Hearthstone thread
Chatting about Hearthstone
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Curiosity wrote:
I just got 300 coins for winning 100 battles.

Arena ahoy!

You get another 300 for 1000 wins. I'm not quite halfway there yet ;(
Well I got maxed out on the Trump make deck so have decided to plough my own furrow again, this time with a warrior deck.

I have no idea if it's a great deck or not (currently at Rank 16 and winning maybe 2 out of 3) but I got Gorehowl (the epic warrior weapon) in my 40 pack splurge the other week so thought it'd be nice to take that for a run. Have been jiggering around with the cards as the games are going on and touch wood it seems to be working OK. Nothing showy about it as I don't want to be relying on certain card combinations coming up, but definitely nice to be doing my own thing after plugging away with the Trump mage deck for so many games.

I've got Cairne in there as he's a nice legendary but he may as well have a big target pinned to his back because pretty much all players seem to be running the assumption they'll get a legendary chucked down against them at some point so he tends to get silenced/polyed/hexed/etc as soon as I play him.

I have 1040 dust and could easily DE a few goldens or a couple of shit legendaries to get the warrior legendary (Grommash) but I'm getting oddly attached to my card collection and can't bring myself to DE anything except duplicates :D

Attachment:
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This is my warrior deck i'm using on the US server.

No legendaries on there...
Trooper wrote:
ElephantBanjoGnome wrote:

I dunno. I might run two of them in a custom Priest buff-deck for fun to see what happens. We can test it out :)


I wish you could make more than 9 decks...


Haven't tried it myself, but there kind of is a way:

http://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/com ... _script_i/
Trooper wrote:
This is my warrior deck i'm using on the US server.

No legendaries on there...


I see you've gone very weapon-heavy and added lots of cards that work around that dynamic, how are you finding it to play with?

I guess if you add enough weapon stuff in you can be fairly confident that you'll be able to play stuff advantageously like Bloodail Raider and Dread Corsair? (You've basically got six weapons in there, the two actual weapons and also the Arathi Weaponsmith.)
AtrocityExhibition wrote:
Trooper wrote:
This is my warrior deck i'm using on the US server.

No legendaries on there...


I see you've gone very weapon-heavy and added lots of cards that work around that dynamic, how are you finding it to play with?

I guess if you add enough weapon stuff in you can be fairly confident that you'll be able to play stuff advantageously like Bloodail Raider and Dread Corsair? (You've basically got six weapons in there, the two actual weapons and also the Arathi Weaponsmith.)


I did OK with it, won more than I lost last season :D

It's very weapon dependant, but that's the point, there is only one card that can remove a weapon, so once that is out the way then you can let rip :) However the lower weapons are all about keeping your minions alive, so attacking minions should always be your first priority.

The other interesting thing about this deck, the raider gets his attack buffed after he has been played, so he gets the charge effect, then plus 5 from your big weapon. That's a 7 point damage charge, plus the 5 damage from the weapon in one round that can be difficult to counter.
I was thinking, given that it's so OP, they could do worse than remove unleash the hounds entirely. It's actually a card that doesn't need to be there. Hunter has a secret board clear, and the huge number of beasts and beast-related buffs available would still make it a strong player. As AE said, it would just mean that decks aren't built around the same old gimmick.

You could argue that Hunter is OP given his buffs and the large number of neutral beasts available. No other class has so much synergy with neutral common cards.
Making of Hearthstone

http://kotaku.com/pens-paper-and-envelo ... 1571690185

Quote:
Pens, Paper And Envelopes: The Making Of Hearthstone

Everybody loves Hearthstone. Everybody is talking about Hearthstone. Everyone is playing Hearthstone. But when Blizzard veteran Eric Dodds said he wanted to make a digital card game instead of an MMO, some people within the company were a little puzzled. That all changed when he showed them what he built with a pen, paper and some envelopes stapled to his office wall.

Eric Dodds describes it as a rumble. Hamilton Chu thinks it was more like a 'murmur'.

Blizzard had just announced the existence of Hearthstone to a packed out room at PAX East to hundreds of fans, and amidst the polite applause, a general confusion. When it was rumoured that Blizzard would be revealing a new product in Boston many speculated the debut of a new MMO, perhaps new DLC for World of Warcraft or any one of Blizzard's major franchises. No-one expected a digital card game.

No-one really wanted a card game.

