Ah, there Kragg is. After seeing him in the DoD key art and not in the expansion I assumed he would turn up here. I certainly didn't expect him to be quest support though.
I'm not convinced it is that dangerous in rogue because you already have so many lackeys anyway and I'm not convinced a late game turn of spamming lackeys is better than what you can already do.
Warlock with Tekahn looks like the bigger danger to me. So far the 4/4s have been OK as you are quite limited on the number of lackeys, but this goes a long way to circumvent that.
You could focus on collecting something a little less broad than 'all cards'. After all, even with all of them you will probably never actually use a lot of them. Heck even I haven't used everything I own and I have been playing since the very start so had lots of time to make janky/theme decks with weak cards.
In recent years I have found it rewarding to be a golden rogue collector. Specifically I craft golden cards for specific rogue archetypes (burgle, pirate, and all rogue legendaries). This way I have a collection that is meaningful (I know I use them a lot), narrow enough to not break the bank unnecessarily, and occasionally impressive to the few players who care.
Collecting every single card on the other hand is much more expensive for relatively little gain. If you are a collector in the purest sense and get the biggest kicks out of just collecting anything, then that's fine, but at least stop to consider whether you could benefit from directing your efforts to something more narrow.
If you really want me to actually answer your original request however, I'd say Goblins vs Gnomes, because it was a high power expansion and has a ton of mechs to use with your Boomsday cards.
You cannot expect them to perfectly judge the power of 135 cards when they are part of a huge and complex system. There are just way too many variables to get every last one of them right, especially when some cards are intended to be powerful. This is no excuse for not trying to balance the cards properly, just a reason for the players to forgive a few mistakes each expansion.
The power of the Galakrond decks was a major misstep though, and Shaman's especially should never have been allowed out. This in particular has inflated the number of changes this expansion, alongside the recent change in philosophy from the devs it seems.
Hi all, and particularly those few who have kept up with the Banana Saga decks and write-ups as they have come out.
The finale is finally here (and I get to stop trying to find new ways to use [Hearthstone Card (Segeant Sally) Not Found] and Bananas. Hooray!) and boy does it make use of a lot of cards that even I had never put in a deck before. Feast you eyes on this monstrosity:
The Unloved
A Highlander Rogue Deck created by
AngryShuckie. Last updated 4 years, 4 months ago
As usual the story in the deck description is the primary reason for the deck to exist, so don't expect great results out of it. At least it is stronger than the last one by virtue of having the highlander cards in it, plus the embarrassment you get your opponent to feel when you win is worth it.
Really though, I tried so hard to find any reason to play The Boogeymonster, and the best I could come up with was the tiny chance of giving it to your opponent with Mischief Maker. At least I can make it the star of a story I guess.
I just secretly stole my opponent's Mecha'thun with Mischief Maker. Even the Zephrys I gave him didn't make up for the fact he didn't know and kept drawing through his deck at lightning speed until he ran out of cards and I gave him a "The pleasure is mine" as he finally realised.
He was a good sport though and let me finish him off (possibly because I was playing the most abysmal deck imaginable. Seriously, it is a deck built around The Boogeymonster and all the other unloved corrupted cards from the Old Gods expansion....).
Anyway, it is an extremely unreliable way to beat them, but my goodness is it the most satisfying!
They're all pretty good, if not always my style. Exact rankings will end up a bit different each day, I'll just group them by tiers.
The very best
TGT, WotOG, RR, Boomsday
The first 3 are just the ones I find catchiest, while Boomsday is the dumbest of them all, and so much better for it.
Great
GvG, Blackrock, LoE, MSoG, K&C, Witchwood, DoD
WW took a while to grow on me. Perhaps I'm a little biased as it is my favourite set flavour-wise.
On the whole I'm not bothered with DoD, but it got promoted for "DRAGONS!" blurting out when you were expecting something slow.
The rest are super good, just not quite top tier.
Good/did their job
Naxx, Karazhan, Un'Goro, KotFT, RoS, SoU
I know lots of people like Karazhan and SoU, but I personally dislike those styles of music so I don't rate them highly.
I never felt RoS meshed together very well, but the Dalaran Heist trailer more than made up for it (though not included on this list).
I quite like the Un'Goro and Frozen Throne ones, and am glad they sometimes take that route, but that style would need some clever word play to be called great by me.
As someone who has done a lot of work with Monte Carlo simulations (where you generate random random numbers that individually are pretty meaningless but build up to give something statistically meaningful) I am acutely aware of the difference between casting 1 random spell and 10. But if you last 10 turns you should still see the same upside statistically, and over many games the statistics should be quite clear that it is beneficial on average.
