You are not the first person I've seen dislike the new Nozdormu card, but anyone calling it a "bad core set choice" is being silly since it is obvious that many players love the idea of the card. Unless you are one of the rare players who tries and enjoys everything, you have to accept that a significant fraction of the cards are designed for other types of players.
Complaining about cards is only really justified when you find them especially unfun to play against, AND they are prevalent enough for it to significantly affect your day to day experience of the game. Satisfying both of these is quite common (see every call for a nerf ever), but it is almost never the case for niche or meme cards.
So let Noz be Noz, casuals mess around with hero power mage, and the inevitable mech decks in the Year of the Gryphon be glad Cogmaster and Spider Tank are here to give them a little extra support.
The update they intended for this week would have only changed a few cards and nothing else (except perhaps a couple of minor bug fixes). The 20.0 patch will most definitely include FitB cards (that why it's not 19.X like this week's would have been), and we'll only get it after the cards are all revealed.
I don't think it's weird for Paladins to have freeze though, since they can throw a Frozen Shadoweaver into their deck like anyone else.
Quote From Pies
I guess I didn't think much of it since even a Mage can swing an Ashbringer in Standard with the right cards in play.
Both of these fall under a very broad umbrella of class identify/mechanics/flavour/fantasy. Those sub-categories all mean slightly different things, but they are nonetheless there for the same reason: to make the classes feel and play differently. Not to the extent that everything every class does is unique to that class, but enough that they have their own take even where they overlap.
As you mention, this doesn't stop classes have some access to effects outside their class, especially through the neutral cards or rogue and priest's thieving. However, the thieving is unreliable and neutrals are limited in either quality or quantity. There are a few exceptions to that, such as neutral taunts often being quite good as a way to keep aggro in check, but for most effects neutrals should be OK at best.
When making cards, you might find it helpful to refer to Blizzard's own class identity breakdown from mid-2019: https://outof.cards/hearthstone/148-keeping-hearthstone-unique-class-identity-breakdown. It could do with a slight update, and would benefit from listing which mechanics (e.g. freeze and weapons) each class is associated with separately, but it's still a helpful tool for creating cards that feel like they would actually fit in Hearthstone.
Quote From Pies
Quote From AngryShuckie
You have a disregard for vanilla stats.
Guilty. I feel it's justified though since I don't think I ever saw someone use a vanilla card even once outside of new accounts. This might change with the new core set though, since some of them appear to be seeing buffs like Raid Leader.
The importance of vanilla cards is not that they are used competitively, but that they establish the boundary between over- and under-statted minions. That's especially important at 5 or less mana. Above 5, you can start to get away with printing over-statted minions, especially at 8+ mana, because you lose more tempo to hard removal and the stats just don't matter as much.
Ultimately, the most important thing vanilla minions do is hold back power creep. Power creep still exists of course, but not in terms of base minion stats. That is good because once the vanilla stats are raised you set a precedent for raising them again and again in future, making everything that came before too weak to consider.
So while our old friend Chillwind Yeti hasn't made it into a serious competitive deck since 2014, he has still been on the front lines of the fight against power creep, and we should be thankful for it :)
When I saw the released list of warrior core cards I found myself surprised at two things; Shield Slam and Brawl were still part of core, and that Shield Block and Battle Rage didn't make it. It still baffles me that shield block was taken away. Is this really a problem card to begin with? Yes it has been played since forever, but what kind of design space is now freed up by its removal?
I don't think it has anything to do with design space in Shield Block's case. Some cards were just removed to help freshen things up a bit, and that can be achieved by removing any card that saw continuous play over the years, not just the most powerful ones.
Like many people I would have been quite happy to see Brawl go too, but that doesn't stop me looking forward to the class using alternatives to Shield Block for a while.
Quote From https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Level
A level is a number assigned to each hero class. Each player's classes start at level 1, and levels can be gained for each by accumulating experience. Experience is gained by playing games, especially winning games, in that class. The current level cap is 60.
The wiki didn't go into any details other than that winning helps.
From my own memory/experiences, I think it behaves similarly to XP for the reward track in that longer games tend to give more XP, but I don't know if they are directly connected at all. It might track the number of cards played rather than the time spent, but I really don't know for sure. Other than that, all I know is you get more in constructed than playing against the Innkeeper (there wasn't any other solo content back when I was grinding class levels!).
