Since you're a fellow shuckle fan you may be interested to hear I prepend it with 'angry' for a reason very close to the present discussion: an angry shuckle simply hasn't got the attack stats to change the situation it is in, so the best it can do is calm down and make the most of what it has got. It sounds a bit defeatist until you remember shuckle learns Power Trick, making it the single most powerful Pokemon when it wants to be. Leaving yourself with a measly base 10 defense along with base 5 speed and base 20 HP isn't a risk to take lightly though, so best to hold off until something really gets your gogoat!
The interesting thing is that shuckle can absolutely be monstrous with the right moves like rollout. After a defense curl its nigh unbeatable.
'Nigh unbeatable' in the same sense that a janky OTK deck in HS wins 100% of the time... in 20% of games. That sure does sound like my kind of deck/Pokemon!
Hmmm... The fact that Southsea Captain remains might hint towards some more pirate cards printed this year? Probably for rogue if i had to guess. Warrior already got the additional pirate stuff last year. Actually the only pirate card rogue got in the last 2 years was Bloodsail Flybooter! Last time Rogue had a pirate package was in Rastahkan's Rumble like 2.5 ish years ago... wow i'm feeling old suddenly...
Hench-Clan Burglar, Sahket Sapper, Skyvateer and Prize Plunderer were all pirates from the last two years. The Year of the Phoenix was very light on pirate cards though, so I expect you are right and we'll see more of a pirate focus at some point this year.
Of course! With eviolite around I suspect they cannot actually give shuckle an evolution. Could you imagine it with 50% higher defenses? Amusing as it might be, effective base 345 defenses might be a bit too much...
Thanks for ruining my day with a dose of reality and proper reading comprehension! LOL Also, I love your profile picture. If you're going to be named after the best Pokémon of all time (indisputable, btw) then you better have great art to go along with it, and you do!
Thanks. You wouldn't think an acrobatic blood elf would make a very good hybrid with a barely-mobile worm in a rock, but it turns out they're a perfect match! I think it was largely to do with them having very similar colour palettes.
Since you're a fellow shuckle fan you may be interested to hear I prepend it with 'angry' for a reason very close to the present discussion: an angry shuckle simply hasn't got the attack stats to change the situation it is in, so the best it can do is calm down and make the most of what it has got. It sounds a bit defeatist until you remember shuckle learns Power Trick, making it the single most powerful Pokemon when it wants to be. Leaving yourself with a measly base 10 defense along with base 5 speed and base 20 HP isn't a risk to take lightly though, so best to hold off until something really gets your gogoat!
The nerdiest part of all of it though is the use of an 'i' instead of an 'l' in Shuckie. There's some seriously morally grey stuff surrounding that particular shuckle. I'm not sure what that means for my online name, but I like to think I'll come up with something deep for it some day. :)
Okay, I definitely read that wrong then. And to be quite honest, if they are not disenchantable I am going to be a little mad! I mean, I get before when they were evergreen in standard and being given for free. But I would expect that as before they would make them disenchantable Common cards. Yes it’s a lot of free dust, and it’s not the same situation as something like Mind Blast rotating out, but to stay consistent with past practices they should be disenchantable!
We’ll see what happens but after realizing I read that part wrong I’m not as hopeful.
Surely the healthy mindset is to view the status quo as neutral instead of a negative, especially when everything involved was free to begin with?
By your own description this isn't even a consistency issue because the circumstances aren't the same as with previous rotating Basic cards. Blizzard's description is a little ambiguous about whether new players will continue to get the Basic cards when they unlock Wild, but I assume they will else they'll never be able to get them. In which case, the rarity solution we saw previously just isn't needed to make them obtainable.
There's a much better case for complaining about inconsistencies with dust for Classic cards. But to be honest, even there you have to first make the case that Blizz should have stuck by their flawed insistence on keeping Basic and Classic around for eternity, instead of actually improving the game by introducing a FREE rotating Core set. Add to that the addition of the Classic mode, which will make most Classic cards far more relevant than they have been in years, and you need a pretty damn compelling argument.
All in all, while I see where the complaints come from and accept it is too subjective to say anyone is wrong to make them, I do think it is best to save yourself the stress and see a good thing as a good thing.
Frosty, they should be disenchantable seeing as the part you quoted says in it that they will be craftable and disenchantable. I hadn’t seen the tweet regarding them being free of rarity, mostly because I hate Twitter and never get on it.
