That said, this is already doing much better than Artifact could've done....
Honest question - how are you making that determination? Since 1) the game is still in beta, and 2) from what I (admittedly very) vaguely recall for Artifact there was a fair amount of hype around it just based on it being Valve and the game itself had a good number of players for the first few weeks until everyone abandoned it.
I'm sure these are all compelling reasons to switch over for someone who looks at Hearthstone as only a card game, but this game doesn't hold a candle to the depth I feel in the roots of Heathstone through its story and art. Hearthstone is built on lore that's over 20 years in the making and is featured in games where you get to interact and develop an almost personal connection with the main characters. LoR is based off the lore of a MOBA where any sense of depth or story is irreverent to the actual game. For me, this is akin to selling off an old family antique that you have history with in order to replace it with the new flashy model that a door-to-door salesmen offered you. If you don't see Hearthstone that way, no problem. I'm not judging, although I do think you are missing out. I just want to offer an alternative perspective.
100% agree and this is a big reason why I don't intend to move over. Although I only played a tiny bit of WoW, a big part of what drew me to HS was the lore since I did play WC2 & WC3. HS has actually helped me "catch up" on what happened after WC3, which has been great to get me to re-engage. It's also why I enjoy the single-player content so much - I find it hard to engage with any game (card or otherwise) where I don't know/care what's going on and/or what the let's say "broader implications" are to my actions.
I would liken this to sports games - if you don't care about basketball & the teams/players, why in the world would you play NBA2K?
Also, and this is just my person thought - given how insanely fast Artifact died, I would not jump into (and certainly wouldn't spend any money) any new card game until I saw the new game was actually taking off. I can't imagine how pissed off I'd be if I bought the intro bundle for $40 or whatever it was and then 2 months later there were only 500 people playing the game still...
The problem you're having if you took a deck that you ALREADY KNEW was a RNG meme, and expected to enjoy playing it when you don't enjoy playing the game that way. I don't understand the reason for the thread tbh. Literally pikachu face meme, "I can't believe the random cards are bad" :O
Did you read my original post or any of the followup posts? If so, I can't fathom how this was your take-away.
I specifically mentioned in my OP that I had a vague recollection of people talking about this deck being good since - as stated - I joined HS after it was already out of Standard and the point of the post was asking for clarification on if/why it was ever good (which was answered) since my experience was fairly bad. And in the follow-up posts I clarified that I ENJOY meme RNG decks that at least have some viability (Thief Priest/Burgle Rogue).
I thought the idea was to give that card to your opponent and then play Unseen Saboteur
I can't think of a practical way to do that, not even for a meme deck.
You could play Lorewalker Cho, but then you have to play the spell before your opponent gets to. Of course you could tune your deck to come out better than an average deck would, but you'd still take a hit.
You could put cards in your opponent's deck with Mischief Maker or King Togwaggle, but in the former case you'd have to get very lucky for that one card to be exactly Renounce Darkness and in the latter case it's hard to tell when the opponent drew it.
If you can manage to get Renounce Darkness in your opponent's hand, you still need some luck for the Saboteur to cast it, since the opponent might be holding other spells. And even if you get lucky, unless Renounce Darkness is worded very poorly, it wouldn't do much unless your opponent also happens to be playing Warlock.
I love the synergy of you having Star Aligner as your avatar while pointing out how perfectly the stars would have to align for that idea to even be possible. Beautiful work; 11/10.
It's a dig at Chinese President Xi Jinping - he was compared to Winnie in a meme and he took offense, so Pooh has been banned in China for the last few years. So naturally it's now re-surging as a protest symbol against him/the Chinese government.
The notion that it's impossible to generalise about what amounts to fun for most players of a specific game, just because someone, somewhere actively prefers losing to winning or w/e, is silly and obtuse. Your argument would have held more weight if you had made it on your own behalf rather than in name of some hypothetical player who may or may not exist.
Hey now - there are dozens (DOZENS!) of us masochists out there who really love a good beating. That's right, Fireball me right in the face...
Seriously though I agree - it's much more fun to have some RNG memes like Academic Espionage, Arch-Villain Rafaam,or Chameleos [Hearthstone Card (in an otherwise okay deck that generate unique, often hilarious wins than something that is a total "coin flip with a double-headed coin" where you're almost guaranteed to lose if the stars don't align for you.
Did anyone notice Pooh bear at the bottom of the page?
Actually, that winnie the pooh is at the bottom of every page. It's a little weird.
