Murlocs are looking pretty trash right now though. So we will probably have to wait an expansion or two before it's actually viable but still cool. 

A new Legendary Priest Minion, Natalie Seline, has been revealed!

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With Blizzard introducing the Initiate Set as an alternative to making 200 cards (Naxx to present) any time you want to try making a new class, I decided to give it another shot.

Meet Scanlan Mellowridge, Gnomish Bard extraordinaire. Well traveled and with many adventures under his belt, he prefers the slower pace of his local tavern these days, where he entertains the patrons with songs and tales of his past exploits. But make no mistake, if there's trouble, he has more than a few aces up his silk sleeve. 

Bard in fantasy settings is a nimble, versatile support class, and I wanted to capture that with the hero power costing 1 rather than 2. The Bard can always sneak in a small word of encouragement in the middle of combat, whether to themselves or an ally.

But the Hero Power is much more than a small heal. Every time you use it, you generate a Note (up to a maximum of 3) that are displayed on the Hero Power button similarly to Silas' and Kael'Thas' abilities in Battlegrounds. Notes enable the class' keyword: Melodic

With some cards requiring 1 Note, while others 2 or 3, there's always an interesting decision to be made on whether to use a Melodic card now, hold off to play a more powerful one later, or plan out your turns so you can accumulate more in the interim.

The class has multiple ways to cheaply draw cards to maintain a nimble, versatile playstyle, while also excelling in stat manipulation (buffs, handbuffs and debuffs), once again drawing on the Bard's identity as a support class. And when you've been around as much as Scanlan has, you hear things, and no one understands the power of information better than the Bard, giving the class access to powerful 1 mana Secrets and related synergy cards.

To balance things out, the class has access only to limited amount of healing beyond its Hero Power, and very few ways to deal damage directly from hand. It also has no hard removal or area of effect damage spells in its arsenal.

Unlike Demon Hunter, that had a 20 card Initiate set and got 15 cards per Year of the Phoenix expansion, I decided on a 30 card Initiate set (mostly because Secrets and Secret synergies take up so much space), which will probably allow me to get away with giving Bard the normal 10 cards per expansion, before picking some of the Initiate set to become part of next year's Core.

To see all 30 cards: Click here: http://www.hearthcards.net/setsandclasses/#6574-Bard

Looking forward to your feedback.

In the past, when Basic cards were sent to Wild via Hall of Fame we saw them become Common rarity cards which could then be Disenchanted. One perfect example is Mind Blast, which I have the regular copies of still, but disenchanted the golden copies.  I am expecting the same to happen when the Core set is implemented, although I haven't heard or seen specific confirmation of this yet.  It might have been mentioned in one of Iksar's community Q&As, but I can't remember.

But here is an interesting wrinkle: 11 of those Basic cards which will be part of the Core set are being assigned a Rare gem, and 1 will be an Epic.  So now I'm wondering if they will still all disenchant as Commons, or will those 12 cards have the higher rarities?  Technically the Core cards are not the same as the Basic versions of the same card, but would they assign them different rarities?

Personally, I'm only going to be dusting the golden Basic cards because I don't need them in gold, but I play a decent amount of Wild and I want to give Classic a try so I'll need the regular copies of all the cards for those modes (mostly for Classic though).

If all the Basic cards are assigned the white Common gem, all 143 (x2) golden Basic cards dusted as Commons is still 14,300 dust, or 100 dust short of crafting 9 legendaries.  But if these 12 cards follow their Core rarities, it's 16.100 dust for disenchanting all the golden Basic cards, which is just over 10 legendary cards worth of dust.

Either way I will be happy to cash in those golden basic cards for some major dust!  But still curious to see what happens with the rarity of these 12 cards at the rotation.

March 14

Hi guys! How do you do? :)

I'm posting a little feature request that as far as I see is not asked until the moment and I think that could be a nice addition to the site. Or at least I'm unable to find a better way to do that so, of course, my ears are open.

Right now we didn't have a profile header gallery, everytime that you want to see a profile the only way is change directly on your profile so, if you want to choose the best for you, you should test it "on live" instead having the option to see them before changing it.

Can it be an option to see all of them before choosing one? I don't know, maybe a dedicated page where you can see all the existing profile headers (owned and/or unowned) that leads you directly to the account settings to save them or even better, a little snapshot when choosing them. Everytime our prfile header collection is bigger and bigger so our vanity in cosmetics makes us more unsure about which one to use :P

Of course that's a minor feature and I don't think that should be consider for any urgent site update (and, of course, if there's an unaware option for doing it that I don' know until now feel free to let me know) but for me can be a nice addition for a growing collection that seems will not stop for the moment.

Have a lovely day and thanks for reading me!

A new Epic Demon Hunter Weapon, Warglaives of Azzinoth, has been revealed!

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A new Common Hunter Minion, Bearshark, has been revealed!

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A new Epic Demon Hunter Spell, Eye Beam, has been revealed!

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Hello everyone, today I wanted to show you a concept that introduces Guilds and Tournament Mode into Hearthstone. The community has asked for Tournament Mode for years and with it not actively being developed I decided to improving on my last attempt at a Tournament Mode.

