Refreshing 1 per spell is fine in decks with minions, because they usually run lots of spells anyway. If the deck has a 50:50 split between minions and spells, the Spring Water averages out to refreshing 1 mana, making it the same as Arcane Intellect. That's not killed at all.
Besides, I don't see why the card needs to still be good in a deck with minions. The whole point in its design is to support spell-heavy decks, not to support all mage decks.
I didn't think it would affect Jandice either, but you'd expect to have seen her summon herself quite a few times if she could, and probably remember the low-roll too, yet I have no memory of it recent enough that I couldn't dismiss as being from early Scholomance. This is all just circumstantial evidence and could be wrong of course.
She might have been caught up in the change that came during Scholomance where cards cannot generate themselves anymore unless they specifically state it (e.g. Dreadsteed). Normally that affects discover cards, but it might be general enough to affect Jandice too.
It's not just control it screws over. Any midrange/value deck gets shafted too because warlock's removal is so strong, meaning it requires a grind before you can exhaust all the removal and finally finish them off. It's not helped that they get up to 32 extra health just from soul fragments, plus the Armor Vendors and Drain Souls. So if you aren't super quick at killing them you have to bring down something like 70+ health. That's really tough to do without needing the last 10 cards your the deck if you aren't really aggressive.
(Yes, I know they hurt themselves, so 70+ is an overestimate. It's still too much to deal with quickly once they're done with tapping though.)
Combo is in a weird spot where it is fine if it draws quickly enough, but is completely screwed otherwise. So Tickatus is really only useless against aggro, which is just what we needed at the end of a year that had already been dominated by aggro...
So the cards in the packs are always standard format?
Or standard from the time, i received them?
They are from Standard at the time you open them (I used rogue, priest and paladin packs at the start of Barrens to get the new cards, for example).
My own plan with them is to hold them until the next full expansion arrives, and use them effectively as packs from that expansion. I have more than enough surplus gold from the Rewards Track that it is most efficient for me to use that for the mini-expansion.
Note I did use packs I had saved up for the DMF mini-expansion to great success, so it is perfectly valid to use the class packs for that, but it would only be reliable if you already have the full Barrens set.
'They' has been a perfectly valid way to refer to a single person in English for a long time (since the 14th Century according to Wikipedia). So no, nobody is changing the language by using 'they' in the singular, they're just making it more common than before. (Not that changing the language would even be a bad thing. The idea that languages don't evolve over time is flawed, and English generally embraces change.)
Meanwhile, calling someone 'it' is going to be interpreted as an insult, no matter how well-meaning you might be. The appropriate definition my 7th Edition paperback Oxford English dictionary (2012) is: referring to an animal or child of unspecified sex. Note it explicitly says child, ruling out use for adults. Not everyone would be offended by being called 'it' (I know I wouldn't be), but it's best not to use it for people.
I always thought the blood elves had joined the Horde during Varian's kidnapping anyway. That's exactly the context of the World of Warcraft comics in which Valeera appears, which are set somewhere in the late Burning Crusade (BC) time period.
Those comics definitely ret-conned the timeline to begin with, by shifting Onyxia's death at the hands of players in Classic to death at the hands of Varian (alongside Valeera, Broll and Jaina) in BC. Despite being at odds with WoW Classic, they're still the canon version of events.
So I'm not entirely sure the timeline has actually been played around with for HS canon (at least not regarding the blood elves and draenei taking part). All it needs is to say the Year of the Gryphon is taking place in late BC, rather than forcing it into Classic and opening up a bunch of unnecessary inconsistencies (including Garrosh's presence, btw).
I completely agree that set rotation is another huge factor that I had missed, despite not saying so explicitly in my previous response (I gave you an upvote for it instead).
I still think The Spring Water was obviously overtuned even in a deck with minions. Mage is the most spell-focused class after all, and though I don't know the statistics, I expect normal mage decks will be at least 50% spells. At which point Spring Water is on average a 2 mana draw 2 without even trying to make it work. If it cost 5, then it's an Arcane Intellect on average, which is much more reasonable, but even then I'd be uneasy with it just because of how easy it is to make a spell-dominated mage deck.
I think the idea of the card is cool, but the execution was obviously flawed. It can absolutely be salvaged though. If it refreshed 1 mana each time and still cost 4 then the whole card makes sense power-wise and doesn't lose any flavour.