A familiar feeling. Eric and Hamilton had experienced this reaction before. A year or so earlier Blizzard brought together a small like-minded group of developers and bestowed upon them the moniker 'Team 5'. Team 5 had one single mission: be flexible, be agile, identify the opportunities that massive lumbering teams cannot and attack them with gusto.

So when Eric Dodds came back to his superiors with the Hearthstone concept, the reaction was not unlike the reaction Blizzard would receive a year later at PAX East in April of 2013. Not rejection, more like apprehension.

And a smattering of confusion.

When we announced the game a lot of people went, 'wow, that's a little weird that you're doing that," says Eric. "What are you doing? You are doing something a little weird and different'. I think that we had those thoughts around the company a little bit.

"It wasn't resistance really, but people were questioning it."

Here is how Blizzard works: team members tend to work on projects that interest them. As Hamilton puts it, developers at Blizzard create the games they want toplay. In that regard Hearthstone made perfect sense. A large number of the newly established Team 5 had been playing card games. They had been playing card games for decades. But everyone understood that these games could be inaccessible — they could be convoluted.

"We thought, boy these are super fun, but many of them are so complicated," explains Hamilton. "Wouldn't it be great if we could make something that would let mass public to find the kind of fun."

Team 5 immediately set about designing the game they wanted to play: an accessible card game set in the Warcraft universe.

Back then no-one — not even Eric Dodds, the game's eventual Director, or Hamilton Chu, Executive Producer — could have predicted how popular Hearthstone would eventually become.

But then, sabotage. Or the closest thing to it. Before the hard work of prototyping began, Team 5 was temporarily dissolved.

Bigger deadlines loomed. Another of Blizzard's major releases required attention before shipping and the majority of Team 5's resources were immediately funnelled onto that project. Only Eric Dodds and Ben Brode, a Senior Game Designer, remained on the game that would ultimately become Hearthstone.

It turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

"It was actually kind of cool," admits Eric.

'Cool' because — almost immediately — Eric and Ben were isolated, working alone. This was far from a problem; it actually worked to Team 5's eventual benefit. It allowed the pair worked feverishly, rapidly prototyping dozens of different versions of Hearthstone, quickly finding out what worked and what didn't with an intense, brutal efficiency.

For the longest time, Eric and Ben worked almost exclusively with pen and paper.

"We were basically in a world of 'what do we think the design of the game should be'? That's not a place you spend that much time in traditionally as a designer," says Eric

"For us that meant trying tonnes of different ideas. We spent a lot of time with paper/pen prototypes to try and figure out what this game was going to be and it was great."

Eric and Ben took blank pieces of paper. Literal pieces of paper. They drew funny pictures and they wrote numbers above those funny pictures.

Says Hamilton: "they took those funny drawings, cut them into cards and tried a whole lot of bad ideas on the way to some great ideas".

It was refreshing. It was exhilarating. It was game design in its purest form. Traditional chokepoints simply didn't exist. There were no pipelines to push assets through, no politics, no nonsense: just two guys in a room with a pen and paper and a handful of crazy ideas that might just work. And if they didn't? No big deal. Scrumple that piece of paper, launch it headways into the nearest trash can and start all over again.

It wasn't your average Blizzard workspace, but Hearthstone wasn't your average Blizzard game. Envelopes and cards stapled all over the walls; the end result of an asynchronous drafting process for Arena: a game mode in Hearthstone that allows players to compete against one another using specifically constructed decks.

This was the workspace that Team 5 walked into after their forced exodus.

To an extent the team knew what to expect. Blizzard was and is permeated with what Hamilton refers to as a "great culture of sharing". Everyone had a vague idea of what Eric and Ben Brode were up to with their envelopes and cut up pieces of paper. They knew what they were in for.

But the newest members of Team 5 weren't prepared for what came next; no idea how far Eric and Ben had taken it. It subverted almost every idea Team 5 had about the traditional process of game design.

Eric pointed to a computer in the corner of the room, running a flash version of Hearthstone. In everyone's absence Eric and Ben Brode had been busy. They had essentially prototyped and then built everything Hearthstone was going to be in Flash.

In short: the game was already finished.

"We pretty much pointed at the computer and said — 'the game is done'," laughs Eric. "Just remake that game over there."

It was the end result of that rapid, brutally efficient iteration process.

"The rate of iteration was like seriously, in order of magnitude, faster than in any game project I've ever been involved with," says Hamilton.

"It was unbelievable how similar the core game ended up being to that initial prototype."

The game that Eric and Ben built — minus the bells and whistle and polish — was essentially the Hearthstone you are playing today.
Coming Out Party

It was time for the game's coming out party.