Keep in mind the meta is filled with decks at around 55-60% win rate, so individual games are still quite close to a coin flip if you only look at whether you win or lose. Decisions on what decks to play are based on the results over many games, so by the same rationale Reno's hero power being statistically good is probably the more appropriate way to analyse it than turn by turn.
Other than that Finley will once again change your hero power, there really isn't a lot to go on other than the +3 bonus cards for week 1 of the explorer side looks suspicious. My guess there is that we get all the Finley, Elise and Brann cards week 1, and only get Reno week 4 because that is when we rescue him.
It would be out of flavour to make Finley cost a lot, so I'm interested in just how small they make him. I wouldn't be surprised if he's the cheapest hero card we have seen so far at 4 mana. I also doubt he has anything to do with murlocs, since his character doesn't spend any time with murlocs.
My best guess for Brann is that he makes actual use of his gun, since he'll be the first gun-wielding hunter hero and that side of the class has been under-explored.
I have no idea with Elise. Something that is thematically studious/intelligent I'm sure.
As for actual mechanics, I would only guess they don't go in the same direction as the Uldum quests, so no choose one stuff for Elise or minion summoning for Brann. It would also be nice to get Pally's first hero power that doesn't summon minions.
I have to wonder because the text does not specify, does it mean any 2 drop minion or just neutrals? Cause this could swing any which way imagine-able if it's any 2 drop minion.
A discover with an unspecified class always takes from neutrals and the class of the person playing it. So this will offer priest and neutral 2-drops if you put it in a deck, but if a rogue burgles it it will offer from rogue and neutral instead.
The only special cases I know of with unspecified class discovers are with secrets, because there are no neutral secrets so if you play a 'discover a secret' card you either get offers from your own class if it has secrets, or from the class of the card you played otherwise. E.g. rogue playing Secret Plan will be offered hunter secrets in Standard, but rogue secrets in Wild.
I hope this clears it up for this and any future unspecified discover cards.
I suspect they are holding it back to give us a bit of time to speculate on what exactly it means. Lots of people enjoy that sort of thing and we'll find out the answer long before the card is available so I wouldn't worry too much about it for now.
Seems so. I very much doubt EVIL villains get their own (fair enough since they have Galakrond and two of them are already hero cards), but I would love to have Togwaggle and Rafaam as heroes. Perhaps as simple skins please Blizz...
You put the pirates in the deck, so I imagine they are as helpful as anything is under normal circumstances. It now looks like a sensible better version of the Lance for decks that are built to make use of it.
But the difference is still: you can put two lances cards in your deck, while only one Ancharrr...
Bad nerf.
While I agree that can allow legendaries to be a bit stronger, there should still be a limit on that, especially when the card in question can draw a card to give you an extra copy (Hoard Pillager).
I don't expect there will ever be any buffs for it. Having 4/5 Galakronds be competitively viable (3 of which concerningly so, and one of those to a ridiculous degree initially) is already a much higher success rate than main set mechanics normally get, but people never expected buffs for the weaker quests or legendary weapons.
In any case, what would you actually buff? You cannot really improve the priest invoke cards without them becoming stronger than the usual power level (which invoke cards are decidedly not meant to be), and I very much doubt they'll change the hero power. I guess you could tweak a number on Fate Weaver.
Didn't feel like pirates were oppressive enough.. but good nerf, now it's on par with Livewire Lance
That's the sad thing. Lackey's provide a great battlecry, whereas the pirate you get from the ability may or may not be helpful.
You put the pirates in the deck, so I imagine they are as helpful as anything is under normal circumstances. It now looks like a sensible better version of the Lance for decks that are built to make use of it.
Dragonqueen Alexstrasza - when I first saw the article, I got really scared by seeing Alex in the thumbnail. Fortunately for us, this is technically a nerf, but actually no: Dragonqueen into Dragonqueen shouldn't have been possible from the beginning. Since the chance to highroll is so little, we can say that this change won't make her worse. We're gonna miss (or not) some insane highlights, but that's it: that's the capacity of this nerf. Still insane, still metadefining. Won't disenchant her.
...
I am absolutely disenchanting her. Now I get to craft her golden for the low low (effective) price of 1600 dust rather than 2800. That or I'm trading in a golden anchor for her. Either way she will finally be the resplendent dragon she is meant to be :)
They could, but the fact 3 out of the 5 Galakrond packages were concerning (even after one of them got nerfed!), and a fourth is solid, suggests there was a fundamental mis-evaluation of the power level. This is even more telling since dragon decks are so rare despite there being a lot of strong cards for them.
