I’ve noticed that game devs tend to disfavour making things too easy for players. One major perk of the currently refreshed weekly quest design is the fact that you don’t have to win Standard laddering games; you only have to play them. This was a huge improvement on the original, and especially so after the controversy, because having to win 10 games is an absolutely miserable experience on your worst day, particularly when the current format is incredibly unenjoyable. (Watching entire fields die to Sickly Grimewalker over and over again made that climb one of the most banal, repetitive experiences I’ve had in Hearthstone.)

The problem for devs is that if people don’t need to win games, it means they spend less time on the game. Playing 10 games is not nearly as time-intensive as having to win 5 of them. In the same way that Niantic jacked up the cost of Remote Raid Tickets to force players to physically go out and do Pokemon Raids, Team 5 wants Hearthstone players to spend more time and/or money – they just haven’t found the perfect balance of stick and carrot to do so. At least to them. Meanwhile players are absolutely not going to like this decision, and the fact that the team has chosen their 10th year anniversary celebration to do all these player-unfriendly decisions has been nothing short of baffling.

(Side note, has anyone else felt how un-10th anniversary The Great Dark Beyond has felt so far? No playful references to beloved characters, just a brand new project to reference major aspects of Warcraft lore. No complaints, personally, the theme and art and direction feels suitably epic – it just hasn’t got the same feel as the last two sets attempting to celebrate 10 years of heritage. Then again… the way Whizbang’s Workshop and Perils in Paradise have felt somewhat insipid and uninspired to the point of being lazy, which is not something you want for your 10 year anniversary. We might not get any references or call-backs at all this set, and I’m fine with it being that way. The 10th year has not felt like much of a celebration.)

Your mileage may vary, but in my limited playing experience, I feel like I have to err on the side of Stonekeep/Old Guardian. Big Spell Mage isn’t unbeatable, and the early builds which I netdecked lost as much to faster aggro decks as they won. I think I prefer the LvGe list that Stonekeep recently profiled, if only because it’s essentially a “shove every good card available together” deck like Hybrid/Tempo Druid in the early PiP days. It has the distinct benefit of having something to do other than pray for the few key cards your deck is built around. But then that build doesn’t run Surfalopod or Under the Sea, so I’m not sure what a nerf to that would do.

I will agree, though, that having to face Turn 4/5 Tsunami feels miserable, and buffs to the other miniset cards would probably be a vast improvement. The theme is great, but I legitimately cannot recall what most of them are. They’re that unremarkable, or desperately praying that the third set this year redeems them.

So shuffle five Heat Waves into the deck that cost for free, and if your opponent doesn’t trade multiple aggro minions into this, those Heat Waves get even stronger.

Some madman will figure out a Shudderblock deck with this, maybe with Sharp-Eyed Seeker for even more spiciness (pun not intended).

Certainly getting Deadmines vibes all over again, mini-set to one of the most detested sets in Hearthstone history (not for me, personally, probably because I had most of the Questline cards that mattered).

Pirate synergies, I fear, are going to break this set wide open in the same way Mr. Smite did back in 2021.

I imagine it’ll be a good play in Sharpshooter Naga Demon Hunter, allowing you to get more copies of 0-mana spells to fire another 2-damage bullet.

It’s not unheard of for developers to plan for some changes they want, but preface it by pushing out some drastic, player-unfriendly changes that cause massive backlash, and then offer a compromise by “meeting players halfway” – they won’t be as nasty but some of the changes the dev team wants are still going to stick. It’s something that, realistically, people across a lot of walks of life will do to get what they want. Parents don’t require their kids to eat all the vegetables on the plate. Students and teachers bargain over assignments. Bosses and workers argue about how many hours to work in a day. And so on.

These were good changes. Requiring people to win matches is something that is absolutely brutal especially if you’re having a bad run, even more so if you’re having a bad day. Which is also strange because Blizzard already realized this way back in the day with their class specific quests. Perhaps they chose to gamble by dipping their toe in the water to see how much they could risk – and chose poorly.

So the nerfs have felt necessary, not helped by the fact that laddering this week felt intensely painful. The sheer range of removals and wipes that Death Knight has at any point means that my Monday weeklies-clearing experience has been almost nothing but slow, grindy, DK mirror matches over and over. The hit to Grimewalker and making Plagues less viable makes sense. The hit to Warrior feels hurtful but probably justified, as much as praying for Brann to drop doesn’t feel as consistent without Dredge in the format. Dirty Rat is still run very frequently so the moment Brann or Boomboss gets yanked out, there goes your game plan.

But ouch, that indirect Sif nerf. I don’t see Rainbow Mage recovering from this.

“We almost called it the Wheel of FINAL!!!”

Well… theoretically they don’t need fixes. There was one round of Mythic I couldn’t complete because Vanndar’s conquest of Alterac Valley was complete, so he was just attacking all of my heroes with +50 attack on Speed 2 without waiting for the cooldown. But that’s what happens when you leave a game mode completely to pasture.

