Oh yeah, 3% is still a TON of money in this context, and no company would like to just drop their revenue by 3% for no reason. I just wrote that because I immediately started hearing that they lost their biggest source of income etc. which might not be exactly true for the company as a whole.

But I honestly think that for Blizzard itself it might be closer to 20-30%. I know that playerbase does not scale 1:1 with spending, but in case of Hearthstone, China is by far the biggest region. If we look at the number of players reaching Legend, China alone is comparable to three other servers combined! WoW is also huge in China, around 1/3 of the whole playerbase was Chinese (stats are from a few years ago so it might have changed a bit, but it just shows how popular the game is there). Overwatch or Diablo are not AS popular as HS/WoW, but still big.

Yeah, I already updated the post, it looks like they put wrong info in the blog post.

It’s 1x Castle Nathria pack today and 1x March of the Lich King tomorrow. Also the time is not cumulative across both days, you can only get one pack today and one pack tomorrow.

Not Dormant, they disappear from the board completely and then reappear 2 turns later.

Of course it depends on how many packs you open but it’s not really that negligible IMO. Let’s say that you end up opening 150 packs per expansion – after 10 expansions you would end up with ~8 Golden Legendaries on average, but now you will also get 8 Signature Legendaries. That’s almost an extra Legendary card per expansion. I would say that’s a nice change.

And 150 packs isn’t really a crazy number between packs you get from Gold, Tavern Brawls, events, ranked chest rewards and so on. If you buy any pre-orders or pack bundles you probably end up with more than that.

Sure, I also won’t go out and buy them, but if I end up getting it somehow, I’ll take 4x the chance of opening a Legendary 🙂

For example, it’s a big deal if you get Mega Pre-Purchase Bundle. They have 5x Signature pack in there now if I remember correctly.

Sadly it’s double the chance of Golden Legendary, not regular Legendary.

Like the other commenter said, the chance of getting a “cosmetic” Legendary will go up from 1 in 181 packs on average to 1 in ~90 packs on average. That’s why I said “slightly” in the post.

Yep, they have a separate reveal for Duels news (new Heroes, treasures) for a few expansions already. This time it will probably be for the Death Knight Hero and maybe something extra 🙂

Good to know, I didn’t get around to doing it yet. Thanks for the comment, I’ll update the post 🙂

Yeah, to explain it again, the free Legendary we got in this patch is a completely separate thing from guaranteed Legendary from the first 10 packs of a new expansion. We always get one Legendary from the upcoming set as a free log-in reward in patch X.6. In 23.6 we had Renathal, in 22.6 we had Okani etc. This time it’s Sunwell.

I think it’s a bit better version of “Ranked cards”, since you can pick exactly the point at which it gets stronger. Ranked cards always upgraded at 5 and 10, which wasn’t perfect for balancing and making cool effects.

With Manathirst, you can make a 1-drop that upgrades on Turn 3, or a 1-drop that upgrades on Turn 8. It can lead to some really interesting design choices.

But overall yes, I think that those two mechanics are pretty similar and maybe a bit too close to each other given that ranked cards are still in Standard. But then again, the new expansion will have so much stuff around DK that introducing some crazy new mechanic might have been too much.

This has to be it, puzzle solved.

Next week can’t come soon enough!

Weird, I didn’t finish it yet, but so far played a game with 2 Infused cards and it counted both of them. Have you already finished the first part (Discover)? Because the 2nd part will only start counting after you finish 1st.

You just play 5 cards that “Discover” something.

Only 40 cards with no extra life makes running Renathal a downside with no upsides, that’s not the way to go IMO. Maybe try changing the life boost value, let’s say make it 35 HP instead of 40 HP.

Denathrius starting from 0 would also make sense, but I’m not sure if both need nerf. Denathrius is so popular because Renathal is so popular – 30 card decks don’t run Denathrius nearly as often. So nerfing Renathal might also indirectly nerf Denathrius.

I understand both sides of this argument, but I think that if they pushed the patch on Monday, that would be enough to do at least some playtesting for the tournament.

If they wanted to do something like Thursday-Friday patch then I would be against it, because the decks would change after they were already sent and locked in, that wouldn’t be very fair for people attending the tournament.

There always need to be some compromises, and doing pros dirty is also not good. But overall, I think that the general playerbase should be prioritized when it comes to balance update timing (maybe outside of something like World Championship, but that’s once per year).

I honestly don’t know. Part of the deck list was hidden in the card page for Muck Pools (official HS card database), and people found it. But before they found the rest it turned out that someone in the Chinese community found the full one (maybe by datamining?)

Once it was figured out most of the people stopped looking for it so I don’t even know if it progressed anywhere.

Thanks for the feedback, I moved that to the beginning of the section. Sorry about your ranks 😀

I know that not every player likes that, but I don’t really mind it. Quite the opposite in fact. When you consume so much HS content as me AND also play the game, it gets boring pretty quickly. So patches and new releases every few weeks are helping a lot. Plus more content to cover is always good for the website 🙂

The thing is, YT is not as a popular of a streaming platform as Twitch. Most of people don’t sit on YT to watch gaming streams, even more so 3 years ago. Recommendations algorithm is also mostly based on videos and not streams, many people don’t even know that there’s a whole category for gaming streams. So if you’re looking for something to watch, you can easily stumble upon HS tournament on Twitch, but not necessarily on YT. People who knew that they were happening and were heavily invested into esports could switch relatively easily, but people who were watching more casually often didn’t even know that there’s a tournament happening. And most of the HS community was present on Twitch, not on YT.

That’s the biggest thing that hurt HS esports during the switch IMO. YT stream also wasn’t perfect ~3 years ago and while yes, pausing and rewinding is a GREAT feature (you can also do it on Twitch but you have to go to the saved videos which is a pain in the neck), the stream was often buggy and choppy for many people. I remember a lot of negative quality or sound-related feedback when they first switched to YT.

But ignoring all of that, the best thing is that without the contract, they can stream on both Twitch and YT. If someone prefers one platform over the other,