Be Excellent To Each Other

6 mana 6/6 that might play 5 secrets, two minimum of which are shit. Meh. I'm inclined to think a mad scientist in mage is actually better value.

Even if it just plays avenge, the tourney one and noble sacrifice it's 6 mana for a 10/9 where the first attack on it always misses.

Not many 10/9 cards for 6 mana.

Admittedly, given how shit some legendaries are, it could easily be a legendary card. There are plenty of epics that are far more usable than legendaries.

Like that 3/4 bird that gives divine shield when you target her with a spell. So niche as to be pointless in all but a couple of classes, and even then not very powerful.

Hearthhead sees a problem with the card.

http://www.hearthhead.com/news=249061/m ... xamination

I came across the deck a couple of times last night where the pally was able to aggressively control the early game and get the Mysterious Challenger onto an empty board, at which point you are, in all fairness, in a world of pain.

Do you know what sucks in the current 'Double Deathrattle' Tavern Brawl?

Having total board control, lethal next turn, and four decent sized minions out, all with deathrattle, two with taunt.

Opponent drops Sylvanas and then hits 'feign death' twice. He steals all four minions.

Trump's doing another F2P run at the moment which I'm finding quite interesting. Same rules as the original one he did, except this time of course we're four expansions down the line. (His original F2P run to Legend was during Classic, when Chillwind Yeti was a perfectly fine card for a lot of decks.....)

He's currently in the mid-teen ranks and using a Priest deck, the videos are appearing on his YouTube channel on a regular basis.

If he can get to Legend again with an F2P deck that'll be a remarkable achievement, although I'm not sure it's even possible now.

He is allowed to craft cards with dust, get as many packs as possible through quests/brawls/etc, do Arena runs and so on - he just can't spend any real cash. (So he could get Naxx/Blackrock wings with gold too I guess, can you still buy them for gold or are they cash only now?)

Either way the videos are a nice change of pace, watching someone try to think their way around meta-mainstays such as Mech Mage and Patron Warrior with a somewhat basic Priest deck.

Aye I've been watching them. The YT videos are quite lagged to his current progress. The one up today shows the 1,3,5 mana brawl which was over a week ago. I think he's at about rank 10 now and will really face a difficult struggle as he reaches the low ranks.

Still, he's plucky and it's his full time job and he's doing the best he could possibly do, so it's pretty interesting.

Opened my first Legendary card in ages last night (Malygos which i've thought about crafting a few times)

From PC gamer on a 14 year old who's playing it still without paying and has hit rank 1 in the US

http://www.pcgamer.com/meet-the-14-year ... ng-a-cent/

I see he agrees with me on Mysterious Challenger

It should definitely be a 7-mana card. Calling it 'Dr. Six' is accurate.

Case in point.

I get a 40 gold quest which of course I mulligan, but instead of getting another 40, or a 60 or the 100, it now has the 50s to choose from.

It gives me 'three wins with Priest'.

I fucking hate Priest. I have no Priest decks. It's ages since I even played as a Priest.

So I either have to do three wins with Priest to complete the quest, or wait a day to mulligan it again. (Which would then use my mulligan for the day which I may want to use on another 40.)

So instead I do three wins with Priest and hate every minute of it, after having deleted one of the decks I actually enjoy playing with, just to get the fucking quest out of the way.

That's bad design right there.

Tavern Brawl is messed up again this week - the main page says 'too many portals' (again) - however your deck has no portals and instead has dozens of webspinner cards

And now fixed so its a 'get lots of portals' deck although both decks break a lot of the new cards since the first one the only minion that you could draw for a joust was a webspinner (so no one won) and the new deck has no minions so any joust cards 'fail'

It's a fun brawl but not one you can really take seriously since it's so stupendously random.

To add insult to injury following on from my forced 'THREE WINS WITH PRIEST' quest I then got 'WIN FIVE TAVERN BRAWLS' which is a 60 gold quest so of course I'm not going to mulligan it, but it's rather a hateful tavern brawl. Grrrr.

It'll be nice to get back to, y'know, actually playing something in the game that I want to. (I'm forcing myself to maximise gold collection as my TGT card collection still has a lot of holes in it so I want to buy as many packs as possible with gold. I'm sat on enough dust to craft anything I want, but I can't bring myself to. So it's kind of my own fault, really.)

