Duels is very far from Arena. Having a deck from your own cards is diametrically different starting grounds. Im not sure about "natural" or "evolution", but those game modes play very differently.
Was more referring to how you build your deck after each battle in duels. I felt like that was the natural evolution of Arena to have a small starter draft deck that built up over each battle. I'm fully aware of how duels differs from Arena Sinti.
That’s a damn shame. I know that the player base was turning against Expeditions, but I really loved them. It was exactly what I want from a draft mode, and what Hearthstone’s Arena failed to provide: A streamlined drafting experience that helped you make a decent deck while still giving you real choices, the ability to improve your deck throughout the run, and enough free entries to keep me coming back. I think the free entries are why you could meet players of all skill levels in Expeditions. Unlike Arena, where the only players were dedicated ones who could crush me, Expeditions had good competition among normal players.
Yea, expeditions improved upon HS's arena mode in a lot of ways. (In fact I feel like Duels is the natural evolution of HS's arena mode in some ways, sans the treasures of course.) There is still a charm in getting random champions and trying to make them work, and getting some semblance of a deck working with what you're drafted. It's a fun challenge, which at the end of the day was the reason I played Arena/Expeditions: For the challenge.
The rewards were just icing, the real reward was the friends we made along the way was having fun attempting to make things work with random cards.
Please don't talk about biases when you're defending your favorite mode.
Excuse me? Pot meet kettle. You're just doing the exact opposite if you wanna go down that particularly "uncivil" method of discussion Mr. "Random Bullshit". But since you opened that can of worms, I'm happy to fish with them. RNG is the POINT of the entire draft mode. So if you're getting angry at RNG in a DRAFT mode in the first place, perhaps you're in the wrong place.
You can do everything Right, and still lose. You can also do everything WRONG, and still win. The people who inherently do better, are the people who know how to leverage the resources given to them, even if they don't get "super overpowered legendary to carry them", there are (and HAVE BEEN) players who made 12 wins arena or 7 wins in expeditions off of cards that seemed weak considered on an individual basis, but managed to make it work.
Complaining that 150g is a "barrier to entry" seems like an odd complaint too. Me personally I spend about 1/2 my gold per new set release on packs. Gold is NOT hard to earn in hearthstone, unlike early on the battlepass change has severely increased my gold income and I'm left with 10k to spare after each expansion (not including miniset releases which cost 2k).
Lastly, no-one is being "forced" to play with bad cards. You CHOOSE to enter into arena (or duels) for that matter. But since this is a runeterra thread...THAT ARGUMENT doesn't even apply: Runeterra has been giving weekly expedition tokens out for free for ages. That's a sight better than hearthstone, and doesn't cost the players ANYTHING.
So .... if the player takes their FREE weekly token (for just playing the game at all) and then goes 7-0 with it in expedition, they come out of that with a ton of rewards. And the best part of that is that you have two trials, so you get TWO CHANCES to get to 7 wins in LoR.
What exactly are you complaining about again? Oh right *hearthstone's* version of arena. So the only basis that your argument has a weak leg to stand on is that "arena/expeditions has RNG. RNG is bad". K, got it. Well I got news for you. Even standard game modes have RNG, so....yea about that. Hate to break it to ya...but card games are built on RNG. Arena/Expeditions just increases that level of RNG in a voluntarily manner. (i.e. you choose to play that mode)
THE ONLY thing that you said that wasn't complete whining or had some semblance of reasonability was that Arena doesn't have a free option like casual duels. I do agree that one particular feature would increase arena's popularity. Beyond that. Your complaint sounds like the rest of r/hearthstone: "I got RNG in muh card-game! /cry"
Enemy deck can have anything in it, at any point in time they can whip out a perfect card to destroy all ...
So can yours. So...I fail to see the exact problem there. I think this is just a form of confirmation bias, where you remember the really bad losses against the guy who drafted 3 legendaries, but you don't recall the ones where you won because you just curved better than your opponent
Why does it seem people hate draft modes? Arena is not popular in HS, and now expeditions is being removed from LoR. Yet, the most fun I've ever had in both physical and digital games is draft modes. Draft mode forces you to be creative and judicious with your choices/resources because it's not "the perfect deck" (aka standard play).
