I'm in the middle of a Turalyon run right now, and experienced two empty buckets (i.e. an empty bucket with no name, and one intentionally empty "no more" bucket) and I played against someone with Robes of Gaudiness (though I guess maybe they started their run before the fix?). Seems like this isn't really resolved yet.
It's explicitly early access, so everyone playing obviously knows they're effectively beta testers. They have weeks to tweak and/or fix it before it really needs to be ready for prime time.
Honestly, this interview, at least as far as the new progression system is concerned, is just piecemeal. There's plenty of nice statements, but it kinda feels like they are trying very hard to put a nice little spin before exposing us to reality. If its supposed to be a positive move, why not be more transparent and just let us see the entire 50 levels (I think this is the cap) of progression and its rewards. Of course, I'm not discounting any possibilities that this can actually end up better than we feared.
What really concerns me is the introduction of new 35 cards mid expansion. Kinda feels like trying to shoehorn in mini-expansions to make more money. At very least they're not doing the same shit as with Galakrond's awakening where a mandatory 20 bucks is required to just stay on par with others. There's obviously more than a few implications, like do you buy as many packs as you can at launch, then save up for the mid expansion, thereby jeopardizing your savings for the next expansion? It won't surprise me one bit if there's a convenient bundle sold at 20 bucks just right after the mid-expansion launches; we need only pray that they are packs from the current expansion.
One last thing I got from the interview;
Over the course of an expansion how many "10 golds" do you get? I don't know. But now, you can actually see how may packs, how much gold, et cetera that you end up getting.
I think that's a subtle hint that that 10 gold every 3 wins is kaput in the new system.
But until they release the full progression, or until 12 Nov when we find out for ourselves, I guess we will never know.
I think the problem with randomness in hearthstone is the amount of variance.
Back when i played yugioh before i quit when they introduced pends i would play one single deck. A randomness deck. This deck would include cards like:
You get the point. Basically a deck designed to be as annoying to play against and luck dependent as possible to win with or win against. And it was fun to play. But do you see the difference? On each of these cards me and my opponent know the outcome of every effect. It's either one thing or another. That's why cards like First Day of School and Magic Trick, i think aren't as oppressive as say Primordial Glyph(excluding magic trick into Evocation obviously) I never had an opponent concede against me out of pure frustration when i played many games with this yugioh deck. That is because me and my opponent knew the odds, and the die rolls or coin flips weren't in either of our favor. Or if they were locked out by particular effects like Tour of Doom or Fairy Box they knew they had potential draws that would negate these effects. But in hearthstone it's different. The amount of variance you can bring forth just by a 1/1 minion that was randomly generated off another minion that discover's a spell, is ridiculous, and there is nothing your opponent can do to limit that effect.
Walk the Plank is considered a joke card to many people that play hearthstone, but i doubt there's not a single person that has fought against a lackey rogue, that hasn't had their lackey rogue opponent discovere it from a randomly generated witchey lackey and won the game off it. The variance is too high.
TL;DR: Variance in hearthstone is a good thing, but not when it causes you to lose to factors out of both player's control. In the future they should either limit discover effects ala Magic Trick to limited card pools, or introduce cards which counter discover mechanics.(if your opponent is holding cards that weren't in their deck originally destroy them or something of the like.)
I just played a few games against 3 friends today (they all had the Challenge a friend quest) and after none of these games my quest log has been updated.
I had 2 50 gold quests "play 30 cards" and "destroy 25 minions" but there was no quest progress -> still 0/30 and 0/25.
Is it bugged? Has anyone else experienced this phenomenon yet?
Before, you would get 10 gold per 3 wins, but how many times did you actually get that during an expansion?
I don't care, i just know that i always manage to save 9k gold between expansions. So as long as i keep getting my 9k, i'm ok with this new system. If i get only half of this, i'm quitting the game for good.