May I ask why you are keen to level up asap? We will be given golden copies of all the Basic cards when the Barrens set arrives along with the Core set, so I'm not sure what you really gain from rushing to level up the classes.
What stood out to me though were Bloodlust, Flametongue Totem, and Totemic Might. With them gone, aggressive, board-flooding archetypes will have a much harder time competing with other minion-focused decks. Totem Shaman has been hit especially hard, since it basically lost its win condition, one of their strongest totems, and one of their best board-wide buffs. But that's of course not all! With rotation, Shamans will also loose other vital powerhouses for board-flooding decks, like Splitting Axe, Totemic Surge, or Storm's Wrath. So, with all that, I think it's safe to say that aggro Shamans off the table for a while; Or at least Totem Shaman.
I love how far we have come with Totemic Might. It feels like only yesterday the entire community laughed at how useless it is, but now we're unironically giving it a joint obituary with Bloodlust and Flametongue Totem. I can't wait for newer players to go into the Classic format expecting it to be a good card.
On that matter, it will be interesting to see whether players are going to have to (re-)learn the old wisdom from the Classic era (e.g. that you shouldn't run 1-drops in most decks), or whether we'll learn we were actually just wrong back then. Certainly a lot of the old 'bad' cards are widely respected these days, with notable inclusions being Twisting Nether and Vanish, and of course Totemic Might.
There are plenty of good idea in there, but I do have a few points of (hopefully constructive) criticism.
While I understand the association of classes with the races, I don't think that motivates making everything into dual-class cards. It would be sufficient for both mage and paladin to have a human focus, for example, but to also have their own distinct cards. Kind of like how warrior, paladin, hunter, druid and warlock were all dinosaur classes in Un'Goro, but they each had their own spin on it.
This is especially important when cards mix themes/mechanics from the two classes that they don't share normally. To highlight an example: why does paladin have access to a freeze effect in Dalaran Sorceress? There is nothing about that card that has anything to do with the paladin class. Perhaps the most problematic examples are the secrets. Paladin shouldn't have a 3-mana secret, and druid shouldn't have any secrets at all.
Neutral weapons with non-0 attack is always a no-no. It has only ever happened with Atiesh, but that was basically an 8-mana weapon that was not really intended to be used to attack with.
You have a disregard for vanilla stats, with a 2 mana 3/3 and 3 mana 3/5 for example. I was glad to see River Crocolisk, Spider Tank and Chillwind Yeti in the Core set to make it clear that power creep in HS has not yet reached the point where vanilla stats have increased on low-mid cost minions.
The Sentry Ward, Shade and Sentinel Owl, all of which can be summoned very early on at next to no cost, should not have permanent stealth. Revealing the opponent's hand, in particular, ought to be valued quite highly. It feels like there are so many cards that ignore stealth (including these cards) just to mitigate this glaring balance problem. I'm sure WC3 inspired a lot of them, but HS isn't WC3 and you sometimes need to get creative to adapt effects to make sense within HS.
On the bright side, I think I've finally worked out why I just don't care about DH: the class doesn't encourage shenanigans in any form. Everything is very practical because everything revolves around drawing cards, surviving, building a board, and damaging the opponent. Even when individual cards are interesting, there's nothing creative to do with them.
Isn't that basically the idea for most if not all decks in the meta?
There's one meme dream you can pull with dhunters, of which Ive only managed a few times, Keymaster Alabaster + Glide, now made easier to pull off with voljin. I might be interested to go back to that at some point before barrens release.
To an extent, yes, but there's still normally something central in them that feels like a reason to want to play them. The heart and soul of the deck, if you like. Take the current aggro rogue as an example: the deck as a whole is a boring smorc-fest, but at least it has Self-Sharpening Sword growing over a few turns while nefarious laughter builds up inside you. The sword would be worth playing just for that feeling alone.
Meanwhile, DH just lacks the feeling. It's like OG zoo-lock just with different mechanics: you play all the cards because they are good, not because they are exciting. Perhaps it's because the attack buffs only last 1 turn so there's no sustained emotion attached to them. Similarly, the complete absence of minion buffs leads me to have less interest in my own minions than I would in other classes.
