Duplicate protection and the dust refunds

So someone on here (I forgot who) brought up that with the new duplicate protection rule there's now a very easy way to farm Dust whenever cards are being nerfed.

The principle is the following: Assuming you own all Rares and Commons of a set and one of them gets nerfed you can then:

1) disenchant all copies of it for their full dust value

2) buy packs from that expansion

3) open them until you have 2 copies of said card again

4) rinse and repeat

If we assume, for instance that 3 cards got nerfed, being 1 Rare and 2 Commons you can technically convert 100g into 300 Dust and essentially buy yourself great value entirely for gold (it would take 6 packs to craft a legendary for instance).

Now I assume that Blizzard is aware of this exploit and will take measures to prevent it. The question is: How exactly?

The most efficient way would be to cap the amount of refunds you can get on a card to only the playable copies so you can't actually DE them for full value more than twice. However, I don't know if that is actually possible in the current code of Hearthstone.

The other possibility would be to treat nerfs like HoF and grant players an automatic dust refund (without having to DE the cards) for all their playable copies. This seems like the most likely solution to me, as it's a familiar system and while it essentially makes players "lose" some dust compared to the previous system it could at least be justified by the duplicate protection rule making up for it.

In any case, I can't imagine they'll keep the system as is, because if they did they'd have to find other ways to incentivize buying packs and I don't believe we'd like that.

Anyways, your thoughts on this?

Considering how casual is HS' playerbase I even doubt that many players are aware of such method to farm easy dust, so if the system will not be exploited too much maybe Blizzard would simply allow it to exist. Otherwise the best solution is probably to just gift each player the amount of dust value corresponding to how many copies of the HoF/nerfed cards he has, instead of having the player to disenchant said cards in order to obtain the refound.

Quote From Lightspoon

Considering how casual is HS' playerbase I even doubt that many players are aware of such method to farm easy dust, so if the system will not be exploited too much maybe Blizzard would simply allow it to exist. Otherwise the best solution is probably to just gift each player the amount of dust value corresponding to how many copies of the HoF/nerfed cards he has, instead of having the player to disenchant said cards in order to obtain the refound.

I think you really underestimate how fast news like this would spread. There'd be at least 2 reddit threads and the obligatory Regis Killbin video "INSANE EXPLOIT, FREE LEGENDARIES????"

Sadly, it seems to not work. The duplicate protection looks at the cards you have opened from packs and have crafted, not at what you have in your collection. Probably to prevent this exploit. See this tweet from Celestalon: https://twitter.com/Celestalon/status/1240320702151942144

Quote From Erodos

Sadly, it seems to not work. The duplicate protection looks at the cards you have opened from packs and have crafted, not at what you have in your collection. Probably to prevent this exploit. See this tweet from Celestalon: https://twitter.com/Celestalon/status/1240320702151942144

well shit that makes opening old packs to get nerfed cards back much less useful. Oh well

I think it would be relatively easy to code a condition over refund, on the first two cards you disenchant (+ two goldens): anything else refunds non-nerf value.

Sadly, there´s another catch:

Q: So hoarding packs before major nerfs will be a good dust strat if you have a good collection (Editor notes: This is a comment about the new duplicate rule).
A: There's a caveat here: once you receive a card, you'll have it marked for "collected" purposes. So if you disenchant a card you've received, it's still considered "owned." So you can't exploit the refund system that way. There's a great benefit to this though: If you don't like a particular card or class, you can disenchant them and not have to worry about getting them in future packs.

Q: And how long is the card will be marked "collected"? For example, I've opened an epic I don't want so I dust it right away. But if I already collected other epics I would like to have them all again.
A: Forever. Once you've collected a card, you've collected it.

Quote From Alleria

Sadly, there´s another catch:

Q: So hoarding packs before major nerfs will be a good dust strat if you have a good collection (Editor notes: This is a comment about the new duplicate rule).
A: There's a caveat here: once you receive a card, you'll have it marked for "collected" purposes. So if you disenchant a card you've received, it's still considered "owned." So you can't exploit the refund system that way. There's a great benefit to this though: If you don't like a particular card or class, you can disenchant them and not have to worry about getting them in future packs.

