100%, this card is a way to test an upcoming mechanic.
We used to see things like this in Tavern Brawl, like when we got the Discover debut in Captain Blackheart's Treasure, so precedence in mechanic testing is definitely a thing.
Hearthstone has gotten more complicated over the years and the vast combinations of cards just lets too much crazy stuff happen and it's been very clear they can't predict much of it anymore since they have to balance cards more than ever. The move to 40 health will be a huge positive for the health of the aging game and might lure players in to give it a try - I'd love to see the metrics on who came back for the new legendary.
I fully expect them to debut this with Hearthstone's next year in 2023. That'll be the year they switch to 4 expansions per year, 40 health on heroes, and do a significant core set rework. We should also see the new rotating format during 2023, with Classic being kicked to the curb.
Remember that this year's final expansion is going to be bigger than ever, which is probably going to help give us a huge push in diversity so when they drop the number of cards we're seeing at the start of next year, it doesn't feel like there are no cards in the game anymore. If Hearthstone's 4 sets a year drop the total cards in a set back to 135 (removing the extra 35 from the mini-sets), it's going to feel like there are not enough options midway through the new set.
Yeah, I'm a little off-topic here but there you have it, my predictions that I can link back to in 2023 when this is all true.
I'll add onto this, thanks to Nirast for picking up the slack!
Normally Riot sends us notes in advance of them being publicly announced which is why we're normally able to get them up nicely formatted on the moment they drop (there was one time where we posted on the embargo time and Riot didn't... that was some nice traffic). That hasn't happened a few times now, receiving them after they go live. I'm not sure what's up with the change since it doesn't even seem to be consistent. But because of that, there was just a lot of other things going on at the time LoR posted their notes and it wasn't stuff I could jump off of. Many other folks here too are busy with other things or are around on a more limited basis so we were able to get to them when we could.
I agree though, it's not a great look for us, especially when I've prided my content career on the fact that I've been first to break a lot of news and generally speaking, we're still damn fast. I know our Runeterra coverage has also just been close to non-existent over the past half year or so, maybe a bit longer. When we lost our primary for covering the game, we just weren't in a great spot to bring someone else on at that point in time, and LoR traffic has just been downhill both here and in general, so hard committing to a new person is a very risky play. Riot pushing forward on a more PVP focus for the game in their recent announcement is nice to see though because that makes me more hopeful they're trying to figure out what to do with the game instead of just letting it die out.
Actions speak louder than words though, and not only does that apply to Riot here, but us too. On that action side of things, there hasn't been much of it and it is my hope that we can turn that around by finding some new people who want to cover LoR on Out of Cards.
We don't have the option to sync your cards automatically as Riot never gave us access to it. You are able to manage your collection manually though, you can find your LoR collection in the menu at the top of the site with your username.
There is functionality to bulk add cards, so for example, if you know you have the entire foundations set, you can filter for that and click the bulk add button to push them all into your collection.
I actually want to write an article about the Mage hero situation badly because their internal ids hit a new milestone with Kael - they ran out of letters for Mages so he is "AA".
I pushed out an update and I hope this resolved the problem with cards not loading. I was able to find a couple of conditions where data wouldn't load correctly. Please let me know if you, or anyone else reading this, has a problem going forward.
So, I'm currently unable to build decks, like, at all. The cards just won't load. Is there anything I can do about this? I assumed it was something on my end, but I've never had it happen before.
Could you be more specific about your device and browser you are using? Essentials for any bug report!
Been a while since we've posted a set of update notes, though we haven't done anything super crazy for a while so it hasn't really been needed. I figured there may be some questions also I'm looking for targeted feedback so this thread will hopefully help with that.
Additions & Changes
General
New Out of Cards Logo!
Removed some advertisement slots.
I needed to test some new slots recently to see performance and have ultimately decided to remove our left side rail. The site felt a little too "boxed in" with it and overall, it wasn't a major change in revenue.
Mobile users will no longer see the static header advertisement.
The homepage no longer displays an advertisement at the top of the sidebar. (This has effectively been replaced by the right siderail.
There is a chance that the top sidebar ad gets removed across the site, I'll be paying attention to performance metrics over the coming weeks to make an informed decision.
Video ads are now served by a new provider.
If you notice anything funky compared to before, please let us know.
The homepage no longer displays deck lists.
This is one of the first steps we're taking to clean up the homepage.
I know this is going to be controversial, but the homepage is not the primary way our community members are clicking into decks.
