Disclaimer: I strongly dislike most of the broad decisions Team 5 has made and absolutely do not like the current direction of the game.
That said: this is easily one of the best ideas the devs have ever had.
This is only upside for the customer with the tiny exception of the FOMO caused when you lose access to the new decks. But even that is acceptable because we (as a society) have low-key decided/accepted that some FOMO is acceptable in a f2p game in order to make it profitable in capitalism. And this level of FOMO is way beneath the bar.
Even if the decks suck, this is still a good idea. You're giving players exposure to the game and they can learn what cards suck. It's not the best execution in this case, but positives still beat negatives even here.
From the dev/owner side, I don't know if it will help retention, but it will definitely increase play rates. People into the game will likely run all the decks. I can't see how it could possibly hurt retention. It doesn't even hurt the bottom line much: you must give returning/new players new cards in order for them to engage the game at all so you're not losing much in the way of more FOMO generation, and you're not even giving them all the cards forever. There are costs in hiring a curator to make decks (note that Team 5 is shockingly bad at that, but as mentioned above, that's not a serious downside since it doesn't matter much if the decks suck) but outside of that and the programming, that's it. Seems cheap.
This not only helps newbies/returning players, it doesn't upset or even disturb existing players. Just wins all around.
More of this, and possibly more of whoever thought of this.
And if we were to look even further into the past, there was a special event called Doom in the Tomb, bringing over some Wild cards into Standard for a limited time. But its overall reception ultimately wasn't very positive, to put it mildly.
Yup. Deliberately making the best meta many players had ever had into literally the worst possible -- especially for f2p -- had something of a backlash. Which is why --
Quote From Dean Ayala
Lately we’ve been brainstorming having events that bring back some old favorites for a limited time in standard.
Is disturbing to hear.
Team 5 is perfectly with making lots and lots of packfiller and with turning viable cards into filler via powercreep, which means the only things coming back into the game are generally a) useless and ignored (this is actually fine) or b) devastating and terrible. Curation is not their strong suit.
What's wacky is that Doom in the Tomb happened and gave them a black eye and their leadership engages with neither autopsy nor reflection. It reminds me a little of ascended fanboys in other media where customer concerns are non-issues compared to the personal engagement the producers have with the product.
This post exists because when someone quickly checks this link to discover if there are drops, they will find this post mentioning drops which would imply that there are no drops, if but for the fact that mentioning implying that there are no drops could be an explicit expression that there are no drops.
From day one, there were calls for counters to poison to balance both poison and stat bloat -- and calls to make combos of poison, stat growth, and divine shield nonviable. (There were also calls to less painfully and successfully counter divine shield.) The players are the BGs playtest team and fundamentals of design receive zero attention and gimmicks receive all. So if a gimmick exposes a fundamental flaw, the gimmick gets tweaked and design moves on. Same thing happens when the gimmick gets old even if it's healthy.
Typo: Khadgar is missing the "to all enemies" clause on Blizzard. (That text was on the ability in the reveal video.)
Note that the Archmage Nova ability MIGHT be targetable since it includes only one targetable ability in its "package."
I commented on this elsewhere, but it looks like Medivh's Unstable Rune can cancel your own team's effects -- which would be the only way it isn't completely and utterly busted.
Medivh is the first character to have a summoning ability that isn't triggered by another effect (e.g., an attack or direct damage effect) that isn't simply the character card for the summoned creature. This could have been an opportunity to give the ability a spell school, but they didn't take it.
I'm trying to figure out how Unstable Runes (Medivh equipment -- summon a 0/10 Arcane Ward with "counter the first ability used each turn") is fair. It can only be that it also cancels friendly effects, forcing you to take slow moves to avoid cancellation.
PvE is tremendously kinder to having a limited roster and/or underdeveloped mercs. There is no way that a PvE mode would get the revenue they're looking for. :-/
There are some fundamentals here that aren't addressed that need be.
Treasures in Mercenaries are horrible, with the vast majority of the options not merely being binary, but being pointless. Some are actively detrimental. This encourages an even tighter adherence to specific comps for PvE.
In PvP, a few comps dominate all others, though there have been good changes made in this area. Matchmaking is garbage (which is hilarious given how they touted the matchmaking system on end) but that will likely be ignored/treated as a feature.
The devs are working to bring the game to basic competence (e.g., deal with coin issues) and ignoring these other problems, which is astounding. Coins should have been handled pre-launch.
Discoverability is really the problem. Druid is unfun in part because its spell pool is very high-utility when it likely should be all over the place. (Compare to DH where there are plenty of spells which literally do nothing or actively set you back). Incarceration won't need to be in decks to steal games. We had a lesser version of this problem with Priest not too many years ago and Team 5 made sure to squash it there; they seem to lack that concern with Druid.