I did specifically say competitive ladder for a reason there. It's the ultimate judge of the complete card pool, with wild actually serving that purpose even better than standard.
You mentioned Arena several times, and here's the thing about Arena - when you artificially limit the card pool to only a certain subset of all cards, some cards are still worse than others, but some otherwise-unplayable cards become playable, solely because the best cards are excluded from the format. Thus, as you mentioned, a Bloodfen Raptor could be ok, when (say) Crackling Razormaw, Huge Toad, Furious Felfin, Faerie Dragon, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Sightless Watcher, and Fallen Hero are all excluded from the format (I have no idea what the current format is, but I know for a fact that Arena is curated to be a limited card pool). I also picked only cards with the same cost and stats as Bloodfen Raptor. And every single card listed is strictly better than it, but if all other 2 cost 3/2 cards are unavailable, sure, Bloodfen Raptor might be pickable.
That's the thing about limited formats. They artificially raise the value of bad cards by excluding good ones from the pool of options. That's why I specifically referred to competitive ladder format - that is the only way to determine which cards are actually the best cards.
Anyways, this doesn't really have much to do with randomness, but it was still interesting to discuss.
I can't wait to see all out and try it myself. I care little about comsetics, but a lot about daily quest's gold. I should start a spreadsheet to check how much gold I will be making with the new system.
Corrupt really feels like the original Old Gods were you had "transformed" minions into twisted-more powerful beings, but done in a refined more interesting way.
So 22 packs or so assuming you already filled out the commons/rares of the set before miniset release.
Or buy less packs and perhaps just craft any missing rares (and epics/legendaries of course) you feel are needed with dust which is probably what I'll do. It's great we can do that rather than uncraftable cards behind a PVE content paywall.
But consider saving pack rewards from end of season and XP progression for the miniset release if you can.
Hopefully the above doesn't imply you don't get any gold for 3 wins anymore - over an expansion cycle it can add up. Then again if we get more gold overall anyway I won't miss it much. It was kinda handy to get that last 10g for a pack/arena run etc though.
Will be interesting to see the rarity distribution of the miniset. Perhaps it will be the same as Galakrond's Awakening. I need to have an idea of how many packs to save for it's release so I can fill in the new commons/rares at least.
Shifting the meta drastically is great for keeping things fresh like the say. It does make crafting cards more risky though ahead of it's release as what can be safe crafts suddenly aren't anymore. But then what's the point if you don't want to play in a stale meta anymore. So overall a good thing? Plus more card reveals yay! :)
I'm still overjoyed about achievements - it's one of things I wanted to have most.
Hearthstone often called an RNG fiesta, and the prevailing wisdom is that it takes less skill to play than other TCGs/CCGs because of it. I’m not here to argue whether HS, MtG, LoR etc. is the more skilful since as far as I know the concept of ‘skill’ cannot be quantified, so we’d be stuck using opinions and gut feelings which get us nowhere.
No, the purpose of this thread is to make the case that RNG, in HS as well as other (card) games, should not be regarded with the surface-level analysis that it usually receives. Namely: “you have less control of the outcome, therefore that outcome requires less skill”. To escape the ever-present debate of whether RNG in deck order counts, I'll focus more on randomness outside of card games, which helps shed a different light on things.
Chess and ‘the bamboozle play’
Show Spoiler
I start with chess: a board game where 1 player goes up against another in a fair, zero-RNG battle of wits and planning. Well, no RNG except for who gets to go first anyway. In a sense we can view chess like a card game mirror match where both players’ decks start on the board. At every point in the game you know exactly what you are up against and you know exactly how every piece is going to behave.
In such a deterministic environment you can plan several turns ahead, working out what you want to do, how you want to do it, and devising counter-plays for your opponent’s inevitable counter-plays. It’s all very skilful… if you are a good player and that description applies to you. I am not a good chess player: I know the rules, but I’m not interested enough in the game to invest the time and effort to make chess a skill of mine. Because of this, I know that if I play against a good player, my odds of winning are very small (which frankly acts as a deterrent against me wanting to play the game, and is certainly a good argument for why HS has so much RNG: to let bad players still enjoy it. But I digress).
