Yeah, the schedule is clearly targeting Asia (since the tournament is based in China) – it’s bad for both Americas and Europe. At least I wasn’t sleeping in the middle of the night so I could even cover it in the first place, haha.

I watched it for like 1.5h after it started and then some more today. The format seems pretty fun and interesting, I like the “team aspect”, but I’ve noticed a bunch of issues and bugs with Mercenaries

I’ve seen this idea many times, but I don’t think it matters at all. I have played a lot of Questline Mage early in the expansion (got bored of it later) and literally my biggest Ignite (according to achievement) was 8 damage, but that was probably with another source of spell damage.

Even if you limit it to 4 shuffles, so 5 casts in total, that’s still more than enough damage to kill Control Warriors (remember that you also have Runed Orb, Fireball and Apexist Blast + you can often generate some more) – they would need to get incredibly lucky with Armor gain to play around that. And for decks without any life gain, you don’t even need that many shuffles, sometimes you don’t even need a single shuffle to kill them if you draw your Fireballs.

Ignite being infinite matters maybe in 0.1% of the matches, so limiting it would be irrelevant – unless you want to limit it heavily, like to 2 shuffles, but then it kills the entire idea behind the card.

Oh, and of course it makes a difference in Wild, where you have an infinite Ignite OTK combo, but I was talking about Standard.

Oh no, I don’t think that will be over for the mini-set achievements. The next expansion patch would be 22.0, this will most likely be 21.8 (or however they want to call it), just adding expansion pre-orders, not actual expansion data and achievements. They always release a patch on the expansion announcement day and that’s the patch I’m talking about.

I expect the actual expansion patch to release in 3 weeks or so. That’s still not much time for achievements, but they’re doable.

I just got mine!

Alterac Valley is what many people have though ever since the first teaser for Year of the Gryphon was posted (including me and Tharid, who wrote this article https://www.hearthstonetopdecks.com/deciphering-the-year-of-the-gryphon-expansion-teasers-what-we-know-so-far-about-upcoming-expansions/)

So I wouldn’t be surprised at all. But we don’t cover leaks so we’ll wait until the official announcement 🙂 Like you’ve said, it shouldn’t be long. I would also guess teaser this week (but I think Thursday) and then announcement next week (Tuesday?).

Yeah, the last expansion will thematically 100% be about Alliance and Horde having a huge fight, but I wonder what mechanics they will use to showcase it. I think that “dueling” would make sense, but I’m not a big fan of more ways of cheating out minions from your deck.

I was thinking just reducing the first Taunt you play each turn by 1. For 2 mana Taunts it’s would work the same way as you proposed, but you would no longer be able to basically win the game on the spot with Oracle + Razormane + Teacher’s Pet / Greybough (pretty common way to seal the match in mid game).

Oh, and I must have misunderstood you then, that makes sense. I think that a small nerf to Mr. Smite might happen (like changing him to a 5/5), but I doubt that we’ll see anything big as making his text affect only other Pirates (which is a common idea people have been throwing around).

No matter how small the nerf is, they will still give 1600 Dust if they decide to nerf Mr. Smite.

But honestly I don’t think they will. The card doesn’t seem that problematic after playing around for a while. It’s strong, but not overly strong in the current meta. Things might still change, of course, but looking at the early stats it doesn’t look THAT bad. Aggro Druid looks stronger right now and a lot of the builds don’t even run Mr. Smite – so if anything, I think that Razormane Battleguard is a more likely nerf candidate.

I think that they will have a small balance update in Patch 21.8, the same patch they add new expansion pre-orders in (my guess would be November 16, but that’s just me). However I don’t expect any massive changes since the new set is so close and it can change the balance completely.

She said on Twitter that she will still cosplay! Not sure about streaming, though. Previously people who started working for Blizzard (like Chakki, Gallon or BoarControl) have dropped creating Hearthstone content.

You’re right, one of them is a Murloc, but he also has some Pirate synergy 🙂

I’m all in for some more disruption, but that sounds painful to be honest. If you play a spell-based deck you could basically just concede against something like that.

Maybe 2->1, but handicapping opponent for 3 turns is too much IMO.

That’s actually a really good comparison, lmao. When my friend bought his first MTG cards (like 20 years ago), I scammed him out of his strongest one, saying that it’s bad and he won’t need it anyway. I gave him something mediocre instead. We’re laughing about it now, but he was furious once he learned how to play and demanded it back.

It happened during Cataclysm – the expansion has basically changed the entire old zones. A lot of NPCs, Dungeons, Quests etc. from the Classic WoW have been revamped during Cataclysm.

I think the story was that Edwin was killed by the adventures (so basically by players) and then his daughter took his place, or something like that. I honestly can’t tell you exactly why, because I wasn’t playing WoW at the time (I quit late in Wrath of the Lich King and then got back during Mists of Pandaria). Maybe there’s a deeper reason behind it or it was explained better.

Yeah, Edwin HAS to be in the mini-set. But I’m not so sure about a Hero card, I think that he will be a regular Legendary minion.

What do you mean by “instead of other content”? For me it looks like we’re getting them on top of other content.

But I agree that it seems too early. It’s probably because Mercenaries was delayed a lot, it was most likely meant to get released a couple weeks earlier, so the gap between Mercenaries and the mini-set was supposed to be bigger.

I’m from Poland, so $25k prize for the first place is also a lot here. Many people don’t earn that much in 3 years. Even 6k for Top 8 is like a yearly minimum wage.

But then again, the prizes aren’t even that high considering how hard it is to place in Top 8 – first you need to get through the elimination tournaments or finish Top 16 on the ladder, then you need to fight against 400+ players in the main tournament itself. That’s why so many pros have quit competitive and started full time streaming instead – it’s just a much safer way to get the money.

I’ve used “rebalanced” because I don’t know the exact new rates. If it’s lower at low level bounties, but e.g. 90% at higher level then it’s more like a rebalance than a straight up nerf.

Although it’s very possibly a straight up nerf (reducing them in low level bounties, while not increasing in higher level), I’m waiting for people to gather some data about that.

They just announced that Dual Class Arena is coming on November 2, so not just yet, but soon (2 weeks from now).

Oh yeah, I mentioned Rexxar in the description, said that he’s a good fit for the comp, but I think that Anacondra is still slightly better in the starting line-up so Rexxar is more like a bench material, so you can pull him out when you need to focus more on damage.

I haven’t tested Blink Fox myself so can’t speak about that. But stealing enemy abilities sounds pretty fun.

I’m pretty sure they don’t really take Wild into consideration when printing new cards. And as the practice shows, you can always ban them if something goes wrong, haha.

I also think that Bloodbloom was much more dangerous than Stealer – some broken Bloodbloom combos could happen as early as Turn 1 with Coin, or T2 without. Stealer decks at least gave some more time for the opponent to react.

You know what, I wouldn’t be surprised. At least they didn’t ignore the issue completely, because it really sucks to get resources that are just useless.