This has been an ongoing discussion on Twitter and the devs have said that they will come back with some answers early next week before the pre-release becomes available. The current protection that has been announced indeed cannot protect you from opening duplicates if you open your packs during pre-release.

Fair enough. The Dire Frenzy synergy probably is not enough of a reason.

I thought about Tarim too, but it is so strong that I thought it would be too much. A wonderful card, for sure!

Yes, in the official Year of the Gryphon blog post, Blizzard wrote that the Core set will be revealed by February 25th.

The developers have mentioned the possibility to bring back Hero cards, possibly modified, but the context seemed to imply that it would not happen this year apart from Lord Jaraxxus. Nothing definite has been said about them as far as I know though.

That’s one can of worms I would be scared to open. Would make for some great Youtube highlights though.

Justicar is Neutral, I used to play Justicar in Paladin!

Yes, indeed, the old versions of those Dragon aspects will not be in the core set.

No, it was meta in late Scholomance Academy, after being absent for most of that expansion too, but now it’s gone again.

Assuming the same rarity distribution as in Galakrond’s Awakening, the situation is actually a little worse: it takes around 50 packs to get the full mini-set if you start with all of the original expansion.

Purely from opening packs, it’s 8.4 packs to get all the commons, 21.0 to get all the rares, 36.2 to get all the epics, and 72.7 to get all the Legendary cards, on average. However, you will be able to use dust to craft the final Legendary card earlier, so it works out to around 50 packs.

There are lots of game-freezing bugs with Yogg. Blizzard has been promising fixes on those issues, they are aware of them.

Hi! Sorry for the late response. The list is based on general performance statistics over thousands of games, mostly on Legend rank with a minor emphasis on Diamond. Lower ranks have not been considered, but the decks should be good on any lower ranks as well. I am currently at around rank 300 Legend on EU myself.

This is perhaps the best deck right now.

Below 50% win rate, so not very good.

N’Zoth feels like it fits everywhere, but in this case, the deck is focused on the Tickatus mill and it should not need N’Zoth for anything.

I’m uncertain how many Old Gods you can put in a deck and not get run over: my initial guess is that you can use two Old Gods in a control deck, but we’ll know better once we can play with the new cards.

No, we do not know the cost of the Battle Pass yet. We’ll know more in a couple of weeks. This article gives the background against which it is possible to evaluate how good of a deal the new rewards system is once we have the details on it: a small increase in rewards will still be a net loss to players because of the new mini-sets, but a major increase in rewards could still be a net gain.

The average dust value of a fully disenchanted pack is 100 dust, yes. But you will open useful cards from packs, so that is not how many packs you will need.

No, Shan’do has not been successful in this archetype. There have been some attempts to use Shan’do in more of a Big Druid style deck with Winged Guardians, but that archetype is not strong enough, even though Shan’do is a decent card in that one as there are more Beasts in it.

Yes, this archetype currently has a very simple mulligan strategy. This has not always been the case, as there were times when Crystal Power was included in the deck and kept in the mulligan against Demon Hunter, and should the meta change, the mulligans may diverge again.

Deryl is significantly better at higher MMR and overtakes Nozdormu already in mid-ranks. It is true that Nozdormu is better very low on the ladder where players do not know how to play with Deryl, but I’d expect anyone who spends enough time to actually look at a tier list to be able to do better with Deryl than Nozdormu.