 1 in Standard last month (three wins short, grrr....), and came in this season at 10x multiplier. Clicked over to Wild, which I have never in my life played -- and have a 6x multiplier. I guess the question is... how? Do they have Standard performance "predict" a Wild MMR as well?
Content aside: some of these new portrait choices seem... bizarre? I like the Diamond league being represented by the League of Explorers and EVIL. But, like, why is Eviscerate -- a spell, not a minion -- even an icon? Why is Alexstraza after C'Thun? Why is Zul'jin, a hero card, in the same category as Doomsayer and Big Game Hunter?
This way madness lies.
What was the Clever Disguise bug? I randomly decided to start playing Quest Rogue at Rank 5 — with bizarre levels of success — but didn’t immediately notice anything.
I’ve tried 5 times and lost each. The thing that most of my co-players also haven’t realized is that there’s value in leaving most of the minions on the board rather than trying to chip away like 2 damage. His “targets up to 3 enemies ability” just goes face that much more often if he’s playing against an empty board.
Beyond holding Loremaster Cho and Millhouse for a big late turn when ideally the Mage has Pyroblast, having the Mage play Brann with other bigger minions around also helps you milk the most out of the effect, including from Tournament Vendors.
Had this on my mind lately, but held off posting since it felt like it was destined for Front Page treatment. Somewhat self-explanatory. I've mained either Hunter or Rogue since at least Kobolds and Catacombs, bouncing back and forth when the playstyle of one or the other becomes boring or oppressive. So I've spent a considerable amount of time recently thinking what Leeroy's imminent Hall of Faming means for the go-to closer of a huge proportion of decks.
I'd be interested in two questions:
1) For those of you who can barely imagine life without Leeroy, what are you thinking of as a replacement? Reckless Rocketeer, for 1 more mana with 1 less damage, obviously isn't a worthwhile substitute.
2) Do you anticipate any shifts in the meta in response to Leeroy's removal? The number of times that I have either won or lost purely because Leeroy delivered the exact amount of damage required to end the game is almost hysterically high: whether the matchup is Mech Paladin or Galakrond Warrior, you can play a near perfect game and get suffocated by a well-timed Leeroy at the end. One of the interesting variables I see here is the timing of the Hall of Fame patch. With only half a week until the end of the season, a lot of more aggro decks will have to orchestrate a quick pivot within a fairly compressed window before new cards can fill the void.
I frankly cannot remember whether Mech Paladin or Murloc Paladin was the most annoying at peak usage.
But Flik would only target them if they were already on the board, so it’s kind of a moot point. Unless the opponent has a way of “hiding” the original 3, their deaths by Flik would trigger the effect, copies or no copies.
With that in mind, I’m kind of more interested in the defensive responses to this. Opponent plays Magtheridon. Rogue Shadowsteps a Warden. Magtheridon sleeps forever. There’s also a kind of cool interaction where you could play Maiev to imprison a warden, thereby preventing its death temporarily.
This is the best decision tree for whatever your priorities happen to be: https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/fkankj/2020_hall_of_fame_craftdust_guide/
If your only goal is to maximize dust as profit, you aren't generating any additional resources by crafting a golden version if you have the normal one. You only get the dust refund for your "highest value cards that can be included in a single deck." In your case -- and mine, for what it's worth -- that means taking no action would generate 1,600 dust for the value of the normal Leeroy, and then another 400 for the "regular" value of disenchanting it, for a grand total of 2,000 dust. Meanwhile, if you craft golden, you're spending 3,200 up front, gaining back the same 3,200, and then gaining the "regular" value of disenchanting both.... for a grand total of, again, 2,000 dust. It's the same result either way.
Or for the mathematically minded:
Have Regular, Craft Golden
- 3,200 (golden craft) + 3,200 (golden refund) + 1,600 (golden disenchant) + 400 (regular disenchant) = 2,000 dust
Have Regular, Do Nothing
1,600 (normal refund) + 400 (regular disenchant) = 2,000 dust
Now if you want the pleasure of playing with golden Leeroy for the time you have left, don't let me stop you.
A million upvotes for this take
I did begin to suspect that something was up with the meta when I posted a Highlander deck only to discover that its crafting cost was 20,660 dust. Most of the non-SOU legendaries weren’t a product of crafts, but just the fact that the first legendary I opened was Antonidas, the first free dragon was Alexstrasza, and I’ve weirdly rolled into the Mage legendaries in each of the last expansions. (And here I’d been hoping to play Deathrattle Rogue.) So yes, while the costs have clearly crept up, I do think that it’s slightly fitting that in a “reboot” of an old expansion the reintroduction of singleton mechanics have created a reward structure for people who have older unplayed cards sitting around collecting dust. (Pun originally not intended...
This feels like it was a step away from a Zephrys fail, so I’m curious if anyone else has experienced this scenario.
Playing Highlander Mage. Opponent has 10 health. I have a Frostbolt in hand and Kalecgos on the board. After whittling down the board I have 7 mana left. There is a 2-health taunt minion in the way.
