I understand that some of the Duels content is gated by collecting Scholomance and Darkmoon Faire cards, and that the format allows you to choose cards from old sets, but it's completely ridiculous to suggest that you can't complete all of your quests for free in Duels. Most of the quests are just "Play 3 games as [Class A], [Class B], or [Class C]" - all of which are trivial to complete in Duels, even if you lose each game - and many of the other ones are things like "Play X [Tribal minions]" or "Play X cards that [meet cost criteria]". It's honestly incredibly easy to do all* of your quests for free in duels.
I get that Duels isn't as fun when you don't have full access to the hero powers and starting treasures, or when you're missing an old card that would really make your deck better. But your initial deck is only 15 cards - it doesn't need to be some optimal list made up of Wild format cards in order to have a decent time playing.
*"All" here obviously ignores the "challenge a friend" type quests
Is there any legit way of restarting anyway? Played like 9 matches last week but couldn't find that retire button anywhere. Seems like once you're locked in, you can't just get out like you can in arena.
A retire button shows up under the hero portrait after your first duel (at least, it has in the past and is supposed to)
I created a deck, but when I go to play I keep getting a deck-related error message. I haven't been able to play a single game, so I can't even retire the deck and restart.
The concern here about the cost of the mini set is certainly valid, but I can't help but wonder how important the set will be in terms of the game's economics. Using Galakrond's Awakening as the template for rarity distribution, it seems like the mini set will mostly be made up of common and rare cards. Thanks to duplicate protection, it should take only a small number of extra packs to gather up those common and rare cards cards, and then you can use dust to create any missing epic or legendary card that happens to be relevant to the metagame. Most of the high-rarity cards from that mini set were good in certain archetypes, but were never meta-defining, so I'm not really worried that the incremental cost will be all that high from a practical standpoint.
I think this conclusion is a bit misleading. I just threw together a small program to simulate daily and weekly quests in the old and new system (assuming you reroll 50g/800exp daily quests). This program doesn't actually consider gold for wins for exp for time played - it's just quest completion. The top level result is that you pretty consistently get more out of the new system in "gold equivalent"* rewards. (It's something like ~7300 gold vs. 7700 "gold equivalent" after 120 days of play)
Now, when you throw out the non-gold rewards, you do end up at something like ~7300 gold vs. 5200 gold for daily and weekly quests. But that requires treating all the other rewards as worthless, which seems really disingenuous to me. The early pack and card rewards are from the latest expansion and will be brand new when you get them (because the track resets at the start of every expansion). Those same "latest expansion packs" retain some of that value later in the cycle because of the bonus mini-set release and the duplicate protection.
* The "gold equivalent" rewards here assume that each pack is worth 100 gold, and that since the average pack is worth 100 dust, card values are determined by their dust value (legendaries are 400 gold, epics are 100 gold).
You probably need three or more spells in hand to make this decent. While I generally love Spell Priest archetypes, and it seems that's a big part of what they're pushing for Priest this go-around, Fortune Teller specifically is a hard sell for me because this kind of effect requires card draw to be consistent, and that's something Priest lacks significantly. Maybe there's something else in the set that makes this work, but so far I'm not sold.
This is fantastic to drop right after Day at the Faire. Silver Hand Paladin has always been a fun deck, and access to reasonable divine shields has often been a big part of its success (since those little 1/1s are so vulnerable to AOE). So, I'm excited for Balloon Merchant - seems like it could be the card that makes that archetype viable in Standard.
Grim Rally was good, in part because of its synergy with eggs, but mainly because buffs aren't widely available in Warlock, so any board-wide buff is really powerful in Zoolock. It wouldn't take much in terms of discard synergy to make this about as good, and you can always just play it on with an empty hand for the buff.
E.T.C., God of Metal seems quietly awesome. With tools like Restless Mummy, Scion of Ruin, and Playmaker, this is plainly built for a midrange Warrior focused on self-harm with a Galakrond package. It's very easy to pair E.T.C with a bunch of rush minions and simultaneously clear the enemy board and pressure the enemy's health. Whether or not E.T.C is needed to make that deck good is unclear, but it does enough for very little mana that I'd expect any deck like that to run it.
I guess this The Nameless One is good. Kabal Songstealer saw play simply because it was a reasonably stated minion with a silence effect tacked on. The Nameless One should be strictly better, as it can pick up useful deathrattles, persistent effects, or valuable keywords, and it comes down a little earlier if you need to silence a buffed minion in an aggro match or some such thing. Probably good, also kind of boring.
People seem pretty down on this card, but I think Horrendous Growth is actually pretty decent. It's easy to corrupt a 2-drop, and being endlessly corruptible makes it easy to rack up stats on this minion. That doesn't mean it's going to be great, but it won't take a ton of Corrupt synergies to make it interesting.
Great result for evolution, and maybe there's a slim chance you could add it as your only beast in a Darkmoon N'Zoth deck? Probably too weak to see play, though.
I understand that some of the Duels content is gated by collecting Scholomance and Darkmoon Faire cards, and that the format allows you to choose cards from old sets, but it's completely ridiculous to suggest that you can't complete all of your quests for free in Duels. Most of the quests are just "Play 3 games as [Class A], [Class B], or [Class C]" - all of which are trivial to complete in Duels, even if you lose each game - and many of the other ones are things like "Play X [Tribal minions]" or "Play X cards that [meet cost criteria]". It's honestly incredibly easy to do all* of your quests for free in duels.
