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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.

Hello everyone! Don't know if anyone else has the same problem, but i always collect the majority of cards in each expansion, but i end up playing the same meta decks over and over. 

I usually use HSreplay to find competitive decks, but i would like to know what sites you visit in order to find fun decks. I don't want to search for Tier 1 decks, but also not win 1 out of 10 games meme decks. I want something in the middle, like decks that differentiate from the Top decks and use some not so played cards, that can win if you play many games and learn how to pilot that deck.

''Lucky Dragon Casino Mage" that was shared in this site, is a good example. Relies too much on RNG to be reliable, but i love Mage and have good results with the deck without it being meta.

Thank you for your suggestions.

It seems to be broken, it just won't play stuff even if it has mana to play stuff, it just won't I see the bot pass a turn with Thresh in hand twice for no apparent reason..

Also the first one almost always skips playing the fleeting spider, wonder it it wants to actually get spell mana, or "play better"

It wasn't like that at first you always saw curve plays no matter what almost all the time.. think they tried to tweak it, or use some ML algorithem but it didn't do well there.

Am I the only one that noticed that?

Competition Theme: Colourful Casting

For the second Season in a row, we've got a scholastic theme to start us out. Time to school those spells!

• You must design a card which synergises with a Spell School
  • Your card can't just be a spell that fits into one of the Schools - it needs to have an effect related to one of them to qualify!

Wailor is looking for us to welcome in the new Season with a look at a brand new mechanic! There's a lot of room here, so get creative.

As always, I can be reached through Discord or here on the site via PM if you have any issues to report.

Competition Phases

Here are the phases of this card design competition

• Submission Phase: Starts on Mon, Mar 15 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Sat, Mar 20 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400)
• Voting Phase: Starts on Sat, Mar 20 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Sun, Mar 21 16:00 EDT (GMT -0400)
• Finalist Phase: Starts on Sun, Mar 21 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Mon, Mar 22 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400)
• Winner Selected: After finalist voting concludes and we validate votes.

Discussion Thread Rules

No thread rules were added to this season. Please populate and manually edit this thread with them.

Man being able to pick for one mana sure makes that a damn good card. I think it may be the best one mana card in the game. It’s a save in numerous occasions. If it was random or the mana cost was higher but as it stands I think it might be the best 1 card in the game. They spell shield to block frost bite give your unit some extra health. 

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!

March 14

Hi fellas.

Something come up in my mind, and I decide to make it happen.

How about making a card that can describe:
- Your personality. (Meme or pun is acceptable, but it's optional), or
- Description of your user ID, or what effect would be if your ID was a card, or
- Something you like to do in your life and make that into a card.

Any feedback is always appreciated. Anything. But please make sure your ID is on the card name itself
And It's up to you to use any kind of card. Whether it's Runeterra, Hearthstone, etc.

But since I mostly played Hearthstone, here's mine.

Happy Weekend.
EDIT. I wonder what kind of card Flux would be. Had been in my mind a few times.

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. 

was this awarded?

okay so hear me out , blizz said  that brawls will give  more recent packs right ? so lets assume this happens  when patch 2.0 goes live , then, we will assume those packs will be barrens because it will be the most recent expansion (technically it still darkmoon but darkmoon will be way less valuable  a week before the new expac) now the fun starts if the patch goes live  tuesday 23 and you have a pack for the last week in the chest it should  trasform into a barrens pack! now this is all a theory but if you dont play tavern  next week ( you can play but you cant win so i dont see a point XD) you dont lose anything and worst case scenario  after the patch rolls you can still get your classic pack if it didnt work ( you can do it against  a friend to save time)

 i will do it so lets experiment with me guys!  a little shout-out to the alleria guy (or girl) that always remember about the free arena pack,  it inspired me to do this  Thread, you rock!

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.

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.

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)

So typically the best way to get an accurate reading on how well an archetype is performing you need to check out the region stats.

Because if a deck has a 58% winrate but a play rate of 1% that means its essentially being carried by a few top players.

What we actually see when examining shurima as a whole is that it's essentially maintaining a 51% winrate in its best decks as of right now.

I consider that very healthy and I think this expansion has been far less devisive than call of the mountain.

https://lor.mobalytics.gg/stats/regions

But what do you guys think, are there any lists or decks you consider to be absolute BS right now or are we seeing a healthy mix?

Hello there!

I've got another custom battlegrounds tribe today, Ogres! When it comes to these guys, size matters, a lot. The mechanic that the Ogre tribe revolve around is Overkill. This all stemmed from a little joke I made when making an Overkill card for Rastakhan's Rumble that depicted an Ogre "More like Ogre-kill", yes I am aware that's a terrible joke. 

