Yeah, creating art to not anger anyone in a massive global audience is quite limiting. Even without trying to cater to a global audience, sci-fi and fantasy are in a bit of a weird spot when it comes to representation. With lots of non-human races and cultures to work with, it is very easy to address race, gender and sexuality in a way that doesn't cause much trouble since they are abstracted from humanity and the real world. But the flip side is it can't easily go beyond 'baby steps' precisely because it is abstracted from the real world.
That said, I'm ace myself (the A that often gets ingloriously dropped from the full LGBTQA+ string), so I personally quite like absence of relationships in HS. I'm pretty weary of romantic subplots ruining perfectly good (potentially) ace characters, so it's nice to have somewhere I don't have to worry about rolling my eyes at unnecessary relationships.
Last I checked, dancing partners don't need to be in love. Heck, ballroom dancing often involves switching partners, so you really can't infer anything romantic into it. Even if you could, they are shades with no hint of gender, so it would still not be making any social comment here.
Calm down. This is exactly why it helps to read the original question and answer, and not just the summary. The devs only started talking about this AFTER seeing the question, when it makes perfect sense to consider the practicalities of it. There's no hidden agenda here.
Whether it "makes sense" that there would be female Silver Hand Recruits... well, there are female members of the Silver Hand in WoW so there's no good reason to not have female art other than that they only use 1 piece of artwork, which happens to be male. Considering having art for both genders would simply be better representing what is already a reality.
As for your projections over future cards depicting same-sex relationships, I'm pretty sure we haven't had any cards depicting ANY romantic relationships yet, so I very much doubt devs are interested in poking that hornet's nest.
In wider society, the changes you are complaining about ARE making a difference, and have been for much much longer than video games have been influenced by recent trends. They just only take hold over time scales of decades, primarily through each generation becoming more "politically correct" than the last. (And the natural reverse of that is each generation tends to think the next one is being too soft and fussy, ironically ignoring the fact that's exactly what their own parents think about them!) Just think about how much of a pansy you must look to someone from a hundred years ago.
Ultimately, no one is being harmed by there being increased representation of previously under-represented groups. It is not corrupting everyone else, regardless of what conspiracy theorists peddle, so just let it happen and be glad that there are lots of people out there who do benefit from it, even if you don't.
It is still a secret mechanically, and not even the first to trigger at the start of your own turn (recall Competitive Spirit, and Plagiarize has pretty much the same trigger). Aside from that, the opponent won't know what secret it is and they may try to play around other secrets as a result, so it's still 'secret' in that sense. It will also activate secret synergies, which looks to be the primary purpose of the card since it practically guarantees you'll have a secret active next turn.
On the theme side of things, perjury means to lie in court, and thus keep the truth hidden. So it probably earns the 'secret' name more than any that have come before.
If both players use The Jailer and Bolf, and neither has untargeted hard removal to get rid of the opponent's Bolf, won't it force a stalemate where neither player can win before the 45 turn limit kicks in? If it ever reaches meta status in Wild (at 10 mana we might hope not, but it can happen with druid, who incidentally has no reliable way to remove an immune Bolf), then that will lead to a lot of frustrating 'ends' to games.
Those suspicious minions have a little sparkle emblem beneath them (same as spellburst's I think) that goes away after the opponent makes their guess, so the devs must have coded it as an effect attached to the minion that is checked for at the start of the turn. Since silencing minions removes everything except their (base) stats, it fits that this is removed too.
Whether this should happen from a design (rather than mechanical) point of view is another question entirely. I suspect this was just their way of coding a battlecry that didn't all resolve straight away, and they didn't think silence edge cases were important enough to work around.
Now add currency exchange into this mix and the gap becomes bigger in some countries than in others.
The size of the gap doesn't grow simply with currency conversion. The 1 cent difference between 2x500 and 1000 in USD grows to £1.01 in the UK (500 -> £3.99 while 1000 -> £8.99), and I'm pretty sure $1 =/= £101.
Whatever they did to set the numbers in the UK, they really need to re-evaluate it. What on Earth can have happened that meant 1000 runestones didn't cost £7.99?
Whoever they got to do the maths for Runestones costs really hates people buying in bulk (or loves ripping them off). In USD you lose a few cents for the higher quantities, but in Sterling (UK) you lose whole pounds, even just for buying 1000 instead of 2x500. That's a hefty price just for convenience...
Thankfully I'm pretty much done with purchasing things in this game and have been playing sub-F2P this expansion (not even using half the gold earned on the Sunken City rewards track on packs). For as long as we can still use gold on packs and minisets, I should be good to just ignore Runestones.
