GetMeowth has interviewed Dean "Iksar" Ayala on his podcast! You can watch the whole thing here:

I've also tried my best to transcript their talk. No big news, but they are very close to nerf APM Mage.

Dean has been playing a lot of Wild lately, what has he experienced?
- He’s very happy about the diversity Wild has to offer. He’s been playing Secret Mage for ages and recently played like 500 or 600 games of Handbuff Paladin. Even at high levels of play, you get to meet lots of different decks. Highlander decks are a big part of this which he much approves of.

How much thought goes into the impact on Wild when the devs are creating a new set?
- There is a lot of correlation between Standard and Wild, what’s fun in Standard is usually cool in Wild as well. They do check if a new card would improve one of the already best performing decks in Wild even more and try to avoid that.

How did the team decide which cards should be unnerfed when rotated and how happy are they with the results so far?
- They look at all the cards in the past and ideally, they unnerf them all. Wild should be the place where you can play the cards as you remember them. But then the question pops up “Is the game really gonna be more fun if we do that? If we make Leeroy 4 Mana, is that gonna make Wild more fun?“ They’re trying to decide this for each individual case. The team disagreed about Arcane Golem for example. Raza is also a card that they look back controversial on because it deletes other decks from the game, especially at super high levels.

Wild has less information, a smaller player base, less streamers and so on. Has the player base been sleeping on a particularly strong deck?
- There are so many people playing Hearthstone out there, it’s pretty much impossible for a strong deck to slip under the radar. What happens quite regularly is that the best performing decks aren’t the most played ones because they are boring (Odd Rogue was the best deck for about 2 months, but never even cracked top 5 or 6).

The meta game is different at lower levels like Diamond 5 and high Legend, Darkglare Warlock is a good example for this, as it sees way more play at the top. Is that something the devs have in mind and are they catering to special groups of players?
- Again, they don’t design cards for Wild. The devs are trying to create interesting tools for the game and the cards will find their way into Wild if they’re strong enough. That way, archetypes like Discard Warlock get stronger over time, because that’s a returning mechanic for Warlock. The team does check if a new card would make an already strong and much played deck even more powerful though, and tries to avoid that. Balance is usually tailored to the highest level of play, not because those players are more important, but because information usually trickles down. They have tons of data that prove this. The only exception are skill intensive decks like Miracle Rogue which take some more time to trickle down. There’s a very big range in MMR on Diamond 5, you can meet players with a 25% win rate there. That happens because people are willing to play decks with bad win rates if they do crazy stuff like Big Priest or Tickatus. Nobody would play Odd Rogue with a 45% win rate.

Does Dean have an idea how big the population of Wild players is that only play for fun? Are there any trends of player engagement in Wild over the years?
- Player engagement has been pretty stable for a long time. Trend is upwards in the east, where Wild is very popular compared to the west. One of the reasons for this is that card rotation is a lot more accepted in the western player base.

Darkglare was nerfed a lot faster than Sn1p-Sn4p, even though the former was still in Standard at the time while the latter wasn’t. Does this mark a change of philosophy?
- Dean assumes there have been technical issues about the Sn1p nerf like there was no patch scheduled at the time or something. The difference between the decks was that Sn1p-Lock did something pretty crazy, but it didn’t reach the raw powerlevel the original Darkglare Warlock had. There were match ups with a win rate of 50 or 51% when the deck was still new and they hoped for the meta to adjust by itself which they always prefer to stepping in. In comparism to this, there were no indicators in the data that Darkglare would fall off without them doing something.
The most important question when it comes to nerfs is still “What will happen afterward?”. Most of the time, the second best deck will just rise to the top and be even more dominant. Making an impact in Wild is naturally more difficult than in Standard because of the enormous card pool. The goal is always to create a better experience after a nerf and there are less opportunities to do so than most players think. Sea Giant Warlock was a good example for this, that wasn’t really Hearthstone anymore. It was just getting to turn x and then you win or you lose. Mage is close to this point these days.

How do the devs feel about cost reduction to 0, which is looked at very critically from the player base and allows decks like Sn1p-Lock, APM Priest and APM Mage to thrive?
- They are aware of the fact that cost reduction cards more often than not will become problematic in Wild at some point, even if they are not that strong in Standard. At the same time, playing a lot of cards in one turn is something very exciting and being able to reduce the cost of cards is something as inherent to a card game as buffing the Attack of your minions. They are reluctant to nerf cards like Sorcerer’s Apprentice because decks like Freeze Mage, Sea Giant Warlock or Barnes Priest make Hearthstone a unique experience. As long as you don’t get the feeling you have to play these decks because they are the most powerful and as long as they don’t get too popular, they won’t step in. APM Mage is really close to that point now and maybe nerfing Sorcerer’s Apprentice even is the answer, but they are very careful about that decision.

Mutanus adds a new layer of nastiness to Shudderwock decks. Now it's really gg once the Wock drops. 

Thanks a lot for that detailed answer! It's always nice to get some behind the scenes info and I'm already looking forward to what's still to come :) 

Happy Birthday and thank you so much to the staff that keeps providing such great content, constantly improves the site and is just super responsive and helpful in general. This site is everything the Internet promised to be: a nice place full of friendly people that share a common hobby. Proud to be a part of this. 

Blistering Rot? After 3 turns your board would be full.

