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Out of all of them, I like Diego Gil's Rattling Performance the most. It's not often you see a goblin in heavy armor, and that sword looks sick! 

Well done all, the art looks great!

There's more than 1 unannounced project at Blizzard, they recently announced that they're working on a survival game: https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/blizzard/23768911/create-a-new-universe-with-us (Brand new IP too)

The problem is wider than Kazakusan. There are several super-powered cards that entire decks are built around. The quest-lines are examples, as is Mozaki. All of those decks have wild match-up spreads.

However, I think the biggest issue is the amount of card draw, and tutored card draw. This makes decks very consistent. Ramp druid needs Capture Coldtooth Mine and Moonlit Guidance to reliably draw Kazakusan. Quest-line hunter can run many low-cost spells because it has so much card draw. This allows decks to go all in on their win condition, which leads to polarised match-ups.

Quite the insightful article. I do tend to gravitate towards dragon builds more often than not, especially when offered Prestor's Pyrospawn at tier 3. I do think you got lucky with that Maexxna into reborn combo though

Looking forward to the announcements! The core set changes are going to also be very exciting, considering we know that were going to see some older popular characters return in the core set as either the same cards before, or in a new version. (Similarly to the current core sets legendary dragons) The new core set alone will almost certainly change the meta in a big way, as some core set cards that see a lot of play right now might "rotate".

And of course seeing what the next expansion is going to be is very exciting, i just hope the cards are going to be board focussed like they promised. And of course the thing that a lot of people might overlook rn, is that they will also show us the plans they have for then next HS year. I'm looking forward to seeing what they got in store for us next year. (I hope some kind of single player mode, such as a dungeon run, boomsday puzzles kinda thing or an adventure... or most importantly.. more bugfixes.)

Also i'm happy to see that they are actually promoting HS Grandmasters and The BG tournament, considering they didn't really promote their own Esport events last year.

Also about that Mobile WoW game, that seems interesting. I hope it's easy to pick up, just like hearthstone. (As in, you can just install the game and play. No WoW experience needed.) I'm also wondering if this mobile game might be the "unrevealed project" that blizzard has been teasing a lot, with a lot of ex HS devs that are working on it. (Would make sense, considering HS devs know a lot about mobile stuff.) Let's just hope whatever this mobile game might end up being, that it's not another cashgrab. That would be the worst thing possible.

Also Blizzard + mobile... I feel like i could make a joke about that, but nah. After all i feel like everyone instantly makes that joke the second they see "blizzard" and "Mobile" in 1 sentence.

First diablo, second wow, what next mobile starcraft? :D

Kinda seems a bit off having a WoW manager post the announcement of the announcement for HS. I understand they want to showcase everything Warcraft related, but grouping them all together like this seems weird. Maybe it's coz there's no Blizzcon this year and they want to keep everything low key.

Lets also hope there's no blizzard drama during the reveal season, we'd already had 2 seasons ruined 

Were the buckets listed anywhere before or during the competition? That seems like important information for viewers for this format.

Meta decks. I believe this is the most important thing of all to have as a Hearthstone Content site. You already do Standard ones, we should have the wild side on the regular too.

After that, fun Deck ideas like mentioned above is a great one. Each month perhaps we could have a theme and people would put their own spin on the idea. For example, Dragon Priest could be a tempo thing, control thing, pair it with Seek Guidence, go thief priest, so on. A little community event to inspire experimentation.

Wild Tournaments perhaps? I am sure the Wild community is craving to have their own esports scene develop, and would naturally cause content to pop out.

How is there no mention of Cram Session? Mage may not be top dog right now, but this card often feels like an unearned amount of card draw. It was absolutely soulcrushing to play against before the quest mage nerf. Mozaki would probably have felt far more balanced without it too.

I think the main issue was that they made it into a big reveal, creating high expectations that they couldn't meet. If they had announced it with less fanfare, I think most people would have reacted "Sure, I'll give it a try".

Its kinda insane that it must have been at least 4 years since we last heard of that disaster PR response.

Dont know what is holding back the release, but I think blizz just believed its tainted from birth and subsequently removed most of its devs at work and the end result being that we waited 4 years for a game no one asked for or wanted.

Would be nice to see another moments like that if they do this in Blizzcon. But I can predict that some trolls on the Blizzard forum gonna start it anyway.

HuntardHuntard - I like the HSreplay idea, maybe that plus an in depth matchup guide for certain meta decks could be a useful tool for players trying to climb and different from the generally non competitive off meta stuff I usually do.

Maybe this is the wrong way of looking at it but regarding the single copy of one card idea. In card games where you can have deck sizes above 30, I read people still want to have the miminum deck size for consistency purposes.