Well, Freeze Shaman became a meme largely because for KotFT the devs knew it's not fun to play against someone who repeatedly freezes your whole board. Snowfall Guardian always felt like an example of the saying "those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it", and could only have been designed because Freeze Mage's sins were too far back to be remembered clearly.
The Macaw was also a mistake of a design because there are just too many ways for it to become bs, but Snowfall Guardian is not innocent in all this.
My guess is it is one of theme. The pure-paladin cards are (normally) thematic representations of intolerance, zealotry and a 'holier than thou' attitude, which are easy to map onto a lot of paladin characters. You could probably justify a very similar theme in DH, but I don't really see it fitting elsewhere.
It's also usually pretty easy to make a deck without neutrals, especially if they are centred around a class mechanic (tribal decks are much more difficult). It's significantly less restrictive than all-spell decks, for example. So I don't think there's that much motivation for the devs to spread the pure thing around more widely, since it only really tweaks archetypes and doesn't generate truly new ones.
If it does end up backfiring more than helping, they might consider buffing it to be a 'when' effect (unless secret rogue as a whole happens to be strong). For now though, I'm willing to wait and see how well it works out in practice. We can identify the worst case scenarios, but we should also keep in mind how effective it can be against other common minions like those with rush and deathrattle.
Hurts more? Come back when you've had deathrattle synergies every expansion for a year (including the precursor to locations!) and nought but coins to show for it :P
Rogue's RNG is nearly always in-hand generation, meaning what you actually do with it is still controlled by the rogue. Infiltrator Lilian is a rare exception necessitated by her being able to attack on the opponent's turn, while Tess... OK, Tess does stretch it. But that's very rare.
I completely agree that it looks more like a paladin card than mage, though. Perhaps it was initially, but the nature of pally secrets usually making minions more sticky meant it was just too dangerous/frustrating there. Besides, mage having a growing minion is unusual, but the straight-to-board random spellcasting is very on-brand for the class.
In any case, I would be more reluctant to put cards like Orion in rogue than any other (secret) class precisely because of what rogue theme and gameplay is built upon. In fact, despite being a rogue main I'd have little interest in making a secret deck if rogue got Orion instead of Halkias because it wouldn't have any shenanigans I could control. It would just be playing good cards and hoping they work out. That's fine for many players and anyone only interested in winning, but it's not why rogue mains become rogue mains. So it's important the devs splash some class identity into decks, else why not put them in another class?
I think Orion's design would be too passive for rogue. One way or another, rogue is always about precise, controlled shenanigans, and Orion just kinda sits there and does his thing largely out of the control of his owner. He might well be better than Halkias, but I don't view it as a rogue card handed to mage because rogue wouldn't be given such a card to begin with.
I'm not so convinced. Most of the time you can just kill Orion before triggering a secret. There are mage secrets that would trigger first in most situations (e.g. Counterspell if the opponent doesn't have minions to do the job, or Oasis Ally if they do), but actually having the right one at the right time is not simple. In Wild it's probably a different story, but I refuse to touch secret mage there.
Halkias has his own awkwardness, but I much prefer him. If nothing else you can be more active in triggering and multiplying him, which is much more fun imo.
I has occurred to me that Preparation might be Halkias' best friend since, as others have pointed out, it would be optimistic to hope any of the 3 rogue secrets in Standard will stick around for a turn. Prep would let you just play them together and avoid that issue.
In Wild, we have Cheat Death to make him a lot more reliable while helping multiply him too.There is also Plagiarize which the opponent cannot trigger on their turn, so you can pretty much guarantee Halkias will stick around for the next turn when you can play another secret to help keep him going. So he's at least good for shenanigans in low-rank Wild.
You're not wrong, and it is arguably the least informative wording they have ever put on a card. At least until you see the Sack token, which makes it all super apparent. I suspect there was no way of squeezing "that returns the minion to the opponent's hand when destroyed" onto the card without going way beyond the 4-line limit.
Besides, I find there's something deeply satisfying about just saying "stuff it in a 0/4 Sack." Sure, it doesn't technically say everything that entails, but it does imply you can get them back out again, and doing that would mean the Sack has to be on the rogue's side. You could also reason from cards like Sap costing 2 and secret effects generally being stronger than normal spells of the same cost, that it probably returns to the opponent's hand rather than their board.
You've just got to tap into your inner Murloc Holmes to work it all out. After all, Kidnapping is a crime that needs solving.
I assumed Cora meant the minion returns to their hand after they kill the sack, which would be a 0/4 deathrattle on your side of the board. Either way, it occurs to me you wouldn't be able to get the minion out of the sack even if you can Shadowstep it, so there's no Stockholm Syndrome here.
