This is extreme jank, but with the new Overlord Runthak, it's technically possible to handbuff Recurring Villain then play it with Spiritsinger Umbra to instantly complete the quest. This combo is actually just playable with any class, now that i think about it.
Tournaments and 2v2 need to be in Hearthstone. The community has been begging for it, for years and if Mythgard and Runeterra can do so then why not Hearthstone?
Alec Dawson said that the unnerfs will happen with the 20.0 patch, which will be 1-2 weeks before the rotation and new expansion. A little bit of time for Buzzard to shine!
I love Lynessa Sunsorrow. One of my favorites. Been messing with that card since it came out. Using it in every kind of Paladin deck I could. One of my favorites was the dragon version using Dragonkin Sorcerer and Sound the Bells!. Always surprises people. It's great to see I'm not the only one using it. Gotta get Lady Liadrin though.
Summary of the first Rewards Track for me: It definitly has worked out better for gaining gold per expansion. I've gone up about 10-11k gold which is about 3k-4k more than usual. Currently sitting at level 137.
I feel like I have played a little more than I would have with having to complete weekly quests and dailies. I used to get lazy and wait 3 days and then remember I had to get on to quickly do them and they'd be done in a few games.
I'm excited to see what new things they could put into the rewards track next season!
Always cool to see your concepts here in the forums! Also, bonus points for making this in GIMP. That program can be really annoying from time to time.
It's been a while since I did something in regards to UI/UX, but here are some of my thoughts:
Guilds
I don't think you need an extra button for that on the Main Screen. You already have the tab in your Diary screen, as you've shown in one of your concepts. If you do want one on the Main Screen, I think turning the icon into a play coin/token that's similar to the shop icon could be a good idea.
Guild Home Screen: Due to its current size, some of the finer lines in the banner disappear, so I'd suggest to make it bigger/the main focus on the screen, and have a smaller space for the text and a smaller font (I think most people wouldn't need that much space to explain their guilds). Also, maybe keep the "stone coin" for the background of the icon? That way you could have some consistency with the other icons (BG, Duels, Shop to some extend,...) AND have customizable banners.
Maybe add a Screen that shows all members? You could click on their icons and get redirected to their Stats tab. Maybe you could even add little crown icons on their stats, and show who's got the most wins etc. in that way?
Rankings: Maybe have it look a bit more similar to the layout of the stats tab? Like, a 2x2 system?
Tournament
I like the idea of adding a Tournament Decks Page to the profile. But there is a bit of a problem: Player A sees Player Bs Decks, and builds his Line Up around those. The rest of the participants doe the same. Now, what if Player B changes his Decks last minute? He could directly counter their Decks and have an inherent advantage. On the other hand, if the chosen decks are locked, the first player to choose their decks are at a disadvantage, because the rest would simply build a line up that counters theirs. The only way I could come up with to prevent this, is to make these pages accessible after you picked and locked your decks... which would make the page kinda pointless? idk
I like the Icon for the Mode. Fits pretty well!
Tournament Mode Screen: Make the font a bit smaller and you're good to go (btw: I think adding fine black borders could look good, but I know how weird and unintuitive text borders in GIMP are).
Match-Up Screen: This one needs more work. Like, you have multiple buttons (Inspect/Review) that do the same, looking at deck lists, when you could simply have one that does that. Then there's a couple of layout choices that I find weird. For example: Why are the banners where they are and not next to the teams name?
Here's my Idea: Maybe repurpose the Deckbuilding Screen. You know, the one were you can pick between premade lists or make your own. The first 3 slots are your Line Up, and the "create new deck" button gets replaced with one that switches to the opponent's decks. And since it's the same layout like the Deckbuilding Screen, you don't need an "inspect" button, because the list will already be displayed on the right side. The "ban" button would be there where the "pick deck" button would be. Also, the last Screen (the one with Key Cards) is a neat idea, but it absolutely doesn't look like HS.
That's about it with my nagging! ;)
I love when people take time out of their day and come up with fun custom ideas for the games they like! To dabble into the different aspects of game design, and to get some experience and newfound appreciation through that,... really cool!
Thank you for reading!
