It's our default description when they forget to include a URL on the official reveal schedule since typically, that's what happens when a URL is left blank. They haven't done a great job this reveal season with that schedule, so there have been a few "Blizzard Email" squares. This one ended up being for 4Gamer, a Japanese website.
For clarity, I've updated the last remaining "Blizzard Email" square to Unknown. We should probably change that as the no URL going forward since it's less annoying.
Hard agree. Everyone knows Standard is what most people are playing, so give that a huge pool at the start of the month and you've got a better chance mid-month to have a big pool for Twist.
We get no warning, just like Tavern Brawl.
Again, this is where Blizzard has dropped the ball. Announcing rules in advance removes the surprise factor. Plus, it's not like if I find out Mean Streets of Gadgetzan is going to be a part of the new format I can go and start earnings their packs a week or two in advance - time doesn't matter here, I can buy the packs today or tomorrow, the results are the same.
Tavern Brawl rarely being a deckbuilding experience should have been something they learned from.
There’s no balancing and no expectation of balancing.
I understand that they want to help Wild out so you will sometimes see Twist getting changes because of it, but I do feel that the reason for most of Wild's balance changes were because they had Twist in mind.
No balancing is the correct move though. The format exists on a monthly rotation. If people figure it out within a couple of weeks, it's effectively already over anyway so let it ride out and let people return to Standard if they get sick of it. Like you said, people have fun in different ways, let them have fun. If there's something so stupidly overpowered that it's going to cause a day 1 problem, a ban is better than balancing cards. Balancing cards for a single month's format has longer-term problems.
But I feel in this instance I can say with certainty that this card would never see play unless there's like an influx of tens of cheap beasts and a massive draw option associated with beasts.
Yeah, we don't know what next year will hold. A card that doesn't look great right now might be the star of every deck next year if the Core Set and first set both go hard on good beasts.
Of course, it's easy to say that for every "bad card" we see during a reveal season because support has to start being printed somewhere.
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 game looks pretty sweet and I'm hoping to join you on that.... once I find the time to play the first one.
Demon, I am jealous of your playthrough of Roller Coaster Tycoon and really want to play it again. So many great memories over years of playing RCT, I'd love to make even more pending the time to do so.
On my side of what's being played for October:
Playing a bit of Path of Exile's 3.22 League still.
WoW Dragonflight has received a bit more attention this month so far, but nothing crazy. I hope to continue running the Timewalking dungeons every week during this event because there's a reward at the end of 5 weeks of timewalking.
WoW Wrath of the Lich King wants me back to fight the namesake of the expansion, but I highly doubt I'll get to it.
Forza Motorsport just came out and I want to try it out.
F1 2023 has been begging me to play and my wheel feels very lonely. I need to find some time this weekend to put some laps in.
Payday 3 was enjoyable for the few lobbies I played last month, but the broken release of the game with server instability caused me to stop playing.
There's also a couple of titles I want to check out to write about for the site, on top of Zelda Seasons and Ages which dropped on Switch Online not too long ago.
I didn't believe you at first, 124 pieces for $40 USD but what in the world?? The set is Tenoo Jedi Temple for anyone else following along.
I was going to make the argument that the branded sets always have some kind of a premium attached, but I can't say I've seen anything that excessive. It's not like there are very unique things going on either. One could argue three minifigs in a smaller set add to price, and the printed on bricks, but I'm not buying it.
Maybe if the bricks were super big; Julian's set has more bricks than Bunnie's set but its cheaper because the bricks are mostly tiny accent pieces which makes sense. I am so glad that I don't collect Star Wars LEGO.
It will work just like Overwatch 2 where it requires that you link your Steam and Battle.net accounts so yes, an account is required but no launcher. Certainly frees up the hassle of extra programs running in the background.
Dragonflight is possibly the only expansion that seems to have "universal" love. Even Legion, which had countless numbers of people praising it during the cycle was met with pockets of hatred when it came to the legendary system with its horrendous RNG. I know plenty of people who quit because of legendary nonsense (who came back for BFA) but I haven't encountered anyone that has left Dragonflight. That's not to say no one has, my pool of closeish friends is certainly not reflective of the player base as a whole, but it is interesting to see that and the overall positive attitude towards DF.
I regret not playing Dragonflight much. I'll login occasionally to do some of the limited-time stuff, but I actually feel like I missed out on so much stuff and the huge backlog of story quests doesn't really help with that. WoW creating FOMO is not a feeling I have had in a very long time and I cannot wait to see where they are planning to take it for the next expansion. If the leaks are true and we're looking at a Dwarven expansion, I might need to get a crew together.
I am 100% open to doing guest posts from the community!
The hardest part would be us getting up guidelines on how things get formatted, though anyone who has been reading our news feed for the past few years has likely picked up on it a bit ;)
As far as getting in touch, I'd send myself a private message here on the site about a topic and maybe a brief sample of what could be expected. If approved, we could then get it into our CMS and attached to your name. You can also send me an email!
I do have some plans in motion to let our community help us cover anything and everything though, with us being able to feature said content in our news feed - more details on that when it makes sense.
I don't know of any online game out there were people aren't always saying it's dying. I'd be willing to wager in most cases it's people not playing the game anymore being the ones crying about it too. Sunk cost fallacy is a helluva drug.
I really don't understand why so many people are talking about 10 folks leaving as the time to quit HS. The team has over 100 people (likely over 2-300 at this point) so 10 people in the grand scheme of things isn't very many. The time to quit was when the game started getting more RNG heavy, we didn't have duplicate protection, and the only thing we could buy was card packs or three cosmetic skins. Hearthstone had some dark times and bad monetization patterns in those days, even for a card game, which is why we saw the changes.
