It's not clear that a 1 mana reduction in cost makes this a playable minion, but having the ability to curve Lightspawn into Power Infusion is intriguing.
To me, the strangest thing about Focused Will is that it's cheap, minor buff in a class where that would be hugely relevant if it didn't silence the target - Crimson Clergy, Sethekk Veilweaver, and Nazmani Bloodweaver would all love a nice, cheap buff if it didn't mean losing their primary value.
Maybe Inner Fire gets replaced in an expansion and makes the buff relevant, but where I think it probably shines is in its flexibility. When your opponent has a single, major threat in your way (e.g. some big deathrattle like Rattlegore or a taunt that's blocking you from dealing face damage), this is a great card. When that's not the case, there may be plenty of times your minions are functionally vanilla and could use a 3 health boost to trade (e.g. battlecry, frenzy, and spellburst are all one-time effects. Once they're spent, your minion is basically vanilla).
It really, really doesn't, though, with the sole exception of the quest you cannot reroll. As long as a reroll option exists, I will always choose that over actually playing Battlegrounds.
You can't really assert that "it really, really doesn't" in general; you can only make that claim for your own personal experience. The only way to know whether or not there's a real increase in user engagement across the millions who play the game is to get usage data from Blizzard. And anyway, I'm not arguing that this sort of "quest-driven cross sell" effort is highly effective, I'm just saying that it's why Blizzard (and other CCGs like MTGA and LoR) offer randomized quests - they're hoping to encourage you to engage in more of the game. This can be as simple as trying a class you wouldn't otherwise play, or it could be engaging in a different format like Duels.
Your point about rerolling quests in any format you don't like is clearly true for you, but there are plenty of other players who don't do that for every quest. For example, the "Deal 1500 damage to enemy minions in Battlegrounds" is pretty easy to finish in two or three decent runs because of how much damage you can deal in a single game. Plenty of "Constructed main" players prefer just completing it rather than going through the hassle of rerolling until they get a more constructed-friendly quest (particularly given the 25% odds you've already mentioned of getting another Battlegrounds quest, and the comparative difficulty of other weekly quests - including constructed ones like "Play 30 Corrupt Cards" which requires a specifically tailored deck and potentially lots of games).
Players are willing to give new things a try when they are free. Free Arena/Duels tickets encourage people to try those modes. Battlegrounds being completely free has made it extremely popular. Hearthstone itself snares most of its players by being "free" (in air quotes). We've all tried all of these things not because of quest rewards, but out of simple curiosity. But once you've tried them, you know whether or not you like them. This weekly incentive to try them again is not engaging; it's annoying.
I agree that content being free is a necessary condition of getting player engagement. This is why Hearthstone dropped its "Finish an Arena run with 4 wins" weekly quest; no one wanted to pay into the format just to complete a weekly quest. But it's not always sufficient for it to be free, because implicit in everything is some time cost (i.e. if I spend an hour playing Battlegrounds, that's an hour I can't spend playing Constructed). In-game rewards is the most concrete way to convince people to spend that time in a format they would otherwise avoid. Sometimes this is in the form of Legendary Quests, like the recent Lunar New Year quests, which had players playing every major format to get packs. But these regular weekly quests serve the same purpose.
Moreover, I think Blizzard is strongly incentivized to keep giving you these quests even after you've tried a format (even if you feel like you don't want to play that format) because they keep updating these formats. They cannot know whether an update to the format will finally interest you unless they drive you toward that format again. (I think Duels is a good showcase of this sort of thing. When Discard Warlock was super broken, the balance for the format was an issue that drove players away. After several updates, a lot of those players might like the format, so quests help to drive re-engagement.)
If the quest rewards system starts decreasing overall engagement (e.g. players dropping out of the game because they're sick of weekly quest rewards pushing formats on them, etc., leading to a sense that the game is not rewarding enough), you can probably expect changes to the reroll system. Maybe they'll add a "duplicate protection" to rerolling weekly quests over the course of a week, or maybe they'll give you two "weekly rerolls" at the start of the week to help kick things off right. But they really have no reason to let you cut yourself off from entire formats because that kind of cross-sell is a good way to get more/longer engagement from players.
I get where a lot of the criticism of the weekly quests is coming from - it can be frustrating to get a quest for a format you don't really want to play. But I think focusing exclusively on individual player responses to a given quest ignores a critical part of why Blizzard gives quests at all, and that's player engagement.
Blizzard could just as easily give you no quests, and just replace them with daily login rewards whereby you get 1000 XP just for logging in. That would be easy, and it would mean that no one has to play any format they don't want to just to max out rewards. But that wouldn't push players to engage with the game.
Let's take the "Play 3 Games As [Class A], [Class B], or [Class C]" example. It's not a hard quest to complete, but if you don't want to play any of those classes you might be disappointed to get it. (You might also be frustrated if they're classes without top tier decks.) Blizzard could just as easily see what decks you have constructed, or see what your play rates are for different classes, and give you a quest that better matches your preferred constructed play.
But they give you this slightly harder quest in the hopes that it will push you to branch out over time, explore the playstyles of every class, and maybe find a class you didn't think you liked, but actually love. That kind of discovery is positive for the player, and it increases engagement, which in turn can increase revenue.
With all that in mind, I wouldn't expect them to change this approach at all. Varied quests encourages playing between formats, which is good for Blizzard. That said, I do like the idea of swapping Win with Play - maybe something like swapping all "Win X" quests with "Play X + 2" or "Play X + 3" to reduce the burden of completing a quest for a format you don't like.
The trick that always works is using card IDs instead of names, but that does require searching for the said IDs beforehand e.g. 2704 for old Drain Soul (which will be buffed to be the same than the core card) and 11445 for the new Drain Soul.
Additionally, when using [card]-tags, you can add set="Core 2021" within the first parentheses to get the core version by using the card name, e.g. [card set="Core 2021"]Drain Soul[/card] without the bolding should give you Drain Soul.
We haven't got the new Classic-format cards in db yet but I'd imagine we'll have a similar solution for them too. Up to Flux if he wants to add new buttons for the text editor for either/both.
