Against blue and black, it's not only essentially a counterspell, it also continues to protect you for the rest of the turn, draws you a card, and only costs 1 mana.
It's just been ridiculously good at shoring up whatever slight weaknesses green had left - Oko was broko, but Veil of Summer and Once Upon a Time were helping to enable the degenerate stuff the deck was doing.
I definitely agree with the searching, but they've actually been improving that recently - including things like 'Snip' allowing you to search for SN1P-SN4P, for example.
I'd be all for showing these cards when you search for "Inspire", even if the cards don't actually use the word.
I mean, if I'd taken them I'd have talked about how much I agree with the decision, and how I think it's a good design choice, so... =P
They're not ditching Inspire, they're consciously choosing not to use it when it would only appear on a couple of cards, and isn't a theme of the set. I prefer it to random keywords popping up in expansions where they don't make sense.
I can understand believing you'd get 10 full Mana Crystals after playing it. That'd be broken, but I could understand why you would think that.
I cannot understand how you're getting 6 full Mana Crystals and 4 empty. You've already paid for Nozdormu the Timeless - why would they remove 4 of your mana afterwards?
It's irrelevant anyway - I wouldn't have so confidently stated how the interaction worked if we didn't have explicit confirmation, which we do. It works exactly like Mojomaster Zihi - you don't get any full Mana Crystals from it.
Mojomaster Zihi leaves you with 4 mana because it removes empty Mana Crystals first, which makes sense. You spend 6 of your 10 available mana, then have 4 left (and in total, 5 Mana Crystals).
Playing Nozdormu the Timeless will cost 4 mana. If you only have 4 when you play it, you'll have none left (and be at 10 Mana Crystals maximum). If you had 5 mana when you played it, you'd be left with 1 mana for the rest of your turn, and so on.
Your opponent will get access to 10 Mana Crystals first. Whether or not that's too big a downside remains to be seen.
Possibly just a reporter looking into what Blizzard has been up to, given their rather controversial nature in the news recently and Blizzcon right around the corner.
A big cancelled project is the sort of thing you'd look into if you were looking for something you can get a story out of, and it makes sense you'd stumble across this when doing so.
Maybe it just came out now that they left??? I didn't even notice the date, I just went straight to the section talking about who these guys are.
This is what happened. I believe that the cancelled Ares project had been reported on before, but Eric, Jason and Dustin leaving wasn't known. Eric and Jason haven't been involved in Hearthstone for a while, but given they were incredibly influential on its development, it felt appropriate to note them leaving the company.
Man, I helped with some ideas for this article and I didn't even stop and think for a second that of course there would be one with the exact same stat boost - I mean, how could there not?
We'll call it an Easter Egg for the Magic players out there =P
We'll still absolutely be covering Hearthstone, but we've made no secret of the fact that we'd love to cover other games as well (as Flux posted about on the forums yesterday). We've had forums for Magic from the beginning, and we also have forums for Eternal and Mythgard in addition to Legends of Runeterra (Which might be new? I'm gonna be super honest, I've not strayed from the HS/MTG side of the site before).
We're in a slight dip for Hearthstone content before Blizzcon, and there's a lot of information to cover on LoR since it's a completely new game, so it can seem like a sudden flood of new and different content. Don't worry though, we still have plenty of Hearthstone content coming (and not all of us can play LoR right now anyway...).
Well, dunno about you, but I'm glad that I won't have to deal with more than 2 Omega Devastators in a single game anymore.
I feel like I should clarify since it sounds like you're not quite understanding the change - you can still Discover class cards from Discover cards. They just don't have the 4x offering bonus they previously did, so you'll see them less.
You can definitely still see more than two Omega Devastators in a game, but seeing 4+ will happen a lot less often.
I mean, Tortollan Pilgrim has clearly been my favourite part of the expansion. Cracking open a Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron with them and watching the chaos is always amazing, but I do think accidentally killing myself with several draw cards was particularly fun.
Don't play the RNG slots unless you don't mind losing, kids!
I played a lot of Quest Warrior in Standard in preparation for an article we put up on the site - it was not great. Decks with Dr. Boom, Mad Genius were just objectively better.
