Nothing against the idea behind this new mode. It makes sense as dungeon runs were a huge success when they were introduced. What worries me is the balance between hero powers and treasures. The effects of the treasures are deliberately busted to improve the fun factor when playing against the A.I.. But in a PvP scenario, this could create a lot of balance issues as some treasures are always better than others. So, they could easily become the deciding factor in many games. Same for hero powers. Look at what's happening in Battlegrounds right now. Power creep has settled in extremely quickly. Some heroes are insanely broken while others are an absolute joke. Some minions or minion types just rule the entire format for prolonged periods of time (Nightmare Amalgam, Holy Mackerel, Amalgadon, Gentle Djinni). We could see the same situation happening again. Certain hero powers or treasures could dictate the format and those who are lucky enough to get them are going to be more successful than others. Also, this mode can't be played by everyone. People who dusted their wild cards and people who are new to the game won't be able to enjoy it and that already removes a ton of potential players. Battlegrounds is completely free, at least. Unfortunately, the new mode doesn't look very promising in my opinion.
Really interesting card. It looks kinda tricky to use properly. It could just be a niche card but it's always cool to play with cards that bring new ideas to the gameplay. I know this isn't exactly a new thing as it's exactly what already happens in the Haunted Carousel but it could have a total different approach or impact in constructed (as opposed to random decks).
I'm still new to the game and i played only once in the Labs. I picked up the deck with The Howling Abyss and faced the discard deck with The University of Piltover. It was a really close game with my opponent always pressuring my health total and i trying to find a way to stabilize and play the landmark. We both got our landmarks on the board eventually and that's when things went wrong for my opponent and right for me. I was on the verge of defeat and the first card i got from the landmark was Miss Fortune. That straight up locked my opponent's units out of combat because they would all die to her AoE effect which helped me chip away at his health (which was still full at that point). I managed to clear his board on the next round and he was left in top deck mode with whatever random cards his landmark could generate. On the next round i got a Thresh and that gave me the win because he pulled Tryndamere out of my deck while keeping the only blocker he had out of the way. I already had a Tryndamere in play so it was enough to finish the game. His landmark did almost nothing. It just generated some low cost units and other random stuff that my opponent didn't bother playing. That's it.
There's certainly something wrong with the design of some of these cards. So far, Runeterra has felt like a much more strategic game where things are always within control of players. But adding these infinite value engines with a ton of variance is going to drag it towards the same state Hearthstone is currently in where RNG is always a thing that can determine the outcome of games.
The Howling Abyss is really unbalanced because level 2 champions are not a joke. There's a reason for their level up requirements. These cards are way too strong and it can lead to situations like the one i mentioned where two random rolls were enough to completely turn the tide of the game. The University of Piltover is even more random and can easily become a source of frustration for those playing with or against it. I'm not against randomness. It's actually the thing that hooked me to Hearthstone. But this kind of RNG isn't healthy.
The worst thing is that these cards can't be balanced that easily. If the cards from Howling Abyss were level one champions, the card would be too weak as level one champions are underwhelming on decks that don't have any synergy with them. In its current form, it's just an easy way to cheat out random win condition cards. I doubt they will completely redesign it so they most likely will only increase it's cost if it becomes a problem. And The University of Piltover is just a casino. Sometimes you win big and sometimes you lose everything. But you never have any control over it. It's just going to be a feels bad card like Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron. Star Spring is a card that wins games by itself but you know what it does and what you should do to avoid it. It's predictable and controllable. Its numbers can be adjusted to make it slower and more fair if needed. But Howling Abyss and University of Piltover are always going to be an uncontrollable RNG fiesta.
I'm kinda anxious and worried. They seriously can't make any mistakes here. This rework of the game's economy is its most important moment since release.