Having just looked back through all of DH's cards, the 5 I care most about by far are:
I'm disappointed that DH will go into the next expansion with a 11* cards (more than an entire expansion's worth!) more than the other classes, and there's still very little in DH that interests me. In fact the one thing I did find cool, namely Token DH, is having its main win conditions taken away without any replacement. Meanwhile, thanks to Illidari Inquisitor, the Big Demon archetype is now being encouraged to copy the more aggressive decks and punch the face.
* due to getting 5 extra in each of the the Year of the Phoenix sets, and 4 of those from AoO are in the Core set, so 15-4=11.
On the bright side, I think I've finally worked out why I just don't care about DH: the class doesn't encourage shenanigans in any form. Everything is very practical because everything revolves around drawing cards, surviving, building a board, and damaging the opponent. Even when individual cards are interesting, there's nothing creative to do with them.
I guess it's fitting really. I can't imagine Illidan would be very impressed if his Illidari spent ages building an army of Greyboughs instead of getting on with killing their foe.
I agree that weakness / resistance mechanics are cool but probably a layer of complexity beyond normal HS. Mostly because you'd need to specify who's weak / resistant to what, which is a lot of clutter on cards that already try to keep to a maximum of 4 lines of text.
I also agree that they'd be perfect for Mercenaries, and it would help in making it so some characters are good against some enemies, which encourages us to try a wide range of characters.
I'm particularly interested to see whether hunter and rogue get enough spells with given schools to justify creating a janky archetype for them. E.g. shadow and nature (poison) spells are perfect thematic fits for the Subtlety and Assassination specialisations in WoW. The question is just whether Blizz wants to turn those specs into archetypes in HS. They went with Enhancement shaman last expansion despite the class having no prior weapon synergy, so who knows?
It's fine if you think this can be fun but i'm not into that. Incredibly short turns aren't fun so i'm certainly not playing with this. The thing that annoys me is that i got the impression that Nozdormu was this really important character in the lore of WoW. The other dragon aspects got really good cards that make them relevant choices when building a deck. They can have an impact in the game but Nozdormu doesn't get the same treatment. It feels like some kind of injustice. It doesn't matter. I was expecting the core set to raise my interest in constructed again but i have seen nothing interesting besides the changes to a few cards (like Tracking).
Priest got kicked in the balls really hard, btw. The class got only two cards that are worth anything: Flash Heal (at least they got rid of Radiance) and the card that discovers a spell in the deck (cycle option). Everything else is incredibly bad. Silence Priest? A complete joke without Divine Spirit. Tempo Priest? Completely unviable without card draw. Shadow Form? Terrible regardless of its cost. The legendary card? An absolute unplayable piece of garbage. Priest got treated like s*** and is going back to its state of being 100% dependant on expansion cards to be relevant. I'm just done with this.
Edit: I just realized they got rid of Inner Fire and Shadow Word: Pain. The main finisher for any sort of buff based Aggro/Tempo/Silence Priest deck is gone. One of the best early game removal tools is gone as well. Instead they gave us a bunch of Tempo cards that are completely irrelevant without proper card draw. Without Northshire Cleric and Acolyte of Pain that archetype will never get anywhere. Basic cycle options aren't good enough when every other Aggro/Tempo class can draw through their entire deck in a few turns or have much higher quality cards and methods of dealing direct damage. Priest's core set is absolutely atrocious. A complete joke.
Regarding Nozdormu, and big lore characters more generally, my stance is always that they have been handled well as long as they are exciting to a noticeable fraction of players. That doesn't require them to actually be strong, especially in a neutral cycle of cards like the dragon aspects where they'd all be competing with each other for the 9/10 mana spot anyway. So by my metric, Noz is much more likely to be a success than any of the other reworked dragons, since he's practically guaranteed to have a following. It's just that that following probably won't include many Spikes.
----------------------------------
Regarding the priest Core set, it is very buff-centric, which doesn't usually go well for the class I agree. Whether it will be "absolutely atrocious" after the significant shift when the Barrens arrives remains to be seen, however. Aside from not knowing what the Barrens set will bring, it is also almost impossible to say what will happen when all the classes lose staple cards.