I get that Duels isn't as fun when you don't have full access to the hero powers and starting treasures, or when you're missing an old card that would really make your deck better. But your initial deck is only 15 cards - it doesn't need to be some optimal list made up of Wild format cards in order to have a decent time playing.
*"All" here obviously ignores the "challenge a friend" type quests
Thanks - that's very helpful context!
This overlay popped up during a Duels run, and the only way I could get rid of it was to restart the Hearthstone client
A retire button shows up under the hero portrait after your first duel (at least, it has in the past and is supposed to)
I created a deck, but when I go to play I keep getting a deck-related error message. I haven't been able to play a single game, so I can't even retire the deck and restart.
The concern here about the cost of the mini set is certainly valid, but I can't help but wonder how important the set will be in terms of the game's economics. Using Galakrond's Awakening as the template for rarity distribution, it seems like the mini set will mostly be made up of common and rare cards. Thanks to duplicate protection, it should take only a small number of extra packs to gather up those common and rare cards cards, and then you can use dust to create any missing epic or legendary card that happens to be relevant to the metagame. Most of the high-rarity cards from that mini set were good in certain archetypes, but were never meta-defining, so I'm not really worried that the incremental cost will be all that high from a practical standpoint.
I think this conclusion is a bit misleading. I just threw together a small program to simulate daily and weekly quests in the old and new system (assuming you reroll 50g/800exp daily quests). This program doesn't actually consider gold for wins for exp for time played - it's just quest completion. The top level result is that you pretty consistently get more out of the new system in "gold equivalent"* rewards. (It's something like ~7300 gold vs. 7700 "gold equivalent" after 120 days of play)
Now, when you throw out the non-gold rewards, you do end up at something like ~7300 gold vs. 5200 gold for daily and weekly quests. But that requires treating all the other rewards as worthless, which seems really disingenuous to me. The early pack and card rewards are from the latest expansion and will be brand new when you get them (because the track resets at the start of every expansion). Those same "latest expansion packs" retain some of that value later in the cycle because of the bonus mini-set release and the duplicate protection.
* The "gold equivalent" rewards here assume that each pack is worth 100 gold, and that since the average pack is worth 100 dust, card values are determined by their dust value (legendaries are 400 gold, epics are 100 gold).
You probably need three or more spells in hand to make this decent. While I generally love Spell Priest archetypes, and it seems that's a big part of what they're pushing for Priest this go-around, Fortune Teller specifically is a hard sell for me because this kind of effect requires card draw to be consistent, and that's something Priest lacks significantly. Maybe there's something else in the set that makes this work, but so far I'm not sold.
This is fantastic to drop right after Day at the Faire. Silver Hand Paladin has always been a fun deck, and access to reasonable divine shields has often been a big part of its success (since those little 1/1s are so vulnerable to AOE). So, I'm excited for Balloon Merchant - seems like it could be the card that makes that archetype viable in Standard.
The Curator was a cool build-around draw engine, and this seems to be much the same kind of card. All in all, I'm excited for it.
Grim Rally was good, in part because of its synergy with eggs, but mainly because buffs aren't widely available in Warlock, so any board-wide buff is really powerful in Zoolock. It wouldn't take much in terms of discard synergy to make this about as good, and you can always just play it on with an empty hand for the buff.
E.T.C., God of Metal seems quietly awesome. With tools like Restless Mummy, Scion of Ruin, and Playmaker, this is plainly built for a midrange Warrior focused on self-harm with a Galakrond package. It's very easy to pair E.T.C with a bunch of rush minions and simultaneously clear the enemy board and pressure the enemy's health. Whether or not E.T.C is needed to make that deck good is unclear, but it does enough for very little mana that I'd expect any deck like that to run it.
I guess this The Nameless One is good. Kabal Songstealer saw play simply because it was a reasonably stated minion with a silence effect tacked on. The Nameless One should be strictly better, as it can pick up useful deathrattles, persistent effects, or valuable keywords, and it comes down a little earlier if you need to silence a buffed minion in an aggro match or some such thing. Probably good, also kind of boring.
Seems decent in a Y'Shaarj deck - great showcase of the "Corrupt" mechanic
People seem pretty down on this card, but I think Horrendous Growth is actually pretty decent. It's easy to corrupt a 2-drop, and being endlessly corruptible makes it easy to rack up stats on this minion. That doesn't mean it's going to be great, but it won't take a ton of Corrupt synergies to make it interesting.
So, if you're willing to wait, this is kind of like a better Swipe. Not bad.
Cool niche combo piece (e.g. give your enemy a Doomsayer), but probably not exciting enough to see a ton of play.
I have no idea what that is, but I'm pretty sure this is a reference to the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog of Monty Python and the Holy Grail fame.
Great result for evolution, and maybe there's a slim chance you could add it as your only beast in a Darkmoon N'Zoth deck? Probably too weak to see play, though.
It's hard to judge this right now, but it won't take more than a couple of really powerful Corrupted cards for Y'Shaarj to be a high value finisher.