Actually you are right – there’s a narrow period (the first few days of the expansion) during which the old system was better. However, I still think that it’s better overall – not only it’s more consistent, but players will actually know about it since the reroll prompt will pop-up when needed. I’m sure that most of the casual players didn’t even know about the full dust refund period at the start of the set and how they can potentially benefit from it.

I don’t believe it will apply if you already own both cosmetic and non-cosmetic copy of a card, but I wish they did something to give people an option to reroll them.

We don’t have official numbers, it’s probably the least popular game mode, but it’s not “dead” by any means, it has a pretty healthy and most importantly a very dedicated playerbase.

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.