There is a difference between attacking and dying. Sonya does not bounce itself, because she is already dead when the ability should trigger, so there is no minion with said ability to trigger anymore. Whereas ETC trades, attack ends, his ability triggers, he dies.
Similar to how something that is supposed to die can survive, if it was buffed "while dying". The order of actions that need to resolve matter.
That sounds like good reasoning, and a little bit of testing with Darius Crowley and Festeroot Hulk confirmed the distinction between attack and death phases (Crowley doesn't buff himself if he dies in the attack, but the Hulk does).
The bit I dislike is that similar logic would lead me to expect Wild Pyromancer to trigger if the spell kills him because the spell has been played before he dies, but he doesn't. It is not obvious that casting a spell should include the death phase.
Wild Pyromancer used to have consistency issues too before Blizzard did its revamp of the "whenever" and "after" spell triggers. There isn't really a generic "death phase" for spells because a spell doesn't necessarily interact with minions at all, which is probably why it doesn't map perfectly onto the templating for attacks. The spell is resolved when all effects from the spell are resolved (including the death of minions if relevant), and that's when the "after" template kicks in. By contrast, attacking always deals some damage, so there's always a need to check for minion or hero death.
There appear to be four versions of these kinds of attack templates (that I've been able to find):
So, spells look more like "cast spell -> whenever spell triggers -> resolve spell effects -> after spell triggers" while attacks look more like "declare attack -> whenever attack triggers -> deal damage -> after attack triggers -> check for deaths -> whenever attack and kill triggers -> resolve deaths -> after attack and kill triggers."
Ultimately, this seems pretty consistent between the spells and attacks, and E.T.C by this description has the right behavior. That said, there's probably room to change some of the templating on old cards to increase clarity.
For instance, Hulking Overfiend, Giant Sand Worm, and Batterhead all feature the same basic behavior - when they kill a minion, they get to attack again - but the Giant Sand Worm has a whenever trigger. I doubt those would produce different results in practice (as none of them buff themselves, and any other buff would be a separate "whenever" vs "after" effect), so having them use different templates is confusing.
By contrast, the difference is very relevant for The Boogeymonster and Darius Crowley, where the "whenever" vs "after" difference can determine* whether or not your minion survives combat because of timing of the self-buff.
*Technically I haven't tested The Boogeymonster for this, so I encourage someone to test this and call me out if I'm wrong. If I'm wrong, then I'd argue that's a bug with The Boogeymonster based on the templating it has. (This should be the same timing as Finja, the Flying Star, but while that's a card I did play back in the day, I don't remember the effect trigger timing in detail.)
I don't think it's as simple as "still need DMF vs don't" in terms of saving packs. You will typically collect every common and rare in a set after about 50 packs, but you still need way more cards than that to have a complete collection. We can expect a lot of rares and commons in the set (based on Galakrond's Awakening). After that ~50 packs, you start getting duplicate commons and rares whose dust value is way less than the cost to craft them.
But if you save your packs and wait until the mini-set comes out, some of those commons and rares that would have been worth very little go back up to fully value. Now, commons and rares don't cost a ton to craft, so maybe it's not enough dust to care about it, but there's clearly a stark difference in terms of value.
This seems like a very reasonable approach to selling these minisets (costs less than a traditional adventure mini expansion like Galakrond's Awakening, and lacks solo content), and overall I'm very happy with it. But for anyone who has been saving up packs and is now instead going to buy the cards this way, saving the packs feels kind of dumb in retrospect. There's no loss of value, of course, but you could have had that value earlier...
I'm not complaining, mind you, I'm just hoping that they get the kinks worked out on how they want the game's economy to work with all of these new features (the revamped rewards track, the standardization of a mini-expansion, etc.) so that this becomes predictable for future expansions.
Art for this challenge is going to be tough...a lot of the O.C.s just have their original card art, and maybe a single piece of concept art from an expansion reveal video. I guess it's okay to reuse that art, but typically a new version of any character comes with new art.
I'm not sure that we're really saying different things here.
Underlying my argument is the idea that if the only purpose of ranking was to tell a player how good they are, there'd be no need for a distinction between internal and external rankings. The externally-facing ladder rankings, however, are a way to reward you for taking part in the game. That is, not only for being good at the game (which drives up both rankings), but also for putting time into the format. I could have outstanding MMR, but if I decide to play zero ranked games in a season I'll still end up at Bronze 10 at the end of the month. (But, notably, my internal MMR will decay much more slowly.)
What I've described as "ranked season rewards" is exactly the "arbitrary way [Blizzard chooses] ]to encourage people to play the mode" that you're describing, so I think these are largely the same.
