Also, what are your thoughts on NOT being able to buy what you want in the beginning to essentially make all possible deck combinations? I've seen a lot of people complaining that they can't build certain decks yet.
Is this a actually a serious question? I loathe money-grabbing F2P models as much as the next guy, but giving every card away for free from the get-go sounds completely ridiculous. It would significantly reduce the incentive to keep playing for a large portion of the playerbase (myself included). Not to mention it'd make no sense from a business perspective. Riot is already being more than fair to us with Runeterra's progression system. I'm perfectly happy with what we got.
Rising Winds is probably a good choice, however, the main reason for including them is that they are an early minion that's still decent to pull from Strength in Numbers even without an Embiggen buff.
After the Embiggen buff they still become decent taunts to play.
Keep in mind that these lists were played before Rising Winds was out so Tol'vir was basically the best possible option until now.
I wrote in the Vault article this past Tuesday that I finished last week with a level 11 Vault which luckily upgraded to level 12 when I opened it and recieved Shen in it.
I will have a level 13 Vault in large part to Expeditions, which leads into my next point about not being able to have access to all the cards:
For anyone complaining I will say Git Gud at Expeditions.
In more seriousness, Expeditions give 2k xp every time you manage to get 7 wins. There are 2 trials for the cost of crafting 1 Champion which will add up the xp so a player can easily get over 2k xp each Expedition even without going 7 wins. Expeditions always reward a random Champion so don't use Shards to craft cards that you are missing.
I am very confused about those two copies of Injured Tol'vir in the embiggen druid list. What are they for? According to HSreplay.net (and I am fairly sure I am reading the data right) the decks win rate goes down when you play them. They don't have synergy with anything in the list. Almost any 2-drop would be better. I took them out of my deck and replaced them with Rising Winds
Also, I have all of the cards for the Highlander Hunter except for Dragonbane, and Subject 9 for the secret deck, and [Hearthstone Card (storm hammer) Not Found] for the dragon one. Are these cards replaceable?
Avalon, in my time seeing you on the forums and even looking at one of your deck guides, you've got a strong understanding of English! I may have made that requirement a bit too bold but at the end of the day, we simply want people who are able to get their thoughts expressed fluently.
Sinti made some great points on it that I'll save repeating them. If you have a desire to create content for the community, submit an app and tell us what it is!
Hell yes! Battlegrounds is such a good mode and with the constant updates so far, it gives us a lot of potential with the mode. Every time we post about Battleground they become some of the more highly trafficked articles.
OK, others have already covered the fact that P&Z has fantastic removal spells that OP forgot.
But there's another point to be made -- just having spells in its own lineup isn't the whole reason P&Z is the "spell" region. There's also the fact that it's the region that gives the best payoffs for building a spell-heavy deck. Two of its Champions have explicit perks for casting spells, and the other two are just generally good in spell-heavy decks.
On top of that, lets try to remember that mono decks are extremely rare in this game and not at all encouraged by the game's design. So it actually would not matter at all if P&Z lacked spells or had very few good ones. If you think another region has better spells, or has the specific spells you want, you are free to build a deck that includes that region. Heimerdinger won't mind!
Title!! VERY curious! What did everyone get in their weekly vault? Also, what are your thoughts on NOT being able to buy what you want in the beginning to essentially make all possible deck combinations? I've seen a lot of people complaining that they can't build certain decks yet.
Here's a video I made with my thoughts for whoever is interested! =) 1st Weekly Vault!
Let´s get straight to the bussiness.... Piltover sucks. It´s extremely slow and dependant on drawing very specific cards to win AND 90% decks you will play against have 3x Deny in their decks, as Ionia is completely broken region with elusive units, aggro, control, spells ... well , pretty much anything.