Guilds
- You're probably right about not having an extra button. The reason the Guild button exists is so that players could know that the diary is something for them personally, whereas the Guild button encompasses the Guild. The reason I used the diary tab is because it's already a readily available asset in Hearthstone. God UI is hard. - The stone coin background is a good idea. I probably should have also resized the "Guild Pages" on the screen so I could have more room to work with, but hindsight is 20/20. - I wanted to actually put player profile images in the "Player Highlights" section but I couldn't decide to use battle.net images or just random pieces of minion art. I had originally thought of making the icon Hearthstone only, and making them unlockable via guild achievements. raid rewards, and maybe Tournament rewards. Like if the guild had a self handicap of only running Highlander decks, the members could use Highlander card icons as their picture. Along with that, the ability to see your mates' profile, but that was scrapped early since there's not much to the player profile anyway. - The rankings goes back to my lack of not making the page bigger.
If it were up to me, the entire Guild system would be located in something as grand and large as the collection manager where you can browse pages of you Guildmates' stats and such, but you know, hindsight.
Tournament
- So your first point has a lot in it and that's because of my lack of explaining how the mode works in its' entirety, so let me try from the Tournament screen. - - Tournament mode set up similar to ladder, you go against one opponent at a time. It's not something like BG's where a lobby exists. - - Decks are built before hand and only that player can their decks, even between Guild members to prevent sabotage. - - So when the players come to the Ban Phase, that's their first look at what they're up against, this is also their chance to increase their chances of winning. If player A has three decks that utilize weapons, he'll be more geared towards banning that opponent's deck that runs Kobold Stickyfinger. This is a very important stage in the set up since this could singlehandedly decide the tournament before it even starts. - Thanks! I wanted to have something reminiscent of TGT, so it was a nice fit. - I agree about the font size, and I think I just forgot about the black border. After staring at these assets for so long you kind of forget the scale of everything when compared to one another. - You're last point I think was a bit explained above how all the decks are made beforehand. Maybe the Key Cards thing can be changed out.
Thank you again for reading! And thank you even more for the feedback!
Well i would realy like some sort of implementation of Guilds. Sound realy interesting and would have lots of potential on how to progress within the Game and stuff.
And didn't Dean Ayala mention something about thinking to implement some sort of Guild Feature? So i guess they are already thinking about it.
He did mention it, and after making this mock-up I can see how much work the UI designers have to do to make everything simple and appealing. That's probably the largest challenge of anything in Hearthstone.
It's not original, but I think Odd Demon hunter is arguably the most competitive DH archetype in Wild currently. It's a low-curve list that typically tops out at Leeroy or maybe the three drop that draws a card and gives you 4 attack if you play the drawn card. I haven't played this deck much recently at all.
For fun(!) I recently have been playing a variant of WowHobbs' (streamer) DH list. I found it on D0nkey (website that gathers streamers' decks). I don't have all the cards he uses, but it's sort of a "Big"/memes archetype. His list emphasizes end of turn mechanics with the big DH demons and disruption cards like Glide and Lorewalker Cho. It lacks survivability and gets steamrolled by most meta Wild aggro decks and many meta Wild control decks, too. The deck is classic Hobbs, so it's just for fun - and when you manage to steal a win it feels excellent. Fun for meming at a rank floor (I am hard stuck in the Diamond 4-5 range with this sort of deck), but not great for grinding DH wins if that's your goal.
I took the Pure Prelate list for a spin last night - only had time for one game but it was a wild one (pun possibly intended)! I didn't have all the cards, so I took it in a more Libram oriented direction. I built a huge Lynessa at the endgame (it works as advertised in the deck guide!), but all my prelates got silenced or transformed by my opponent who was an elemental/Reno mage who kept discovering devolving missiles thanks to some "created by" shenanigans. In the end they Brann Bronzebearded out multiple Jan'alai, the Dragonhawk and Ragnaros the Firelord and eventually the fireballs went face.
I'll admit, I wasn't the first to use Fading Memories but I was surprised how well it works.
Also with cards like The Box and Passage Unearned, they both are really good but tend to brick your hand a lot, feeling like you spend the game with less cards than your opponent. All worth it for the blowout play though! 😉
Draklorn may work in a more midrange-y deck but it is a bit of a board hog
13th March update: FCBoogax's Renolock: Tickatus fiesta vs Jade Clown Druid!
How many times is it fair to play Tickatus against Jade Druid? 1? 2? 3? A cool Renolock deck from FCBoogax! Also, loving the inclusion of Sludge Belcher! :-)
I've been reading up on some forums, and I felt the need to say this because nobody seems to understand: data is expensive. You can't just "save all the data in a bunch of data centres" because that costs too much. A 1 terabyte hard drive already runs upwards of $140, and you also have to pay for security and bandwidth and a whole bunch of stuff. If people could save their data everywhere, then they would.
EDIT: Should probably point out that I don't work in IT. My knowledge comes from my friends that do.