By comparing your winrate against the winrate overall of the deck you're piloting. For at least all the people that play meta decks, there is a lot of data to compare against. And if you really play a deck that is different to all metadecks by like 4 or more cards (just spitballing here) then by winrate alone.
Do you have any evidence you can cite for this claim? I've never seen anything from Blizzard that suggests this, nor have I seen anyone else online claim that it's true.
It's hard to overstate how unnecessary this thread is - your decklist is exactly one card off away from a straight copy/paste of the top Soul Demon Hunter list on HSReplay (1x Consume Magic swapped for 1x Relentless Pursuit). Even if everyone weren't experiencing this deck all the time on ladder, HSReplay's match overview for the deck tells you everything you need to know about how Libram Paladin and Control Warrior prey on it.
All that said, kudos on the much-higher-than-average win rate and on reaching legend.
what is the point of having a rank if you always face the same level of opponents?
It's not clear to me what the point is for Battlegrounds, but I think the case for it in the constructed formats is pretty straightforward: your external ranking determines your ranked season rewards, while your internal MMR determines how to best match you up for fun/challenging games. It doesn't seem like they're announcing any particular season rewards for Battlegrounds, so the distinction may not offer any value today. But perhaps they'll add those soon, and this is just a step in that direction.
Quote From Morthasa
How would you climb if the MMR tries to always pair you with opponents of your own level (which would lead to a 50% average winrate)?
MMR is based on the long view of your historical win rates. Again thinking about constructed formats here, but even if matching were always perfect, you'd still have win streaks and deck choices playing a major role in your shorter term success despite being paired with opponents who have similar long term success. For example, if I'm playing on ladder, at a ranked floor, and struggling to make progress against a sea of Aggro Demon Hunters, I could make a control deck to specifically target them and try to "artificially" improve my win chances despite the 50% average winrate that my MMR match is trying to give me.
Battlegrounds has certain parallels. If I see that both Beasts and Murlocs are available, I'm more likely to want to pick Jandice Barov, for example, because I have better odds of getting early tokens that I can turn into golden units with a Brann + Khadgar combo. Knowing the interplay between available tribes and available heroes may give you an edge despite having similar MMRs. Then, of course, there's a component of good luck with your rolls. That will average out over time, but in the short term could help you jump between ranked floors
Of course, this all assuming perfect matching, which is itself impossible (even if there's a perfect match out there, they might not be online at the same time you are), so some amount of noise in the matching can also account for moving between ranked floors.
Shukie mentioned the pandemic and I didn't thought about that being a slowing factor and a problem with testing the game if people work from home and don't test as well it as normally (that explains the insane amount of bugs), but you are being too forgiving...
They did this thing of ruining the meta and then solve it to get praise a lot of times making blatantly overpowered cards (KOFT druid, DoD shaman, AOO demon hunter) and also they nerfed classic cards for cards they introduced in those expansions making the game even more expensive...
I assume when you say that they nerfed classic cards, you're referring to Innervate, Nourish, and Wild Growth, which were nerfed during Knights of the Frozen Throne and Rastakhan's Rumble. It's true that they nerfed these basic and classic cards to make room for expansion cards, but again, I think your conclusion that this was done intentionally to drive up the cost of the game isn't really right. All of those classic cards were too good, and therefore saw play in every Druid deck. In a game where you can only put 30 cards in a deck, having three cards be automatic two-of inclusions in every Druid deck meant far less room for any new cards to see play. Deck building and game play both get very boring when the game looks like that.
Brian Kibler has talked about this a lot - there are real risks to game health when you have an evergreen set, because new cards only get to see play when they're stronger than the evergreen cards. In classes like Druid, that was often not the case, and in classes like Priest, that was too often the case (meaning that Priest could be great or trash based entirely on the strength of its expansion cards). Over time we've seen them address the power level of numerous evergreen cards, but that risk is always there. This is why Kibler advocates for having no evergreen set. That would allow these current evergreen cards to keep their high power levels because they'd rotate out (and perhaps back in) over time.
The MTG approach, by comparison, doesn't use evergreen sets. Instead, they introduce a core set every year to act as the thematic backbone for each color, and typically include lots of reprints in each core set. The result of having lots of familiar building blocks for each color is very similar, but it lets them take cards out that are too good, or limit the overlap of cards which are uniquely powerful together. There are a lot of upsides to this approach, but it has had issues mapping onto the digital formats of the game, and MTGA has had to introduce a "reprint protection" because fans were so mad about constantly opening reprints (which was driving up the cost for anyone with a large collection).
