You're right about Alex into Alex creating a surprise huge board. That is a different thing.
But Pogos and Tess? You can make a lot of them with the right set up, but not infinite, and you have to draw them. Once you've become Galakrond, your hero power gives you lackeys, plus you can keep invoking to get more. That's a lot of 4/4s. I mean, how many times did they nerf The Caverns Below?
First off, there is no true infinite in HS without using Nozdormu turn reset shenanigans, because there is a finite number of turns before the game is declared a draw.
Regardless, you can make more than enough Tesses or Pogos for other decks to handle, so they are 'endless' within the scope of the game in that you win while still having many turns of them left to come. But what I really meant to get at was that I would rather face down 1 or 2 4/4s each turn than a Tess or an ever-growing Pogo.
The Caverns Below looks and smells the same but it isn't. It didn't even have positive win rates most of the time. The issue with that deck was due to the sheer prevalence of it which made people dislike playing against it, and that it locked control decks out of the meta. If for whatever reason only 1% of players played it, it would not have warped the meta and no one would have had a problem with the deck. The same goes for Tekhan now: it appears so rarely in rogue that the effect on the meta and the game as a whole is negligible.
Look at it this way: you can count the number of times you have seen it happen since the release of DoD on one hand right? Now how many times have you won or lost due to other crazy luck in the same time? Way more I bet, so why does this rare event concern you?
I don't think it should be blocked. The whole allure of burgle rogue cards is the chance that by breaking class boundaries you might just get something that breaks the game.
As for comparing it to Alex into Alex: that event may have been similarly rare but was much faster and a surprise board of huge dragons is a different problem to a board of 4/4s.
If the concern is long term continuous 4/4s, there are more unfair things than that that no one worries about. E.g. Togwaggle's Scheme -> 15x Tess Greymane or Pogo-Hopper. These are more meme-y, but still way more consistent.
Well, regardless of what the deleted comment was, I'm glad it sparked a response that improved my understanding of what (likely) goes on behind the scenes. I had always wondered what was done to keep players with and without an update apart, but not enough to look into it.
Elise is both a druid and priest, Finley is a paladin/shaman, Reno a rogue/mage and Brann a hunter/warrior. This is actually coded into the game, as when using them in one of the tavern brawls you could complete quests for both classes for each hero.
Anyway, they got treasures for both classes, with the class assigned to each best matching the mechanics of that class. E.g. Sr. Scout having windfury --> shaman. The only iffy one is Sr. Excavator, but neither hunter nor warrior have are huge on (unconditional) card draw so I suppose they based it on the look of the character instead of mechanics.
I'm not really clear on why people want the dust system revamped - not criticizing the point, I honestly just don't see a problem with it. Anyone care to enlighten me?
The economy of the game sucks, you can't normally experiment with new decks yourself because it's very expensive and if you don't wanna be stuck with bad decks you would just wait for the data.. it creates the influx of net decking..
The game's economy doesn't really help, but the biggest driver for net-decking is the Spike mentality. I have no issues with Spikes, but when a 'bad' deck has 40% win rate the problem isn't that you never win with them, it's that you feel it is important to have a win rate higher than 50%.
The person who just played their turn usually has more minions, or reversed, the person starting their turn usually has fewer minions. This is doubly true with Reno who always leaves you with 0 mana and an empty board when you play him, so on the first turn your opponent is practically guaranteed to benefit if Reno casts a buff. Add to that mage being one of the less minion-centric classes, and I would expect most buffs to be in your opponent's favour.
Yes, and a good way to do that is to improve consumer satisfaction. The optimal (legal) way for a company to make money always takes what consumers want into account.
Now, the discussion about whether whatever is coming is optimal can be saved for later, but for now there is reason for people to build up a little hope/hype.
Thank you, that's great feedback. I honestly haven't thought about Cabalist's Tome. So two lessons learned already with my first entry: be sure the art isn't already in use and doublecheck for similar cards in the game.
What do you think about the rarity? The tome being an epic makes me feel like I got that aspect wrong, too...
I think common is OK for it. Cabalist's Tome was in WotOG, and lots of things that were fancy back then are commonplace now. A good example is Princess Huhuran which got 'copied' by a rare only 1 year later with Terrorscale Stalker. These days adding mage spells to your hand is pretty standard.
I suppose you could compare to Pick Pocket which actually has a lot of similarities by having a set keyword, adding random cards to your hand and being repeatable. If that was a rare then perhaps your card could be too, but there is no need to go up to epic that's for sure.
