For the sake of Devil’s Advocate: just because it has no direct benefit to you doesn’t mean its useless. I suspect Blizzard’s main goal was to make the game more “casual-friendly”–i.e., now you can build reasonably competitive decks without ever visiting a 3rd party site, so less involved players might be less discouraged and a play a little more which is generally good for everyone.

But yeah, I’ll go back to my earlier comment and say I too am pretty disappointed that the tool isn’t more competent. Hopefully it improves with time.

Another great article, Guardian, although it’s very disappointing news. I was REALLY hoping for something like “hey, I’ve opened Undertakah and Tirion, can you make me an interesting off-meta deck around that?” This sounds like almost the exact opposite: it reinforces “proven” meta synergies and just fails to recognize new or off-meta synergies.

>>Zayle than can be drawn out of packs too? Should work this way. So playing the single player content dont give me anything Special.

I read this as: it will work just like previous adventures. For example, if you buy, play, and beat all of The One Night in Karazhan, you are awarded free copies of the legendaries Medivh and Prince Malchezaar. Alternatively, though, anyone can pay 1600 dust to craft either legendary regardless of whether they’ve bought the expansion.

It sounds like playing the upcoming single player content will also award you free packs (as opposed to how previous adventures gave away 30-45 unique cards which weren’t available through packs), presumably at a significantly better rate than if you spent your $20 on just purchasing 15 card packs from the store instead. I don’t know whether you consider that discount “special” or not.

What I am interested to see is if the meta goes hyper-aggro. Between the loss of early uber-taunts (namely tar creeper, chain gang, and stonehill), the loss of cheap armor gain (odd warrior, branching paths), and the loss of so many favored stabilization tools (duskbreaker, spreading plague, psychic scream, spikeridge steed, cheating out void lord, etc), control and combo decks both are going to be feel painfully slow unless they get some solid replacements from the next expansion.

Not that I would mind, per say–I really hate how “must have” the above cards have become.

I would say all these have the possibility of insane high rolls, so they all even out in a crazy sort of way.

If I had to pick, though, I’d say either Shaman or Warlock. Triple battlecry can just be insane: I dropped a 22 attack Midnight Drake on Turn 4 last night.

It’s an even bigger change than just that. Think of it conceptually as if each player is really only bringing ONE deck, but it’s best two-out-of-three and they have the option to make slight changes to their deck between matches.

So basically you can sideboard cards, but you need to define “Sideboard A” with at most 5 cards and “Sideboard B”.

Promising. It will be interested to see if players start to focus on decks that can morph into different archetypes with a few changes (e.g., how pre-nerf ramp Druid could morph into Maly or Togwaggle or Taunt with a few card changes) or if they stick with a single archetype with just tech cards to counter particular matchups in the sideboard.

Does anyone want to hazard a guess at who the good choices are?

All these seem pretty fun. Be careful if you get a Paladin v Paladin matchup, though: my opponent dropped a turn 1 Crystalizer, and our totems chained-pinged us both into a dual loss.

Stonekeep’s post originally said “not a Frostfire”. I assumed it should have instead been “add” (at work and can’t check) because that’s the verb used by cards like Gilded Gargoyle, Holy Water, and Lyra, but I guess Blizzard actually used “put” instead here.

For Malacress, I think you mean “add a Frostfire”.

I wish they would have more brawls like this and less of the RNG-fests. This is so much more fun!!

There are some significant power level discrepancies between the decks, but nothing horrendous. Priest, Rogue, and Paladin are definitely Tier One. Mage, Hunter, and Shaman are Tier Two. Warrior, Druid, and Warlock are viable but only if your opponent doesn’t pop-off–play only if you’re up for a challenge.

I really like and respect Brian Kibler, but that man is always saying something or other is “ruining Hearthstone”. 5 months ago when Quest Rogue was dominating the meta, it was Preparation. Then Giggling Inventor got nerfed and Quest Rogue disappeared, and it became Baku/Genn.

In my opinion, this is part of a larger problem Blizzard is facing in that they make want to make good cards that players will want to use (and therefore buy packs), but they always make some cards so good they become auto-include for most decks. E.g., why not run Vilespine and Elven Minstrel in every rogue deck? Or Psychic Scream and Shadow Visions in every priest deck? Brawl, Execute, Volcano, Void Lords, Zilliax, Lich King, practically every hero card, etc. Unless it’s counterproductive to your particular deck’s win condition, these cards are just too good NOT to include.

They’ve tried mitigating this by coupling certain powerful effects with deck limitations, which is a very creative solution, but players are smart–or at least very well-informed. It quickly becomes abundantly clear when the cards that are worth the additional limitations (Reno, Prince Keleseth, Rhok’delar) and when they’re not (Prince Valanar, Glitter Moth, Prince Taldaram in most cases).

Baku and Genn are just the natural progression of this. I.e., if you’re building a Paladin Control deck, there’s probably not too many odd cards you’d even consider–maybe Zilliax, Stonehill, and Lynessa? Why not trade these in for a 1-mana hero power effective at the beginning of the game? Even if you personally aren’t thinking that, it soon becomes abundantly clear on HsReplay that that deck has a superior winrate.
Sure, you can nerf Genn and make him less appealing, but at the end of the day he’s either still more value or less value than Zilliax + Stonehill + Lynessa combined, and once he’s less value then everyone that follows HsReplay will just drop Genn and add in the latter. Then THOSE become the auto-include cards that everyone complains about. Or if neither side of the equation has a significant winrate on the current meta, then players just start playing other decks that do–re: druid and shaman after their recent respective nerfs.

It won’t directly affect the game as we know it, but there will be some indirect effects to every Blizzard department. I’ll bet everyone on Team 5 use to interact with at least one person that’s no longer employed.

I’ve been on both the “cut” and the “kept” sides of downsizing efforts. Not fun. I’m glad AB is concentrating on long-term sustainability, but I also appreciate that the cost is short-term misery.

Lorenzeub just posted a smart decklist where he uses a Cloning Gallery to cheat out his enforcers.

https://www.hearthstonetopdecks.com/decks/i-will-build-a-wall/

Barring that, you could try a Shadow Essence with the same goal.

As much as I respect the ingenuity behind this deck, I’m REALLY glad this enforcer/inner-fire/rez synergy is only being discovered weeks before the rotation because its not at all fun to play against.

Honestly, the druid deck above is relatively cheap and the only epics are the 2 Branching Paths, which are usually used for card draw rather than armor. If you’re still hesitant, you could try substituting in a card draw of your choice (e.g., loot hoarder, novice engineer, bloodmage, etc) and feel that out before pulling the trigger.

Nothing about Maly Rogue? That’s probably the 2nd most popular rogue deck right now, behind Odd Rogue.

WOW. I’m stunned they are making this many changes to the evergreen sets. In a vacuum, each of these nerfs sound individually justifiable, but taken all together with last month’s nerfs to druid’s evergreen cards plus the fact these cards have been unchanged for almost 5 years at this point really makes me wonder what exactly Team 5 is trying to accomplish here…