That's really cool - I had no idea that "set" attribute existed. Thanks for the help!
Haha, right now my biggest question is how diligent the team will be about back-populating spell schools once rotation drops. It seems relevant (not unlike when they back-populated Elemental tags), but I don't think I've seen anything explicitly saying that they will do that.
That said, I like the idea of vulnerability or resistance to a spell type, but I suspect that if it were to be introduced, it would be used in very narrow circumstances. Adding such a feature could have lopsided balance impact (e.g. a card with resistance to holy would screw over Priest and Paladin, and do basically nothing to Mage).
That Buff Priest you are talking about was great because it had finishers. It had Cleric and PW:Shield that let you draw a lot of cards while winning tempo and the most important part: Divine Spirit + Inner Fire. That combo let you finish the game in one turn. Right now priest has no finisher in order to win the game. If they clean your board, you are out of the game.
I agree with you, but my point is that it was a really good Tempo Priest deck (a thing you claimed would never be a thing), and that a lot of the same pieces that made it effective exist in different forms today. It probably needs one or two more big plays and a little more card draw, but it's close to what it needs. For instance, it's possible that Shadowform will be the thing that makes it work. That's easy to scoff at, but Midrange Hunter (a perennially successful archetype) achieves success by whittling down the opponent with their hero power while managing tempo. Priest will be able to tutor Shadowform and buffs, both of which that kind of deck will want.
Libram Paladin has a lot of cards with strong synergies with Libram cards and broken cards for this deck like Lady Liadrin (mega refill) or Barov. It's not even comparable. Priest has no synergies at all. Blizzard knows that Tempo priest will never be a thing, they know it, but still gives tempo cards to them without giving it draw. It's like they want Priest to be bad on purpose. I'm getting tired of this.
Tempo Priest has been a great deck before, so this idea that Blizzard is just pushing a junk archetype rings false to me. Back when the Boomsday Buffs came through (Summer 2019, I think), Buff Priest was hugely effective. (Here's a video from Kibler about the deck from July 2019.) The deck was so powerful they had to un-buff Extra Arms.
It doesn't look exactly the same as Boomsday's Buff Priest, and it doesn't look exactly like Libram Paladin, but there are a lot of good building blocks here, and it wouldn't take much more content to push this archetype over the edge.
Look at High Abbess Alura. She is completely unplayable in the class because she forces you to abdicate of all your board control tools and run a completely buff centric deck around her. But the archetype lacks card draw so badly that you run into all sorts of issues. If you try to play conservatively, you fall behind. If you go all in, you run out of cards really fast. If you lose your board, it's pretty much impossible to recover due to a lack of resources. Your hand becomes stuck with buff spells that you can't do anything with because Priest can't dump those cards without any minions to buff while Paladin does that very easily with their Hero Power. The Priest Hero Power itself is useless most of the time because you have to keep healing your face and you don't want to be trading a lot. You pretty much have to build an early snowball in order to have any chance of winning.
We don't need to keep debating the details of Tempo Priest, but one last thing I'd like to bring up is that Libram/Broom Paladin spent a lot of time at the top of the tier list despite running relatively little card draw (often just Hand of A'dal and Salhet's Pride). I think the lesson there is that you don't need a ton of card draw if you can snowball early tempo with cheap buffs and your hero power. That's obviously a tougher thing for Priest to do, but cards like Crimson Clergy and Lightsteed and the buffed* Lightspawn help a lot with making the hero power a positive tempo play, and they don't need much more in the form of cheap buffs to consistently build on early game tempo. Paladin does a lot of that stuff better, yes, but I think Priest can get there too.
*I'm calling it a buff, since -1 cost is well worth the -1/-1 statline
Priest got kicked in the balls really hard, btw. The class got only two cards that are worth anything: Flash Heal (at least they got rid of Radiance) and the card that discovers a spell in the deck (cycle option). Everything else is incredibly bad. Silence Priest? A complete joke without Divine Spirit. Tempo Priest? Completely unviable without card draw. Shadow Form? Terrible regardless of its cost. The legendary card? An absolute unplayable piece of garbage. Priest got treated like s*** and is going back to its state of being 100% dependant on expansion cards to be relevant. I'm just done with this.
Apologies - this turned into a longer response than I intended because I really love the Tempo Priest archetype, wish it had gotten more love over the last several expansions, and I see this set as hopeful for it.
Tempo Priest has been right on the edge of playable for a long time, and I would be careful not to underestimate it in the context of a rotation and a Core Set whose focus is clearly more on Tempo/Midrange play than the Classic/Basic sets. I tried a lot of Tempo Priest after Scholomance launched, and one of the biggest issues was turn 2 - it was easy to load up on useful 1-drops like Frazzled Freshman and Intrepid Initiate (or even Soulbound Ashtongue), but if you didn't get the perfect draw into Power Word: Feast you'd often have very little to do on turn 2.
For that reason, I think you're underselling Crimson Clergy a bit. He provides a relevant body on turn 1, and a meaningful way to leverage your hero power on turn 2. In many respects, that was the most important thing Northshire Cleric had going for it. Because of how many of Priest's 2-mana options are reactive cards and resource generation cards, a turn 2 hero power is commonplace. So, any viable tempo deck needs to be able maximize the hero power on turn 2. A value trade into buffing your 1-drop into a vanilla 2-drop statline is nothing to scoff at. And in the right match-up, "Crimson Clergy into Power Word: Feast + trade" can give you a 4/5 minion on turn 2 that can continue to scale its attack over time.
The important thing to note about cards like Shadowform and Shadowed Spirit isn't that they're knockout, amazing cards, but rather that they offer Priest a way to "switch into attack mode" and pressure down their opponent. This can be a real struggle in Tempo Priest because the Priest hero power strongly incentivizes value trading and board control, but does very little for you when it's time to make the shift over to beating down your opponent.
