There's lots of comparable cards, either as 1 mana discover something spells with no body, or 1 mana 1/1 (or 1/2 in the cases of Pharaoh Cat and Sky Raider) minion that adds something randomly to your hand. These are often good but never over-the-top unless you are just fed up of randomly generated cards, which is fair enough.
Spell Thief is the best of both worlds, but the combo trigger also makes it awkward since it often cannot just be thrown down on turn 1. As a result the 1/2 body isn't as impactful as it has been for similar cards in the past, and neither rogue nor mage makes the most of small bodies late on. Rogue already has lots of them as Lackeys, who also never turn up on turn 1, and are also made fair because of this.
Addressing the greater availability of board clears in rogue: you are overstating how reliable these will be to get. In Standard mage only has Flamestrike, Blizzard, Arcane Blast and Flame Ward if you are feeling generous. Because mage has decent AoE in the basic and classic set it rarely gets given more, which is the complete opposite of priest historically. Between Fan of Knives, spell damage and Blade Flurry (which is relevant in burgle rogue lists running Bazaar Burglary), it is only Flamestrike that really adds anything beyond what rogue could do more reliably if it wants to.
Re quest mage in Wild: sure, it is more fuel for that deck, but I don't think that deck will care much whether it was a 1/2 minion or just a normal spell that discovers a spell. Plus that deck is already well over the tipping point and adding cards like this now is relatively minor compared to what was added in Rise of Shadows.
I can't imagine it going anywhere else when northshire cleric exists.
Northshire doesn't exist in Standard...
I don't think the card needs to be for a big flashy Inner Fire combo. One buff from Dragonmaw Overseer or Apotheosis and it has plenty of attack and health to do some serious early-mid game work.
Nice catch, though I think it is more likely there are 3 legendaries per class (1 single class, 2 dual class), otherwise there's a huge reduction in the number of legendaries (since all the dual classes together only make 10) or a whole ton of extra neutral ones (which they have rightly reduced since Un'Goro).
Because the total of 135 cards is unchanged, I expect the total number of each rarity to be the same as usual. If I'm right, there will be some funny counting to do, making it look the same as before by counting each dual-class card as 1/2 a card in each class. With 40 dual class cards total --> 4 per pair, I then expect each class individually to have 14 cards this time around (except DH with 19?).
Certainly you don't need to cut 40 cards, or even just the 10 legendaries, to fit 5 extra in DH.
Edit: we already know Rattlegore so that pretty much settles it.
You can give Wand Thief a pass, since mage and rogue both have a major focus on resource generation (I'm not sure why Iksar didn't include rogue alongside priest and mage since nobody doubts burgle rogue is a thing). In fact it is quite a beautiful blend of mage's generation of mage spells and rogue's generation of non-rogue cards.
But the studies cards (look forward to every class getting a 1 mana discover a card of type X, the next card of that type you play costs (1) less) and first day of school can definitely be singled out here.
I think he's saying they both institutions that are a little more rotten on the inside than they try to claim, to put it lightly. Of course that's true to varying degrees for many (probably most) governments around the world, but China barely even tries to cover it up because they censor everything their residents see anyway.
Anyway, that's a discussion better held on a forum not dedicated to a children's card game.
You can bet we'll be seeing a few dual-class weapons then. Rogue/warrior and warrior/paladin are particularly likely looking at the class combinations.
It's not really like running cards from different classes, since they can just make sure the potentially game breaking effects don't appear on the shared cards. E.g. the rogue/mage one we've seen does something both classes already do anyway.
Whether they were actually cautious though remains to be seen.
I reckon it'll be Thursday at the earliest. I don't think blizz would have two significant events in the game (major nerfs and expansion reveal) hitting on the same date, as they would dilute one another's coverage. Could be wrong, though.
No, the message is clear. On the July 14th there will be a patch. Why is there a patch? Because (my speculation) Blizzard will announce the new expansion and will roll out the patch with the prepurchase card back and prepurchase rogue hero skin.
And with this patch they sneaked out the balance changes.
I have my doubts about it happening tomorrow (14th) because they have not announced the announcement stream yet. Unless they do that today they are not going to just dump the information without telling people it is coming. Nerf patches often happen without much fuss, so that alone is not strong evidence.
As much as I'd love another rogue skin, there is also little to suggest it will be with the next pre-purchase. When they commented on this a couple of months back they said the character was decided on, but that "it likely won't be as soon as you want, sorry for that." To me that sounds like it is still some time away. I wouldn't be surprised if it will be Silas Darkmoon as the pre-purchase hero for the December expansion.