Relatively speaking, data storage isn't that expensive, neither is bandwidth, compute sure as hell is though.
It is cheaper, in the long run, to run your own drives and hardware RAID in a couple of different places if we're just talking about files, but you're better off using an object store like Amazon's AWS S3. They worry about all the stuff that can go wrong and your data is built with the loss of two data centers in mind. (The odds of 3 data centers losing the same files in three places at the same time? I'll take that risk). Even with that in mind though, anything critical you are storing on S3 you should also mirror somewhere else. It could be an on-premises NAS or Google / Azure clouds - never trust a single service.
If you need a database though, that's when things can get pricy. Depending on the workloads you're dealing with, you're going to need comparable hardware in your second location if you want to do a real-time replica (which ensures little to no data loss when the primary fails). You'll also need to do backups (at least daily) to dump into storage but storage itself is cheap so that's not a big deal.
If your business relies on its data, it is in your best interest to make sure you can recover when a failure happens. Failures are ALWAYS a when and not if situation. You can be as proactive as you want but even that is not enough to give you a 100% guarantee that you are safe. If a business can't afford the cost to make regular backups of their essential data, I don't think they're doing a very good job as a business.
The only thing that Out of Cards doesn't have is the ability to instantly switch the site onto a fresh set of hardware. There would be some downtime involved since our compute isn't distributed. I don't consider it essential at this point, though it would be nice, because we're talking about a relatively small amount of downtime. I'd prefer us to have zero, but that's a spot I'm willing to penny-pinch on for now.
I'm still on the search for the best version of Lissandra with Draklorn Inquisitor. I was lucky enough to make the Draklorn prismatic, and Kindly Tavernkeeper as well, so I want a deck with both of them in it (alongside a prismatic Liss, maybe? Need more essence for that...).
On the subject of your deck, I did not think of using Fading Memories to chain-summon a bunch of Ice Pillars. I also forgot The Box exists; I slotted in one copy of Passage Unearned for Sand Soldiers and the like, but haven't had a chance to utilize it too much.
I love that I’m not the only one who immediately thought of Umbra + Recurring Villain with that Rogue Quest! I may actually craft it again just to try that list or one similar to it once the patch drops.
Or maybe right now. It already works as is I guess.
Weekend Wild Hearthstone Decks - Pure Paladin, Mill Rogue, Spiteful Quest Shaman, and More!
This is extreme jank, but with the new Overlord Runthak, it's technically possible to handbuff Recurring Villain then play it with Spiritsinger Umbra to instantly complete the quest. This combo is actually just playable with any class, now that i think about it.
[Game] Card Treasure Hunt (The Resurrection Attempt)
Plague Scientist
Guilds and Tournament Mode, A Hearthstone Concept
Tournaments and 2v2 need to be in Hearthstone. The community has been begging for it, for years and if Mythgard and Runeterra can do so then why not Hearthstone?
[Game] Card Treasure Hunt (The Resurrection Attempt)
Shado-Pan Rider?
In The Frame: Empires of the Ascended Concept Art
This is the kind of stuff that urges me to try drawing. These concepts are so excellent that I wanna start trying my own.
Buzzard Miracle Hunter
Alec Dawson said that the unnerfs will happen with the 20.0 patch, which will be 1-2 weeks before the rotation and new expansion. A little bit of time for Buzzard to shine!
Weekend Wild Hearthstone Decks - Pure Paladin, Mill Rogue, Spiteful Quest Shaman, and More!
I love Lynessa Sunsorrow. One of my favorites. Been messing with that card since it came out. Using it in every kind of Paladin deck I could. One of my favorites was the dragon version using Dragonkin Sorcerer and Sound the Bells!. Always surprises people. It's great to see I'm not the only one using it. Gotta get Lady Liadrin though.
Buzzard Miracle Hunter
The only problem I see with this deck is that by the time starving buzzard gets buffed, he'll be in wild.
[Game] Card Treasure Hunt (The Resurrection Attempt)
Both wrong.
Hint:
Bigger hint:
Fun at the Crossroads
I have been visiting that page. It may be a visual bug. I am mainly curious if this is happening to anyone else.
*edit* it started working normally today.
Rewards Track: Current progress
Summary of the first Rewards Track for me: It definitly has worked out better for gaining gold per expansion. I've gone up about 10-11k gold which is about 3k-4k more than usual. Currently sitting at level 137.
I feel like I have played a little more than I would have with having to complete weekly quests and dailies. I used to get lazy and wait 3 days and then remember I had to get on to quickly do them and they'd be done in a few games.