Piltover is supposed to be THE spell control region, but it has almost the worst spells in the game ( For example, Piltover is the only region without hard removal spell like Vengeance, Culling Strikes and Noxxian Guillotine , the best thing you get is 3 damage for 7 mana in Piltover :D )
Deny needs it´s cost increased to atleast 4-5, so Ionia decks won´t be allowed to counter anything for 3 spell mana. And Piltover cards like Assemly Bot needs buff ( for example, decrease it´s cost to 2 ) , Piltover has no viable 1-2 cost units except Eager Apprentice so your deck becomes viable at turn 5+, where you can start comboing with Heimerdinger etc. , but in this meta there is no way you survive that long.
In what world does Piltover suck? Hemierdinger decks are great for lategame, and Jinx might be the best 4 drop champion in the game paired with aggro classes like Noxus or Ionia. Just because most of your special snowflake decks don't work how you like doesn't mean the class as a whole is bad.
true...but what if they keep sapping ressource just to see how far they can push it.
Keep in mind, there are interviews that show that the internal development of Warcraft Reforged got basically sabotaged by stripping them of ressources which led to the disaster we have now.
Blizzard is in flames at the moment and Hearthstone will eventualy have to catch fire as well.
And to anyone who thinks about applying to be part of our Content team, do it! We've been pretty lucky with our last round getting some amazing ppl on board, i hope we can get more of you <3
I say give it your best shot and we will see, worst thing that can happen is you wont be picked which is the same as if you didnt apply at all. So by applying, you can only gain.
That being said, the strong English skills might seem like a "snobby" requirement, but it is no fun to spend literally hours to edit an article week after week after someone ... might have as well written it myself and done it faster lol. That is not to say that such a person did anything wrong, it just creates a huge time sucking wormhole that no one really has time to get into, which i hope is understandable.
So in conclusion, dont be affraid to apply, we might like what we see, you never know. And if you dont get picked, dont get discouraged, keep using the forum or discord, engaging in a conversation with other members is about as valuable as writing articles! So good luck and thanks ;-)
I'm a little skeptical on two points, though. Maybe you can explain your thoughts on those some more?
1) "Your table" Match-making / duration of games Say I create my own table. It then ends up in a potentially reeeeeeeeally long list of tables until someone chooses to play with me. Next my opponent has to fully grasp my rules and build a deck which meets those rules. So between creating or even publishing my table and actually starting a game quite some time will pass... like... 5-10 minutes or something? That doesn't sound healthy for the game mode. The bright side is that this shouldn't be a problem for the other modes. But "your table" sure as hell looks veeeeery sexy in concept and might end up being really annoying because of the points I tried to make.
2) New rewards I don't really get the point of the new rewards. A pack token is nothing else than 100 gold which can't be spent for entry fees. And while pack sleeves look like something one could really be excited about (I mean who DOESN'T hate pack rng?), I fear it could tip the scales too far in a pay2win direction (obviously dependend of how they were to be obtained). The point is, you might end up enlarging the gap between f2p-players and p2w-players. Right now, everybody can climb the ladder and get bigger rewards. If you hide those new rewards behind an entry fee, you lower the accessability to the probably best rewards in the game. I don't have an easy solution for this, but maybe we might avoid the problem by just simply sticking to the usual rewards of cards / dust / gold / packs and increasing their volume according to the players achievements. (Side note: that's why european soccer is so boring. The big guys always go to the Champions League and then earn the big money which helps them securing their claims the next season. The only way to avoid this is to outrun the market by flooding the competition with money like the English Premierleague does. I very much prefer the Americans drafting systems and salary caps but don't see how they could be implemented in soccer or HS.)
Thanks for your efforts, this truely great work!
1: This one is going to be difficult and and I'm glad you pointed it out. So the overall point of "Your Table" is to establish your own rule sets, and publish them to the players of Hearthstone. Post the Rule Set code on OutOfCards, Reddit, Hearthpwn, wherever you feel like it would be seen most. If enough people see they may jump into matchmaking with a crafted deck specifically for your rules, however this is also dependent on how much people actually want to play your rule set. If ALOT of players enjoy it, it could be featured for a week or so on the splash page of the game browser granting a high number of player volume within that mode. Then after it's no longer featured, people who have it bookmarked can go back into match making and specifically look for "Your Table".