For any given meta, some cards will generally perform better than others. You can see that in HSreplay stats. So, usually, I’d rather have 2 copies of the better performing card to be able to get it more consistently than 1 copy each of 2 different cards. In any meta, there’s always going to be one card that does better and then consistency is important.

One exception could be if your deck has a ton of card draw, then maybe you’d rather run 2 cards that serve 2 different purposes to be able to have both effects available in your deck rather than running 2 of the same card.

Zelgadis - Thanks for the in depth response, will definitely think about doing something among what you said.

How about something like the evolution of a deck from first draft as it gets refined, with reasoning for each step (including thoughts about the initial step)? Generally, you can have some guidelines for something like mana but it does require trial and error because each deck will have different speeds, synergies and win cons such that it’s hard to predict if you need a higher or lower mana curve or more or less card draw without testing it out. 

Kind of unrelated to the above but doing a math analysis for combos is for sure interesting. If you have 5 combo pieces, you can definitely do some analysis to see the chance that at least one is in your bottom 5 cards. Not counting mulligan maybe you’d do 25/30 chance for each to be in top 25, so then 25/30 to the 5th power is the chance all are in top 25, so then 1 - that = 59.8% chance that one of your 5 combo pieces is in your bottom 5 cards. If you do count mulligan, you’d have to think about how to do this because depending on the combo deck you don’t always mulligan for combo pieces, you’d often mulligan them away for card draw and early game survival tools.

I think an in-depth guide for certain match-ups would be good for the average player and generate discussion. It could even be as simple as uploading an HSreplay and explaining why you made every play that you did.

I think Zelgadis' idea of discussing running a single copy of a card is pretty neat as well, though it does not seem exclusive to Wild.

Maybe revisit old archetypes that didn't make it in Standard to see if they are playable now with cards released later. For example Beast Druid, Freeze Shaman, Discolock, Handbuff.

In the case of Freeze Shaman, second time around it did make it in Standard based on the new cards alone, so there the question would be whether any of the old freeze cards are good enough to make it into a Wild deck.

In the case of Handbuff, an aggressive Handbuff Paladin saw some play in Wild already, but Hunter and Warrior not so much, neither have I seen much of a more mid-range or combo Handbuff Paladin (I have a partially refined decklist, if you're interested). Also Warlock has handbuff potential; we saw that in Standard for a short time until Imprisoned Scrap Imp got nerfed.

I would also be interested in an article about deckbuilding, since we usually only see the end results, not the process that led to it. I really liked Firebat's Deck Doctor series, for example, or Chump refining Patreon decks. But starting from just an idea instead of a deck list would be even more interesting.

Something I struggle with in particular is how many synergies to include. There are a lot of possible synergies in Wild, but some additions strengthen the deck while others make it too hit or miss and it's often not easy to see which way it is going to go. From the viewer decks I saw in the aforementioned videos, often deck builders try to do too many different things in a single deck. But sometimes it does all fit together and that makes a deck special.

Another difficult decision is how much deck slots to spend on the core of the deck and how many on support (like card draw, removal, healing/armor). Often my first draft will be top-heavy since the coolest cards often have high mana costs and then I have to drop some of them to make sure I can actually survive into the late game to play those cards. Are there some guidelines for balancing such things or is it all trial and error?

Something that I didn't realize until I had built a lot of decks is the relationship between card draw/generation, mana curve and situational/tech cards. For example, in Handlock you can afford to run more situational cards, since you draw a lot of cards and aren't going to play the majority of your hand. If you're mostly going to play cards on curve, you don't need much card draw; Seek Guidance Quest Priest is an extreme example, but also many Elemental, Spiteful and C'thun decks play cards on curve.

Another interesting topic is one-of cards. Some people don't want to see any of those at all (except legendaries), arguing that you should always include two copies of the best card. I think that's too simplistic: the best card often depends on the situation and having two different options in your hand can be superior to having the same option twice. When is consistency actually required to make the deck work versus it being an excuse to build decks that can be auto-piloted?

If you're into math, it might be interesting to do an article on the chances of finding certain cards by a certain turn. For example, what is the effect of including a two-of when running Zephrys or Reno, or a non-dragon when running Kazakusan? How many dragons do you need in your deck to reliably have one in hand by turn X? How many tutored cards do you run relative to the number of tutors: I see 3 tutored + 2 tutors quite often, but is that close to the ideal ratio or does Standard just not have enough options to allow other quantities?

For combo decks, how far into your deck can you expect to find the full combo? MarkMcKz often remarks he's very unlucky to find the last combo piece in the bottom cards of his deck, but since many of his combos require 5 or more cards, that might actually be the statistically expected outcome.

I'm terribly excited FOR ALL THESE THINGS!!! 

Hit by... 305 Snowballs(!) Avalanche indeed! Thanks!

Appreciate!!

Avalanche!!! :D