But now I’m very confused! Why even bother making them disenchantable and craftable if they have no rarity or associated dust value? Or will they have a dust value but no rarity gem? If so will it be the same as Common cards?!
I guess we’ll only really know when the change happens. Which in my personal opinion, can’t happen soon enough!
The sentence in Frosty's quote regarding Basic says nothing about them being disenchantable (ignoring the part about golden DH Initiate cards in parentheses). Only Classic was actually said to be craftable and disenchantable in the preceding sentence.
It could certainly have been spelled out more clearly though. I've never been a fan of the devs' insistence on saying these things inside normal paragraphs, instead of utilising lists or tables to give visual separation between things that will behave differently.
Triggering at the start of a turn is functionally the same thing as triggering at the end of your opponent's turn in Hearthstone, and we recently had both Plagiarize and Rigged Faire Game trigger then. Granted neither of them affect the opponent's board so we have to be a bit careful in the comparison with Patient Stab, but certainly it doesn't look like Blizz has an issue with end/start of turn triggers.
It seems we are of equal minds (at least with Even Cannon Rogue... I've never gotten on well with Discolock, though I suppose High Priestess Jeklik was the card that came closest to making me enjoy it). Truth be told I have a soft spot for TGT as well as Rumble, again largely because of Pirate Rogue. Skycap'n Kragg charrrrrging in is always satisfying!
The new Fogsail Freebooter should be a good news for Even Rogue in Wild, since it's the one deck you absolutely always have a weapon in.
I'm not new to broadside decks myself, I even crafted double golden
back in Rumble to show my devotion to it (I mean look at it, it's easily one of the best animations in the game), but I've only just got around to the full Patches variant. It always seemed like the purest way to do it, though in practice it was almost certainly the least effective.
I feel you on not even winning the game. I did 33 damage with that combo and still the priest lived on 4. Thankfully Yogg was feeling merciful (for the first time all day!) and cast Swipe to save me from a rather embarrassing loss.
"No weaknesses" is a bit of a stretch, but whatever. If it makes you feel any better about the class, I just spent ages fulfilling the dream of shooting 13 canons in 1 turn with a deck that uses Togwaggle's Scheme on Patches the Pirate (yes, I wanted to draw Patches!), then with 9 mana you:
It was like a beautiful broadside from Cap'n Valeera's ship. We had to sail through some choppy waters to get there, but we proudly flew the flag for honourable rogues everywhere while we did it.
Regarding zoo, I think his point is not that they don't have good 1-2 drops, but rather that they are always close to the threshold where it becomes a problem. Perhaps that was ensured by always having both Flame Imp and Voidwalker in Standard until now. Of course zoo would use the hp more if it had more strong 1-2 drops to rely on, so his comments are consistent at least. Since they are clearly conscious of the dangers, it is perhaps unlikely we'll actually be given enough to test it for ourselves in Standard.
As for hunter and class identity, you can't have your cake and eat it. The primary reason people want control rogue and hunter decks is because they have significantly different tools to other classes, but the primary reason they have those tools is because their class identities have traded away defensive tools for them. In practice, DH fills in the gap for control variants of both classes, since it has the tempo and face damage of rogue and hunter alongside healing and AoE. Granted it doesn't have the more specialist sides of rogue and hunter, but that's kind of my point: it can't fit all of it in.
This isn't really the place for a big discussion about the pros and cons of class identity, so I'll leave it at that.
1. Hunters can't heal or clear boards. And incidentally they can't draw cards neither. Now that most of the aggro cards from hunter will be purged from standard, its really time for hunter to actually be able to draw/generate cards. Then we'll start seeing some variety.
I also don't understand what's so difficult for them to just make a few conditional healing options for hunter, like maybe 2 mana 1/2 stealth beast that heals face for 1 at the end of the turn. Hell, you can make that heal for 2 and it still wouldn't be oppressive.
It sounds like they're more open to giving every class OK draw from now on. As for your healing beast suggestion, I'm not sure giving that stealth is a good idea. Opposing control decks wouldn't care of course, but getting a ~free 1 or 2 health back every turn is really strong against aggro and over the course of a game would outclass healing from classes that are meant to be good at it.