In the end priest's problems are always rooted in it being at the greedier end of control than warrior: they always have more value at the cost of lower tempo removal. That is a benefit in slow metas, but a hindrance in the aggro metas the Year of the Phoenix pushed so hard. From a game design point of view this is all perfectly sensible, but I've played the game more than long enough to acknowledge it has its problems in practice.
So the best solution to the priest problem is probably just to design sets that swing the balance away from aggro and back towards control a bit. Priest can then prey on the slower meta. Sadly, I'm not optimistic that a horde-focused expansion is going to weigh control over aggro...
My only reaction to this is feeling unnecessarily outraged by their decision to make Nozdormu even worse than he already is for the sake of a joke/meme. Every other Dragon Aspect got better but he got the Boulderfist Ogre treatment: a pile of stats that does absolutely nothing. I'm just going to forget this whole thing and move on.
How did Noz get worse?!
A 7 mana 8/8 >> 9 mana 8/8 with an effect that is irrelevant 90% of the time. Even if a 7 mana 8/8 is still not enough to make it into any competitive decks, it at least feels OK to play now.
On the meme side, he's now an absolute monster that creates a whole new game mode, especially for friendly games where you can both agree to put him into your decks. That alone makes him more worthwhile than most cards can ever hope for. Yes, he could be turned into something functional, but would we really be better off because of it?
On the whole I agree with you, and frankly I welcome a major shake-up whichever way it goes. I play Wild and can mess around in Classic too, so there's really nothing much for me to miss.
I'm glad you discussed what was removed as well as what was changed/added, because that probably says more. A notable, yet easily missed feature was the complete removal of AoE from both druid and rogue. Granted, their options were weak to begin with, but I was surprised Blizz went as far as to give them absolutely nothing outside neutral.
On a related note, neutral card draw took a hit, which might weigh heavy on some of the classes whose own card draw didn't fare any better. It won't bother druid and rogue at least, so I guess it evens out.
Overall, we can be pretty sure the concept of class identity is alive and kicking in Hearthstone.
AMAZING rework! Old Onyxias trouble was that her board was too easy to clear, and this fixes it. Also: if your opponent doesn't clear Onyxia the Broodmother, and she spawns tokens at the end of your opponents turn, will those tokens be able to attack on your turn? IF so then that's potentially 16 FACE damage. I'm REALLY glad that this releases AFTER Unseal the Vault rotates, that would have been a nightmare to face.
They should be able to attack yes, because they were summoned on your opponent's turn. It's one of the few instances where the difference between 'end of each turn' and 'start of each turn' matters.
Right, but the question is whether the Legacy versions I actually own will change or not. I.e. are both versions available in Wild functionally the same, or is there a meaningful* choice between them?
* Of course you'd choose the buffed Core version in most cases, but not in all of them
Does anyone know if the devs have ever said whether these changes apply to non-Core versions of the cards? It will matter when cards leave the Core set, and matters straight away for a few cards who have been changed 'sideways' more than getting a buff. E.g. Bluegill now having rush instead of charge.
Also, good so see Mini-Mage again. It has surely been one of the rarest sights in all of HS's history, but I still always liked him.
The number of Silver Hand Recruit cards pally got concerns me a bit to be honest, especially as it likely does signal further support for the archetype (probably in expansion 2 if that's Alliance focused). Lothraxion is going to be so obnoxious if played on curve...
I don't think Assassinate got a magic school, so I also expect most hunter, rogue and warrior spells to have no school. I wonder if they'll categorise things like Vanish and Cloak of Shadows as shadow spells though. There's definitely some magic going on with turning invisible (and yes, they do canonically turn invisible).
From a thematic standpoint I can certainly picture spell schools and tribes allowing rogue to really show its WoW specs:
Subtlety --> shadow spells
Assassination --> nature spells (from poisons)
Outlaw --> pirates
The realist inside me doubts there'll ever be enough cards in Standard for the first two to happen though.
You are not the first person I've seen dislike the new Nozdormu card, but anyone calling it a "bad core set choice" is being silly since it is obvious that many players love the idea of the card. Unless you are one of the rare players who tries and enjoys everything, you have to accept that a significant fraction of the cards are designed for other types of players.