As Eric mentioned, Hearthstone, for a certain element of Blizzard, was seen as a curiosity. For a company used to developing mammoth, era-defining video games, across multiple teams packed with multiple employees, a card game was… different. Not everyone was convinced of the direction Eric had taken Team 5 in. Not everyone understood. Some people didn't 'get' it.

"But that all changed a little after the coming out party," says Eric.

The 'coming out party': it took the shape of a Blizzard-wide Hearthstone competition, a competition that took the office by storm. By the end, after everyone got their hands on the Alpha version, there wasn't a single person who didn't 'get' Hearthstone.

The finals took place in the Blizzard theatre and that theatre was completely packed with cheering crowds utterly engrossed in everything Hearthstone. Eric and the team had been vindicated. Everyone at Blizzard had fallen completely in love with the video game that, just months ago, was a strange idea that some were unsure of.

"It was really amazing," says Hamilton. "When you're heads down on something, really close to a project, sometimes you have a skewed point of view. Getting it out to people, feeling the vibe, hearing everyone talk about what was fun to them, what stood out, what they hated — it definitely created this atmosphere. It was amazing."

Eric agrees.

"It was an exciting moment."

The flash prototype was an overwhelming success, but there was still work to be done. Hearthstone was a video game first and foremost, but creating an experience that felt tangible and above all physical was a major priority. The flash prototype that Eric and Ben Brode had built was completely two dimensional, so the majority of the remaining development time was spent working on aesthetics: how it Hearthstone would look, how all the separate visual elements worked in tandem to create the overall experience. It was important that Hearthstone looked and felt like a card game.

It was the kind of work that couldn't be done on pen and paper.

"A ton of time spent figuring out how these cards move in the game space, how the board looks," explains Eric. "How do we can retain that physical feel? There was a lot of time spent there."

"Then we had to hook it up to the server," adds Hamilton. "There was just a lot of actualisation that still had to happen."

Team 5 worked furiously towards an unveiling at PAX East in April of 2013. Buoyed by newly registered enthusiasm for the project internally at Blizzard, there was a confidence about the team. The prototype was rock solid, the game was rock solid, all that was left was to deliver a polished version of that product — an experience that lived up to the promise of a game that was once nothing but a series of envelopes stapled to a wall.

The public unveiling of Hearthstone was, in a sense, a picture perfect cross section of the internal issues Eric Dodds had with the game during development. Eric was showing his baby to the world for the very first time — to a bustling sea of Blizzard fans who weren't quite sure how to react.

It wasn't rejection. More like apprehension. And confusion.

"I was nervous," admits Eric. "I didn't exactly know how it was going to go. Hearthstone was a new thing.

"When we announced it there was definitely a rumble in the audience of 'we don't know what this is."

"There was a lot of murmuring in the crowd," Hamilton adds. "People didn't really know what to make of it."

'Disappointment' is probably the wrong word. Both Eric and Hamilton had seen this reaction before and, in a sense, were used to explaining themselves, used to explaining Hearthstone to people who weren't exactly sure what the hell they were looking at.

They remembered Hearthstone's coming out party, the shift that became apparent the second people began playing Hearthstone. Perhaps the same thing would happen at PAX.

Of course, that was precisely what happened.

After the announcement, Eric and Hamilton strolled towards the show floor. By the time they arrived at the Blizzard booth the line to play Hearthstone was an hour long.

"My initial nerves instantly transformed into elation," says Eric.

"The energy was amazing," adds Hamilton.

"Anxiety was immediately replaced with astonishment. People were enjoying the game so much."

Later that day; another moment. Hamilton scans the queue, spots a face in the crowd. He's certain he's seen that guy before. He taps Eric on the shoulder, 'hey, recognise that guy?'

'Yeah, he must have been here at least three times'.

Hamilton walks up, 'Have you played this before?'

'Yeah, this is my 12th time'.
The Hearthstone That Never Was

In a corner of a room in Blizzard studios there is a space reserved for the Hearthstones that never came to be. Boxes upon boxes of paper and envelopes wheeled wherever they'll fit.

In the wake of the PAX East announcement, Hearthstone has been more successful than anyone could have anticipated, to the point where it is now said to be driving iPad sales.12
People are talking about Hearthstone. Everyone is talking about Hearthstone. And it all started at PAX East.

There was initial confusion, but even back then — walking around the halls of the Boston Exhibition Center — there were already rumblings. A murmur.

