Blizzard is deploying a hotfix to the servers today to change the way the Discover keyword works.
- Discover cards can no longer Discover themselves.
- Cards that ‘generate a random card’ can no longer generate themselves.
Read on for more information on why the change was made. What do you think of the changes?
Quote From Kerfluffle Hey everyone,
We’ve got a hotfix going out later today that includes significant changes to the Discover keyword and randomly generated cards:
- Discover cards can no longer Discover themselves.
- Cards that ‘generate a random card’ can no longer generate themselves.
Dev comment: Overall, this change is aimed at helping games feel a bit more varied. While generating the same card can be an exciting individual moment, these types of experiences tend to have diminishing returns after a while. These adjustments should make for healthier games against classes with a ton of resource generation.
The hotfix also includes the following:
- Mr. Bigglesworth is now available in Battlegrounds to all players.
- Fixed a bug where the selected minion summoned by Jandice Barov would not have the death upon damage enchantment when summoned again with Khadgar.
- Fixed a bug where Headmaster Kel’Thuzad would not resurrect minions that were destroyed from being returned to a full hand.
These changes will take place on the server side, so you won’t have to download anything if you’ve already updated to 18.0.
![All The Great Dark Beyond Card Reveals for October 12 - Day 2 [Finished]](dark-beyond-reveals-day-2-thumb.webp)
Comments
No, I don't see it as unfair. The majority of supported mechanics and archetypes in every class fall by the wayside and disappear from the meta after a week or two. E.g. Rogue has all these fancy tools for shuffling insane cards into their deck, and has Anka, the Buried to make deathrattle decks do some ludicrous things, but they have no presence in the meta whatsoever. But remember when Unlicensed Apothecary cost 4 mana and Necrium Blade was around? Then we definitely saw deathrattle rogue.
My point is that 1 mana made the difference between deathrattle rogue being OP and practically unplayed at the end of the DoD expansion cycle. That is how fine a line archetypes' success or failure is determined by (at least to players who care about win percentages; casual players don't care whether it is 45% win rate or 55%, but that's a separate discussion). Notably, deathrattle rogue had exactly the same amount of card draw available to it (in fact it even had more options after Galakrond's Awakening), so you have to find other reasons than card draw for why it ended up 'weak'.
Applying this to tempo priest and shaman, I would argue that what they are lacking is not card draw, but effective tools to compensate for them not having strong card draw. If a class is good at something it should be weak elsewhere, and vice versa. The times classes have been poorly designed are when they have too few weaknesses, or their strengths are not sufficient to overcome their weaknesses. Control priest does have such tools, but the tempo archetype is not quite there yet.
Then what do you suggest? What kind of tools Tempo Priest could use that isn't card draw? The archetype has powerful buffs, strong tempo minions, strong value cards and a bit of mana cheating (through Alura). What is missing here other than card draw? I don't see it. I can't see what other tools could compensate for such a massive flaw in the archetype.
Tempo Priest was a thing at one point, back when Dragon Synergy was an actual deck. The deck literally revolves around using that synergy to get a bigger than average minion on the board each turn. Been ages since it was a thing, but it’s not like it’s impossible for them to have a tempo deck without card draw
I have played Tempo Priest, and the biggest flaw is a fundamental one: it has no comeback mechanism whatsoever. Or at least, it uses no comeback mechanism whatsoever; there's plenty to choose from in priest if you want them. No amount of card draw will make up for the fact that when you have lost the board, you have more or less lost the game already.
Now, card draw would be a help against decks that don't fight for the board, but even then it will be tricky trying to make progress building a board from scratch against control, while you probably have a decent win rate against combo already.
So what do I suggest? Probably to try to make it a bit more midrange-y and less all-in from turn 1. I recall dragon priest in TGT, which got off to a fast start with Twilight Whelp and [Hearthstone Card (Wrymrest Agent) Not Found], and had Velen's Chosen to really hammer in early dominance, but didn't rely entirely on it and had slow cards and AoE like Lightbomb in there as well. It was tier 2 in this particular meta snapshot: https://tempostorm.com/hearthstone/meta-snapshot/legacy/meta-snapshot-33-new-kid-on-the-block
I fully admit a lot has changed for priest since then, and card draw is no small part of that, but I genuinely think the entire philosophy of the all-in Tempo Priest we have today makes its own problems. It is built to win if the opponent has no answer for a few early big minions and doesn't give itself any options if that fails. Coming back to my previous post: a 1 mana change on 1 card can make all the difference on whether that approach is overall a success or a failure, as happened with Extra Arms a year ago.
So overall I think the archetype just needs to consider the full Priest toolkit better, and at worst it is in a bucket alongside a huge number of decks that are in that unfortunate window where they are fine but their win rate is a couple of per cent too low for ladder climbers and they get called 'unplayable'.
I don't know man. This seems kinda hopeless. Adding removals and board clears will make Alura a bad card in the deck. The current dragon synergies aren't as good as the ones from previous years. There's Disciplinarian Gandling for deathrattle synergy but looking at the current state of the meta it seems too slow. I'm hitting my head against a brick wall trying to break through but it seems the only thing i'm going to achieve is a headache. Thanks for the constructive discussion.
Should've been designed like this from the start. Hearthstone has this small affliction where they think cards that generate themselves are inherently funny so nearly every one of them are designed to do so. Too bad the joke really gets old after you see mage and priest double up their value for the billion-th time.
I understand the change. I will miss it off of Stonehill Defender though. Sometimes you got 2 crappy options and you could 'reroll' for better options. Oh well. Also a nerf to Yogg. I would purposefully put spells that could roll into themselves and other spells to get that 30+ Spell RNG fiesta!
Amusingly, this is a buff to Jandice Barov, since she can't make a copy of herself.
she doesn't discover, just summon two random minions
The change also addresses that.Pretty sure this is not the case. I think she will still be able to summon herself.
You sure? Jandice doesn't generate cards to your hand. I think it affects only cards like Sky Raider.
You're right, but the hotfix also affects cards that create random cards, not just discovery effects. We just remember a lot more of the discovering cards affected because it's easier to chain them together.
Should have happened a while ago. Also, slight buff to Shadow Visions in my opinion! Rarely when playing that do I want to discover another Shadow Visions, and it coming up as an option was only good if the other two options were not what I wanted.
It only affects random discovers not from deck
Shadow Visions still works in the same way.
The devs said so on Reddit
Does that mean that Stitched Tracker works the same, too?
Yes. If you have another copy of Stitched Tracker in the deck, you'll still be able to discover it.
In principle, this change seems pretty good - varied gameplay is important, and these "discover cycles" can be very frustrating to play against. That said, I think it the impact will be felt much more significantly by the classes with very weak card draw (I'm thinking Priest and Shaman primarily). Random cards are (on average) worse than cards in your deck, so you need to be able to generate more cards to make up for their relative quality. This could mess with the consistency of those classes who lack meaningful card draw tools.
Great change.