I was referring to only milling your opponent and whilst unfun to play against I also think it's fair as it has its counters. I mean what's people's strategy to control and combo at the mo. The typical answer would be to rush them down. Can anyone suggest some more counters besides this and milling
You'll often lose against combo decks but a full on value deck will beat control. Burgle rogue should rarely lose to a true control deck for example. In fact, with Togwaggle's Scheme and/or Academic Espionage it is a reasonable counter to mill decks too.
Calling it 'trouble' would be making a mountain out of a molehill to say the least, but it is reflective of how great you and the rest of the OoC team are! Hopefully the revenue streams prove enough in the long run, since the fresh start has been a great improvement so far.
Thank you very much :)
Ah, there Kragg is. After seeing him in the DoD key art and not in the expansion I assumed he would turn up here. I certainly didn't expect him to be quest support though.
I'm not convinced it is that dangerous in rogue because you already have so many lackeys anyway and I'm not convinced a late game turn of spamming lackeys is better than what you can already do.
Warlock with Tekahn looks like the bigger danger to me. So far the 4/4s have been OK as you are quite limited on the number of lackeys, but this goes a long way to circumvent that.
You could focus on collecting something a little less broad than 'all cards'. After all, even with all of them you will probably never actually use a lot of them. Heck even I haven't used everything I own and I have been playing since the very start so had lots of time to make janky/theme decks with weak cards.
In recent years I have found it rewarding to be a golden rogue collector. Specifically I craft golden cards for specific rogue archetypes (burgle, pirate, and all rogue legendaries). This way I have a collection that is meaningful (I know I use them a lot), narrow enough to not break the bank unnecessarily, and occasionally impressive to the few players who care.
Collecting every single card on the other hand is much more expensive for relatively little gain. If you are a collector in the purest sense and get the biggest kicks out of just collecting anything, then that's fine, but at least stop to consider whether you could benefit from directing your efforts to something more narrow.
If you really want me to actually answer your original request however, I'd say Goblins vs Gnomes, because it was a high power expansion and has a ton of mechs to use with your Boomsday cards.
You cannot expect them to perfectly judge the power of 135 cards when they are part of a huge and complex system. There are just way too many variables to get every last one of them right, especially when some cards are intended to be powerful. This is no excuse for not trying to balance the cards properly, just a reason for the players to forgive a few mistakes each expansion.
The power of the Galakrond decks was a major misstep though, and Shaman's especially should never have been allowed out. This in particular has inflated the number of changes this expansion, alongside the recent change in philosophy from the devs it seems.
Hi all, and particularly those few who have kept up with the Banana Saga decks and write-ups as they have come out.
The finale is finally here (and I get to stop trying to find new ways to use [Hearthstone Card (Segeant Sally) Not Found] and Bananas. Hooray!) and boy does it make use of a lot of cards that even I had never put in a deck before. Feast you eyes on this monstrosity:
As usual the story in the deck description is the primary reason for the deck to exist, so don't expect great results out of it. At least it is stronger than the last one by virtue of having the highlander cards in it, plus the embarrassment you get your opponent to feel when you win is worth it.
Really though, I tried so hard to find any reason to play The Boogeymonster, and the best I could come up with was the tiny chance of giving it to your opponent with Mischief Maker. At least I can make it the star of a story I guess.
I just secretly stole my opponent's Mecha'thun with Mischief Maker. Even the Zephrys I gave him didn't make up for the fact he didn't know and kept drawing through his deck at lightning speed until he ran out of cards and I gave him a "The pleasure is mine" as he finally realised.
He was a good sport though and let me finish him off (possibly because I was playing the most abysmal deck imaginable. Seriously, it is a deck built around The Boogeymonster and all the other unloved corrupted cards from the Old Gods expansion....).
Anyway, it is an extremely unreliable way to beat them, but my goodness is it the most satisfying!
They're all pretty good, if not always my style. Exact rankings will end up a bit different each day, I'll just group them by tiers.
The very best
TGT, WotOG, RR, Boomsday
The first 3 are just the ones I find catchiest, while Boomsday is the dumbest of them all, and so much better for it.
Great
GvG, Blackrock, LoE, MSoG, K&C, Witchwood, DoD
WW took a while to grow on me. Perhaps I'm a little biased as it is my favourite set flavour-wise.
On the whole I'm not bothered with DoD, but it got promoted for "DRAGONS!" blurting out when you were expecting something slow.
The rest are super good, just not quite top tier.
Good/did their job
Naxx, Karazhan, Un'Goro, KotFT, RoS, SoU
I know lots of people like Karazhan and SoU, but I personally dislike those styles of music so I don't rate them highly.