Thats what I got yesterday which is why i was playing so much Brawl - although since Brawl is 'offline' for a few days each week I wonder if the random quest generator will spit out a 'win 5 brawl matches' when you cant actually play any ?

Most of the brawl matches I played were pretty one sided and it did feel like there was not really much skill involved - if you got the good cards you won , if your opponent got good cards they won.
There did not seem to be any game where both sides got a good set.

However one positive is that i drew one of the new cards i'd never seen before and now I want to craft it





So in this game it was just what i had in hand but for a 6 mana card something that buff's *everything* both in your hand and in your deck it was great - its a pity its just a Shamen card rather than a neutral one (but I'm thinking playing a Shamen Murlock deck with that in there)

I also had Icehowl



which was an interesting card for 6 mana but i dont see it as very good with its normal 9

I'm currently losing this brawl to fucking pricks that keep portalling five legendaries over the course of the game. And even then they only *just* win. Cunts.

I find it infuriating. I don't mind getting one win at it for the classic pack of cards, but five wins is really pushing it.

It doesn't matter how well you're doing or what you set up, the insanely random nature of it means it's always possible to lose to just about anything at any time.

On a wider note I think there's too much RNG in the game anyway, this brawl just magnifies it to the max.

(In the normal game for example, what pops out of a Piloted Shredder can swing a game one way or the other, it's daft.)

I've slowed down quite a lot with Hearthstone recently, I'm doing my daily quest, and maybe a few games beyond that, but nothing like at the rate I have in the past.

Hahahaha, man. Some cunt in Tavern Brawl was spamming 'Well Played' when I was on 9HP after he dropped a Deathwing.

I responded by playing 3 portals, which got me a frostwolf grunt, shade of naxx, and... a Van Cleef which drops as a 12/12.

Deathwing has to hit the 2/2 taunt, my Cleef takes it out, and then I build up an almighty board that he can't recover from, and I fucking win. Fuck you BM twat.

First thing I do every match is hit squelch which has improved my win rate and my enjoyment of the game.

Only 130 more wins for golden priest. I was hoping for a more control based meta after TGT but yesterday I faced 12 face decks in a row.

I have noticed that my friends list has been sparsely populated of late, I think a lot of people have become frustrated with the current state of the meta.

Yeah me too, why wait to found out they're a BM twat or not when a pre-emptive strike gets the job done

I think the meta is 'OK' at the moment, Face Hunter is still exactly the same as it was pre-TGT, and it's still basically a roll of the dice if you beat it or not with most decks, even those that are well capable of beating it.

My play rate is definitely well down or where it was, but it's still a fun game.

I'm having fun with an echo heavy mage deck , the only things that are knocking me are priests who steal and use all my best cards and facehunters who can get enough damage in before I draw my restore cards or my blockers

There are a lot more 'dragon priest' decks around the bottom end of the ladder (i've been as high as 13 so far this season but i'm generally drifting between 15 and 16) and its nice to see at least some type of variety of decks

Trump has won the NA Blizzcon Qualifier against reigning world champion Firebat.

Vod here: http://www.twitch.tv/playhearthstone/v/16991340 from about 5:40

Bless Trump, he tries very hard and he's still F2Ping this month, but he's still quite a way off.

An unusual twist for this weeks challenge but does not really seem to work.

Basically at the start of your turn if you have 3 points less health than your opponent then you gain a random minion

So really easy - play as Warlock , and on turn 1 coin / tap / if they have hit you with anything you start getting free stuff next turn.

I played a priest who kept on healing me to avoid having the minions drop (which was nice) but I never really got any 'good' minions for free (i think the best thing I got was an injured blademaster who was not injured because their battlecry does not trigger).

I also had a card played against me which needs to go on my 'must craft' list - the only real issue is that its a priest only

http://www.hearthpwn.com/cards/22368-co ... -paletress



So drop the card , and each tap of your hero power spawns another legendary on the board.

I like the way you present stuff as if the people that read this thread don't play the game They might do, but I doubt it after 96 pages.

Here's a mythbuster video with some cool-as-shit interactions:

I've been mullered by a couple of Dragon Priest decks recently. As long as they get the cards they want, the dragon interactions are brutal. 2/3 for 1 mana, 3/5 for 3 mana, etc etc.

haha. Thought I'd play a couple of games tonight and get the Warlock quest out of the way. Playing a Zoo-esque deck as I don't have all the cards for Handlock.