The change to Evocation is very good as it prevents two direct sources from generating it. The nerf to Solarian Prime is fine as it slows the card down significantly. I feel like the card is highly overrated but that's just me. Nerfing Sorcerer's Apprentice isn't something they want to do, it seems. It's probably because the card enables several archetypes and other cards. If they nerf the card too much, it's going to drag a bunch of other cards with it to limbo. Mozaki, Master Duelist effectively can't function without that kind of support. Also, they can't change Apprentice's effect for the sake of wild and ignore Radiant Elemental as it's pretty much the same thing. It's not causing problems now but it could become a problem in the future.
It seems they are going to slowly add more wacky RNG cards to the game. What is LoR's target audience, after all? Competitive card game players don't like cards with an extreme degree of unpredictability like The University of Piltover. This is a card for fun casual games. It's the type of card that non-competitive people love (like Yogg-Saron in HS). But, from what i've experienced so far (i started playing a week ago), the game seems very focused on providing a balanced level of predictable randomness which is better for competitive and strategic play. Do they want to be more of a MtG type of game? Or a Hearthstone type of game?
This looks like a pure casino card. It doesn't specify what cards it generates. It just creates random cards. It sure is meant to be more of a meme than anything but this kind of card is pretty scary for a competitive environment. Not because it's broken or anything like that but because it can be frustrating for either player. This could be the Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron of Runeterra: strong enough to see play but not strong enough to be nerfed and frustrating for players all over the ladder.
Glide doesn't see play because of the highly aggressive meta and not just because there aren't enough combo decks around. There are too many decks out there who just love to dump their hands and refill using Voracious Reader. Glide is a complete liability against those decks as you will just help your opponent most of the time. Also, Glide isn't just useful against combo decks. It can also completely screw over control decks as they like to hoard resources in hand and losing up to 6 cards instantly is absolutely terrible. I also believe that Glide would mostly see play in an aggro deck and aggro decks don't need to disrupt combo decks. They can just kill them. But removing a bunch of cards from the hands of a control player can be pretty helpful. Glide is a meta dependent card but if things line up well enough for it then it could become really powerful.
Guardian Druid might still be good enough for tournaments because it's easier to predict opponents and adjust accordingly. But the deck is struggling a lot on ladder after the nerf.
I'm not as much into playing underdog decks but i'm into testing underdog cards. I like to play with decks that i create even if they are not very good. I created a Highlander Control Shaman with King Phaoris and it's 12/12 (50% WR) but it's the most fun i had with a deck this expansion so far. I was lucky enough to open some of the legendary cards i wanted for the deck (Speaker Gidra and Instructor Fireheart) recently so i'm going to make some adjustments and see how it goes.
I'm also trying a Highlander Warrior with the bomb win condition but the main purpose was to test the effectiveness of Playmaker. The card is perfectly fine and can be pretty powerful but it's lacking support because of the rotation. There's only a few good targets available: Kargath Bladefist, Kargath Prime (with the help of a discount from Athletic Studies), Doctor Krastinov, Restless Mummy, Ruststeed Raider and Evasive Wyrm. If Zilliax was still around, it would be enough to make the card extremely powerful. The deck itself is currently at 9/6. Very small sample size so it's not really possible to tell if it's good or not.
I also made a Highlander Hunter with a bunch of spells just to test Professor Slate and Krolusk Barkstripper. Both are fine cards but Slate is suffering from the same problem as Playmaker. There aren't enough good spells available to justify adding him to a deck but he is very good at handling those big minions. I won quite a few games against Paladins that played their usual strategy of "apply big buff to minion and play Argent Braggart for cheap big boy" just to have their big guys instantly destroyed by Rapid Fire. This deck is 19/13, currently. It's actually quite old as i made it within the first week of the expansion and haven't played with it a lot.
I'm not playing Hearthstone as much recently as i decided to step away for some time to test Legends of Runeterra. I'm still doing my quests but that's it. Probably will only bother with climbing near the end of the month. The meta has been quite diverse but i'm not having a good time playing because of the constant presence of face decks (Face Hunter, Aggro Rogue and Aggro DH). I really hate those decks because playing against them is either a hopeless loss or a complete stomping victory but totally soulless. It always feels like a complete waste of time and i'm encountering them very frequently so i'm not getting any enjoyment whenever i play on ladder. At this point, i'm already in "Wait for next expansion" mode.