However, while I know I’m bad at playing chess conventionally, I also know I can help even the odds by reducing my opponent’s ability too. Which brings me to what I call ‘the bamboozle play’. The idea is simple: do something the opponent won’t expect yet doesn’t do you any harm either. Often this involves moving a piece that still leaves all your key pieces protected but has no influence on the current points of tension on the board. I basically pick a piece at random and as long as it can do something safe I’m happy to move it.
The upshot of the bamboozle play is that it leaves the opponent unsure what I’m going to do, thereby negating a lot of their advantage in being able to predict future turns. The bamboozle play itself is not especially skilful; yes, I must know the rules well enough to know what is safe to do, but it doesn’t go a whole lot deeper than that. However, the very idea of the bamboozle play is quite skilful since it is designed specifically to counter my main disadvantage.
Thus, by feeding a bit of randomness into how I play, I am a more skilful player than I would be without it. Of course I could choose to be even more skilful by actually learning to play chess properly, but I have better things to do than that.
The genius of Monte Carlo simulations
Show Spoiler
Moving away from games, let’s talk about using RNG in a serious setting: to run scientific simulations and therefore better understand the world around us. The simulations in question, named after the casinos in the city of Monte Carlo (so it’s got some connection to card games through that at least), choose to ignore the known equations provided by mathematics and/or physics in favour of generating a heck of a lot of random numbers instead.
Perhaps the simplest example is calculating the value of the mathematical constant pi (i.e. the pi in the area of a circle = pi * r^2). The way to do this is to snugly put a circle inside a square so the circle’s diameter is equal to the square’s width, 2r = w, and then fire randomly generated vectors at it, each landing at a position (x,y) inside the square. Do this a lot of times, then at the end count what fraction of those vectors landed inside the circle. That will equal the ratio of circle area to square area (pi*(r/w)^2 = pi/4), so multiply it by 4 et voila! You have calculated pi!
You can do much more sophisticated things than this, and I personally have a lot of experience in running Monte Carlo simulations of polymers or swimming bacteria which need to interact in complex ways through the fluid they are in. Each random number does something that has no physical meaning, but real physics can be made to come out if you generate enough of them in the right way.
The point is that RNG can be extremely clever at a statistical level, but that only becomes apparent after a long time. If you focus on individual random numbers, then it looks uncontrolled and you might mistake the end result as an accident of chance when it is in fact just as likely to happen as if you used deterministic equations to get there.
Relating these to Hearthstone
Show Spoiler
Now to bring things back to RNG in HS.
The bamboozle play can be most easily related to random card generation, letting you do something the opponent won’t expect and plan for. That could be entirely accidental, which is often the case with casting a random spell or summoning a random minion, in which case it is probably not skill or wisdom that led you to do it. Even here though there are examples where it does involve skill, e.g. recognising your only path to victory lies in summoning a taunt.
The discover keyword provides the cleanest demonstration of this ‘bamboozle skill’. There are at least 3 tiers of skill here: 1) you just pick randomly; 2) you pick the card that best suits your deck; 3) you pick the card that best suits your deck while also acting as a counter to the opponent. There’s a lot of knowledge and understanding that goes into making the right choice.
Ultimately, I think the middle ground random card generation (i.e. it goes into your hand, but you don’t have any choice in what card it is) hides the most skill of these three. Being able to work out a good use for a card that has no obvious use arguably shows more skill than following the same old game-plan with a low RNG deck. That comparison can be debated; I’m just pointing out there’s an argument for it.