Another first time participant here :-) I'm really excited! Could someone please explain to me how to add images to this thread, though? What am I to enter into the "source" field?
Here's a link to my entry on imgur for the time being.
Edit: Since it's my first try, feedback would be really appreciated. Here are some of my thoughts about the card: I'm currently enjoying JambaJooze's Wild Aggro Quest Mage. That made me want to create a cheap Mage spell generator which obviously screams RENO!! in the Year of the Dragon narrative. "Genius" is a reference to Reno ;-) Twinspell further helps completing the quest, so that was my keyword. There was a cool piece of art with Reno holding the Gatling Gun, but I decided against it in favor of the scrolls because the generated spells are added to your hand and not cast. The hardest part was balancing the card. Arcane Intellect draws 2 for 3, but those are not random. So I went with Tome of Intellect for reference and extrapolated. The downside of the spells being random was heavy enough for me to not increase the cost of the card by 1 for the twinspell-tag, but that surely is debateable. In the end, this card heavily supports Open the Waygate, Raid the Sky Temple and Learn Draconic. It also gives Casino Mage one more toy for the early game.
Edit 2: Oh dear. I have never played Raid the Sky Temple and wasn't aware of the fact that I used its art for my card. Just randomly got it from an art site. I'll just show myself out.
I personally would have settled on 3 mana for this as it currently way outclasses Cabalist's Tome, which was actually played a bit. Your card is a better version of 4 mana add 4 mage spells to your hand, notably in a class which uses Sorcerer's Apprentice almost by default, which reduces it to 2 mana overall, and then reduces the cost of everything it generates too. Even without the apprentice 4 mana add 4 probably raises a few concerns.
If it was in another class I could see there being a case for making it 2 mana if you really want to push the card, especially if that class has a lot of situational or low value spells that might not be super helpful (e.g. Paladin), but in mage it feels too easy to abuse.
Fire Mage Jaina is super cool, would have liked to see her Kul'tiran attire though!
She IS wearing her BfA attire (which is what I assume you mean), it's just red instead of blue.
I'm personally not too fussed about getting new voice lines or entrance animations. I'm just glad to have a pirate rogue hero so my swashbuckling decks no longer have an anti-thematic assassin hero.
Your biggest mistake is to think Blizzard puts the same value on an effect throughout the game lifespan. Not only do they "fine-tune" cards to suit their flavor, but they increase their power level on purpose in some occasions to make them stand out. Not easy to then compare the cards solely on their stats and effects and draw a definitive conclusion from that.
like I was saying, this is the nerfs often come from. The idea that there are no basic formula in deciding how minions work is gonna make nerfs happen more often.
I know that there are some effects that are uncountable towards stats, like effects on Flik Skyshiv (No pun intended). And it could be the filter of Legendary cards. every card that can't be measured should be put there (or Epic if it's too many). And it's already standing out when some effects is very unique.
so, back again, I do think minions should have a ground formula.
For neutral cards I largely agree they should follow some sort of guidelines on stats, and to be fair they generally do: For all the talk about power creep we still never get a 2 mana 3/3, 3 mana 4/4, 4 mana 5/5 etc without an effect that is detrimental unless used in a particular way.
With class cards I'm less sure a ground formula works. Sure they should use the same vanilla stats as an upper limit for minions with additional positive effects. If they don't then power creep will be much worse. But I think the number of stats lost for a given effect should depend on the class, because that is what makes one class good at something compared to other classes. Flik Skyshiv is a great example of this: rogue is designed to be the best at single target removal, so that effect reduces stats less than it would anywhere else. Similarly paladin is designed to have great healing, so is allowed Amber Watcher despite Antique Healbot being widely used in its day.
Mathematically the total vanilla stats could be written as 2n+1+(1/n!), rounded down.
Could you elaborate about your formula?
0 drops would be 0/0 + 1 + (1/0 this is an infinite).
and 5 drops would be 5/5 + 1 (1/5 rounded down is 0) = 5/5 + 1 random stats?
That's a factorial, which is never zero. 0! = 1 by convention. Not sure how correct the formula is since this game is anything but consistent (and they always push some power creep to force certain decks because that's how they designed it in the first place), but it might be close enough.
The 1/n! term was really just trying to be as concise as possible to give 0 and 1 mana cards +1 stat. Of course there is no fixed rule, especially for non-vanilla cards.
