Interesting idea, but isn't it missing the amount of damage it deals? Like "1 damage for..."? Or is it meant to do something else, like if you dealt 3 damage with a Frostbolt, your card does 3 damage randomly split again?
Peon then. A pawn is the first figure moved in chess more often than not. I don't know it's voiceline upon death, but the flavor text says something about a job that's never done and that is what you get to hear when you have nothing left to do on your turn ("job's done").
Thanks for all your feedback so far! I'll go with Pyrotechnician, but I'm still debating if it should go face or not. It is meant to punish Control or Combo decks that accumulate a lot of cards in their hand, so it is an Aggro card by definition and that's a strong point for potential face damage. Nevertheless, I see that playing this on curve on an empty board is a very strong play. Maybe raising the Cost would be a solution, but I don't feel comfortable with that right now.
Here's some feedback for y'all while I'm trying to make up my mind:
linkblade
I agree with Arkasaur, it's in a strange place between useless and OP. I also second to go with the established Warrior thing of basing the condition on damaged minions. Something like "Gain 2 Armor for each damaged friendly minion." should do the trick. Way less complicated, but it keeps the flavor and could be quite useful .
BasilAnguis
That's a quite flavorful card, I like it. The one thing I'd change is the text flow, to avoid the "orphan" in the third line.
grumpymonk
Both cards are quite cool ideas. Shadow Illusions is probably more interesting, but also very strong. It's basically Zerek's Cloning Gallery for your hand and that's obviously a legendary that costs five (!) more Mana. You might also loose some points due to the fact that Rogue/Priest isn't an established combination of classes, but I have to say it fits like a glove in this case. So yeah, Shadow Illusions is the more exciting card to go with, but I think it needs some tweaking.
Demon
Nice idea! I'm a bit surprised it doesn't have the watermark from your Time Traveller class, it looks like it would be a nice fit for it. There are a few interesting aspects about your card, like it discourages you to use it in Highlander decks or lists with a lot of other legendarys. I could see this in a Wild Quest Mage deck. If you build your deck around it, it might even be a finisher instead of a board clear. Neat!
Wailor
I agree with the others that Maelstrom Harbringer is the better of the two. That swarm Demon Hunter thing never really took off. A 3/5 statline sounds good to me. It's interesting, flexible and a solid play even without a Spell Damage buff. I'm no native speaker, but shouldn't it be "Harbinger" instead of "Harbringer" (Fire Plume Harbinger, Harbinger Celestia)?
Nirast
I also prefer Get Ready for the Boom! because a direct damage spell doesn't fit Warrior very well. You might want to tune it down a bit, since giving Bomb Warrior such a strong survival card might be a bit too much. I'd also look for different art.
Is it a certain fact that the diamond cards will be bound to owning cards of their expansion? I think there would be a lot of possibilities for more creative achievements, like owning all neutral Pirate cards for a diamond Patches instead of that bird that doesn't see play.
Finally I get an opportunity to show you a card I've been sitting on for ages:
It's basically a Meteorologist for your opponent's hand and punishes Control decks. I'm not yet sure if I want it to be able to go face, what do you think?
I've also made a more fun-oriented card with C'Thun 3.0. Rogue would love this and it might also find a place in Wild Battlecry Shaman or that crazy Miracle Priest that discovers itself to death.
I'll add feedback later, when some more cards have been added to the thread.
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.
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.
snek <3
Interesting idea, but isn't it missing the amount of damage it deals? Like "1 damage for..."? Or is it meant to do something else, like if you dealt 3 damage with a Frostbolt, your card does 3 damage randomly split again?
I found this one on twitter and it works well enough for me:
https://twitter.com/Husky0821/status/1400665704559366146?s=19
Darkest Hour 2.0 is indeed better. Add two Demonic Studies to your list to pull off the combo earlier.
Don't craft Mecha'Thun for the Stealer deck. There's a better version out there, people call it Darkest Hour 2.0
https://twitter.com/Husky0821/status/1400665704559366146?s=19
Oh dear, there goes my hard earned gold.
Starving Buzzard it is, well done!
Nope.
For a long time, I have been too fat
Now I've lost some weight, people's attention is back
But I'm more than hungry, I'm almost dead
I can give you something that my class usually lacks
Peon then. A pawn is the first figure moved in chess more often than not. I don't know it's voiceline upon death, but the flavor text says something about a job that's never done and that is what you get to hear when you have nothing left to do on your turn ("job's done").
It's a strech, but... High Inquisitor Whitemane because white moves first in chess?
Thanks for all your feedback so far! I'll go with Pyrotechnician, but I'm still debating if it should go face or not. It is meant to punish Control or Combo decks that accumulate a lot of cards in their hand, so it is an Aggro card by definition and that's a strong point for potential face damage. Nevertheless, I see that playing this on curve on an empty board is a very strong play. Maybe raising the Cost would be a solution, but I don't feel comfortable with that right now.
Here's some feedback for y'all while I'm trying to make up my mind:
Is it a certain fact that the diamond cards will be bound to owning cards of their expansion? I think there would be a lot of possibilities for more creative achievements, like owning all neutral Pirate cards for a diamond Patches instead of that bird that doesn't see play.
Finally I get an opportunity to show you a card I've been sitting on for ages:
It's basically a Meteorologist for your opponent's hand and punishes Control decks. I'm not yet sure if I want it to be able to go face, what do you think?
I've also made a more fun-oriented card with C'Thun 3.0. Rogue would love this and it might also find a place in Wild Battlecry Shaman or that crazy Miracle Priest that discovers itself to death.
I'll add feedback later, when some more cards have been added to the thread.
Congrats to MathU and Arkasaur!
This was my favorite competition this season, so many cool cards :)
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.