Quote From Dapperdog
3. Maybe this is just me, but I don't find life tap at all oppressive that it restricts card design. Draw 1 for 2 health. Warlock tends to have better draw cards than other classes, and since Mountain Giant is gone, where does this 'domination' come along? Touching on that point, what other card can possible top mountain giant on 4 as that dominating medium-powered neutral drop anyway? and we've been dealing with that for 6 years. I don't particularly remember warlock being on tier 1 every meta mountain giant was in standard.
Iksar was really talking about zoo decks here since he said "medium power Neutral 1-2 drop". So Mountain Giant doesn't have much to do with it.
How about flipping the whole effect around and making the grunt be a 2 mana 2/2 with an effect like: "Has +2 health if you have less than 5 mana"? That way it is overstatted in the early game but you pay the price of it being weak in the mid-late game.
Note that losing a buff in Hearthstone doesn't reduce your health unless you were above your base health. E.g. if he has 3 or 4 health at the start of turn 5 he'll go down to 2, but he won't lose any health if he's only got 1 or 2 left.
It's a slight departure from the intended upgrade mechanic, but perhaps it is an interesting twist on it nonetheless.
An early-game minion should taper off naturally as more powerful cards get to be played. If it's got a built-in 'only play this before this time' ability, I dunno, I personally feel the result is an even less interesting card, and we may wonder why other good cards don't need to be sectioned off into a designated time-slot.
Ultimately, I think it's okay to have a valuable textless minion. In my view, it does not follow that other minions must have their stats raised to keep up with it. I would also like to point out that there is precedent for a class card being a 'same-with-better-stats' version of a neutral card. See Spymistress, Worgen Infiltrator.
There is a distinction between 'same with better stats' and 'same with better than vanilla stats', but you are right that it is safer when made a class card. I admit I have been keeping quiet about Frazzled Freshman, which is the one card I can think of that does go beyond vanilla without any conditions/drawbacks.
So fine, the Durotar Grunt is fine to stay as a 2/4 because it's a class card, BUT at that point I would remove the text that has it grow when you reach 5 mana. It's one thing to argue for going beyond vanilla stats, and quite another to then also give it an up-side so it is way stronger than other 2-drops in the late game.
I'm not going to budge on your over-statted neutral, Skeletal Orc Grunt, though.
By the way, I just remembered we already have a Goblin Sapper card (it's effect was a bit of a pun on how Sap works). We also already have DOOM!, Obsidian Statue and Spellbreaker, so those cards might want renaming.
I guess the take-home message is that if you want to make powerful minions, always stick within vanilla stats but give them interesting/powerful effects.
Makes sense. This is sort of where it gets tricky balancing those ideas while adhering to source material. In War3, a Grunt's whole identity is being a basic unit that won't go down easily in the early game. I won't deny that ends up being a bit less interesting in HS than in War3, but I'd feel weird giving cards extra things they didn't have originally.
How about flipping the whole effect around and making the grunt be a 2 mana 2/2 with an effect like: "Has +2 health if you have less than 5 mana"? That way it is overstatted in the early game but you pay the price of it being weak in the mid-late game.
Note that losing a buff in Hearthstone doesn't reduce your health unless you were above your base health. E.g. if he has 3 or 4 health at the start of turn 5 he'll go down to 2, but he won't lose any health if he's only got 1 or 2 left.
It's a slight departure from the intended upgrade mechanic, but perhaps it is an interesting twist on it nonetheless.
Coming from goodness knows how many hours of playing Pokemon over my lifetime, the idea of (spell-)type match-ups is as obvious and natural to me as the existence of spells and minions to begin with. That said, I don't think it would be a good thing for the traditional Hearthstone game modes for 3 reasons.
First is simply complexity of card text, which is especially relevant in a game that insists on keeping below 4 lines of text. Clearly there will be no space to write weaknesses and resistances on every minion, many of whom already have 3 or 4 lines occupied. The obvious solution is to just write a 'spell-tribe' using the space where minion tribes are written. But is there space in there to convey sufficient information, especially when some existing tribes could have a whole range of type match-ups (I'm looking at you elementals)?
The second issue is much more philosophical: is HS with type match-ups actually the same game as HS without them? Certainly a lot of what happens now and in the past would play out differently without any changes to cards. Is such a fundamental shift actually in the game's interest given it sells itself as simple to learn?
