She’s not a bad option, but the main problem is that she doesn’t really fit the deck’s game plan. This is no a slow, control deck – it’s a beatdown deck. You usually want to kill your opponent as quickly as you can by putting constant pressure. Playing a 6 mana 3/6 and then 5 mana 2/2, 5 mana 3/3 and a 5 mana 4/4 doesn’t really fit the “pressure” theme.

In the end, some of the builds use her, others don’t, in the end it really depends on the decks you face. If you play against a really slow meta, like lots of Taunt Druids and Quest Priests, then she’s great. If you don’t, then she’s mediocre.

This specific list is the one Sjow used to get #1 Legend. She didn’t need her on the way up there, but she might be better at other ranks (because the high Legend meta is sometimes different than e.g. R5-R1 meta or e.g. R15 meta).

That’s a bad idea IMO. Not only Call to Arms is still a great card (it’s one of the highest win rate cards in the deck!), but Level Up is just not good in this list. You rarely Hero Power, and Hero Power only summons a single 1/1. Comboing Lost in the Jungle with Level Up is not good at all – you pay 6 mana and two cards to get two 3/3 Taunts. You would need to consistently get at least 3-4 buffs for Level Up to be good.

It’s good in Odd Paladin, because you want to Hero Power every often there. Having 4+ Recruits on the board is common. Just play Murloc Paladin and start counting – how many times you have more than 2 Silver Hand Recruits up in the mid game?

It’s still one of the best cards in the deck, there is no point in swapping it.

You know, bad draws happen in a card game. If you play an Aggro deck and don’t draw your early game at all, you often just lose. If you play Control Warlock and draw your Voidlords before Lackeys, you often just lose. If you play any combo deck, and combo pieces are the last cards in your deck, you often just lose.

That’s how the game works, and you’re not the only one affected. You would be surprised how many games you (or anyone, for that matter) won not because you were playing great, but because your opponent had poor draws.

You absolutely need the Twig for your Malygos combo, so if it gets destroyed by Ooze/Harrison, you’re out of luck. Kobold is there to get it again for another attempt.

It can, but it’s not good. On average, you will pull out something like a 1/2, 1/1 with Divine Shield and a 2/1. It’s not worth it for 5 mana if you only run 1-drops.

When we’re talking about getting that card back in mullgan – you’re correct, there is 0% chance to get it back. E.g. you throw away Leeroy and get Leeroy again – it’s impossible.

What is possible is getting the card you threw away as your first draw after mulligan. HS decks are relatively small, so the chance to immediately draw a card you threw away in mulligan is not that low.

However, lots of people say that it happens more often than it should, but that’s not true – it’s actually another bias, called “confirmation bias” – you remember the times it happened more than it didn’t happen, because it supports your claim.

That’s why I’ve said in general. In other words, on average. You can get more than one Legendary in 20 packs – heck, you can get even a few Legendaries in a single pack! It’s just better than average result, so great for you! 🙂

You’re right – we can’t be sure. All we know is what the devs have said us.

For example, about the cards in your deck. Devs have confirmed that they do remain static until an effect that affects the deck gets played – such as shuffling cards into the deck. Then the order is randomized. But, from the player’s perspective, the cards are random anyway, so it doesn’t matter if the order is static or dynamic.

As for the other RNG, like mulligan etc. – the devs have also been asked about it, for example regarding the chance to draw the cards you’ve mulliganed. Lots of players believed that you had a higher chance to draw the cards you have mulliganed as one of the first draws, which of course isn’t true. The devs have confirmed that it’s not the case. They’ve also confirmed that there is no such a thing as matchup manipulation, e.g some players believed that after a longer win streak they will start facing bad matchups, or vice versa.

But I understand that you can’t really trust everything devs say, as they might hide some information. In case of Hearthstone, knowing those things is mostly about the sample size. Sites such as HSReplay gather hundreds of games every minute, including replays – cards that were mulliganed, drawn etc. For example, in the last 7 days, they’ve gathered over 9 MILLION games. If the RNG was altered in some way, it would stand out. Unless the alterations are in the margin of error, but that would be quite pointless.

