I mean, I'm not complaining, but where is that bonus xp coming from? and how long will it last?

👏TAVERN REVIEW 👏

Alright, it looks like Elementals are a strange hybrid of both Pirates and Murlocs, it meshes the economy aspect of pirates and the board-buffing aspect of Murlocs, but does not really excel at either of them. However besides big stats, I don’t really see Elementals being able to compete with the Divine Shields and massive stats of dragons or being able to beat Amalgadon, the most played strategy right now. Unless it ends up being a very strong midrange strategy, I can see it potentially flopping. I’m not going to look into the individual cards, but most of them show a lot of promise, especially since their discover/draw effects are very targeted and low tiered.

Heroes:

Ragnaros: 3/5

Could potentially be very strong, actually! You can activate this hero power by turns 5-6 and this is a massive power spike as you just get so much free stats over the course of the game. However, seeing how fast the meta is at the moment, it could be a problem of “too little, too late” as you are forced to go without a hero power for so many turns. I am optimistic for this hero, especially since there are so many tokens that your opponents will be running. Not amazing probably, but has potential.

Chenvaala: 2/5

I am not very sold on this hero. He has crazy highroll potential provided you receive elementals. I will not write him off as of course, power-leveling is the meta right now, and if done correctly, can allow you to really pop off. However, he seems rather inconsistent and relies on the elemental tribe which I believe will not be that good. I suspect you will just use his hero power to quickly switch off elementals into Amalgadon or a Beast build and try to win from there. Very skeptical overall due to how inconsistent the strat is as you will probably die before you can really pop off.

Rakanishu: 1/5

Hero power is way too slow and at 2 gold is not even worth it. Edwin is much better in that sense, and even he is struggling right now.

Al’akir: 4/5

We have established that free stuff is awesome! This is very similar to the Lich King’s hero power and just buffs your dude for free. It can allow you to survive the early game easily (which we established was a problem) and reach those late game builds much safer. I would say he has the most potential to succeed among the heroes shown here is Rag or Chenvaala don’t blow my expectations out of the water. However, the hero power can also prove to be a hinderance in certain situations, but they are rare and few. You have Divine Shield to survive a first hit and Windfury to ensure the minion will always get its swings in.

Anyone played against a really good Lee Sin lately? 22 damage in one turn is kinda ludicrous. Especially considering the protections he has spell shield and deny do an excellent job rending him unmovable. And the card that fills your hands with gems works wonders with him. I’m just not sure how to deal with him Deny and spell shield strong. 

What do you think fellow Hearthstonians?

Do you think Celestials are fine....?

Or

Is it the same CreatedBy as Hearthstone's Mage/Priest...?

The only nice thing about it for me is that it's rarer to chain a Celestial into another Celestial......

As we know from two weeks ago, they said Petty Officer was on the chopping block. The question is, what will happen to the ugly little guy?

My personal prediction - he now summons a 1/1 Dreg Dredger and you can no longer choose a Powder Keg as an option.

A fun little quote from him at time code 22.25

Only 10 new cards were released from this set that see play

The only new list is Asol Trundle ramp and even then Bilgewater Noxious is just better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY8D2MC6FHY

He also praises Fiora Shen which isn't being played by anyone really but has the potential to be great

This list was grabbed straight off swim's website if you want to try it, it's the same one Bruised is streaming

Although he run's dragons on 5, which is a whatever change

https://lor.mobalytics.gg/decks/btlupe1la4s85h9j4vq0

So I've unlocked all of the new champion capsules in all of the region rewards.

Providing me a full set of Taric and Nocturn.

That only leaves a full playset of Sol to grab from weekly's and with gems.

Unfortunately, a lot of these champs are underrepresented in the meta right now.

You are either hardcore aggro or super control, and these match's are decided very quickly.

If I wanted to grind rank I'd just jam pirate aggro with it's insane 59 percent win rate overall.

https://lor.mobalytics.gg/decks/code/CICAIAIDAIHSKKACAIBQGBAGAIDAQFRAEYWTUAIDAYDAAAIBAEBTG

It has a 70 - 90 percent win rate against all of the control regions in the game so Targon, P and Z, Ionia, Noxious, Freijord

Shadow would be your best bet but it still looses 59 percent of the time.

Hurray, no midrange and no combo decks to speak of, so fun.