Ultimately, I think this problem of "set balance" is much harder than you're treating it. You need collecting cards to feel like it matters, but you can't just let people play with every old card or you'd end up with rampant powercreep or a horrible new player experience because new players would be punished for having fledgling collections. (This is why the Wild format is such a shitshow.) MTG attempts to solve some of this with different game formats that limit the number of legal sets, and Blizzard is trying the same thing (that's why Duels offers a subset of old and new sets - to give players how have lots of old cards a chance to see them shine).
While I've seen nothing about whether they'll swap them each cycle, I expect they'll have no reason to swap them for a while (since there are enough portraits to cover a couple of years for everyone). Perhaps they'll add some next year, but I wouldn't expect removals.
I do not think so, the Cram session deck building requirement is very steep and it does not really fit into mage archetypes. While Acrobatics is plain powercreep on other class cards and is not played because DH have even more ridiculous card draws, mostly generating tempo while drawing cards. Like Silence and draw a card. Cast 4/1 and gain 4 attack and draw a card. Draw 3 cards and reduce their cost to 0.
People love to cry "powercreep" when powerful cards are released, but strictly speaking I don't think it's valid for comparisons either a) between class and neutral cards or b) between basic and non-basic cards (particularly when you're looking across classes). For instance, you'd never hear anyone complain about how Subdue is a powercreeped Hunter's Mark, or how Combustion is a powercreeped Shadow Bolt, or how both Time Rip and Malevolent Strike are powercreeped Assassinate's. This is for a couple of reasons.
First, the basic set is designed to express the basic strengths/weaknesses of the class, but many of the cards are intentionally weaker to avoid having them crowd out expansion cards. (This was a common problem with cards like pre-nerf Innervate - it showed up too often in Druid decks because it was better than even expansion ramp tools meant to fit that same slot in the deck.) Second, classes have different baselines for their strengths and weaknesses, so seeing cards which look like powercreep across classes (as with your [Hearthstone Card (Arcane Insight) Not Found] example) often just reflects proper adjustments for the different baselines each class has. Demon Hunter is way better at card draw than Mage, which finds itself at the nexus of drawing and generating resources. As such, we'd expect Demon Hunter to get more out of an equivalent cost, particularly when one is an expansion card and the other isn't.
Regarding the high power Demon Hunter cards you've outlined, you're being a bit unfair about what these DH cards do. Consume Magic doesn't always draw a card, sometimes it's just a worse Silence. Stiltstepper doesn't always grant +4 attack, it requires you to play whatever you topdeck get the attack buff. Skull of Gul'dan doesn't inherently reduce costs, and even when it does it reduces by 3, not to 0.
These may seem like arbitrary distinctions when, in practice, these cards usually function as you've described. But that's really the core problem - these "max value" interactions are too common because they all have the same basic build-around requirement (namely, to run a low curve Demon Hunter deck). By contrast, you basically never see a good higher curve Demon Hunter deck. So, the biggest issue is that the best cards in Demon Hunter all push a single archetype because they all have pretty similar requirements to maximize their value.
Dh have more powerful cards. Example - draw 2 more cards
versus
Comparing Arcane Intellect to Acrobatics really isn't fair because one is an evergreen basic card and the other is an expansion card that will eventually rotate. The basic set sets out what the class does, and the expansion cards are almost always more poweful.
A more appropriate comparison would be Cram Session to Acrobatics. Both require you build your deck in a certain way to maximize value, and both can draw well above the average number of cards for their cost if your deck is optimized to leverage them.
Mmy central point is that they solved mostly problems they introduced instead of solving the main issue (long lasting pain), they do this a lot of times introducing issues then FINALLY solving them.. like with Patches the Pirate and Baku the Mooneater they introduced so many problems with those that were complained for ages.. and then getting the praise for solving them.
sure you can also get the other analogy from this tale which is also a legit one that people complain about stuff that are not so bad, I like this tale cause it can got both ways:
the doctor is introduced a problem that didn't exist and solved it and then got the praise.
OR
The person is complaining about pain but it's not so bad in the end.
Which are both stances about the battle pass, that's why I posted it.
Of course I am on the patient side but I am also looking at the other side of the coin, did Blizzard did this kind of thing just to get praises about them fixing the problem and making us forget about the long time pain?
The first interpretation you've offered - that the doctor has caused harm simply to later get praise for it - is a misinterpretation of the "get rid of the goat" parable. This is made plain by the historical context of the story. It is a traditional Jewish story in which a poor (but faithful) man calls on God to alleviate his misery, and God (depending on the retelling) either tells him to get a goat or gives him a goat, and then the story proceeds basically as you've written it. Over time, God would be replaced in the story with a rabbi, or a wiseman, or (today) with a doctor.