Complaining about cards is only really justified when you find them especially unfun to play against, AND they are prevalent enough for it to significantly affect your day to day experience of the game. Satisfying both of these is quite common (see every call for a nerf ever), but it is almost never the case for niche or meme cards.
So let Noz be Noz, casuals mess around with hero power mage, and the inevitable mech decks in the Year of the Gryphon be glad Cogmaster and Spider Tank are here to give them a little extra support.
The update they intended for this week would have only changed a few cards and nothing else (except perhaps a couple of minor bug fixes). The 20.0 patch will most definitely include FitB cards (that why it's not 19.X like this week's would have been), and we'll only get it after the cards are all revealed.
Both of these fall under a very broad umbrella of class identify/mechanics/flavour/fantasy. Those sub-categories all mean slightly different things, but they are nonetheless there for the same reason: to make the classes feel and play differently. Not to the extent that everything every class does is unique to that class, but enough that they have their own take even where they overlap.
As you mention, this doesn't stop classes have some access to effects outside their class, especially through the neutral cards or rogue and priest's thieving. However, the thieving is unreliable and neutrals are limited in either quality or quantity. There are a few exceptions to that, such as neutral taunts often being quite good as a way to keep aggro in check, but for most effects neutrals should be OK at best.
When making cards, you might find it helpful to refer to Blizzard's own class identity breakdown from mid-2019: https://outof.cards/hearthstone/148-keeping-hearthstone-unique-class-identity-breakdown. It could do with a slight update, and would benefit from listing which mechanics (e.g. freeze and weapons) each class is associated with separately, but it's still a helpful tool for creating cards that feel like they would actually fit in Hearthstone.
The importance of vanilla cards is not that they are used competitively, but that they establish the boundary between over- and under-statted minions. That's especially important at 5 or less mana. Above 5, you can start to get away with printing over-statted minions, especially at 8+ mana, because you lose more tempo to hard removal and the stats just don't matter as much.
Of course, even below 5 mana you can print over-statted minions, but they need to either come with a drawback (e.g. King Mukla, Novice Zapper) or meet a condition to get those stats (e.g. Blackwing Technician, Edwin VanCleef).
Ultimately, the most important thing vanilla minions do is hold back power creep. Power creep still exists of course, but not in terms of base minion stats. That is good because once the vanilla stats are raised you set a precedent for raising them again and again in future, making everything that came before too weak to consider.
So while our old friend Chillwind Yeti hasn't made it into a serious competitive deck since 2014, he has still been on the front lines of the fight against power creep, and we should be thankful for it :)
I don't think it has anything to do with design space in Shield Block's case. Some cards were just removed to help freshen things up a bit, and that can be achieved by removing any card that saw continuous play over the years, not just the most powerful ones.
Like many people I would have been quite happy to see Brawl go too, but that doesn't stop me looking forward to the class using alternatives to Shield Block for a while.
The wiki didn't go into any details other than that winning helps.
From my own memory/experiences, I think it behaves similarly to XP for the reward track in that longer games tend to give more XP, but I don't know if they are directly connected at all. It might track the number of cards played rather than the time spent, but I really don't know for sure. Other than that, all I know is you get more in constructed than playing against the Innkeeper (there wasn't any other solo content back when I was grinding class levels!).
May I ask why you are keen to level up asap? We will be given golden copies of all the Basic cards when the Barrens set arrives along with the Core set, so I'm not sure what you really gain from rushing to level up the classes.
I love how far we have come with Totemic Might. It feels like only yesterday the entire community laughed at how useless it is, but now we're unironically giving it a joint obituary with Bloodlust and Flametongue Totem. I can't wait for newer players to go into the Classic format expecting it to be a good card.
On that matter, it will be interesting to see whether players are going to have to (re-)learn the old wisdom from the Classic era (e.g. that you shouldn't run 1-drops in most decks), or whether we'll learn we were actually just wrong back then. Certainly a lot of the old 'bad' cards are widely respected these days, with notable inclusions being Twisting Nether and Vanish, and of course Totemic Might.