It's true card draw was a struggle for the deck - often if you didn't get Voracious Reader in time, you'd run out of gas. With that in mind, I think this rotation has more going for it than you give it credit for. Thrive in the Shadows provides deck-thinning and a useful tutor effect, either for buffs to keep your board trading up or reload in the form of Rally!. Also, Insight and Raise Dead are still available, and we may get more draw tools in the FitB expansion.
(One other shout-out here is the potential tempo sleeper for Priest - Nerubian Egg. By turn 3 you have access to two strong buffs: Power Word: Feast and Apotheosis. These make the egg a real threat. It also offers a very relevant deathrattle for Disciplinarian Gandling, which never really took off.)
I am not a fan of butchering the small Charge cards, moving them to Wild would be ok, but I am still not sure if both versions are changed or not, but I enjoyed both Anyfin Pally and Handbuffcopy Boar Hunter decks. Also gonna miss Houndmaster, Unleash the Hounds, Tundra Rhino...
I understand where you're coming from on this, but ultimately I think it's good to have less Charge in the Core Set. Hearthstone at its core is a tempo game, so I think the "Core Set" should reflect that, and that swapping Charge for Rush on most cards achieves that. You also see this reflected in removal of cards like Pyroblast.
Removing those sources of direct face damage leaves room to introduce new chargers and other direct damage tools in expansions. I don't think they'll introduce a ton of Chargers, mind you - it's still a keyword that can produce some very frustrating metagames - but because the baseline for direct face damage is much lower in the Core Set, they can now introduce new direct damage cards they might have otherwise been afraid to put into the game for fear of hyper-degenerate aggro metas.
My only reaction to this is feeling unnecessarily outraged by their decision to make Nozdormu even worse than he already is for the sake of a joke/meme. Every other Dragon Aspect got better but he got the Boulderfist Ogre treatment: a pile of stats that does absolutely nothing. I'm just going to forget this whole thing and move on.
I think AngryShuckie got it right - he's not a spectacularly powerful card, but he creates the ability to play "Speed Hearthstone," which seems like a fun option to have for friendly games.
If you assume for a minute that people like the original effect of Nozdormu in principle, I think there are two questions the design team has to resolve: "is this an effect that is healthy for the game when your opponent drops it on you?" and "how can we make that effect consistent when you want it, but not the kind of thing that punishes a player arbitrarily?"
For the first question, I think it's pretty clear that his effect is very bad for the game if one player is able to take advantage of it and harm the other player's ability to interact with the game (e.g. a 15 second turn on mobile is pretty rough, and if you happened to be AFK during your opponent's turn, they might have just stolen a turn from you with that play, which feels bad). On the second question, Nozdormu today typically shows up when he's randomly generated, and it's usually a surprise/punishment that screws over the active player because you weren't expecting to suddenly lose the rest of your turn. If he's generated during some long animation, that loss of time is all the more frustrating.
So by making this something each player gets to opt into, you set the effect up to create much more positive experiences when it's active. Honestly, I think it's great. The only way to make a truly "playable" Nozdormu would have been to change the effect entirely, which I think would have been less fun/unique.
Now that a card reference in Hearthstone could reference a Core Set version or non-Core Set version (e.g. Drain Soul in KotFT deals 2 damage, while it deals 3 damage in the Gryphon Core Set, Sprint has different costs between Gryphon Core Set and Basic), the site will need to support specifying a version of the card when linking to the card in forums, decks, etc.
There's a ton to pick apart with the new Core Set (available to peruse now), but I figured it would be nice to have a thread where people can post their reactions. Here's some of what I'm particularly excited about after reviewing the set:
Charge is nearly non-existent, only showing up on some class legendaries. Old neutral Charge minions got minor buffs and were converted to Rush.
Loads of minor changes that might make a lot of once great cards good again (e.g. -1 cost to Sprint and Big Game Hunter, minor health buffs to lot of classic cards like Cairne Bloodhoof, Baron Geddon, etc.)
Doomsayer effectively replaced with Explosive Sheep - should reduce the number of feel bad moments that come from randomly creating the neutral AOE minion in the game.
Except everyone IS "shopping today" because we are comparing veteran players to newer players at the launch of an expansion at the beginning of a rotation.
No one is saying that new players aren't getting a better deal out of this - I conceded as much in my original response. But new player and veteran player value are independent variables. Your complaint is with what you believe to be a misrepresentation of veteran player value in gaming media, so any comparisons to new player value only serves to conflate issues. This is exactly why I got into questions of fairness and refunds in an earlier post (not based on H0lySatan's post, as I mentioned) - you're using the difference between new player and veteran player value to claim misrepresentation, which implicitly brings up these questions of fair value to veteran players.
Quote From FortyDust
And no, you cannot definitively say the cost of the game will go down over time, anyway. Blizzard makes money by selling expansions. They are not going to make the Core set so powerful that it cuts in to expansion sales.
It's clear we're not ever going to see eye-to-eye on this, so I'm not going to continue to engage on this beyond this final post. The question of "will the cost of the game go down" is the heart of this issue here. It's clear you believe that switching from Classic/Basic sets to the new Core Set will be net-neutral in terms of what percentage of any given deck comes from "core cards" vs expansion cards, and therefore won't impact the cost of meta decks, which in turn means it won't impact the practical costs of keeping up with the meta after an expansion. If that's true, then the switch will certainly add zero economic value for any player who already had a full Classic set.
But as I've already cited in an earlier post, Celestalon has said we should expect the base power level of the Core Set to be higher than Classic/Basic because, as a rotating set, it can afford to be stronger than an evergreen set can without introducing long-term balance issues. Whether you choose to believe that Celestalon is honestly expressing the intent of the Hearthstone team is up to you, but if the Core Set is stronger than the Classic/Basic sets, the natural result will be a higher percentage of meta decks coming from core cards, which in turn makes it cheaper to keep up-to-date with the meta. That benefit is conferred on every player, veteran or not. And that is what people are putting forth in these articles - the idea that the Core Set will be stronger and more valuable than the Classic/Basic sets ever were.
But I never said anything about decisions to buy more cards, so sunk cost is 100 percent beside the point. You're building straw man after straw man. It's better if you respond to my actual comments, not these anticipated counterarguments you keep concocting.