The game portal pages are more relevant for deck lists.
Not all our users care about all the games we have coverage for and because of this, decks takes up a lot of scrolling space on the homepage.
Our homepage should be more of a portal into our different titles that are covered, and this will become more apparent in future site updates.
Portal links have been removed site-wide.
This may sound counter-productive to our overall goal with sending people towards portals, which they are already going, but the next site update will be bringing back a portal switcher. It will instead be found in a new menu at the very top of the site, and not be a part of our navigation.
Hearthstone
Deckbuilder Changes
How we load and organize card data in the deckbuilder has changed.
Please report any issues you find with the deckbuilder so they can be investigated.
Everything should be much quicker and subsequent uses of the deckbuilder are much faster.
Collection Manager Changes
How we load and organize card data in the collection manager has changed.
Please report any issues you find with the collection manager so they can be investigated.
Bug Fixes
General
RSS feeds have been fixed for all games.
Hearthstone
All collectible cards now properly appear in the deckbuilder.
There was an issue during the Throne of the Tides mini-set update that prevented us from showing certain cards.
Our redeveloped internals make this a non-issue going forward.
Known Issues
General
If you have ads disabled on the site due to having a Premium membership, the top of the site looks a little out of place with its wider header.
A solution will be implemented, however, if you are using ad-block you will be stuck with the wide header. Surprise, we don't support blocking our ads, which feed our content creators =)
Hearthstone
Deckbuilder shows all Duels heroes, powers, and treasures regardless of class.
This will be "fixed" in a larger deckbuilder update.
Our intention is to allow Duels players to correctly create decks that are not tied to a single class.
We've still got some UI work to do before this will be finalized, but this is temporary measure to let it work.
We still need to flag Duels Heroes so we know which powers and treasures they work with, which is why we just dump them all out at you instead of filtering.
Some Duels content is not appearing in the deckbuilder.
We're a little behind on flagged data. This won't require a new site update to fix, we just need to go through and get our data up to date.
Dean has previously stated that if they go to 4 expansions, the mini-sets are gone.
I think 4 sets per year could work pretty well since they can do a lot more variety with the extra set. Mini-sets are currently just building on the set that it comes out with, so let's throw in another whole new theme of fun instead. I think it would give the game more staying power.
Though, with that said, they need to figure out the legendary situation.
~25 legendary cards in each set, we'd be getting 100 legendary cards in a year, whereas now its ~87 with the 25 from a main set and then 4 from the mini-set. The big problem Hearthstone has with their design now is that each class always gets 2 legendary cards, and you have to also have some legendary cards that are neutral. The problem only gets worse once the next class shows up within the next couple of years.
I'm not saying people need full collections to enjoy the game, but it is very unfortunate that players would be even more limited in what they could obtain - assuming nothing changes.
I like to think that Blizzard has been doing a decent job over the past couple of years and shifting a large amount of their monetization over to cosmetics, so it might make sense to look again at the base pack system. Maybe Legendary cards become a bit easier to obtain (pity timer to 30?), maybe their dust cost gets reduced a chunk, or maybe we just go back to having 1 legendary for each class in each expansion. Hell, fewer class legendaries might break the game less too.
Now what might take the sting from this issue would be to not rate them card for card anymore, but instead ordering them from first place to last (or maybe just picking the top 3). That's what most people seem to do anyway: pick your favorite and downvote all the rest to oblivion. KANSAS' idea of having "card battles" where you always see two cards and pick your favorite would be another iteration of the same concept. Do you think this would be possible from a programming point of view?
So, I'll respond with the typical "anything is possible" line because I love to use that internally as well, even though I know the staff must groan at me quite a bit when I do so.
Personally, I like the idea of doing a "pick your top 3 cards and rank them". It would be not as high effort as ranking all the cards, and it would force people to actually have a top 3 instead of the possibility of the downvote frenzy. Card battles sound like fun too, but I think there might be too much RNG factor there and without enough people going through it, we might end up with less than optimal results.
Either of these would be fairly easy to implement though on the backend. Having it work easily on the frontend though is a different story since we need to make sure it works really good on mobile too. Curse mobile devices!
Regarding prices, maybe we can talk Flux into dishing out a bronze Premium membership for a year for the person who accumulates the most wins during one season.
I don't have a problem with us offering something like this, it would be a pretty sweet reward for the top competitor of the season. I've wanted to do another kind of reward (physical) as well, for each individual competition, though never got the time to fully flesh that one out. No spoilers in case we do end up doing it.