Fun fact: if you look up the Gamma function, which is a generalisation of the factorial to non-integers, you find 0!=1 isn't just convention but mathematically justified.
Trump summarised it well when he made a singleton rogue near the start of the expansion. I don't remember exactly how he phrased it but he essentially considered Flik to be an unfair card more or less on par with Zephrys and Alexstrasza.
Viewing it another way, rogue has been built to have the best single target removal of all the classes, and Flik is arguably the best of those. (I personally think she's a fair bit better than Vilespine Slayer was. That's subjective but says a lot!) Given you choose a class based on what it is good at, it becomes quite obvious that Flik ends up in pretty much every rogue deck regardless of what the archetype is: she's one of the reasons to play rogue in the first place.
From a physics perspective (similar to the maths one just with greater concern for the real system), the (n/n) + 1 formula is evidently incomplete. It should have an extra contribution for the inherent value of the card, since the cost of a card is not just its mana, but also a card itself.
For most mana costs this value contribution is non-existent because playing a minion of vanilla stats it still meaningful when played off-curve. E.g. a Chillwind Yeti isn't a good turn 6 play, but it is still big enough that it would normally achieve something. But at 0 and 1 mana this is not true, and the odds are high that a late game Wisp actually does do nothing important. So playing a vanilla 0/1 mana card late in the game is not dissimilar to discarding a card. To compensate for this they get given additional stats.
Mathematically the total vanilla stats could be written as 2n+1+(1/n!), rounded down.
Regarding Zilliax, it is harder than you might hope to attribute a definite cost to a keyword. Certainly divine shield is worth more if you have high attack, while taunt is worth more with high health. Part of why Zilliax is OK is that its stats are so low that none of the keywords are abusive, but at the same time it is used so much because it does so many different things just about well enough to almost always be useful. The end result is that most decks can get decent but not crazy results out of him.
I want to add, that HS canon is not the same as what happens in expansions/adventures. Officially it is all just stories told in the tavern, which may or may not have actually happened.
Good examples where the central part of expansions did not really happen are WotOG and KotFT, the latter showing this explicitly in the comics that came out during the hype season.
So to some extent what happened to the various characters depends on the whim of the story-teller. Hence why both EVIL and Explorers versions can be equally 'canon' despite contradicting each other.
While they share many story threads (e.g. George's redemption) I think the two sides of the adventure are separate timelines, so yes Lazul dies in the Explorers' version of events, but she may not have done in the EVIL one. The airship battle (with or against Eudora) is a clear example where the two versions had a decidedly different outcome.
The biggest clue is that the EVIL leaders are all in Rafaam's deck when he plays against Galakrond, suggesting they are still alive and working together. That or he used the plague of undeath on them I suppose.
I don't think Rafaam originally planned to defeat Galakrond. He just did that because Galakrond had destroyed too much and was leaving no one behind to fear/worship/etc him.
Also, they DID take artifacts from Dalaran: the treasures we took/used in the Dalaran Heist. It is very possible one of these was needed to unleash the plagues in Uldum (we only saw the story from the Explorers' point of view so we didn't see how the plagues were released). Certainly it seems unlikely they could be released without something special; if anyone could just go to Uldum and let them out they weren't imprisoned very well.
Keep in mind Rafaam is an ethereal with a huge ego. It is well within his character to steal treasures purely for the sake of stealing treasures, and Dalaran is itself one heck of a treasure. Plus it provided a very useful and portable base for the league of E.V.I.L.
Is the story told perfectly? No. As Bersak said above card games are not the best medium for story telling. Did I have to make inferences without official confirmation of the facts? Yes. But you can make a consistent narrative if you are willing to fill in a few blanks.
First off, there is no true infinite in HS without using Nozdormu turn reset shenanigans, because there is a finite number of turns before the game is declared a draw.
Regardless, you can make more than enough Tesses or Pogos for other decks to handle, so they are 'endless' within the scope of the game in that you win while still having many turns of them left to come. But what I really meant to get at was that I would rather face down 1 or 2 4/4s each turn than a Tess or an ever-growing Pogo.
The Caverns Below looks and smells the same but it isn't. It didn't even have positive win rates most of the time. The issue with that deck was due to the sheer prevalence of it which made people dislike playing against it, and that it locked control decks out of the meta. If for whatever reason only 1% of players played it, it would not have warped the meta and no one would have had a problem with the deck. The same goes for Tekhan now: it appears so rarely in rogue that the effect on the meta and the game as a whole is negligible.