So I'll admit that I'm not especially learned in math or programming, but, following your analogy, why would you start with the assumption that all the marbles are red and go to disprove it? Surely, it's a schrodinger's cat situation first, since you have no idea if there are any red marbles in the bag. Once you've thoroughly checked the bag and it's empty, you have in fact disproved that there were any red marbles in there.
If I'm missing something very obvious here, feel free to point it out to me!
I'm not particularly skilled at mathmatical theory either, but I view it in a similar fashion as Zelgadis does except my experience is with SQL. You can view the marble bag as "null". Null can be a unknown value or an absence of a value, where as an Empty or Blank string is a value, but is just empty.
To take this into HS situations: If HS does a "deck check" when a card is played it will probably do something like it looks at the deck's minion types. Populates those types into a separate temporary table.
If that table contains anything other than dragons, it fails the check and the card's battlecry won't go off.
If they wanted, they could have coded it to fail the check if the table is empty, but that doesn't make sense (and also increases code overhead by making a card do multiple checks)
If the table is null on minion types (meaning no minions exist) then technically it doesn't fail the check, because it's only failure code is if the table contains OTHER minion types. Not if the table contains "NULL" values (no value).
It does demonstrate that the power level is trending upwards and that is concerning. On the other hand, games with fatigue as the win condition aren't the most interesting to play or watch, so forcing decks to have a quicker win condition is not a bad thing, in my opinion.
They generally allow the last set/mini-set/expansion of a year's rotation have the highest power level, since it will be "in standard" for the shortest period of time. But I do agree that when power levels trend upwards, it makes me pause.
Quote From Author
Note that I'm talking about decks designed around fatigue as a win condition, not about cases where a match happens to go to fatigue. Those can be interesting and skill-testing, since you have to decide whether you can win in fatigue or whether you have a better chance if you make a push before then.
Agreed. Reading between the lines of your statement: Demon Seed Warlock was a mistake and effectively kills any control deck attempting to build out in this meta, fatigue between two control opponents is a skill test. Fatigue from a warlock is a stupid win condition.
I understand that "If there are no non-Dragon minions in your deck" is unwieldy, but the existing text does not convey this battlecry would activate with only spells or no deck at all in the slightest. If there are no minions in your deck, then all the minions in your deck are not Dragons!
True...but It's also something that has existed before: Zephrys the Great currently works/worked based on deck restrictions. So if he is the last card in your deck, or rather even the ONLY card in your deck/hand, he still activates despite there being no other minions.
Font of Power also works in a similar fashion. If you happen to be a regular old mage with minions, but discover this at a point when your deck no longer exists (in fatigue), it will work: despite you having minions in your hand and starting off with minions in your deck at the beginning of the game.
That Magister Dawngrasp interaction you mentioned has a double edge. You do discover two cards but you draw only one. Meaning unless you've draw options, you're really just 50-50 your choice of cards each turn, getting worse as the game progresses. In my opinion, that's something you dont want.
In any case, that mana increase is relevant, because its not easy even for mage to cast 7 mana do nothing, especially in a format like duels. A timely one too, because with most of the more dangerous treasures getting rarer or removed altogether, there isn't really alot of burn decks available so obviously something like ping mage gets better.
To get around this problem with discovering two, but drawing one: many mages started putting mana feeder panther (whatever the hero power/draw synergy card is) into their decks that way if need be, they can hero power (something they want to do anyways) to draw the extra discovers, granted this limits their action pool each round to potentially 6 mana tops (assuming they do both of the aforementioned actions)
I agree that the mana increase is largely irrelevant IF they are ahead. Ping mage has no problem casting frost nova+infinite arcane and stalling a turn.