I'm a new player. Please, tell me if my assumption is correct: the difference between a stun from Leona and a stun from Swain is the fact that Leona's stun is tied to the Daybreak keyword which i assume is classified as an ability (thus, it's negated by spellshield). There's a lot of interactions that i still need to learn.
Thanks for all the responses. I'm going to step out of Hearthstone for a bit (i'll do my quests and go for Diamond 5 near the end of the month) to test Runeterra a little bit better. It's going to be a difficult month to keep up with as i'm also going to spend time on single player games (Spelunky 2, mainly). It's always a little intimidating to start over in a new online game so i'm going to take my time.
Quote From sto650
It's kinda stunning that HS is still alive, honestly.
Runeterra (or any other of the popular card games) isn't going to kill Hearthstone. This is a mistake that people makes very frequently when comparing Hearthstone to other card games. HS's selling point is its extreme simplicity. It's a game designed for casual and inexperienced players. I can tell this because i'm not a card game player. HS was the first real card game i played and it was very simple to learn. Casual gamers and people playing card games for the first time are going to be extremely intimidated by the complexity of Runeterra or MtG.
I said that Runeterra isn't as complicated as i thought but this is current me. I learned a lot about card games from interacting with other players and from HS itself. If it was me from a few years ago, i definitely wouldn't have bothered going past the tutorial in Runeterra. They do a good job of explaining the basic stuff but there's a lot more to absorb. The game already has more total keywords than Hearthstone and that's a lot to decorate. It takes a lot more time and dedication and casual gamers most likely won't bother diving deeper into it without outside assistance (friends or content creators).
Hearthstone has a pretty bad economy model and that's a huge issue. It will get a full revamp in two months. Then we will see if the game is going to provide better rewards and become more accessible or if it's going to be bad and die because of it. That's what is going to kill HS. If the economy doesn't become better, it will eventually strangle itself. But, even if it dies, the casual playerbase might not feel like moving to another more complex card game.
I'm a little lost because there's a lot of stuff to experiment with. The game has a bunch of different modes and there's an exp based progression system that rewards you constantly for just playing the game. I spent this entire afternoon just playing against the A.I. to understand how some of the mechanics work and it was pretty simple to get through the Prologue rewards. The F2P factor is as good as people constantly say. After finishing the tutorial i was really surprised with the fact that all three decks were given to me for free. It seems that i will gain more free stuff in one week of playing Runeterra than the amount of free stuff i got from HS in about three and a half years.
The game has some really cool level up animations for each champion and for some of their spells. It isn't as complicated as i thought it would be but i'm still getting used to the whole blocking thing. HS was the first competitive card game i played so i got used to playing blockers (taunts) during my turn and praying that my opponent has no way of getting through them. It adds another layer of complexity because i need to determine which units to sacrifice, if i should block or just let damage get through to protect valuable units and i need to consider spells as well. The only A.I. opponent i had some trouble with was a Shen/Karma deck that had quite a few barrier spells and lifesteal and that caught me off guard during my attacking phase. Other than that, the A.I. opponents are extremely simple to deal with for someone with previous card game experience but they are still a great source of information before diving into the actual competition. I don't know if the basic free decks are good enough for the PvP experience though.
I still don't know if i will keep playing the game but i'm going to need some weeks playing it to see if it catches my interest permanently. It's pretty hard to play two online games like these simultaneously and i already put a lot of time and money into Hearthstone. What is going to be a big factor is the variety of decks (a good balance between aggro, midrange, combo and control) and predictability of matchs. The excessive RNG in HS pisses me off a lot but it's also the thing that hooked me to the game in the first place since i really like games with random generation (mostly roguelikes/rogue-lites but games like Terraria as well). Is there any other site besides this one that provides good information about decks? Or a good content creator that can provide information and help me learn more about the game?