The swapping of pins; the presentations on board games. In every queue, in every panel, hordes of gamers huddled around Magic: The Gathering. Hearthstone tapped into something dormant — a sub culture within a sub culture, waiting for that one video game that made sense to them, the game they could share with others. That's what Hearthstone has become.3

"I don't know if I have a lot of insight into the meta-movement of the genre," says Hamilton. "All I can say is both Eric and I and a bunch of other people in the team have enjoyed these types of games for a long time and it makes me really happy that other people are starting to enjoy it now.

"It's great to see that these games getting the attention they deserve."
Amazing game against a Warlock.

Got him down to 1 Health. I still had 20+.

He had no minions, I had three, and an Arcanite Reaper.

He still managed to bloody win!

Bloody sun Walker with taunt and divine shield. Absorbed my attacks, but then another one, and another taunt card, then Leeroy Jenkins and suddenly I'm on 2 health.

I fight back with a taunt card of my own, kill his minions apart from Leeroy. He can't get past my taunt though. I'm down to 1 health...

Nooooo! Minion with a "1 damage to all" battle cry!
I just fatigued a Warrior (again!) - I was on 15 health and him on 30 plus 21 armour, but he ran out of cards while I still had 12 left. I was left with 2 health when he finally died. That was quite a laugh. :)

This was at rank 12.
I just lost an Arena game against a hunter. Of all the games I thought I'd won, I cannot believe I lost.

Me: 11 Health.

I have a Defender of Argus between a 7/8 boulderfist and a harvest golum, a 1/1 recruit, and a 9/9 frostwolf warload. He has a boulderfist ogre.

I drop the defender giving me two strong taunts that not even a UTF/Timberwolf can break with his last two cards. I ignore the Ogre and hit the face. I have lethal next turn. I've won.

He sits there, pondering for a long time. Eventually he unleashes the hounds and uses three of them to get the boulderfist down to 7/5. Weird.

Then he uses his last card... Ysera Awakens (I'd killed his Ysera a couple of turns before). Kills both of my taunts, leaving me precisely on 6 health which his Boulderfist does. He wins. Im-fucking-possible.
A small balancing tweak but Unleash the hounds is going to be moved up to 3 mana

http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/for ... 73778812#1

Quote:
The following balance change will be made in an upcoming patch:

Unleash the Hounds (Hunter) now costs 3 (up from 2)


Over the last few months, we have seen hundreds of different decks do well in game depending on many different factors. Our community is incredibly creative, and we’ve seen players constantly trying out new things and coming up with new strategies to counter whatever decks they have trouble with.

At the very highest levels of play there are a lot of different decks performing well, and the decks at the top change from week to week. Since we’ve seen many cards and deck types in the current state of the game rise and fall as players adapt, we did not want to change Unleash the Hounds immediately. However, Hunter decks have become increasingly more dominant and are doing better than we are comfortable across many levels of play.

We do like the idea of decks that have a really big turn and pull off a sweet combo, but when playing against Hunter decks, you may feel punished too much for playing minions. Playing minions is one of the key, fun pieces of the overall Hearthstone puzzle, and feeling like your options are limited by the opponent creates a play experience that may not be particularly enjoyable.

We take any balance changes very seriously, and we will continue to hold true to our stance that we plan on only making changes to cards if we feel it is completely necessary. After much consideration we have decided to increase the mana cost of Unleash the Hounds to 3. This change should make the card more fun to play against while still allowing for some big plays.
A welcome change, but the side effect of this is that all the Huntards will move over to playing Warlock Zoo, so people will then start demanding nerfs to assorted Warlock cards and/or their hero power. :)
I don't think the nerf is too severe. Not enough to stop people playing it, anyway.
When UTH cost 4 mana it was considered a trash card and hunters were a trash class in Constructed.

1 mana is a lot, especially when it will most likely push them back UTH comboing a turn. I've lost count of the number of times I only needed one more turn to beat a hunter.

See how it beds in, the effect may be more dramatic than you expect....
Maybe so.

At the moment I'm just larking about without much direction, so come up against an UTH Hunter deck quite rarely.
Case in point I just lost a game against a hunter where he UTH-ed me on Turn 4 (constructed, Rank 15), no buzzard, just a hyena and then the hounds. I had three minions down at this point which I figured was probably safe on Turn 4 since he couldn't do the 'full' UTH combo but he still went for it, and even then it gave him what he needed (as it broke the tempo of the game for me and game me a big 8-4 to deal with).