Another reason why I don’t believe that it would be the case is the situation in which they would be found out. If some statistics, or anything, confirmed that the RNG is indeed altered, there would be a MASSIVE outrage, and lots and I mean lots of bad PR for the game, so I don’t think it’s worth it. They have other ways to lure the players and keep them playing, there’s no need to alter RNG in order to do that.

But you’re right that we will never be 100% sure how it really works. Maybe HSReplay is paid off to not share that data? Maybe players who discovered it are silenced? Okay, that sounds like a terrible conspiracy theory, so I will just stop there 🙂

Thank you!

Thanks!

Yeah, exactly. While not every cognitive bias affects HS players in particular, I still have lots of material. confirmation bias will probably be #2, but I was also thinking about hindsight bias and a few other things 🙂

That’s one of the only parts of HS I’ve been lucky with – Doomguard discards. It somehow always dodges my Bloodreaver Gul’dan and I’m grateful for that. It feels bad to get double punished – once by not drawing Skull or getting it destroyed, and second one with a bad discard.

But yes, when I face CubeLocks and they drop Doomguard, I see Gul’dan flying out of the hand way too often (which I don’t mind if I face them, but I still can’t help to feel bad).

Thank you! Yeah, the randomness in video games is a really interesting concept. Because despite what lots of HS players are saying, some randomness IS fun. What is unfun are the streaks of bad RNG, mostly, and that’s why devs often do those little tricks to make the game less frustrating. We can all say that “well, I don’t fall for those cognitive biases”, but it would be a lie. Even though I understand them and I write about them, my brain STILL feels that I should win the next roll if I lost the previous 2 or 3, and losing another one in a row feels even worse. That’s how we’re programmed and there isn’t much we can do about it. So I really applaud devs for doing something to make the experience better, even if we have to sacrifice the true randomness a little.

You’re right, matchup RNG is one of the worst RNG’s in HS and I don’t know why it’s not discussed too much. You can be playing perfectly fine, have an optimized deck without lots of RNG etc. and still lose most of your games just because you roll bad matchups. That is the reason why decks that works well across the board (some matchups are good, some are bad, but there are no terrible MUs) have the highest play rate – by removing one type of RNG you add consistency to the decks.

But the thing is, there isn’t much they can do here. Bans are a good concept in tournament environment, but they would be pretty much impossible to implement on the ladder. I think that the best way to somewhat counter matchup RNG would be side-boarding. Before each game starts (when you already know the class you play against, but you haven’t mulliganed yet), if you play ranked, you can switch a few cards in your deck for the ones you have in the sideboard. It wouldn’t suddenly turn bad matchups good and vice versa, but it would let players tech against some common bad matchups. The downside is that it would take extra 30 seconds or so at the start of every game, and when you play let’s say 200 games during a season, that really adds up.

Thank you!

Thanks, Julian! 😀

Law of large numbers is something slightly different. It just means that you will sometimes have good streaks, sometimes have bad streaks (so you’re still vulnerable to gambler’s fallacy), but after the sample size grows immensely, the “luck” will eventually even out and get closer and closer to the average.

I will probably tackle it in one of the future articles – because it ultimately means that HS isn’t just “RNG fest” like a lot of people like to call it, and it actually requires skill. After you play a lot, your luck will even out, but the thing that carries you forward is your skill.

But thanks, I’m glad that you enjoyed it!

New expansions are announced roughly a month before they come out, so with a mid-August release date, it should get announced around mid-July, in more or less two months. We will post about it as soon as we find out anything, but at this point we would be just guessing.

The Witchwood came out a little more than a month ago, and we have a nerf patch coming very soon. There’s still plenty to do with this expansion!

Me too, The Witchwood had very low impact on the meta in general, so I hope that more of the WW cards / strategies will become playable.

Thank you!

Expansions come out roughly every 4 months – one in April, one in August and one in December. So mid-August (roughly 3 months from now) is the best guess right now.