Having said that, when you got the Quest off and started getting value, it was a lot of fun to run people over. It might be possible to make a consistent enough deck in Wild to at least have that fun, even if it can't stand up to the sheer value other decks can produce.
Very pleased with these changes - there are things I would've done differently, for sure, but they're at least hitting the right decks and not throwing a curveball card in there.
Luna's Pocket Galaxy is one that I see people wondering why it didn't go to 6 mana; the simple answer is that they don't want it to be remotely playable again. You can meme with it all you want, but this experiment showed them that a card like that being good is not fun, which is the most important reason it was nerfed. Putting it to 6 risks it still being too strong, whereas we know that it isn't good enough at 7 to be anything but jank fun.
Conjurer's Calling is still good, but losing the ability to find it from Magic Trick is pretty big. I'd have preferred moving it to only summon one minion - better removal, less good as a board builder - but I can understand them not wanting to change the functionality of a card too much, since historically those kinds of nerfs haven't exactly been good.
Don't really have an opinion on the other three - I don't play Wild that much, and I don't play many decks involving the other two unless for a quest.
Well. Time has passed and it is clear that they have nerfed the animation as i mentioned. Heroes are not worth my money anymore. Case closed.
This is a really embarrassing take, honestly. The animation isn't 'nerfed', it's broken. This clearly isn't an intentional change; only one of the layers of the animation is showing right now.
Your initial post was equally embarrassing. Yes, China is definitely to blame for a completely innocuous animation not working. They're definitely censoring those sexy, sexy interlocking mechanical parts. Just talking about it gets me all steamy.
A great question! And I'm not going to lie to you - if you want to be running the best Warrior deck right now, you should absolutely be running Dr. Boom, Mad Genius in one of the various decks that support him.
This deck was purely to see how good a deck you can make using the new Quest, and Boom goes against the point of that. Turns out the Quest can be pretty good by itself though, so if you're looking to switch up how you've been playing Warrior, it's a great option for that.
I don't know how Quest Rogue was fairing in wild, but this is a nice way to make Sonya to be used as intented: a value generator using little copies of big battlecriers/deathrattlers/EoT users.
This change would have made the last few months of standard Quest Rogue look less painful for control decks, though.
Lul. You have no idea how questrogue competes in wild, but you like it. You deserve my down vote for that. :D
And thx to this change Sonya Shadowdancer is unplayable now. I want my dust refund.
Sonya is still playable in a range of other decks. That's a ridiculous reason to ask for a dust refund. Quest Rogue will be just fine with this interaction changed. Just swap out a couple of cards and move on. N
To be fair, this is absolutely a nerf to The Caverns Below. It's not ridiculous to expect a dust refund on something like that. I could see the argument that Sonya hasn't been changed - even though I'd prefer a refund option on her too - but the Rogue Quest absolutely has been changed.
It's a bit late to complain about sneaky nerfs/changes to cards that don't offer refunds, since they've done it several times before and gotten away with it, but I'll keep saying this is a shitty policy if they keep doing it. Allowing them to arbitrarily define what counts as a nerf like this means they can nerf Legendary cards and not give players anything far more easily - Mekgineer Thermaplugg, Shudderwock, Jungle Giants etc.
Toast said weeks back that he was turning down the reveal. The fact that Blizzard didn't amend their guide until after the reveal was supposed to happen is kind of ridiculous.
There's certainly a trade-off. I wouldn't say the smaller card pool is inherently a downside, nor would I be able to suggest something that would fix it.
Wild's upsides are being able to make more consistent, powerful decks with the larger card pool along with mitigating how powerful some random effects are by the sheer variance of them. You'll always be able to play the majority of decks that you've played in the past here, though they may not be as powerful as they once were. On the downside, the format itself can be off-puttingly high-powered, has a daunting barrier-to-entry for new players and, while random effects can be less powerful, they are also inherently more random, which is not a good thing in many people's eyes.
Standard, on the other hand, can basically flip these. The smaller rotating card pool means that it's easier for players to get into, and isn't as powerful a format as Wild. Random effects having less options makes them easier to play around - whether or not you are able to, of course, is another question. Rotation can also be seen as a positive, since it guarantees a refresh of the options available. Negatives include less consistent decks, due to both the swingy nature of some random effects and the lack of options sometimes, and how wildly some random effects can vary due to a lack of options.
