Hearthstone

WiscHahshuo#1753.

Hi everyone! Idk if there's another thread for this and because I couldnt find it, I will ask this anyways. Does standard packs have duplicate protection? because some people are telling me there is indeed, but when stormwind came out I opened 20 standard packs and the cards that came in the packs were from the previous sets, and yes, at the time I already had all the collection from standard past stormind.

Met something really strange today.

Opened up the shop, saw two bundles. One 20 stormwind packs + 2 legendaries and the other the same but for wild packs.

Thought about it for a while. Played some games, then came back and poof, they were gone.

Like is this seriously a bug, or has team5 finally reached its slot limit in the shop, what with multiple offers from 3 different games.

Anyone encountered this? Or has quest mage finally made hearthstone hazardous to my health?

I’m just not having fun playing standard at the moment. The game is just an aggro fest and every deck’s only goal is face.

How do you guys have fun? Should I just switch to Wild which (shockingly) looks more healthy?

Lets play a game - name a card you no one knows about yet is still exists in Standard (or, maybe, Wild). 

I will kick off with

Who's next?

Here is an idea I had that can be fun to do if you like a lot of decks but many of them aren't viable in ranked. Take a group of decks according to some theme, a number divisible by 2, so something like 8, 16, 32, or even 64 would work well. Try to not have any deck with overly high power compared to the rest of them, so the result is unpredictable. Then make a tournament bracket (good site I found to do it easily is https://challonge.com/tournament/bracket_generator but can just do it on paper too).

Finally, you can do it with ingame hs friends where for each deck matchup you would do a friend challenge (they can borrow your decks if only one person has them) and play 3 games. You can switch the person playing each deck once too. The deck that wins best out of 3 (or you can set it up to be best out of 1, out of 5, whatever you prefer) moves on to the next round.

You can keep doing this until you get the final winner. For me this type of thing is very enjoyable (the suspense of which deck will move on to the next round and being able to play a huge variety of decks against others of a similar power level and not worry so much about the meta) but I only had the idea to do it yesterday, so I wanted to share the general idea in case anyone wants to try.

Here is an example bracket for the first tournament I'm doing (theme is off meta ones, specifically ones on the weaker side of things and/or very rarely seen).

After that I'm planning to do a tournament of 32 reno decks from all different classes for some kind of ultimate reno deck showdown.

Overall, lots of options and you can set it up however you want. Maybe do a tournament of decks from just one class or using only cards from certain expansions, many possibilities.

since last patch (two weeks ago) i dont see any xp going to my reward track after i finish quests i  know it is just visual but anyone know if they plan to fix it soon ?

how do you get the 11 star modifier? For the first time in my life I am around Legend 1000. Slightly below or above. Should I finish the month below 1000 or if the level is reached once it's enough ? tks

Hey, guys

Any recommendations which deck is good against warlock?  Trying to get Dimond 5, had a few attempts with Libram pal and Warrior - no luck so far. Last 2-3 stars are occupied by warlocks who draw and heal :( 

Thanks! 

The miniset releases roughly two months after the main expansion, so in next 2-3 weeks we should see the next miniset.

I really hate this meta, where it is only quests or decks trying to counter quests (yeah, aggro). 

So I was thinking - what could the devs do to change the meta? Create even stronger cards than quests? Will there be mass nerfs?

What do you expect from the miniset?

Any hint how to defeat Bolvar?

I'm an Arena and Battlegrounds fan so maybe I'm a little biased, but I really don't enjoy seeing:

Hearthstone

Battlegrounds 

Mercenaries

Modes

You open up modes to find Arena, Solos, Duels and Tavern Brawls. Would it have been so much to ask to split the 4 main bars into 1/8's and also add in practice mode to make up the 8th? 

It just seems clumsy and rushed to me. I feel it's tacky and out of place. They should know better and I hope they change it soon!

"Anyone who purchases (or has purchased since Thursday, July 1,2021) a 6-month subscription before October 19, 2021 or have a 6-month subscription with a future renewal date of Monday, August 31, 2021 is eligible for the 6-Month Subscription rewards."

...

"Your Mercenaries packs will not be visible until the Mercenaries game mode goes live on October 12, 2021."

...

"In addition, if you still have game time on December 1, 2021, you will also get an additional:

• 15 New Expansion Packs
• 15 Mercenaries Packs
• Next Expansion Tavern and Battleground Perks"

Stole the description from Wowhead. This has to be the reason.

So they have advertised "over 50" initially available Mercenaries ... well, guess what? They already revealed 52 on the reveal stream this morning.

You've got the ten "Mercenaries" of the Year of the Gryphon ...

The ten "original" heroes of Hearthstone classes ...

Gromm, Ragnaros, Jaraxxus, Samuro, Voone, Blink Fox, Antonidas, Cairne, Sylvanas, Diablo, daddy Roame, Gruul, Mukla, Mannoroth, Mutanus, Arthas/The Lich King, Tirion, Varian, Krush, Tyrande, Millhouse, Geddon, Murk-Eye, Rathorian, Saurfang, Alexstrasza, Brightwing, Anacondra, Morgl, Velen, Natalie Seline, Shadow Hunter Vol'jin.

That's 52. All confirmed in the stream.

Interesting that Rathorian made it; he's the only one I (as a non-WoW-player) am completely unfamiliar with from War2, War3, and HS.

I just finished watching the Mercenaries stream and I wanted to share my thoughts about it in general and create some discussion.

First off, the mode in itself is Hearthstone's greatest departure from its core experience. So much that at times I thought this could be a completely standalone game, only with a layer of Hearthstone paint. If we didn't have that, not much resemblance would remain of the main game. This is concerning for Blizz, because the mode could alienate the core HS players because it's so weird and different, but fail to attract new, outside audiences because it's part of an established game where they would be far behind long-time players.