Monte Carlo’s relation to RNG in Hearthstone is usually one of win rates rather than individual games. Put succinctly, you play the random effects that statistically improve your odds of winning, even if each individual effect looks uncontrolled. The entire reason RNG makes it into strong decks is statistical, and the people who worked out the RNG cards were good (I’m not looking at you netdeckers!) were the skilled players that saw past the variance… OK, and deck-trackers build the statistics for them so they only actually need to know that a larger number is good. But that diminishment of skill is down to the deck-trackers and HS websites, not the game design itself.
Ultimately, a player’s skill in any game is just a measure of how well they can navigate the environment they are given. You can be great at chess but hopeless in HS and vice versa, not so much because one game requires more skill than the other, but because the two games require a different set of skills. To comment on the amount of RNG in HS is to comment on the game environment, not the skill it takes to play it well.
To round things off I’m going to make a comment regarding Burgle Rogue (which has long been my favourite archetype and I am therefore very biased). Given my preference for the bamboozle play in chess, it is perhaps obvious that I would gravitate to a deck whose main win condition is to bamboozle the opponent into submission by doing it so much that statistics shine through within a single game. I guess all I really want is for people to recognise that there’s a lot more skill and planning going on than it looks like when you meet me on ladder and I beat you up with an Animated Avalanche in a deck with no elementals in it.
Tl;dr: seriously? If you really want 1500 words condensed into a single sentence I guess I’ll repeat this: To comment on the amount of RNG in HS is to comment on the game environment, not the skill it takes to play it well.
What I really like most about N'Zoth, God of the Deep is that it gets to be different for different classes. There are certainly some decent neutral elementals and dragons you might be happy to slot into any Darkmoon N'Zoth deck, but that's a lot less likely for other types, and many classes have class minions that are likely to be preferable over those neutrals.
By contrast, a lot of Old Gods N'Zoth decks rely on powerful neutral deathrattles like Sludge Belcher, Khartut Defender, and Sylvanas Windrunner (with only an occasional strong class deathrattle). That package can be slotted into any class, which is nice, but it also makes Old Gods N'Zoth less interesting.
On one hand, this looks like good fun and a nice callback to the original Yogg. On the other hand, nobody wants the game to end out of nowhere due to an unfortunate Rod of Roasting.
If I play a 10 mana card and someone doesnt die from it, I are dissapoint
Lunar Eclipse and Solar Eclipse are both really good, but maybe not good enough to auto-include into any Druid deck. On the other hand, tossing one card in that generates the value of both Eclipse spells seems great as the 30th card in a lot of value-oriented Druid decks.
Seems generically good most of the time, and dramatically better than the original Yogg Saron since many of the effects allow for some level of player control.
C'Thun, the Shattered seems like it will be really powerful in Druid, where tons of cards care about holding and playing 5 drop spells, and card draw is widely available.
Hearthstone Hotfixes - Robes of Gaudiness Removed From Duels, Loot Buckets Fixed for Turalyon
I'm in the middle of a Turalyon run right now, and experienced two empty buckets (i.e. an empty bucket with no name, and one intentionally empty "no more" bucket) and I played against someone with Robes of Gaudiness (though I guess maybe they started their run before the fix?). Seems like this isn't really resolved yet.
Quest Trading - Play A Friend!
Battletag: Zeedrome#done
Region: NA
Trade only?: Yes. You go first. I can show proof of my quest
Hearthstone Hotfixes - Robes of Gaudiness Removed From Duels, Loot Buckets Fixed for Turalyon
It's explicitly early access, so everyone playing obviously knows they're effectively beta testers. They have weeks to tweak and/or fix it before it really needs to be ready for prime time.
Hearthstone Hotfixes - Robes of Gaudiness Removed From Duels, Loot Buckets Fixed for Turalyon
They did it to give you something obvious to complain about, and you took the bait hard.
Hearthstone's Liv Breeden and Cora Georgiou Talk Darkmoon Faire, Balance, Progression, Duels, and More!