Of course I could be wrong on all of this, but to me the message is certainly not clear.
Right, but your point revolves around matters where they are making decisions that make people less happy. Those should absolutely be called out, but they were not part of the thought experiment. That was intended to be more abstract and point out it is actions rather than internal (and hidden) beliefs/motives that matter: you could be on a quest for world domination and doing a huge list is benevolent things to trick people into admiring you first, but if you never get around to the nefarious deeds planned for when you gain power then it doesn't really matter why you did the good stuff. The fact remains you did good stuff.
As soon as people learn it was all part of a dastardly plan they tend to treat the benevolent actions as though they were entirely malevolent, as though they wish it never happened at all, but that's irrational and wasteful.
The saying "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" is the succinct way of phrasing all of this. I would also extend "actions speak louder than words" to "actions speak louder than words, which themselves speak louder than motives".
--------------------------------------
Returning to the original discussion, you can rightly complain about the initial power level of DH and the decision making behind it, but once we are in that position complaints should not be levied at the appropriate nerfs. And when the nerfs arrive 3 months into an expansion the discussion should still be on the initial power level of DH and how it was so preposterous that we still need nerfs on it so late on, and and how it delayed changes to other classes that ought to have happened at a more reasonable time had DH not been so powerful.
I think part of the timing is simply the result of their approach to Demon Hunter. As that class has been slowly brought in line, problematic cards elsewhere have become easier to identify. I have no doubt some of these would have been hit months ago if DH didn't exist to redirect all the attention.
On a much wider note, there is an inherent conflict between wanting the meta to change to keep things fresh and interesting, and keeping existing decks strong to not force players into opening more packs. The standard/wild split embodies these two stances, with standard built entirely on the need to buy new packs sooner or later and wild letting you keep going with old cards and fewer packs.
Of course Blizz wants us to spend money on the game (that's how it keeps going after all!), but they do that by keeping us interested, and it is a moot point what the motives behind that are. Thought experiment: does it actually matter how greedy and devious someone is if all their money is earned by doing things that make people happy?
In fairness Paladin and Shaman are the two classes that have seen buffs this expansion cycle so you cannot call them out for not buffing them now. We should recognise that all classes are weak in certain metas, even with strong cards at their disposal, and shifting the meta through nerfs can be just as helpful to those classes as buffs are.
I looked into the numbers and it is true that big dragons (16+ total stats, e.g. 8/8 or 4/12 or 12/12) make up a higher fraction of them in standard (32.6%) than in wild (24.7%). These numbers give:
54.6% chance to get at least 1 big dragon in standard, and 43.3% for wild.
10.6% to get 2 big dragons in standard, and 6.1% in wild.
So yes it is more likely in standard, but not by some crazy margin, and the standard dragon pool of 43 cards is not actually that small (being more than half the wild pool of 77).
Interestingly if you instead look at low rolls, which I arbitrarily set as dragons with less than 10 total stats, then you have 30.2% of standard and 29.9% of wild. So to odds of low rolls are pretty much identical. (Note I excluded Twilight Drake and Midnight Drake because these will often be larger than 10 total in slow decks.)
In any case, I wouldn't be a big fan of them printing a bunch of small dragons just to weaken Alex. They'd need to print so many to make a meaningful difference in a pool of 43 that you detract greatly from what dragons are meant to be: some of the biggest creatures out there. And even then the high rolls will still happen and people will still feel cheated out of games.
-----------------------------------------
I would argue the bigger difference for Alex in wild is that she is compared to other huge instant board (re)fills, which are mostly resurrection effects (e.g. N'Zoth, Bloodreaver Gul'dan and Greater Diamond Spellstone/Mass Resurrection). So in wild she's neither the biggest nor most common of the late game board fills, so she's not on many people's radar there.
Those costing 1 when you have 7+ mana to play with will often not be very important. It is not like the early turns where Backstab costing 0 or 1 mana makes the difference between playing a minion and not.
The bigger change is being able to play lots the turn you play Galakrond, and Backstab and Shadowstep were rarely the game winning cards then anyway.
There is still a whole month before the expansion comes out so I wouldn't expect to see any news about it for another week or so, based on how late they have been announced lately. It is most likely the upcoming nerfs are announced first.
Yeah, I'm one of Burgle Rogue's biggest fans and even I feel dirty playing Spectral Cutlass, so I normally stick with Bazaar Burglary instead. That way no one feels bad just because the opponent either does or noes not have weapon removal. At least it does have a simple counter available to everyone though.
