I think the main issue was that they made it into a big reveal, creating high expectations that they couldn't meet. If they had announced it with less fanfare, I think most people would have reacted "Sure, I'll give it a try".
Maybe revisit old archetypes that didn't make it in Standard to see if they are playable now with cards released later. For example Beast Druid, Freeze Shaman, Discolock, Handbuff.
In the case of Freeze Shaman, second time around it did make it in Standard based on the new cards alone, so there the question would be whether any of the old freeze cards are good enough to make it into a Wild deck.
In the case of Handbuff, an aggressive Handbuff Paladin saw some play in Wild already, but Hunter and Warrior not so much, neither have I seen much of a more mid-range or combo Handbuff Paladin (I have a partially refined decklist, if you're interested). Also Warlock has handbuff potential; we saw that in Standard for a short time until Imprisoned Scrap Imp got nerfed.
I would also be interested in an article about deckbuilding, since we usually only see the end results, not the process that led to it. I really liked Firebat's Deck Doctor series, for example, or Chump refining Patreon decks. But starting from just an idea instead of a deck list would be even more interesting.
Something I struggle with in particular is how many synergies to include. There are a lot of possible synergies in Wild, but some additions strengthen the deck while others make it too hit or miss and it's often not easy to see which way it is going to go. From the viewer decks I saw in the aforementioned videos, often deck builders try to do too many different things in a single deck. But sometimes it does all fit together and that makes a deck special.
Another difficult decision is how much deck slots to spend on the core of the deck and how many on support (like card draw, removal, healing/armor). Often my first draft will be top-heavy since the coolest cards often have high mana costs and then I have to drop some of them to make sure I can actually survive into the late game to play those cards. Are there some guidelines for balancing such things or is it all trial and error?
Something that I didn't realize until I had built a lot of decks is the relationship between card draw/generation, mana curve and situational/tech cards. For example, in Handlock you can afford to run more situational cards, since you draw a lot of cards and aren't going to play the majority of your hand. If you're mostly going to play cards on curve, you don't need much card draw; Seek Guidance Quest Priest is an extreme example, but also many Elemental, Spiteful and C'thun decks play cards on curve.
Another interesting topic is one-of cards. Some people don't want to see any of those at all (except legendaries), arguing that you should always include two copies of the best card. I think that's too simplistic: the best card often depends on the situation and having two different options in your hand can be superior to having the same option twice. When is consistency actually required to make the deck work versus it being an excuse to build decks that can be auto-piloted?
If you're into math, it might be interesting to do an article on the chances of finding certain cards by a certain turn. For example, what is the effect of including a two-of when running Zephrys or Reno, or a non-dragon when running Kazakusan? How many dragons do you need in your deck to reliably have one in hand by turn X? How many tutored cards do you run relative to the number of tutors: I see 3 tutored + 2 tutors quite often, but is that close to the ideal ratio or does Standard just not have enough options to allow other quantities?
For combo decks, how far into your deck can you expect to find the full combo? MarkMcKz often remarks he's very unlucky to find the last combo piece in the bottom cards of his deck, but since many of his combos require 5 or more cards, that might actually be the statistically expected outcome.
Is the taunt from Niuzao's Bullish Fortitude bugged? Half of the time it is not applied for me. That was before the patch, but since they changed Yu'lon, I was expecting a fix for Niuzao as well.
True, but in this specific case they removed a pretty high chance of 28 face damage over two turns while slightly increasing the chance of 32 face damage over four turns, so overall the power level should drop.
It could become a factor if they reduce the pool further in the future. However, Rustrot Viper will be in the Standard card pool just as long as Kazakusan, so if it becomes an issue, you can tech against it.
I haven't tested this, but from watching the video it seems that when a minion gets the Envoy Rustwix deathrattle via Tamsin's Phylactery, it will shuffle cards that can be generated by the minion instead of primes. So The Lich King will shuffle Death Knight cards, while the hero powers in card form probably originate from Sir Finley Mrrgglton.