I never felt RoS meshed together very well, but the Dalaran Heist trailer more than made up for it (though not included on this list).
I quite like the Un'Goro and Frozen Throne ones, and am glad they sometimes take that route, but that style would need some clever word play to be called great by me.
As someone who has done a lot of work with Monte Carlo simulations (where you generate random random numbers that individually are pretty meaningless but build up to give something statistically meaningful) I am acutely aware of the difference between casting 1 random spell and 10. But if you last 10 turns you should still see the same upside statistically, and over many games the statistics should be quite clear that it is beneficial on average.
Keep in mind the meta is filled with decks at around 55-60% win rate, so individual games are still quite close to a coin flip if you only look at whether you win or lose. Decisions on what decks to play are based on the results over many games, so by the same rationale Reno's hero power being statistically good is probably the more appropriate way to analyse it than turn by turn.
Other than that Finley will once again change your hero power, there really isn't a lot to go on other than the +3 bonus cards for week 1 of the explorer side looks suspicious. My guess there is that we get all the Finley, Elise and Brann cards week 1, and only get Reno week 4 because that is when we rescue him.
It would be out of flavour to make Finley cost a lot, so I'm interested in just how small they make him. I wouldn't be surprised if he's the cheapest hero card we have seen so far at 4 mana. I also doubt he has anything to do with murlocs, since his character doesn't spend any time with murlocs.
My best guess for Brann is that he makes actual use of his gun, since he'll be the first gun-wielding hunter hero and that side of the class has been under-explored.
I have no idea with Elise. Something that is thematically studious/intelligent I'm sure.
As for actual mechanics, I would only guess they don't go in the same direction as the Uldum quests, so no choose one stuff for Elise or minion summoning for Brann. It would also be nice to get Pally's first hero power that doesn't summon minions.
A discover with an unspecified class always takes from neutrals and the class of the person playing it. So this will offer priest and neutral 2-drops if you put it in a deck, but if a rogue burgles it it will offer from rogue and neutral instead.
The only special cases I know of with unspecified class discovers are with secrets, because there are no neutral secrets so if you play a 'discover a secret' card you either get offers from your own class if it has secrets, or from the class of the card you played otherwise. E.g. rogue playing Secret Plan will be offered hunter secrets in Standard, but rogue secrets in Wild.
I hope this clears it up for this and any future unspecified discover cards.
I suspect they are holding it back to give us a bit of time to speculate on what exactly it means. Lots of people enjoy that sort of thing and we'll find out the answer long before the card is available so I wouldn't worry too much about it for now.
Seems so. I very much doubt EVIL villains get their own (fair enough since they have Galakrond and two of them are already hero cards), but I would love to have Togwaggle and Rafaam as heroes. Perhaps as simple skins please Blizz...
While I agree that can allow legendaries to be a bit stronger, there should still be a limit on that, especially when the card in question can draw a card to give you an extra copy (Hoard Pillager).
I don't expect there will ever be any buffs for it. Having 4/5 Galakronds be competitively viable (3 of which concerningly so, and one of those to a ridiculous degree initially) is already a much higher success rate than main set mechanics normally get, but people never expected buffs for the weaker quests or legendary weapons.
In any case, what would you actually buff? You cannot really improve the priest invoke cards without them becoming stronger than the usual power level (which invoke cards are decidedly not meant to be), and I very much doubt they'll change the hero power. I guess you could tweak a number on Fate Weaver.
You put the pirates in the deck, so I imagine they are as helpful as anything is under normal circumstances. It now looks like a sensible better version of the Lance for decks that are built to make use of it.
I am absolutely disenchanting her. Now I get to craft her golden for the low low (effective) price of 1600 dust rather than 2800. That or I'm trading in a golden anchor for her. Either way she will finally be the resplendent dragon she is meant to be :)
They could, but the fact 3 out of the 5 Galakrond packages were concerning (even after one of them got nerfed!), and a fourth is solid, suggests there was a fundamental mis-evaluation of the power level. This is even more telling since dragon decks are so rare despite there being a lot of strong cards for them.
You'll often lose against combo decks but a full on value deck will beat control. Burgle rogue should rarely lose to a true control deck for example. In fact, with Togwaggle's Scheme and/or Academic Espionage it is a reasonable counter to mill decks too.
Calling it 'trouble' would be making a mountain out of a molehill to say the least, but it is reflective of how great you and the rest of the OoC team are! Hopefully the revenue streams prove enough in the long run, since the fresh start has been a great improvement so far.