What struck me about the art style was that it's... not very pretty. It looks basic, barren at times. The main mode doesn't have amazing spectacles either, but every deck has at least 15 different artworks. The board evolves throughout the game, with minions being summoned and destroyed. However, in Mercenaries, it's just 6 GIFs in a 3x2 table? It's very static. Yes, there are fancy entrance and ability animations but many of those are recycled and there are lots of empty, boring grayish/brownish space on the board.

In terms of gameplay, it doesn't look too bad, there are many factors in play like positioning, speed, schools, the Tank/Melee/Caster R/P/S triangle, etc. You must choose 3 out of 6 mercs at the start of a game, that's 20 combinations if I'm correct, there's room for variance and adaptability. The deckbuilding aspect, however, looks pretty simplistic: "I type Murloc into the searchbar and choose 6 of them". We'll see how tribe/spell school focused the "decks" are going to be, but with ultimately only having to choose 6 mercs + 6 equipment, the experimentation and flex spots of the traditional 30 card deckbuilding are missing. Also, the thing that will ultimately greatly simplify your choices is that there's a big power difference between mercs with different levels, which leads me to the next point, and the elephant in the room:

Monetization. For me, the way progression is handed is a major turnoff. Frankly, it's insulting. Hearthstone is already a very expensive game, in terms of your money and your time, which is your gold (or both). Either you play Standard, where half of your collection is deleted every April, or you play Wild, where there are thousands of collectible cards. Not even €130 worth of preorders give you all cards in an expansion. Battlegrounds is €20 or gold every 4 months for the ability to choose a better hero, and both Arena and Duels require payment to enter. And when they show us 3 PREORDERS, 2x €50 and 1x €30, that was just upsetting. How much are they expecting us to pay? How many whales do they want to milk? It's just all so overblown compared to normal, offline, singleplayer games (that cost 90 at most with DLC for a complete, balanced experience).

It just doesn't feel pleasant that non-whales will have to play those time-consuming, computer-generated and therefore soulless "campaign maps" to just have one roll at the slot machine. Oops, didn't get the mercenary that's in the meta? Well, play more and more for more rolls until you become so disillusioned with the grinding that you buy our packs. Any semblance of a decent progression is shattered when a whale can just buy packs until they have all mercs at max level. They said they wanted "asymmetrical PvP matches", but we all know what that means: buy packs until your numbers are higher so "the balance" tips in your favor.

Overall, I am disappointed. I don't want to completely disregard the mode, but this is not what I expected. This was never Slay the Spire, this is only a numbers game. Buy packs to win.

What are your thoughts? 

I have just reached for the 9th time in the month Diamond 1 + 3 stars.

All the previous times, this was the start of a sequence of losses, leading to restart the process to reach Legend ... now I decided to stop and go to bed ... Let see tomorrow, the last day of the month, if I finally succeed to reach Legend ...

https://twitter.com/GW_Alec/status/1430579587172294657?s=20

8/31: 2 Warlock changes (upping mana, feels focused)

Seems like we are going to hear from it very soon (not tm)! Some people received an upload notification for it on the official youtube channel and one user even managed to screen record it. I really didn't expected to hear from it so soon, but if anything that makes me even more hyped!

source

https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/pamjko/i_was_able_to_record_the_mercenaries_leak/

Edit:

AND IT'S LAUNCHING OCTOBER 12TH!

https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/pamdeq/got_this_just_now_in_my_youtube_subscribed_list/ha5k6q2/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3

Blizzard often talks about improving the "new player experience" but do they ever do anything?

My daughter (11) recently got back into the game after a couple years absence. She has a very small collection and not much dust or gold to improve it. At Bronze 10, we face Questline Hunter and Questline Warlock, both using all the top-tier epics and legendaries (like Flesh Giant, still an abomination of a card after the nerf). The best way to grow your collection (while staying F2P) is to earn XP, like that juicy 2500 each week for 5 ranked wins. This goal is literally impossible when you're facing these top tier Questline decks. What are these players doing at Bronze 10?!?!?! How is a new player supposed to get a toe-hold in this game?

how this balance update was ever put through is beyond me. by nerfing so many decks substantially while leaving questline warlock nearly untouched (in terms of how the actual changes affect the deck; e.g. the two nerfs on questline warlock did much less to nerf the deck than the single nerf to incanter's flow did to nerf every tempo/combo mage list in both formats) they've paved the way for the deck to completely stomp the meta twice as hard as it was before. this is even more of a problem in wild where:

• evenlock was hit much harder from losing flesh giant than questlock was by the cost increase
• apm/tempo mage decks have a much harder time playing incanters flow while dealing with aggressive warlock/priest/hunter boards
• odd questline hunter somehow went completely untouched, resulting in even more games against drooling brainlets playing the skill equivalent of cookie clicker (sorry not sorry)

i could go on, but you get the picture. for the first time in a very long time, blizzard has butchered a balance update so badly that the meta has devolved into mostly the two same decks not only in one format, but in both of them. furthermore, the decks before this patch such as miracle mage and secret paladin that could stand up to the more overpowered decks without being too powerful (by blizzard's own statistics!) have been nerfed so much harder than their already more powerful counterparts that they've been stomped into a minuscule portion of the meta. so thanks blizzard, and thanks to all the players complaining about uninteractive mage decks, tax paladins and other decks with no actual statistical reason to be nerfed. i hope you enjoy the god awful meta you helped create. i, for one, will not be making legend for the first time in a while, because its not even close to worth the frustration of playing against the same 2-3 decks every single game regardless of what format im playing.

edit: i understand that the tone of this post is apparently too aggressive and i apologize. ill be rewriting my thoughts on this subject in a new, calmer post and will likely delete this one afterwards