Update: Both Alleria and Magni disappeared from the shop shortly after posting this… Not sure what’s going on. I’ll leave this post just in case they come back. Medivh is still available.
Blizzard is bringing back even more old Heroes to the shop. This time we’re getting three, but only one can be purchased with gold.
Here’s a full list of what’s available:
- Medivh Hero Portrait + Card Back – $9.99 or 1500 Gold
- For the Hoard! Card Back (Kobolds & Catacombs Pre-Purchase) – $2.99 or 500 Gold
- Alleria Hero Portrait + Card Back – $6.99
- Magni Hero Portrait + Card Back – $6.99
Those three were the first alternate Hero portraits that were released in Hearthstone, back in 2015. They were available all the way until late 2019.
Yes, Medivh seems to be the only one purchasable with in-game gold for now – you need to open in-game shop to do it, can’t purchase it with Gold through Battle.net.
However, the pricing is… a bit curious. His real money price is $9.99, as opposed to Alleria and Magni, which are both $6.99, even though they apparently also come with card backs.
Medivh is available through April 12, while the other two are on a “limited time sale” without any specific dates.
I’m just waiting for the Deathwing Portrait in Hearthstone.
Also just to add it would be nice if the card backs were 1.99. Because its like do i want to spend 3 dollars on a card skin or 3 dollars on 2 packs
Was magni already removed from sale I dont see him or Alleria listed on the bliz launcher
Wait so medivh leaves the shop on April 12th?
Wait, so will Medivh disappear from the shop on April 12th?
Wait, so will Medivh disappear from the shop on April 12th? Cause it seems like a very short window, I can’t even rack up that much gold…
Yes! That’s really bad. I don’t know how can I get 1.2k golds in 6 days….
BTW, last hero portrait(Sylvanas) in shop 2 weeks and now my favourite hero portrait Medivh only in shop for one week 🙁
Hmm, I should start saving gold for when a good portait comes back out
Feels great to purchase this. Glad they are releasing one after another like this which makes the purchase an easier decision. Not sure why the others are complaining to this post. So what if the marketing team decides to monetize cosmetics? Ideally their decision should not introduce code errors. I work in IT so saying from experience.
Game is riddled with awful bugs and they introduce more bugs over time than what they fix. And I can just see the conversation at Blizzard, “Release the skins!! Milk it for all it’s worth!” Like another silly little cash grab will magically fix the real problems. Like people will never stop buying cosmetics and they think the game will stand on its own magically forever with 0 effort put in. Typical Californians think that nobody in the company has to do real human work to accomplish something; they believe that money itself will do all the work for them and fix the problems like the wave of a magic wand.
Alternatively: bugs sometimes require getting in and messing with the code, and if not handled correctly lead to even worse bugs, and thus should be approached with caution. Hero portraits and card backs, conversely, already exist entirely within the game and the storefront pages are templates that have been shown to not have technical issues, and thus take little to no hero.
In summary, feel free to critique Blizzard for monetizing old content (though that seems disingenuous with the alternate hero portraits, given they were already monetized), but I highly doubt there’s any real connection between Blizzards changing the Hero Portrait and Card Back available for purchase and Blizzards progress in fixing bugs.
Ok fair, but I don’t find it a coincidence that there’s more for sale in the game than ever before, especially with rotating returning card back & hero skin every week for a while now, with all the problems and negativity the last year from players not to mention I hear the standard meta state now is bad. And the thing is they have a tendency to create completely unnecessary bugs overreacting to something else. The xp bar at the end of game when finishing a quest is showing phantom xp sometimes and multiple quest progress is never shown (the game never had a problem with that before). Core set was supposed to solve every class having same amount of cards available and nobody noticed that for demon hunter they just reprinted 3 or 4 cards from Ashes of Outland (still standard) and nobody notices that? So they need to now invent 3 or 4 new demon hunter core cards and figure out how to put that in the game asap with as little people noticing the mistake as possible. That’s not even a bug but it’s just so incredibly complacent and ignorant to have happen with no team member noticing. That’s just one example of maybe a hundred irritating things in the game right now. I have a feeling though that you wouldn’t approve of the CEO’s recent $200 million bonus among company layoffs.
Oh sorry one more thing: Quests are not completing now if either player concedes. After any length of match. This seems like it could have been an intentional misguided try-hard change so people couldn’t auto-concede to finish quests. The problem is you can play an entire match and more often than not if the opponent is going to lose then they will just concede. Ouch, no quest progress and it’s already been all day trying to grind the fire spells quest among others to inch forward on the track.
And the way it worked for years was already ONE HUNDRED PERCENT perfect. Then they go too far in one direction. Then too far in the other direction. For no reason other than quests went from gold to xp (not a reason this should have changed anything to do with how quests are completed).
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I dislike Blizzard’s focus on profits above all else (though I do have trouble being upset with them about it, given it is their literal job, being a public company and all). And I also don’t think it needs to be stated that, as a company, Blizzard tends to have a lot of issues with giving their games functioning code – I know it’s not Hearthstone, but the fact that they can’t expand the base Backpack size in WoW really kills my confidence in the technical longevity and functionality of Blizzard games. All this to say, I agree with basically every criticism you have (with the exception of the new quest system, I think that’s a positive change if they could get the code working), I just highly doubt that there’s any major connection between Hearthstone’s monetization and Hearthstone’s code stability. Because, let’s be real, if Blizzard hired 20 new employees for Hearthstone (to be clear, this is a random fucking number), I think we all know that far more of those would go towards marketing and monetization than would go towards coding and quality assurance.
Agreed. I have to sort of correct one point though. For all 2020 expansions, demon hunter got 5 more cards than the other classes to make up for lack of prior cards. So now I guess they wouldn’t have to invent more like I thought. They’re actually ahead by around 10 or 11 cards still. I would just leave it how it is knowing next year the cards per class would line up again assuming they didn’t mess up. So they just have to remove the annoyance of seeing duplicate core cards for now.
I also think that they’re pushing too many skins / bundles / etc. lately, but keep in mind that design team which creates new cards, engineering team which fixes bugs and marketing/sales team which works on all the promos, bundles etc. are all separate. You can’t take a marketing person and tell them to help with bug fixing, for example. That would end up even worse, haha.
To be honest, let them push as many skins, card backs, board changes, music packs, and whatever they desire to monetize as long as it relieves heavy and unfair monetization model of packs and dust. If billion hero skin portraits is a tradeoff for the fairer price for the packs and cards, I would be more than happy to accept it.