I'm a bit hestitant to admit it, but I'm a filthy netdecker (and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one). Even if I'm repeating myself, outof.cards is the most awesome Hearthstone page on the web for me. Still, there are two things that are closely related to each other which I have to look for on other pages. So here are my suggestions how you could at least partially avoid that if you wanted to:

1) Top decks

Not sure how the algorythms work, but right now the "hot" and the "top" decks are showing almost the same results. You have that cooperation with HSReplay running, so why not use it some more? I suggest keeping the "hot" section as it is (I guess it's based on views, comments and upvotes?) and displaying the lists with the highest win rates from HSReplay in "top", updated daily at midnight or some such. Sometimes people are just looking for the best decks to grind the ladder with and right now, it's quite difficult to find them if there doesn't happen to be a post like this on the frontpage. It goes without saying that keeping the filters as they are would be vital if that is possible.

2) Meta Reports

This might be a little insolent, but I'd really appreciate it if there was a section where you point us to meta reports. Everybody has their favorites but I think we can agree about the top 3 or something. You could either post a short news article whenever a new one comes out or silently update a site where they are all displayed with a link to their respective external site. I know this would be pretty much advertizing third party content but since OOC understandably can't provide such reports themselves, why not make things for users a bit easier? While we're at it, a collection of podcasts would be pretty awesome, too.

I hope you don't get these ideas the wrong way. It's just that OOC is my platform of choice for everything social about Hearthstone right now, but if I want to be competitive, I have to look elsewhere most of the time. Maybe you are fine with that, but if you want to cater to a bigger audience, the two points above might be places to start.

Quote From BasilAnguis

• ... a wow kobold ... looking like a hairless deformed rat whose snout got stung by a bee and swollen.

Thanks for the laugh, really cool description! :D 

Wow, that's next level depth of design and the reason why I like to compete with you veterans so much: I'm learning a lot.

I will tinker some more with your text tomorrow, but maybe just cutting the "always" might be an acceptable solution. It isn't really necessary, even if the text sounds better with than without that word. "Always" is also very rarely used in HS so far. "Your Hero Power summons Stoneclaw Totem."... Hmmmm. 

Honestly, I think tinkering with the font size shouldn't be an immediate reason for a DQ as long as you don't go out of the window with it. I mean you have to compensate for a single letter, that should be done by going -1 or -2 and won't probably be noticed at all if people don't know it from the start. I've tried out alternate wording for KANSAS' card and it still looked okay at -4. We could also ask Shadows but I'm all for not asking questions in cases like this. 

@Fedrion: I understand your train of thought, I've done something similar in that competition that made us design effects that trigger next turn. But this week is about having 2 lines of text max and so your current version doesn't work. :/

@KANSAS: I feared as much. I've tinkered a bit on Hearthcards and you get it into two lines if you set the font size to -5 and end the first line with "Legendary". I don't know where the DQ line is drawn when it comes to altering font size, but for my eyes this looks okay. If you choose to ignore my little nitpicking issue, I'd definitely go with the original wording.

@Demon: Thanks for the explanation. Regarding the text, why don't you simply phrase it in the present tense? "Your Hero Power always summons Stoneclaw Totem." 

Feedback: I must say I really love this week's theme and your cards. Simplicity is one of the key advantages of HS and building a competition around that was genious. Thanks, JFK!

Wow, this is really impressive. I know 700 wins is a frightening grind, but the 1.000 wins Demon Hunter portrait is one of the best in the game for me, so maybe that's something you can put your mind on when you spam Illidan. I've also found the newish Deathrattle / Il'gynoth hybrid decks very fun to play and powerful, maybe that's something you want to look into. The downside is that games usually take 10-15 turns, Odd Demon Hunter would be way faster.

I guess I can say I have achieved all I ever wanted and more, that is getting to legend in Standard and Wild. I'm also looking forward to more golden and 1.000 Heros, but I usually play what I feel like at that moment and only actively start to grind a class when I'm about 100 wins away from a treshold. I'm really, really bad at Arena so 12 wins isn't something I'm even trying to achieve. I might give it a go in Duels if I ever get bored enough, but right now I'm happy with Standard & Wild.

Thanks for all your feedback! Just to save me some points in the voting: I have actually checked the wording and Scholomance still used the "from your deck" phrase in Double Jump, so I'll leave my card as it is for consistency.

Will add feedback first thing tomorrow morning (roughly 12 hours from now). 

I'm running a Deathrattle / Il'gynoth hybrid Demon Hunter that feels pretty strong. Might finally give Rush Warrior a go for a change though.

Don Han'Cho and Feat of Strength?

Here's my first idea for this week:

It's very similar to the card I won competition 2.1 with, but the art is just so fitting for the effect. The flavor is about a Squire who is too lazy to fetch his Paladin's weapon the ordinary way and resorts to magic instead. Nice way to tutor Ceremonial Maul or Underlight Angling Rod and it was even possible to play those on curve when Scholomance came out because First Day of School was at 0 Mana back then. The card only gets better with Hammer of the Naaru and Libram of Judgment added to the pool. Could also fetch you Val'anyr in wild.

Congrats, Arkasaur!

The Snowglobe was rightfully critisized as too complicated, so I dug for some fitting piece of art. Ended up with something pretty cool, here's my first take for it:

What do you think? It's a huge powercreep of Inner Demon, but Druid isn't as aggressive as Demon Hunter and life gain has been a thing for Malfurion every now and then.

More feedback:

I usually visit the page several times a day since Hearthstone is my number 1 hobby right now. My main interest lies in HS News articles, the Weekly Card Design Competition and the Card Treasure Hunt. I also check for cool new deck ideas now and then.

Wow, that's a really cool riddle. I can see easily three different directions this could go. Let's start with one of the obvious possibilities: Reckless Experimenter?