I'm one win off Rank 11 now. Must have won about 8 in a row! Got insanely lucky in the last round though, hitting a Fisty of Jarxxus to the face for the win when he had 4 minions out. I did apologise to him.

Decks like this seem to have put filth like Face Hunters in their place though, definitely fewer pure face aggro decks around now.

Some aggro in the game is fine, it stops control decks getting too greedy, but there has to be a limit to how effective they are, and before TGT it was too much in face/aggro's favour IMO.



I'm up to date with the YT vdeos now and he's managed Rank 5 (and looks like he go better!), which with an F2P deck, four expansions down the line, is a remarkable achievement. I'm finding these videos far more interesting than watching the best players just pounding away with the best decks. Seeing Trump close down legendary/epic heavy decks, and even win horrible match-ups like Patron Warrior - is quite refreshing.

On a wider note I'm keeping up with my daily quests but that's about it, there are some cards that are plain boring and need nerfing or sorting out, Piloted Shredder for example, completely fucks the four-drop design space. In anything but the most specialised deck, why wouldn't you just put a Shredder in there. It's like a four-drop version of Dr Boom, with similarly annoying RNG.

I love it when they have board control and i kill their shredder which drops a Doomsayer :-)

Fringe cases like that don't nearly make the card anything other than an auto-include in most decks, it even finds its way into decks like Oil Rogue, just because it's insane value for a four-drop.

I know it's a common card so easily accessible to anyone, but when you're putting a deck together and the thought process for the 4-mana slot is basically 'Nothing is as good as Shredder, I'll take two', there's a problem.

Got a Rogue quest so made an Oil Rogue deck and had some fun with that. Gets destroyed by Charge-heavy face hunter decks every time, but won all my other matches.

Sometimes I don't know where you get your ideas from. Nobody is saying, or has ever said 'NERF SHREDDER NOW'. I feel like a couple of bad experiences on the receiving end colour your view.

If anything TGT nerfed it with some highly variable 2-drops. Darnassus Aspirant losing you a mana crystal? Huge potential tempo loss. If silenced it's a poor value 4/3. Ultimate it's a card like any other, and is a bit of a random pick if you aren't playing a mech deck. If you're just popping it into your decks automatically then your deck isn't very specialised, and possibly just not very good. I don't know of any decks, even mech ones, where the Shredder was a fundamental card.

In Arena it's a bit better, but that's about it.

Like you though I'm mostly flipping quests. Over 1k gold, can't be arsed to do much with it.

The overall verdict on TGT for Shredder was that it stayed about the same, with outliers like Aspirant going into the same category as Doomsayer - i.e. it's so rare that it doesn't affect the card. (One of the top players (Reynad?) has said it's basically a 5-mana card for 4-mana.) I wouldn't go that far but it certainly needs to be a 4/2 IMO.

It won't go into most specialised decks (although Trump felt it was a worthy inclusion in Oil Rogue to give it some board presence), but in any sort of minion-tussling deck, it's a choice you won't go far wrong with. (Just check out the deck lists on Icy Veins and see how much it turns up.)

The issue I have with it is that's a rather boring, ubiquitous card, capable of horrible RNG swings, but whose fundamental stats makes it a very tempting inclusion in a large number of decks. On average it's a 6/5 for 4 mana, which is big numbers for small mana.

IIRC in his pre-TGT previews Trump dropped Shredder to a 4/2, that seems right to me.

EDIT - If you look at Sludge Belcher that seems right to me, it's a Senjin and a Goldshire Footman in one card, with the mana cost added together to give 5.



Save it for the next expansion? If they follow the same routine as they have thus far it'll be a Naxx/Blackrock style thing so will take a big wedge of gold to unlock all the wings.

I'm buying a few TGT packs every time I get to a few hundred gold, getting a dreadful run on epics though (not seeing many at all), and Wrynn was the only legendary I've had for ages.

Would quite like a Ysera for Dragon Priest, and I believe I need those epic ones that get taunt if you have a dragon in hand. But outside of Tavern Brawl I'm not getting any classic packs so I might have to bite the bullet on 1600 dust for Ysera.

Dragon Priest is a remarkably 'clean' Priest deck in that it doesn't do much in the way of trickery and thievery.