Thing is you have to try and make a decent start against hunters because they've got the awful tick-tock of damage with their hero power and playing one or two bigger minions a bit later on doesn't guarantee anything with hunter's mark and deadly shot in their arsenal (or slow things down with traps), plus they can always chuck a taunt up with houndmaster and two of the animal companions are pretty troublesome (the taunt one and the charge one).

As such I figured I had to risk the play to get a little bit of early momentum and a 2 mana UTH + hyena on Turn 4 pretty much turned the game at that point, it was downhill from there. Give me another turn to work with that game before he could make a meaningful UTH play, and it'd have been a lot closer or given me a chance to win.

On paper making UTH cost 3 mana instead of 2 doesn't look like much of a change, but you have to remember that the hunter deck was basically identical to how it is now when UTH cost 4 mana (the card functioned the same and synergised with everything else the same), and yet the card and class were basically considered trash for constructed play.

When mages got their nerf a little while ago all that was done was tweaking the mana cost of cards by 1 (or 2 in the case of pyroblast), and by all accounts it basically knocked the entire class for a burton in the top ranks of constructed.
Playing Arena as a Mage. I very rarely play as one.

Got Ysera.

Ysera is ace.
2-0 as Mage. All going to go to bits soon, I'm sure, but really happy with a win over a rogue. He had a Ragnos (hello small minion and fireball) and TWO Illidan Stormrages! Mental! One got polymorphed and the other attacked by my tiger.

Yeah!
6-3 Paladin Arena run. Bah. Good deck, but a couple of games of bad luck. Could have gone further with it. Played nothing but fucking mages.
I'm beginning to think that rogues are the next hunters, their ability to cycle through their deck with the Gadgetzan Auctioneer is fucking horrible, and there's no particular way I can see to play around it either.

You can hurt them pretty hard early on whilst whey accumulate cards, then once the Auctioneer comes down they can cycle through their deck at a ridiculous rate of knots, and you can bet your arse they're all running Leeroy.

Had three of them this evening, and in every game I'm hard pushed to think of a single play that I made wrong. At the end of the day if they can get through 20-30 cards in a 30 card deck whilst you get through maybe 15, you're pretty much always going to be on a losing ticket.

On paper they might burn out and fatigue, but in reality of course they've banged through so much of their deck, so quickly, that you're hard pushed to win.

Been one win away from Rank 14 several times this evening, but never quite managed to tip over. I'm not getting all worrisome about rank this season, but it is a good way of keeping an eye on where the meta's at. Hunters are still a pain in the arse of course because their nerf hasn't been patched in yet, but I'm starting to get somewhat wary of rogues too. If you see one of the fuckers doing the absolute bare minimum to keep themselves in the game whilst hoarding cards, just wait for the one or two turns of doom that awaits you.....

Apparently they do very badly against rush decks but I don't have one of those and don't play them, so can't really comment.
Funny you should say that as I've met a lot of Miracle Rogues today - in fact probably more in just this one day than in the past week! The best counters seem to be the rush approach or some good Taunts, trouble is that Sap will quickly get a Taunt out of the way, often allowing Leeroy to come charging in three times and dealing at least 18 damage with the help of two Shadowstep cards .........
Against a Hunter in Arena. He played an UTH really early. Awesome. Another a bit later... hah, what a loser!

Then a buzzard, UTH and Timber Wolf, just after I'd brought out a load of minions.

I survived the onslaught, but he went from 3 cards to 10 cards.

:(

He finished me off with two Dire Wolf Alphas, a massive lion hyena thing and King Krush.

Ouch. That's one hell of a deck.
Also, I went 3/3 in the end (from 3/0), but despite getting through over half my deck in all six games, I only ever once saw my Ysera. Saw both of my River Crocolisks in all six games. Randomiser hates me.
3:3 is my comfort point in Arena, anything less and I tend to feel a bit annoyed. The RNG can be a killer sometimes, you'll have good runs and bad runs but it all evens out over time, however that doesn't make you feel any better when you're on the wrong end of some shit luck and bad beats :D

Also, I just dropped (another) £35 on 40 packs of cards. One fucking legendary which was fucking Tinkmaster Overspark, arguably the worst legendary in the game since he got nerfed a few weeks ago :facepalm:

Got 2325 dust now so plenty to craft a legendary of choice but I'm now finding it hard to choose which one.... Could easily afford two (3200 dust) if I got DE-ing but even then not sure....

So I'm now £72 in on this game (two £35 card packs and £2 in beta).
Wow AE, you basically paid £35 for one crappy legendary and some dust towards another....