The fact that DH doesn't have a huge suite of cards that go dormant in order to buff themselves (training) or force other cards to go dormant (attacks on their mana or the result of dueling them) is a remarkable flavor-fail.
Theft Accusation is sitting right next to a Warlock card (Arson Accusation) that has one of the lightest play restrictions in Hearthstone while doing the same thing. Team 5 doesn't care if the card is good. They put in some blinkered verion of symmetry and took off early from work.
Thief Priest will be trash (in Standard). Incriminating Psychic is interesting for Quest Priest, however, as it generates another card that can meet a quest requirement and puts a 6-Health stall on the board. I doubt it's worth it, though, as it doesn't actually solve many problems.
Clear Conscience means that Pelagos sticks on 6 nearly all of the time, save for against Druid and Control Priest. That's worth my time, though what card Wig Priest loses for it isn't immediately clear. This can also ensure that a tiny minion (Priestess Valishj) can be grown into a threat without enemy reprisal. Finally, it grants a buff that helps one stay in the game when you don't draw Wig and have to stall. The effect is actually broken, but in modern Hearthstone, merely broken isn't enough to draw concern. It's still less unfair than any top-tier card.
Looks like I was wrong about the Inquisitor demon's class (but was right about the mini-set not giving a poop about the meta).
Arson Accusation scarcely has a real limitation; an enemy-only targeting clause would have been stricter than what it has and that's usually irrelevant for Warlock. It's an excellent indication of how far Assassinate has fallen, especially since four-mana-kill-anything isn't even a must-play and aggro can pass it by.
Drop your Location and Imp-oster on the same turn and you get two buffed imps. Winmore at the cost of having a situational card. I can see it.
Everything is trash or broken in HS of late -- no inbetween. No subtelty, no cleverness, nothing that feels good for the opponent even if it makes them lose. I get to play and you don't.
The worst thing about Theotar was that, as soon as I saw it, I knew that its only future would be complete nerfing annihilation (Illucia) that comes much too late or even more Theotar. Once the last patch's buffs were confirmed, the only option left was the latter.
At this point, Hearthstone desperately needs a keyword or trait that allows for hand disruption counterplay.
Agreed except for Afterlife Attendant. If you can reliably feed, draw, and play Denatrius (Demon Hunter and Druid), this can help set up your win condition. The main problem is that it's hard to consistently kill off your own minions for good effect on your own turn. I don't think that this is very likely to see play, but it's a possibility. If they print another endgamish infuse card, the possibility goes up.
It's not just you. It's splashy design that gets attention but is terrible for overall game health -- short-term benefits with long-term problems. It also tends to overwhelm and eliminates smaller, more subtle mechanics unless they, too, get massive over-the-top power-ups that shut down playstyles.
I find the meta-based predictions questionable in concept here as these sets are designed a year in advance -- including the mini-set -- and cards aren't held back or pushed forward simply because of the meta (though, this being a digital game, they could just do that . . . but they don't).
The Habeas Corpus image appears to have a demon that is the same kind found within the Illidari Inquisitor ranks. That suggests Demon Hunter more than Warlock, one would think.
I am so tired of Theotar being the best card in my deck in every non-aggro deck I play.
I was going to make this into a joke or funny reference, but I don't even have it in me.
It's just exhausting.
Edit: came back to note that everything said about Starfish applies x10 to Theotar. I know that nerfing Theotar probably requires a subsequent Denathrias nerf, but I believe that nearly everyone would be fine with that, too.
I don't think you were lucky. Paladin seems pretty reliable. I played Paladin first and, while the deck wasn't thematic or full of wacky cards, it was solid and felt okay to play, so those random discovers feel really powerful.
Warlock is effectively unplayable -- a lot of high-cost, no impact, slow building gimmick minions that can be boardwiped by the opponent while they can attack face consistently. If you drop Nozdormu (variant art for the Paladin version), the opponent can pyroblast you directly. Every part of that deck is hot garbage. This is aggravated by the fact that Warlock spells en masse suck, so random Warlock is always a bad time in HS vairant games.
Paladin seems reliable since it re-makes huge boards with spells -- if you get the right spells -- and has mediocre-to-decent minions.
Priest requires significant luck because the minions in it are trash. You want to get card draw into card draw so that you can hope that one of your random spells wins the day. So Druid would be that times ten.
While this is probably better than the average brawl, it's bizarre how bad the curation is. It's not merely that the decks are bad, it's that Blizz has a habit of making unfun decks with boring cards that you wouldn't play with even in a casual game. It's like they're allergic to meme decks.