My third point was going to be about the one-sided nature of type match-ups, and how it would just shafts some decks against some classes for no reason other than the spell schools they have available. A little bit of thought quickly showed that was an over-reaction since few decks in HS are thematic enough to all be weak to a single type, and most spells don't do damage anyway. So in practice it would never be anything similar to the innate advantage of a fire team against a grass one in Pokemon, for example.
My actual third point is then: is it not an awful lot of complication for actually very little effect? You use paladin as an example, but other than Consecration it won't have any damage dealing spells, so it would never matter with any other card. Similarly rogue will kill minions with basically everything other than damage from spells (through weapons, minions or hard removal). Warrior probably won't even have spell schools, while druid will have nature but will mostly be punching things to kill them anyway. It looks like only mage, shaman, warlock and, to a lesser extent, priest will actually care much about it. And even then a lot of the time it won't matter.
So yeah, it's an obvious and neat idea, but one that doesn't make a whole lot of sense in traditional Hearthstone... I could absolutely see type match-ups appearing in Mercenaries however.
Am I overvaluing the mechanics on these cards? What exactly makes mine so overwhelmingly better than these? Ultimately I don't really feel right about nerfing them without first better understanding their standing with Standard cards.
This hits right at the heart of how power creep exists despite vanilla stats not increasing. In truth Foxy Fraud probably is stronger than a 2 mana 3/3, for example. In other cases it is a bit less obvious because stat distributions can be bad. The keywords on Crabrider, for instance, are made a lot weaker by it only having 1 attack, so it requires buffs to actually make it good.
I guess the take-home message is that if you want to make powerful minions, always stick within vanilla stats but give them interesting/powerful effects. This is especially true if those effects require a condition to be met in order to be powerful, e.g. needing a buff for Crabrider or a combo card for Foxy Fraud.
The most compelling argument I can think of for not raising vanilla stats is that every minion has stats, so raising these sets the bar for every minion of the same cost to be compared against. Drawing power from effects, however, is much more narrow and will only serve to guide the power of a relatively small number of cards. Often they rotate out of Standard before a single comparable card is made, and they don't actually have a permanent effect on power creep at all.
Another aspect to consider is what contingency plans are there in case a card is too strong? If it has an effect you can change the stats and/or mana cost while still keeping a meaningful card. But if it is just a textless minion, all you can do to it is change a number to turn it into something that already exists.
I suppose a third aspect is that textless minions are just not very interesting. They can be strong if you give them enough stats, but are they really making the game more enjoyable than similar cards that reward players for taking steps to activate an effect?
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This is all quite subtle and more subjective than I make it sound, so I encourage you to question everything I said and only apply it if/when you have understood it and actually agree with it. I have the advantage of having played Hearthstone most days since early 2014 and have been able to build an understanding of the game's design slowly as it all happened, but I can still be wrong. In the end I have no more control over what cards get printed than anyone else, and maybe one day Blizz will raise the vanilla stats, making me look jolly silly!
I have to say, not including a fight against Onyxia was a bold choice, given it was the culmination of the first 4 fights.
Not including Med'an was... a less contentious choice.
As for the surprise Uncrowned fight: I really liked it. A bit of a puzzle with an air of mystery. It's a shame we couldn't see the Shadows for longer at the end; I barely had time to take in just how chunky Taoshi and Tethys were. No wonder I had to get creative with some poisoned knife juggling!
Valeera can finally say goodbye to class AoE forever, but I'm looking forward to Blademaster Samuro + Plague Scientist* for a surprise 1-sided full board clear.
* Note for the author: plague scientist was actually brought back from the Frozen Throne, replacing his slightly more expensive brother Plaguebringer.
What good would there be in creating an entire blitz mode? It would just be like a normal meta but where any combo, control or value deck is suppressed because they need the time to think turns through. The goofy restriction of Nozdormu gives people the chance to play blitz mode against friends whenever they like, without needing to waste resources splitting the playerbase with an aggro-focused game mode.
Anyway, my entire point was that 'useless' only means something from a limited perspective. Just because you can't envision yourself playing cards, it doesn't mean there aren't players out there making the most of them. A case in point: a friend and I both had a good laugh trying to get Duskfallen Aviana to work. The card is really bad, but it's still not useless.
Edit: I am aware of the apparent hypocrisy in dismissing a blitz game mode while saying no card is useless. If there was a huge appetite for a blitz game mode (best tested in a Tavern Brawl) then I'm all for it. That doesn't change the fact it is more effort with a vastly greater chance for failure than just printing 1 card to do the job: a card needs a handful of players to like it, but a game mode needs an entire community for the matchmaker to work.