Q: And how long is the card will be marked "collected"? For example, I've opened an epic I don't want so I dust it right away. But if I already collected other epics I would like to have them all again.
A: Forever. Once you've collected a card, you've collected it.

good to know.

Although how does this work with Golden cards? Do they count seperately? If I open, say, a golden epic and I DE it, is there just no chance that I would ever open a regular copy? If so that kinda makes disenchanting golden cards entirely pointless since there's no actual way to get them in regular form anymore.

Quote From Alleria

Sadly, there´s another catch:

Q: So hoarding packs before major nerfs will be a good dust strat if you have a good collection (Editor notes: This is a comment about the new duplicate rule).
A: There's a caveat here: once you receive a card, you'll have it marked for "collected" purposes. So if you disenchant a card you've received, it's still considered "owned." So you can't exploit the refund system that way. There's a great benefit to this though: If you don't like a particular card or class, you can disenchant them and not have to worry about getting them in future packs.

So does that mean that the first time I get 2 copies, I disenchant them, open up packs, I'm not guaranteed to get the cards I disenchanted earlier back?

Quote From dapperdog

Quote From Alleria

Sadly, there´s another catch:

Q: So hoarding packs before major nerfs will be a good dust strat if you have a good collection (Editor notes: This is a comment about the new duplicate rule).
A: There's a caveat here: once you receive a card, you'll have it marked for "collected" purposes. So if you disenchant a card you've received, it's still considered "owned." So you can't exploit the refund system that way. There's a great benefit to this though: If you don't like a particular card or class, you can disenchant them and not have to worry about getting them in future packs.

So does that mean that the first time I get 2 copies, I disenchant them, open up packs, I'm not guaranteed to get the cards I disenchanted earlier back?

Yes, these two cards you disenchanted are still considered as “collected” and will not show automatically for next packs

Does the duplication protection work for Golden cards? I keep the good common cards, but DE the bad ones (f2p). If I open packs after march 26, does that mean that every golden common I get are ones I don't have the regular version of?

Quote From JackJimson

Quote From Alleria

Sadly, there´s another catch:

Q: So hoarding packs before major nerfs will be a good dust strat if you have a good collection (Editor notes: This is a comment about the new duplicate rule).
A: There's a caveat here: once you receive a card, you'll have it marked for "collected" purposes. So if you disenchant a card you've received, it's still considered "owned." So you can't exploit the refund system that way. There's a great benefit to this though: If you don't like a particular card or class, you can disenchant them and not have to worry about getting them in future packs.

Q: And how long is the card will be marked "collected"? For example, I've opened an epic I don't want so I dust it right away. But if I already collected other epics I would like to have them all again.
A: Forever. Once you've collected a card, you've collected it.

I wonder if the "collected" tag is retroactive or will only take effect from March 26 onward.

For example, say I dusted nerfed cards from a few years ago. Are those still marked as collected?

Well, there´s no official answer on this AFAIK, but people on reddit guessed it won´t be retroactive, because now when you accidentally DE a card, the support say they cant track your DE-ed cards to prove you really had the said card, so they can´t restore it for you. But it´s just a guess by now.

This is obviously too late, but just for future reference, it turned out that it was not retroactive. I had dusted all my copies of Raiding Party for example, after the nerf last year, and those were my only missing rares from Rastakhan's Rumble. I opened one RR pack and it had two rares in it -- both copies of Raiding Party! I also opened a copy of Scion of Ruin from DoD pack I got as an arena reward, which I had collected in the past but dusted when it was nerfed. I had several other similar examples as well. But testing out the new system, dusting a card now after the patch does indeed leave it as "collected", and you don't even get that card when you've collected all the other cards of that rarity in the set, they're totally random from then on.