I never particularly felt that the Overkill mechanic fit the Trolls that well, it needed to belong to someone a little bigger and beefier, like these guys. This Ogre set contains three new heroes and 15 new minions. I hope you enjoy my set, provided in the Google Slides presentation below (I dunno why I do it there, I just think it looks good). Any feedback would be really appreciated, be that on balance, flavour or anything else.

Thank you!

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FJ_2y3EB8zf92YwDzO1AJObYKhgpYoR0uT5C_kMdP9g/edit?usp=sharing

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

Time to prepare the "two losses" stratagy :)

So there are a lot of people making bold statements about what is and isn't op right now during the expansion.

But let's ground things a little with a mobalytics article and I'll break down each list and how I feel about it.

https://mobalytics.gg/blog/best-legends-of-runeterra-decks/

A lot of this is gonna seem obvious extra attacks plus sandmen equals double value and double aggression

Rememberance if a bunch of your tokens are dying you get to cast it for free

Rangers resolve as anti wail/ice shard tech

Rock hopper is supposed to synergize with greenfang warden where you get to utilize barrier to challenge, not sure how reliable that is at 2 a piece

Also ancient preparations will probably get cut it doesn't do anything in this list

But everything else look great.

The thing is though we have so many great aggro lists that this is looking B tier right now

I had said that they who nasus would be a great list during announcement season and here it is

A lot of this list looks super flexible I like the baccai spinners here, trade with your opponents champ to enable slay

3 counters to 1 atrocity is interesting, and again we see a lot of confidence in rock hopper which I don't share

Black spear is great I always thought that card was underated, and thresh gets you the box too

I would say this deck has A tier potential

Hey look it's anivia control without the jank, not much else to say

You just stall and stall and stall till your free 8/8's pop out fresh as daisies

Spectral matron is fun, you play it on rekindler or inquisitor and it levels Lissandra

Honestly just super solid S tier stuff here

So it's ledros control without carina, and without the otk potential of concurrent timelines

I don't think this list makes sense honestly, like all you need is like 1 hush play and this deck is done

I think this list is being carried by surrenders, people just get hard controlled and give up

So veiled Temple Thaliyah with Aphelios is a strong mana cheating list

I really like weight of judgement here card is super undervalued I run it as a 1 of in a lot of decks

Goal is pretty simple stack your buffs on one dude and then infernum for overwhelm

You also get your burn dmg from leveled Thalia 

The only question is, better than TF Aphelios where you get your free 3/4 challengers

Just having deny might make it better, but it looks weak to aggro I see the fangs going down on 4 and its too little too late

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The truth is though a lot of important lists are absent I believe that there is absolutely a very strong Rekton list out there 

I believe that Ash with Leblanc looks absolutely nuts

I think deep should be revisited, along with dragons

The fact a lot of what we are seeing is people just playing shadow isles is not a great sign on the creativity front

and what about Sivr, you can't tell me she's garbage, she has spell shield and quick attack like holly crap

Anyway that's it for me, let me know what you guys think down below.

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.

I have been opening on average 2 packs a day for about a month now playing Arena without a single legendary. Often I open more.

Cant help but feel they gave out more gold but passive agressively lowered the drop rate of them to stick it to us.

No, I have no proof of this but I've been playing this game for a while now and have a good feel of when one is around the corner. I've certainly opened more than 40.

I'm sure most of you will write this off as whining and am just seeing if anyone else is feeling the same way.

Like, seriously. They are so freaking annoying to try and deal with. It just feels like a 3 cost 5/2 with quick attack is so freaking busted, and a 4 cost 5/3 with quick attack and spell shield is even more so. And what's even more annoying is their stupid card that allows a 5+ power card to strike a unit for only 4 mana. Like, unless you are playing a full removal deck, you just lose. Idk it just feels like all of my decks do nothing against them, unless they get super unlucky and draw the wrong cards.

All I can say is I can't wait till the next update when they nerf some cards.

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.

A mode where we have access to all cards. It would be nice if it was against other players but to be fair I will say strictly against friends.

I know Blizzard wouldn't really want a mode like this because it could possibly kill some pack sales but it would be really nice to have.

There wouldn't have to be any battlepass, class, achievement, or quest progression for this mode so players would just play it occasionally and not play it more than ladder or other modes you would want to make purchases for.

There are decks that people have never gotten the chance to play and would really like to including myself and can't do so because of the steep prices or not having enough dust to play everything you want, so a mode like this would really make players enjoy the game even more.