'Nigh unbeatable' in the same sense that a janky OTK deck in HS wins 100% of the time... in 20% of games. That sure does sound like my kind of deck/Pokemon!
Hench-Clan Burglar, Sahket Sapper, Skyvateer and Prize Plunderer were all pirates from the last two years. The Year of the Phoenix was very light on pirate cards though, so I expect you are right and we'll see more of a pirate focus at some point this year.
Of course! With eviolite around I suspect they cannot actually give shuckle an evolution. Could you imagine it with 50% higher defenses? Amusing as it might be, effective base 345 defenses might be a bit too much...
Thanks. You wouldn't think an acrobatic blood elf would make a very good hybrid with a barely-mobile worm in a rock, but it turns out they're a perfect match! I think it was largely to do with them having very similar colour palettes.
Since you're a fellow shuckle fan you may be interested to hear I prepend it with 'angry' for a reason very close to the present discussion: an angry shuckle simply hasn't got the attack stats to change the situation it is in, so the best it can do is calm down and make the most of what it has got. It sounds a bit defeatist until you remember shuckle learns Power Trick, making it the single most powerful Pokemon when it wants to be. Leaving yourself with a measly base 10 defense along with base 5 speed and base 20 HP isn't a risk to take lightly though, so best to hold off until something really gets your gogoat!
The nerdiest part of all of it though is the use of an 'i' instead of an 'l' in Shuckie. There's some seriously morally grey stuff surrounding that particular shuckle. I'm not sure what that means for my online name, but I like to think I'll come up with something deep for it some day. :)
Surely the healthy mindset is to view the status quo as neutral instead of a negative, especially when everything involved was free to begin with?
By your own description this isn't even a consistency issue because the circumstances aren't the same as with previous rotating Basic cards. Blizzard's description is a little ambiguous about whether new players will continue to get the Basic cards when they unlock Wild, but I assume they will else they'll never be able to get them. In which case, the rarity solution we saw previously just isn't needed to make them obtainable.
There's a much better case for complaining about inconsistencies with dust for Classic cards. But to be honest, even there you have to first make the case that Blizz should have stuck by their flawed insistence on keeping Basic and Classic around for eternity, instead of actually improving the game by introducing a FREE rotating Core set. Add to that the addition of the Classic mode, which will make most Classic cards far more relevant than they have been in years, and you need a pretty damn compelling argument.
All in all, while I see where the complaints come from and accept it is too subjective to say anyone is wrong to make them, I do think it is best to save yourself the stress and see a good thing as a good thing.
The sentence in Frosty's quote regarding Basic says nothing about them being disenchantable (ignoring the part about golden DH Initiate cards in parentheses). Only Classic was actually said to be craftable and disenchantable in the preceding sentence.
It could certainly have been spelled out more clearly though. I've never been a fan of the devs' insistence on saying these things inside normal paragraphs, instead of utilising lists or tables to give visual separation between things that will behave differently.
Triggering at the start of a turn is functionally the same thing as triggering at the end of your opponent's turn in Hearthstone, and we recently had both Plagiarize and Rigged Faire Game trigger then. Granted neither of them affect the opponent's board so we have to be a bit careful in the comparison with Patient Stab, but certainly it doesn't look like Blizz has an issue with end/start of turn triggers.
It seems we are of equal minds (at least with Even Cannon Rogue... I've never gotten on well with Discolock, though I suppose High Priestess Jeklik was the card that came closest to making me enjoy it). Truth be told I have a soft spot for TGT as well as Rumble, again largely because of Pirate Rogue. Skycap'n Kragg charrrrrging in is always satisfying!
The new Fogsail Freebooter should be a good news for Even Rogue in Wild, since it's the one deck you absolutely always have a weapon in.
I'm not new to broadside decks myself, I even crafted double golden
back in Rumble to show my devotion to it (I mean look at it, it's easily one of the best animations in the game), but I've only just got around to the full Patches variant. It always seemed like the purest way to do it, though in practice it was almost certainly the least effective.
I feel you on not even winning the game. I did 33 damage with that combo and still the priest lived on 4. Thankfully Yogg was feeling merciful (for the first time all day!) and cast Swipe to save me from a rather embarrassing loss.
