2 mana draw 2 is always solid. Though for this to consistently work you have to give up quite a lot of neutral options.

Might be a nerf candiate. Charge is always scary and hunter always welcomes card draw/generation.

Comparable to Darkmoon Tonk, except faster and less deathrattle damage. Seems like a generally good card for big hunter.

May or may not be a throwback to Corpsetaker it's definetely going to be a stable in rainbow DK and might even be playable with only rush and lifesteal.

A fairly stick thread, kinda like a midrange Rattlegore. Though 6 mana might make it a bit too slow.

There are a bunch of cheap unholy spells that are generally good for swarmy decks. Though the pool of cheap DK spells are bigger than you might expect.

Basically a 1 mana Defile, but you have to make the first trigger yourself. You could even use it preemptively on turn 1 or 2, without triggering it, to discourage your opponent from playing any more minions. It might become a class stable.

I don't think there are going to be enough frost spells in standard to make it consistent enough.

Seems like a fine handbuff payoff, but I don't think there are enough of them to make it a viable strategy.

I can see it finding a place in some sort of midrange handbuff deck, but I doubt that's going to be a thing.

Thank god they didn't announce a black/white 1/2 remake. They are my favorite pokemon games and based on their recent main line releases I'm sure they would mess it up one way or another.

I love that even smaller cards are getting a callback. Amateur Puppeteer for example features the same character as Mistress of Mixtures

The Hero Mastery: Gauntlet mode (Co-Op tower defense mode where you have to defend multiple towers at once and get currency that you can spen during a match for stuff like air strikes) that they announced during Blizzcon is also coming out this season btw.

24 hour peak of 1,291,967. Turns out people love pokemon games even more, if they don't suck (not saying that the recent pokemon games are unplayable, but they are definetely not that great either).

At worst we are stuck in 2023. They actually released 3 big updates last year that all focused on bug fixes, readability and general new player experience. They basically screamed "a steam release is coming".

Quote From Author

Illidan Stormrage was even changed to Xavius when Demon Hunter was announced. But now we have so many alternate Heroes, many of which are represented as minions.

The same expansion also introduced the Lady Liadrin legendary, even though the character already existed as a hero skin. The reason why they changed the Illidan minion was because they didn't want to have the base hero portrait character represented as a minion on the board (At least for Constructed. According to an Interview Mercenaries actually started out with only the 10 base heroes). They might have changed their mind about that, but there indicator you gave is not valid here.

The web events? I think they said on discord that they weren't satisfied with their quality, which I can definetely see. They were extremely easy to miss, clunky to navigate ingame and generally uninteresting if it wasn't for the few rewards they gave out.

That they stopped supporting the mode is nothing new sadly, however I'm shocked that they are outright removing it. It made sense for classic, since the population of that mode was a lot lower and because they reused the assets/UI for twist, but for Duels? My best guess is that they want to combat the splitting playerbases by combining Arena (which is getting more attention lately) and Duels. Though I was never a Arena guy, so I guess my Tavern Tickets that I used for heroic duels runs are going to gather dust again.

I mean, even Mercenaries (as much as I love this mode) is still in the client. Are they going to keep it because of pve and are going to disable pvp there too in the future?

Though the timing is somewhat interesting. The April patch they are describing is surely going to be the one that starts of the next HS Year with the next Expansion. They also did hint at Hearthstones 10. Anniversary during Blizzcon and a upcoming steam release is already confirmed per datamined strings and graphics. I wonder if they are going to market it as some kind of soft re-launch with a more defined gameplay (Traditional, Battlegrounds, Arena). No more "Hearthstone is a platform for card games" I guess.

What's going to happen with the live service team btw? As far as I remember they are responsible for Tavern Brawls, Solo Adventures, Arena and Duels. Are they solely focusing on Arena now, is there something new coming up ("and more") or were the 10 people they lost in the recent internal restructering the entire/most of the live service team? I have so many questions right now that are hopefully getting answered with the announcement of the next Hearthstone year.

Another shop update, another 7 days of waiting to find out how the legendary jaina skin VFX look like.

To each their own. I loved the trial and error of finding and executing the perfect route in each level.