Let's be honest, they should definitely have foreseen a card that is better than Pot of Greed would be a problem. You don't even need to look at the context to know that; it's like the cardinal rule of TCG/CCGs.
Not seeing/fully appreciating the problem specifically with Deck of Lunacy is easier to forgive, likewise with Sword of the Fallen. Secret pally has been pushed twice and failed twice between TGT and Barrens, so it makes sense they'd push the power higher this time.
The simple fact we have these problems and they are quick to change them shows the broken decks are unintentional. That doesn't mean they didn't intend to make Refreshing Spring Water and Sword of the Fallen strong, just that they hadn't been able to play test enough to see how strong they would be in the resulting meta.
There are many factors in that failure, not just time. The whole HS team is a bit over 100 people the last I heard, but only a fraction of those are in final design and have any say in the power of cards. Then ask that handful of people to play test the entire set in <4 months, with cards being tweaked the entire time so the internal meta is shifting just like it does with buffs and nerfs in the meta we see, and it is easy to see how difficult it can be for them to get everything right.
Let's do a bit of maths to help show the challenge they're up against: let's suppose there's 10 people in final design, and an active player-base of 10,000 (certainly an underestimate!) in the first week of an expansion. 4 months is ~122 days, but they're working hours, so we're looking at (122 days)*(8 hours per day)*(10 players) = 9760 hours of testing per expansion (maximum!).
Compare to 1 week in the hands of players (assuming an average play time of 2 hours a day in that time): 7*2*10,000 = 140,000 hours = 14 times more than final design had. In other words it takes players about half a day to test as much as the devs can in 4 months. If I had been more realistic with my numbers it would be even faster.
Tl;dr: you'd think 4 months is long enough, but it's not even close.
Forged in the Barrens will introduce 10 all-new Mercenary characters as Legendary minions! We’ll be telling the stories for these characters over the course of the year through our expansions, our website, the Hearthstone Mercenaries game mode, and through Book of Mercenaries!
Book of Mercenaries will tell an epic, serialized story featuring all 10 new Mercenary characters and will release on a semi-monthly basis like Book of Heroes. Book of Mercenaries Rokara, the first installment in the series, will release on April 6!
To me it sounds like we'll follow the current 10 mercenaries all year as they gain experience and level up, and that we won't see more as the year progresses. Reading "semi-monthly" as 'every 2 months', I assume the months will alternate between the Books of Merenaries and Heroes, at least while we finish up the OG class heroes. After that, who knows? They have said they'd like to cover other heroes we have, e.g. Maiev and Medivh, so maybe they'll start appearing in the BoH at that point? It would be ~8 months away so there's lots of time to prepare for it.
They did make it sound like the Barrens had more focus on the Horde mercs, but I don't know if they plan to take it further than just them appearing in the Barrens cinematic. Maybe we'll learn about all of them first? The BoM would be slow for that, but the quote above does mention telling their stories on their website, so maybe we'll see stuff there? Or perhaps the mini-set?
The more highroll-y nature of pally and mage drawing specific cards in the first few turns can make it feel worse, certainly, but I'm not sure it actually is. At least I have more hope when they don't highroll than I ever did against the more consistent DH and Galakrond Shaman.
In the end the human brain is pretty bad at comparing emotions separated by a year, and usually treats present emotions as stronger than past ones, even if they actually aren't. That is not to say "I'm right, you're wrong", just that it's probably not possible to compare them fairly.
I don't think we ever had a first week meta that was so bad that basically any and all meme decks are completely unplayable because you can't actually win these matchups without going hard on the turn 1 tempo.
I'm not sure how you have forgotten about Galakrond Shaman and DH at the start of AoO so quickly. It's not just a recent thing either. When they added quests in Un'Goro? Say hello to a meta of Pirate Warrior vs Quest Rogue, where you want to play control to beat the warriors but then rogues beat you up.
When they added hero cards and decided death knights don't need to obey class identity in the Frozen Throne? Druid dominates. At least it was so powerful you could play meme druid decks to good success, I suppose.
Do I even need to mention Genn and Baku, who were only better because they were neutral and made several things problematic at once.