It's a dig at Chinese President Xi Jinping - he was compared to Winnie in a meme and he took offense, so Pooh has been banned in China for the last few years. So naturally it's now re-surging as a protest symbol against him/the Chinese government.
AH! I did not know about the Barnes/Y'Shaarj thing - so that explains it. Thanks for clearing that up!
I love a good RNG meme deck as much as the next guy (Burgle Rogue/Thief Priest are some of my favorite decks), but this was just too much - Renounce give you either a fantastically synergistic deck that allows for a steamroll (very rare) or you get a bunch of disjointed junk that gets you bodied (mostly this). I'll probably still kick it around between now and December, but man were my expectations way out off base with this one!
Regardless of the art, it is nice to see some "long-term goals" stuff coming in. Here's hoping a real achievement system (with gold/dust/card rewards!) is coming next...
Perhaps I'm seriously misremebering, but for someone who joined HS well after Renounce Warlock was in Standard, I could have sworn seeing people talk from time to time about how good/strong/fun it was. Was that all in my imagination and the deck was always a hot mess?
Trying it out today and whoo boy - aside from that 50% of the time I don't draw the card at all, the other 45% when I do play it delivers usually a trash fire of mismatched nonsense. I've seen some other people luck out some crazy synergies (one particular person had about 4 rush cards on top of a Spirit of the Rhino so nice for them), but in probably 10 games I don't think I've won a single one.
Was there some secret to playing this deck in that past that I'm missing?
Got to 10/2 not sure if I should try for 12 I got Reno and siamat and quite a good tempo core :/
I feel like I read somewhere that if you get over 7 wins you should play it out since the rewards are better than the cost of the new ticket? But again I don't play Arena so someone who knows better can confirm.
As someone who does not play arena, can anyone who understands the mode more than I confirm:
It says "To ensure that players have a chance to try out this devilish dual-class deck-building dress-up party, weeks 1 and 2 of this event will award Arena Tickets on login!"
So is the proper way to do this: 1) Start a run today, leave @ 2 losses - 2) Get 1st free ticket tomorrow, leave @ 2 losses - 3) Get 2nd free ticket next week, play it out - 4) Play out the "comped" ticket for today's run whenever.
Is that the correct way to do this to maximize runs one only buying 1 ticket - 4 entries?
Inject this into my data-junkie veins. This is seriously top-notch and that excel tracker (particularly the "key card" column) is an idea I will 100% steal.
Beat Tekahn first try on normal, went to unpack my earned packs, boom! Colossus of the Moon. Then my golden classic pack.... Golden Brightwing! Luckyest Day ever!
But that's not where it stopped! Got my pack from tavern Brawl... GOLDEN Cairne Bloodhoof! To make it better, those 2 golden legendaries were back to back! (Probably normal legendary timer on golden classic, and golden timer on the normal pack)
Edit: for soms reason i decided to buy a rastakhan's rumble pack with gold, pulled a Hex Lord Malacrass! 5th legendary in a row... What is going on with my lucky today..?!?
Keep in mind that Blizzard will want to maximize profits, regardless of what they do (even if that results in a price cut, the cut will be because the revenue will increase as more people will buy). If you keep that perspective at the front of your argument, we know certain things are unlikely to happen:
1.) Making the Classic/Basic cards viable (through reworks or buffs) regardless of the expansion would hurt sales of the expansion packs (who would need to buy them to compete?). To use the Priest example (i.e. every expansion has a broken Priest deck because the Classic set is awful), if they fixed the Classic set so it alone was strong, who would buy the cards needed for the new meta deck that has been blowing up the ladder?
2.) Giving out the entire Classic set (or a rotational set) for free/at a drastically reduced price will remove the revenue from Classic packs entirely, so unless this results in more expansion packs selling, it would be unlikely (maybe the survey results suggest people would spend the money they saved from the Classic price reduction on other packs, but I doubt it). Classic packs also provide a steady revenue that doesn't change through rotations (btw, I am ALL in favor of discounting packs after rotation... I can't imagine why this hasn't been done, aside from potentially reducing dust cost).
3.) No matter what, the best deck meta MUST necessitate the new expansion cards, or as a business you have failed. You could argue a delay in response time to broken meta cards is intentional to force people to buy packs/craft the broken card, then nerf it to result in different expansion cards being needed. I know you typically receive the full dust from creating these cards upon nerf, but that doesn't result in a 100% return on investment (maybe in very rare scenarios, but not usually... see "Gift Card Theory" in Marketing for more info on that). I'm not saying this is true, just playing devil's advocate...