When it comes to encourage participation, most of the above aims at just that. Picking up what Wailor said, I'd encourage Shadows to reach out to the winner of each competition and let them share their thoughts about their card in a weekly article like in the spotlight articles Demon does but smaller. This could be seen as some further encouragement and a reminder at the same time. Should be completely voluntarily of course.
We 100% could be doing more in our news feed for promoting the competitions and winners. We certainly push out enough content on Out of Cards that anything Fan Creations wouldn't become a huge wall of FC-only content on the homepage. We had that issue on the last site we were on due to the stupid rules we had to follow for posting content and all I could remember were the consistent complaints about "so much fan stuff omg". People still clicked on it though, to complain, so the metrics were still good lol. Granted, we'd probably still get the occasional complaint here, and honestly, I don't really care. Skipping content you don't like is easy enough and if all you want to do is complain, maybe we should do more FC content on the homepage to get them to leave, making the community more positive overall.
Realistically, HearthStation was more of a beta test than anything and while I have addressed it in the past, I do consider the official birthday of Out of Cards to be when Out of Cards first came online.
I'd love for us to have a larger focus on MTG. The reality is though we just don't have anyone that is able to cover it from a news perspective. I'd love to change that of course because there's a lot of content that happens with that game from just the news side of things, nevermind the wide variety of decks thanks to so many different formats.
Our forums are going to receive an increased focus though across the board in the future. We just need to improve sending people to a place to have discussions and the forums are a great place for that.
Sexual innuendo. Many laughs were had and several Battlegrounds streamers were being way over the top about it too.
100%, this card is a way to test an upcoming mechanic.
We used to see things like this in Tavern Brawl, like when we got the Discover debut in Captain Blackheart's Treasure, so precedence in mechanic testing is definitely a thing.
Hearthstone has gotten more complicated over the years and the vast combinations of cards just lets too much crazy stuff happen and it's been very clear they can't predict much of it anymore since they have to balance cards more than ever. The move to 40 health will be a huge positive for the health of the aging game and might lure players in to give it a try - I'd love to see the metrics on who came back for the new legendary.
I fully expect them to debut this with Hearthstone's next year in 2023. That'll be the year they switch to 4 expansions per year, 40 health on heroes, and do a significant core set rework. We should also see the new rotating format during 2023, with Classic being kicked to the curb.
Remember that this year's final expansion is going to be bigger than ever, which is probably going to help give us a huge push in diversity so when they drop the number of cards we're seeing at the start of next year, it doesn't feel like there are no cards in the game anymore. If Hearthstone's 4 sets a year drop the total cards in a set back to 135 (removing the extra 35 from the mini-sets), it's going to feel like there are not enough options midway through the new set.
Yeah, I'm a little off-topic here but there you have it, my predictions that I can link back to in 2023 when this is all true.
I'll add onto this, thanks to Nirast for picking up the slack!
Normally Riot sends us notes in advance of them being publicly announced which is why we're normally able to get them up nicely formatted on the moment they drop (there was one time where we posted on the embargo time and Riot didn't... that was some nice traffic). That hasn't happened a few times now, receiving them after they go live. I'm not sure what's up with the change since it doesn't even seem to be consistent. But because of that, there was just a lot of other things going on at the time LoR posted their notes and it wasn't stuff I could jump off of. Many other folks here too are busy with other things or are around on a more limited basis so we were able to get to them when we could.
I agree though, it's not a great look for us, especially when I've prided my content career on the fact that I've been first to break a lot of news and generally speaking, we're still damn fast. I know our Runeterra coverage has also just been close to non-existent over the past half year or so, maybe a bit longer. When we lost our primary for covering the game, we just weren't in a great spot to bring someone else on at that point in time, and LoR traffic has just been downhill both here and in general, so hard committing to a new person is a very risky play. Riot pushing forward on a more PVP focus for the game in their recent announcement is nice to see though because that makes me more hopeful they're trying to figure out what to do with the game instead of just letting it die out.
Actions speak louder than words though, and not only does that apply to Riot here, but us too. On that action side of things, there hasn't been much of it and it is my hope that we can turn that around by finding some new people who want to cover LoR on Out of Cards.
We don't have the option to sync your cards automatically as Riot never gave us access to it. You are able to manage your collection manually though, you can find your LoR collection in the menu at the top of the site with your username.
There is functionality to bulk add cards, so for example, if you know you have the entire foundations set, you can filter for that and click the bulk add button to push them all into your collection.
