Hearthstone

[Tick Tock Crocodile]

There's a funny parallel between HS and SV right now, with the Rogue and Mage quests being like much faster variants of Maelstrom Serpent and Dimensional Shift, respectively.

 

[Projas]

Another thing that seems to be really good (and fun) right now is Handlock. Those 3 mana 4/8 plants are actually really amazing. I've been playing it for a while now and I've only ever lost to quest rogue, but even that matchup seems fairly winnable. And you only need two new cards for it.

 

[Metro]

Another thing that seems to be really good (and fun) right now is Handlock. Those 3 mana 4/8 plants are actually really amazing. I've been playing it for a while now and I've only ever lost to quest rogue, but even that matchup seems fairly winnable. And you only need two new cards for it.

Funny enough those two plants are one of only three rare cards I didn't pull out of 100+ packs.

 

[Projas]

Another thing that seems to be really good (and fun) right now is Handlock. Those 3 mana 4/8 plants are actually really amazing. I've been playing it for a while now and I've only ever lost to quest rogue, but even that matchup seems fairly winnable. And you only need two new cards for it.

Funny enough those two plants are one of only three rare cards I didn't pull out of 100+ packs.

That is funny, because exactly the same thing happened to me. Got at least one copy of every rare, even got three golden sentries, but not a single 4/8 plant. Had to craft them.

 

[Metro]

Rogue quest is pissing a lot of people off to the point of auto-conceding. I encouraged it on the HS forums because it's probably the only way the devs will recognize there is a problem. After messing around and watching streamers a lot of the other quests are falling a bit flat.

Druid: Takes a while to get going and the reward is not as good as it seems. Typically you want to avoid flooding the board with shit, even big shit. Maybe it'll be best with Malygos or something but I haven't seen too much like that yet.

Hunter: It's good for card draw especially combined with Starving Buzzard but Hunter still lacks the tools to be a control deck. People are saying Dinomancy midrange with deathrattles is better.

Mage: Annoying as hell to face. Watched a pro streamer try mostly elemental control/grinder shaman with Pyros and he seemed to think it was as good as a quest deck.

Paladin: Gimmicky as shit. Put a lot of subpar buff cards into your deck and the payoff can be a total bust. The five adaptations can be repeated so the odds of you getting that charging, windfury, high attack iteration is fairly low.

Priest: Solid. Not overwhelming but solid.

Shaman: It's Neptulon on steroids. While they added a lot of murloc synergy I don't see this as a very successful deck. Yay, you get your hand filled with murloc cards... great? Elemental Shaman seems way better.

Warlock: I hate that they keep pushing this discard shit. The quest seems unnecessary and as noted above Handlock might actually be better with those new 4/8 plants.

Warrior: While Taunt Warrior in itself is an okay deck I don't see getting Rag's hero power as something great. Especially in a meta where people seem to have a lot of minions on the board. Eventually I think traditional CW while rise again maybe with King Mosh added as further removal/board clear.

Month from now I think these will be the most played legendaries: Mage quest, Pyros, Priest quest, Rogue quest unless nerfed, Kalimos, and the new Elise.

 

[Metro]

This reddit post hits it on the head: Hearthstone is more expensive than WoW:

https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/644p3w/dear_team_5_im_your_average_hearthstone_player/

I realize this is way too long, so here is a tl;dr summary of why this expansion has killed the game for me:

• Legendary quest cards and must-have epics that support them put an outrageous amount of the game behind a gigantic paywall.
• The amount of duplicates and low rate of epics/legendaries in packs makes it incredibly expensive to craft a playable deck.
• Team 5 seems to be more interested in designing decks than cards, so that cool epic you got in a pack is close to useless without the dozen other cards that synergize with it.
• It has become abundantly clear that Team 5 is designing this game to squeeze as much money out of its playerbase as possible, rather than creating a fun game that anyone can play.

 

[cvv]

Yes, the fact that you pay a standard full AAA price - 60 jewro - and discover you need to pay at least three times as much to get a reasonable portion of every new expansion is the main reason I stopped playing. And that was before they scrapped the adventures which offered a great value for the amount of cards you got.

The price of packs is just beyond absurd. Kripparian the other day bought over 1000 packs and he only got half of the legs. That's insane.