If I wanted, I could set; Max Health=Unlimited Starting Hand Size=7 Deck Size≥60 Starting Health=20 Common Duplicate Limit=4 Rare Duplicate Limit=3 Epic Duplicate Limit=2 Legendary Duplicate Limit=1 Fatigue Damage=Infinite Card Bans=Reno Jackson, Nozari.
And call it whatever but people know it's MTG. If people want to go back and play this, they most certainly will and they'll probably keep decks specifically for it.
Essentially it's mainly for your friends to fool around with, and maybe create some alternate metas just for funsies. So depending on how fun it is determines the likelihood of queue time. Think the Starcraft II Arcade in a way.
2: The pack token is there so F2P players don't have to worry about dipping into their gold savings when wanting to play Arena or Brawlesium. I've seen where people say they don't touch Arena because of the possibility of drafting a really bad deck because RNG was not on their side and essentially wasting 150 gold. So it's kind of a safety net.
So Pack Sleeves were just something I came up with because like you said, most people hate pack RNG. So I'm about to sound like an ass, but there will always be a huge split between F2P and P2W and there needs to be. The members of Team 5 gotta feed their families, pay there bills, and come up with ways to ensure that they keep their jobs. Creating incentives is a way to get someone who hasn't spent money on Hearthstone, to start. Obviously I spend money on Hearthstone and I sympathize with F2P players, but we also have to be realistic. F2P players can obtain 52 free packs a year from the Tavern Brawl and another 240 packs from saving up gold from completing daily quests, and I don't know how many more free packs from launch and promo events. F2P players are given the short end of the stick, but it's not as short as they think it is. I think the real issue lies in the atrocious Dust economy, but that discussion is for another time and another Thread.
I put the Tokens and Sleeves there because there needs to be more rewards, and they give you control over your rewards which is the most important aspect of them. Imagine going to Dave N' Busters or Chuck E' Cheese, obtaining a large amount of tickets, going to the prize counter, and the attendant just giving you random stuff, that's how ALL of Hearthstone's (FEW) rewards feel like. Giving players an amount of control is big, but also fair, and unfortunately has to come with a cost. I hoard Gold all the way up to an expansion and spend it all on new packs and, to me Dust is useless because I honestly feel like I'm being robbed whenever I craft or disenchant a card.
Anyway, thank you for your input, now I got another thing to think about lol.
Because I sure don't. Am I in Bronze? Or am I in Gold? Am I in Plat? Silver? Iron? Who the F knows. An even more impertinent question, why didn't the devs not just label the ranks with, you know, WORDS. Like every other competitive game ever made, including League of Legends.
Good point on those 2 champions, I agree they're definitely among the weakest of the bunch.
The only card that comes to mind right now for me is Trueshot Barrage. Only 6 damage for 7 mana on a slow spell seems absolutely horrible to me. Being able to split up the damage is kind of nice, but can also turn into a hindrance in cases where you want to target a big enemy with a lot of damage. I'd say the cost definitely needs to be reduced to 6 to make it an even remotely viable choice for a damage spell.
You forgot Mystic Shot and Get Excited! the cheapest cards that can damage the nexus, Thermogenic Beam probably one of the best removal spells in the game in terms of flexibility.
I didnt forget about other spells , but Mystic Shot is still just 2 damage, Thermogenic Beam is really good, BUT it´s a slow spell which is a huge disadvantage , it costs all of your mana, and if enemy has Deny ( Which he most probably has ) you can surrender. And let´s not bring up Get Excited, as it is for Zaun discard decks like Jinx Draven.
It's technically a piltover/zaun deck, but again I will mention that you don't HAVE to play the P&Z spells you can play whatever spell you want from other regions as long as you don't mix a third region so if you don't like the P&Z spells you can easily mix another region (including ionia which has Karma and Deny) to help you in your Ezreal/Heimerdinger build.
Get Excited! CAN be played in a pitch in such a deck if you have a lot of spell generation or tech cards, since you are trying to play a combo/control deck don't you?