My only point here is that veteran players gain no immediate financial benefit from the introduction of a Core set. Several writers have stated or implied that they will, and that is incorrect. if you don't want to talk about that, please make your own thread.
Frankly, I think I am responding to your comments directly with this question of sunk cost, but I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that.
With respect to your only point here - that veteran players gain no immediate financial benefit from the introduction of a Core set - that is a sufficiently narrow understanding of "cost of Hearthstone" that I actually agree with it. But I also think it's an utterly useless way to discuss the cost of the game, which is why you don't see any of these articles using that framing. Instead they're talking about the typical understanding of "cost of Hearthstone" - that is, the cost over time to stay current with the metagame. You could make the same "no immediate benefit" argument with respect to players with full collections and the recent duplicate protection changes - after all, they have all the current cards and don't derive immediate value from duplicate protection - but no one believes that duplicate protection has no benefit to veteran players because eventually they'll be opening more packs and trying to stay up-to-date with an evolving meta.
Here's a more concrete example: imagine your local area is decreasing sales tax by 1% effective today. You might say that the sales tax decrease doesn't have any immediate benefit to you because you're not shopping today, but that's an arbitrary and disingenuous way to discuss the impact of such a change.
Similarly, the Core Set change has no immediate financial impact on players because they're not spending money on it. But so long as it decrease the ongoing costs of staying up-to-date with Hearthstone, it will benefit veteran and new players alike. That is what all of these articles are saying - over time, the cost of the game will go down thanks to this change.
You do not understand me right. In fact, you just put a very long wall of text into my mouth.
So once again, for those who think they know my opinion better than I do: CORE SET GOOD, but we don't need to pretend veteran players are coming out ahead.
I apologize if you think I'm putting words in your mouth. I merely meant to state my understanding of your argument explicitly as an anchor for my counterargument. I understand full well that you think the Core Set is good for the game, and did not mean to suggest otherwise.
My point in bringing up the notion of a refund was merely to point out that most people who have a full Classic set have already derived a great deal of value from the resources they've spent to get it. This gets at a question of fairness, which I believe is implicit in any notion that this change is worse for some players and not others (in this case, veteran players with full Classic sets and not new players).
Quote From FortyDust
I do not, and it would save everyone a lot of time if you would avoid conflating the opinions of different people you disagree with.
That I appeared to be conflating opinions is mere coincidence. I started writing this post well before H0lySatan posted, but was delayed in finishing it until much later. I hadn't even read that post before providing my view.
Quote From FortyDust
I merely pointed out that certain assets – assets that were once believed to have ongoing value in Standard – no longer hold value. That's not a sunk-cost fallacy.
I think you've largely side-stepped my point about sunk cost by saying that the value of these Classic cards has decreased. That's entirely true, but has nothing to do with the sunk cost fallacy. The sunk cost fallacy is treating the value of a veteran player's full set of Classic cards as a relevant input for the decision to spend money on Hearthstone expansions simply because they've spent resources (money, time, etc.) on getting it. Perhaps if they were taking away the Classic set without replacing it, you could make that case; that would mean you'd need even more cards from the expansion to build good decks, which would very obviously drive up the cost.
But because they're replacing it, the Classic set's value is irrelevant to the decision to buy into an expansion/spend more time playing Hearthstone - this is true regardless of whether you've sunk money or time or both into it, and it's true regardless of whether it has lost or gained value as a set. Only the value of the new Core Set can be used to inform whether Hearthstone is getting more or less expensive (i.e. whether you'll need more or fewer expansion cards to make a good deck in Standard). Blizzard has been clear that their aim is to make the Core Set more relevant to the metagame than the Classic and Basic sets are today, so that should result in lower costs moving forward for every player.
They are canceling hundreds of cards that were supposed to be permanent…I'm just saying it's kind of stupid that these articles keep saying it's a boon to the wallets of veteran players when that is clearly not the case.
If I understand you right, you're suggesting that this is economically bad for veteran players because they've already spent a lot of money on their full Classic collection, which they were told would be evergreen in Hearthstone. If that's what you're arguing, then your argument is based on the sunk cost fallacy. Any money veteran players have spent on their Classic collection is gone, so at the point that you've collected a full collection of Classic cards, the only economic question left in the game is whether or not you're going to keep spending money on future expansions. To suggest otherwise is to assert that the sunk cost of having a full Classic set should weigh in on your present economic choices, which it plainly shouldn't.
So, if the Core Set enables you to make a meta deck with a higher percentage of "Core" cards (i.e. Evergreen cards today, Core soon) than before without costing you a cent, then you have fewer expansion cards you need to buy or craft to build your deck, and can therefore save money and in-game resources that you might have otherwise spent. This is why the Core set is economically positive for all players. The Tavern Brawl thing is an added (and long overdue) bonus on top of that, but it's not strictly necessary.
The other part of your argument that I think might merit some attention is this idea that Blizzard promised that these cards would be evergreen. No one ever bemoans the fact that expansion sets rotate (even though this same complaint could just as easily be lobbed at annual Standard rotations) because we expect those sets to rotate. Ultimately, though, I think the question you have to ask is "would knowing that this set would rotate five years after it became the evergreen Standard set have changed your behavior?" At some level, that's a personal question each player would have to answer for themselves, but I think there are two things worth noting about the question generally. First, in those five years you could have picked up 260 classic packs for free from Tavern Brawls. Second, buying into five years of the evergreen set would probably still yield a fair value when compared to a single year of an expansion set. It's hard for me to believe knowing the Classic set only had a five-year run ahead of it would have changed anything that anyone did.
So, to the extent that you feel this is unfair to veteran players, and that some refund is due for anyone who spent money on the Classic set because of this promise, I guess all I can say is "get over it." For any player who enjoyed their time playing Classic cards, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that they're owed something simply because those cards are rotating, and new players won't have to buy into the Classic set in the future. Some of the first cards I crafted were Sylvanas Windrunner and Ragnaros the Firelord because of how powerful they were, and they were among the first cards to be Hall-of-Famed. I didn't think Blizzard owed me anything because I had enjoyed all of the time I had spent playing those cards and gotten my money's worth out of them.