Given that God is the original adviser in the story, and that God is good in the Abrahamic traditions, the point was never to suggest that God has maliciously ruined the man's life for the sake of praise. In fact, he already has the man's praise, as he is faithful when he originally calls on God. God in the story is teaching the man perspective and gratitude for what he has. So, the second interpretation has always been the actual meaning of the story. That's plain to see even in the modern, secular retelling of the story you're offering. Doctors swear a Hippocratic Oath, which first says to do no harm. The purpose of replacing God or a rabbi with a doctor is to make the story connect more effectively to secular audiences while maintaining the notion that the adviser in the story has the man's best interests at heart. That the secular version is now open to such misinterpretations as you've offered today is probably a reflection of a broader, modern distrust in institutions. But at this point I've probably spent more time than necessary on religion, history, and politics, as this is a space for discussing CCGs.
So, to go back to the argument about Hearthstone, Blizzard does not benefit from alienating its fans, and it was clear from the start that they weren't trying to. Looking back to the earliest announcements of this new system in August, Dean Ayala was quoted on Reddit as saying "Our intent with the system is for it to be upside for all players. We've done many checks on different player segments to try and make sure that is the case no matter how you play. Despite all this, we're making XP per level and XP bonuses as tuning knobs in case our predictions were incorrect. We can push legendary quests or give out additional rewards during events as well." As I argued in a separate forum post, we have seen these good faith efforts to make the game better for everyone over the course of the entire year.
There's no question that they were wrong in their assumptions, but it seems clear that they acted in good faith, and that they have made major changes to address the cases where they missed the mark. You can feel that the system doesn't go far enough to address the cost of the game, but that really has nothing to do with whether or not Blizzard is trying to make the game more rewarding than it has been in the past.
And frankly, I think the arguments about slow fixes to cards like Patches the Pirate and Baku the Mooneater are an unreasonable comparison to the rewards track. There were (and still are) a lot of players who enjoyed both of those cards in their original states. For that reason, any change would inevitably have a negative impact on some player segments, and therefore required a lot more consideration before they could proceed. But the rewards track change was intended from the start to simply offer more stuff to everyone. Again, you can say it's not enough, but by the end of the adjustments no one will be getting less, making these changes easier to roll out from a community PR standpoint.
So why were they? You knew exactly what you were doing and did it anyway. You're only changing things now because people called you out on your bullshit.
There's way too strong a desire to associate malice with the Hearthstone development team. (Apparently no one in the Hearthstone community has heard of Hanlon's Razor...)
As was already noted elsewhere on this thread, it's possible they intended to grant everyone an Old God as their "bonus legendary" and that changes were made over the course of development that threw that assumption out of whack. It's also possible they thought people would gravitate toward playing Duels to complete that quest, as it's pretty easy to get Darkmoon Faire Old Gods in that mode. Maybe they just thought adding that quest and the Play 50 Corrupt cards would get people excited about playing Darkmoon Faire cards, and that the cost of rerolling was low enough that it wouldn't matter if any individual player wanted to skip it because they'd get lots of chances to do so over the course of a week (and would be able to roll over one weekly quest to the next week if it came to that).
I don't work in the gaming industry, but I do work in software, and I've seen lots of examples of teams with the best intentions for positive user experiences making mistakes and frustrating users. It's not easy, and Blizzard has (as far back as August) been up front about how they were designing the system to be flexible so that if there were issues, they could go in and make changes. In retrospect, it feels like the biggest gap here was Blizzard thinking "rewards are a four month process, so it's okay if you have to roll over quests week to week, and it's okay if we wait until a major event to give you bonus XP, etc., because you have four months" while the community was thinking "rewards are a day-to-day event and I want to feel gratified every day I play." That gap can explain a lot of the missteps here without any need to assert malice.
It would have been nice if they had said "we hear you, we're working on it" a bit earlier, just to let people know they were listening, but I'm honestly not surprised they didn't given how incredibly toxic the Hearthstone community can be.
The priest achievement You Ghuuna be sorry(spend 100 life as priest on cards) can, surprisingly, completed with Seadevil Stinger in wild in murloc Warlock deck.
Part of me hopes Blizzard doesn't respond, part of me really wants to see that most, if not all, players hit level 50 and get around the same amount of gold they would have before. Just so I can get some good hardy laughs out of the goldmine that r/hearthstonecirclejerk will become.