"No weaknesses" is a bit of a stretch, but whatever. If it makes you feel any better about the class, I just spent ages fulfilling the dream of shooting 13 canons in 1 turn with a deck that uses Togwaggle's Scheme on Patches the Pirate (yes, I wanted to draw Patches!), then with 9 mana you:
It was like a beautiful broadside from Cap'n Valeera's ship. We had to sail through some choppy waters to get there, but we proudly flew the flag for honourable rogues everywhere while we did it.
Oh, also, Gladiator Valeera's wow emote is... beautiful!
Regarding zoo, I think his point is not that they don't have good 1-2 drops, but rather that they are always close to the threshold where it becomes a problem. Perhaps that was ensured by always having both Flame Imp and Voidwalker in Standard until now. Of course zoo would use the hp more if it had more strong 1-2 drops to rely on, so his comments are consistent at least. Since they are clearly conscious of the dangers, it is perhaps unlikely we'll actually be given enough to test it for ourselves in Standard.
As for hunter and class identity, you can't have your cake and eat it. The primary reason people want control rogue and hunter decks is because they have significantly different tools to other classes, but the primary reason they have those tools is because their class identities have traded away defensive tools for them. In practice, DH fills in the gap for control variants of both classes, since it has the tempo and face damage of rogue and hunter alongside healing and AoE. Granted it doesn't have the more specialist sides of rogue and hunter, but that's kind of my point: it can't fit all of it in.
This isn't really the place for a big discussion about the pros and cons of class identity, so I'll leave it at that.
It sounds like they're more open to giving every class OK draw from now on. As for your healing beast suggestion, I'm not sure giving that stealth is a good idea. Opposing control decks wouldn't care of course, but getting a ~free 1 or 2 health back every turn is really strong against aggro and over the course of a game would outclass healing from classes that are meant to be good at it.
Iksar was really talking about zoo decks here since he said "medium power Neutral 1-2 drop". So Mountain Giant doesn't have much to do with it.
There is a distinction between 'same with better stats' and 'same with better than vanilla stats', but you are right that it is safer when made a class card. I admit I have been keeping quiet about Frazzled Freshman, which is the one card I can think of that does go beyond vanilla without any conditions/drawbacks.
So fine, the Durotar Grunt is fine to stay as a 2/4 because it's a class card, BUT at that point I would remove the text that has it grow when you reach 5 mana. It's one thing to argue for going beyond vanilla stats, and quite another to then also give it an up-side so it is way stronger than other 2-drops in the late game.
I'm not going to budge on your over-statted neutral, Skeletal Orc Grunt, though.
By the way, I just remembered we already have a Goblin Sapper card (it's effect was a bit of a pun on how Sap works). We also already have DOOM!, Obsidian Statue and Spellbreaker, so those cards might want renaming.
How about flipping the whole effect around and making the grunt be a 2 mana 2/2 with an effect like: "Has +2 health if you have less than 5 mana"? That way it is overstatted in the early game but you pay the price of it being weak in the mid-late game.
Note that losing a buff in Hearthstone doesn't reduce your health unless you were above your base health. E.g. if he has 3 or 4 health at the start of turn 5 he'll go down to 2, but he won't lose any health if he's only got 1 or 2 left.
It's a slight departure from the intended upgrade mechanic, but perhaps it is an interesting twist on it nonetheless.
Only in spirit. 2 mana Fiery War Axe is possible again via Bloodsail Deckhand, but the base card is staying at 3 mana.
Coming from goodness knows how many hours of playing Pokemon over my lifetime, the idea of (spell-)type match-ups is as obvious and natural to me as the existence of spells and minions to begin with. That said, I don't think it would be a good thing for the traditional Hearthstone game modes for 3 reasons.
First is simply complexity of card text, which is especially relevant in a game that insists on keeping below 4 lines of text. Clearly there will be no space to write weaknesses and resistances on every minion, many of whom already have 3 or 4 lines occupied. The obvious solution is to just write a 'spell-tribe' using the space where minion tribes are written. But is there space in there to convey sufficient information, especially when some existing tribes could have a whole range of type match-ups (I'm looking at you elementals)?
The second issue is much more philosophical: is HS with type match-ups actually the same game as HS without them? Certainly a lot of what happens now and in the past would play out differently without any changes to cards. Is such a fundamental shift actually in the game's interest given it sells itself as simple to learn?