I made the Guild concept because Hearthstone is a lonely game, there truly isn't much interaction besides emoting. The game is set in a lively tavern yet the only way to tell if anyone else is actually playing is seeing what they're doing on your friends list. Occasionally you'll get notifications when they open a Legendary Card, start/finish an Arena run, reach a certain rank on Ladder, but there's really no feeling of community.

Starting the game will bring you to the home screen with it's new addition, the Guild button, it's appearance changes depending on what your Guild Leader wants it to look like. Clicking it will take you to the guild home page.

I wanted to make a UI that was completely independent from what's already in the game, I just couldn't make a design that was appealing.
I also wanted to make a way to browse for guilds, but there's only so much I can do in GIMP without it looking like trash.

So this is the Guild home screen, nothing spectacular. Just a description and your Guild's banner. If you join a Guild and want to invite one of your friends to join there should be a "recommend a friend" button within the friends list so your Leader can decide to invite them or not.

If you want to play around with making the banners here's a link for you.

On the next screen you'll be given player highlights, it's pretty much who's climbed the highest of the current month. These can be changed depending if the Guild is more Arena focused or if they play nothing but Battlegrounds. Things like "Most 1st place finishes", "Most games played", or "Most 12-0 Arena Runs" come to mind on the spotlight section.

For the icons that go into the squares, the Battle.net profile pictures should suffice unless there's a way to incorporate Hearthstone only images for this page.

On the last page of the Guild tab are all the guild ratings in their respective modes. A member can choose whether or not to represent their Guild when they play, the reason for that will be further down the thread.

And there are rewards based on these numbers at the end of an Expansion Cycle. We'll get to that later.

An addition I made to the Profile pages is the Tournament Decks page. This is where you select your deck lineup when you go into Tournament Mode. Clicking "inspect" will give you a brief run down of a deck, I have an example of it below. Clicking "Select" will take you to the collection manager where you can either make an entirely deck or pick one you've been running.

I tried everything I could, I just could not get the colors right. It was either brown as hell or orange.

This is the new Modes screen with the addition of The Tournaments button. Those of you who have played the game for a while can probably accurately guess where the shield came from.

So here we have The Tournaments mode screen. It gives you a brief description, your rating, and your Guild's rating. Upon clicking "Play" you'll be asked if you want to represent yourself or your Guild. Pretty self explanatory.

For this concept we're using the Conquest Tournament Format, I don't know how everyone would feel if it rotated between Conquest, Specialist, and other Tournament formats. That's for you all to decide.

Upon matching up with an opponent, you'll be presented with this screen and thus starts the ban phase. Here you can see their Guild banner and you can hover over it to get a few more details but that could waste you some time! When the ban phase starts, you have 300 seconds (5 minutes) to inspect your opponents decks and come up with a game plan on how you want to approach a match up, but remember, your opponent is also doing the same thing against you!

Upon inspecting an opponent's deck, you are presented with this screen. It gives you the deck list, mana curve, key cards that you can drag over and highlight so you don't forget about them if you click out and back in when trying to decide on which deck to ban. Once you've decided "Yep, f*** Priest" you click the ban button and wait for your opponent to finish their ban phase.

Once BOTH players have banned a deck, the red X's plop down onto a portrait, and the player's choose a deck and head into their first game. They won't be able to see which deck the other is choosing so this prevents counter queueing. They head in, complete a best of three in the respective Format, and that ends it. The player who wins increases either their own or their Guild's rating, which means more challenging opponents are to come.

Now for the rewards.

A new reward I've created is the Portrait Token, it is used to unlock Hero Portraits of past pre-purchase bundles.

Based on ALL of the ratings your guild has at the end of an Expansion Cycle, your Guild will automatically distribute these out to members who performed at high levels depending on their respective mode.

Thank you all for reading, if you have any questions, suggestions, or improvements, leave a comment down below so I can use them to improve my next concept.

Cut Content

I started this project with the idea of Raids being alongside the Guild system since they would be a perfect fit, I couldn't create an appealing UI nor could I make it easily convey what it was trying to do without being too confusing. The plan was for a Raid to last the duration of an Expansion Cycle, release a boss every 2-3 weeks (totaling 5) that Guildies could challenge. Rewards would be tied for defeating a boss as each class for an award that the whole Guild could work together on. The rewards would be cards like Auto-Pecker 4000 or a meme card that really won't affect the meta, but is fun to have.

There were Guild achievements but I mean those are easy to come up with so I focused my time on other parts of the concept instead.

I wanted to also include a shared collection within the guild that everyone donated to. Whenever a player would go to disenchant a card they would have the option to donate nothing, or up to 5% of that dust to the Guild's dust collection.

On top of that with the Guild's collection, players could apply to rent cards for X amount of games to give it a try for a meme deck or try to get an achievement without actually having to craft said card.

Hey all,

Bringing in another incident report, yeah! we had a couple hours of downtime this morning due to issues with our hosting provider.