I don't think this is all doom and gloom; a company asking these survey questions is a great step in the right direction and can result in wonderful initiatives that benefit players (reduced pack cost, new bundles across different price points, new ideas and fixes for points of contention, etc...). I'm just suggesting to temper your expectations and remember the bottom line is always the bottom line. :)
Your first two sentences are 1) spot-on and 2) very likely the cost:benefit analysis Blizzard is doing - i.e. to what level do we need to reduce pricing OR offer more content to increase buy-in and grow overall revenue.
My guesses on a macro level would be:
1. I expect the main ex-pac bundles will either 1) increase in goods rather than decrease in price - perhaps next time the $50 bundle will have the card back and cosmetic hero and the $80 bundle will have everything the $50 does plus an additional golden legendary or two. Alternatively, now that they've gone back to the paid single-player adventures/bundles, they may slightly reduce the bundle costs to try and get as many people to "double-dip" as possible - say $40 & $75. Because hey you saved call it $10, that $20 PvE bundle is REALLY only $10 more than you would have "normally" spent, right?
2. As to reducing the cost of rotated x-packs, I think the only way they will actually pursue that is if they're planning on trying to make Wild more popular to get people to buy in - again, less money per pack but more packs sold = more $$$. They've definitely hinted at the being on the table with the big Wild bundle earlier this year, and now this "bringing the 'much loved' wild cards back into Standard" might be an attempt to gauge how much buy-in your average player wants this/tries out Wild after getting a taste.
I guess my big question is: Figuring out the "why" will almost always tell you the "what/how." Sure there's more competition in the TCG space now than there was 5 years ago, but not so much I can buy it being the driver behind these moves? Is it purely because it's an established (Do yOu GuyS eVEn haVe PHoneS?!) mobile-friendly property and they're clearly chasing that player-base? Not really sure about that either.
I might add to your calendar about the guaranteed Twitch drops for Grandmasters Playoffs? For people like me who "watched" 50+ hours and got no packs and thus gave up on it, would be good to know that some guaranteed packs are coming:
When the end-of-season Playoffs roll around, we’ll be returning to the same formula for Twitch Drops that was in place for Masters Tour Seoul. For the Playoffs, if you watch for 3 hours (consecutive or non-consecutive), and you’ll be granted one Saviors of Uldum card pack. Watch for a total of 6 hours, and you’ll get another! Additionally, 1,500 lucky eligible viewers will be randomly rewarded with Classic card packs every hour.
"While not included in our next major update, here’s a preview of some of the changes we’re making to quests a little further down the line.
We’re cutting some of the less popular daily quests and tuning down some of their requirements to make them quicker and easier to complete. We’ll also be adding some new quests to the pool to mix things up!
We split most daily quests into two buckets: Easy (50g) and Slightly More Difficult (60g). Rerolling a Slightly More Difficult (60g) quest (like Play 10 Beasts) always gives you an Easy (50g) quest, so players can be guaranteed to get an Easy quest every day if they want. We love Murlocs and Pirates as much as anyone, but it should be your choice if you decide to complete their quests."
I saw this and am also hopeful this breathes a little life into these quests! That second point is asinine though - does ANYONE reroll a 60/80/100g quest hoping for and "easier" 50g quest? Who's out here voluntarily taking less gold?
I'm not much of a ladder player since I prefer fun memes over finely-tuned metadecks (out of curiosity I checked and in total only 19% of my wins have been on the ladder), and the golden hero portraits were never enough of a carrot to make me try. These new portraits though...maybe I'll start making some effort...
Very nice to see more "in between expansions" events and Quality of Life/Goal improvements!
Beat Death Lord first try with Finley & a deck full of Murlocs and some excellent timing on Eternal Tomb shenanigans:
1. Got Rin, the First Disciple from my Eternal Tomb during Phase 1 and slow-played the demons, hoping that if I could make it to Phase 3 just as I got Azari, the Devourer well that would be an insta-win since DL would have no deck.
2. Tomb was queued up to give me Tirion Fordring right as the boss moved to Phase 2, so the boss's passive power kept resurrecting him - I think all in I had 4 or 5 Tirions before boss finally played Plague of Death and a different minion was Reborn. But by that point I was almost to Phase 3.
3. Phase 3 starts and my play for Azari worked perfectly - nuked his deck. BUT THEN the icing on the cake? Death Lord's Eternal Tomb gave him Hakkar, the Soulflayer, so I killed it and between Fatigue and Corrupted Blood he was a goner - and none too soon as by that point I only had 5 cards left in my deck.
The whole match, I kept waiting for the hammer to drop and things to go sideways, but they just never did - whoo boy, what a feeling!