Plus Blizzard seems to be so focused on churning out these super expensive sets they don't give a shit some cards or decks are completely broken. I takes them months, sometimes years, to nerf or buff cards. They discovered only now PW is ridiculous. Yeah no shit.

Problem is HS the only card game I really like. I tried a couple of them, always left disappointed. Only Gwent kept me marginally interested but that is still quite raw. So I prolly keep coming back and keep playing, a few weeks before and after each expansion, to see what's new and then leave again.

 

[Metro]

WoW is on the downswing. Most of their original/long time developer crew left alongside Metzen. Game is now being run by Gurgthok of Elitist Jerks (not joking, he's Ion whatshisface... corporate lawyer turned game dev). Lots of shitty filler Diablo like content.

These F2P loot-box games are the future of Blizzard. They can operate on 20% of the staff of WoW and produce the same amount of revenue with this pay for RNG system. Heroes of the Storm is switching to something similar with loot crates just like Overwatch. But at least those two games either give you the heroes or make it easy to acquire them unlike HS which subjects your ability to play to massive RNG/paywalls.

 

[sser]

Warlock Quest is DOA. There's no reason to play it in a regular Discard deck, that's how bad it is. People seem obsessed with the Rogue quest, but I'm not convinced. A deck which often does nothing for the first half of the game has some obvious weaknesses and might just be preying upon a disorganized meta. Despite not much going on now, I still think the Shaman/Hunter quests have a ton of potential at least on paper. A lot of the new cards are pretty fun, but the 'gated' entry to the game now is fucking ridiculous. How stupid of me to think Blizzard would just release the quests like they did with C'thun.

 

[cvv]

Rogue quest is hillariously broken. So is mage with Alex and Arcane Giants. That one is 30 to 0 OTK, very consistently. So fun and interactive. Didn't they say they wanted to retire freeze mage with the removal of Ice Lance? Lolblizzard.

 

[Metro]

Was watching Trump's rating of the Un'Goro cards before-the-fact and holy shit he's almost completely wrong across the board:



Said the Hunter quest was great. Said the Priest quest was terrible. Said the ROGUE quest was terrible. Also says a lot of the good cards are awful. What a 'pro.'

 

[Projas]

These predictions are almost always like half wrong. The priest quest is pretty bad though, I've yet to see someone make it work. It just doesn't do enough and the deathrattles in standard are too weak. He also made a pretty good call on handlock.

Rogue quest is hillariously broken. So is mage with Alex and Arcane Giants. That one is 30 to 0 OTK, very consistently. So fun and interactive. Didn't they say they wanted to retire freeze mage with the removal of Ice Lance? Lolblizzard.

Mage is far from broken. So far it seems like less consistent version of freeze mage. Good, but not t1. It also gets screwed hard by dirty rat.

 

[cvv]

These predictions are almost always like half wrong. The priest quest is pretty bad though, I've yet to see someone make it work. It just doesn't do enough and the deathrattles in standard are too weak. He also made a pretty good call on handlock.

Rogue quest is hillariously broken. So is mage with Alex and Arcane Giants. That one is 30 to 0 OTK, very consistently. So fun and interactive. Didn't they say they wanted to retire freeze mage with the removal of Ice Lance? Lolblizzard.

Mage is far from broken. So far it seems like less consistent version of freeze mage. Good, but not t1. It also gets screwed hard by dirty rat.

Trump is no worse than anyone else, his problem is he's too confident. Instead "this card might be good but we'll see" he says "this card will be amazing and that's a fact". Does that for everything. Unlike someone like Kripp who's always full of disclaimers.

As for Quest Mage - I played in total about 6 matches against them and they managed to pull off their combo every single time. One time it was due to sheer cosmic luck - he was at 1 HP, out of Ice Blocks, played Babbling Book, got another Ice Block. But still. But Rogue definitely is broken, it's way too easy to complete the quest, even before turn 5.

 

[Tick Tock Crocodile]

No pro saw Patron etc. coming, either. The predictions of most pros tend to be wrong, even when you're talking less about the likes of 'personalities' such as Trump and Kripp (they are pros, but the term really should be used loosely as good play is not what they're paid for) and more about truly excellent players (Dog, StrifeCro, Kolento...). Dog, who everyone agrees is one of the best Rogue players there is, thought the quest was bad

Reynad once said he believed that meta predictions and the like stem from a different skillset than what makes one good at piloting decks (or building them, even, though that's more closely aligned), and I agree with him. No HS meta or card was ever a surprise to me, but that doesn't make me good enough to be a pro, or anywhere close.

