If it's at the end of each turn, opponent can never remove it, and you get full board of ready to attack minions next turn. If at the start of each turn, you actually can't summon any more minions nor attack with your board, basically you block yourself. Which one it is?
In fairness, they included the Merc game mode on last year's plan BEFORE the pandemic came in and made everything more difficult. I honestly don't think it is "fair to expect a majestic new game mode" on time when you know the game's development has been affected by the very thing that has shut down jobs across the planet.
Besides, I'd much rather they release it when its ready than rush things for a schedule and we end up with an unfinished product. There's more than enough stuff going on in HS these days to not get bored waiting for it.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Quest rogue isn't even that good. It was always played way more than its win rate deserved in Standard, and I'm not sure it'll have the same loyal following as it did back then, especially as there aren't really any slow control decks in Wild to prey upon.
At least I'm hoping quest rogue doesn't become a meta deck, because I've been waiting years to enjoy messing around with janky versions of the deck without feeling dirty doing it!
Yes and no. Spell schools will be retroactively added to cards, but non-magic spells (e.g. Slam, and almost every warrior spell for that matter) won't have a school.
If it upgrades like the DH spell, then it's just really underpowered imo. If maybe it gets +2 each time, it will be nuts.
It gets +2 on each upgrade, yes. So it's good. I guess we'll find out just how important it was for Evis to deal 4 on turns 1-4. If it turns out that's not important at all, then we can treat it like Evis got buffed.
If a mechanic exists, you can be sure rogue will get card draw for it. (That's actually true, just look back at rogue in recent sets.) I'm disappointed I didn't predict it when being quietly certain there'd be another poison.
It gets kinda boring to default to card draw for everything, but at least it ensures draw won't be a problem whatever meme you pursue in rogue. So sure, sign me up I guess.
That warrior weapon looks like a bad move. Even Liv was eager to place the blame on the final design team.
What really baffles me is that we've had Iksar say recently that pre-nerf Ancharrr was an honorable mention for most OP card ever. So why would they then make a card that is arguably better?
Edit: I just realised it has to kill a minion, so I'll retract my comment, at least a little bit. If Liv said it was already strong at 2 durability then I have no reason not to trust her that it's pretty broken.
The really troubling thing is that upon rotation warlock is going to be the only class with any good way to shuffle things back into the deck (Cast when drawn cards don't really count). Not even rogue will have anything. So if you want to play a slow deck that doesn't just lose to having half of its cards deleted, you have to play warlock. Such great design...
It's biggest problem imo is that it actually does the opposite of what you'd expect. It loos like it promotes fighting for the board, but it actually just means the opponent can grab it back again easily as soon as you win it because they can give all their minions rush for basically no cost because the Broom itself is often an important part in making trades. I'd remove rush from the Broom at the very least.
Looking back, the 1-drops in Scholomance were all pretty ridiculous. I understand the whole school-kids are small flavour, but they went a bit far with it.
Kinda makes us wonder why Argent Braggart isn't a legendary himself. Is this card really the nuts that team5 couldn't make it an epic card instead?
It is a more complex effect than the Braggart has, so a higher rarity fits (though that doesn't mean epic and legendary makes more sense than rare and epic would). I think in practice though they are very different cards used for completely different things, and their comparison is only skin deep.
Serena probably makes more sense from a slow midrange point of view than the usual control mindset of "I must kill everything all the time". If you shrink something until it's not a significant threat anymore then you don't need to deal with it immediately, while Serena also sits on the board as something that will quite often be able to value trade into whatever it stole stats from. Perhaps that mindset doesn't have much of a place outside of Arena...
Also, that damn broom. It shows how overtuned a 1-mana neutral is when people's first thoughts are "maybe it works well with broom?"
To my computational physicist's mind I admit I do find it a very elegant solution that lets you tune a card/deck's power on a continuous scale without being subject to the discrete jumps of changing small integers (e.g. a card's cost). But underneath it's clean exterior I don't think it is actually any simpler or more effective than conventional nerfs are.
For one thing, we'd still have to wait just as long for changes to be made. It's not like the devs are going to tweak these numbers every day. No, they're going to wait a while and see how they perform. And when the numbers are tweaked, do players get to dust cards for full refund? A card is objectively weaker if its draw rate is reduced after all.
It also has a negative effect on player agency: Players cannot do the calculation of how likely they will be to draw a specific card, because the proper calculation will have to include the draw rates of every card still in the deck. It's an easy calculation for a computer, but too laborious for a human to do in the middle of their turn.
It's also not as helpful to deck diversity as you might think. Unless you want to maintain multiple different draw rates for single cards based on what deck they are in (a very difficult thing to define btw), you'll end up reducing the power of decks you weren't trying to nerf, with much the same effect as a conventional nerf would have had.