I perhaps have a softer spot for Mercenaries than most, because I had a pretty bad phase in 2021 and just about anything that looked like rewards for effort, even if it was tedious grinding, was good enough for me back then to just get on with the day. And even then, the devs could still manage to shove in some storytelling with Mercenaries through repeating the Kazakus-Onyxia storylines, having Khadgar confront the Echo of Medivh, the League of Explorers tracking the Old Gods all the way back to the Darkmoon Faire, and so on. Mercenaries had the potential to be another source of content generation for Team 5. Duels… not so much, and I can only guess that with every new expansion with the various class archetypes that get introduced, even more balancing headaches would have to be addressed.

Hearthstone is at a mature stage that’s similar to the MMO that spawned it, I imagine. Unless I’m Rarran trying to get people interested in modes, I don’t think I’d recommend the game to newcomers. It’s hard to recommend any game that is absolutely savage to newcomers who have to play against people who’ve been maining since Day 1 of open beta.

Huh. Gotta say, if there was one mode that Blizzard would have retired I was almost certain it was going to be Mercenaries, but I can’t say it’s a huge surprise for Duels to be on the chopping block.

It’s just occurred to me that following 2021 we haven’t really had a lot of great single player content. Mercenaries has more or less been left out to pasture with Mythic mode, I’m pretty certain nobody PVPs on that despite me never attempting it (when was the last Old Guardian video about it? Aside from pointing out that Baine/Trigore is a problem?). The last Book of Mercenaries-esque story was the narrative for Voyage to the Sunken City. Even the main storyline of Festival of Legends was left up to a single Tavern Brawl that we had to play for two weeks.

It’s really a shame, because the single player stories would have gone a good way in elaborating on the lore of each set. I would’ve at least enjoyed solving the Murder at Castle Nathria.

You use Hi-Ho Silverwing to get the single copy of Holy Wrath, Order in the Court to make Shirvallah on top. Finley will swap out Shirvallah into the bottom of your deck if you need him to. But I’ll agree, it seems like a Reno deck for the sake of being a Reno deck and the Holy Wrath combo is mostly an afterthought.

“It seems that bad news is all that we’ve been getting lately. I wish all the employees good luck and I hope that they land new jobs soon. Those who are still there – keep up the good work. And for people who read this – please don’t use it as an opportunity to kick them while they’re already down like I’ve seen some people already doing on social media.”

Obvious jibes at post-2020 Blizzard aside, I think the biggest takeaway we should leave this with should be something that we can apply looking at this game and hobby as a whole. There are things out of our control, whether it’s problematic workplace cultures, corporate takeovers and cuts, abandoned game modes, cards we don’t have access to, metagames we don’t enjoy, predictions we make on cards that turn out to be wildly misguided.

And you know what, I think it should be alright to be mistaken, to be able to admit “I was wrong” or “I feel terrible about this”. And to get to that point, I think we need to encourage behaviors that in turn encourage those behaviors. I know I enjoy a good bit of kicking someone when they’re down, and I’m more than guilty of BMing via emotes, so I’m not the most morally appropriate person to say all this. But in these times, I think we could use a little more problem-solving and a little more compassion than we’re immediately equipped to demonstrate in a highly fast-paced, competitive gaming environment.

Whatever you think of this, whatever you’re going through, if you’re currently in a situation where you feel the urge to kick someone while they’re down, I hope you can grow into a position where you are able to choose not to do that, and can find that moment of happiness within this game that is why we’re here to start with. Or outside of it. Whichever helps you.

Beat me to it.

Brothers of the mine rejoice!

Theme-wise, there’s a good few cards from Audiopocalypse that do fit the mechanics and musical genres of mixing the classes together. Yelling Yodeler took me a while, but it’s one of the cards I feel exemplifies this best: yodeling is a major form of European folk music and heavy metal features a lot of death growls and screams – though we don’t really have much in the way of Deathrattle synergies for Hunter, do we? Funnel Cake seems to be based on how Priest seems to have more board presence focus with Overheal synergies – and we do still have Priestess Valishj in the format.

Sure, it’s not visibly obvious for every class combination, and I’ll agree the execution doesn’t feel as clean as Scholomance’s was, but it’s there.

“Oh look! It’s head chef Refreshment Vendor. What’s on the menu tonight, chef Vendor?”

“Funnel cake! Funnel cake? Funnel cake! Funnel cake?! Funnel cake! Funnel cake! FUNNEL – “

Took me a while to realise it, but now I have NanowaR of Steel playing on repeat in my head.

“Disco METAL, dancing in the moonlight, dancing in the shadows, metal in the hoooooooouse!”

I barely managed to scrape three wins for the Scarlet skin last round, and really, what I said the last time applies here. If you’re not a fan of the current format you’re not going to have a good time, and you’d be better off getting disappointed by the ten packs you could have gotten with the gold you’d spend.

The decision to start out 2023 with a lighthearted expansion was a bold one, perhaps, but following 2021’s overarching story and 2022’s general focus on dramatic or serious themes, it’s possible that we might be in for a return to Raven levels of power de-creep. When was the last time we had a focus on all-out class brawl? There’s Rastakhan’s vibes, Mean Streets of Gadgetzan and Boomsday Project to some degree. It’s high time we got back to Hearthstone being unapologetically wacky. Here’s hoping.

Current Paladin lists won’t see Stonehearth Vindicator, though, because that minion is leaving Standard along with Fractured in Alterac Valley in the upcoming rotation. Maybe Paladin will get more value generators next set, because I don’t see this getting its effect off consistently enough for it to be worth it.