I play Frostbolt first on the taunt minion to use Kalecgos’s “free” cast. I run Kalecgos into face. With opponent now at 6 health, Zephrys correctly offers Fireball for lethal. (And weirdly Arcanite Reaper, in case I wanted to toy with him for another turn...?)
My concern at the time was whether or not Zephrys “knew” about Kalecgos’s effect. Without Kalecgos, I wouldn’t have had enough mana (just 5) to play both Frostbolt and Fireball in the same turn. Had I played Zephrys right away, would he have seen the potential lethal, or would he have offered me The Black Knight?
I actually like the card MORE because I had to do the work, but I can see why it would be subject to possible misunderstandings.
The card text says “wish for” the perfect card, and his summoning audio is “your wish is my suggestion” instead of the more familiar “your wish is my command.” This isn’t false advertising. (Perhaps what you’re feeling is buyer’s remorse?
Doesn’t Wild just mean that you’ve been giving Blizzard your money for longer?
I was intrigued to scroll through HS Replay and to find that the archetype currently running in Tier 2 as “Big Spell Mage” is 99% made up of Highlander decks, where the “bigness” is simply the payoff for the slow burn of the deck.
I’m currently flirting with a derivative of this archetype, below, that incorporates Raid the Sky Temple, which I’m calling Skylander (eh, get it?!). Despite how down everyone is on Quest Mage, no Highlander deck that I’ve seen has a Turn 1 play, and you drop enough random spells along the way to complete the quest at some point.
The trick simply is to not rush to complete the quest, and to just play as normal. Even if you only get one or two uses out of the hero power, it’s more use than you’ll get out of a Turn 8+ ping. And although it might seem counter-synergistic with King Phaoris, you can always drop Naga Sea Witch to round the lower mana cost spells back up to 5 for beefier bodies on the next turn. Seems like this would be the thread to solicit feedback if anyone has thoughts :)
Still doesn’t address Cenarius. Or Shiv in the prior example.But, uh, ...Healing Touch? What do you want from me!? I’m vaguely interested in why the bulk of this thread has now been devoted to sniping at me and the OP. Are we genuinely convinced as a community that Zephrys is indeed “perfect?”
I’d be equally open to using this as a forum for finding out where Zephrys’s AI is restricted by human error. Perhaps the turn before lethal just isn’t the time you should use him? Great! But that doesn’t seem to be the conversation others are interested in having.
Touché. But Shiv over Swipe or whatever still holds. Cenarius could be a better option for what I described than Tirion. (Or Alexstrazsa.
These examples are just taken off the top of my head without the sets open in front of me. But for an AI that DOES have those options coded into its programming, the possibilities ought to be more diverse.
I think the answer to the original scenario then is found above: Zephrys is "too" hard coded to offer lethal, since Swipe, Fireball, and Eviscerate are all literally different flavors of the same thing. (Beyond which, the OP mentioned that this happened twice, so it's actually SIX flavors of the same thing.) If the point of the "Discover" mechanic is meant to be variety, the AI should only offer one of those options, and then provide two other cards for some other scenario that the human player might anticipate but that Zephrys doesn't know.
If others are willing to look beyond the OP's framing to the broader question, I would be interested in what other scenarios people have seen go awry. One thing I've noticed in playing against Zephrys is what seems like a fairly limited card pool. If I'm a turn away from lethal, my opponent almost always plays Tirion Fordring the same turn as Zephrys. But one thing that the AI clearly doesn't weigh -- but that the human player should -- is that I'm playing Rogue, so have numerous ways to get Tirion out of the way or to ping off his Divine Shield. Sap? Game over. Fan of Knives, Lackeys, SI:7 Agent, whatever. So I'd say there were two separate problems that the Tirion scenario draws out:
1) Lack of awareness of opponent's class identity. The AI doesn't need to know exactly what cards I'm holding to know whether I'm more or less likely to have answers based purely on the spells available to my class (in Standard at least).
2) General lack of options. Like I said, Tirion is produced literally every time. But objectively, even something like Khartut Defender something else might be a better option if you're a turn away from certain death. (I mean, even in the OP's scenario, if the other player was at 1 HP, why even offer Swipe, Fireball, and Eviscerate? Why not Shiv?)
The single biggest surprise for me is that a mechanic that theoretically slows down the game for 4-5 turns (Quests) has also coincided with the extinction of aggro decks like Mech Hunter or Murloc Shaman.
Not to continue derailing this thread further but, I mean, if he can heal that much through 5 turns.... isn’t that sort of on you? He played the quest so you know what his goal is. The early counter is to not make plays that produce damage without removing targets from the board entirely. Instead conserve resources to make a more concerted push. Priest is the only quest that — with the exception of Wild Pyromancer combos — is utterly reactionary.
ANYWAY... back on topic, given all the fuss, I’ve found Deathrattle/Mechathuun Rogue to be surprisingly inert this expansion. The combo is still technically easy to execute. It’s just that I’ve typically already won by the time it would be viable.