Still think Bilgewater isn't op guys...

Hey guys and gals, I figured it might be cool to talk about our favorite books, recommend each other hidden gems and keep up to date with promising releases.

For starters, I'd like to let you know that I'm rooting for Science Fiction and Fantasy (big surprise) and everything in between since I've been given the Lord of the Rings as a present on my 10th birthday. Here are some of the titles I'd like to recommend to anyone with a similar taste:

Dan Simmons: The Hyperion Cantos (4 books)
My favorite Sci-Fi books. Don't be fooled by the first book, it's  primarily a set up for the main story which takes place in books 2-4. There's space craft, there's AI, there's an epic love story and if you feel rather sceptic about religion, this is a great book for you.

Eliezer Yudkowsky a.k.a Less Wrong: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Yes, this is a fan fiction. But please hear me out: This is probably the best book I've ever read. The basic question of the book is what Harry Potter would have acted like if he was a (very) intelligent, grown up, modern person. At times it's hillarious, all of it is exciting, and last but not least: it's free. You can read or download the book at www.hpmor.com - I actually went to the lenghts of taking this to a copy shop and having it bound for 80 € because it is so, so great.

David Mack - Dark Arts series (currently 3 books)
This is another series about magicians, but with an interesting twist to the usual pattern: the magicians are yoking demons to perform magic for them. The storys of the first and the second book are taking place during the Second Wolrd War with magic users on both sides. It's way darker than HP in all kind of ways. A good example is the yoking of demons which is mentally exhausting to the point that all major magic users are addicted to alcohol, cocaine or other drugs because they'd lose their mind otherwise.

Terry Goodkind - The Sword of Truth series (main plot ends after book 11)
One of my favorite fantasy series, The Sword of Truth is a great story about ethics and morale, set in a world full of magic and magical creatures. It has its lengths but never lost its relevance for me, since it colorfully describes what happens if narrowminded, intolerant people gain the upper hand with the help of a very powerful leader. This is adult material as well - there's quite some cruelty and while the sex scenes themselves are scarce and not detailed at all, the teasing which leads to them certainly isn't.
[In my personal opinion, you should start with "Wizard's first rule" and most importantly stop after "Confessor". All the other sequels were just an attempt to milk the cow to death.]

I have chosen to showcase those 4 because my other favorites are rather well known and don't need to be promoted very much imho. Among them are the "Foundation" series by Asimov, the "Ender" series by Orson Scott Card, "The Forever War" by Haldeman and "The Parafaith War" by Modesitt Jr.

High places on my next to read list are taken by "To sleep in a sea of stars" by Paolini and "The Name of the Wind" by Rothfuss (if he ever manages to finish book 3 of the series). I am entertaining the thought to try Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series for a third (or fourth?) time. I've never managed to get past book 4 because he's all about character development and I prefer faster plots.

What are your favorites? Is there anything you'd like to advertice in particular? Something you're looking forward to? Please tell!

So after our beloved lady Jaina, who do you think will be next hero to tell their story? I´ve heard some rumours it will be Hunter - some say it was spoiled by Blizzard themselves in some promotional video. Have any of you heard/saw something regard this?

I´m interested in your thoughts, which hero you´d guess is the next? Or which one you´d love to see/get?

For me, obviously as a Hunter main, I´d love to see Rexxar´s story the most.

Thanks for your replies and please, be nice to each other :)

Competition Theme: À La Card

We're hungry for some thematic cards this week, so see what you can serve up!

• You must create a card which is themed around food or eating
  • The most famous existing example is Priest of the Feast, but fellow Karazhan card Silverware Golem would also work - get creative!

It looks like grumpymonk has food on the brain this week - let's feed those thoughts!

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, Sep 21 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Sat, Sep 26 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400)
• Voting Phase: Starts on Sat, Sep 26 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Sun, Sep 27 16:00 EDT (GMT -0400)
• Finalist Phase: Starts on Sun, Sep 27 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Mon, Sep 28 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.

Greetings card fans.

I've been giving HS a bit of a back seat the last 6 months or so. (I got bit tired of climbing ladders and story modes don't interest me in the slightest.) 

So naturally I haven't been following the forums or websites for Hearthstone news.

However, this week i decided I'd log back on to play some strange decks so I came back to OOC looking for some inspiration.