And I disagree with what Avalon said on if they change the treasure to discover from a different pool it will "kill" the card. Discover itself is random and can be tailored in sooooooo many ways. "Discover a spell, discover arcane spells, discover spells that cost 5 or more, etc etc...) Changing it is the only way to reign it in. The nerf will slow decks down, but right now this signature treasure is the go to treasure for nearly all semi competent mage decks. It needs to be taken back in so the other treasures can be given equal opportunity.
I'm loving the druid "choose one" card pool. I've piloted a deck with choose one stuff to some minor success in Duels, so here's to hoping a new archetype opens up in standard. Ramp is polarizing, and beasts/aggro is not my style. Not to mention but I loved Fandral when he was in standard along with DK malfurion.
Not too happy to see DH and hunter get easy refill/attack/damage, it's not like those decks were hurting for any of those things. (maybe hunter, but that is supposed to be their weakness... so much for that I guess.)
It requires you to hold on to these spells, and this being a situational card makes it a big problem. Against a fast deck, you'd might be forced to not play your Thrive in the Shadows or Palm Reading on curve because you might be gambling your clear away. That's just really iffy for a board clear effect that is usually needed on demand.
I don't think you are necessarily wrong, it does have a must stricter requirement than duskbreaker. However we have no idea what other cards released in the miniset or for the next year of HS will synergize with. For all we know dragons could be a broken keyword, and this is pre-emptive toning down by not making it "too easy" to activate. There could be some "dragon synergy" that makes this broken (eventually, perhaps...)
Deep Breath concerns and bothers me, because it is a card that would best function in a spell-only Mage deck. Fine in theory, but we've seen the results of such a deck lately. I think most of us are ready for the Mage to go back to needing minions again.
Onyxian Drake, though...*chef's kiss* Shield Slam on a stick, with Taunt and a vanilla body? Crazy.
I'm really hoping that either this miniset, or the yearly rotation will give mages a chance to go back to minion based combat again. I wouldn't mind dragon mage, I loved playing dragon mage back in the DoD expansion. (plus Reno was so much fun
Is there any way to filter out content we don't want to see on the landing/news page? I mean this in the nicest way, but I don't have any interest in Yu-Gi-Oh at all, and would prefer not to see it. I'd love if we were able to adjust settings so we can filter out the games we don't play. Not sure if this is viable for you (both digitally from a back-end standpoint, or financially from a site sustainability standpoint)
Seems like they are going the TFT route with battlegrounds. Boards = Arenas. Portraits = Tacticians. Finishers = Booms.
I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Right? I find TFT to have a more complex skill cap though to be honest. Don't really see myself getting super invested in cosmetics unless they start letting us "buff" minions from hand with special legendary items (aka spells).
I feel like people aren't talking about Battleground Battlemaster enough, this card is literally always 6 mana 8 - 16 damage every time I've seen it
It's not on people's radar only because it's been played in just one deck (HandLock). If Battleground Battlemaster will ever get more popular, Reddit won't miss the chance to cry about it.
My problem with Battlemaster is that it creates a situation where if you don't remove the opponent's entire board, you risk lethal. Just TWO 4/4's left on board is 16 damage if Battlemaster gets thrown down.
On a side note I'm here to rant about Mage in Duels. The Infinite Arcane signature treasure needs to be nerfed. It's anti-fatigue, and effectively perfect draws every turn. It needs to be "discover a spell from the pool of mage spells" so that way it still acts as anti-fatigue and can have synergies, but no longer lets you have infinite Mordresh and/or freeze.
I was thinking of the Starfox ships, but yea same thing. Also, these are the skins I was waiting for. Might actually make me start playing LoR again.
Assuming the patch isn't going to drop until about 1 PM EST, yes?
Was more referring to how you build your deck after each battle in duels. I felt like that was the natural evolution of Arena to have a small starter draft deck that built up over each battle. I'm fully aware of how duels differs from Arena Sinti.
Yea, expeditions improved upon HS's arena mode in a lot of ways. (In fact I feel like Duels is the natural evolution of HS's arena mode in some ways, sans the treasures of course.) There is still a charm in getting random champions and trying to make them work, and getting some semblance of a deck working with what you're drafted. It's a fun challenge, which at the end of the day was the reason I played Arena/Expeditions: For the challenge.