I don't know if you play hearthstone but lets assume the current state of priest: it has no deck to play it kinda sucks, but you mix priest with mage and suddenly you have a win condition in priest while having so much aoe, in HS you can't do that.. but in LoR you not only can do that but you are intensified to do that...
That seems to be true. Blizzard only gave links to the list of invited players which is never the true participant list. There were around 360 invites and now that battlefy has the stats, 258 participants.
What's everyone think so far of the free-to-play system!?
Is this a actually a serious question? I loathe money-grabbing F2P models as much as the next guy, but giving every card away for free from the get-go sounds completely ridiculous. It would significantly reduce the incentive to keep playing for a large portion of the playerbase (myself included). Not to mention it'd make no sense from a business perspective. Riot is already being more than fair to us with Runeterra's progression system. I'm perfectly happy with what we got.
The Popular and the Powerful - Iksar Gives an Update on the Hearthstone Standard Meta
Rising Winds is probably a good choice, however, the main reason for including them is that they are an early minion that's still decent to pull from Strength in Numbers even without an Embiggen buff.
After the Embiggen buff they still become decent taunts to play.
Keep in mind that these lists were played before Rising Winds was out so Tol'vir was basically the best possible option until now.
What's everyone think so far of the free-to-play system!?
I wrote in the Vault article this past Tuesday that I finished last week with a level 11 Vault which luckily upgraded to level 12 when I opened it and recieved Shen in it.
I will have a level 13 Vault in large part to Expeditions, which leads into my next point about not being able to have access to all the cards:
For anyone complaining I will say Git Gud at Expeditions.
In more seriousness, Expeditions give 2k xp every time you manage to get 7 wins. There are 2 trials for the cost of crafting 1 Champion which will add up the xp so a player can easily get over 2k xp each Expedition even without going 7 wins. Expeditions always reward a random Champion so don't use Shards to craft cards that you are missing.
The Popular and the Powerful - Iksar Gives an Update on the Hearthstone Standard Meta
I am very confused about those two copies of Injured Tol'vir in the embiggen druid list. What are they for? According to HSreplay.net (and I am fairly sure I am reading the data right) the decks win rate goes down when you play them. They don't have synergy with anything in the list. Almost any 2-drop would be better. I took them out of my deck and replaced them with Rising Winds
Also, I have all of the cards for the Highlander Hunter except for Dragonbane, and Subject 9 for the secret deck, and [Hearthstone Card (storm hammer) Not Found] for the dragon one. Are these cards replaceable?
What Rewards Drop From Vault Chests in Legends of Runeterra?
Yes. It was a discussion before Flux updated article to include upgrade chances... In fact I asked him personally to add those details.
A Letter From Flux - February Plans, Looking Back on January, Content Squad Recruitment
Avalon, in my time seeing you on the forums and even looking at one of your deck guides, you've got a strong understanding of English! I may have made that requirement a bit too bold but at the end of the day, we simply want people who are able to get their thoughts expressed fluently.
Sinti made some great points on it that I'll save repeating them. If you have a desire to create content for the community, submit an app and tell us what it is!
A Letter From Flux - February Plans, Looking Back on January, Content Squad Recruitment
Hell yes! Battlegrounds is such a good mode and with the constant updates so far, it gives us a lot of potential with the mode. Every time we post about Battleground they become some of the more highly trafficked articles.
Piltover Spell Decks
OK, others have already covered the fact that P&Z has fantastic removal spells that OP forgot.
But there's another point to be made -- just having spells in its own lineup isn't the whole reason P&Z is the "spell" region. There's also the fact that it's the region that gives the best payoffs for building a spell-heavy deck. Two of its Champions have explicit perks for casting spells, and the other two are just generally good in spell-heavy decks.
On top of that, lets try to remember that mono decks are extremely rare in this game and not at all encouraged by the game's design. So it actually would not matter at all if P&Z lacked spells or had very few good ones. If you think another region has better spells, or has the specific spells you want, you are free to build a deck that includes that region. Heimerdinger won't mind!