Honestly, this interview, at least as far as the new progression system is concerned, is just piecemeal. There's plenty of nice statements, but it kinda feels like they are trying very hard to put a nice little spin before exposing us to reality. If its supposed to be a positive move, why not be more transparent and just let us see the entire 50 levels (I think this is the cap) of progression and its rewards. Of course, I'm not discounting any possibilities that this can actually end up better than we feared.
What really concerns me is the introduction of new 35 cards mid expansion. Kinda feels like trying to shoehorn in mini-expansions to make more money. At very least they're not doing the same shit as with Galakrond's awakening where a mandatory 20 bucks is required to just stay on par with others. There's obviously more than a few implications, like do you buy as many packs as you can at launch, then save up for the mid expansion, thereby jeopardizing your savings for the next expansion? It won't surprise me one bit if there's a convenient bundle sold at 20 bucks just right after the mid-expansion launches; we need only pray that they are packs from the current expansion.
One last thing I got from the interview;
I think that's a subtle hint that that 10 gold every 3 wins is kaput in the new system.
But until they release the full progression, or until 12 Nov when we find out for ourselves, I guess we will never know.
RNG vs skill: a false competition
I think the problem with randomness in hearthstone is the amount of variance.
Back when i played yugioh before i quit when they introduced pends i would play one single deck. A randomness deck. This deck would include cards like:
You get the point. Basically a deck designed to be as annoying to play against and luck dependent as possible to win with or win against. And it was fun to play. But do you see the difference? On each of these cards me and my opponent know the outcome of every effect. It's either one thing or another. That's why cards like First Day of School and Magic Trick, i think aren't as oppressive as say Primordial Glyph(excluding magic trick into Evocation obviously) I never had an opponent concede against me out of pure frustration when i played many games with this yugioh deck. That is because me and my opponent knew the odds, and the die rolls or coin flips weren't in either of our favor. Or if they were locked out by particular effects like Tour of Doom or Fairy Box they knew they had potential draws that would negate these effects. But in hearthstone it's different. The amount of variance you can bring forth just by a 1/1 minion that was randomly generated off another minion that discover's a spell, is ridiculous, and there is nothing your opponent can do to limit that effect.
Walk the Plank is considered a joke card to many people that play hearthstone, but i doubt there's not a single person that has fought against a lackey rogue, that hasn't had their lackey rogue opponent discovere it from a randomly generated witchey lackey and won the game off it. The variance is too high.
TL;DR: Variance in hearthstone is a good thing, but not when it causes you to lose to factors out of both player's control. In the future they should either limit discover effects ala Magic Trick to limited card pools, or introduce cards which counter discover mechanics.(if your opponent is holding cards that weren't in their deck originally destroy them or something of the like.)
New Druid Spell - Guess the Weight
Person with snake profile picture defends snake vore fetish art
Quest progress
Hey guys,
I just played a few games against 3 friends today (they all had the Challenge a friend quest) and after none of these games my quest log has been updated.
I had 2 50 gold quests "play 30 cards" and "destroy 25 minions" but there was no quest progress -> still 0/30 and 0/25.
Is it bugged? Has anyone else experienced this phenomenon yet?
Hearthstone Hotfixes - Robes of Gaudiness Removed From Duels, Loot Buckets Fixed for Turalyon
Releasing obviously broken stuff. What could go wrong? So players are being used as beta testers? No that's not true. Thats impossible!
Except they've been doing it for ages. But since so far it's casual mode so i guess theres no problem
Hearthstone's Liv Breeden and Cora Georgiou Talk Darkmoon Faire, Balance, Progression, Duels, and More!
I offered advice above. Usually mine is suspect.
Hearthstone's Liv Breeden and Cora Georgiou Talk Darkmoon Faire, Balance, Progression, Duels, and More!
I don't care, i just know that i always manage to save 9k gold between expansions. So as long as i keep getting my 9k, i'm ok with this new system. If i get only half of this, i'm quitting the game for good.