Total cost here £0. Just went 0/3 in Arena but pulled a Baron Geddon from my resulting pack. Nice!
ElephantBanjoGnome wrote:
Wow AE, you basically paid £35 for one crappy legendary and some dust towards another....


Bargain-tastic!

Quote:
Total cost here £0. Just went 0/3 in Arena but pulled a Baron Geddon from my resulting pack. Nice!


I DEMAND BETTER PACKS BECAUSE I'M SPENDING MONEY :D

The really, really stupid thing is that I've now decided to have a proper crack at Ranked with the Trump F2P Shaman deck, and of course the clue's in the name as to how much money you need to spend to play with that deck......

I'm not really interested in playing with any of the legendary heavy 'technique' decks so fuck knows why I keep buying packs of cards. Although it is tremendous fun to open them all.
I just tried putting my collection into that Hearthhead site someone recommended. Unfortunately it's a bag of shite as the default card search doesn't actually show all of the cards, and when I tediously put my collection in, the search filters didn't even work to show me the one Priest card I know I haven't got. Good idea but needs to actually work.
Just about clinging onto Rank 15 with the Trump F2P Shaman Deck, although I did dive straight into ranked with it without much of a clue as to how to play it.

Very interesting deck though, loads going on and great fun, and I'm definitely making mistakes in nearly every game, so loads of room for improvement.

GOOD JOB I SPUNKED £35 ON 40 PACKS OF CARDS BEFORE THAT HAVE MADE ABSOLUTELY ZERO FUCKING DIFFERENCE TO HOW I'M PLAYING THE GAME THEN.....
Reasonable arena run with a pally, went 5:3 for 110 gold and a pack of cards (five shit duplicates with the basic one rare for a massive 45 dust......).

Had one game where I felt really sorry for my priest opponent, got a 6-7 Harvest Golem on the board early on with Blessing Of Kings which he just didn't seem to have the cards to deal with and it was all over on turn eight.

Then again my final loss was an equally desperate feeling of hopelessness against a hunter who had what can only be considered truly perfect card draw, and that one ended on turn eight too.

Quite comfortable overall with arena now in that I've got the concept of it properly in my head, no need to refer to the Trump spreadsheets or anything like that, I know what the good cards and bad cards are instinctively now.

Got enough gold to start another arena run straight away but I'll save it for tomorrow, just do some F2P shaman tonight methinks.

Whilst I have spent £72 on this game via card packs, it's still basically saved me money because I've effectively stopped spending money on any other 'luxury' items since I started playing it, and I do have a terrible habit of spunking money on random crap if I don't have a good solid addiction on the go - and Hearthstone is a pretty innocuous addiction as far as they go, even if it does cost me the occasional £35 for card packs which are so deliciously thrilling to open...... :hat:
God damn.

Was 2-1 in Arena.

As a shaman, fighting a shaman.

We get to 10 mana each. I have 30 health, he has 7 health. We each have two totems out and nothing else.

He pulls a lightwarden (?), which is a terrible card (1/2, with gain two attack whenever healing takes place). Apart from I can't kill either of his totems, but he can injure one for a single point and heal it every turn. So every turn he just gets stronger and stronger as we trade off our other top draws and totems. We end up with him having about six totems and a 15 attack character, and me with a similar amount of totems, getting killed to bits.

Lucky bastard. That card is worthless as a shaman most of the time!
Feral spirit is a vicious card. Every time I get it in the early game I tend to win.
Again I register my disagreement with Trump's assessment of Shieldbearer.

Guy played an Acolyte of Pain and a Mana Wyrm, and then two Shieldbearers on the same turn. It created a completely unbreakable wall behind which he could draw cards pretty much at will, and create a monster attack card, in just one turn, without it being too far in the game. Add in a Dire Wolf Alpha the following turn, and he had two 1/4 cards with taunt, behind which he had a ton of useful cards and me with no way to get to them.

For their cost they're a superb card, IMO. Definitely the one that causes me the most trouble on a consistent basis. 4 health is a lot to get through.
Curiosity wrote:
Feral spirit is a vicious card. Every time I get it in the early game I tend to win.


It's the card that tends to give the most hassle when I'm playing against shamans, and needless to say I've got two of them in my shaman constructed deck (which is basically a copy of the Trump F2P shaman deck but with a Ragnaros replacing one of the fire elementals).

When I'm playing arena I'll take three of them if I get offered that many as it's such a good card, the overload penalty seems pretty trivial compared to the card's power, and if you can get a flametongue in between them......
Curiosity wrote:
Again I register my disagreement with Trump's assessment of Shieldbearer.