Remember that Baku is a beast so you can't play her if you want to use Witching Hour to resurrect Hadronox in Odd Druid. I made that mistake in the past.
Some needed changes but i feel like they could have gone in a different direction for Druid. Nerfing Twilight Runner to 6 or Overgrowth to 5 would probably be a lot better. Guardian Animals is also a Hunter card and Hunter doesn't have access to ramp to play it faster which makes the increased cost a lot more devastating to them. The card is dead for Hunter before it even started seeing some real experimentation.
I'm not sad in the slightest that Turtle Mage is dead. But Pilgrim also seems a lot worse for any Control/Highlander Mage. Instead of providing a high value battlecry that makes high cost spells more worthwhile, now it will remove the spell and increase your fatigue counter by 1. That's a big deal against other control decks. I don't think it's worth using it anymore.
I bought the Wild bundle to expand my collection and my deck building options for the format. I opened a bunch of bad epics, some decent ones, obtained missing rares from a few expansions and just 2 legendary cards. The first one was Archbishop Benedictus which is fine by me. The second one was... golden Whizbang the Wonderful. A little bit too late, unfortunately. I'll most likely disenchant him but i'm not totally sure yet. I still don't understand why they didn't keep the card available for standard. No need to move it to classic. Just making an exception for this card would be enough. It simply doesn't make sense in Wild. It's not like this card would break standard or anything like that. Really bad move on their part.
The way Zephrys' AI interprets the game is different from ours. I believe he doesn't know what secrets the opponent has. And he most likely doesn't believe that a single secret is enough of a threat or enough of a defense mechanism for the opponent that he has to give you a way to remove it. He will prioritize pretty anything else. This behavior is very common when it comes to secrets. The times that he let me down were mostly caused by he not really caring about enemy secrets as much as the other stuff that's on the board. He almost always won't offer Flare unless your opponent has 3 or more secrets and the board is pretty much empty because in this scenario he doesn't really have any better immediate options. He is that stingy when it comes to secrets. He likes to offer SI:7 Infiltrator way more because it's also a decent tempo minion.
The nerf to Cabal Acolyte seems way harsher than the Secret Passage one. Now he is absolutely terrible as a taunt and will only be worth anything when the effect is triggered. The nerf to Secret Passage hurts mostly slower Rogue builds as it lowers the chance of you getting your pay off cards (like Kronx or Togwaggle). Aggro Rogue will still do the exact same thing as most of their deck is just burn and cycling anyway.
Yes, i'm salty as i really dislike decks that don't do anything else other than go face. And Cabal Acolyte helped me achieve my first legend rank so i'm sad seeing him getting weakened so much when there are other cards still destroying the ladder since their introduction (Guardian Animals, mostly).
Mostly okay changes. The buff to Totem Goliath probably won't be enough to help Shaman, though. What i really like is the change in the interaction between Headmaster Kel'Thuzad and Professor Slate. Now there's some real potential for late game swings and i love it! I still need to craft Kel'Thuzad but i should be able to gather enough dust to do it.
I just hit legend for the first time! And i did it with a Highlander Control Priest! Control decks are my favorite type of deck so it felt really good to accomplish this without forcing myself to play aggro.
The highlight was one mirror match and it was one of the craziest (and longest) games i have ever played. I won on my very last few cards. My opponent didn't play safe when he was finally ahead and he ended up being surprised by a Kayn Sunfury (obtained from Brightwing that came from Dragonqueen Alexstrasza) into two Apotheosis into two attacks from the minions i had on the board and 7 fatigue damage for exact lethal. If my opponent traded i would have lost. If he played Mindrender Illucia, he would have won as well. It's impossible to play around something as random as this but it's not impossible to play safe when you are about to win. Btw, we both kept our Illucia's in hand the whole game and never played her because it's just too risky in a mirror match. I know he had one because i got a copy of it from Envoy of Lazul.