Honest question - how are you making that determination? Since 1) the game is still in beta, and 2) from what I (admittedly very) vaguely recall for Artifact there was a fair amount of hype around it just based on it being Valve and the game itself had a good number of players for the first few weeks until everyone abandoned it.
100% agree and this is a big reason why I don't intend to move over. Although I only played a tiny bit of WoW, a big part of what drew me to HS was the lore since I did play WC2 & WC3. HS has actually helped me "catch up" on what happened after WC3, which has been great to get me to re-engage. It's also why I enjoy the single-player content so much - I find it hard to engage with any game (card or otherwise) where I don't know/care what's going on and/or what the let's say "broader implications" are to my actions.
I would liken this to sports games - if you don't care about basketball & the teams/players, why in the world would you play NBA2K?
Also, and this is just my person thought - given how insanely fast Artifact died, I would not jump into (and certainly wouldn't spend any money) any new card game until I saw the new game was actually taking off. I can't imagine how pissed off I'd be if I bought the intro bundle for $40 or whatever it was and then 2 months later there were only 500 people playing the game still...
Did you read my original post or any of the followup posts? If so, I can't fathom how this was your take-away.
I specifically mentioned in my OP that I had a vague recollection of people talking about this deck being good since - as stated - I joined HS after it was already out of Standard and the point of the post was asking for clarification on if/why it was ever good (which was answered) since my experience was fairly bad. And in the follow-up posts I clarified that I ENJOY meme RNG decks that at least have some viability (Thief Priest/Burgle Rogue).
I love the synergy of you having Star Aligner as your avatar while pointing out how perfectly the stars would have to align for that idea to even be possible. Beautiful work; 11/10.
It's a dig at Chinese President Xi Jinping - he was compared to Winnie in a meme and he took offense, so Pooh has been banned in China for the last few years. So naturally it's now re-surging as a protest symbol against him/the Chinese government.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/07/china-bans-winnie-the-pooh-film-to-stop-comparisons-to-president-xi
Hey now - there are dozens (DOZENS!) of us masochists out there who really love a good beating. That's right, Fireball me right in the face...
Seriously though I agree - it's much more fun to have some RNG memes like Academic Espionage, Arch-Villain Rafaam,or Chameleos [Hearthstone Card (in an otherwise okay deck that generate unique, often hilarious wins than something that is a total "coin flip with a double-headed coin" where you're almost guaranteed to lose if the stars don't align for you.
) Not Found]It's a dig at Chinese President Xi Jinping - he was compared to Winnie in a meme and he took offense, so Pooh has been banned in China for the last few years. So naturally it's now re-surging as a protest symbol against him/the Chinese government.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/07/china-bans-winnie-the-pooh-film-to-stop-comparisons-to-president-xi
AH! I did not know about the Barnes/Y'Shaarj thing - so that explains it. Thanks for clearing that up!
I love a good RNG meme deck as much as the next guy (Burgle Rogue/Thief Priest are some of my favorite decks), but this was just too much - Renounce give you either a fantastically synergistic deck that allows for a steamroll (very rare) or you get a bunch of disjointed junk that gets you bodied (mostly this). I'll probably still kick it around between now and December, but man were my expectations way out off base with this one!
Definitive, not-at-all-subjective rankings:
1. Gul'dan - Best
2. Thrall
3. Malfurion
4. Garrosh
5 & 6. Uther & Jaina - Tie
7. Aduin
8. Valeera
9-99. Being hit by a bus
100. Rexxar
Regardless of the art, it is nice to see some "long-term goals" stuff coming in. Here's hoping a real achievement system (with gold/dust/card rewards!) is coming next...
Perhaps I'm seriously misremebering, but for someone who joined HS well after Renounce Warlock was in Standard, I could have sworn seeing people talk from time to time about how good/strong/fun it was. Was that all in my imagination and the deck was always a hot mess?
Trying it out today and whoo boy - aside from that 50% of the time I don't draw the card at all, the other 45% when I do play it delivers usually a trash fire of mismatched nonsense. I've seen some other people luck out some crazy synergies (one particular person had about 4 rush cards on top of a Spirit of the Rhino so nice for them), but in probably 10 games I don't think I've won a single one.
Was there some secret to playing this deck in that past that I'm missing?
I feel like I read somewhere that if you get over 7 wins you should play it out since the rewards are better than the cost of the new ticket? But again I don't play Arena so someone who knows better can confirm.