Guy played an Acolyte of Pain and a Mana Wyrm, and then two Shieldbearers on the same turn. It created a completely unbreakable wall behind which he could draw cards pretty much at will, and create a monster attack card, in just one turn, without it being too far in the game. Add in a Dire Wolf Alpha the following turn, and he had two 1/4 cards with taunt, behind which he had a ton of useful cards and me with no way to get to them.

For their cost they're a superb card, IMO. Definitely the one that causes me the most trouble on a consistent basis. 4 health is a lot to get through.


I assume that was in constructed then? In which case he could have built the deck to allow him to do that with the right card draw, it'd be a very risky choice in arena as there's no guarantee you'll get the other cards to allow that sort of play.

For him to play all those cards in one turn you're talking 6 mana (or 5 with the coin), and he's used four cards in the process. A single clear (lightning storm as a shammy, flamestrike as a mage, equality > consecrate as a pally etc) would have destroyed it and he'd have lost both board and card advantage in the process.

Sometimes daft and/or weak plays can work out well in a given set of circumstances, but that doesn't mean it makes for a consistently great strategy.

Certainly if you watch videos of the best players in constructed and arena, none of them will be taking up precious card slots with a cheap card like shieldbearer that doesn't even have an innate attack.

Imagine having a shieldbearer drop into your hand on turn 10, it's 99.9% useless at that stage of the game.
It's not 99% useless. It will protect you or a valuable minion from an attack. If you both have a 7/7 minion out there, then you can go for the kill while they have to waste their 7/7 attacking your crap card.

The above scenario was in Arena. The guy had three Shieldbearers and they all annoyed me no end. In the early game it's going to take you an absolute minimum of two turns, and probably more, to get rid of him. In the meantime the opponent has brought out more valuable minions and is smashing you with them with impunity, including the cards you're trying to kill the effing Shieldbearer with.
I'm not saying it's the best card in the world, but I do think it should be up a couple of tiers on arena rankings.
Curiosity wrote:
It's not 99% useless. It will protect you or a valuable minion from an attack. If you both have a 7/7 minion out there, then you can go for the kill while they have to waste their 7/7 attacking your crap card.

The above scenario was in Arena. The guy had three Shieldbearers and they all annoyed me no end. In the early game it's going to take you an absolute minimum of two turns, and probably more, to get rid of him. In the meantime the opponent has brought out more valuable minions and is smashing you with them with impunity, including the cards you're trying to kill the effing Shieldbearer with.


Well if he put three shieldbearers in his deck he was running a massive risk and very much depending on seeing two of them before turn 5 for them to be effective, I'd be very interested to know what his results for the whole run were.

I'm not saying they can't work in some situations, because obviously they can, and I've been caused hassle by them popping up early on in a game as well, but there's no way I'd fill a deck slot in either arena or constructed with one, they've got zero attack and can be dealt with in all sorts of ways. Silence one of the buggers for example and short of being buffed by something else, they literally do nothing. At least a silenced golem for example can still attack.

I suppose it's possible the guy was trying to build a low-cost aggro style deck and he may have got away with it with favourable card choices, but to me the mere concept of filling 10% of your card slots with zero attack cards sounds like madness.
Maybe so, but if you get silenced then that's a waste of their silence that could be used on a much better card.
Compare to, say, Novice Engineer, which is much more highly rated. Sure, you get a 1/1, but that will get killed without swapping for anything, and you get another card, but since the NE is basically useless you may as well start with that other card anyway.
Curiosity wrote:
Compare to, say, Novice Engineer, which is much more highly rated. Sure, you get a 1/1, but that will get killed without swapping for anything, and you get another card, but since the NE is basically useless you may as well start with that other card anyway.


At least the engineer replaces the card it costs, and is capable of doing something other than sitting there waiting to be destroyed.

I'm not much of a fan of the engineer myself, but at least there's a card draw there. Drawing the engineer later in the game gives you a 1/1 on the board and will draw you another card, which you can probably play immediately. Drawing the shieldbearer later in the game will give you a 0/4, you'll be down a card, and you'll have useless lump on the board that will most likely be swatted like a fly on your opponent's next turn.

I'd take the engineer over the shieldbearer for either constructed or arena.
I dunno. I find that 50% of games don't make it to Round 10, and even when it does, it's often that you'll not have massive minions out. 4 health is more than the majority can kill in one go. If you've got a deck with lots of buffs in, or lots of fragile minions then Shieldbearer is valuable; far more so than a 1/1 that gets knocked out by a hero power and protects nothing.
Really, really loving this shammy.