So no, this is not a uniquely bad start, but instead seems to be a common symptom of adding fancy new things without the capacity to test them fully. In this case the move from Classic to Core sets threw a lot of decks in the air, and I appreciate how hard it was to see where they'd all land. I'm still willing to point fingers where its obvious though (I'm looking at you Galakrond Shaman).
The deck is fun because of the randomness. It's really fun to play cards from other classes, especially one's I seldom play. It's honestly the most fun I've had in Hearthstone in years...
That has always been the basis of Burgle Rogue (BR), which has been my own favourite archetype for years. There are several reasons why I think BR is a fundamentally better design than Lunacy Mage (LM), but by far the biggest one is simply that they always kept the power level of BR inside a 'Goldilocks zone' for casual decks: it has decent win rates for casual players, but never approached tier 1 where it would flood the meta with excessive RNG.
Becoming powerful enough to leave that Goldilocks zone is a dangerous business. Partly because any tier 1 deck will be hated by the community as a whole, and partly because the deck will now have a real impact on the legitimacy of competitive Hearthstone. Randomness in card draw is one thing, but a deck based entirely on RNG is quite another. OG Yogg was nerfed for this reason, and Deck of Lunacy has become a much bigger offender than he ever was.
So ultimately, LM is really bad for the game so long as it remains powerful. I agree that the randomness adds to the fun of playing it, but it is also the best reason why it should not be allowed near tier 1.
Sadly for Deck of Lunacy itself, I just don't think it can stay at 2 mana anymore. Turn 3 is just too early to be drawing into the transformed cards when the card pool is as good as it is now.
I mean for YoggChamp! I used Mischief Maker because sending Oh my Yogg! over with Lorewalker Cho would make the opponent trigger your oh my yogg with the one your trying to give them, but when you do these kinda decks you just have to build them assuming the opponent is dumb and doesnt know what your doing.
The overall concept is the same though in that you bait the opponent into setting up the stage for you to complete the achievement.
I curious about how you did YoggChamp! now. When I did it I had an elaborate scheme involving multiple Chos to multiply Oh My Yogg! and a lot of coins to hope to transform into Raise Dead, all enabled by intentionally encountering a friend in ranked.
So I didn't have the patience to bait the opponent into it and then hope RNG was kind, and just rigged the whole system instead. There was plenty of baiting involved when I did the achievement for Shadow Clone though. Hmm, the achievements associated with secrets tend to be a lot more work than the others, now that I look at it. I suppose that makes sense since they have to involve the opponent doing something.
### Superschnüffler # [snip] # AAEBAcOfAwTvCPWJA76YA4DsAw2MAc4DyASJEIu9ArPBAtj+AvmTA8/rA9vuA+7xA9D3A8igBAA= # # Um dieses Deck zu verwenden, kopiert es in Eure Zwischenablage und erstellt ein neues Deck in Hearthstone.
I used a similar strategy to YoggChamp from the Darkmoon Faire run and got the achievement pretty easily.
Mulligan Hard for Lorewalker Cho & potentially Cannonmaster Smythe.
When ready drop Cho and send secrets over to your opponent, desperate measures is best since its twinspell and effectively counts as 2 secrets (especially if opponents hand is close to full). Feel free to clog the opponents hand as it will only increase the incentive for them to play the secrets. then have your opponent plays them out the next turn.
Once the opponent played 5 secrets drop cannonmaster if there are any untriggered secrets followed by horde operative and profit.
In my case the cannonmaster was not needed because the opponent triggered all the secrets I sent over with cho but its in the deck for this purpose.
Also if you want to replace any secrets In this deck you might not have, the only thing I say to that is I specifically omitted secrets that trigger when a minion or spell is played (not to be put off by the opponent playing secrets, or by your own Smythe when you need to clear your own secrets), so no Oh my yogg/Repentence! but otherwise they are basically swappable to whatever you have in your collection.
Thank goodness (yet again) for Lorewalker Cho! My deck was different in that it ran a fairly typical control paladin shell with lots of draw, but only 5 secrets with the plan that Subject 9 would find those. The secrets I chose were particularly undisruptive, and were intended to demonstrate clearly how little interest I had in winning the game.
Despite that, the hardest part was finding an opponent able to recognise when someone is just trying to complete an achievement, and then choose to be kind. I guess it's fitting it was a The Last Kaleidosaur quest paladin who finally helped me out, though I did feel a little bad when my Reckoning killed his Galvadon.