The fragmentation of streaming services is a problem, in my opinion. With music, you can pick one service and get access to reasonable chunk of popular music. With video, I haven't bothered signing up for any of them since I don't want to spend the time researching which service has which series that I might enjoy. Even worse, this changes over time as new series are released and old series disappear when licensing agreements expire.
Ideally, a user would be able to pick the game, the store and the launcher independently. Having different games available in different stores and/or launchers restricts rather than expands the options for users. For example, on Android you can install Hearthstone from Google Play or from Amazon's store, so you can decide who you'd rather give your money and data to (even if it is picking a lesser evil), but on PC your only options are to use Battle.net or play a different game and that inflexibility means there is hardly any competitive pressure to improve the store or the launcher.
If I could buy a game in one store and automatically get it in my library on all platforms, that would be great. But instead of trying to figure out how something useful like that can be implemented using blockchain tech, everyone is trying to get rich selling pointless cosmetics.
While I have no numbers to back this up, I can imagine that on average people who play only on mobile would be more casual than people who (also) play on desktop. So the kind of audience who is interested in e-sports and community content would be more likely to use Battle.net.
Besides, they have the news feed viewer already, they only need to push more content to it. They did start doing a bit of this by highlighting community content every once in a while, but they could have done it much more regularly. In fact, a significant portion of what they did highlight was items they sponsored.
Actually, now that I look more closely at Battle.net again, there is more content there than I thought, but I have to scroll past old featured items to get to the news. For example, the announcement of Grandmasters this weekend is invisible unless I scroll down: full height window at 1080p and it's off screen. That's just bad design.
I don't think red tape can be to blame for all of it. Things like incomplete patch notes points to there not being enough structure in their way of working rather than too much of it.
The feeling I get from Hearthstone is that once the prototype became a success, they've never had a quiet moment to rethink their code, tools and processes. The way their broadcast client is a Frankenstein video composition for example, where half the time discover options are showing card backs instead of the face sides. Faeria had an in-house e-sports client used for broadcasts and that was made by an actual small indie company.
Battle.net is not bad, but it could have been used better. They could have done a lot more community and e-sports integration into their launcher, for example. If I didn't read this site, I wouldn't have know about last weekend's Master's Tour.
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.
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.
In mathematics, any property is valid for all elements of the empty set. For example, all of the numbers in the empty set are even, but they are also all odd.
You can think of it this way: let's say you have a bag of marbles and want to check if all marbles in the bag are red. A way to do that is to start with the assumption that they are all red, then pick one marble at a time from the bag. If the picked marble is not red, you've disproved the assumption. Otherwise, you continue by picking the next marble. If the assumption of all marbles in the bag being red still holds when the bag is empty, all marbles in the bag were red. And not only all marbles in the original bag, but at any step along the way, including the last step when the bag was empty.
It's perhaps not intuitive, but it does make sense, especially if you're doing math or programming.
Since it starts at 1 damage, I think you'd need only 3 spells in hand (Deep Breath itself and 2 others) to match the damage of Fire Sale.
I do agree though that it doesn't look very good: Fire Sale being Tradeable is very useful, so I don't see Deep Breath replacing it, while I also don't think any deck would run this in addition to Fire Sale.
In theory the fact that this doesn't damage your own board could be useful, but if you care about your own board you probably won't have enough spells in your hand to power this, plus you wouldn't want to spend 5 mana on something that doesn't add a body to the board.
With 5 health and Frenzy, it's likely Whelp Bonker will draw at least one card or have the opponent spend a card on it (if they're Fireballing this, you're probably happy). However, you are also spending 3 mana and a deck slot on it and I'm not sure that is worth it.
Honorable Kill hasn't been all that easy to activate. At 2 or 3 attack you have some chance, but once you buff it to 4 and beyond it becomes increasingly unlikely to find a minion with the right amount of health to honorably kill. Acolyte of Pain was good with handbuff because you were likely to get at least 2 activations; I think it will be harder to achieve that with this card.