This to me is the biggest thing - the rewards track is a four month process, we're only a quarter the way through it, and we're not even past the typical Winter Veil seasonal event. Despite that, the loudest voices in the room are still raging against Blizzard about it because they don't think they'll have enough gold in April. Dean Ayala was quoted as saying "We’re making XP per level and XP bonuses as tuning knobs in case our predictions are incorrect." I think it's clear from the way that Blizzard was talking about this new system back in the summer that they want it to be a positive change for everyone, and that they're working toward that. It is simply too early to pass judgement on how much gold you'll be able to rack up.
The battle pass doesn't offer very much, and it's reasonable to be mad if you bought it thinking it would give you more, it's valid that leveling up feels slow (so maybe they need more levels with smaller gaps in between), and it was valid that packs as late level rewards were bad, but they changed that. There's still room for improvement, but there's also time for improvement and a lot to appreciate about Blizzard's approach to Hearthstone in the last year. People ought to reserve judgement about their end-of-expansion gold until the actual end of the expansion.
The idea that order matters for various "start of game" effects is all well and good, but those "start of game" effects ought to trigger whether or not the card ends up in your opening hand, and in this case it didn't. The pieces of C'Thun never shuffled into my deck, I just got the 10-drop at the start of the game.
Forgot to take a screenshot, but I added C'Thun, the Shattered to my deck, and got the Small Pouches treasure. It pulled C'Thun into my hand at the start of the game, and as a result his "start of game" effect never triggered - I just had him in hand.
Wild Pyromancer used to have consistency issues too before Blizzard did its revamp of the "whenever" and "after" spell triggers. There isn't really a generic "death phase" for spells because a spell doesn't necessarily interact with minions at all, which is probably why it doesn't map perfectly onto the templating for attacks. The spell is resolved when all effects from the spell are resolved (including the death of minions if relevant), and that's when the "after" template kicks in. By contrast, attacking always deals some damage, so there's always a need to check for minion or hero death.
There appear to be four versions of these kinds of attack templates (that I've been able to find):
So, spells look more like "cast spell -> whenever spell triggers -> resolve spell effects -> after spell triggers" while attacks look more like "declare attack -> whenever attack triggers -> deal damage -> after attack triggers -> check for deaths -> whenever attack and kill triggers -> resolve deaths -> after attack and kill triggers."
Ultimately, this seems pretty consistent between the spells and attacks, and E.T.C by this description has the right behavior. That said, there's probably room to change some of the templating on old cards to increase clarity.
For instance, Hulking Overfiend, Giant Sand Worm, and Batterhead all feature the same basic behavior - when they kill a minion, they get to attack again - but the Giant Sand Worm has a whenever trigger. I doubt those would produce different results in practice (as none of them buff themselves, and any other buff would be a separate "whenever" vs "after" effect), so having them use different templates is confusing.
By contrast, the difference is very relevant for The Boogeymonster and Darius Crowley, where the "whenever" vs "after" difference can determine* whether or not your minion survives combat because of timing of the self-buff.
*Technically I haven't tested The Boogeymonster for this, so I encourage someone to test this and call me out if I'm wrong. If I'm wrong, then I'd argue that's a bug with The Boogeymonster based on the templating it has. (This should be the same timing as Finja, the Flying Star, but while that's a card I did play back in the day, I don't remember the effect trigger timing in detail.)
I don't think it's as simple as "still need DMF vs don't" in terms of saving packs. You will typically collect every common and rare in a set after about 50 packs, but you still need way more cards than that to have a complete collection. We can expect a lot of rares and commons in the set (based on Galakrond's Awakening). After that ~50 packs, you start getting duplicate commons and rares whose dust value is way less than the cost to craft them.
But if you save your packs and wait until the mini-set comes out, some of those commons and rares that would have been worth very little go back up to fully value. Now, commons and rares don't cost a ton to craft, so maybe it's not enough dust to care about it, but there's clearly a stark difference in terms of value.
This seems like a very reasonable approach to selling these minisets (costs less than a traditional adventure mini expansion like Galakrond's Awakening, and lacks solo content), and overall I'm very happy with it. But for anyone who has been saving up packs and is now instead going to buy the cards this way, saving the packs feels kind of dumb in retrospect. There's no loss of value, of course, but you could have had that value earlier...
I'm not complaining, mind you, I'm just hoping that they get the kinks worked out on how they want the game's economy to work with all of these new features (the revamped rewards track, the standardization of a mini-expansion, etc.) so that this becomes predictable for future expansions.
I'm pretty sure the 900 XP quests are there to give people who love min-maxing games something to do.