Spring Water could simply refresh 1 mana crystal per spell instead of 2. That way it is the same as Arcane Intellect if your deck is ~ 50:50 minions and spells, and is a 2 mana draw 2 when you draw 2 spells. That way it is usually as good or better than Arcane Intellect, but never busted.
I had to complete the murloc shaman achievement somehow, and sadly it's the best hope the deck has of not running out of fuel unless you have the luxury of having murlocs to trade away with Magicfin. If I hadn't got bored of murloc decks in 2015 I'd be pretty disappointed by that.
I'm all for RNG-heavy decks, but not if they are near/at the top of the meta. So despite enjoying Lunacy mage in DMF, I have quickly grown to loathe it.
It's clear that Deck of Lunacy was balanced around both an unreliable card pool and limited card draw in mage, and I guess we shouldn't be surprised about the results when neither of those are true anymore. Yu-Gi-Oh taught us all long ago that 0 mana draw 2 with no conditions (aside from a simple deck building constraint) is too powerful, and Fresh Water is better than that because it often only costs 2 or 3 itself.
Refreshing 1 per spell is fine in decks with minions, because they usually run lots of spells anyway. If the deck has a 50:50 split between minions and spells, the Spring Water averages out to refreshing 1 mana, making it the same as Arcane Intellect. That's not killed at all.
Besides, I don't see why the card needs to still be good in a deck with minions. The whole point in its design is to support spell-heavy decks, not to support all mage decks.
I didn't think it would affect Jandice either, but you'd expect to have seen her summon herself quite a few times if she could, and probably remember the low-roll too, yet I have no memory of it recent enough that I couldn't dismiss as being from early Scholomance. This is all just circumstantial evidence and could be wrong of course.
She might have been caught up in the change that came during Scholomance where cards cannot generate themselves anymore unless they specifically state it (e.g. Dreadsteed). Normally that affects discover cards, but it might be general enough to affect Jandice too.
It's not just control it screws over. Any midrange/value deck gets shafted too because warlock's removal is so strong, meaning it requires a grind before you can exhaust all the removal and finally finish them off. It's not helped that they get up to 32 extra health just from soul fragments, plus the Armor Vendors and Drain Souls. So if you aren't super quick at killing them you have to bring down something like 70+ health. That's really tough to do without needing the last 10 cards your the deck if you aren't really aggressive.
(Yes, I know they hurt themselves, so 70+ is an overestimate. It's still too much to deal with quickly once they're done with tapping though.)
Combo is in a weird spot where it is fine if it draws quickly enough, but is completely screwed otherwise. So Tickatus is really only useless against aggro, which is just what we needed at the end of a year that had already been dominated by aggro...
They are from Standard at the time you open them (I used rogue, priest and paladin packs at the start of Barrens to get the new cards, for example).
My own plan with them is to hold them until the next full expansion arrives, and use them effectively as packs from that expansion. I have more than enough surplus gold from the Rewards Track that it is most efficient for me to use that for the mini-expansion.
Note I did use packs I had saved up for the DMF mini-expansion to great success, so it is perfectly valid to use the class packs for that, but it would only be reliable if you already have the full Barrens set.
'They' has been a perfectly valid way to refer to a single person in English for a long time (since the 14th Century according to Wikipedia). So no, nobody is changing the language by using 'they' in the singular, they're just making it more common than before. (Not that changing the language would even be a bad thing. The idea that languages don't evolve over time is flawed, and English generally embraces change.)
Meanwhile, calling someone 'it' is going to be interpreted as an insult, no matter how well-meaning you might be. The appropriate definition my 7th Edition paperback Oxford English dictionary (2012) is: referring to an animal or child of unspecified sex. Note it explicitly says child, ruling out use for adults. Not everyone would be offended by being called 'it' (I know I wouldn't be), but it's best not to use it for people.
I always thought the blood elves had joined the Horde during Varian's kidnapping anyway. That's exactly the context of the World of Warcraft comics in which Valeera appears, which are set somewhere in the late Burning Crusade (BC) time period.
Those comics definitely ret-conned the timeline to begin with, by shifting Onyxia's death at the hands of players in Classic to death at the hands of Varian (alongside Valeera, Broll and Jaina) in BC. Despite being at odds with WoW Classic, they're still the canon version of events.