Nothing against the idea behind this new mode. It makes sense as dungeon runs were a huge success when they were introduced. What worries me is the balance between hero powers and treasures. The effects of the treasures are deliberately busted to improve the fun factor when playing against the A.I.. But in a PvP scenario, this could create a lot of balance issues as some treasures are always better than others. So, they could easily become the deciding factor in many games. Same for hero powers. Look at what's happening in Battlegrounds right now. Power creep has settled in extremely quickly. Some heroes are insanely broken while others are an absolute joke. Some minions or minion types just rule the entire format for prolonged periods of time (Nightmare Amalgam, Holy Mackerel, Amalgadon, Gentle Djinni). We could see the same situation happening again. Certain hero powers or treasures could dictate the format and those who are lucky enough to get them are going to be more successful than others. Also, this mode can't be played by everyone. People who dusted their wild cards and people who are new to the game won't be able to enjoy it and that already removes a ton of potential players. Battlegrounds is completely free, at least. Unfortunately, the new mode doesn't look very promising in my opinion.
Really interesting card. It looks kinda tricky to use properly. It could just be a niche card but it's always cool to play with cards that bring new ideas to the gameplay. I know this isn't exactly a new thing as it's exactly what already happens in the Haunted Carousel but it could have a total different approach or impact in constructed (as opposed to random decks).
I'm still new to the game and i played only once in the Labs. I picked up the deck with The Howling Abyss and faced the discard deck with The University of Piltover. It was a really close game with my opponent always pressuring my health total and i trying to find a way to stabilize and play the landmark. We both got our landmarks on the board eventually and that's when things went wrong for my opponent and right for me. I was on the verge of defeat and the first card i got from the landmark was Miss Fortune. That straight up locked my opponent's units out of combat because they would all die to her AoE effect which helped me chip away at his health (which was still full at that point). I managed to clear his board on the next round and he was left in top deck mode with whatever random cards his landmark could generate. On the next round i got a Thresh and that gave me the win because he pulled Tryndamere out of my deck while keeping the only blocker he had out of the way. I already had a Tryndamere in play so it was enough to finish the game. His landmark did almost nothing. It just generated some low cost units and other random stuff that my opponent didn't bother playing. That's it.
There's certainly something wrong with the design of some of these cards. So far, Runeterra has felt like a much more strategic game where things are always within control of players. But adding these infinite value engines with a ton of variance is going to drag it towards the same state Hearthstone is currently in where RNG is always a thing that can determine the outcome of games.
The Howling Abyss is really unbalanced because level 2 champions are not a joke. There's a reason for their level up requirements. These cards are way too strong and it can lead to situations like the one i mentioned where two random rolls were enough to completely turn the tide of the game. The University of Piltover is even more random and can easily become a source of frustration for those playing with or against it. I'm not against randomness. It's actually the thing that hooked me to Hearthstone. But this kind of RNG isn't healthy.
The worst thing is that these cards can't be balanced that easily. If the cards from Howling Abyss were level one champions, the card would be too weak as level one champions are underwhelming on decks that don't have any synergy with them. In its current form, it's just an easy way to cheat out random win condition cards. I doubt they will completely redesign it so they most likely will only increase it's cost if it becomes a problem. And The University of Piltover is just a casino. Sometimes you win big and sometimes you lose everything. But you never have any control over it. It's just going to be a feels bad card like Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron. Star Spring is a card that wins games by itself but you know what it does and what you should do to avoid it. It's predictable and controllable. Its numbers can be adjusted to make it slower and more fair if needed. But Howling Abyss and University of Piltover are always going to be an uncontrollable RNG fiesta.
I'm kinda anxious and worried. They seriously can't make any mistakes here. This rework of the game's economy is its most important moment since release.
