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It's kinda hard to imagine it's not Jax. The cards seem to be supporting a Runeterran champion and they referenced him in Fireth's flavor text.

It lets them put a uniform worldwide runestone price on shop items, and then they can adjust for variations in real currencies by changing the price of runestones in a given country. It's a lot easier to change that one price than to go through the entire shop and adjust the price of every item for each region.

So, instead of being a shady move like Nightmare suggests, it's actually just an efficient business move that has nothing to do with obfuscation or psychological tricks.

Glad Riot decided to implement Jax as a bit of a comical character, he works better this way than if they tried to play it straight with him. I expect him to be a menace, whether he fights with a fishing rod, a frying pan or a lamppost.

My hype for this game was insane, now after months available in some regions I totally lost interest for the game

I've noticed that you put 3 copies Dispossessed Soul in your Flower Power Standard deck, which is why I can't use copy deck feature and play that.

I just hate that the passes can't be bought using gold. I'd literally be willing to spend 10k gold per expansion for both, so 5k each. Possibly even more. I'm not, however, willing to ever spend real money on this game. Their free to play model is HORRIBLE. I wish it was more like something like Legends of Runeterra.

Had one of those wacky games again. I won a game where everything seemed to go wrong at the start: I missed two turns because of disconnection, my Deepwater Evokers drew two Flurry (Rank 1) (what are the odds of that happening??), my Magister Dawngrasp was stolen via  Theotar, the Mad Duke, and my Quest Priest opponent finished his quest on time, around turn 10.

However, I still won because I managed to steal the Purified Shard (which my opponent had apparently been keeping in his hand for the past 4-5 turns) using Theotar, the Mad Duke. This game can be funny sometimes. 

Well, there is a way to do it in Duels. While you can add just one location to your starting deck, you can discover another two or three through buckets. I had numerous games with 4 locations in my deck easily.

While talking about Duels, there is another cool way to progress the "Primordial Soup" Shaman Achievement. You can choose Fluctuating Totem as your starting Signature Treasure, which can proc Baroness Vashj effect on and on, if not killed (just make sure to place Baroness Vashj on the totems right side).

They said this will not happen

There is one legit reason. For small purchases the fees from Apple/Google/card companies can be very high (30+%). By buying fantasy currency in bulk you avoid fees for every small purchase.

They already said, that they will keep 1 USD = 100 runestones and sell packages same size as preorders/passes. They do it mainly to sell small items like single BG portrait to avoid huge fees on these small purchases.

thanks for this deck. What are the heroic power and the treasure please?

I couldn't care less about BG and it's new contents, free or not.

But the question remains, how long will BG stays in Hearthstone platform and not getting it's own. Because with new contents like this, the game size is getting bigger than ever. To most players that only play traditional HS, it's getting annoying. Why would you ever need to download several GB of contents that you don't touch at all.

The monetization part is kinda restricted to BG for now.
But the moment it disrupt HS economy, that's when you know something bad gonna happen.

Its only a matter of time anyway. BG is coming up in popularity and blizz isn't going to let this slide without some wads of cash slipping into their pockets. So the next big thing is to bring up new currencies, remove gold from BG, and make tons of cash off their adoring fans. Here's an idea blizz, free of charge, just give BG its own server and client already and stop forcing me to update hearthstone for a mode I simply dont care about. At very least I'll be relieved to know some of the profits actually goes towards player experience and not into Bobby's ill-deserved bonus package.

But new currency. Nobody asked for it, but here it is. Wouldn't be too long before regular hearthstone gets stoned to death by it, so let's have a more positive perspective. We might be able to buy the stones using another currency to cheapen the costs, or buy it in bulk during promotions to be spent at a different date. What with USD going up and my own country's down in the pits, the exchange rate has gotten so insulting that Im tempted to buy these digital stones if only because I know it'll get worse later.

Certainly a step in the wrong direction. But with any luck the resulting furor and pitchforks might force a more amicable implementation that might just improve the gaming experience.

I didn't misread it -- but they did, in fact, miswrite it.

After checking on the devs on social media, they clarified that they hadn't written up the announcement all that well and, thankfully, contradicted it.

You can no longer buy packs in bulk using in-game currency

What are you talking about? Gold purchases would remain exactly the same. You misread this part somehow.

The problem isn't that BG is "pay to win" now, or any such silliness. The problem goes all the way back to when BG launched and they didn't bother to monetize it properly. That set up all these extremely unrealistic expectations among the players that it would totally free forever.

If it became popular (and it certainly did!), they were always going to start charging you to play the game with unrestricted access. It took them way too long to figure out how to do that, and that's why people are upset now. The absolute dumbest part is that this is barely any different from the way they monetized HoTS, so it's baffling why they didn't just put this system in place at the outset.

Congratulations, F2P players: you're looking at what might be the worst patch in Hearthstone history.

The Runestones are an obvious cash grab, but here's what the Battlegrounds changes are really all about:

By giving Battlegrounds players their own rewards track, we can give them more rewards they care about, and we no longer need to try to mesh Battlegrounds rewards with a Gold and XP system that was designed to serve traditional Hearthstone . . .

No. You will still gain some Hearthstone Rewards Track XP as you play Battlegrounds . . .

Runestones will be replacing real money purchases for nearly every product in the Hearthstone shop. Some products, like Pre-Purchase Bundles, the Hearthstone Tavern Pass, and Packs (purchasing more than one at a time) will be able to be purchased with money or Runestones. A few other select products, like individual packs and cosmetics crafted in the Collection, will remain purchasable with only Gold.

. . . No, there are no plans to earn Runestones in-game.

This is a massive, massive convenience punish for f2p players. You can no longer buy packs in bulk using in-game currency. Now the top of every expansion is sinking five to ten minutes just clicking on a button to earn your privilege of playing Hearthstone. It's a deliberate reduction of game quality to increase the financial cost of the game to you.

Further, this is a way to kill the gold gained by playing Battlegrounds. BGs was the best way for f2p players to hit that rewards track because the game spends less time on interstitial screens and wastes less gameplay on non-rewards-track time. Blizzard knew this: this is why BGs was updated some time ago to force lowest-level players to play with some low-mid players no matter what because the lowest-level players are always a bunch of afk'ers. (This has the hilarious effect of punishing low-level players, encouraging them to go afk.) Given the massive connection problems HS has, BGs was the best way to play through the rewards track since the constant bugs and disconnects don't feel nearly as bad for a throwaway game of auto-chess.

These changes are a direct attack on those tactics, so now you can expect even more dead games of casual and Tavern Brawl as people find other ways to crawl the rewards track.

Edit: And I forgot to mention the xp gains are only on wins on BGs. If this change hits the regular Hearthstone rewards track, this will all be even worse.

This is on top of the p2w changes on heroes making BGs even less enjoyable. Players lose at every opportunity.

If that wasn't enough, the fallout from this will dominate every discussion online.

Welcome to Hearthstone: Reddit Controversy Edition.

Sadly but they are implementing the runestones for all the modes now... altough the things you can buy with gold you can still buying with gold