Yeah, creating art to not anger anyone in a massive global audience is quite limiting. Even without trying to cater to a global audience, sci-fi and fantasy are in a bit of a weird spot when it comes to representation. With lots of non-human races and cultures to work with, it is very easy to address race, gender and sexuality in a way that doesn't cause much trouble since they are abstracted from humanity and the real world. But the flip side is it can't easily go beyond 'baby steps' precisely because it is abstracted from the real world.
That said, I'm ace myself (the A that often gets ingloriously dropped from the full LGBTQA+ string), so I personally quite like absence of relationships in HS. I'm pretty weary of romantic subplots ruining perfectly good (potentially) ace characters, so it's nice to have somewhere I don't have to worry about rolling my eyes at unnecessary relationships.
Last I checked, dancing partners don't need to be in love. Heck, ballroom dancing often involves switching partners, so you really can't infer anything romantic into it. Even if you could, they are shades with no hint of gender, so it would still not be making any social comment here.
Calm down. This is exactly why it helps to read the original question and answer, and not just the summary. The devs only started talking about this AFTER seeing the question, when it makes perfect sense to consider the practicalities of it. There's no hidden agenda here.
Whether it "makes sense" that there would be female Silver Hand Recruits... well, there are female members of the Silver Hand in WoW so there's no good reason to not have female art other than that they only use 1 piece of artwork, which happens to be male. Considering having art for both genders would simply be better representing what is already a reality.
As for your projections over future cards depicting same-sex relationships, I'm pretty sure we haven't had any cards depicting ANY romantic relationships yet, so I very much doubt devs are interested in poking that hornet's nest.
In wider society, the changes you are complaining about ARE making a difference, and have been for much much longer than video games have been influenced by recent trends. They just only take hold over time scales of decades, primarily through each generation becoming more "politically correct" than the last. (And the natural reverse of that is each generation tends to think the next one is being too soft and fussy, ironically ignoring the fact that's exactly what their own parents think about them!) Just think about how much of a pansy you must look to someone from a hundred years ago.
Ultimately, no one is being harmed by there being increased representation of previously under-represented groups. It is not corrupting everyone else, regardless of what conspiracy theorists peddle, so just let it happen and be glad that there are lots of people out there who do benefit from it, even if you don't.
It is still a secret mechanically, and not even the first to trigger at the start of your own turn (recall Competitive Spirit, and Plagiarize has pretty much the same trigger). Aside from that, the opponent won't know what secret it is and they may try to play around other secrets as a result, so it's still 'secret' in that sense. It will also activate secret synergies, which looks to be the primary purpose of the card since it practically guarantees you'll have a secret active next turn.
On the theme side of things, perjury means to lie in court, and thus keep the truth hidden. So it probably earns the 'secret' name more than any that have come before.
If both players use The Jailer and Bolf, and neither has untargeted hard removal to get rid of the opponent's Bolf, won't it force a stalemate where neither player can win before the 45 turn limit kicks in? If it ever reaches meta status in Wild (at 10 mana we might hope not, but it can happen with druid, who incidentally has no reliable way to remove an immune Bolf), then that will lead to a lot of frustrating 'ends' to games.
Those suspicious minions have a little sparkle emblem beneath them (same as spellburst's I think) that goes away after the opponent makes their guess, so the devs must have coded it as an effect attached to the minion that is checked for at the start of the turn. Since silencing minions removes everything except their (base) stats, it fits that this is removed too.
Whether this should happen from a design (rather than mechanical) point of view is another question entirely. I suspect this was just their way of coding a battlecry that didn't all resolve straight away, and they didn't think silence edge cases were important enough to work around.
The size of the gap doesn't grow simply with currency conversion. The 1 cent difference between 2x500 and 1000 in USD grows to £1.01 in the UK (500 -> £3.99 while 1000 -> £8.99), and I'm pretty sure $1 =/= £101.
Whatever they did to set the numbers in the UK, they really need to re-evaluate it. What on Earth can have happened that meant 1000 runestones didn't cost £7.99?
Whoever they got to do the maths for Runestones costs really hates people buying in bulk (or loves ripping them off). In USD you lose a few cents for the higher quantities, but in Sterling (UK) you lose whole pounds, even just for buying 1000 instead of 2x500. That's a hefty price just for convenience...
Thankfully I'm pretty much done with purchasing things in this game and have been playing sub-F2P this expansion (not even using half the gold earned on the Sunken City rewards track on packs). For as long as we can still use gold on packs and minisets, I should be good to just ignore Runestones.
Well, Freeze Shaman became a meme largely because for KotFT the devs knew it's not fun to play against someone who repeatedly freezes your whole board. Snowfall Guardian always felt like an example of the saying "those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it", and could only have been designed because Freeze Mage's sins were too far back to be remembered clearly.