 

[Grubba]

47 packs opened on thursday, got 1 legend (warrior quest) and 7 epics. Weak.

Quest warrior deck has been doing pretty good. Cornered Sentry is great, those 1/1s you give your opponent set up interactions with so many things. Set up brawl and second-rate bruiser. They're good for when you have armorsmith or frothing berserker, and of course they're easily eliminated with whirlwind or ravaging ghoul. I've won most of my games against quest rogue, dirty rat and brawl being key cards in that matchup. Pirate warrior is tough but I did beat the last one I faced.

 

[cvv]

47 packs opened on thursday, got 1 legend (warrior quest) and 7 epics. Weak.

Quest warrior deck has been doing pretty good. Cornered Sentry is great, those 1/1s you give your opponent set up interactions with so many things. Set up brawl and second-rate bruiser. They're good for when you have armorsmith or frothing berserker, and of course they're easily eliminated with whirlwind or ravaging ghoul. I've won most of my games against quest rogue, dirty rat and brawl being key cards in that matchup. Pirate warrior is tough but I did beat the last one I faced.

Yeah I liked what little I saw from the Warrior quest deck. But Pirates still give it trouble? I thought a deck full of solid taunts would absolutely crush pirates. Especially the Alley Armorsmith, I saw a dude on a StrifeCro stream plonk down this card buffed to 4/9 and in two turns he racked up like 30 armor :D Main reason I was planning to craft all cards for the Warrior Quest deck is to finally fuck pirates in the ass. Plus it's an interesting take on a CW, I like that. This and Priest seem like the most fun new decks to play.

 

[WhiteGuts]

I opened a second Clutchmother. Just like the in the previous expansion where I opened 3 Wickerflames.

Blizzard just fucked my shit up

 

[cvv]

Well, one more to go.

(My last two legs from Classic packs was Nozdormu and gold Nozdormu).

 

[Grubba]

You should hang onto that golden Nozdormu for the future Galvadon meta

 

[Projas]

So it looks like freeze mage (without quest) is the single best deck in the meta right now according to win rates. Didn't see that coming. Meanwhile quest rogue is on the decline now that the meta has somewhat settled.

 

[Tick Tock Crocodile]

Freeze Mage has more lives than a cat.

 

[cvv]

Yeah I stopped playing again since I realized I got no cards to build decks (my TGT and all my adventure sets are gone and I just can't craft everyting that's good in WotG, Gadgetzan and Ungoro).

But I watch some streams and noticed the quest rogue withdrawed from the scene. Actually I only see the quest mage and quest warrior now, all the other quests are non existent (even tho Nzoth Quest Priest seems to me eminently viable). But there are a lot of miracle rogue and freeze mage now. Also clown decks like the Inner Fire Priest or Turn-one-Bittertide Hydra-Druids, very lulzy but very fun. Oh and also Kripp's Holy Fire Pally, check out his recent vid. Very hillarious.

 

[Projas]

Inner Fire Priest is legit man, that's what I've been playing for last couple of days and it actually has a decent win rate.

 

[Grubba]

Paladin is back baby. Aggro murloc pally really stomps the shit out of people and gentle megasaur can get you those spicy turn 4 lethals if you curve out just right. Hydrologist is a great swiss-army knife type card. Playing against taunt warrior? Take Repentance and watch your opponent cry. Freeze Mage? Take Eye for and Eye, pop their ice block, and let them kill themself. You don't even really need Finja in there but it's nice to have as a backup plan. Same goes for Sunkeeper Tarim, who can save your ass against quest rogue cancer. Paladin always gets interesting legendaries. And speaking of those, Stonehill Defender might be the best paladin card in the set and it's a neutral.

 

[Daedalos]

I have to say, I'm thouroughly enjoying this expansion.

Plenty of different fun and viable decks to play around with. I'm at rank 2 atm, with a n'zoth control pally, and i've tried the murloc aggro, which is crazy strong.

Also been playing silence priest and taunt warrior alot. Also great fun. Add to that, n'zoth and miracle rogue with sherazim