Agreed that it feels like a "cut some people loose before the acquisition" situation so Microsoft doesn't take the flak.
Welcome and thank you =)
Now don't be a stranger!
It's our default description when they forget to include a URL on the official reveal schedule since typically, that's what happens when a URL is left blank. They haven't done a great job this reveal season with that schedule, so there have been a few "Blizzard Email" squares. This one ended up being for 4Gamer, a Japanese website.
For clarity, I've updated the last remaining "Blizzard Email" square to Unknown. We should probably change that as the no URL going forward since it's less annoying.
Hard agree. Everyone knows Standard is what most people are playing, so give that a huge pool at the start of the month and you've got a better chance mid-month to have a big pool for Twist.
Again, this is where Blizzard has dropped the ball. Announcing rules in advance removes the surprise factor. Plus, it's not like if I find out Mean Streets of Gadgetzan is going to be a part of the new format I can go and start earnings their packs a week or two in advance - time doesn't matter here, I can buy the packs today or tomorrow, the results are the same.
Tavern Brawl rarely being a deckbuilding experience should have been something they learned from.
I understand that they want to help Wild out so you will sometimes see Twist getting changes because of it, but I do feel that the reason for most of Wild's balance changes were because they had Twist in mind.
No balancing is the correct move though. The format exists on a monthly rotation. If people figure it out within a couple of weeks, it's effectively already over anyway so let it ride out and let people return to Standard if they get sick of it. Like you said, people have fun in different ways, let them have fun. If there's something so stupidly overpowered that it's going to cause a day 1 problem, a ban is better than balancing cards. Balancing cards for a single month's format has longer-term problems.
That's a wrap on today's card reveals!
Yeah, we don't know what next year will hold. A card that doesn't look great right now might be the star of every deck next year if the Core Set and first set both go hard on good beasts.
Of course, it's easy to say that for every "bad card" we see during a reveal season because support has to start being printed somewhere.
That's a wrap for day 1
Good luck everyone! Make sure you let your friends know they can come rate the cards at the very least so it will improve our overall rankings!
I must say, I was not expecting this announcement today. Really cool theme though and I dig the new keywords.
If there was One Note I could make about your comment it would be how Excellent it is.
A true legend! Great design and and execution.
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 game looks pretty sweet and I'm hoping to join you on that.... once I find the time to play the first one.
Demon, I am jealous of your playthrough of Roller Coaster Tycoon and really want to play it again. So many great memories over years of playing RCT, I'd love to make even more pending the time to do so.
On my side of what's being played for October:
There's also a couple of titles I want to check out to write about for the site, on top of Zelda Seasons and Ages which dropped on Switch Online not too long ago.
I didn't believe you at first, 124 pieces for $40 USD but what in the world?? The set is Tenoo Jedi Temple for anyone else following along.
I was going to make the argument that the branded sets always have some kind of a premium attached, but I can't say I've seen anything that excessive. It's not like there are very unique things going on either. One could argue three minifigs in a smaller set add to price, and the printed on bricks, but I'm not buying it.
Maybe if the bricks were super big; Julian's set has more bricks than Bunnie's set but its cheaper because the bricks are mostly tiny accent pieces which makes sense. I am so glad that I don't collect Star Wars LEGO.
The current way it works is definitely not ideal. Threads that are 4 years old shouldn't even be able to be bumped without staff intervention tbh.
There is some magic in the works to fix this problem. Call it one of my top 10 annoyances on our platform!
It will work just like Overwatch 2 where it requires that you link your Steam and Battle.net accounts so yes, an account is required but no launcher. Certainly frees up the hassle of extra programs running in the background.
I couldn't agree more.
Dragonflight is possibly the only expansion that seems to have "universal" love. Even Legion, which had countless numbers of people praising it during the cycle was met with pockets of hatred when it came to the legendary system with its horrendous RNG. I know plenty of people who quit because of legendary nonsense (who came back for BFA) but I haven't encountered anyone that has left Dragonflight. That's not to say no one has, my pool of closeish friends is certainly not reflective of the player base as a whole, but it is interesting to see that and the overall positive attitude towards DF.
I regret not playing Dragonflight much. I'll login occasionally to do some of the limited-time stuff, but I actually feel like I missed out on so much stuff and the huge backlog of story quests doesn't really help with that. WoW creating FOMO is not a feeling I have had in a very long time and I cannot wait to see where they are planning to take it for the next expansion. If the leaks are true and we're looking at a Dwarven expansion, I might need to get a crew together.
I get chills everytime I think about his openings.
I am 100% open to doing guest posts from the community!
The hardest part would be us getting up guidelines on how things get formatted, though anyone who has been reading our news feed for the past few years has likely picked up on it a bit ;)
As far as getting in touch, I'd send myself a private message here on the site about a topic and maybe a brief sample of what could be expected. If approved, we could then get it into our CMS and attached to your name. You can also send me an email!
I do have some plans in motion to let our community help us cover anything and everything though, with us being able to feature said content in our news feed - more details on that when it makes sense.
Ain't that the truth!
I don't know of any online game out there were people aren't always saying it's dying. I'd be willing to wager in most cases it's people not playing the game anymore being the ones crying about it too. Sunk cost fallacy is a helluva drug.
Fixed, thank you!
I really don't understand why so many people are talking about 10 folks leaving as the time to quit HS. The team has over 100 people (likely over 2-300 at this point) so 10 people in the grand scheme of things isn't very many. The time to quit was when the game started getting more RNG heavy, we didn't have duplicate protection, and the only thing we could buy was card packs or three cosmetic skins. Hearthstone had some dark times and bad monetization patterns in those days, even for a card game, which is why we saw the changes.
Agreed that it feels like a "cut some people loose before the acquisition" situation so Microsoft doesn't take the flak.