Still getting to grips with the intricacies of the class but I'm a lot better than I was a couple of days ago at managing the overloads and seguing from one overload turn to another whilst still making sure I can still do something meaningful on the non-overload turns.

Just had a monumentally satisfying game against a warlock murloc aggro deck, a match-up I almost always lost with the mage deck.

The shammy just seems to have the tools to deal with it, especially the Trump shammy deck that I'm running, so right from the off I was able to control him down on the board and have him life-tapping near constantly. (Earth Shock FTW.)

Having turned the tide very much against him by around Turn 10 and with lethal the next turn he finally brought the Hellfire out (killing his two stealthed health-buffing imps in the process but he really had no choice), which I followed up with another Feral Spirit and I still had my taunted Chillwind Yeti and buffed taunted Unbound Elemental out who had survived the Hellfire.

With four cards in my hand (I'd got really good draw of a Gadgetzan he couldn't get rid of for a couple of turns) and him at 5 health, he conceded.

Because I fucking hate rush decks I gave him a victorious threaten emote as he conceded.

Rank 14 but I'm confident I can go further with this deck.....
Just took down a Rank 12 druid who played five (!) legendaries. I thought he was being a bit free and easy with his swipes and wraths early on..... The thing with this shammy deck is it seems to have an answer for just about everything, unless I'm simply having an incredibly lucky run. I've climbed to Rank 12 and am one win away from 11, and have won four on the trot now.

Also, what a difference one mana makes.... Seems like hunters are much rarer in constructed now, and when you do play them they're having to try for different plays besides the horrible cheap UTH combos.
ARRRRGGHHHHHHHHHHHH - One game away from Rank 10 and my winning streak ended against a Warlock Giant Deck. He played very well TBH, it's not an easy deck to play well and he pretty much nailed it, I put up a decent fight but when he brought his Raggy out I had very little left in the tank. Gave him a 'well played' (which he reciprocated) and smashed my own face to pieces on his Raggy to end the game. I'm sure Rank 10 or better is achievable with this deck though.

Shame to see the winning streak come to an end but I don't feel hard done to as he was a quality player doing a very good job with a pretty complicated deck.
An acceptable 4:3 run in arena, although the annoying thing is that all three losses were where my opponent had a legendary, the paladin legendary in particular is brutally hard to work through in arena. (I had the guy on the ropes until he brought that fucking thing out, and that's the legendary that basically broke Trump against that writer from Eurogamer.)

My deck didn't even get a single epic choice, let alone a legendary, so I'm reasonably satisfied with the result, but I'm still a bit 'meh' about the randomness of the card choice, I didn't even get one bloody swipe, and yet got a mage who had two polys and two fireballs!
I was thinking on the drive home today about a deck I might try. A full minion warrior deck, with as many taunts as possible, and Lorewalker Cho sitting behind them to copy spells...
Trooper wrote:
I was thinking on the drive home today about a deck I might try. A full minion warrior deck, with as many taunts as possible, and Lorewalker Cho sitting behind them to copy spells...


I was actually dreaming about the game a couple of nights ago, I'm not sure what's worse, obsessing about the game consciously or sub-consciously :D
Going to bed at 2/0 with a fun Paladin deck.

It's a risky one as it doesn't have many low cost minions, but when it works, it is devastating. Lots of extra card draws from Gnomish Inventors and that 3 Damage + Card one, plus a Cult Leader or whatever he's called. Some Aldor Peacekeepers to pacify big minions, and then some big ones of my own.

First match I won within a few turns, an Injured Blademaster followed by a Blessing of Kings, and then it was all over bar the shouting.

Second match I came close to losing against a Druid. He was always ahead on health, but I kept drawing cards and managing to knock down his stronger minions. I was down to under 5 health, but the 5/6 minion with a healing of 6 kept me alive long enough to outlast him, and then I brought my large minions out to finish him.

It's a simultaneously versatile and vulnerable deck!
Hearthly wrote:
ARRRRGGHHHHHHHHHHHH - One game away from Rank 10 and my winning streak ended against a Warlock Giant Deck.


If it makes you fell any WORSE, I'm already at rank 10. ;) :D :D

Although I did get stuck for a day or two shuffling between 11 and 12.

Warlock Zoo and Handlock are a pain to play against though, although with a little luck and careful playing my Mage deck can defeat them about 50% of the time.
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