A Letter From Flux - February Plans, Looking Back on January, Content Squad Recruitment
That is awesome to hear! I've definitely seen a lot of Hearthstone faces enjoy Runeterra. I wonder how Blizzard is going to respond to it.
Probably too little too late LUL
A Letter From Flux - February Plans, Looking Back on January, Content Squad Recruitment
Sure!
A Letter From Flux - February Plans, Looking Back on January, Content Squad Recruitment
No plans on covering the game for the foreseeable future. It just isn't worth the core resources when we're still on the smaller side of things.
What's everyone think so far of the free-to-play system!?
Title!! VERY curious! What did everyone get in their weekly vault? Also, what are your thoughts on NOT being able to buy what you want in the beginning to essentially make all possible deck combinations? I've seen a lot of people complaining that they can't build certain decks yet.
Here's a video I made with my thoughts for whoever is interested! =) 1st Weekly Vault!
So, how long is Deny gonna stay at 3 mana?
Maybe if there were a Burst spell that turns your next spell into a Burst? (Or turns Slow into Fast, and Fast into Burst?)
Then you could get undeniable spells, but at a mana and card premium.
Piltover Spell Decks
In what world does Piltover suck? Hemierdinger decks are great for lategame, and Jinx might be the best 4 drop champion in the game paired with aggro classes like Noxus or Ionia. Just because most of your special snowflake decks don't work how you like doesn't mean the class as a whole is bad.
Mike Donais Leaves the Hearthstone Team, Remains at Blizzard
true...but what if they keep sapping ressource just to see how far they can push it.
Keep in mind, there are interviews that show that the internal development of Warcraft Reforged got basically sabotaged by stripping them of ressources which led to the disaster we have now.
Blizzard is in flames at the moment and Hearthstone will eventualy have to catch fire as well.
Hearthstone's January Season is Ending Soon! Get Your Shoring Up Card Back
That is actually a pretty cool card back for a change, Fluxy you better play your 5 games ahahaha :P
Mike Donais Leaves the Hearthstone Team, Remains at Blizzard
yes, instead we should all just consoom product and get excited for next product.
Better not question the authorities, wouldn't want our social credit score to suffer
A Letter From Flux - February Plans, Looking Back on January, Content Squad Recruitment
Hyped for the Fan Creation stuff!
And to anyone who thinks about applying to be part of our Content team, do it! We've been pretty lucky with our last round getting some amazing ppl on board, i hope we can get more of you <3
A Letter From Flux - February Plans, Looking Back on January, Content Squad Recruitment
I say give it your best shot and we will see, worst thing that can happen is you wont be picked which is the same as if you didnt apply at all. So by applying, you can only gain.
That being said, the strong English skills might seem like a "snobby" requirement, but it is no fun to spend literally hours to edit an article week after week after someone ... might have as well written it myself and done it faster lol. That is not to say that such a person did anything wrong, it just creates a huge time sucking wormhole that no one really has time to get into, which i hope is understandable.
So in conclusion, dont be affraid to apply, we might like what we see, you never know. And if you dont get picked, dont get discouraged, keep using the forum or discord, engaging in a conversation with other members is about as valuable as writing articles! So good luck and thanks ;-)
Tables, A Way To Play Hearthstone With Your Own Rules.
1: This one is going to be difficult and and I'm glad you pointed it out. So the overall point of "Your Table" is to establish your own rule sets, and publish them to the players of Hearthstone. Post the Rule Set code on OutOfCards, Reddit, Hearthpwn, wherever you feel like it would be seen most. If enough people see they may jump into matchmaking with a crafted deck specifically for your rules, however this is also dependent on how much people actually want to play your rule set. If ALOT of players enjoy it, it could be featured for a week or so on the splash page of the game browser granting a high number of player volume within that mode. Then after it's no longer featured, people who have it bookmarked can go back into match making and specifically look for "Your Table".
If I wanted, I could set;
Max Health=Unlimited
Starting Hand Size=7
Deck Size≥60
Starting Health=20
Common Duplicate Limit=4
Rare Duplicate Limit=3
Epic Duplicate Limit=2
Legendary Duplicate Limit=1
Fatigue Damage=Infinite
Card Bans=Reno Jackson, Nozari.