I've found myself very annoyed by the shuffle animation, but the prize turn animation hasn't been such a nuisance for me yet.
Art for this challenge is going to be tough...a lot of the O.C.s just have their original card art, and maybe a single piece of concept art from an expansion reveal video. I guess it's okay to reuse that art, but typically a new version of any character comes with new art.
I'm not sure that we're really saying different things here.
Underlying my argument is the idea that if the only purpose of ranking was to tell a player how good they are, there'd be no need for a distinction between internal and external rankings. The externally-facing ladder rankings, however, are a way to reward you for taking part in the game. That is, not only for being good at the game (which drives up both rankings), but also for putting time into the format. I could have outstanding MMR, but if I decide to play zero ranked games in a season I'll still end up at Bronze 10 at the end of the month. (But, notably, my internal MMR will decay much more slowly.)
What I've described as "ranked season rewards" is exactly the "arbitrary way [Blizzard chooses] ]to encourage people to play the mode" that you're describing, so I think these are largely the same.
Do you have any evidence you can cite for this claim? I've never seen anything from Blizzard that suggests this, nor have I seen anyone else online claim that it's true.
It's hard to overstate how unnecessary this thread is - your decklist is exactly one card off away from a straight copy/paste of the top Soul Demon Hunter list on HSReplay (1x Consume Magic swapped for 1x Relentless Pursuit). Even if everyone weren't experiencing this deck all the time on ladder, HSReplay's match overview for the deck tells you everything you need to know about how Libram Paladin and Control Warrior prey on it.
All that said, kudos on the much-higher-than-average win rate and on reaching legend.
It's not clear to me what the point is for Battlegrounds, but I think the case for it in the constructed formats is pretty straightforward: your external ranking determines your ranked season rewards, while your internal MMR determines how to best match you up for fun/challenging games. It doesn't seem like they're announcing any particular season rewards for Battlegrounds, so the distinction may not offer any value today. But perhaps they'll add those soon, and this is just a step in that direction.
MMR is based on the long view of your historical win rates. Again thinking about constructed formats here, but even if matching were always perfect, you'd still have win streaks and deck choices playing a major role in your shorter term success despite being paired with opponents who have similar long term success. For example, if I'm playing on ladder, at a ranked floor, and struggling to make progress against a sea of Aggro Demon Hunters, I could make a control deck to specifically target them and try to "artificially" improve my win chances despite the 50% average winrate that my MMR match is trying to give me.
Battlegrounds has certain parallels. If I see that both Beasts and Murlocs are available, I'm more likely to want to pick Jandice Barov, for example, because I have better odds of getting early tokens that I can turn into golden units with a Brann + Khadgar combo. Knowing the interplay between available tribes and available heroes may give you an edge despite having similar MMRs. Then, of course, there's a component of good luck with your rolls. That will average out over time, but in the short term could help you jump between ranked floors
Of course, this all assuming perfect matching, which is itself impossible (even if there's a perfect match out there, they might not be online at the same time you are), so some amount of noise in the matching can also account for moving between ranked floors.
I assume when you say that they nerfed classic cards, you're referring to Innervate, Nourish, and Wild Growth, which were nerfed during Knights of the Frozen Throne and Rastakhan's Rumble. It's true that they nerfed these basic and classic cards to make room for expansion cards, but again, I think your conclusion that this was done intentionally to drive up the cost of the game isn't really right. All of those classic cards were too good, and therefore saw play in every Druid deck. In a game where you can only put 30 cards in a deck, having three cards be automatic two-of inclusions in every Druid deck meant far less room for any new cards to see play. Deck building and game play both get very boring when the game looks like that.
Brian Kibler has talked about this a lot - there are real risks to game health when you have an evergreen set, because new cards only get to see play when they're stronger than the evergreen cards. In classes like Druid, that was often not the case, and in classes like Priest, that was too often the case (meaning that Priest could be great or trash based entirely on the strength of its expansion cards). Over time we've seen them address the power level of numerous evergreen cards, but that risk is always there. This is why Kibler advocates for having no evergreen set. That would allow these current evergreen cards to keep their high power levels because they'd rotate out (and perhaps back in) over time.
The MTG approach, by comparison, doesn't use evergreen sets. Instead, they introduce a core set every year to act as the thematic backbone for each color, and typically include lots of reprints in each core set. The result of having lots of familiar building blocks for each color is very similar, but it lets them take cards out that are too good, or limit the overlap of cards which are uniquely powerful together. There are a lot of upsides to this approach, but it has had issues mapping onto the digital formats of the game, and MTGA has had to introduce a "reprint protection" because fans were so mad about constantly opening reprints (which was driving up the cost for anyone with a large collection).