My third point was going to be about the one-sided nature of type match-ups, and how it would just shafts some decks against some classes for no reason other than the spell schools they have available. A little bit of thought quickly showed that was an over-reaction since few decks in HS are thematic enough to all be weak to a single type, and most spells don't do damage anyway. So in practice it would never be anything similar to the innate advantage of a fire team against a grass one in Pokemon, for example.
My actual third point is then: is it not an awful lot of complication for actually very little effect? You use paladin as an example, but other than Consecration it won't have any damage dealing spells, so it would never matter with any other card. Similarly rogue will kill minions with basically everything other than damage from spells (through weapons, minions or hard removal). Warrior probably won't even have spell schools, while druid will have nature but will mostly be punching things to kill them anyway. It looks like only mage, shaman, warlock and, to a lesser extent, priest will actually care much about it. And even then a lot of the time it won't matter.
So yeah, it's an obvious and neat idea, but one that doesn't make a whole lot of sense in traditional Hearthstone... I could absolutely see type match-ups appearing in Mercenaries however.
This hits right at the heart of how power creep exists despite vanilla stats not increasing. In truth Foxy Fraud probably is stronger than a 2 mana 3/3, for example. In other cases it is a bit less obvious because stat distributions can be bad. The keywords on Crabrider, for instance, are made a lot weaker by it only having 1 attack, so it requires buffs to actually make it good.
I guess the take-home message is that if you want to make powerful minions, always stick within vanilla stats but give them interesting/powerful effects. This is especially true if those effects require a condition to be met in order to be powerful, e.g. needing a buff for Crabrider or a combo card for Foxy Fraud.
The most compelling argument I can think of for not raising vanilla stats is that every minion has stats, so raising these sets the bar for every minion of the same cost to be compared against. Drawing power from effects, however, is much more narrow and will only serve to guide the power of a relatively small number of cards. Often they rotate out of Standard before a single comparable card is made, and they don't actually have a permanent effect on power creep at all.
Another aspect to consider is what contingency plans are there in case a card is too strong? If it has an effect you can change the stats and/or mana cost while still keeping a meaningful card. But if it is just a textless minion, all you can do to it is change a number to turn it into something that already exists.
I suppose a third aspect is that textless minions are just not very interesting. They can be strong if you give them enough stats, but are they really making the game more enjoyable than similar cards that reward players for taking steps to activate an effect?
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This is all quite subtle and more subjective than I make it sound, so I encourage you to question everything I said and only apply it if/when you have understood it and actually agree with it. I have the advantage of having played Hearthstone most days since early 2014 and have been able to build an understanding of the game's design slowly as it all happened, but I can still be wrong. In the end I have no more control over what cards get printed than anyone else, and maybe one day Blizz will raise the vanilla stats, making me look jolly silly!
I have to say, not including a fight against Onyxia was a bold choice, given it was the culmination of the first 4 fights.
Not including Med'an was... a less contentious choice.
As for the surprise Uncrowned fight: I really liked it. A bit of a puzzle with an air of mystery. It's a shame we couldn't see the Shadows for longer at the end; I barely had time to take in just how chunky Taoshi and Tethys were. No wonder I had to get creative with some poisoned knife juggling!
Valeera can finally say goodbye to class AoE forever, but I'm looking forward to Blademaster Samuro + Plague Scientist* for a surprise 1-sided full board clear.
* Note for the author: plague scientist was actually brought back from the Frozen Throne, replacing his slightly more expensive brother Plaguebringer.
What good would there be in creating an entire blitz mode? It would just be like a normal meta but where any combo, control or value deck is suppressed because they need the time to think turns through. The goofy restriction of Nozdormu gives people the chance to play blitz mode against friends whenever they like, without needing to waste resources splitting the playerbase with an aggro-focused game mode.
Anyway, my entire point was that 'useless' only means something from a limited perspective. Just because you can't envision yourself playing cards, it doesn't mean there aren't players out there making the most of them. A case in point: a friend and I both had a good laugh trying to get Duskfallen Aviana to work. The card is really bad, but it's still not useless.
Edit: I am aware of the apparent hypocrisy in dismissing a blitz game mode while saying no card is useless. If there was a huge appetite for a blitz game mode (best tested in a Tavern Brawl) then I'm all for it. That doesn't change the fact it is more effort with a vastly greater chance for failure than just printing 1 card to do the job: a card needs a handful of players to like it, but a game mode needs an entire community for the matchmaker to work.