When life gives you lemons and a leaf blower, then I guess it is time to make a fresh and zesty mortar cannon. It's not what either was meant for but it does, erm, something.
Thus the joy of playing Burgle Rogue is explained: you have a plan, and part of that plan is to make the plan up as you go along based on what rubbish or brilliance your cards give you. Every game is different, you get to make use of even the most unloved cards, and the occasional game-breaking multi-class combos show even the best meta decks who's boss.
What the class was imagined to be was, aggressively stated minions, with powerful card draw options, and clears minions using the hero via weapons etc. Its weak to board clears, have weak card generation, and supposedly big minions.
The identity is where I really have a problem with the class, and it is useful to repeat something I said in another thread recently: DH is designed to be good or great at what I consider all the primary mechanics of the game, namely
strong minions (both big and small);
high tempo;
single target removal (big and small);
AoE (big and small);
face damage;
healing/taunt;
and card draw.
Meanwhile every other class either has major weaknesses in the primary mechanics (e.g. rogue's lack of healing/taunt and AoE), or they are mediocre at most of them (e.g. shaman having tools for most situations, but they're normally worse than the versions in other classes).
It is all well and good having weaknesses like card generation, but that doesn't mean anything when you have great card draw and there's lots of good neutral card generators anyway, especially while they have a tiny pool of great cards to get off things like Vulpera Scoundrel and Cobalt Spellkin. Also, while they seem to lack hard removal, that is also pretty much irrelevant because they can a) ignore taunt and have silence, b) tend to kill you before big minions can be played, and c) they have enough pretty big removal to be able to take down all but the highest health minions anyway.
I genuinely think the only real weakness tempo DH has at the moment is its reliance on 2-health minions in the early game, which can be exploited but for how long?
So what I really hope to see is a fundamental change in class identity that strips them of one or two of the primary mechanics, replacing them with some more janky things to bring the class in line with the other 9 classes. But I doubt there is going to be an opportunity for that until next April, and even then only the DH Initiate set will leave.
I'm always super skeptical about dual-class constructed HS, because unlike other TCG/CCGs its balance is driven entirely by the classes being separate. Plus I'm a strong believer that classes should always have major weaknesses, which is a feature that dual classes greatly diminish.
That is not to say it doesn't have huge potential for fun and I'd love to try it out in a truly casual setting, but I can say the same thing about Wild, where I already know that most of the scope for casual fun is actually an exercise in masochism.
Having said that, the ban list idea might salvage it. In fact if it is a ban list for specific class combinations (e.g. you could use Shadowjeweler Hanar with all classes except Mage, Paladin and Hunter), then I could genuinely see it working very well, so long as Blizz updates the ban lists frequently enough.
There's lots of comparable cards, either as 1 mana discover something spells with no body, or 1 mana 1/1 (or 1/2 in the cases of Pharaoh Cat and Sky Raider) minion that adds something randomly to your hand. These are often good but never over-the-top unless you are just fed up of randomly generated cards, which is fair enough.
Spell Thief is the best of both worlds, but the combo trigger also makes it awkward since it often cannot just be thrown down on turn 1. As a result the 1/2 body isn't as impactful as it has been for similar cards in the past, and neither rogue nor mage makes the most of small bodies late on. Rogue already has lots of them as Lackeys, who also never turn up on turn 1, and are also made fair because of this.
Addressing the greater availability of board clears in rogue: you are overstating how reliable these will be to get. In Standard mage only has Flamestrike, Blizzard, Arcane Blast and Flame Ward if you are feeling generous. Because mage has decent AoE in the basic and classic set it rarely gets given more, which is the complete opposite of priest historically. Between Fan of Knives, spell damage and Blade Flurry (which is relevant in burgle rogue lists running Bazaar Burglary), it is only Flamestrike that really adds anything beyond what rogue could do more reliably if it wants to.
Re quest mage in Wild: sure, it is more fuel for that deck, but I don't think that deck will care much whether it was a 1/2 minion or just a normal spell that discovers a spell. Plus that deck is already well over the tipping point and adding cards like this now is relatively minor compared to what was added in Rise of Shadows.
Northshire doesn't exist in Standard...
I don't think the card needs to be for a big flashy Inner Fire combo. One buff from Dragonmaw Overseer or Apotheosis and it has plenty of attack and health to do some serious early-mid game work.
Nice catch, though I think it is more likely there are 3 legendaries per class (1 single class, 2 dual class), otherwise there's a huge reduction in the number of legendaries (since all the dual classes together only make 10) or a whole ton of extra neutral ones (which they have rightly reduced since Un'Goro).