Ultimately, I think this problem of "set balance" is much harder than you're treating it. You need collecting cards to feel like it matters, but you can't just let people play with every old card or you'd end up with rampant powercreep or a horrible new player experience because new players would be punished for having fledgling collections. (This is why the Wild format is such a shitshow.) MTG attempts to solve some of this with different game formats that limit the number of legal sets, and Blizzard is trying the same thing (that's why Duels offers a subset of old and new sets - to give players how have lots of old cards a chance to see them shine).
While I've seen nothing about whether they'll swap them each cycle, I expect they'll have no reason to swap them for a while (since there are enough portraits to cover a couple of years for everyone). Perhaps they'll add some next year, but I wouldn't expect removals.
People love to cry "powercreep" when powerful cards are released, but strictly speaking I don't think it's valid for comparisons either a) between class and neutral cards or b) between basic and non-basic cards (particularly when you're looking across classes). For instance, you'd never hear anyone complain about how Subdue is a powercreeped Hunter's Mark, or how Combustion is a powercreeped Shadow Bolt, or how both Time Rip and Malevolent Strike are powercreeped Assassinate's. This is for a couple of reasons.
First, the basic set is designed to express the basic strengths/weaknesses of the class, but many of the cards are intentionally weaker to avoid having them crowd out expansion cards. (This was a common problem with cards like pre-nerf Innervate - it showed up too often in Druid decks because it was better than even expansion ramp tools meant to fit that same slot in the deck.) Second, classes have different baselines for their strengths and weaknesses, so seeing cards which look like powercreep across classes (as with your [Hearthstone Card (Arcane Insight) Not Found] example) often just reflects proper adjustments for the different baselines each class has. Demon Hunter is way better at card draw than Mage, which finds itself at the nexus of drawing and generating resources. As such, we'd expect Demon Hunter to get more out of an equivalent cost, particularly when one is an expansion card and the other isn't.
Regarding the high power Demon Hunter cards you've outlined, you're being a bit unfair about what these DH cards do. Consume Magic doesn't always draw a card, sometimes it's just a worse Silence. Stiltstepper doesn't always grant +4 attack, it requires you to play whatever you topdeck get the attack buff. Skull of Gul'dan doesn't inherently reduce costs, and even when it does it reduces by 3, not to 0.
These may seem like arbitrary distinctions when, in practice, these cards usually function as you've described. But that's really the core problem - these "max value" interactions are too common because they all have the same basic build-around requirement (namely, to run a low curve Demon Hunter deck). By contrast, you basically never see a good higher curve Demon Hunter deck. So, the biggest issue is that the best cards in Demon Hunter all push a single archetype because they all have pretty similar requirements to maximize their value.
Comparing Arcane Intellect to Acrobatics really isn't fair because one is an evergreen basic card and the other is an expansion card that will eventually rotate. The basic set sets out what the class does, and the expansion cards are almost always more poweful.
A more appropriate comparison would be Cram Session to Acrobatics. Both require you build your deck in a certain way to maximize value, and both can draw well above the average number of cards for their cost if your deck is optimized to leverage them.
The first interpretation you've offered - that the doctor has caused harm simply to later get praise for it - is a misinterpretation of the "get rid of the goat" parable. This is made plain by the historical context of the story. It is a traditional Jewish story in which a poor (but faithful) man calls on God to alleviate his misery, and God (depending on the retelling) either tells him to get a goat or gives him a goat, and then the story proceeds basically as you've written it. Over time, God would be replaced in the story with a rabbi, or a wiseman, or (today) with a doctor.
Given that God is the original adviser in the story, and that God is good in the Abrahamic traditions, the point was never to suggest that God has maliciously ruined the man's life for the sake of praise. In fact, he already has the man's praise, as he is faithful when he originally calls on God. God in the story is teaching the man perspective and gratitude for what he has. So, the second interpretation has always been the actual meaning of the story. That's plain to see even in the modern, secular retelling of the story you're offering. Doctors swear a Hippocratic Oath, which first says to do no harm. The purpose of replacing God or a rabbi with a doctor is to make the story connect more effectively to secular audiences while maintaining the notion that the adviser in the story has the man's best interests at heart. That the secular version is now open to such misinterpretations as you've offered today is probably a reflection of a broader, modern distrust in institutions. But at this point I've probably spent more time than necessary on religion, history, and politics, as this is a space for discussing CCGs.