"A little break from opening their wallets"? In what way, exactly? After all, old players who have spent a great deal of money on the game already had complete Classic collections. Hell, even free players who have been around since launch probably had all the Classic cards they would ever need. This move to a Core set does absolutely nothing for veteran players in terms of saving money, and it's disturbing how often I see the lie repeated.
The primary purpose of the Core Set is to anchor class themes for the year and provide a fresh baseline for the play experience, but it has the added benefit of upping the baseline power level of the "base set" of Hearthstone's Standard format. The result should be a higher percentage of meta-relevant/competitive cards in the set relative to the current Evergreen Basic/Classic sets (e.g. even classically powerful cards like Al'Akir the Windlord and Lord Jaraxxus haven't seen play in ages.). Because the Core Set is free, and will be regularly refreshed, the net result should be a decrease in the "necessary annual spend" in order to get one or more meta decks constructed.
It's certainly true that this is a much bigger boon for new players and players who never had a full set of Classic cards, but it's being positioned as financially better for all players because of this "upping the baseline." Perhaps, once the full set is out and people get their hands on it, people will find that it does not have a higher percentage of "playable" cards, and therefore doesn't save veteran players any money. But Blizzard's intent on this is clear. From Celestalon's Q&A - "Since Core is refreshed each year, we can make Core cards more consistently impactful and relevant to the current meta." The Basic and Classic sets have seen a ton of hall-of-fames and nerfs to keep them from crowding out expansion cards year after year after year, but that doesn't have to happen any more, so we can expect these cards to be better/more relevant. Getting relevant cards for free drives down the cost of the game.
Quote From FortyDust
Blizzard didn't [create the Classic format] because they saw a demand for it…Classic mode had to happen because the Core set is about to remove the one very large chunk of every Standard player's assets they could always count on, and Blizzard would have looked fairly villainous if they'd relegated all those cards to Wild and given nothing back.
There's probably some truth to this, but I think it's also worth noting that this format is consistent with the promise of the wild format - namely, "you get to play the classic decks you loved, just like you remember them." This is why they'd been un-nerfing some cards when they got Hall-of-Famed, and the Classic mode offers an opportunity to make good on that promise without causing balance issues in Wild (or any future format that allows for Basic and Classic cards).
Ah ha! I knew my Boogeymonster was good for something. Turns out he dies the same as Crowley does. I guess we can't be too surprised Blizz didn't bother to align his mechanics with everyone else's when they standardised this a while back...
Hah, well, that's disappointing but not surprising. Sounds like they have some room to fix up their templating, because according to the Finja page on Gamepedia (https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Finja,_the_Flying_Star), he triggers even if he takes lethal damage.
It's not clear that a 1 mana reduction in cost makes this a playable minion, but having the ability to curve Lightspawn into Power Infusion is intriguing.
To me, the strangest thing about Focused Will is that it's cheap, minor buff in a class where that would be hugely relevant if it didn't silence the target - Crimson Clergy, Sethekk Veilweaver, and Nazmani Bloodweaver would all love a nice, cheap buff if it didn't mean losing their primary value.
Maybe Inner Fire gets replaced in an expansion and makes the buff relevant, but where I think it probably shines is in its flexibility. When your opponent has a single, major threat in your way (e.g. some big deathrattle like Rattlegore or a taunt that's blocking you from dealing face damage), this is a great card. When that's not the case, there may be plenty of times your minions are functionally vanilla and could use a 3 health boost to trade (e.g. battlecry, frenzy, and spellburst are all one-time effects. Once they're spent, your minion is basically vanilla).
You can't really assert that "it really, really doesn't" in general; you can only make that claim for your own personal experience. The only way to know whether or not there's a real increase in user engagement across the millions who play the game is to get usage data from Blizzard. And anyway, I'm not arguing that this sort of "quest-driven cross sell" effort is highly effective, I'm just saying that it's why Blizzard (and other CCGs like MTGA and LoR) offer randomized quests - they're hoping to encourage you to engage in more of the game. This can be as simple as trying a class you wouldn't otherwise play, or it could be engaging in a different format like Duels.
Your point about rerolling quests in any format you don't like is clearly true for you, but there are plenty of other players who don't do that for every quest. For example, the "Deal 1500 damage to enemy minions in Battlegrounds" is pretty easy to finish in two or three decent runs because of how much damage you can deal in a single game. Plenty of "Constructed main" players prefer just completing it rather than going through the hassle of rerolling until they get a more constructed-friendly quest (particularly given the 25% odds you've already mentioned of getting another Battlegrounds quest, and the comparative difficulty of other weekly quests - including constructed ones like "Play 30 Corrupt Cards" which requires a specifically tailored deck and potentially lots of games).
I agree that content being free is a necessary condition of getting player engagement. This is why Hearthstone dropped its "Finish an Arena run with 4 wins" weekly quest; no one wanted to pay into the format just to complete a weekly quest. But it's not always sufficient for it to be free, because implicit in everything is some time cost (i.e. if I spend an hour playing Battlegrounds, that's an hour I can't spend playing Constructed). In-game rewards is the most concrete way to convince people to spend that time in a format they would otherwise avoid. Sometimes this is in the form of Legendary Quests, like the recent Lunar New Year quests, which had players playing every major format to get packs. But these regular weekly quests serve the same purpose.
Moreover, I think Blizzard is strongly incentivized to keep giving you these quests even after you've tried a format (even if you feel like you don't want to play that format) because they keep updating these formats. They cannot know whether an update to the format will finally interest you unless they drive you toward that format again. (I think Duels is a good showcase of this sort of thing. When Discard Warlock was super broken, the balance for the format was an issue that drove players away. After several updates, a lot of those players might like the format, so quests help to drive re-engagement.)