So I'm not entirely sure the timeline has actually been played around with for HS canon (at least not regarding the blood elves and draenei taking part). All it needs is to say the Year of the Gryphon is taking place in late BC, rather than forcing it into Classic and opening up a bunch of unnecessary inconsistencies (including Garrosh's presence, btw).
I completely agree that set rotation is another huge factor that I had missed, despite not saying so explicitly in my previous response (I gave you an upvote for it instead).
I still think The Spring Water was obviously overtuned even in a deck with minions. Mage is the most spell-focused class after all, and though I don't know the statistics, I expect normal mage decks will be at least 50% spells. At which point Spring Water is on average a 2 mana draw 2 without even trying to make it work. If it cost 5, then it's an Arcane Intellect on average, which is much more reasonable, but even then I'd be uneasy with it just because of how easy it is to make a spell-dominated mage deck.
I think the idea of the card is cool, but the execution was obviously flawed. It can absolutely be salvaged though. If it refreshed 1 mana each time and still cost 4 then the whole card makes sense power-wise and doesn't lose any flavour.
Let's be honest, they should definitely have foreseen a card that is better than Pot of Greed would be a problem. You don't even need to look at the context to know that; it's like the cardinal rule of TCG/CCGs.
Not seeing/fully appreciating the problem specifically with Deck of Lunacy is easier to forgive, likewise with Sword of the Fallen. Secret pally has been pushed twice and failed twice between TGT and Barrens, so it makes sense they'd push the power higher this time.
The simple fact we have these problems and they are quick to change them shows the broken decks are unintentional. That doesn't mean they didn't intend to make Refreshing Spring Water and Sword of the Fallen strong, just that they hadn't been able to play test enough to see how strong they would be in the resulting meta.
There are many factors in that failure, not just time. The whole HS team is a bit over 100 people the last I heard, but only a fraction of those are in final design and have any say in the power of cards. Then ask that handful of people to play test the entire set in <4 months, with cards being tweaked the entire time so the internal meta is shifting just like it does with buffs and nerfs in the meta we see, and it is easy to see how difficult it can be for them to get everything right.
Let's do a bit of maths to help show the challenge they're up against: let's suppose there's 10 people in final design, and an active player-base of 10,000 (certainly an underestimate!) in the first week of an expansion. 4 months is ~122 days, but they're working hours, so we're looking at (122 days)*(8 hours per day)*(10 players) = 9760 hours of testing per expansion (maximum!).
Compare to 1 week in the hands of players (assuming an average play time of 2 hours a day in that time): 7*2*10,000 = 140,000 hours = 14 times more than final design had. In other words it takes players about half a day to test as much as the devs can in 4 months. If I had been more realistic with my numbers it would be even faster.
Tl;dr: you'd think 4 months is long enough, but it's not even close.
Adding further details:
To me it sounds like we'll follow the current 10 mercenaries all year as they gain experience and level up, and that we won't see more as the year progresses. Reading "semi-monthly" as 'every 2 months', I assume the months will alternate between the Books of Merenaries and Heroes, at least while we finish up the OG class heroes. After that, who knows? They have said they'd like to cover other heroes we have, e.g. Maiev and Medivh, so maybe they'll start appearing in the BoH at that point? It would be ~8 months away so there's lots of time to prepare for it.
They did make it sound like the Barrens had more focus on the Horde mercs, but I don't know if they plan to take it further than just them appearing in the Barrens cinematic. Maybe we'll learn about all of them first? The BoM would be slow for that, but the quote above does mention telling their stories on their website, so maybe we'll see stuff there? Or perhaps the mini-set?
The more highroll-y nature of pally and mage drawing specific cards in the first few turns can make it feel worse, certainly, but I'm not sure it actually is. At least I have more hope when they don't highroll than I ever did against the more consistent DH and Galakrond Shaman.
In the end the human brain is pretty bad at comparing emotions separated by a year, and usually treats present emotions as stronger than past ones, even if they actually aren't. That is not to say "I'm right, you're wrong", just that it's probably not possible to compare them fairly.
I'm not sure how you have forgotten about Galakrond Shaman and DH at the start of AoO so quickly. It's not just a recent thing either. When they added quests in Un'Goro? Say hello to a meta of Pirate Warrior vs Quest Rogue, where you want to play control to beat the warriors but then rogues beat you up.