Look at it this way: you can count the number of times you have seen it happen since the release of DoD on one hand right? Now how many times have you won or lost due to other crazy luck in the same time? Way more I bet, so why does this rare event concern you?
I don't think it should be blocked. The whole allure of burgle rogue cards is the chance that by breaking class boundaries you might just get something that breaks the game.
As for comparing it to Alex into Alex: that event may have been similarly rare but was much faster and a surprise board of huge dragons is a different problem to a board of 4/4s.
If the concern is long term continuous 4/4s, there are more unfair things than that that no one worries about. E.g. Togwaggle's Scheme -> 15x Tess Greymane or Pogo-Hopper. These are more meme-y, but still way more consistent.
Well, regardless of what the deleted comment was, I'm glad it sparked a response that improved my understanding of what (likely) goes on behind the scenes. I had always wondered what was done to keep players with and without an update apart, but not enough to look into it.
Elise is both a druid and priest, Finley is a paladin/shaman, Reno a rogue/mage and Brann a hunter/warrior. This is actually coded into the game, as when using them in one of the tavern brawls you could complete quests for both classes for each hero.
Anyway, they got treasures for both classes, with the class assigned to each best matching the mechanics of that class. E.g. Sr. Scout having windfury --> shaman. The only iffy one is Sr. Excavator, but neither hunter nor warrior have are huge on (unconditional) card draw so I suppose they based it on the look of the character instead of mechanics.
The game's economy doesn't really help, but the biggest driver for net-decking is the Spike mentality. I have no issues with Spikes, but when a 'bad' deck has 40% win rate the problem isn't that you never win with them, it's that you feel it is important to have a win rate higher than 50%.
The person who just played their turn usually has more minions, or reversed, the person starting their turn usually has fewer minions. This is doubly true with Reno who always leaves you with 0 mana and an empty board when you play him, so on the first turn your opponent is practically guaranteed to benefit if Reno casts a buff. Add to that mage being one of the less minion-centric classes, and I would expect most buffs to be in your opponent's favour.
Yes, and a good way to do that is to improve consumer satisfaction. The optimal (legal) way for a company to make money always takes what consumers want into account.
Now, the discussion about whether whatever is coming is optimal can be saved for later, but for now there is reason for people to build up a little hope/hype.
I think common is OK for it. Cabalist's Tome was in WotOG, and lots of things that were fancy back then are commonplace now. A good example is Princess Huhuran which got 'copied' by a rare only 1 year later with Terrorscale Stalker. These days adding mage spells to your hand is pretty standard.
I suppose you could compare to Pick Pocket which actually has a lot of similarities by having a set keyword, adding random cards to your hand and being repeatable. If that was a rare then perhaps your card could be too, but there is no need to go up to epic that's for sure.
I personally would have settled on 3 mana for this as it currently way outclasses Cabalist's Tome, which was actually played a bit. Your card is a better version of 4 mana add 4 mage spells to your hand, notably in a class which uses Sorcerer's Apprentice almost by default, which reduces it to 2 mana overall, and then reduces the cost of everything it generates too. Even without the apprentice 4 mana add 4 probably raises a few concerns.
If it was in another class I could see there being a case for making it 2 mana if you really want to push the card, especially if that class has a lot of situational or low value spells that might not be super helpful (e.g. Paladin), but in mage it feels too easy to abuse.
She IS wearing her BfA attire (which is what I assume you mean), it's just red instead of blue.
I'm personally not too fussed about getting new voice lines or entrance animations. I'm just glad to have a pirate rogue hero so my swashbuckling decks no longer have an anti-thematic assassin hero.
Yep, it's a neat little Easter egg.
It also means Dr Boom took some Pogo Hoppers with him to Dalaran, and I like to imagine a whole group of them terrorising the city's streets.
For neutral cards I largely agree they should follow some sort of guidelines on stats, and to be fair they generally do: For all the talk about power creep we still never get a 2 mana 3/3, 3 mana 4/4, 4 mana 5/5 etc without an effect that is detrimental unless used in a particular way.
With class cards I'm less sure a ground formula works. Sure they should use the same vanilla stats as an upper limit for minions with additional positive effects. If they don't then power creep will be much worse. But I think the number of stats lost for a given effect should depend on the class, because that is what makes one class good at something compared to other classes. Flik Skyshiv is a great example of this: rogue is designed to be the best at single target removal, so that effect reduces stats less than it would anywhere else. Similarly paladin is designed to have great healing, so is allowed Amber Watcher despite Antique Healbot being widely used in its day.
