Honestly not sure yet… I’ll update it once we know what it is.

Galakrond Warlock is one of the best decks on the ladder right now, and its Invoke cards definitely aren’t “meh”. People just discovered its power quite recently and it didn’t become oppressive yet, but it’s good to give it a small nerf preemptively IMO.

I’m nearly sure that some Heroes will leave, they just haven’t announced which ones yet.

And Mounted Raptor’s thing is not a bug. It does not summon TIER 1 minions, it summons 1 COST minions. So minions that cost 1 mana in regular Constructed. Same goes for Shredders / Sky Golem. Sky Golem can for example drop a Megasaur, which costs 4 in Constructed.

It’s confusing and should be changed IMO, but that’s how it works right now.

I’m pretty sure that Twitch drops will be there, but they talk more about them closer to each event. Masters Tour Arlington starts January 31, so we should learn more about drops a few days before that most likely.

We actually don’t know how the card reveals will look like for the upcoming 35 cards. Maybe they will do community reveals again, or maybe they will have a single reveal stream (because 35 cards ain’t that much). Either way I hope that we’ll get more info soon

And to answer your Lunar Festival question, it started early in February last year, so I would assume that there’s still a ~month or so until it happens.

But yeah, the next month or so should be packed with action, news, events etc. 🙂

https://us.shop.battle.net/en-us/product/hearthstone-hero-sylvanas

Those are Standard stats 🙂

Fixed it.

Yep, that’s the one, although I’ve been playing a slightly different build 🙂

The best one you can try is Apxvoid’s list: https://www.hearthstonetopdecks.com/decks/highlander-mage-4-legend-apxvoid-descent-post-nerf/

But Highlander Mage is not very strong in Standard right now. Tier 3 deck – playable, especially if you master it, but not as good as other builds.

But if you’re also playing Wild, I’m having a blast with Quest Highlander Mage in there, it’s one of the most fun decks I’ve played in a while!

Unlike in Deathrattle build, which really relies on Necrium Apothecary, here it’s just an addition. Deathrattle builds which run 2x Apothecary and 2x Necrium Blade are already pretty inconsistent, this in this case you won’t see the combo in most of your games 🙂

But yeah, I agree, Highlander Rogue is pretty fun to play! I like to play Highlander decks in general, because singleton builds often let me have fun with cards that I wouldn’t normally play in other decks.

Pretty much, but not exactly. There are some minor differences – for example, if you play this on a minion one turn, it won’t be able to attack face. But it will still have Charge, so if you now copy it with Faceless Manipulator on the next turn, you will be able to hit face (because the second part of the card is only relevant for a turn that has already passed). Plus some minor synergy differences, like it won’t get affected by cards that affect Rush, but those that affect Charge.

They would probably make it Rush, but back when the card was changed, Rush was not a keyword yet. Plus Rush is not a part of the Basic/Classic set (and Charge is a Basic card), so they didn’t want to introduce a new keyword for a single card

Every month since Hearthstone’s launch – Rng/Luck based gameplay.

I don’t know why people act like it’s something new, it’s a card game to begin with (which are inherently random) and it always had extra RNG through different card effects. In fact, I feel like it got better over the years – early sets were worst IMO. We don’t really have RNG cards like Piloted Shredder or Flamewaker printed in DoD.

But the thing is, RNG is something out of players’ control and it will even out eventually. Sometimes you will get more lucky, sometimes you will get less lucky, but it won’t matter over hundreds of matches. The only variable you can change is your skill, so it’s the thing that affects your results most. It’s always been that way and it will always be that way. RNG matters in a single game, but if we’re looking at whole season worth of games, it’s irrelevant.

It’s definitely not too much, because Mike Donais has already confirmed a while back that Dragons will come to Battlegrounds 🙂 But he didn’t give a specific date yet. I think that they need to adjust some cards first or create the new ones, because “Holding a Dragon” mechanic doesn’t translate into Battlegrounds too well, as well as most of the Dragon synergies.

You CAN remove Hemet and just add more draw or another removal instead, but the deck will be slightly worse. Since you want to get to the bottom as quickly as you can, removing 5, 10, or even more cards from your deck is very useful.

Of course, you’re right, patches that hit a certain deck have usually a big “psychological” impact too – players don’t really like to play things that just got nerfed even if they’re still strong. There’s a solid chance that someone optimizes Galakrond Shaman build to the point of it being overpowered again. But all of the nerfs really did hurt the deck and I don’t think that it would dominate the meta the way it did early. It has Tier 1 potential, but most likely won’t be Tier 0 / Tier S (or however you call the absolute best decks).

Then, there’s a question of timing – if that will happen just before Adventure release, I don’t think that they will necessarily want to release a patch, but rather wait and see the impact of new cards on the meta first and maybe THEN patch it up.

So we would probably need to see some broken deck by the end of this week in order to warrant another balance update before solo adventure.

“The final battle in the Year of the Dragon’s solo adventure story is Galakrond’s Awakening, coming this January! We won’t spoil too much, but we hope you’re ready to battle E.V.I.L. (or good) and collect 35 new cards! More details on Galakrond’s Awakening will be coming soon.”

Source: https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/blog/23239986/hearthstone-update-december-5-descent-of-dragons

I also remember dev confirming that the gameplay will be similar to old adventure content and won’t follow the Dungeon Run formula, but I can’t find the source right now. Either way, it should most likely be announced soon-ish – my guess would be within 2 weeks 🙂

Yeah, it would be great, but the problem is that Zephrys’ thinking isn’t that complex. He won’t offer you cards to mess up with your opponent’s strategy (at least not on purpose) simply because he has no clue what that strategy is.

Maybe in future we’ll get a card built on machine learning that will get smarter with data, but we aren’t there yet 🙂

They never said that there will 100% be a patch on January 5th (it’s Sunday anyway). They just said that IF it will be necessary, they might do another patch after January 5th. So the question is – do we need another patch now?

I honestly don’t think so. It’s not the healthiest meta ever, but it’s relatively balanced, and the strongest decks have their own counters. I don’t think that we really need another patch. We’re probably going to learn more after New Year, but I would be very surprised if we got one. The only chance IMO is some kind of quick, emergency patch if some overpowered deck gets discovered over the next few days etc.

Of course, if Deathrattle Rogue becomes more popular, everyone would run those. But the point of Zephrys is that he can substitute most of the other tech cards and be useful no matter what situation you’re in. Which normally makes him great in a very diverse meta, but it just doesn’t work the way most players expect it to work against Apothecary. I honestly think that Zephrys is good enough anyway, but I wouldn’t mind them hard-coding it to always offer Silence vs Apothecary (at least if you get down to 0 mana first).

Click on the name of a given deck to get redirected to a full guide with mulligan, strategy etc.

In the Rogue & Shaman guides, I’ve added those alternative builds at the bottom 🙂