The rewards were just icing, the real reward was the friends we made along the way was having fun attempting to make things work with random cards.
Excuse me? Pot meet kettle. You're just doing the exact opposite if you wanna go down that particularly "uncivil" method of discussion Mr. "Random Bullshit". But since you opened that can of worms, I'm happy to fish with them. RNG is the POINT of the entire draft mode. So if you're getting angry at RNG in a DRAFT mode in the first place, perhaps you're in the wrong place.
You can do everything Right, and still lose. You can also do everything WRONG, and still win. The people who inherently do better, are the people who know how to leverage the resources given to them, even if they don't get "super overpowered legendary to carry them", there are (and HAVE BEEN) players who made 12 wins arena or 7 wins in expeditions off of cards that seemed weak considered on an individual basis, but managed to make it work.
Complaining that 150g is a "barrier to entry" seems like an odd complaint too. Me personally I spend about 1/2 my gold per new set release on packs. Gold is NOT hard to earn in hearthstone, unlike early on the battlepass change has severely increased my gold income and I'm left with 10k to spare after each expansion (not including miniset releases which cost 2k).
Lastly, no-one is being "forced" to play with bad cards. You CHOOSE to enter into arena (or duels) for that matter. But since this is a runeterra thread...THAT ARGUMENT doesn't even apply: Runeterra has been giving weekly expedition tokens out for free for ages. That's a sight better than hearthstone, and doesn't cost the players ANYTHING.
So .... if the player takes their FREE weekly token (for just playing the game at all) and then goes 7-0 with it in expedition, they come out of that with a ton of rewards. And the best part of that is that you have two trials, so you get TWO CHANCES to get to 7 wins in LoR.
What exactly are you complaining about again? Oh right *hearthstone's* version of arena. So the only basis that your argument has a weak leg to stand on is that "arena/expeditions has RNG. RNG is bad". K, got it. Well I got news for you. Even standard game modes have RNG, so....yea about that. Hate to break it to ya...but card games are built on RNG. Arena/Expeditions just increases that level of RNG in a voluntarily manner. (i.e. you choose to play that mode)
THE ONLY thing that you said that wasn't complete whining or had some semblance of reasonability was that Arena doesn't have a free option like casual duels. I do agree that one particular feature would increase arena's popularity. Beyond that. Your complaint sounds like the rest of r/hearthstone: "I got RNG in muh card-game! /cry"
So can yours. So...I fail to see the exact problem there. I think this is just a form of confirmation bias, where you remember the really bad losses against the guy who drafted 3 legendaries, but you don't recall the ones where you won because you just curved better than your opponent
Why does it seem people hate draft modes? Arena is not popular in HS, and now expeditions is being removed from LoR. Yet, the most fun I've ever had in both physical and digital games is draft modes. Draft mode forces you to be creative and judicious with your choices/resources because it's not "the perfect deck" (aka standard play).
I'm not particularly skilled at mathmatical theory either, but I view it in a similar fashion as Zelgadis does except my experience is with SQL. You can view the marble bag as "null". Null can be a unknown value or an absence of a value, where as an Empty or Blank string is a value, but is just empty.
To take this into HS situations: If HS does a "deck check" when a card is played it will probably do something like it looks at the deck's minion types. Populates those types into a separate temporary table.
If that table contains anything other than dragons, it fails the check and the card's battlecry won't go off.
If they wanted, they could have coded it to fail the check if the table is empty, but that doesn't make sense (and also increases code overhead by making a card do multiple checks)
If the table is null on minion types (meaning no minions exist) then technically it doesn't fail the check, because it's only failure code is if the table contains OTHER minion types. Not if the table contains "NULL" values (no value).
They generally allow the last set/mini-set/expansion of a year's rotation have the highest power level, since it will be "in standard" for the shortest period of time. But I do agree that when power levels trend upwards, it makes me pause.