Madness at the Darkmoon Faire
I did specifically say competitive ladder for a reason there. It's the ultimate judge of the complete card pool, with wild actually serving that purpose even better than standard.
You mentioned Arena several times, and here's the thing about Arena - when you artificially limit the card pool to only a certain subset of all cards, some cards are still worse than others, but some otherwise-unplayable cards become playable, solely because the best cards are excluded from the format. Thus, as you mentioned, a Bloodfen Raptor could be ok, when (say) Crackling Razormaw, Huge Toad, Furious Felfin, Faerie Dragon, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Sightless Watcher, and Fallen Hero are all excluded from the format (I have no idea what the current format is, but I know for a fact that Arena is curated to be a limited card pool). I also picked only cards with the same cost and stats as Bloodfen Raptor. And every single card listed is strictly better than it, but if all other 2 cost 3/2 cards are unavailable, sure, Bloodfen Raptor might be pickable.
That's the thing about limited formats. They artificially raise the value of bad cards by excluding good ones from the pool of options. That's why I specifically referred to competitive ladder format - that is the only way to determine which cards are actually the best cards.
Anyways, this doesn't really have much to do with randomness, but it was still interesting to discuss.
Hearthstone's Liv Breeden and Cora Georgiou Talk Darkmoon Faire, Balance, Progression, Duels, and More!
I can't wait to see all out and try it myself. I care little about comsetics, but a lot about daily quest's gold. I should start a spreadsheet to check how much gold I will be making with the new system.
Corrupt really feels like the original Old Gods were you had "transformed" minions into twisted-more powerful beings, but done in a refined more interesting way.
Hearthstone's Liv Breeden and Cora Georgiou Talk Darkmoon Faire, Balance, Progression, Duels, and More!
OK if the same as GA I think it would be:
- 30 commons
- 24 rares
- 8 epics
- 4 legendaries
So 22 packs or so assuming you already filled out the commons/rares of the set before miniset release.
Or buy less packs and perhaps just craft any missing rares (and epics/legendaries of course) you feel are needed with dust which is probably what I'll do. It's great we can do that rather than uncraftable cards behind a PVE content paywall.
But consider saving pack rewards from end of season and XP progression for the miniset release if you can.
Hearthstone's Liv Breeden and Cora Georgiou Talk Darkmoon Faire, Balance, Progression, Duels, and More!
Hopefully the above doesn't imply you don't get any gold for 3 wins anymore - over an expansion cycle it can add up. Then again if we get more gold overall anyway I won't miss it much. It was kinda handy to get that last 10g for a pack/arena run etc though.
Will be interesting to see the rarity distribution of the miniset. Perhaps it will be the same as Galakrond's Awakening. I need to have an idea of how many packs to save for it's release so I can fill in the new commons/rares at least.
Shifting the meta drastically is great for keeping things fresh like the say. It does make crafting cards more risky though ahead of it's release as what can be safe crafts suddenly aren't anymore. But then what's the point if you don't want to play in a stale meta anymore. So overall a good thing? Plus more card reveals yay! :)
I'm still overjoyed about achievements - it's one of things I wanted to have most.
New Neutral Minion - N'Zoth, God of the Deep
A while back, I played around with a Menagerie Shudderwock deck in wild. This is perfect for it, and may actually make it close to viable. I like it.
RNG vs skill: a false competition
Hearthstone often called an RNG fiesta, and the prevailing wisdom is that it takes less skill to play than other TCGs/CCGs because of it. I’m not here to argue whether HS, MtG, LoR etc. is the more skilful since as far as I know the concept of ‘skill’ cannot be quantified, so we’d be stuck using opinions and gut feelings which get us nowhere.
No, the purpose of this thread is to make the case that RNG, in HS as well as other (card) games, should not be regarded with the surface-level analysis that it usually receives. Namely: “you have less control of the outcome, therefore that outcome requires less skill”. To escape the ever-present debate of whether RNG in deck order counts, I'll focus more on randomness outside of card games, which helps shed a different light on things.