I couldn't help but feel however there seems to be less of a community going on here than when the site first launched? Maybe I've got this all wrong but it feels to me like there aren't tonnes of decks with lots of up votes and comments like back in the hearthpwn days. So I just wandered, is that a thing or am i just looking in the wrong places? 

Did you all move on to bigger and better things? Basically my question is, where are all the OGs at? 

Did anyone try? I love it. Would not mind if the current ranked mode gets replaced with this one.

Hello,

I feel dumb but I can't find out how to buy multiple packs at once using gold in MtG Arena.

I'd be grateful if somebody could explain how to proceed.

Thanks.

I don't know if this is common knowledge or not, but I was playing a Midrange Treant Druid just now against a type of Resurrect Priest in Wild and experienced a very strange interaction between Treants that had been summoned and died on their side of the board and their spellstone.  They were using the Radiant Elemental and Veilweaver to generate a ton of value similar to a Lyra deck might try to do.  Anyway, they had also played a few thief Priest cards to generate things like Soul of the Forest, and I also played Poison Seeds at one point.

Later, when the opponent played a 3 minion rez Diamond Spellstone I was expecting Radiant, Veilweaver, and a Treant as those are the only three minions that had died on my opponent's side.  Instead he got a Veilweaver and 2x Treants!

I was like, "WTF?!"  My Opponent was also like "WTF?!" and went bottom right to end the match instantly.  But in the few moments I had prior to his concede I realized the two Treants have different watermarks!  One was a Classic set Treant and the other was Naxxramas set Treant!  So despite the same artwork and same name, the game counted them as different minions in regards to the spellstone's mechanic.

Again, is this specific interaction common knowledge?  Does it sound like a potential bug?  Not that I really care as it's just one additional way a Resurrection Priest's game plan can get screwed up, but I am generally interested to hear if others have had similar experiences, or just your thoughts on the interaction.

This is not a salt thread.... This is an honest inquiry on things that I am starting to feel the conspiracy theory about with the matching system.  Does anyone know if the matching algorithm for games looks for specific cards and matches you up against people that have opposing styles of cards?

I ask this on both sides of the fence.  Whenever I play a common combo deck, I feel like I am constantly getting paired against aggro decks.  And when I switch to aggro, I get tossed a lot of control decks.  The same goes the other way though.  When I play something like Kingsbane Rogue, I end up playing against combo players and dog walk them.  

If there is such an algorithm, is it Blizzards way of saying, get better to beat the style of deck that kills yours... or is it a subtle jab to your kidneys?

I saw her in the solo adventure so either they wanted to make this encounter extremely easy by giving him garbage cards (more likely) or will warsong commander get a rework or something to do with injured minions/weapon? maybe they left her as she made sense.

One can only hope for justice to the most obvious "we don't want to deal with this card so we deleted it but it's still there for people to wonder just why it exists" card.

also Malfurion has "Night elf tag" foreshadowing that night elves being a tribe?

So Bilgewater has been the tempo king since rising tides

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

mobalyitics has 3 of their lists exceeding 55 percent win rate.

https://www.swimstrim.com/runeterra/decks-and-meta

Swim has the number of top tier bilgewater lists at 5

and then there's literally everything else in the game that comes after

It absolutely blows the mind that this region has dodged nerfs this long, and really shows how little the developers play their own game.

You are thinking well they hit war chefs, and Ezreal, but those cards were never the issue.

It has always been the core region cards.

Best 3 drop, and is good at aggro and control plays

best removal in the game

best finisher in the game

best 1 drop in the game

best champ who might as well be bilgewater

I know you are all thinking QQ

but I just want to play the new set, and there's literally no reason to right now and that sucks

Okay, technically it is 2:30 AM on the 17th for me, and most people its the 17th, but since the Pacific coast counts, we're going to pretend it is the 16th.

New Features

Magic the Gathering

• Added set pages. Here's Zendikar Rising.
  • Cards currently only display in numeric order. Sort options are the endgame goal.
  • Cards themselves now nest cleanly under sets.
• Modal Dual-Faced Cards can now be flipped!
• Added tooltips for cards.
  • Plains

Flip Card

Changes

Magic the Gathering

• Split card frames now rotate 90 degrees so they can be properly read.
• Added extra navigation when on non-Magic pages for faster browsing.

Mythgard

• Added to navigation.
• Added a site header for the game.