I'm playing a Dragon Priest variant at the moment (I drew two priest quests win 3 and win 5) and there are a few 'steal' things in there but not much (Cabal with a shrink and Mind Control Tech) , no card steals and no mind control itself.

http://www.hearthpwn.com/decks/312259-t ... gon-priest is the basis for mine - I'm missing Vol'Jin and Yersa and Fjola - swapped in Alex and another Dragonkin Sorcerer and Sylvanas

Reynad is a chundering arsehole, can't stand the guy or anything he has to say about anything.

Shredder - couldn't care less about it. If it's really that big of a problem you can run an extra silence and then it's terrible for its cost. I barely even notice the card exists, particularly when there are just so many other options for the slot now.

Trump isn't going to make it with the F2P Priest, he disappeared for over a week to attend various Cons. Currently Rank 4 with only today and tomorrow left.

Still, Rank 4 is a very solid achievement with that deck.

He's beaten down just about every other deck along the way, including really horrible match-ups for the deck.

Great fun to watch, with some fantastic plays I'd simply never have thought of.

Will be sorry to see the run finish and him go back to 'normal' decks TBH.

The new Tavern Brawl is a riot

ROBOT WARS!

Rank 14 chest got me :

I got the same, but ten more dust, for level 12 (different cards, same rarity levels).

Bit of a shit boost for 2 levels!

Realistically you'd have to play her with 9 mana, so you're guaranteed at least one extra legendary, because let's face it, she won't last more than one turn - especially with those stats.

The other issue of course, is that there are quite a lot of shit legendaries out there, or legendaries where the stats are poor but it's only the Battlecry that makes them interesting. I assume you don't get the Battlecry? So if you get a Harrison Jones for example, he won't destroy a weapon?

Correct - so either single use or you need stuff to buff her

When i had the card played against me i did not have something to kill her instantly so he got 2 legendary s (Raggy and something mid range out of her) - if she was a Mage's card then I'd be playing her with a duplicate already in place.

And i've not had it happen (but I've seen it on you tube) - she can draw herself so your then doubling up on Legendary cards

So this is an interesting one - get a card appropriate to the round - i bet there are ways to exploit it by only having 1 of a type (e.g. i'm playing a mage and only have flamestrike as a 7 point card so i *will* draw it on round 7

Yeah so
Turn 7 - Flamestrike
Turn 8 - Raggy
Turn 9 - Alex
Turn 10 - Pyroblast

Having a single Mana Wyrm in your deck can start things off nicely too... (Or two for insurance against an unfortunate early death.)

I have a leper gnome as my 1 point card - so i will always draw that first regardless of what i have in hand - it makes the mulligan at the start interesting as well as you 'know' what you will draw at later points

So now the arena rewards random packs? If it is, i'm extremely unlucky because i got 3 core packs in a row. Just because of that i stopped playing arena altogether.

It would only be far if Tavern brawl packs were also random, because let's face it, core packs at tis time are usually just getting a few dust.

Didn't noticed there was such big fuss over shredder. Don't see the point really. It's a fun and good, but not overpowered card.

Don't see any reason to nerf it. I never get any kind of desperation from when the opponent drops one, as it's usual when I used to get from a Necropotence or Tolarian Academy from the days when i played magic.

Yes Arena is random - for my cards the one I 'hate' to see the pack for is actually Goblins as unless I pick a Legendary then its just dust - I'm still finding odd core cards filling small gaps - however I agree it would be nice to either have random or allow you to select (its a pack and you pick which deck to draw it from)

With all due respect I wish people would read what I actually said about the card, namely that it's so good for its mana cost that it's the best 'standard' minion for the 4 mana slot, not that it's overpowered in and of itself, especially so with it being a common. (So everyone can run a couple, and a huge number of decks do.)

I agree with Trump that as a 4/2 with the same mana cost and deathrattle, it'd give other cards a bit of air in the slot.

It's a boring card IMO and that very slight nerf to its base stats would be beneficial to the game.

I don't get a sense of desperation when an opponent drops one either, it's just a card that's all over the fucking place so you learn how to work around it as efficiently as possible, like a low-rent version of Dr Boom.

The fact that the card has become a staple, isn't reason enough for it to be nerfed. It some situations the Yeti might even be better, so it's not a case that the shredder is the only choice for a 4-cost. And i don't get how is the card is boring, since it spawns a random creature and it can generate all kinds of weird situations, like the Doomsayer that has been mentioned here.

It's worrying when some cards can shape the metagame completely, like when Memory Jar was released on MTG and had to be banned within a month or so. The Shredder is just a good card, and there's no reason to start nerfing a card just because it's good.