Chess and ‘the bamboozle play’
I start with chess: a board game where 1 player goes up against another in a fair, zero-RNG battle of wits and planning. Well, no RNG except for who gets to go first anyway. In a sense we can view chess like a card game mirror match where both players’ decks start on the board. At every point in the game you know exactly what you are up against and you know exactly how every piece is going to behave.
In such a deterministic environment you can plan several turns ahead, working out what you want to do, how you want to do it, and devising counter-plays for your opponent’s inevitable counter-plays. It’s all very skilful… if you are a good player and that description applies to you. I am not a good chess player: I know the rules, but I’m not interested enough in the game to invest the time and effort to make chess a skill of mine. Because of this, I know that if I play against a good player, my odds of winning are very small (which frankly acts as a deterrent against me wanting to play the game, and is certainly a good argument for why HS has so much RNG: to let bad players still enjoy it. But I digress).
However, while I know I’m bad at playing chess conventionally, I also know I can help even the odds by reducing my opponent’s ability too. Which brings me to what I call ‘the bamboozle play’. The idea is simple: do something the opponent won’t expect yet doesn’t do you any harm either. Often this involves moving a piece that still leaves all your key pieces protected but has no influence on the current points of tension on the board. I basically pick a piece at random and as long as it can do something safe I’m happy to move it.
The upshot of the bamboozle play is that it leaves the opponent unsure what I’m going to do, thereby negating a lot of their advantage in being able to predict future turns. The bamboozle play itself is not especially skilful; yes, I must know the rules well enough to know what is safe to do, but it doesn’t go a whole lot deeper than that. However, the very idea of the bamboozle play is quite skilful since it is designed specifically to counter my main disadvantage.
Thus, by feeding a bit of randomness into how I play, I am a more skilful player than I would be without it. Of course I could choose to be even more skilful by actually learning to play chess properly, but I have better things to do than that.
The genius of Monte Carlo simulations
Moving away from games, let’s talk about using RNG in a serious setting: to run scientific simulations and therefore better understand the world around us. The simulations in question, named after the casinos in the city of Monte Carlo (so it’s got some connection to card games through that at least), choose to ignore the known equations provided by mathematics and/or physics in favour of generating a heck of a lot of random numbers instead.
Perhaps the simplest example is calculating the value of the mathematical constant pi (i.e. the pi in the area of a circle = pi * r^2). The way to do this is to snugly put a circle inside a square so the circle’s diameter is equal to the square’s width, 2r = w, and then fire randomly generated vectors at it, each landing at a position (x,y) inside the square. Do this a lot of times, then at the end count what fraction of those vectors landed inside the circle. That will equal the ratio of circle area to square area (pi*(r/w)^2 = pi/4), so multiply it by 4 et voila! You have calculated pi!
You can do much more sophisticated things than this, and I personally have a lot of experience in running Monte Carlo simulations of polymers or swimming bacteria which need to interact in complex ways through the fluid they are in. Each random number does something that has no physical meaning, but real physics can be made to come out if you generate enough of them in the right way.
The point is that RNG can be extremely clever at a statistical level, but that only becomes apparent after a long time. If you focus on individual random numbers, then it looks uncontrolled and you might mistake the end result as an accident of chance when it is in fact just as likely to happen as if you used deterministic equations to get there.
Relating these to Hearthstone
Now to bring things back to RNG in HS.
The bamboozle play can be most easily related to random card generation, letting you do something the opponent won’t expect and plan for. That could be entirely accidental, which is often the case with casting a random spell or summoning a random minion, in which case it is probably not skill or wisdom that led you to do it. Even here though there are examples where it does involve skill, e.g. recognising your only path to victory lies in summoning a taunt.