There are plenty of good idea in there, but I do have a few points of (hopefully constructive) criticism.
While I understand the association of classes with the races, I don't think that motivates making everything into dual-class cards. It would be sufficient for both mage and paladin to have a human focus, for example, but to also have their own distinct cards. Kind of like how warrior, paladin, hunter, druid and warlock were all dinosaur classes in Un'Goro, but they each had their own spin on it.
This is especially important when cards mix themes/mechanics from the two classes that they don't share normally. To highlight an example: why does paladin have access to a freeze effect in Dalaran Sorceress? There is nothing about that card that has anything to do with the paladin class. Perhaps the most problematic examples are the secrets. Paladin shouldn't have a 3-mana secret, and druid shouldn't have any secrets at all.
Neutral weapons with non-0 attack is always a no-no. It has only ever happened with Atiesh, but that was basically an 8-mana weapon that was not really intended to be used to attack with.
You have a disregard for vanilla stats, with a 2 mana 3/3 and 3 mana 3/5 for example. I was glad to see River Crocolisk, Spider Tank and Chillwind Yeti in the Core set to make it clear that power creep in HS has not yet reached the point where vanilla stats have increased on low-mid cost minions.
The Sentry Ward, Shade and Sentinel Owl, all of which can be summoned very early on at next to no cost, should not have permanent stealth. Revealing the opponent's hand, in particular, ought to be valued quite highly. It feels like there are so many cards that ignore stealth (including these cards) just to mitigate this glaring balance problem. I'm sure WC3 inspired a lot of them, but HS isn't WC3 and you sometimes need to get creative to adapt effects to make sense within HS.
To an extent, yes, but there's still normally something central in them that feels like a reason to want to play them. The heart and soul of the deck, if you like. Take the current aggro rogue as an example: the deck as a whole is a boring smorc-fest, but at least it has Self-Sharpening Sword growing over a few turns while nefarious laughter builds up inside you. The sword would be worth playing just for that feeling alone.
Meanwhile, DH just lacks the feeling. It's like OG zoo-lock just with different mechanics: you play all the cards because they are good, not because they are exciting. Perhaps it's because the attack buffs only last 1 turn so there's no sustained emotion attached to them. Similarly, the complete absence of minion buffs leads me to have less interest in my own minions than I would in other classes.
Having just looked back through all of DH's cards, the 5 I care most about by far are:
Sadly, that's pretty much all token DH, which is getting gutted on rotation.
I'm disappointed that DH will go into the next expansion with a 11* cards (more than an entire expansion's worth!) more than the other classes, and there's still very little in DH that interests me. In fact the one thing I did find cool, namely Token DH, is having its main win conditions taken away without any replacement. Meanwhile, thanks to Illidari Inquisitor, the Big Demon archetype is now being encouraged to copy the more aggressive decks and punch the face.
* due to getting 5 extra in each of the the Year of the Phoenix sets, and 4 of those from AoO are in the Core set, so 15-4=11.
On the bright side, I think I've finally worked out why I just don't care about DH: the class doesn't encourage shenanigans in any form. Everything is very practical because everything revolves around drawing cards, surviving, building a board, and damaging the opponent. Even when individual cards are interesting, there's nothing creative to do with them.
I guess it's fitting really. I can't imagine Illidan would be very impressed if his Illidari spent ages building an army of Greyboughs instead of getting on with killing their foe.
I agree that weakness / resistance mechanics are cool but probably a layer of complexity beyond normal HS. Mostly because you'd need to specify who's weak / resistant to what, which is a lot of clutter on cards that already try to keep to a maximum of 4 lines of text.
I also agree that they'd be perfect for Mercenaries, and it would help in making it so some characters are good against some enemies, which encourages us to try a wide range of characters.
I'm particularly interested to see whether hunter and rogue get enough spells with given schools to justify creating a janky archetype for them. E.g. shadow and nature (poison) spells are perfect thematic fits for the Subtlety and Assassination specialisations in WoW. The question is just whether Blizz wants to turn those specs into archetypes in HS. They went with Enhancement shaman last expansion despite the class having no prior weapon synergy, so who knows?