The change to Evocation is very good as it prevents two direct sources from generating it. The nerf to Solarian Prime is fine as it slows the card down significantly. I feel like the card is highly overrated but that's just me. Nerfing Sorcerer's Apprentice isn't something they want to do, it seems. It's probably because the card enables several archetypes and other cards. If they nerf the card too much, it's going to drag a bunch of other cards with it to limbo. Mozaki, Master Duelist effectively can't function without that kind of support. Also, they can't change Apprentice's effect for the sake of wild and ignore Radiant Elemental as it's pretty much the same thing. It's not causing problems now but it could become a problem in the future.
It seems they are going to slowly add more wacky RNG cards to the game. What is LoR's target audience, after all? Competitive card game players don't like cards with an extreme degree of unpredictability like The University of Piltover. This is a card for fun casual games. It's the type of card that non-competitive people love (like Yogg-Saron in HS). But, from what i've experienced so far (i started playing a week ago), the game seems very focused on providing a balanced level of predictable randomness which is better for competitive and strategic play. Do they want to be more of a MtG type of game? Or a Hearthstone type of game?
This looks like a pure casino card. It doesn't specify what cards it generates. It just creates random cards. It sure is meant to be more of a meme than anything but this kind of card is pretty scary for a competitive environment. Not because it's broken or anything like that but because it can be frustrating for either player. This could be the Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron of Runeterra: strong enough to see play but not strong enough to be nerfed and frustrating for players all over the ladder.
Glide doesn't see play because of the highly aggressive meta and not just because there aren't enough combo decks around. There are too many decks out there who just love to dump their hands and refill using Voracious Reader. Glide is a complete liability against those decks as you will just help your opponent most of the time. Also, Glide isn't just useful against combo decks. It can also completely screw over control decks as they like to hoard resources in hand and losing up to 6 cards instantly is absolutely terrible. I also believe that Glide would mostly see play in an aggro deck and aggro decks don't need to disrupt combo decks. They can just kill them. But removing a bunch of cards from the hands of a control player can be pretty helpful. Glide is a meta dependent card but if things line up well enough for it then it could become really powerful.
Guardian Druid might still be good enough for tournaments because it's easier to predict opponents and adjust accordingly. But the deck is struggling a lot on ladder after the nerf.
I'm not as much into playing underdog decks but i'm into testing underdog cards. I like to play with decks that i create even if they are not very good. I created a Highlander Control Shaman with King Phaoris and it's 12/12 (50% WR) but it's the most fun i had with a deck this expansion so far. I was lucky enough to open some of the legendary cards i wanted for the deck (Speaker Gidra and Instructor Fireheart) recently so i'm going to make some adjustments and see how it goes.
I'm also trying a Highlander Warrior with the bomb win condition but the main purpose was to test the effectiveness of Playmaker. The card is perfectly fine and can be pretty powerful but it's lacking support because of the rotation. There's only a few good targets available: Kargath Bladefist, Kargath Prime (with the help of a discount from Athletic Studies), Doctor Krastinov, Restless Mummy, Ruststeed Raider and Evasive Wyrm. If Zilliax was still around, it would be enough to make the card extremely powerful. The deck itself is currently at 9/6. Very small sample size so it's not really possible to tell if it's good or not.
I also made a Highlander Hunter with a bunch of spells just to test Professor Slate and Krolusk Barkstripper. Both are fine cards but Slate is suffering from the same problem as Playmaker. There aren't enough good spells available to justify adding him to a deck but he is very good at handling those big minions. I won quite a few games against Paladins that played their usual strategy of "apply big buff to minion and play Argent Braggart for cheap big boy" just to have their big guys instantly destroyed by Rapid Fire. This deck is 19/13, currently. It's actually quite old as i made it within the first week of the expansion and haven't played with it a lot.
I'm not playing Hearthstone as much recently as i decided to step away for some time to test Legends of Runeterra. I'm still doing my quests but that's it. Probably will only bother with climbing near the end of the month. The meta has been quite diverse but i'm not having a good time playing because of the constant presence of face decks (Face Hunter, Aggro Rogue and Aggro DH). I really hate those decks because playing against them is either a hopeless loss or a complete stomping victory but totally soulless. It always feels like a complete waste of time and i'm encountering them very frequently so i'm not getting any enjoyment whenever i play on ladder. At this point, i'm already in "Wait for next expansion" mode.
