It tries to give you something you can play this turn (with the mana you still have).
If not possible, it gives you something you can play next turn.
Cards are put into various categories (Value, Tempo, etc.) and you get to choose a good card from one of the categories.
You don't really get any bad or uninteresting cards.
Peter Whalen said that you will be offered a Crazed Alchemist if there is a Doomsayer on your opponent's board, so the effect seems to take the current board state into account.
(Pure speculation) Maybe if your opponent is low on health you'll get some direct damage spells? And conversely, you get healing spells when you are close to dying?
It made me want to add brewmaster to my deck so I could play it again!
Especially against murlocs so I could Hungry Crab them twice in a row :)
Given that this card is an expansion card and will rotate, I'm curious why it only looks at basic and classic cards. Is that just to keep the algorithm from getting unbearably large and taking too long to process? Was it a technical decision, a gameplay/design decision, a balance decision, or what?
Partly technical since there's a lot of manual work involved in figuring out how to rate the cards, but the bigger reasons to me are design.
A big part of playing with Zephrys is understanding what it's going to offer you and playing it in a situation where you can maximize your payoff. That gets harder and harder the weirder the cards are in the pool and also with more cards in the pool. Basic and classic provided basically everything we wanted - a good mix of removal, AoE, minions, and situational cards - while being pretty simple and well-known to most of our players. This also means you only end up learning the card once rather than having to relearn every expansion. The other big perk is that basic and classic have fewer really extreme cards which reduces the frustration of playing against it. There's pros and cons both ways, but all told I'm happy with going this direction.
That was a great answer thanks Peter! A follow up question though;
Did you consider having Zephrys just look at cards from Saviors of Uldum, like how Trailblazer Elise worked back in Journey to Un'Goro?
Would it have been too difficult for the games AI since you guys (presumably) didn't have as much data on Saviors of Uldum compared to Basic and Classic?
Forgive all the questions, it's just one of the most interesting cards ever! I'm crafting it golden day one haha.
Biggest challenge there is you don't have all the core effects in Saviors - basic has removal/AoE/minions/etc at a bunch of different costs for a bunch of different situations. Our expansions tend to have more situational cards that go in particular archetypes rather than catch-alls like you see in Basic and Classic. Since those tend to be the most useful things to get off of Zephrys, you'd be a lot more limited if we restricted to just this set.
Mike Donais
It made me want to add brewmaster to my deck so I could play it again!
Especially against murlocs so I could Hungry Crab them twice in a row :)
Peter Whalen
Yes, very much so. It’ll give you healing or burn (or bloodlust) late game and hero health can also change the priority of things like taunt minions.
Peter Whalen
Partly technical since there's a lot of manual work involved in figuring out how to rate the cards, but the bigger reasons to me are design.
A big part of playing with Zephrys is understanding what it's going to offer you and playing it in a situation where you can maximize your payoff. That gets harder and harder the weirder the cards are in the pool and also with more cards in the pool. Basic and classic provided basically everything we wanted - a good mix of removal, AoE, minions, and situational cards - while being pretty simple and well-known to most of our players. This also means you only end up learning the card once rather than having to relearn every expansion. The other big perk is that basic and classic have fewer really extreme cards which reduces the frustration of playing against it. There's pros and cons both ways, but all told I'm happy with going this direction.
Peter Whalen
Biggest challenge there is you don't have all the core effects in Saviors - basic has removal/AoE/minions/etc at a bunch of different costs for a bunch of different situations. Our expansions tend to have more situational cards that go in particular archetypes rather than catch-alls like you see in Basic and Classic. Since those tend to be the most useful things to get off of Zephrys, you'd be a lot more limited if we restricted to just this set.