I could go on and raise similar concerns to other people, but I'll stop here. As I said, I recognise it is an elegant solution, and I know it could be made to work in principle, but in practice I don't think the benefits outweigh the complications. That's especially true when I believe the players themselves are the bigger problem than the cards most of the time. No matter what you do, Spikes will latch onto a small handful of decks and create a meta that sooner or later you'll get fed up with. Occasionally a Tier S deck comes along and you can blame the HS team for the meta, but most of the time the number of good decks is much larger than the number of common ones, and you can only blame the players for that.
It pays for itself plus more. You are spending 4 mana to get 6 mana in discounts.
Right, but each card is discounted by less than the cost of Scabbs. So yes, you get to use more mana in 1 turn than you should be able to, but you cannot cheat anything out earlier than normal (without multi-turn shenanigans with things like Shadowstep or Potion of Illusion), which is very often where mana cheating becomes obnoxious.
Add in the fact that you quite often won't even use all 6 mana because of how cheap most rogue cards are, and you have to put a few asterisks on "get 6 mana in discounts".
Don't get me wrong, I think Scabbs is strong, but his ability to cheat mana cannot easily be compared to the cards of the the past which have taught us how broken mana cheating can be.
This looks like it would stack with Preparation to get a potential 5 mana discount on a spell, alongside a 3 mana discount on something else. Rogue doesn't have many high cost spells to use this with, but it opens up a lot of space for big swing turns or OTKs.
I'm also liking the idea of using one of those discounts playing Potion of Illusion. Storing a 1 mana Scabbs for net +5 mana later can be pretty insane.
OK, so the meme player in me is now super excited about this little guy and the world of dumb combos he opens up.
I'm super glad they're going so heavy on the flavour again. I loved the coherency of the artwork in the Year of the Dragon (even if rogue being dominated by kobolds for a whole year was a bit much).
I guess you could add a misc section for appearances in other card art, such as Yoink!. I expect they'll be recurring features in art this year like lackeys and the League of EVIL were in the Year of the Dragon.
The portal fills your board at the end of each of YOUR turns (see the token at https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/cards/63219-neeru-fireblade?order=desc&set=forged-in-the-barrens), so if the opponent removes them you'll have board space.
In fairness, they included the Merc game mode on last year's plan BEFORE the pandemic came in and made everything more difficult. I honestly don't think it is "fair to expect a majestic new game mode" on time when you know the game's development has been affected by the very thing that has shut down jobs across the planet.
Besides, I'd much rather they release it when its ready than rush things for a schedule and we end up with an unfinished product. There's more than enough stuff going on in HS these days to not get bored waiting for it.
Cool, I missed that. Where/when was this said?
It's a good thing rogue is pulling the weight of 6 classes for me at over 3000 wins, otherwise those neutral legendaries would be a long way off.
No problem. It was easy to miss because Blizz (and subsequently OoC) only added it as a *NEW* FAQ in the post on the next rewards track (https://outof.cards/hearthstone/2826-hearthstone-reveals-details-on-forged-in-the-barrens-rewards-track) some time after the post was originally made.
They have already said that you cannot get Mankrik or Samuro from those preorder legendaries, so it's all good.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Quest rogue isn't even that good. It was always played way more than its win rate deserved in Standard, and I'm not sure it'll have the same loyal following as it did back then, especially as there aren't really any slow control decks in Wild to prey upon.
At least I'm hoping quest rogue doesn't become a meta deck, because I've been waiting years to enjoy messing around with janky versions of the deck without feeling dirty doing it!
Yes and no. Spell schools will be retroactively added to cards, but non-magic spells (e.g. Slam, and almost every warrior spell for that matter) won't have a school.
It gets +2 on each upgrade, yes. So it's good. I guess we'll find out just how important it was for Evis to deal 4 on turns 1-4. If it turns out that's not important at all, then we can treat it like Evis got buffed.
If a mechanic exists, you can be sure rogue will get card draw for it. (That's actually true, just look back at rogue in recent sets.) I'm disappointed I didn't predict it when being quietly certain there'd be another poison.
It gets kinda boring to default to card draw for everything, but at least it ensures draw won't be a problem whatever meme you pursue in rogue. So sure, sign me up I guess.
Only the gills need to be red I suppose. Heck, only one of them too.
Agreed, Liv was brilliant. She was funny, efficient, and knew exactly when a new card appeared. I.e. everything these streams need.
That warrior weapon looks like a bad move. Even Liv was eager to place the blame on the final design team.