Agreed. Reading between the lines of your statement: Demon Seed Warlock was a mistake and effectively kills any control deck attempting to build out in this meta, fatigue between two control opponents is a skill test. Fatigue from a warlock is a stupid win condition.
True...but It's also something that has existed before: Zephrys the Great currently works/worked based on deck restrictions. So if he is the last card in your deck, or rather even the ONLY card in your deck/hand, he still activates despite there being no other minions.
Font of Power also works in a similar fashion. If you happen to be a regular old mage with minions, but discover this at a point when your deck no longer exists (in fatigue), it will work: despite you having minions in your hand and starting off with minions in your deck at the beginning of the game.
To get around this problem with discovering two, but drawing one: many mages started putting mana feeder panther (whatever the hero power/draw synergy card is) into their decks that way if need be, they can hero power (something they want to do anyways) to draw the extra discovers, granted this limits their action pool each round to potentially 6 mana tops (assuming they do both of the aforementioned actions)
I agree that the mana increase is largely irrelevant IF they are ahead. Ping mage has no problem casting frost nova+infinite arcane and stalling a turn.
And I disagree with what Avalon said on if they change the treasure to discover from a different pool it will "kill" the card. Discover itself is random and can be tailored in sooooooo many ways. "Discover a spell, discover arcane spells, discover spells that cost 5 or more, etc etc...) Changing it is the only way to reign it in. The nerf will slow decks down, but right now this signature treasure is the go to treasure for nearly all semi competent mage decks. It needs to be taken back in so the other treasures can be given equal opportunity.
Did we *really* need to go and give warlock MORE ways to deal fatigue damage? Sigh...
I'm loving the druid "choose one" card pool. I've piloted a deck with choose one stuff to some minor success in Duels, so here's to hoping a new archetype opens up in standard. Ramp is polarizing, and beasts/aggro is not my style. Not to mention but I loved Fandral when he was in standard along with DK malfurion.
Not too happy to see DH and hunter get easy refill/attack/damage, it's not like those decks were hurting for any of those things. (maybe hunter, but that is supposed to be their weakness... so much for that I guess.)
I don't think you are necessarily wrong, it does have a must stricter requirement than duskbreaker. However we have no idea what other cards released in the miniset or for the next year of HS will synergize with. For all we know dragons could be a broken keyword, and this is pre-emptive toning down by not making it "too easy" to activate. There could be some "dragon synergy" that makes this broken (eventually, perhaps...)
I'm really hoping that either this miniset, or the yearly rotation will give mages a chance to go back to minion based combat again. I wouldn't mind dragon mage, I loved playing dragon mage back in the DoD expansion. (plus Reno was so much fun
Is there any way to filter out content we don't want to see on the landing/news page? I mean this in the nicest way, but I don't have any interest in Yu-Gi-Oh at all, and would prefer not to see it. I'd love if we were able to adjust settings so we can filter out the games we don't play. Not sure if this is viable for you (both digitally from a back-end standpoint, or financially from a site sustainability standpoint)
Seems like they are going the TFT route with battlegrounds. Boards = Arenas. Portraits = Tacticians. Finishers = Booms.
I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Right? I find TFT to have a more complex skill cap though to be honest. Don't really see myself getting super invested in cosmetics unless they start letting us "buff" minions from hand with special legendary items (aka spells).
Yea he looks interesting. In fact more so than Galio himself!
My problem with Battlemaster is that it creates a situation where if you don't remove the opponent's entire board, you risk lethal. Just TWO 4/4's left on board is 16 damage if Battlemaster gets thrown down.
On a side note I'm here to rant about Mage in Duels. The Infinite Arcane signature treasure needs to be nerfed. It's anti-fatigue, and effectively perfect draws every turn. It needs to be "discover a spell from the pool of mage spells" so that way it still acts as anti-fatigue and can have synergies, but no longer lets you have infinite Mordresh and/or freeze.
All necessary changes to keep the format healthy, albeit stop-gap solutions until those treasures are re-designed or removed entirely.