Still, at least they tried. Imagine what they could do if they actually paid someone to make these regularly.
Disclaimer: I strongly dislike most of the broad decisions Team 5 has made and absolutely do not like the current direction of the game.
That said: this is easily one of the best ideas the devs have ever had.
This is only upside for the customer with the tiny exception of the FOMO caused when you lose access to the new decks. But even that is acceptable because we (as a society) have low-key decided/accepted that some FOMO is acceptable in a f2p game in order to make it profitable in capitalism. And this level of FOMO is way beneath the bar.
Even if the decks suck, this is still a good idea. You're giving players exposure to the game and they can learn what cards suck. It's not the best execution in this case, but positives still beat negatives even here.
From the dev/owner side, I don't know if it will help retention, but it will definitely increase play rates. People into the game will likely run all the decks. I can't see how it could possibly hurt retention. It doesn't even hurt the bottom line much: you must give returning/new players new cards in order for them to engage the game at all so you're not losing much in the way of more FOMO generation, and you're not even giving them all the cards forever. There are costs in hiring a curator to make decks (note that Team 5 is shockingly bad at that, but as mentioned above, that's not a serious downside since it doesn't matter much if the decks suck) but outside of that and the programming, that's it. Seems cheap.
This not only helps newbies/returning players, it doesn't upset or even disturb existing players. Just wins all around.
More of this, and possibly more of whoever thought of this.
Yup. Deliberately making the best meta many players had ever had into literally the worst possible -- especially for f2p -- had something of a backlash. Which is why --
Is disturbing to hear.
Team 5 is perfectly with making lots and lots of packfiller and with turning viable cards into filler via powercreep, which means the only things coming back into the game are generally a) useless and ignored (this is actually fine) or b) devastating and terrible. Curation is not their strong suit.
What's wacky is that Doom in the Tomb happened and gave them a black eye and their leadership engages with neither autopsy nor reflection. It reminds me a little of ascended fanboys in other media where customer concerns are non-issues compared to the personal engagement the producers have with the product.
This post exists because when someone quickly checks this link to discover if there are drops, they will find this post mentioning drops which would imply that there are no drops, if but for the fact that mentioning implying that there are no drops could be an explicit expression that there are no drops.
From day one, there were calls for counters to poison to balance both poison and stat bloat -- and calls to make combos of poison, stat growth, and divine shield nonviable. (There were also calls to less painfully and successfully counter divine shield.) The players are the BGs playtest team and fundamentals of design receive zero attention and gimmicks receive all. So if a gimmick exposes a fundamental flaw, the gimmick gets tweaked and design moves on. Same thing happens when the gimmick gets old even if it's healthy.
Typo: Khadgar is missing the "to all enemies" clause on Blizzard. (That text was on the ability in the reveal video.)
Note that the Archmage Nova ability MIGHT be targetable since it includes only one targetable ability in its "package."
I commented on this elsewhere, but it looks like Medivh's Unstable Rune can cancel your own team's effects -- which would be the only way it isn't completely and utterly busted.
Medivh is the first character to have a summoning ability that isn't triggered by another effect (e.g., an attack or direct damage effect) that isn't simply the character card for the summoned creature. This could have been an opportunity to give the ability a spell school, but they didn't take it.
I'm trying to figure out how Unstable Runes (Medivh equipment -- summon a 0/10 Arcane Ward with "counter the first ability used each turn") is fair. It can only be that it also cancels friendly effects, forcing you to take slow moves to avoid cancellation.
PvE is tremendously kinder to having a limited roster and/or underdeveloped mercs. There is no way that a PvE mode would get the revenue they're looking for. :-/
There are some fundamentals here that aren't addressed that need be.
Treasures in Mercenaries are horrible, with the vast majority of the options not merely being binary, but being pointless. Some are actively detrimental. This encourages an even tighter adherence to specific comps for PvE.
In PvP, a few comps dominate all others, though there have been good changes made in this area. Matchmaking is garbage (which is hilarious given how they touted the matchmaking system on end) but that will likely be ignored/treated as a feature.
The devs are working to bring the game to basic competence (e.g., deal with coin issues) and ignoring these other problems, which is astounding. Coins should have been handled pre-launch.
Discoverability is really the problem. Druid is unfun in part because its spell pool is very high-utility when it likely should be all over the place. (Compare to DH where there are plenty of spells which literally do nothing or actively set you back). Incarceration won't need to be in decks to steal games. We had a lesser version of this problem with Priest not too many years ago and Team 5 made sure to squash it there; they seem to lack that concern with Druid.