I'm excited to see what new things they could put into the rewards track next season!
[Game] Card Treasure Hunt (The Resurrection Attempt)
Because it's not a class card at all?
Silver Hand Knight
Guilds and Tournament Mode, A Hearthstone Concept
Thank you for reading!
Guilds
- You're probably right about not having an extra button. The reason the Guild button exists is so that players could know that the diary is something for them personally, whereas the Guild button encompasses the Guild. The reason I used the diary tab is because it's already a readily available asset in Hearthstone. God UI is hard.
- The stone coin background is a good idea. I probably should have also resized the "Guild Pages" on the screen so I could have more room to work with, but hindsight is 20/20.
- I wanted to actually put player profile images in the "Player Highlights" section but I couldn't decide to use battle.net images or just random pieces of minion art. I had originally thought of making the icon Hearthstone only, and making them unlockable via guild achievements. raid rewards, and maybe Tournament rewards. Like if the guild had a self handicap of only running Highlander decks, the members could use Highlander card icons as their picture. Along with that, the ability to see your mates' profile, but that was scrapped early since there's not much to the player profile anyway.
- The rankings goes back to my lack of not making the page bigger.
If it were up to me, the entire Guild system would be located in something as grand and large as the collection manager where you can browse pages of you Guildmates' stats and such, but you know, hindsight.
Tournament
- So your first point has a lot in it and that's because of my lack of explaining how the mode works in its' entirety, so let me try from the Tournament screen.
- - Tournament mode set up similar to ladder, you go against one opponent at a time. It's not something like BG's where a lobby exists.
- - Decks are built before hand and only that player can their decks, even between Guild members to prevent sabotage.
- - So when the players come to the Ban Phase, that's their first look at what they're up against, this is also their chance to increase their chances of winning. If player A has three decks that utilize weapons, he'll be more geared towards banning that opponent's deck that runs Kobold Stickyfinger. This is a very important stage in the set up since this could singlehandedly decide the tournament before it even starts.
- Thanks! I wanted to have something reminiscent of TGT, so it was a nice fit.
- I agree about the font size, and I think I just forgot about the black border. After staring at these assets for so long you kind of forget the scale of everything when compared to one another.
- You're last point I think was a bit explained above how all the decks are made beforehand. Maybe the Key Cards thing can be changed out.
Thank you again for reading! And thank you even more for the feedback!
Guilds and Tournament Mode, A Hearthstone Concept
He did mention it, and after making this mock-up I can see how much work the UI designers have to do to make everything simple and appealing. That's probably the largest challenge of anything in Hearthstone.
Weekend Wild Hearthstone Decks - Pure Paladin, Mill Rogue, Spiteful Quest Shaman, and More!
It's not original, but I think Odd Demon hunter is arguably the most competitive DH archetype in Wild currently. It's a low-curve list that typically tops out at Leeroy or maybe the three drop that draws a card and gives you 4 attack if you play the drawn card. I haven't played this deck much recently at all.
For fun(!) I recently have been playing a variant of WowHobbs' (streamer) DH list. I found it on D0nkey (website that gathers streamers' decks). I don't have all the cards he uses, but it's sort of a "Big"/memes archetype. His list emphasizes end of turn mechanics with the big DH demons and disruption cards like Glide and Lorewalker Cho. It lacks survivability and gets steamrolled by most meta Wild aggro decks and many meta Wild control decks, too. The deck is classic Hobbs, so it's just for fun - and when you manage to steal a win it feels excellent. Fun for meming at a rank floor (I am hard stuck in the Diamond 4-5 range with this sort of deck), but not great for grinding DH wins if that's your goal.
Hope these are helpful.
Weekend Wild Hearthstone Decks - Pure Paladin, Mill Rogue, Spiteful Quest Shaman, and More!
I took the Pure Prelate list for a spin last night - only had time for one game but it was a wild one (pun possibly intended)! I didn't have all the cards, so I took it in a more Libram oriented direction. I built a huge Lynessa at the endgame (it works as advertised in the deck guide!), but all my prelates got silenced or transformed by my opponent who was an elemental/Reno mage who kept discovering devolving missiles thanks to some "created by" shenanigans. In the end they Brann Bronzebearded out multiple Jan'alai, the Dragonhawk and Ragnaros the Firelord and eventually the fireballs went face.
Will definitely play some more.
Lissandra & Trundle Watcher Deck List and Guide - Runeterra Deck Spotlight
I'll admit, I wasn't the first to use Fading Memories but I was surprised how well it works.