I don't think either format is inherently better - each format has cards that will impact it more than the other, and it's really just up to the individual what they prefer in a game. Do you want consistency and a wide variety of options at the expense of sheer madness occasionally? Pick Wild. Want something tamer that has (on average) more variance set to set? Pick Standard.
Against blue and black, it's not only essentially a counterspell, it also continues to protect you for the rest of the turn, draws you a card, and only costs 1 mana.
It's just been ridiculously good at shoring up whatever slight weaknesses green had left - Oko was broko, but Veil of Summer and Once Upon a Time were helping to enable the degenerate stuff the deck was doing.
I definitely agree with the searching, but they've actually been improving that recently - including things like 'Snip' allowing you to search for SN1P-SN4P, for example.
I'd be all for showing these cards when you search for "Inspire", even if the cards don't actually use the word.
I mean, if I'd taken them I'd have talked about how much I agree with the decision, and how I think it's a good design choice, so... =P
They're not ditching Inspire, they're consciously choosing not to use it when it would only appear on a couple of cards, and isn't a theme of the set. I prefer it to random keywords popping up in expansions where they don't make sense.
I can understand believing you'd get 10 full Mana Crystals after playing it. That'd be broken, but I could understand why you would think that.
I cannot understand how you're getting 6 full Mana Crystals and 4 empty. You've already paid for Nozdormu the Timeless - why would they remove 4 of your mana afterwards?
It's irrelevant anyway - I wouldn't have so confidently stated how the interaction worked if we didn't have explicit confirmation, which we do. It works exactly like Mojomaster Zihi - you don't get any full Mana Crystals from it.
That's not how the interaction works.
Mojomaster Zihi leaves you with 4 mana because it removes empty Mana Crystals first, which makes sense. You spend 6 of your 10 available mana, then have 4 left (and in total, 5 Mana Crystals).
Playing Nozdormu the Timeless will cost 4 mana. If you only have 4 when you play it, you'll have none left (and be at 10 Mana Crystals maximum). If you had 5 mana when you played it, you'd be left with 1 mana for the rest of your turn, and so on.
Your opponent will get access to 10 Mana Crystals first. Whether or not that's too big a downside remains to be seen.
Possibly just a reporter looking into what Blizzard has been up to, given their rather controversial nature in the news recently and Blizzcon right around the corner.
A big cancelled project is the sort of thing you'd look into if you were looking for something you can get a story out of, and it makes sense you'd stumble across this when doing so.
This is what happened. I believe that the cancelled Ares project had been reported on before, but Eric, Jason and Dustin leaving wasn't known. Eric and Jason haven't been involved in Hearthstone for a while, but given they were incredibly influential on its development, it felt appropriate to note them leaving the company.
Man, I helped with some ideas for this article and I didn't even stop and think for a second that of course there would be one with the exact same stat boost - I mean, how could there not?
We'll call it an Easter Egg for the Magic players out there =P
We'll still absolutely be covering Hearthstone, but we've made no secret of the fact that we'd love to cover other games as well (as Flux posted about on the forums yesterday). We've had forums for Magic from the beginning, and we also have forums for Eternal and Mythgard in addition to Legends of Runeterra (Which might be new? I'm gonna be super honest, I've not strayed from the HS/MTG side of the site before).
We're in a slight dip for Hearthstone content before Blizzcon, and there's a lot of information to cover on LoR since it's a completely new game, so it can seem like a sudden flood of new and different content. Don't worry though, we still have plenty of Hearthstone content coming (and not all of us can play LoR right now anyway...).
I feel like I should clarify since it sounds like you're not quite understanding the change - you can still Discover class cards from Discover cards. They just don't have the 4x offering bonus they previously did, so you'll see them less.
You can definitely still see more than two Omega Devastators in a game, but seeing 4+ will happen a lot less often.
I mean, Tortollan Pilgrim has clearly been my favourite part of the expansion. Cracking open a Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron with them and watching the chaos is always amazing, but I do think accidentally killing myself with several draw cards was particularly fun.
Don't play the RNG slots unless you don't mind losing, kids!