I think this would need Rush to be a playable card.
The weapon restriction isn't much of a limitation, as completing the first questline stage will draw a weapon. The Wild version plays more cheap pirates, so questline progression is quicker. Additionally there is N'Zoth's First Mate which provides a weapon even earlier and for less mana.
That the shots are random isn't a huge detractor either, since anything they hit in the early game is useful: minion hits enable trades, while face hits shorten the time the opponent has to present a counter-lethal. Since Wild has several free pirates (Patches the Pirate, Parachute Brigand), the Pirate Warrior is pretty much always ahead on board in the early game and Defias Cannoneer extends that by another turn.
While the card is stronger in Wild, it bothers me in Standard as well. If you don't deal with it quickly, the hits on board and on your life total will become a problem. Not all decks can deal with a 3-health minion efficiently, especially after their own minions being cleared by weapons and cannon shots, which means the Pirate Warrior gets to disrupt your turn for a very low cost.
Overall, the questline feels unfair because it rewards the Pirate Warrior for playing good cards, but I'm not sure why Cannoneer feels more unfair than other pirates. Maybe it has to do with him being the latest addition to the deck. Maybe it has to do with the time in the match that he appears on the board, when you think you can take over the board before the questline completes, but Cannoneer destroys those dreams. It's probably a combination of those: Standard Pirate Warrior used to have a strong start and a strong finish, but a weaker middle, and Cannoneer fixed that.
Rapid Fire is listed as a card buff, but it is of course a deck nerf for Odd Hunter. Which is a good thing, since that's one of the Wild decks that you run into way too often, along with Pirate Warrior.
I think the main issue was that they made it into a big reveal, creating high expectations that they couldn't meet. If they had announced it with less fanfare, I think most people would have reacted "Sure, I'll give it a try".
Maybe revisit old archetypes that didn't make it in Standard to see if they are playable now with cards released later. For example Beast Druid, Freeze Shaman, Discolock, Handbuff.
In the case of Freeze Shaman, second time around it did make it in Standard based on the new cards alone, so there the question would be whether any of the old freeze cards are good enough to make it into a Wild deck.
In the case of Handbuff, an aggressive Handbuff Paladin saw some play in Wild already, but Hunter and Warrior not so much, neither have I seen much of a more mid-range or combo Handbuff Paladin (I have a partially refined decklist, if you're interested). Also Warlock has handbuff potential; we saw that in Standard for a short time until Imprisoned Scrap Imp got nerfed.
I would also be interested in an article about deckbuilding, since we usually only see the end results, not the process that led to it. I really liked Firebat's Deck Doctor series, for example, or Chump refining Patreon decks. But starting from just an idea instead of a deck list would be even more interesting.
Something I struggle with in particular is how many synergies to include. There are a lot of possible synergies in Wild, but some additions strengthen the deck while others make it too hit or miss and it's often not easy to see which way it is going to go. From the viewer decks I saw in the aforementioned videos, often deck builders try to do too many different things in a single deck. But sometimes it does all fit together and that makes a deck special.
Another difficult decision is how much deck slots to spend on the core of the deck and how many on support (like card draw, removal, healing/armor). Often my first draft will be top-heavy since the coolest cards often have high mana costs and then I have to drop some of them to make sure I can actually survive into the late game to play those cards. Are there some guidelines for balancing such things or is it all trial and error?
Something that I didn't realize until I had built a lot of decks is the relationship between card draw/generation, mana curve and situational/tech cards. For example, in Handlock you can afford to run more situational cards, since you draw a lot of cards and aren't going to play the majority of your hand. If you're mostly going to play cards on curve, you don't need much card draw; Seek Guidance Quest Priest is an extreme example, but also many Elemental, Spiteful and C'thun decks play cards on curve.