The discover keyword provides the cleanest demonstration of this ‘bamboozle skill’. There are at least 3 tiers of skill here: 1) you just pick randomly; 2) you pick the card that best suits your deck; 3) you pick the card that best suits your deck while also acting as a counter to the opponent. There’s a lot of knowledge and understanding that goes into making the right choice.
Ultimately, I think the middle ground random card generation (i.e. it goes into your hand, but you don’t have any choice in what card it is) hides the most skill of these three. Being able to work out a good use for a card that has no obvious use arguably shows more skill than following the same old game-plan with a low RNG deck. That comparison can be debated; I’m just pointing out there’s an argument for it.
Monte Carlo’s relation to RNG in Hearthstone is usually one of win rates rather than individual games. Put succinctly, you play the random effects that statistically improve your odds of winning, even if each individual effect looks uncontrolled. The entire reason RNG makes it into strong decks is statistical, and the people who worked out the RNG cards were good (I’m not looking at you netdeckers!) were the skilled players that saw past the variance… OK, and deck-trackers build the statistics for them so they only actually need to know that a larger number is good. But that diminishment of skill is down to the deck-trackers and HS websites, not the game design itself.
Ultimately, a player’s skill in any game is just a measure of how well they can navigate the environment they are given. You can be great at chess but hopeless in HS and vice versa, not so much because one game requires more skill than the other, but because the two games require a different set of skills. To comment on the amount of RNG in HS is to comment on the game environment, not the skill it takes to play it well.
To round things off I’m going to make a comment regarding Burgle Rogue (which has long been my favourite archetype and I am therefore very biased). Given my preference for the bamboozle play in chess, it is perhaps obvious that I would gravitate to a deck whose main win condition is to bamboozle the opponent into submission by doing it so much that statistics shine through within a single game. I guess all I really want is for people to recognise that there’s a lot more skill and planning going on than it looks like when you meet me on ladder and I beat you up with an Animated Avalanche in a deck with no elementals in it.
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Tl;dr: seriously? If you really want 1500 words condensed into a single sentence I guess I’ll repeat this: To comment on the amount of RNG in HS is to comment on the game environment, not the skill it takes to play it well.
New Neutral Minion - N'Zoth, God of the Deep
What I really like most about N'Zoth, God of the Deep is that it gets to be different for different classes. There are certainly some decent neutral elementals and dragons you might be happy to slot into any Darkmoon N'Zoth deck, but that's a lot less likely for other types, and many classes have class minions that are likely to be preferable over those neutrals.
By contrast, a lot of Old Gods N'Zoth decks rely on powerful neutral deathrattles like Sludge Belcher, Khartut Defender, and Sylvanas Windrunner (with only an occasional strong class deathrattle). That package can be slotted into any class, which is nice, but it also makes Old Gods N'Zoth less interesting.
New Neutral Minion - Yogg-Saron, Master of Fate
If I play a 10 mana card and someone doesnt die from it, I are dissapoint
New Neutral Minion - C'Thun, the Shattered
Druid says Hi
New Neutral Minion - Yogg-Saron, Master of Fate
Demon hunter could be one of the classes that gets some really good use out of it with their cheap spells and blur
New Druid Minion - Kiri, Chosen of Elune
Lunar Eclipse and Solar Eclipse are both really good, but maybe not good enough to auto-include into any Druid deck. On the other hand, tossing one card in that generates the value of both Eclipse spells seems great as the 30th card in a lot of value-oriented Druid decks.
New Neutral Minion - Yogg-Saron, Master of Fate
Seems generically good most of the time, and dramatically better than the original Yogg Saron since many of the effects allow for some level of player control.
New Neutral Minion - C'Thun, the Shattered
C'Thun, the Shattered seems like it will be really powerful in Druid, where tons of cards care about holding and playing 5 drop spells, and card draw is widely available.
New Druid Spell - Guess the Weight
Don't kink shame blizzard artists!