I'm a new player. Please, tell me if my assumption is correct: the difference between a stun from Leona and a stun from Swain is the fact that Leona's stun is tied to the Daybreak keyword which i assume is classified as an ability (thus, it's negated by spellshield). There's a lot of interactions that i still need to learn.
Thanks for all the responses. I'm going to step out of Hearthstone for a bit (i'll do my quests and go for Diamond 5 near the end of the month) to test Runeterra a little bit better. It's going to be a difficult month to keep up with as i'm also going to spend time on single player games (Spelunky 2, mainly). It's always a little intimidating to start over in a new online game so i'm going to take my time.
Runeterra (or any other of the popular card games) isn't going to kill Hearthstone. This is a mistake that people makes very frequently when comparing Hearthstone to other card games. HS's selling point is its extreme simplicity. It's a game designed for casual and inexperienced players. I can tell this because i'm not a card game player. HS was the first real card game i played and it was very simple to learn. Casual gamers and people playing card games for the first time are going to be extremely intimidated by the complexity of Runeterra or MtG.
I said that Runeterra isn't as complicated as i thought but this is current me. I learned a lot about card games from interacting with other players and from HS itself. If it was me from a few years ago, i definitely wouldn't have bothered going past the tutorial in Runeterra. They do a good job of explaining the basic stuff but there's a lot more to absorb. The game already has more total keywords than Hearthstone and that's a lot to decorate. It takes a lot more time and dedication and casual gamers most likely won't bother diving deeper into it without outside assistance (friends or content creators).
Hearthstone has a pretty bad economy model and that's a huge issue. It will get a full revamp in two months. Then we will see if the game is going to provide better rewards and become more accessible or if it's going to be bad and die because of it. That's what is going to kill HS. If the economy doesn't become better, it will eventually strangle itself. But, even if it dies, the casual playerbase might not feel like moving to another more complex card game.
I'm a little lost because there's a lot of stuff to experiment with. The game has a bunch of different modes and there's an exp based progression system that rewards you constantly for just playing the game. I spent this entire afternoon just playing against the A.I. to understand how some of the mechanics work and it was pretty simple to get through the Prologue rewards. The F2P factor is as good as people constantly say. After finishing the tutorial i was really surprised with the fact that all three decks were given to me for free. It seems that i will gain more free stuff in one week of playing Runeterra than the amount of free stuff i got from HS in about three and a half years.
The game has some really cool level up animations for each champion and for some of their spells. It isn't as complicated as i thought it would be but i'm still getting used to the whole blocking thing. HS was the first competitive card game i played so i got used to playing blockers (taunts) during my turn and praying that my opponent has no way of getting through them. It adds another layer of complexity because i need to determine which units to sacrifice, if i should block or just let damage get through to protect valuable units and i need to consider spells as well. The only A.I. opponent i had some trouble with was a Shen/Karma deck that had quite a few barrier spells and lifesteal and that caught me off guard during my attacking phase. Other than that, the A.I. opponents are extremely simple to deal with for someone with previous card game experience but they are still a great source of information before diving into the actual competition. I don't know if the basic free decks are good enough for the PvP experience though.
I still don't know if i will keep playing the game but i'm going to need some weeks playing it to see if it catches my interest permanently. It's pretty hard to play two online games like these simultaneously and i already put a lot of time and money into Hearthstone. What is going to be a big factor is the variety of decks (a good balance between aggro, midrange, combo and control) and predictability of matchs. The excessive RNG in HS pisses me off a lot but it's also the thing that hooked me to the game in the first place since i really like games with random generation (mostly roguelikes/rogue-lites but games like Terraria as well). Is there any other site besides this one that provides good information about decks? Or a good content creator that can provide information and help me learn more about the game?