Because the total of 135 cards is unchanged, I expect the total number of each rarity to be the same as usual. If I'm right, there will be some funny counting to do, making it look the same as before by counting each dual-class card as 1/2 a card in each class. With 40 dual class cards total --> 4 per pair, I then expect each class individually to have 14 cards this time around (except DH with 19?).
Certainly you don't need to cut 40 cards, or even just the 10 legendaries, to fit 5 extra in DH.
Edit: we already know Rattlegore so that pretty much settles it.
You can give Wand Thief a pass, since mage and rogue both have a major focus on resource generation (I'm not sure why Iksar didn't include rogue alongside priest and mage since nobody doubts burgle rogue is a thing). In fact it is quite a beautiful blend of mage's generation of mage spells and rogue's generation of non-rogue cards.
But the studies cards (look forward to every class getting a 1 mana discover a card of type X, the next card of that type you play costs (1) less) and first day of school can definitely be singled out here.
Priest only pairs with paladin and warlock. I guess a priest/pally weapon is possible, but I don't expect to see it.
I think he's saying they both institutions that are a little more rotten on the inside than they try to claim, to put it lightly. Of course that's true to varying degrees for many (probably most) governments around the world, but China barely even tries to cover it up because they censor everything their residents see anyway.
Anyway, that's a discussion better held on a forum not dedicated to a children's card game.
Yes. I think it is basically a quick way of writing "Battlecry: the next spell you cast (this turn?) also does X".
You can bet we'll be seeing a few dual-class weapons then. Rogue/warrior and warrior/paladin are particularly likely looking at the class combinations.
It's not really like running cards from different classes, since they can just make sure the potentially game breaking effects don't appear on the shared cards. E.g. the rogue/mage one we've seen does something both classes already do anyway.
Whether they were actually cautious though remains to be seen.
I have my doubts about it happening tomorrow (14th) because they have not announced the announcement stream yet. Unless they do that today they are not going to just dump the information without telling people it is coming. Nerf patches often happen without much fuss, so that alone is not strong evidence.
As much as I'd love another rogue skin, there is also little to suggest it will be with the next pre-purchase. When they commented on this a couple of months back they said the character was decided on, but that "it likely won't be as soon as you want, sorry for that." To me that sounds like it is still some time away. I wouldn't be surprised if it will be Silas Darkmoon as the pre-purchase hero for the December expansion.
Of course I could be wrong on all of this, but to me the message is certainly not clear.
Right, but your point revolves around matters where they are making decisions that make people less happy. Those should absolutely be called out, but they were not part of the thought experiment. That was intended to be more abstract and point out it is actions rather than internal (and hidden) beliefs/motives that matter: you could be on a quest for world domination and doing a huge list is benevolent things to trick people into admiring you first, but if you never get around to the nefarious deeds planned for when you gain power then it doesn't really matter why you did the good stuff. The fact remains you did good stuff.
As soon as people learn it was all part of a dastardly plan they tend to treat the benevolent actions as though they were entirely malevolent, as though they wish it never happened at all, but that's irrational and wasteful.
The saying "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" is the succinct way of phrasing all of this. I would also extend "actions speak louder than words" to "actions speak louder than words, which themselves speak louder than motives".
--------------------------------------
Returning to the original discussion, you can rightly complain about the initial power level of DH and the decision making behind it, but once we are in that position complaints should not be levied at the appropriate nerfs. And when the nerfs arrive 3 months into an expansion the discussion should still be on the initial power level of DH and how it was so preposterous that we still need nerfs on it so late on, and and how it delayed changes to other classes that ought to have happened at a more reasonable time had DH not been so powerful.
I think part of the timing is simply the result of their approach to Demon Hunter. As that class has been slowly brought in line, problematic cards elsewhere have become easier to identify. I have no doubt some of these would have been hit months ago if DH didn't exist to redirect all the attention.
On a much wider note, there is an inherent conflict between wanting the meta to change to keep things fresh and interesting, and keeping existing decks strong to not force players into opening more packs. The standard/wild split embodies these two stances, with standard built entirely on the need to buy new packs sooner or later and wild letting you keep going with old cards and fewer packs.
Of course Blizz wants us to spend money on the game (that's how it keeps going after all!), but they do that by keeping us interested, and it is a moot point what the motives behind that are. Thought experiment: does it actually matter how greedy and devious someone is if all their money is earned by doing things that make people happy?