So, to go back to the argument about Hearthstone, Blizzard does not benefit from alienating its fans, and it was clear from the start that they weren't trying to. Looking back to the earliest announcements of this new system in August, Dean Ayala was quoted on Reddit as saying "Our intent with the system is for it to be upside for all players. We've done many checks on different player segments to try and make sure that is the case no matter how you play. Despite all this, we're making XP per level and XP bonuses as tuning knobs in case our predictions were incorrect. We can push legendary quests or give out additional rewards during events as well." As I argued in a separate forum post, we have seen these good faith efforts to make the game better for everyone over the course of the entire year.
There's no question that they were wrong in their assumptions, but it seems clear that they acted in good faith, and that they have made major changes to address the cases where they missed the mark. You can feel that the system doesn't go far enough to address the cost of the game, but that really has nothing to do with whether or not Blizzard is trying to make the game more rewarding than it has been in the past.
And frankly, I think the arguments about slow fixes to cards like Patches the Pirate and Baku the Mooneater are an unreasonable comparison to the rewards track. There were (and still are) a lot of players who enjoyed both of those cards in their original states. For that reason, any change would inevitably have a negative impact on some player segments, and therefore required a lot more consideration before they could proceed. But the rewards track change was intended from the start to simply offer more stuff to everyone. Again, you can say it's not enough, but by the end of the adjustments no one will be getting less, making these changes easier to roll out from a community PR standpoint.
There's way too strong a desire to associate malice with the Hearthstone development team. (Apparently no one in the Hearthstone community has heard of Hanlon's Razor...)
As was already noted elsewhere on this thread, it's possible they intended to grant everyone an Old God as their "bonus legendary" and that changes were made over the course of development that threw that assumption out of whack. It's also possible they thought people would gravitate toward playing Duels to complete that quest, as it's pretty easy to get Darkmoon Faire Old Gods in that mode. Maybe they just thought adding that quest and the Play 50 Corrupt cards would get people excited about playing Darkmoon Faire cards, and that the cost of rerolling was low enough that it wouldn't matter if any individual player wanted to skip it because they'd get lots of chances to do so over the course of a week (and would be able to roll over one weekly quest to the next week if it came to that).
I don't work in the gaming industry, but I do work in software, and I've seen lots of examples of teams with the best intentions for positive user experiences making mistakes and frustrating users. It's not easy, and Blizzard has (as far back as August) been up front about how they were designing the system to be flexible so that if there were issues, they could go in and make changes. In retrospect, it feels like the biggest gap here was Blizzard thinking "rewards are a four month process, so it's okay if you have to roll over quests week to week, and it's okay if we wait until a major event to give you bonus XP, etc., because you have four months" while the community was thinking "rewards are a day-to-day event and I want to feel gratified every day I play." That gap can explain a lot of the missteps here without any need to assert malice.
It would have been nice if they had said "we hear you, we're working on it" a bit earlier, just to let people know they were listening, but I'm honestly not surprised they didn't given how incredibly toxic the Hearthstone community can be.
That's a really great find - given how many cards don't work (Bloodbloom, Scion of the Deep, Cho'gall), I would have never even bothered to try Seadevil Stinger.
This to me is the biggest thing - the rewards track is a four month process, we're only a quarter the way through it, and we're not even past the typical Winter Veil seasonal event. Despite that, the loudest voices in the room are still raging against Blizzard about it because they don't think they'll have enough gold in April. Dean Ayala was quoted as saying "We’re making XP per level and XP bonuses as tuning knobs in case our predictions are incorrect." I think it's clear from the way that Blizzard was talking about this new system back in the summer that they want it to be a positive change for everyone, and that they're working toward that. It is simply too early to pass judgement on how much gold you'll be able to rack up.
The battle pass doesn't offer very much, and it's reasonable to be mad if you bought it thinking it would give you more, it's valid that leveling up feels slow (so maybe they need more levels with smaller gaps in between), and it was valid that packs as late level rewards were bad, but they changed that. There's still room for improvement, but there's also time for improvement and a lot to appreciate about Blizzard's approach to Hearthstone in the last year. People ought to reserve judgement about their end-of-expansion gold until the actual end of the expansion.
The idea that order matters for various "start of game" effects is all well and good, but those "start of game" effects ought to trigger whether or not the card ends up in your opening hand, and in this case it didn't. The pieces of C'Thun never shuffled into my deck, I just got the 10-drop at the start of the game.
Forgot to take a screenshot, but I added C'Thun, the Shattered to my deck, and got the Small Pouches treasure. It pulled C'Thun into my hand at the start of the game, and as a result his "start of game" effect never triggered - I just had him in hand.