When they added hero cards and decided death knights don't need to obey class identity in the Frozen Throne? Druid dominates. At least it was so powerful you could play meme druid decks to good success, I suppose.
Do I even need to mention Genn and Baku, who were only better because they were neutral and made several things problematic at once.
So no, this is not a uniquely bad start, but instead seems to be a common symptom of adding fancy new things without the capacity to test them fully. In this case the move from Classic to Core sets threw a lot of decks in the air, and I appreciate how hard it was to see where they'd all land. I'm still willing to point fingers where its obvious though (I'm looking at you Galakrond Shaman).
That has always been the basis of Burgle Rogue (BR), which has been my own favourite archetype for years. There are several reasons why I think BR is a fundamentally better design than Lunacy Mage (LM), but by far the biggest one is simply that they always kept the power level of BR inside a 'Goldilocks zone' for casual decks: it has decent win rates for casual players, but never approached tier 1 where it would flood the meta with excessive RNG.
Becoming powerful enough to leave that Goldilocks zone is a dangerous business. Partly because any tier 1 deck will be hated by the community as a whole, and partly because the deck will now have a real impact on the legitimacy of competitive Hearthstone. Randomness in card draw is one thing, but a deck based entirely on RNG is quite another. OG Yogg was nerfed for this reason, and Deck of Lunacy has become a much bigger offender than he ever was.
So ultimately, LM is really bad for the game so long as it remains powerful. I agree that the randomness adds to the fun of playing it, but it is also the best reason why it should not be allowed near tier 1.
Sadly for Deck of Lunacy itself, I just don't think it can stay at 2 mana anymore. Turn 3 is just too early to be drawing into the transformed cards when the card pool is as good as it is now.
I curious about how you did YoggChamp! now. When I did it I had an elaborate scheme involving multiple Chos to multiply Oh My Yogg! and a lot of coins to hope to transform into Raise Dead, all enabled by intentionally encountering a friend in ranked.
So I didn't have the patience to bait the opponent into it and then hope RNG was kind, and just rigged the whole system instead. There was plenty of baiting involved when I did the achievement for Shadow Clone though. Hmm, the achievements associated with secrets tend to be a lot more work than the others, now that I look at it. I suppose that makes sense since they have to involve the opponent doing something.
Thank goodness (yet again) for Lorewalker Cho! My deck was different in that it ran a fairly typical control paladin shell with lots of draw, but only 5 secrets with the plan that Subject 9 would find those. The secrets I chose were particularly undisruptive, and were intended to demonstrate clearly how little interest I had in winning the game.
Despite that, the hardest part was finding an opponent able to recognise when someone is just trying to complete an achievement, and then choose to be kind. I guess it's fitting it was a The Last Kaleidosaur quest paladin who finally helped me out, though I did feel a little bad when my Reckoning killed his Galvadon.
Spring Water could simply refresh 1 mana crystal per spell instead of 2. That way it is the same as Arcane Intellect if your deck is ~ 50:50 minions and spells, and is a 2 mana draw 2 when you draw 2 spells. That way it is usually as good or better than Arcane Intellect, but never busted.
I had to complete the murloc shaman achievement somehow, and sadly it's the best hope the deck has of not running out of fuel unless you have the luxury of having murlocs to trade away with Magicfin. If I hadn't got bored of murloc decks in 2015 I'd be pretty disappointed by that.
I'm pretty sure it looks like this :)
As for how it would play? That's much less obvious, especially as they didn't even want to let shaman have fun with freeze effects.
I'm all for RNG-heavy decks, but not if they are near/at the top of the meta. So despite enjoying Lunacy mage in DMF, I have quickly grown to loathe it.
I know its a highroll, but the last one I faced had the dream hand (Deck of Lunacy and both copies of the Fresh Water), and by turn 4 they had played Skull of Gul'dan, Arbor Up (twice!), Barricade and Siphon Soul. Meanwhile I was just hoping for Tinyfin's Caravan to survive 1 turn.
It's clear that Deck of Lunacy was balanced around both an unreliable card pool and limited card draw in mage, and I guess we shouldn't be surprised about the results when neither of those are true anymore. Yu-Gi-Oh taught us all long ago that 0 mana draw 2 with no conditions (aside from a simple deck building constraint) is too powerful, and Fresh Water is better than that because it often only costs 2 or 3 itself.