I’m pretty sure it will be April, they have no reason to break the current expansion release cycle. It’s been April – August – December for years now and it’s working well.

Oh yeah, I didn’t include it because it was nerfed. It was a key card back at 5 mana, but really isn’t in its current state. It hasn’t seen any real play at 7 mana as far as I remember.

Correct, fixed.

Eh, it really depends on the next expansion. If they get a bunch of good cards next expansion then I think that Shaman might have a chance to come back into the meta.

But yes, I think that Invocation of Frost to 2 was an overkill. I think that it would be better to get rid of the “Frost” part and just make it Invoke for 1 mana. 1 mana 2/1 Rush is still solid. 2 mana 2/1 Rush with Freeze is not (while the Freeze part did come handy at times, often it was just useless). But then they would also have to change the name and art, because it would make no sense 😀

I would argue that more people than you think. Most players are competitive and they want to be good at something. It’s not fair to call the mode “completely random” when it’s not – your skill still matters a lot. You can be bad at it, you can play hundreds of games and never go past 5k rating. And then you’ve got lots of pros consistently at the top.

Ranking in HS also doesn’t really matter. Outside of some minor differences in your end of month chest, it doesn’t really matter if you hit e.g. R5 or Legend. And some players still grind hundreds of games to get there. Sometimes to prove themselves, and other times because they just like it, they want to be among the best players.

Of course I would be lying if I said that Battlegrounds is not heavily RNG, but I think that the regular formats have already proven that the mode can be RNG (Constructed, not to mention Arena where your drafts are also heavily random) and skill can still matter.

And in the end, what’s the problem with them sharing that info? 🙂 People who don’t care can just ignore it, others might find it interesting.

True, I remember it! Nice one 🙂

No clue yet. They usually post more info a few days before event.

Oh yeah, that’s interesting. By balance changes they most likely meant nerfing some of the best decks, because they were asked about it multiple times. Players have commonly asked about nerfs to Quest Mage, Secret Mage, Mech Paladin and a few other Wild builds.

Buffing cards that don’t really see play and aren’t problematic isn’t exactly meant to BALANCE the best meta decks, but rather give some more usable options in lower tiers.

So I think that both of those aren’t mutually exclusive. You can buff some cards that don’t see any play and it won’t be a “balance change” – unless one of those cards turn out to be over the top, then it will definitely upset the current balance, eh.

And just like Smasher101 already said, you get extra Dust only for nerfs, not for buffs. But there’s still Hall of Fame when it comes to free Dust 🙂

I didn’t think about it. Is it a real, viable deck or just sort of a meme combo? Because I assume that you run Deathwing as your only Deathrattle and then a lot of big Dragons? So if you draw your Deathwing or Apothecary gets Silenced you just kind of lose?

Or do you just play Deathwing as your only Dragon and settle on a single 12/12, then play a regular Rogue deck? I think that makes more sense, hahah.

I don’t think that Aviana will be reverted – the card was nerfed specifically for the Wild format. It was already not in Standard at the time it was changed. Same thing for Naga Sea Witch – I don’t think it will be made 5 mana again because it was a nerf targeted at Wild 🙂

He didn’t stop casting spells when he died.

E.g. if you had 20 spells played, he ALWAYS cast 20 random spells. Now if he kills himself with the 1st spell, he won’t cast the other 19.

Because it’s still better to buy packs from the upcoming expansion instead (or one of this year’s expansion if you’re missing some cards from them), this way they will have a very high chance to contain playable cards, which are more valuable than Dust. E.g. opening a good Legendary is worth 1.6k Dust and not 400 Dust like disenchanting one you certainly won’t be playing. Even Commons (with diminishing returns, of course, because you get all of them pretty quickly) – opening a good one that you will use is worth 40 Dust instead of 5.

Of course, if money is not a concern, then one can still do it. But there are better deals to buy – such as new expansion’s pre-order. This way bundle will be more expensive per pack, but it will also hold a much higher value.

That’s why I would buy this specific bundle in two situations. 1. I play Wild or want to play Wild and don’t have many cards from those sets. 2. I have a lot of disposable income and I don’t really care about $15 and want to open some old packs.

You’re right about the worst case scenario, but looking at averages is a better idea. On average, one pack is around 100 Dust (not 40 Dust), so this bundle should be ~2400 Dust.

But yes, I agree that it’s not worth to buy just for the Dust 🙂

I’m not sure why, but people constantly overrate Sylvanas. All stats ever since shortly after she was released (including the ones released after the Dragon patch) indicate that she’s one of the worst Heroes.

HSReplay stats put her at #33 out of 35 and Firestone stats put her at #27 out of 35. Even if we take the average, that’s #30 out of 35.

Maybe people not really knowing how to use her Hero Power contribute to the weak result… but at the same time, Deryl which has even harder to use Hero Power is consistently in Top 5 stats (not to mention that both HSReplay and Firestone gather those stats for above average MMR players – like 6.5k+ or something).

But in general, taking any Hero to #1 doesn’t mean that it’s good. Despite being lower tier, she still has 8% win rate – so 8% of people who pick her win with her (the numbers for Tirion and Deathwing are 20%+ in comparison). It doesn’t mean that she’s good, it just means that a really good composition can carry no matter what Hero you run (because even Millhouse has ~5% win rate).

Yeah, in the blue post he mentioned that it seems to be problem with specific devices. It seems to be working on mine, but let’s hope that they figure it out as soon as possible 🙂

Yeah, it’s a solid educated guess. Either way, we’ll see pretty soon 🙂

That’s interesting. I didn’t have a run open myself, but maybe they’ve changed their approach. Maybe too many people were “abusing” and didn’t finish their runs just to get free tickets? :p Although I don’t see a free Arena ticket every ~2 months as a big issue anyway.

I mean, I’m pretty sure that SOME people will get it even if it’s the worst deal ever. But I can’t imagine that the sales for this bundle will be high. $2 per pack is a lot. Even if I was playing mostly Mage, I would still rather get let’s say DoD packs at a better price.

Well, technically it’s not ANY Hearthstone stream. The streamer has to activate drops option first. But I guess that pretty much every streamer did it, because there’s no reason not to 🙂

So yeah, you can most likely watch any of your favorite streamers and get packs.

I’ve been wondering about the same thing! But given that the cards don’t have rarity crystals (unlike actual Constructed cards, which do have them even in BG), I don’t think that those mean anything. I think that they just felt that a given card “belonged” to a certain class and decided to color it this way to keep it thematic.

I would be surprised if they first released a card in BG and THEN added it to Constructed, but who knows? 🙂