In tonight's community Q&A with Dean Ayala, a question was asked about upgrading normal cards into goldens - a popular community request. Dean gave us a great answer.
- They are working towards allowing us to upgrade normal cards to golden.
- There are questions to solve - what does the UI look like, should you be able to use gold to upgrade.
- This is a part of the same project that was announced last week which would allow us to craft hero portraits (and maybe card backs)
What do you think? Would you upgrade your normal cards to golden versions? Should Gold be allowed to be used instead of just dust? Let us know your thoughts on how it should work down below.
Quote From Dean Ayala Many people would like to see the "upgrade card to its golden form" button, do you think that we might finally see it this year?
No timetable but it's something actively being kicked off as a project. It's part of the same project where we plan to make card back and (some) hero skins craftable. The open questions are how it looks in the UI, should you be able to use gold if you want, some others.
![All The Great Dark Beyond Card Reveals for October 12 - Day 2 [Finished]](dark-beyond-reveals-day-2-thumb.webp)
Comments
I personally don’t keep golden cards unless they are uncraftable or unless I don’t have enough non-golden copies. So my golden collection is basic cards, a few golden epics, and some golden legendaries that were worth keeping.
For the Core set, I am most excited about Basic cards turning into craftable commons so I can DE the golden versions for a total of 14,300 dust. That’s just short of 9 legendary cards worth of dust!
I'm more interested in a way to downgrade a golden card into a normal one, giving us dust, precious dust...
Same here! I mean, some golden cards look really sweet, but I just don't care that much. I'd rather have the dust so I can craft other cards I want.
If they created a "make non golden common/rare/epic/legend card golden" tokens, you could
They could be quest rewards, help people make their golden decks.
For more complexity, they could maybe stack.
I think that whilst lizzard are listening, someone should point them at this: https://outof.cards/forums/hearthstone/hearthstone-general/2665-tables-a-way-to-play-hearthstone-with-your-own-rules
There's a lot of good ideas in there, with pack sleeves and tokens.
Actually, an interesting idea! The only major disadvantage I see is that it involves a new type of currency (with subtypes). But as I've heard, Blizz has already created unique currencies for Chinese region. So it shouldn't be a problem.
I would LOVE an upgrade to gold feature, even remember someone on reddit photoshopping how the UI could look like. It'd be a great thing for me to be able to craft my favorite cards like Jaraxxus without feeling so wasteful of dust. Not to mention that it would relieve the sadness of not opening packs at prerelease because I need to craft my day one favs in golden first.
You can already upgrade normal cards into golden. You disenchant the normal one and use the dust (plus a ton more dust) to make the golden one. You can also already use gold to do this. You buy some packs, disenchant what you get, and craft what you want from the dust.
I have trouble believing their "upgrade" system would actually be more cost-effective than that, so I really don't see much point in designing a whole new UI around the process.
However, for the sake of argument, I think it would be fun if you could merge two identical normal cards into the golden version, at no additional cost. That's honestly the only way I see myself doing it. Anything more is just too wasteful.
As for crafting portraits and cardbacks, I would craft a select few that I've missed, but only if it's shockingly cheap. The conversion rate I use is 100 dust = 100 gold = $1.17, and I'll be keeping that in mind when I make any cosmetic crafting decisions.
I would expect the upgrade cost to be the difference on golden and non-golden crafting costs, rather than golden crafting minus non-golden disenchant.
So you'd have:
That difference is quite significant and makes it a worthwhile feature, but still keeps golden versions expensive.
The most natural way to implement it, would probably be to give us a discount for the normal crafting value.
So when upgrading a legendary, this wouldn’t cost 3200 (- 400 DE value of the normal one, but 1600 dust.
I think that’s reasonable!
As you said yourself, it would indeed to be pointless to design UI in that case, so I think it is more logical to be optimistic and believe that we'll get a better price if we already have normal card.
Also, I don't think they would add a lot of new, "confusing" numbers to their system, like -395, -780 etc.
Merging doubles into golden would make them never nerf anything, since we would get enourmous profits from merging those 9+ duplicates.
That's easy enough to fix. Just make it so you cannot disenchant a golden card that was created this way. Ostensibly, you're making it golden because you want to keep it, so that should not be a problem.
I suppose the ‘no-brainer” approach would be to offer the upgrade as a difference of the normal and golden dust cost. I would also welcome an alternative means of getting the upgrade, but since there is no obvious conversion rate between dust and gold, I suspect they would be wary about such a system being exploited for dust (arguably the more precious of the two resources).
Recently I took the unprecedented step of crafting a golden card (Licensed Adventurer) so that I could show off the new golden coin animations. Probably not going to do that again anytime soon because it just feels so wasteful lol
Yeah, I have a lot of cards I would love to upgrade, but never would just "craft".
This really should be a thing! I always wished to upgrade some of my favourite legendaries in wild with my pile of unused dust. But it would feel so bad to waste 1200 dust in the process, so I never did it. I think that upgrade cost should just be the dust difference between golden and normal card.
Btw, this system exists in Gwent, they even have a separate currency just for upgrading to golden cards. One of my favorite concepts.
I wouldn't use it. Disenchanting golden cards is good source of dust and I prefer to have more cards to build decks from over having golden cards. But I think it makes sense to give players the option.
One thing I've always wanted to seem them do is to have a "Golden Day/Week" type of promotion, where every single card played in any mode is its golden equivalent. The golden animations are really quite something and most people see so few of them, especially free to play. I think it would get people excited about the golden cards as well as show off the amazing design work the team has done.
"There are questions to solve - what does the UI look like, should you be able to use gold to upgrade."
I don't think anyone would actually ever do this (unless the costs were really wacked), but it's actually a really flavorful option. It's like you're melting your gold and using it as the base for the golden card.