If the quest rewards system starts decreasing overall engagement (e.g. players dropping out of the game because they're sick of weekly quest rewards pushing formats on them, etc., leading to a sense that the game is not rewarding enough), you can probably expect changes to the reroll system. Maybe they'll add a "duplicate protection" to rerolling weekly quests over the course of a week, or maybe they'll give you two "weekly rerolls" at the start of the week to help kick things off right. But they really have no reason to let you cut yourself off from entire formats because that kind of cross-sell is a good way to get more/longer engagement from players.
I get where a lot of the criticism of the weekly quests is coming from - it can be frustrating to get a quest for a format you don't really want to play. But I think focusing exclusively on individual player responses to a given quest ignores a critical part of why Blizzard gives quests at all, and that's player engagement.
Blizzard could just as easily give you no quests, and just replace them with daily login rewards whereby you get 1000 XP just for logging in. That would be easy, and it would mean that no one has to play any format they don't want to just to max out rewards. But that wouldn't push players to engage with the game.
Let's take the "Play 3 Games As [Class A], [Class B], or [Class C]" example. It's not a hard quest to complete, but if you don't want to play any of those classes you might be disappointed to get it. (You might also be frustrated if they're classes without top tier decks.) Blizzard could just as easily see what decks you have constructed, or see what your play rates are for different classes, and give you a quest that better matches your preferred constructed play.
But they give you this slightly harder quest in the hopes that it will push you to branch out over time, explore the playstyles of every class, and maybe find a class you didn't think you liked, but actually love. That kind of discovery is positive for the player, and it increases engagement, which in turn can increase revenue.
With all that in mind, I wouldn't expect them to change this approach at all. Varied quests encourages playing between formats, which is good for Blizzard. That said, I do like the idea of swapping Win with Play - maybe something like swapping all "Win X" quests with "Play X + 2" or "Play X + 3" to reduce the burden of completing a quest for a format you don't like.
That's really cool - I had no idea that "set" attribute existed. Thanks for the help!
Haha, right now my biggest question is how diligent the team will be about back-populating spell schools once rotation drops. It seems relevant (not unlike when they back-populated Elemental tags), but I don't think I've seen anything explicitly saying that they will do that.
That said, I like the idea of vulnerability or resistance to a spell type, but I suspect that if it were to be introduced, it would be used in very narrow circumstances. Adding such a feature could have lopsided balance impact (e.g. a card with resistance to holy would screw over Priest and Paladin, and do basically nothing to Mage).
I agree with you, but my point is that it was a really good Tempo Priest deck (a thing you claimed would never be a thing), and that a lot of the same pieces that made it effective exist in different forms today. It probably needs one or two more big plays and a little more card draw, but it's close to what it needs. For instance, it's possible that Shadowform will be the thing that makes it work. That's easy to scoff at, but Midrange Hunter (a perennially successful archetype) achieves success by whittling down the opponent with their hero power while managing tempo. Priest will be able to tutor Shadowform and buffs, both of which that kind of deck will want.
Tempo Priest has been a great deck before, so this idea that Blizzard is just pushing a junk archetype rings false to me. Back when the Boomsday Buffs came through (Summer 2019, I think), Buff Priest was hugely effective. (Here's a video from Kibler about the deck from July 2019.) The deck was so powerful they had to un-buff Extra Arms.
You're right that tempo decks rely on synergies, and that was true for the Buff Priest too (e.g. Grave Horror's synergy with cheap buffs), and they need decent card draw/resource generation. The landscape has changed, but there are some corollaries that suggest this could be a real deck in Year of the Gryphon. Crimson Clergy replaces Northshire Cleric, Voracious Reader replaces Acolyte of Pain, Power Word: Feast replaces Extra Arms, the Grave Horror spell synergies see some replacement with the self harm tempo package (Raise Dead, Brittlebone Destroyer, Flesh Giant, and Soulbound Ashtongue).
It doesn't look exactly the same as Boomsday's Buff Priest, and it doesn't look exactly like Libram Paladin, but there are a lot of good building blocks here, and it wouldn't take much more content to push this archetype over the edge.
We don't need to keep debating the details of Tempo Priest, but one last thing I'd like to bring up is that Libram/Broom Paladin spent a lot of time at the top of the tier list despite running relatively little card draw (often just Hand of A'dal and Salhet's Pride). I think the lesson there is that you don't need a ton of card draw if you can snowball early tempo with cheap buffs and your hero power. That's obviously a tougher thing for Priest to do, but cards like Crimson Clergy and Lightsteed and the buffed* Lightspawn help a lot with making the hero power a positive tempo play, and they don't need much more in the form of cheap buffs to consistently build on early game tempo. Paladin does a lot of that stuff better, yes, but I think Priest can get there too.
*I'm calling it a buff, since -1 cost is well worth the -1/-1 statline
Apologies - this turned into a longer response than I intended because I really love the Tempo Priest archetype, wish it had gotten more love over the last several expansions, and I see this set as hopeful for it.
Tempo Priest has been right on the edge of playable for a long time, and I would be careful not to underestimate it in the context of a rotation and a Core Set whose focus is clearly more on Tempo/Midrange play than the Classic/Basic sets. I tried a lot of Tempo Priest after Scholomance launched, and one of the biggest issues was turn 2 - it was easy to load up on useful 1-drops like Frazzled Freshman and Intrepid Initiate (or even Soulbound Ashtongue), but if you didn't get the perfect draw into Power Word: Feast you'd often have very little to do on turn 2.
For that reason, I think you're underselling Crimson Clergy a bit. He provides a relevant body on turn 1, and a meaningful way to leverage your hero power on turn 2. In many respects, that was the most important thing Northshire Cleric had going for it. Because of how many of Priest's 2-mana options are reactive cards and resource generation cards, a turn 2 hero power is commonplace. So, any viable tempo deck needs to be able maximize the hero power on turn 2. A value trade into buffing your 1-drop into a vanilla 2-drop statline is nothing to scoff at. And in the right match-up, "Crimson Clergy into Power Word: Feast + trade" can give you a 4/5 minion on turn 2 that can continue to scale its attack over time.