And call it whatever but people know it's MTG. If people want to go back and play this, they most certainly will and they'll probably keep decks specifically for it.
Essentially it's mainly for your friends to fool around with, and maybe create some alternate metas just for funsies. So depending on how fun it is determines the likelihood of queue time. Think the Starcraft II Arcade in a way.
2: The pack token is there so F2P players don't have to worry about dipping into their gold savings when wanting to play Arena or Brawlesium. I've seen where people say they don't touch Arena because of the possibility of drafting a really bad deck because RNG was not on their side and essentially wasting 150 gold. So it's kind of a safety net.
So Pack Sleeves were just something I came up with because like you said, most people hate pack RNG. So I'm about to sound like an ass, but there will always be a huge split between F2P and P2W and there needs to be. The members of Team 5 gotta feed their families, pay there bills, and come up with ways to ensure that they keep their jobs. Creating incentives is a way to get someone who hasn't spent money on Hearthstone, to start. Obviously I spend money on Hearthstone and I sympathize with F2P players, but we also have to be realistic. F2P players can obtain 52 free packs a year from the Tavern Brawl and another 240 packs from saving up gold from completing daily quests, and I don't know how many more free packs from launch and promo events. F2P players are given the short end of the stick, but it's not as short as they think it is. I think the real issue lies in the atrocious Dust economy, but that discussion is for another time and another Thread.
I put the Tokens and Sleeves there because there needs to be more rewards, and they give you control over your rewards which is the most important aspect of them. Imagine going to Dave N' Busters or Chuck E' Cheese, obtaining a large amount of tickets, going to the prize counter, and the attendant just giving you random stuff, that's how ALL of Hearthstone's (FEW) rewards feel like. Giving players an amount of control is big, but also fair, and unfortunately has to come with a cost. I hoard Gold all the way up to an expansion and spend it all on new packs and, to me Dust is useless because I honestly feel like I'm being robbed whenever I craft or disenchant a card.
Anyway, thank you for your input, now I got another thing to think about lol.
Does anyone know what Ranks the different Colors specify for Competitive?
Because I sure don't. Am I in Bronze? Or am I in Gold? Am I in Plat? Silver? Iron? Who the F knows. An even more impertinent question, why didn't the devs not just label the ranks with, you know, WORDS. Like every other competitive game ever made, including League of Legends.
Which cards do you think are the most UNDERpowered?
Good point on those 2 champions, I agree they're definitely among the weakest of the bunch.
The only card that comes to mind right now for me is Trueshot Barrage. Only 6 damage for 7 mana on a slow spell seems absolutely horrible to me. Being able to split up the damage is kind of nice, but can also turn into a hindrance in cases where you want to target a big enemy with a lot of damage. I'd say the cost definitely needs to be reduced to 6 to make it an even remotely viable choice for a damage spell.
Piltover Spell Decks
It's technically a piltover/zaun deck, but again I will mention that you don't HAVE to play the P&Z spells you can play whatever spell you want from other regions as long as you don't mix a third region so if you don't like the P&Z spells you can easily mix another region (including ionia which has Karma and Deny) to help you in your Ezreal/Heimerdinger build.
Get Excited! CAN be played in a pitch in such a deck if you have a lot of spell generation or tech cards, since you are trying to play a combo/control deck don't you?
I don't know if you play hearthstone but lets assume the current state of priest: it has no deck to play it kinda sucks, but you mix priest with mage and suddenly you have a win condition in priest while having so much aoe, in HS you can't do that.. but in LoR you not only can do that but you are intensified to do that...
A Letter From Flux - February Plans, Looking Back on January, Content Squad Recruitment
Love your meta reports. It's well-written, entertaining, and useful. Couldn't ask for more.
Hearthstone Masters Tour Arlington Survival Guide
That seems to be true. Blizzard only gave links to the list of invited players which is never the true participant list. There were around 360 invites and now that battlefy has the stats, 258 participants.