The Macaw was also a mistake of a design because there are just too many ways for it to become bs, but Snowfall Guardian is not innocent in all this.
Rogues hiding in the shadows: "why, thank you!" :)
My guess is it is one of theme. The pure-paladin cards are (normally) thematic representations of intolerance, zealotry and a 'holier than thou' attitude, which are easy to map onto a lot of paladin characters. You could probably justify a very similar theme in DH, but I don't really see it fitting elsewhere.
It's also usually pretty easy to make a deck without neutrals, especially if they are centred around a class mechanic (tribal decks are much more difficult). It's significantly less restrictive than all-spell decks, for example. So I don't think there's that much motivation for the devs to spread the pure thing around more widely, since it only really tweaks archetypes and doesn't generate truly new ones.
If it does end up backfiring more than helping, they might consider buffing it to be a 'when' effect (unless secret rogue as a whole happens to be strong). For now though, I'm willing to wait and see how well it works out in practice. We can identify the worst case scenarios, but we should also keep in mind how effective it can be against other common minions like those with rush and deathrattle.
Hurts more? Come back when you've had deathrattle synergies every expansion for a year (including the precursor to locations!) and nought but coins to show for it :P
Valeera sat in the corner noticing Malfurion's frustration: "First time?"
Rogue's RNG is nearly always in-hand generation, meaning what you actually do with it is still controlled by the rogue. Infiltrator Lilian is a rare exception necessitated by her being able to attack on the opponent's turn, while Tess... OK, Tess does stretch it. But that's very rare.
I completely agree that it looks more like a paladin card than mage, though. Perhaps it was initially, but the nature of pally secrets usually making minions more sticky meant it was just too dangerous/frustrating there. Besides, mage having a growing minion is unusual, but the straight-to-board random spellcasting is very on-brand for the class.
In any case, I would be more reluctant to put cards like Orion in rogue than any other (secret) class precisely because of what rogue theme and gameplay is built upon. In fact, despite being a rogue main I'd have little interest in making a secret deck if rogue got Orion instead of Halkias because it wouldn't have any shenanigans I could control. It would just be playing good cards and hoping they work out. That's fine for many players and anyone only interested in winning, but it's not why rogue mains become rogue mains. So it's important the devs splash some class identity into decks, else why not put them in another class?
I think Orion's design would be too passive for rogue. One way or another, rogue is always about precise, controlled shenanigans, and Orion just kinda sits there and does his thing largely out of the control of his owner. He might well be better than Halkias, but I don't view it as a rogue card handed to mage because rogue wouldn't be given such a card to begin with.
I'm not so convinced. Most of the time you can just kill Orion before triggering a secret. There are mage secrets that would trigger first in most situations (e.g. Counterspell if the opponent doesn't have minions to do the job, or Oasis Ally if they do), but actually having the right one at the right time is not simple. In Wild it's probably a different story, but I refuse to touch secret mage there.
Halkias has his own awkwardness, but I much prefer him. If nothing else you can be more active in triggering and multiplying him, which is much more fun imo.
I has occurred to me that Preparation might be Halkias' best friend since, as others have pointed out, it would be optimistic to hope any of the 3 rogue secrets in Standard will stick around for a turn. Prep would let you just play them together and avoid that issue.
In Wild, we have Cheat Death to make him a lot more reliable while helping multiply him too.There is also Plagiarize which the opponent cannot trigger on their turn, so you can pretty much guarantee Halkias will stick around for the next turn when you can play another secret to help keep him going. So he's at least good for shenanigans in low-rank Wild.
You're not wrong, and it is arguably the least informative wording they have ever put on a card. At least until you see the Sack token, which makes it all super apparent. I suspect there was no way of squeezing "that returns the minion to the opponent's hand when destroyed" onto the card without going way beyond the 4-line limit.
Besides, I find there's something deeply satisfying about just saying "stuff it in a 0/4 Sack." Sure, it doesn't technically say everything that entails, but it does imply you can get them back out again, and doing that would mean the Sack has to be on the rogue's side. You could also reason from cards like Sap costing 2 and secret effects generally being stronger than normal spells of the same cost, that it probably returns to the opponent's hand rather than their board.
You've just got to tap into your inner Murloc Holmes to work it all out. After all, Kidnapping is a crime that needs solving.
I assumed Cora meant the minion returns to their hand after they kill the sack, which would be a 0/4 deathrattle on your side of the board. Either way, it occurs to me you wouldn't be able to get the minion out of the sack even if you can Shadowstep it, so there's no Stockholm Syndrome here.