Regarding Nozdormu, and big lore characters more generally, my stance is always that they have been handled well as long as they are exciting to a noticeable fraction of players. That doesn't require them to actually be strong, especially in a neutral cycle of cards like the dragon aspects where they'd all be competing with each other for the 9/10 mana spot anyway. So by my metric, Noz is much more likely to be a success than any of the other reworked dragons, since he's practically guaranteed to have a following. It's just that that following probably won't include many Spikes.
----------------------------------
Regarding the priest Core set, it is very buff-centric, which doesn't usually go well for the class I agree. Whether it will be "absolutely atrocious" after the significant shift when the Barrens arrives remains to be seen, however. Aside from not knowing what the Barrens set will bring, it is also almost impossible to say what will happen when all the classes lose staple cards.
In the end priest's problems are always rooted in it being at the greedier end of control than warrior: they always have more value at the cost of lower tempo removal. That is a benefit in slow metas, but a hindrance in the aggro metas the Year of the Phoenix pushed so hard. From a game design point of view this is all perfectly sensible, but I've played the game more than long enough to acknowledge it has its problems in practice.
So the best solution to the priest problem is probably just to design sets that swing the balance away from aggro and back towards control a bit. Priest can then prey on the slower meta. Sadly, I'm not optimistic that a horde-focused expansion is going to weigh control over aggro...
How did Noz get worse?!
A 7 mana 8/8 >> 9 mana 8/8 with an effect that is irrelevant 90% of the time. Even if a 7 mana 8/8 is still not enough to make it into any competitive decks, it at least feels OK to play now.
On the meme side, he's now an absolute monster that creates a whole new game mode, especially for friendly games where you can both agree to put him into your decks. That alone makes him more worthwhile than most cards can ever hope for. Yes, he could be turned into something functional, but would we really be better off because of it?
DH had 15 cards more than everyone else from the Year of the Phoenix sets, so taking a few from AoO is only helping to balance that out.
Even so, DH will still have 11 more cards over the next year than the other classes, so if anything I'd say it got lucky rather than cheated.
On the whole I agree with you, and frankly I welcome a major shake-up whichever way it goes. I play Wild and can mess around in Classic too, so there's really nothing much for me to miss.
I'm glad you discussed what was removed as well as what was changed/added, because that probably says more. A notable, yet easily missed feature was the complete removal of AoE from both druid and rogue. Granted, their options were weak to begin with, but I was surprised Blizz went as far as to give them absolutely nothing outside neutral.
On a related note, neutral card draw took a hit, which might weigh heavy on some of the classes whose own card draw didn't fare any better. It won't bother druid and rogue at least, so I guess it evens out.
Overall, we can be pretty sure the concept of class identity is alive and kicking in Hearthstone.
Ah, thanks.
RIP Anyfin pally I guess. I guess I'm also glad the Classic format will exist to let me have an upgraded 3 damage Shadowform.
They should be able to attack yes, because they were summoned on your opponent's turn. It's one of the few instances where the difference between 'end of each turn' and 'start of each turn' matters.
Right, but the question is whether the Legacy versions I actually own will change or not. I.e. are both versions available in Wild functionally the same, or is there a meaningful* choice between them?
* Of course you'd choose the buffed Core version in most cases, but not in all of them
Does anyone know if the devs have ever said whether these changes apply to non-Core versions of the cards? It will matter when cards leave the Core set, and matters straight away for a few cards who have been changed 'sideways' more than getting a buff. E.g. Bluegill now having rush instead of charge.
Also, good so see Mini-Mage again. It has surely been one of the rarest sights in all of HS's history, but I still always liked him.
The number of Silver Hand Recruit cards pally got concerns me a bit to be honest, especially as it likely does signal further support for the archetype (probably in expansion 2 if that's Alliance focused). Lothraxion is going to be so obnoxious if played on curve...
I don't think Assassinate got a magic school, so I also expect most hunter, rogue and warrior spells to have no school. I wonder if they'll categorise things like Vanish and Cloak of Shadows as shadow spells though. There's definitely some magic going on with turning invisible (and yes, they do canonically turn invisible).
From a thematic standpoint I can certainly picture spell schools and tribes allowing rogue to really show its WoW specs:
The realist inside me doubts there'll ever be enough cards in Standard for the first two to happen though.