Another interesting topic is one-of cards. Some people don't want to see any of those at all (except legendaries), arguing that you should always include two copies of the best card. I think that's too simplistic: the best card often depends on the situation and having two different options in your hand can be superior to having the same option twice. When is consistency actually required to make the deck work versus it being an excuse to build decks that can be auto-piloted?
If you're into math, it might be interesting to do an article on the chances of finding certain cards by a certain turn. For example, what is the effect of including a two-of when running Zephrys or Reno, or a non-dragon when running Kazakusan? How many dragons do you need in your deck to reliably have one in hand by turn X? How many tutored cards do you run relative to the number of tutors: I see 3 tutored + 2 tutors quite often, but is that close to the ideal ratio or does Standard just not have enough options to allow other quantities?
For combo decks, how far into your deck can you expect to find the full combo? MarkMcKz often remarks he's very unlucky to find the last combo piece in the bottom cards of his deck, but since many of his combos require 5 or more cards, that might actually be the statistically expected outcome.
Ah, that blocks your own taunt as well? In that case, that likely explains it, since I'm leveling up both of them in the same party.
Is the taunt from Niuzao's Bullish Fortitude bugged? Half of the time it is not applied for me. That was before the patch, but since they changed Yu'lon, I was expecting a fix for Niuzao as well.
True, but in this specific case they removed a pretty high chance of 28 face damage over two turns while slightly increasing the chance of 32 face damage over four turns, so overall the power level should drop.
It could become a factor if they reduce the pool further in the future. However, Rustrot Viper will be in the Standard card pool just as long as Kazakusan, so if it becomes an issue, you can tech against it.
I haven't tested this, but from watching the video it seems that when a minion gets the Envoy Rustwix deathrattle via Tamsin's Phylactery, it will shuffle cards that can be generated by the minion instead of primes. So The Lich King will shuffle Death Knight cards, while the hero powers in card form probably originate from Sir Finley Mrrgglton.
The fragmentation of streaming services is a problem, in my opinion. With music, you can pick one service and get access to reasonable chunk of popular music. With video, I haven't bothered signing up for any of them since I don't want to spend the time researching which service has which series that I might enjoy. Even worse, this changes over time as new series are released and old series disappear when licensing agreements expire.
Ideally, a user would be able to pick the game, the store and the launcher independently. Having different games available in different stores and/or launchers restricts rather than expands the options for users. For example, on Android you can install Hearthstone from Google Play or from Amazon's store, so you can decide who you'd rather give your money and data to (even if it is picking a lesser evil), but on PC your only options are to use Battle.net or play a different game and that inflexibility means there is hardly any competitive pressure to improve the store or the launcher.
If I could buy a game in one store and automatically get it in my library on all platforms, that would be great. But instead of trying to figure out how something useful like that can be implemented using blockchain tech, everyone is trying to get rich selling pointless cosmetics.
While I have no numbers to back this up, I can imagine that on average people who play only on mobile would be more casual than people who (also) play on desktop. So the kind of audience who is interested in e-sports and community content would be more likely to use Battle.net.
Besides, they have the news feed viewer already, they only need to push more content to it. They did start doing a bit of this by highlighting community content every once in a while, but they could have done it much more regularly. In fact, a significant portion of what they did highlight was items they sponsored.
Actually, now that I look more closely at Battle.net again, there is more content there than I thought, but I have to scroll past old featured items to get to the news. For example, the announcement of Grandmasters this weekend is invisible unless I scroll down: full height window at 1080p and it's off screen. That's just bad design.
I don't think red tape can be to blame for all of it. Things like incomplete patch notes points to there not being enough structure in their way of working rather than too much of it.
The feeling I get from Hearthstone is that once the prototype became a success, they've never had a quiet moment to rethink their code, tools and processes. The way their broadcast client is a Frankenstein video composition for example, where half the time discover options are showing card backs instead of the face sides. Faeria had an in-house e-sports client used for broadcasts and that was made by an actual small indie company.
Battle.net is not bad, but it could have been used better. They could have done a lot more community and e-sports integration into their launcher, for example. If I didn't read this site, I wouldn't have know about last weekend's Master's Tour.