What makes this scary was when I went to sleep the night before knowing that OVH's SBG-2 data center burned down to the ground. Not kidding, it caught on fire and is a total heap of trash now. It also took out a part of SBG-1. SBG-3 and SBG-4 which are the other two parts of that deployment were taken offline and OVH is currently working on getting what is left of SBG-1 and 3+4 back online over the next 9 days.

Now, this fire didn't occur where we host Out of Cards so that wasn't an issue. But when your host is OVH and you wake up to a dead server, what do you think my first thought was?

Event Log

All times in Eastern.

7:52 AM - Alarms sound that the site is offline.

7:52 AM - Automated notification of a hardware fault on our server from our data center.

10:31 AM - Site is back online.

What Happened

It turns out your server goes offline when they decided to re-cable all the gear! 

OVH went through and replaced "a large number of power supply cables" due to a potential problem with their insulation. The maintenance required was critical and also took out networking for some time on the rack our hardware is in which extended our downtime.

In an ideal situation, we'd have better failover protocols and hardware in place if something were to happen at our primary data center. Unfortunately, it isn't justifiable at this point in time to have that with the costs involved. We keep regular multi-location backups so that we can be up and running somewhere else if disaster strikes within a fairly short time frame, having containerized infrastructure helps quite a bit with the agility here, but there will always be some downtime if that happens. We lost some ad revenue and I know it was an inconvenience for people trying to access the site. I think we'll all live though!

Today's downtime gave us an opportunity to confirm our disaster recovery situation and that our backups work properly. If you were to learn something from this situation its that you shouldn't wait until a potential disaster strikes to make sure you have stuff in working order. Your backups are only good if they actually work!

I feel bad for everyone who lost critical information in the fires today. Sometimes it isn't even the fault of developers or the IT department for having poor backup practices. Sometimes your CEO just doesn't think it is necessary to spend money on a backup solution elsewhere to keep your data synced to at least one outside source. It's always fun when that same person who said it wasn't needed starts screaming and asking why there aren't backups in place when something really goes wrong and puts the blame back on them. We call those people assholes.

I don't recommend torching your data center as a method to wake up though.

With the Weekly Card Design Competitions still taking a hiatus, I was wondering if you guys are interested in sharing ideas of how cards with the new Frenzy keyword might look. Maybe someone can even predict a card before the reveals hit :-)

So here's my take:

There's probably more flavor than power, but I like the idea of the new keyword being represented by a fierce bear mother protecting her young. It should also fit the focus on Beasts and midrange cards that we deduced from the Core cards, so I put it in Hunter even if Druid might have been a good place as well.

What do you think? I'm always grateful for feedback and curious about your own ideas for Frenzy.

I assume that with Forgen there will be an Arena rotation. Correct?

Time to prepare the "two losses" stratagy :)

was this awarded?

Simple question; although I expect very diverse answers... "What do you consider BM within HS?"

Repetitive intentional roping and spamming emotes are probably the most commonly acknowledged BM behaviors.

Now for something more subtle and only noticable by yourself... What about playing a topdecked card (which flips the board state in your favor) instead of playing the exact same copy of that topdecked card which you already had several turns earlier in your hand. Would this also be considered as BM or does it just proof that you are being an ass**le? 😅

Finally, we have a schedule for the revelation of the new expansion cards, we'll have from the 16th to the 19th with a sample with the art of the cards, I just don't know why on the 19th we have only 1 tho. link below.

Forged in the Barrens - Hearthstone Card Library (playhearthstone.com)

A new Common Warrior Minion, Bloodsail Deckhand, has been revealed!

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This is a collection of cards based off Warcraft III.

A few goals I had with this set was to restrict myself from adding any new Keywords or Minion types, yet still have the cards retain the distinguishing flavor of their War3 counterparts. I wanted to make this set feel compatible with the existing Hearthstone game.

While I was working on this, imagine my surprise when Blizzard announced that some spells will be able to level up as the game goes on! Although in the Barrens expansion it seems to only apply to spells, I feel it could work for minions and weapons too. In War3, both hero spells and units can be upgraded, so I've definitely taken advantage of it for this fan expansion.

Mechanics Introduced

Human ( Mage / Paladin )

Orc ( Shaman / Warrior )

Undead ( Priest / Warlock )

Night Elf ( Hunter / Druid )

Neutral

Mercenaries ( Obtained from the Mercenary Camp card )

Show Spoiler

 

Treasures ( Obtained from the Treasure Hunt card )

Show Spoiler

 

Tokens

Show Spoiler

 

A new Common Neutral Minion, Murloc Tinyfin, has been revealed!

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Correct me if I’m wrong but from what I understand the nerf reverts to cards that rotate to wild will be active in this state from the patch that introduces the Barrens cads, which will probably happen after the reveal stream on the 22nd, probably the 23rd or 25th of this month, so there will be a period of about a week or so where these cards will be in standard, unnerfed, before the rotation and the new expansion hit, right?

If that’s right, I think I’m even happier with these changes.

A new Common Neutral Minion, Worgen Infiltrator, has been revealed!

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A new Common Neutral Minion, Voodoo Doctor, has been revealed!

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A new Common Neutral Minion, Stonetusk Boar, has been revealed!

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A new Common Neutral Minion, Elven Archer, has been revealed!

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