What really baffles me is that we've had Iksar say recently that pre-nerf Ancharrr was an honorable mention for most OP card ever. So why would they then make a card that is arguably better?
Edit: I just realised it has to kill a minion, so I'll retract my comment, at least a little bit. If Liv said it was already strong at 2 durability then I have no reason not to trust her that it's pretty broken.
The really troubling thing is that upon rotation warlock is going to be the only class with any good way to shuffle things back into the deck (Cast when drawn cards don't really count). Not even rogue will have anything. So if you want to play a slow deck that doesn't just lose to having half of its cards deleted, you have to play warlock. Such great design...
It's biggest problem imo is that it actually does the opposite of what you'd expect. It loos like it promotes fighting for the board, but it actually just means the opponent can grab it back again easily as soon as you win it because they can give all their minions rush for basically no cost because the Broom itself is often an important part in making trades. I'd remove rush from the Broom at the very least.
Looking back, the 1-drops in Scholomance were all pretty ridiculous. I understand the whole school-kids are small flavour, but they went a bit far with it.
It is a more complex effect than the Braggart has, so a higher rarity fits (though that doesn't mean epic and legendary makes more sense than rare and epic would). I think in practice though they are very different cards used for completely different things, and their comparison is only skin deep.
Serena probably makes more sense from a slow midrange point of view than the usual control mindset of "I must kill everything all the time". If you shrink something until it's not a significant threat anymore then you don't need to deal with it immediately, while Serena also sits on the board as something that will quite often be able to value trade into whatever it stole stats from. Perhaps that mindset doesn't have much of a place outside of Arena...
Also, that damn broom. It shows how overtuned a 1-mana neutral is when people's first thoughts are "maybe it works well with broom?"
To my computational physicist's mind I admit I do find it a very elegant solution that lets you tune a card/deck's power on a continuous scale without being subject to the discrete jumps of changing small integers (e.g. a card's cost). But underneath it's clean exterior I don't think it is actually any simpler or more effective than conventional nerfs are.
For one thing, we'd still have to wait just as long for changes to be made. It's not like the devs are going to tweak these numbers every day. No, they're going to wait a while and see how they perform. And when the numbers are tweaked, do players get to dust cards for full refund? A card is objectively weaker if its draw rate is reduced after all.
It also has a negative effect on player agency: Players cannot do the calculation of how likely they will be to draw a specific card, because the proper calculation will have to include the draw rates of every card still in the deck. It's an easy calculation for a computer, but too laborious for a human to do in the middle of their turn.
It's also not as helpful to deck diversity as you might think. Unless you want to maintain multiple different draw rates for single cards based on what deck they are in (a very difficult thing to define btw), you'll end up reducing the power of decks you weren't trying to nerf, with much the same effect as a conventional nerf would have had.
I could go on and raise similar concerns to other people, but I'll stop here. As I said, I recognise it is an elegant solution, and I know it could be made to work in principle, but in practice I don't think the benefits outweigh the complications. That's especially true when I believe the players themselves are the bigger problem than the cards most of the time. No matter what you do, Spikes will latch onto a small handful of decks and create a meta that sooner or later you'll get fed up with. Occasionally a Tier S deck comes along and you can blame the HS team for the meta, but most of the time the number of good decks is much larger than the number of common ones, and you can only blame the players for that.
Right, but each card is discounted by less than the cost of Scabbs. So yes, you get to use more mana in 1 turn than you should be able to, but you cannot cheat anything out earlier than normal (without multi-turn shenanigans with things like Shadowstep or Potion of Illusion), which is very often where mana cheating becomes obnoxious.
Add in the fact that you quite often won't even use all 6 mana because of how cheap most rogue cards are, and you have to put a few asterisks on "get 6 mana in discounts".
Don't get me wrong, I think Scabbs is strong, but his ability to cheat mana cannot easily be compared to the cards of the the past which have taught us how broken mana cheating can be.
This looks like it would stack with Preparation to get a potential 5 mana discount on a spell, alongside a 3 mana discount on something else. Rogue doesn't have many high cost spells to use this with, but it opens up a lot of space for big swing turns or OTKs.
I'm also liking the idea of using one of those discounts playing Potion of Illusion. Storing a 1 mana Scabbs for net +5 mana later can be pretty insane.
OK, so the meme player in me is now super excited about this little guy and the world of dumb combos he opens up.
Fair enough.
I'm super glad they're going so heavy on the flavour again. I loved the coherency of the artwork in the Year of the Dragon (even if rogue being dominated by kobolds for a whole year was a bit much).
I guess you could add a misc section for appearances in other card art, such as Yoink!. I expect they'll be recurring features in art this year like lackeys and the League of EVIL were in the Year of the Dragon.