Hearthpwn

Think this is a pretty fun card that will be useful for newcomers, who do not yet have large collections, to get a chance to try out various legendaries.

It's hard to talk about "too much RNG" since it's hard to quantify in a meaningful way. Like, Madder Bomber seems more random than Mad Bomber, but in reality it's more predictable because there are more rolls, and they will balance out a high percentage of the time. And it's pretty easy to tell what C'Thun will do to your board.

In fact, I think what bugs people is less having a lot of random effects, than having a small number of high-impact rolls. Piloted Shredder's Deathrattle occurs at a crucial stage of the game and this one roll can determine the outcome.

Similarly, real-world sports like baseball are TREMENDOUSLY random in practice, because even the most skilled players cannot reliably hit the ball. But baseball runs an incredibly long season and the RNG averages out.

Spend all your mana. For each mana spent, target minion gains Stealth for 1 turn.

"Simplicity" is a poorly defined concept. Go has simpler rules than chess but is more complicated to play well. I do think Hearthstone is simpler than MtG, but mostly because the games are shorter and therefore simply have fewer decisions. And of course shorter games was an intentional and laudable design goal.

I don't think people who ask this understand sports? Because in practice one of the most RNG-heavy human pursuits is baseball. Hitting the ball reliably off an MLB pitcher is outside the realm of human ability, so even though some batters are better than others they're all just swinging and hoping. Although you can argue that it's somewhat deterministic in theory (depending on what you believe about physics) it's very random in practice.

Man, all I can say is, at almost whatever rank you're at, there's gonna be somebody better than you. And if you're rank 1 Legend, billions of people won't ever care. It's all relative, so trying to describe some particular rank as "impressive", or some other rank as "not impressive", is as absurd as it gets.

Long Priest vs Priest game which included Nefarian... got into Shadowform at one point, then forgot about it and Mind Spiked my own face :(

I sort of think that what many people really want out of Casual is something impossible: they want it to be easier. Since Hearthstone is a match-making-based game it's not possible for it to be easier. You can't have a mode where everyone always gets matched with someone less good than themselves :)

A mode with "all experimental decks" would be interesting if you could find a way to enforce "experimental", which isn't necessarily impossible (some algorithm could detect the decks being played most often on ladder). But what good is the experiment if you're not testing your decks against those which are played competitively?

Well, they put it in the "big fixes" section of the announcement, although it kinda walks back their previous position.

Given all the other cases of "summon a random X" in the game, they needed to do this or change the wording.

For people who have trouble visualizing the math (meaning, those of you who incorrectly think it is 3/7) try looking at it this way. Imagine this as three coin flips, except all 3 flips are made before the results are shown at all. In other words suppose that the third flip is always made "just in case", then discarded if it's not needed.

Obviously if the three flips are made in advance, there are 8 outcomes and 4 result in the minion being killed. The fact that the third flip is ignored sometimes doesn't change the outcome.