Also with cards like The Box and Passage Unearned, they both are really good but tend to brick your hand a lot, feeling like you spend the game with less cards than your opponent. All worth it for the blowout play though! 😉
Draklorn may work in a more midrange-y deck but it is a bit of a board hog
Darkseeker's channel - 13th November update: KOtsosKOtsos' Reno Evolve Shudderwock Shaman - ft. Archivist Elysiana
13th March update: FCBoogax's Renolock: Tickatus fiesta vs Jade Clown Druid!
How many times is it fair to play Tickatus against Jade Druid? 1? 2? 3?
A cool Renolock deck from FCBoogax! Also, loving the inclusion of Sludge Belcher! :-)
Deck code: AAEBAf0GHtwGxAj+DYEOjg7DFoUX4KwC2LsCl8EC3sQC38QC58sC8tACl9MC6OcCw+oCnPgCoIADoaED/KMDnakD66wDxLkD1rkDlc0D184DzuED9uMDkuQDAAA=
https://youtu.be/nK6q35Shk2Y
Rewards Track: Current progress
Congratss! That is a damn high milestone!
I will try to get to 200 myself and see how much I open this expansion :) also saving classic Packs for golden cards. Crossing my fingers for Rag
Weekend Wild Hearthstone Decks - Pure Paladin, Mill Rogue, Spiteful Quest Shaman, and More!
I'm looking for inspiration or suggestion for a wild demon hunter's list, anyone ?
Out of Cards Incident Report - 2021-03-10
Relatively speaking, data storage isn't that expensive, neither is bandwidth, compute sure as hell is though.
It is cheaper, in the long run, to run your own drives and hardware RAID in a couple of different places if we're just talking about files, but you're better off using an object store like Amazon's AWS S3. They worry about all the stuff that can go wrong and your data is built with the loss of two data centers in mind. (The odds of 3 data centers losing the same files in three places at the same time? I'll take that risk). Even with that in mind though, anything critical you are storing on S3 you should also mirror somewhere else. It could be an on-premises NAS or Google / Azure clouds - never trust a single service.
If you need a database though, that's when things can get pricy. Depending on the workloads you're dealing with, you're going to need comparable hardware in your second location if you want to do a real-time replica (which ensures little to no data loss when the primary fails). You'll also need to do backups (at least daily) to dump into storage but storage itself is cheap so that's not a big deal.
If your business relies on its data, it is in your best interest to make sure you can recover when a failure happens. Failures are ALWAYS a when and not if situation. You can be as proactive as you want but even that is not enough to give you a 100% guarantee that you are safe. If a business can't afford the cost to make regular backups of their essential data, I don't think they're doing a very good job as a business.
The only thing that Out of Cards doesn't have is the ability to instantly switch the site onto a fresh set of hardware. There would be some downtime involved since our compute isn't distributed. I don't consider it essential at this point, though it would be nice, because we're talking about a relatively small amount of downtime. I'd prefer us to have zero, but that's a spot I'm willing to penny-pinch on for now.
In an ideal setup, Out of Cards would be distributed in a few locations and we'd run Chaos Monkey.
https://github.com/Netflix/chaosmonkey
I've always wanted to run infrastructure with that running.
[Game] Card Treasure Hunt (The Resurrection Attempt)
Murloc Knight
Lissandra & Trundle Watcher Deck List and Guide - Runeterra Deck Spotlight
I'm still on the search for the best version of Lissandra with Draklorn Inquisitor. I was lucky enough to make the Draklorn prismatic, and Kindly Tavernkeeper as well, so I want a deck with both of them in it (alongside a prismatic Liss, maybe? Need more essence for that...).
On the subject of your deck, I did not think of using Fading Memories to chain-summon a bunch of Ice Pillars. I also forgot The Box exists; I slotted in one copy of Passage Unearned for Sand Soldiers and the like, but haven't had a chance to utilize it too much.
Looking Back at the Most Popular & Impactful Decks Used in the Masters Tour Ironforge Qualifiers
There is nothing more thematic for Shaman than Barrens, so our time should come soon... I hope. And not on the back of random evolving.
Weekend Wild Hearthstone Decks - Pure Paladin, Mill Rogue, Spiteful Quest Shaman, and More!
I love that I’m not the only one who immediately thought of Umbra + Recurring Villain with that Rogue Quest! I may actually craft it again just to try that list or one similar to it once the patch drops.
Or maybe right now. It already works as is I guess.