The fact that DH doesn't have a huge suite of cards that go dormant in order to buff themselves (training) or force other cards to go dormant (attacks on their mana or the result of dueling them) is a remarkable flavor-fail.
They have 5 upvotes now, smh.
Theft Accusation is sitting right next to a Warlock card (Arson Accusation) that has one of the lightest play restrictions in Hearthstone while doing the same thing. Team 5 doesn't care if the card is good. They put in some blinkered verion of symmetry and took off early from work.
Thief Priest will be trash (in Standard). Incriminating Psychic is interesting for Quest Priest, however, as it generates another card that can meet a quest requirement and puts a 6-Health stall on the board. I doubt it's worth it, though, as it doesn't actually solve many problems.
Clear Conscience means that Pelagos sticks on 6 nearly all of the time, save for against Druid and Control Priest. That's worth my time, though what card Wig Priest loses for it isn't immediately clear. This can also ensure that a tiny minion (Priestess Valishj) can be grown into a threat without enemy reprisal. Finally, it grants a buff that helps one stay in the game when you don't draw Wig and have to stall. The effect is actually broken, but in modern Hearthstone, merely broken isn't enough to draw concern. It's still less unfair than any top-tier card.
Looks like I was wrong about the Inquisitor demon's class (but was right about the mini-set not giving a poop about the meta).
Arson Accusation scarcely has a real limitation; an enemy-only targeting clause would have been stricter than what it has and that's usually irrelevant for Warlock. It's an excellent indication of how far Assassinate has fallen, especially since four-mana-kill-anything isn't even a must-play and aggro can pass it by.
Drop your Location and Imp-oster on the same turn and you get two buffed imps. Winmore at the cost of having a situational card. I can see it.
Everything is trash or broken in HS of late -- no inbetween. No subtelty, no cleverness, nothing that feels good for the opponent even if it makes them lose. I get to play and you don't.
The worst thing about Theotar was that, as soon as I saw it, I knew that its only future would be complete nerfing annihilation (Illucia) that comes much too late or even more Theotar. Once the last patch's buffs were confirmed, the only option left was the latter.
At this point, Hearthstone desperately needs a keyword or trait that allows for hand disruption counterplay.
Agreed except for Afterlife Attendant. If you can reliably feed, draw, and play Denatrius (Demon Hunter and Druid), this can help set up your win condition. The main problem is that it's hard to consistently kill off your own minions for good effect on your own turn. I don't think that this is very likely to see play, but it's a possibility. If they print another endgamish infuse card, the possibility goes up.
It's not just you. It's splashy design that gets attention but is terrible for overall game health -- short-term benefits with long-term problems. It also tends to overwhelm and eliminates smaller, more subtle mechanics unless they, too, get massive over-the-top power-ups that shut down playstyles.
I find the meta-based predictions questionable in concept here as these sets are designed a year in advance -- including the mini-set -- and cards aren't held back or pushed forward simply because of the meta (though, this being a digital game, they could just do that . . . but they don't).
The Habeas Corpus image appears to have a demon that is the same kind found within the Illidari Inquisitor ranks. That suggests Demon Hunter more than Warlock, one would think.
I am so tired of Theotar being the best card in my deck in every non-aggro deck I play.
I was going to make this into a joke or funny reference, but I don't even have it in me.
It's just exhausting.
Edit: came back to note that everything said about Starfish applies x10 to Theotar. I know that nerfing Theotar probably requires a subsequent Denathrias nerf, but I believe that nearly everyone would be fine with that, too.
I don't think you were lucky. Paladin seems pretty reliable. I played Paladin first and, while the deck wasn't thematic or full of wacky cards, it was solid and felt okay to play, so those random discovers feel really powerful.
Warlock is effectively unplayable -- a lot of high-cost, no impact, slow building gimmick minions that can be boardwiped by the opponent while they can attack face consistently. If you drop Nozdormu (variant art for the Paladin version), the opponent can pyroblast you directly. Every part of that deck is hot garbage. This is aggravated by the fact that Warlock spells en masse suck, so random Warlock is always a bad time in HS vairant games.
Paladin seems reliable since it re-makes huge boards with spells -- if you get the right spells -- and has mediocre-to-decent minions.
Priest requires significant luck because the minions in it are trash. You want to get card draw into card draw so that you can hope that one of your random spells wins the day. So Druid would be that times ten.
While this is probably better than the average brawl, it's bizarre how bad the curation is. It's not merely that the decks are bad, it's that Blizz has a habit of making unfun decks with boring cards that you wouldn't play with even in a casual game. It's like they're allergic to meme decks.
Still, at least they tried. Imagine what they could do if they actually paid someone to make these regularly.