I actually want to write an article about the Mage hero situation badly because their internal ids hit a new milestone with Kael - they ran out of letters for Mages so he is "AA".
Great job, Blizzard!
We missed posting about this - source is the announcement video!
Everything should be starting in 34 minutes!
I pushed out an update and I hope this resolved the problem with cards not loading. I was able to find a couple of conditions where data wouldn't load correctly. Please let me know if you, or anyone else reading this, has a problem going forward.
Could you be more specific about your device and browser you are using? Essentials for any bug report!
Been a while since we've posted a set of update notes, though we haven't done anything super crazy for a while so it hasn't really been needed. I figured there may be some questions also I'm looking for targeted feedback so this thread will hopefully help with that.
Additions & Changes
General
Hearthstone
Bug Fixes
General
Hearthstone
Known Issues
General
Hearthstone
Dean has previously stated that if they go to 4 expansions, the mini-sets are gone.
Dean has previously stated that if they go to 4 expansions, the mini-sets are gone.
I think 4 sets per year could work pretty well since they can do a lot more variety with the extra set. Mini-sets are currently just building on the set that it comes out with, so let's throw in another whole new theme of fun instead. I think it would give the game more staying power.
Though, with that said, they need to figure out the legendary situation.
~25 legendary cards in each set, we'd be getting 100 legendary cards in a year, whereas now its ~87 with the 25 from a main set and then 4 from the mini-set. The big problem Hearthstone has with their design now is that each class always gets 2 legendary cards, and you have to also have some legendary cards that are neutral. The problem only gets worse once the next class shows up within the next couple of years.
I'm not saying people need full collections to enjoy the game, but it is very unfortunate that players would be even more limited in what they could obtain - assuming nothing changes.
I like to think that Blizzard has been doing a decent job over the past couple of years and shifting a large amount of their monetization over to cosmetics, so it might make sense to look again at the base pack system. Maybe Legendary cards become a bit easier to obtain (pity timer to 30?), maybe their dust cost gets reduced a chunk, or maybe we just go back to having 1 legendary for each class in each expansion. Hell, fewer class legendaries might break the game less too.
Laurie? What is he doing in this Hearthstone patch?
I'm certain we're going to see midsummer stuff with the patch because of this. It could be them just being "fun" though too.
I must have missed that communication regarding Old on Sunday and New on Wednesday - do you have a source for that?
So, I'll respond with the typical "anything is possible" line because I love to use that internally as well, even though I know the staff must groan at me quite a bit when I do so.
Personally, I like the idea of doing a "pick your top 3 cards and rank them". It would be not as high effort as ranking all the cards, and it would force people to actually have a top 3 instead of the possibility of the downvote frenzy. Card battles sound like fun too, but I think there might be too much RNG factor there and without enough people going through it, we might end up with less than optimal results.
Either of these would be fairly easy to implement though on the backend. Having it work easily on the frontend though is a different story since we need to make sure it works really good on mobile too. Curse mobile devices!
I don't have a problem with us offering something like this, it would be a pretty sweet reward for the top competitor of the season. I've wanted to do another kind of reward (physical) as well, for each individual competition, though never got the time to fully flesh that one out. No spoilers in case we do end up doing it.
We 100% could be doing more in our news feed for promoting the competitions and winners. We certainly push out enough content on Out of Cards that anything Fan Creations wouldn't become a huge wall of FC-only content on the homepage. We had that issue on the last site we were on due to the stupid rules we had to follow for posting content and all I could remember were the consistent complaints about "so much fan stuff omg". People still clicked on it though, to complain, so the metrics were still good lol. Granted, we'd probably still get the occasional complaint here, and honestly, I don't really care. Skipping content you don't like is easy enough and if all you want to do is complain, maybe we should do more FC content on the homepage to get them to leave, making the community more positive overall.
Realistically, HearthStation was more of a beta test than anything and while I have addressed it in the past, I do consider the official birthday of Out of Cards to be when Out of Cards first came online.
Hopefully things only get better as time goes on :D
I'd love for us to have a larger focus on MTG. The reality is though we just don't have anyone that is able to cover it from a news perspective. I'd love to change that of course because there's a lot of content that happens with that game from just the news side of things, nevermind the wide variety of decks thanks to so many different formats.
Our forums are going to receive an increased focus though across the board in the future. We just need to improve sending people to a place to have discussions and the forums are a great place for that.
No plans to change the favicon =)