I played a lot of Quest Warrior in Standard in preparation for an article we put up on the site - it was not great. Decks with Dr. Boom, Mad Genius were just objectively better.
Having said that, when you got the Quest off and started getting value, it was a lot of fun to run people over. It might be possible to make a consistent enough deck in Wild to at least have that fun, even if it can't stand up to the sheer value other decks can produce.
Very pleased with these changes - there are things I would've done differently, for sure, but they're at least hitting the right decks and not throwing a curveball card in there.
Luna's Pocket Galaxy is one that I see people wondering why it didn't go to 6 mana; the simple answer is that they don't want it to be remotely playable again. You can meme with it all you want, but this experiment showed them that a card like that being good is not fun, which is the most important reason it was nerfed. Putting it to 6 risks it still being too strong, whereas we know that it isn't good enough at 7 to be anything but jank fun.
Conjurer's Calling is still good, but losing the ability to find it from Magic Trick is pretty big. I'd have preferred moving it to only summon one minion - better removal, less good as a board builder - but I can understand them not wanting to change the functionality of a card too much, since historically those kinds of nerfs haven't exactly been good.
Don't really have an opinion on the other three - I don't play Wild that much, and I don't play many decks involving the other two unless for a quest.
King Krush is green - in Hearthstone he's blue.
This is a really embarrassing take, honestly. The animation isn't 'nerfed', it's broken. This clearly isn't an intentional change; only one of the layers of the animation is showing right now.
Your initial post was equally embarrassing. Yes, China is definitely to blame for a completely innocuous animation not working. They're definitely censoring those sexy, sexy interlocking mechanical parts. Just talking about it gets me all steamy.
A great question! And I'm not going to lie to you - if you want to be running the best Warrior deck right now, you should absolutely be running Dr. Boom, Mad Genius in one of the various decks that support him.
This deck was purely to see how good a deck you can make using the new Quest, and Boom goes against the point of that. Turns out the Quest can be pretty good by itself though, so if you're looking to switch up how you've been playing Warrior, it's a great option for that.
To be fair, this is absolutely a nerf to The Caverns Below. It's not ridiculous to expect a dust refund on something like that. I could see the argument that Sonya hasn't been changed - even though I'd prefer a refund option on her too - but the Rogue Quest absolutely has been changed.
It's a bit late to complain about sneaky nerfs/changes to cards that don't offer refunds, since they've done it several times before and gotten away with it, but I'll keep saying this is a shitty policy if they keep doing it. Allowing them to arbitrarily define what counts as a nerf like this means they can nerf Legendary cards and not give players anything far more easily - Mekgineer Thermaplugg, Shudderwock, Jungle Giants etc.
Toast said weeks back that he was turning down the reveal. The fact that Blizzard didn't amend their guide until after the reveal was supposed to happen is kind of ridiculous.
Wish we got to name it Fluffy Palley Cat, but on the other hand, having the right translation so fast is probably much better.
There's certainly a trade-off. I wouldn't say the smaller card pool is inherently a downside, nor would I be able to suggest something that would fix it.
Wild's upsides are being able to make more consistent, powerful decks with the larger card pool along with mitigating how powerful some random effects are by the sheer variance of them. You'll always be able to play the majority of decks that you've played in the past here, though they may not be as powerful as they once were. On the downside, the format itself can be off-puttingly high-powered, has a daunting barrier-to-entry for new players and, while random effects can be less powerful, they are also inherently more random, which is not a good thing in many people's eyes.
Standard, on the other hand, can basically flip these. The smaller rotating card pool means that it's easier for players to get into, and isn't as powerful a format as Wild. Random effects having less options makes them easier to play around - whether or not you are able to, of course, is another question. Rotation can also be seen as a positive, since it guarantees a refresh of the options available. Negatives include less consistent decks, due to both the swingy nature of some random effects and the lack of options sometimes, and how wildly some random effects can vary due to a lack of options.
I don't think either format is inherently better - each format has cards that will impact it more than the other, and it's really just up to the individual what they prefer in a game. Do you want consistency and a wide variety of options at the expense of sheer madness occasionally? Pick Wild. Want something tamer that has (on average) more variance set to set? Pick Standard.