Thanks, I’ve noticed that too, she has been available for an hour or so and then gone.

But Hat has already confirmed on social media that she will be back soon (I assume in 1-2 weeks).

Mercenaries is also essentially dead. They announced that the mode will no longer be supported about a year ago: https://www.hearthstonetopdecks.com/big-final-mercenaries-update-coming-in-patch-25-4/

However, unlike Duels, they decided to leave it in the game because it costs them basically nothing and it won’t get “broken” and need fixes. The difference is that Mercenareis has static content and new Hearthstone releases have no impact on it. In Duels, however, all of the balance changes, new releases etc. affect the game. For example, let’s say that a card get buffed and it’s now broken in Duels. Or one of the cards/treasures/whatever available in Duels gets bugged because of some newly released thing and it keeps crashing the game.

So there would be two ways going forward – one is to keep bug fixing and balancing Duels (probably not very often, but still, they would have to keep some people on that task) and the other is to just remove it completely.

So ultimately, they probably realized that almost no one was playing Duels so they decided that axing it completely is better option than just leaving it in and letting it become more and more imbalanced/buggy with time.

It’s sad and I don’t like them removing game modes, but the truth is that Hearthstone isn’t getting any younger. Playerbase gets smaller with time and Duels was never very popular to begin with. I would love them to repeat the success of Battlegrounds, but at this point I’m not sure if it’s ever going to happen.

Sure, sometimes I think asking the community for a bigger input in stuff like that would be cool.

Then I read comments about Hearthstone balance on social media and I no longer think that :p

Sorry for a late reply. If you’re already past apprentice ranks there’s no way to go back to them.

I wish they did, but I’m pretty pessimistic about that. This year they really didn’t want to put emphasis on the esports. Horrible first announcement, only a few events, they didn’t talk much about them, no hype built around them etc. I think they hoped that people will just forget and they could shut down the program completely next year citing “not enough interest”.

I would love to be wrong. I would love them to restore Hearthstone esports back to its old state and try to revive it. But I just don’t think so. I don’t want to get my hopes up and then be disappointed.

Yes, I meant old minions, brain fart 🙂

Those mechanics are usually there for a single season. They might come back in the future for a limited time, but I’m pretty sure that they will be gone and replaced with something else instead.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t played almost any BG this season. I’m a semi-casual player and learning play patterns for all of the Anomalies simply felt like too much to bother.

Fixed.

Because it wants to play as many Spell Schools as possible. Each spell school in Hearthstone has a different color. Holy = yellow, Nature = green, Frost = blue, Fire = red etc. So playing all of them creates a sort of “rainbow” 😀

True, but there’s also a huge sun right behind her head 😀 So I’d say that it’s still day. The night sky above her was probably supposed to show that it’s already setting and it’s right before nighttime.

Anyway, I don’t think that Faerie/Fey Dragons change color based on the time of day/night in Warcraft lore, but it’s a cool interpretation.

I think that Skarr IS a “default air elemental”, he just sucked in the sand when going through the desert, and that’s why it looks like that from the outside. The SIgnature card has the view from “inside” the tornado. So that one can easily be explained, but I agree that the base one looks better, more unique, fits the expansion theme more. It’s one of the few artworks I like better on the base version.

As for Fye, it could possibly be explained by the lighting (regular artwork has strong orange lighting from the setting sun), but maybe not to this extent. I think this is one just a mistake.

But in general, that’s how I think it works. They give two different artists the same set of instructions, but the instructions are vague enough that they need to fill in the details. I’m not a big fan of this – I think they should let one artist make the regular version first and then give that to another artist so they know how the base card will look. I like that Signature cards have different styles, but they shouldn’t depict what looks to be completely different characters.

It would be boring if they made all of them this way, but I wish they made at least 2-3 wanted posters for some of the Outlaw characters. Kurtrus, Tae’thelan and Theldurin for example. I like those “unique-looking” Signatures the most (like Ra-den or Mimiron from TITANS). That’s why High Noon Duestlist is my favorite this expansion I think.

“As usual this is a great improvement, but far late.”

History of Hearthstone in a single sentence :p

Hey! Yes, I’m aware. Sadly our deck codes don’t support ETC and I don’t think that anything can be done with it for now.

Any deck that has ETC in it lists the sideboard in the description. It’s just that deck descriptions aren’t copied when I link a deck in another post. You need to click on the deck list you’re interested it, scroll down a bit, and you will see it.

Yes, the Badlands packs make no difference. Catch-up packs will contain no Badlands cards, so you can open those first if you want.

However, it would be best to open Catch-Up backs before packs from any other Standard expansion (including Standard packs), though. I’ll definitely post a reminder about it around the release time so people won’t make a mistake!

I get where you’re coming from, but do you feel stupid when something you buy goes on sale and gets cheaper later? It happens with everything. Games, movies, electronics etc. If you buy a full single player game on day 1 for 60€, 2 years later it might only cost 10€. Catch-up packs are basically like a discount on the old releases, something that happens with most of things.

Because you spent 200€, you could play the game all the time and enjoy it, have fun with it during those 2 years. And a person catching up still won’t get nearly as big of a collection as you have. The packs are great to get all the commons and rares, they aren’t great at getting all the Epics and Legendaries. Plus they contain no Golden cards, so their dust value is much lower. And they will have to pay full price going forward.

It’s not useless though – those packs are added for free to the pre-purchase bundles, so it’s like getting 10-20 extra Standard Card Packs (that can’t give you cards from Badlands) if you buy one. That’s free dust even if you own all of the cards from those sets.

They aren’t “punished”, nothing about their card acquisition has changed. In fact, it became even easier if they buy pre-purchases, because they get a few Catch-Up packs for free (and they still act as regular packs even if you have a full collection).

I don’t think “active players are getting punished” should be the narrative. Making it easier to start as a new player or get back to the game as a returning player is an AMAZING feature for everyone who plays the game. Hearthstone dying from the lack of fresh blood is the last thing “active players” should want.

You’re right, at the point I was writing this Flint wasn’t revealed, but the combo seems nice. Still, you probably need to already have Bounty Board played the turn before, because you need to play at least four Quickdraw cards to get advantage of Board (and that might be hard, even if they lean towards lower cost).

And yes, Murloc Warlock seems like the best option right now – but Howdyfin alone probably isn’t good enough to make it work. I hope we get some new Murloc synergies this expansion too.

Yep, as Strangiii said, it’s listed as a bug and will get changed back so I didn’t put it here. They probably planned to change it initially, but decided not to after seeing how busted Discard Warlock was in Twist 😀