Remember that Baku is a beast so you can't play her if you want to use Witching Hour to resurrect Hadronox in Odd Druid. I made that mistake in the past.
Some needed changes but i feel like they could have gone in a different direction for Druid. Nerfing Twilight Runner to 6 or Overgrowth to 5 would probably be a lot better. Guardian Animals is also a Hunter card and Hunter doesn't have access to ramp to play it faster which makes the increased cost a lot more devastating to them. The card is dead for Hunter before it even started seeing some real experimentation.
I'm not sad in the slightest that Turtle Mage is dead. But Pilgrim also seems a lot worse for any Control/Highlander Mage. Instead of providing a high value battlecry that makes high cost spells more worthwhile, now it will remove the spell and increase your fatigue counter by 1. That's a big deal against other control decks. I don't think it's worth using it anymore.
I bought the Wild bundle to expand my collection and my deck building options for the format. I opened a bunch of bad epics, some decent ones, obtained missing rares from a few expansions and just 2 legendary cards. The first one was Archbishop Benedictus which is fine by me. The second one was... golden Whizbang the Wonderful. A little bit too late, unfortunately. I'll most likely disenchant him but i'm not totally sure yet. I still don't understand why they didn't keep the card available for standard. No need to move it to classic. Just making an exception for this card would be enough. It simply doesn't make sense in Wild. It's not like this card would break standard or anything like that. Really bad move on their part.
The way Zephrys' AI interprets the game is different from ours. I believe he doesn't know what secrets the opponent has. And he most likely doesn't believe that a single secret is enough of a threat or enough of a defense mechanism for the opponent that he has to give you a way to remove it. He will prioritize pretty anything else. This behavior is very common when it comes to secrets. The times that he let me down were mostly caused by he not really caring about enemy secrets as much as the other stuff that's on the board. He almost always won't offer Flare unless your opponent has 3 or more secrets and the board is pretty much empty because in this scenario he doesn't really have any better immediate options. He is that stingy when it comes to secrets. He likes to offer SI:7 Infiltrator way more because it's also a decent tempo minion.
I was considering buying it but without custom voices it's not good enough even with the packs.
The nerf to Cabal Acolyte seems way harsher than the Secret Passage one. Now he is absolutely terrible as a taunt and will only be worth anything when the effect is triggered. The nerf to Secret Passage hurts mostly slower Rogue builds as it lowers the chance of you getting your pay off cards (like Kronx or Togwaggle). Aggro Rogue will still do the exact same thing as most of their deck is just burn and cycling anyway.
Yes, i'm salty as i really dislike decks that don't do anything else other than go face. And Cabal Acolyte helped me achieve my first legend rank so i'm sad seeing him getting weakened so much when there are other cards still destroying the ladder since their introduction (Guardian Animals, mostly).
Mostly okay changes. The buff to Totem Goliath probably won't be enough to help Shaman, though. What i really like is the change in the interaction between Headmaster Kel'Thuzad and Professor Slate. Now there's some real potential for late game swings and i love it! I still need to craft Kel'Thuzad but i should be able to gather enough dust to do it.
I just hit legend for the first time! And i did it with a Highlander Control Priest! Control decks are my favorite type of deck so it felt really good to accomplish this without forcing myself to play aggro.
The highlight was one mirror match and it was one of the craziest (and longest) games i have ever played. I won on my very last few cards. My opponent didn't play safe when he was finally ahead and he ended up being surprised by a Kayn Sunfury (obtained from Brightwing that came from Dragonqueen Alexstrasza) into two Apotheosis into two attacks from the minions i had on the board and 7 fatigue damage for exact lethal. If my opponent traded i would have lost. If he played Mindrender Illucia, he would have won as well. It's impossible to play around something as random as this but it's not impossible to play safe when you are about to win. Btw, we both kept our Illucia's in hand the whole game and never played her because it's just too risky in a mirror match. I know he had one because i got a copy of it from Envoy of Lazul.