As someone who does not play arena, can anyone who understands the mode more than I confirm:
It says "To ensure that players have a chance to try out this devilish dual-class deck-building dress-up party, weeks 1 and 2 of this event will award Arena Tickets on login!"
So is the proper way to do this: 1) Start a run today, leave @ 2 losses - 2) Get 1st free ticket tomorrow, leave @ 2 losses - 3) Get 2nd free ticket next week, play it out - 4) Play out the "comped" ticket for today's run whenever.
Is that the correct way to do this to maximize runs one only buying 1 ticket - 4 entries?
Inject this into my data-junkie veins. This is seriously top-notch and that excel tracker (particularly the "key card" column) is an idea I will 100% steal.
Buy a lottery ticket - FAST!
Your first two sentences are 1) spot-on and 2) very likely the cost:benefit analysis Blizzard is doing - i.e. to what level do we need to reduce pricing OR offer more content to increase buy-in and grow overall revenue.
My guesses on a macro level would be:
1. I expect the main ex-pac bundles will either 1) increase in goods rather than decrease in price - perhaps next time the $50 bundle will have the card back and cosmetic hero and the $80 bundle will have everything the $50 does plus an additional golden legendary or two. Alternatively, now that they've gone back to the paid single-player adventures/bundles, they may slightly reduce the bundle costs to try and get as many people to "double-dip" as possible - say $40 & $75. Because hey you saved call it $10, that $20 PvE bundle is REALLY only $10 more than you would have "normally" spent, right?
2. As to reducing the cost of rotated x-packs, I think the only way they will actually pursue that is if they're planning on trying to make Wild more popular to get people to buy in - again, less money per pack but more packs sold = more $$$. They've definitely hinted at the being on the table with the big Wild bundle earlier this year, and now this "bringing the 'much loved' wild cards back into Standard" might be an attempt to gauge how much buy-in your average player wants this/tries out Wild after getting a taste.
I guess my big question is: Figuring out the "why" will almost always tell you the "what/how." Sure there's more competition in the TCG space now than there was 5 years ago, but not so much I can buy it being the driver behind these moves? Is it purely because it's an established (Do yOu GuyS eVEn haVe PHoneS?!) mobile-friendly property and they're clearly chasing that player-base? Not really sure about that either.
That's a NICE card back. Nowhere near "$50 nice", but for people who were buying the ticket anyways know that I'm jealous of you getting it :)
I might add to your calendar about the guaranteed Twitch drops for Grandmasters Playoffs? For people like me who "watched" 50+ hours and got no packs and thus gave up on it, would be good to know that some guaranteed packs are coming:
When the end-of-season Playoffs roll around, we’ll be returning to the same formula for Twitch Drops that was in place for Masters Tour Seoul. For the Playoffs, if you watch for 3 hours (consecutive or non-consecutive), and you’ll be granted one Saviors of Uldum card pack. Watch for a total of 6 hours, and you’ll get another! Additionally, 1,500 lucky eligible viewers will be randomly rewarded with Classic card packs every hour.
Playoffs Twitch Drops Active Dates:
I saw this and am also hopeful this breathes a little life into these quests! That second point is asinine though - does ANYONE reroll a 60/80/100g quest hoping for and "easier" 50g quest? Who's out here voluntarily taking less gold?
I'm not much of a ladder player since I prefer fun memes over finely-tuned metadecks (out of curiosity I checked and in total only 19% of my wins have been on the ladder), and the golden hero portraits were never enough of a carrot to make me try. These new portraits though...maybe I'll start making some effort...
Very nice to see more "in between expansions" events and Quality of Life/Goal improvements!
Beat Death Lord first try with Finley & a deck full of Murlocs and some excellent timing on Eternal Tomb shenanigans:
1. Got Rin, the First Disciple from my Eternal Tomb during Phase 1 and slow-played the demons, hoping that if I could make it to Phase 3 just as I got Azari, the Devourer well that would be an insta-win since DL would have no deck.
2. Tomb was queued up to give me Tirion Fordring right as the boss moved to Phase 2, so the boss's passive power kept resurrecting him - I think all in I had 4 or 5 Tirions before boss finally played Plague of Death and a different minion was Reborn. But by that point I was almost to Phase 3.
3. Phase 3 starts and my play for Azari worked perfectly - nuked his deck. BUT THEN the icing on the cake? Death Lord's Eternal Tomb gave him Hakkar, the Soulflayer, so I killed it and between Fatigue and Corrupted Blood he was a goner - and none too soon as by that point I only had 5 cards left in my deck.
The whole match, I kept waiting for the hammer to drop and things to go sideways, but they just never did - whoo boy, what a feeling!