The 1/n! term was really just trying to be as concise as possible to give 0 and 1 mana cards +1 stat. Of course there is no fixed rule, especially for non-vanilla cards.
Fun fact: if you look up the Gamma function, which is a generalisation of the factorial to non-integers, you find 0!=1 isn't just convention but mathematically justified.
Trump summarised it well when he made a singleton rogue near the start of the expansion. I don't remember exactly how he phrased it but he essentially considered Flik to be an unfair card more or less on par with Zephrys and Alexstrasza.
Viewing it another way, rogue has been built to have the best single target removal of all the classes, and Flik is arguably the best of those. (I personally think she's a fair bit better than Vilespine Slayer was. That's subjective but says a lot!) Given you choose a class based on what it is good at, it becomes quite obvious that Flik ends up in pretty much every rogue deck regardless of what the archetype is: she's one of the reasons to play rogue in the first place.
From a physics perspective (similar to the maths one just with greater concern for the real system), the (n/n) + 1 formula is evidently incomplete. It should have an extra contribution for the inherent value of the card, since the cost of a card is not just its mana, but also a card itself.
For most mana costs this value contribution is non-existent because playing a minion of vanilla stats it still meaningful when played off-curve. E.g. a Chillwind Yeti isn't a good turn 6 play, but it is still big enough that it would normally achieve something. But at 0 and 1 mana this is not true, and the odds are high that a late game Wisp actually does do nothing important. So playing a vanilla 0/1 mana card late in the game is not dissimilar to discarding a card. To compensate for this they get given additional stats.
Mathematically the total vanilla stats could be written as 2n+1+(1/n!), rounded down.
Regarding Zilliax, it is harder than you might hope to attribute a definite cost to a keyword. Certainly divine shield is worth more if you have high attack, while taunt is worth more with high health. Part of why Zilliax is OK is that its stats are so low that none of the keywords are abusive, but at the same time it is used so much because it does so many different things just about well enough to almost always be useful. The end result is that most decks can get decent but not crazy results out of him.
I'm all for reverting Yogg and changing Warsong to something useful again (the old version giving rush instead of charge seems reasonable).
But I'm not sure we want Patches having charge again, nor even rush. Unlike Yogg and Warsong he's still good and gets used.
I want to add, that HS canon is not the same as what happens in expansions/adventures. Officially it is all just stories told in the tavern, which may or may not have actually happened.
Good examples where the central part of expansions did not really happen are WotOG and KotFT, the latter showing this explicitly in the comics that came out during the hype season.
So to some extent what happened to the various characters depends on the whim of the story-teller. Hence why both EVIL and Explorers versions can be equally 'canon' despite contradicting each other.
While they share many story threads (e.g. George's redemption) I think the two sides of the adventure are separate timelines, so yes Lazul dies in the Explorers' version of events, but she may not have done in the EVIL one. The airship battle (with or against Eudora) is a clear example where the two versions had a decidedly different outcome.
The biggest clue is that the EVIL leaders are all in Rafaam's deck when he plays against Galakrond, suggesting they are still alive and working together. That or he used the plague of undeath on them I suppose.
I don't think Rafaam originally planned to defeat Galakrond. He just did that because Galakrond had destroyed too much and was leaving no one behind to fear/worship/etc him.
Also, they DID take artifacts from Dalaran: the treasures we took/used in the Dalaran Heist. It is very possible one of these was needed to unleash the plagues in Uldum (we only saw the story from the Explorers' point of view so we didn't see how the plagues were released). Certainly it seems unlikely they could be released without something special; if anyone could just go to Uldum and let them out they weren't imprisoned very well.
Keep in mind Rafaam is an ethereal with a huge ego. It is well within his character to steal treasures purely for the sake of stealing treasures, and Dalaran is itself one heck of a treasure. Plus it provided a very useful and portable base for the league of E.V.I.L.
Is the story told perfectly? No. As Bersak said above card games are not the best medium for story telling. Did I have to make inferences without official confirmation of the facts? Yes. But you can make a consistent narrative if you are willing to fill in a few blanks.
Agreed, the final chapter did not disappoint.
Now if only they'd finally tell us what E.V.I.L. stands for. Currently I'm just running with the assumption it stands for Every Villain Is Lovely.