Runeterra

• Imported fresh data for Patch 1.10

Bug Fixes

General

• Fixed an issue with the portal deck widget showing the wrong game if you switched portals.

Magic the Gathering

• Fixed incorrect default width of cards. Was 240, is now 265.
• Corrected images for Modal DFC cards. Previously the same image was used for both sides of the cards.
• Card BBCode will now prefer a collectible card over a non-collectible.
  • MTG doesn't really have non-collectible cards, save for tokens. However, with the way our data works, Modal DFC (and some other dual-faced cards) have a back and front that is a separate "card" in our database. When requesting these cards in bbcode, we're assuming you will want the front face of the card by default.

Mythgard

• Fixed an issue when browsing Mythgard content that would result in a homepage error afterwards.
  • This was live for a few minutes this past afternoon. Sorry to the couple hundred people who ended up seeing the error.

Flux Notes

Yo! Couple things here.

• MTG Deckbuilder should be out before the end of the month. We've got some big tech choices to get through to make this work well.
• Mythgard support. You've noticed some Mythgard articles today. Thanks to Nirast for helping us cover the game! I'm not going to consider us fully committed to it just yet, which is why it doesn't have a large portal link on all pages, though the game has a great community and we'd love to give players a great home.
  • If there's some free time this month, we'll get a card database up for the title pending datamining and card generation. 
  • If helping cover Mythgard is something you'd be interested in doing as a volunteer, hit me up.
• MTG "stuff" as a whole is still a work in progress. Card pages are still quite bare!
• I'm going to bed now so I can be up for the launch of Zendikar Rising!

what is inside ? Mage cards, ok. But Classic of any expansion? golden or not?

You know what's not fun? Having no control. For me there is no point in playing the game if it is just being fed to me. This is getting tiresome. People qq'ed by the amount of dungeon runs they were churning out but guess what? Thanks to your qq'ing we get even worse solo adventures. Granted, the following DR's never captured the magic of the first one in Kobolds, but at least they tried to keep them fresh like with the shrines in Rastakan.

I'm sure some people like this and I don't mean to be a prick and alienate you, but after two goes with Jaina and seeing that I am going to have no control over the deck I'm using, I have no motivation to play it. I'd rather netdeck and have the ability to at least change a card or two to fit my play style.

If you want a return to Dungeon Runs, please voice your opinion, otherwise keep getting these.

https://playruneterra.com/en-us/news/patch-1-10-notes/

War chefs going down to 1/3 hurts scouts and lulu

Ezreal nerf is healthy

Lee Sin buff is great

Yordle Grifter is brought in line with bannerman but otherwise bilgewater is untouched.

How do we feel about this, out of anything that was going to get nerfed I wasn't thinking Demacia of all things

Kind of a strange patch overall but I will let you guys decide.

A site deploy has gone live tonight with support for Magic the Gathering cards. We've also fixed issues with site cache.

New Features

Magic the Gathering

• Card database is live with more than 50k Magic cards
  • This is considered a soft release for right now.
  • Filters have not yet been touched much. We'll get these fleshed out more when the deckbuilder hits.
  • You can embed magic cards with the "mtgcard" bbcode. We'll detail this more in the future in a dedicated forum post.

Changes

Hearthstone

• Fan Creations (deployed last week)
  • Cards now support multiclass.
  • Finalists can no longer vote on finalist entries.
  • Winners gallery has been updated to look nicer.
• Deck listing now lets you sort by specific Tavern Brawls

General

• Articles now display their date in a mouseover tooltip on the timestamp

Bug Fixes

Runeterra

• Fixed an issue with the patch filter on the homepage deck widget (This went out last week)
• Fixed an issue with the region filter on the homepage deck widget

General

• Fixed issues where spam was getting through more often than it should have.
• Improved performance on article loads
• Fixed an issue where our site cache was unable to connect to certain site nodes
  • Since our move to new hardware a month ago, this has been an ongoing issue. Sorry for the slower than normal load times!
• Improved query logic on the forums for some speedups.

I feel like every morning, I see a lot of whatever deck he released a YouTube video for the night before. He showcases a lot of interesting decks, so I get why people would want to try them out, but the frequency with which I see them just seems crazy to me.

Hi guys, 

does anybody know, what happened to my hearthstone? :D

Am I the chosen one?