The important thing to note about cards like Shadowform and Shadowed Spirit isn't that they're knockout, amazing cards, but rather that they offer Priest a way to "switch into attack mode" and pressure down their opponent. This can be a real struggle in Tempo Priest because the Priest hero power strongly incentivizes value trading and board control, but does very little for you when it's time to make the shift over to beating down your opponent.
It's true card draw was a struggle for the deck - often if you didn't get Voracious Reader in time, you'd run out of gas. With that in mind, I think this rotation has more going for it than you give it credit for. Thrive in the Shadows provides deck-thinning and a useful tutor effect, either for buffs to keep your board trading up or reload in the form of Rally!. Also, Insight and Raise Dead are still available, and we may get more draw tools in the FitB expansion.
(One other shout-out here is the potential tempo sleeper for Priest - Nerubian Egg. By turn 3 you have access to two strong buffs: Power Word: Feast and Apotheosis. These make the egg a real threat. It also offers a very relevant deathrattle for Disciplinarian Gandling, which never really took off.)
I understand where you're coming from on this, but ultimately I think it's good to have less Charge in the Core Set. Hearthstone at its core is a tempo game, so I think the "Core Set" should reflect that, and that swapping Charge for Rush on most cards achieves that. You also see this reflected in removal of cards like Pyroblast.
Removing those sources of direct face damage leaves room to introduce new chargers and other direct damage tools in expansions. I don't think they'll introduce a ton of Chargers, mind you - it's still a keyword that can produce some very frustrating metagames - but because the baseline for direct face damage is much lower in the Core Set, they can now introduce new direct damage cards they might have otherwise been afraid to put into the game for fear of hyper-degenerate aggro metas.
I think AngryShuckie got it right - he's not a spectacularly powerful card, but he creates the ability to play "Speed Hearthstone," which seems like a fun option to have for friendly games.
If you assume for a minute that people like the original effect of Nozdormu in principle, I think there are two questions the design team has to resolve: "is this an effect that is healthy for the game when your opponent drops it on you?" and "how can we make that effect consistent when you want it, but not the kind of thing that punishes a player arbitrarily?"
For the first question, I think it's pretty clear that his effect is very bad for the game if one player is able to take advantage of it and harm the other player's ability to interact with the game (e.g. a 15 second turn on mobile is pretty rough, and if you happened to be AFK during your opponent's turn, they might have just stolen a turn from you with that play, which feels bad). On the second question, Nozdormu today typically shows up when he's randomly generated, and it's usually a surprise/punishment that screws over the active player because you weren't expecting to suddenly lose the rest of your turn. If he's generated during some long animation, that loss of time is all the more frustrating.
So by making this something each player gets to opt into, you set the effect up to create much more positive experiences when it's active. Honestly, I think it's great. The only way to make a truly "playable" Nozdormu would have been to change the effect entirely, which I think would have been less fun/unique.
Now that a card reference in Hearthstone could reference a Core Set version or non-Core Set version (e.g. Drain Soul in KotFT deals 2 damage, while it deals 3 damage in the Gryphon Core Set, Sprint has different costs between Gryphon Core Set and Basic), the site will need to support specifying a version of the card when linking to the card in forums, decks, etc.
There's a ton to pick apart with the new Core Set (available to peruse now), but I figured it would be nice to have a thread where people can post their reactions. Here's some of what I'm particularly excited about after reviewing the set:
No one is saying that new players aren't getting a better deal out of this - I conceded as much in my original response. But new player and veteran player value are independent variables. Your complaint is with what you believe to be a misrepresentation of veteran player value in gaming media, so any comparisons to new player value only serves to conflate issues. This is exactly why I got into questions of fairness and refunds in an earlier post (not based on H0lySatan's post, as I mentioned) - you're using the difference between new player and veteran player value to claim misrepresentation, which implicitly brings up these questions of fair value to veteran players.
It's clear we're not ever going to see eye-to-eye on this, so I'm not going to continue to engage on this beyond this final post. The question of "will the cost of the game go down" is the heart of this issue here. It's clear you believe that switching from Classic/Basic sets to the new Core Set will be net-neutral in terms of what percentage of any given deck comes from "core cards" vs expansion cards, and therefore won't impact the cost of meta decks, which in turn means it won't impact the practical costs of keeping up with the meta after an expansion. If that's true, then the switch will certainly add zero economic value for any player who already had a full Classic set.
But as I've already cited in an earlier post, Celestalon has said we should expect the base power level of the Core Set to be higher than Classic/Basic because, as a rotating set, it can afford to be stronger than an evergreen set can without introducing long-term balance issues. Whether you choose to believe that Celestalon is honestly expressing the intent of the Hearthstone team is up to you, but if the Core Set is stronger than the Classic/Basic sets, the natural result will be a higher percentage of meta decks coming from core cards, which in turn makes it cheaper to keep up-to-date with the meta. That benefit is conferred on every player, veteran or not. And that is what people are putting forth in these articles - the idea that the Core Set will be stronger and more valuable than the Classic/Basic sets ever were.
Frankly, I think I am responding to your comments directly with this question of sunk cost, but I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that.
With respect to your only point here - that veteran players gain no immediate financial benefit from the introduction of a Core set - that is a sufficiently narrow understanding of "cost of Hearthstone" that I actually agree with it. But I also think it's an utterly useless way to discuss the cost of the game, which is why you don't see any of these articles using that framing. Instead they're talking about the typical understanding of "cost of Hearthstone" - that is, the cost over time to stay current with the metagame. You could make the same "no immediate benefit" argument with respect to players with full collections and the recent duplicate protection changes - after all, they have all the current cards and don't derive immediate value from duplicate protection - but no one believes that duplicate protection has no benefit to veteran players because eventually they'll be opening more packs and trying to stay up-to-date with an evolving meta.
Here's a more concrete example: imagine your local area is decreasing sales tax by 1% effective today. You might say that the sales tax decrease doesn't have any immediate benefit to you because you're not shopping today, but that's an arbitrary and disingenuous way to discuss the impact of such a change.