In fairness Paladin and Shaman are the two classes that have seen buffs this expansion cycle so you cannot call them out for not buffing them now. We should recognise that all classes are weak in certain metas, even with strong cards at their disposal, and shifting the meta through nerfs can be just as helpful to those classes as buffs are.
I looked into the numbers and it is true that big dragons (16+ total stats, e.g. 8/8 or 4/12 or 12/12) make up a higher fraction of them in standard (32.6%) than in wild (24.7%). These numbers give:
So yes it is more likely in standard, but not by some crazy margin, and the standard dragon pool of 43 cards is not actually that small (being more than half the wild pool of 77).
Interestingly if you instead look at low rolls, which I arbitrarily set as dragons with less than 10 total stats, then you have 30.2% of standard and 29.9% of wild. So to odds of low rolls are pretty much identical. (Note I excluded Twilight Drake and Midnight Drake because these will often be larger than 10 total in slow decks.)
In any case, I wouldn't be a big fan of them printing a bunch of small dragons just to weaken Alex. They'd need to print so many to make a meaningful difference in a pool of 43 that you detract greatly from what dragons are meant to be: some of the biggest creatures out there. And even then the high rolls will still happen and people will still feel cheated out of games.
-----------------------------------------
I would argue the bigger difference for Alex in wild is that she is compared to other huge instant board (re)fills, which are mostly resurrection effects (e.g. N'Zoth, Bloodreaver Gul'dan and Greater Diamond Spellstone/Mass Resurrection). So in wild she's neither the biggest nor most common of the late game board fills, so she's not on many people's radar there.
Those costing 1 when you have 7+ mana to play with will often not be very important. It is not like the early turns where Backstab costing 0 or 1 mana makes the difference between playing a minion and not.
The bigger change is being able to play lots the turn you play Galakrond, and Backstab and Shadowstep were rarely the game winning cards then anyway.
There is still a whole month before the expansion comes out so I wouldn't expect to see any news about it for another week or so, based on how late they have been announced lately. It is most likely the upcoming nerfs are announced first.
Yeah, I'm one of Burgle Rogue's biggest fans and even I feel dirty playing Spectral Cutlass, so I normally stick with Bazaar Burglary instead. That way no one feels bad just because the opponent either does or noes not have weapon removal. At least it does have a simple counter available to everyone though.
When life gives you lemons and a leaf blower, then I guess it is time to make a fresh and zesty mortar cannon. It's not what either was meant for but it does, erm, something.
Thus the joy of playing Burgle Rogue is explained: you have a plan, and part of that plan is to make the plan up as you go along based on what rubbish or brilliance your cards give you. Every game is different, you get to make use of even the most unloved cards, and the occasional game-breaking multi-class combos show even the best meta decks who's boss.
The identity is where I really have a problem with the class, and it is useful to repeat something I said in another thread recently: DH is designed to be good or great at what I consider all the primary mechanics of the game, namely
Meanwhile every other class either has major weaknesses in the primary mechanics (e.g. rogue's lack of healing/taunt and AoE), or they are mediocre at most of them (e.g. shaman having tools for most situations, but they're normally worse than the versions in other classes).
It is all well and good having weaknesses like card generation, but that doesn't mean anything when you have great card draw and there's lots of good neutral card generators anyway, especially while they have a tiny pool of great cards to get off things like Vulpera Scoundrel and Cobalt Spellkin. Also, while they seem to lack hard removal, that is also pretty much irrelevant because they can a) ignore taunt and have silence, b) tend to kill you before big minions can be played, and c) they have enough pretty big removal to be able to take down all but the highest health minions anyway.
I genuinely think the only real weakness tempo DH has at the moment is its reliance on 2-health minions in the early game, which can be exploited but for how long?
So what I really hope to see is a fundamental change in class identity that strips them of one or two of the primary mechanics, replacing them with some more janky things to bring the class in line with the other 9 classes. But I doubt there is going to be an opportunity for that until next April, and even then only the DH Initiate set will leave.
I'm always super skeptical about dual-class constructed HS, because unlike other TCG/CCGs its balance is driven entirely by the classes being separate. Plus I'm a strong believer that classes should always have major weaknesses, which is a feature that dual classes greatly diminish.
That is not to say it doesn't have huge potential for fun and I'd love to try it out in a truly casual setting, but I can say the same thing about Wild, where I already know that most of the scope for casual fun is actually an exercise in masochism.
Having said that, the ban list idea might salvage it. In fact if it is a ban list for specific class combinations (e.g. you could use Shadowjeweler Hanar with all classes except Mage, Paladin and Hunter), then I could genuinely see it working very well, so long as Blizz updates the ban lists frequently enough.