Yeah: having one launcher is great, having your game collection spread over multiple separate launchers is not.
There isn't a schedule that's good for everyone across the globe though. Rotating the times like they do is the fairest solution.
I did a quick check before posting that, but too quick, since I didn't see there was a page 2 of comments.
I tried Drakkari Enchanter, but apparently the auto-attacks are not considered to be end-of-turn effects.
What did work though was using Darkbishop Benedictus:
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.
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.
In mathematics, any property is valid for all elements of the empty set. For example, all of the numbers in the empty set are even, but they are also all odd.
You can think of it this way: let's say you have a bag of marbles and want to check if all marbles in the bag are red. A way to do that is to start with the assumption that they are all red, then pick one marble at a time from the bag. If the picked marble is not red, you've disproved the assumption. Otherwise, you continue by picking the next marble. If the assumption of all marbles in the bag being red still holds when the bag is empty, all marbles in the bag were red. And not only all marbles in the original bag, but at any step along the way, including the last step when the bag was empty.
It's perhaps not intuitive, but it does make sense, especially if you're doing math or programming.
Since it starts at 1 damage, I think you'd need only 3 spells in hand (Deep Breath itself and 2 others) to match the damage of Fire Sale.
I do agree though that it doesn't look very good: Fire Sale being Tradeable is very useful, so I don't see Deep Breath replacing it, while I also don't think any deck would run this in addition to Fire Sale.
In theory the fact that this doesn't damage your own board could be useful, but if you care about your own board you probably won't have enough spells in your hand to power this, plus you wouldn't want to spend 5 mana on something that doesn't add a body to the board.
With 5 health and Frenzy, it's likely Whelp Bonker will draw at least one card or have the opponent spend a card on it (if they're Fireballing this, you're probably happy). However, you are also spending 3 mana and a deck slot on it and I'm not sure that is worth it.
Honorable Kill hasn't been all that easy to activate. At 2 or 3 attack you have some chance, but once you buff it to 4 and beyond it becomes increasingly unlikely to find a minion with the right amount of health to honorably kill. Acolyte of Pain was good with handbuff because you were likely to get at least 2 activations; I think it will be harder to achieve that with this card.
I think this would need Rush to be a playable card.
In-game it states that the Duels season ends in 3 days; is the client lying or did they push back the patch date?
The weapon restriction isn't much of a limitation, as completing the first questline stage will draw a weapon. The Wild version plays more cheap pirates, so questline progression is quicker. Additionally there is N'Zoth's First Mate which provides a weapon even earlier and for less mana.
That the shots are random isn't a huge detractor either, since anything they hit in the early game is useful: minion hits enable trades, while face hits shorten the time the opponent has to present a counter-lethal. Since Wild has several free pirates (Patches the Pirate, Parachute Brigand), the Pirate Warrior is pretty much always ahead on board in the early game and Defias Cannoneer extends that by another turn.
While the card is stronger in Wild, it bothers me in Standard as well. If you don't deal with it quickly, the hits on board and on your life total will become a problem. Not all decks can deal with a 3-health minion efficiently, especially after their own minions being cleared by weapons and cannon shots, which means the Pirate Warrior gets to disrupt your turn for a very low cost.
Overall, the questline feels unfair because it rewards the Pirate Warrior for playing good cards, but I'm not sure why Cannoneer feels more unfair than other pirates. Maybe it has to do with him being the latest addition to the deck. Maybe it has to do with the time in the match that he appears on the board, when you think you can take over the board before the questline completes, but Cannoneer destroys those dreams. It's probably a combination of those: Standard Pirate Warrior used to have a strong start and a strong finish, but a weaker middle, and Cannoneer fixed that.
Rapid Fire is listed as a card buff, but it is of course a deck nerf for Odd Hunter. Which is a good thing, since that's one of the Wild decks that you run into way too often, along with Pirate Warrior.