Similarly, the Core Set change has no immediate financial impact on players because they're not spending money on it. But so long as it decrease the ongoing costs of staying up-to-date with Hearthstone, it will benefit veteran and new players alike. That is what all of these articles are saying - over time, the cost of the game will go down thanks to this change.
I apologize if you think I'm putting words in your mouth. I merely meant to state my understanding of your argument explicitly as an anchor for my counterargument. I understand full well that you think the Core Set is good for the game, and did not mean to suggest otherwise.
My point in bringing up the notion of a refund was merely to point out that most people who have a full Classic set have already derived a great deal of value from the resources they've spent to get it. This gets at a question of fairness, which I believe is implicit in any notion that this change is worse for some players and not others (in this case, veteran players with full Classic sets and not new players).
That I appeared to be conflating opinions is mere coincidence. I started writing this post well before H0lySatan posted, but was delayed in finishing it until much later. I hadn't even read that post before providing my view.
I think you've largely side-stepped my point about sunk cost by saying that the value of these Classic cards has decreased. That's entirely true, but has nothing to do with the sunk cost fallacy. The sunk cost fallacy is treating the value of a veteran player's full set of Classic cards as a relevant input for the decision to spend money on Hearthstone expansions simply because they've spent resources (money, time, etc.) on getting it. Perhaps if they were taking away the Classic set without replacing it, you could make that case; that would mean you'd need even more cards from the expansion to build good decks, which would very obviously drive up the cost.
But because they're replacing it, the Classic set's value is irrelevant to the decision to buy into an expansion/spend more time playing Hearthstone - this is true regardless of whether you've sunk money or time or both into it, and it's true regardless of whether it has lost or gained value as a set. Only the value of the new Core Set can be used to inform whether Hearthstone is getting more or less expensive (i.e. whether you'll need more or fewer expansion cards to make a good deck in Standard). Blizzard has been clear that their aim is to make the Core Set more relevant to the metagame than the Classic and Basic sets are today, so that should result in lower costs moving forward for every player.
If I understand you right, you're suggesting that this is economically bad for veteran players because they've already spent a lot of money on their full Classic collection, which they were told would be evergreen in Hearthstone. If that's what you're arguing, then your argument is based on the sunk cost fallacy. Any money veteran players have spent on their Classic collection is gone, so at the point that you've collected a full collection of Classic cards, the only economic question left in the game is whether or not you're going to keep spending money on future expansions. To suggest otherwise is to assert that the sunk cost of having a full Classic set should weigh in on your present economic choices, which it plainly shouldn't.
So, if the Core Set enables you to make a meta deck with a higher percentage of "Core" cards (i.e. Evergreen cards today, Core soon) than before without costing you a cent, then you have fewer expansion cards you need to buy or craft to build your deck, and can therefore save money and in-game resources that you might have otherwise spent. This is why the Core set is economically positive for all players. The Tavern Brawl thing is an added (and long overdue) bonus on top of that, but it's not strictly necessary.
The other part of your argument that I think might merit some attention is this idea that Blizzard promised that these cards would be evergreen. No one ever bemoans the fact that expansion sets rotate (even though this same complaint could just as easily be lobbed at annual Standard rotations) because we expect those sets to rotate. Ultimately, though, I think the question you have to ask is "would knowing that this set would rotate five years after it became the evergreen Standard set have changed your behavior?" At some level, that's a personal question each player would have to answer for themselves, but I think there are two things worth noting about the question generally. First, in those five years you could have picked up 260 classic packs for free from Tavern Brawls. Second, buying into five years of the evergreen set would probably still yield a fair value when compared to a single year of an expansion set. It's hard for me to believe knowing the Classic set only had a five-year run ahead of it would have changed anything that anyone did.
So, to the extent that you feel this is unfair to veteran players, and that some refund is due for anyone who spent money on the Classic set because of this promise, I guess all I can say is "get over it." For any player who enjoyed their time playing Classic cards, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that they're owed something simply because those cards are rotating, and new players won't have to buy into the Classic set in the future. Some of the first cards I crafted were Sylvanas Windrunner and Ragnaros the Firelord because of how powerful they were, and they were among the first cards to be Hall-of-Famed. I didn't think Blizzard owed me anything because I had enjoyed all of the time I had spent playing those cards and gotten my money's worth out of them.
The primary purpose of the Core Set is to anchor class themes for the year and provide a fresh baseline for the play experience, but it has the added benefit of upping the baseline power level of the "base set" of Hearthstone's Standard format. The result should be a higher percentage of meta-relevant/competitive cards in the set relative to the current Evergreen Basic/Classic sets (e.g. even classically powerful cards like Al'Akir the Windlord and Lord Jaraxxus haven't seen play in ages.). Because the Core Set is free, and will be regularly refreshed, the net result should be a decrease in the "necessary annual spend" in order to get one or more meta decks constructed.
It's certainly true that this is a much bigger boon for new players and players who never had a full set of Classic cards, but it's being positioned as financially better for all players because of this "upping the baseline." Perhaps, once the full set is out and people get their hands on it, people will find that it does not have a higher percentage of "playable" cards, and therefore doesn't save veteran players any money. But Blizzard's intent on this is clear. From Celestalon's Q&A - "Since Core is refreshed each year, we can make Core cards more consistently impactful and relevant to the current meta." The Basic and Classic sets have seen a ton of hall-of-fames and nerfs to keep them from crowding out expansion cards year after year after year, but that doesn't have to happen any more, so we can expect these cards to be better/more relevant. Getting relevant cards for free drives down the cost of the game.
There's probably some truth to this, but I think it's also worth noting that this format is consistent with the promise of the wild format - namely, "you get to play the classic decks you loved, just like you remember them." This is why they'd been un-nerfing some cards when they got Hall-of-Famed, and the Classic mode offers an opportunity to make good on that promise without causing balance issues in Wild (or any future format that allows for Basic and Classic cards).
Hah, well, that's disappointing but not surprising. Sounds like they have some room to fix up their templating, because according to the Finja page on Gamepedia (https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Finja,_the_Flying_Star), he triggers even if he takes lethal damage.