So with the release of SN1P-SN4P, we have a new Echo card printed, the first since the witchwood released. Blizzard has stated that they won't be using Echo again for one-off cards yet prints this? Do they honestly think Echo is a hard concept to grasp for new players if they take 5 seconds to hover over a card text to see the keywords explained? The difference between Charge and Rush is probably just as complicated for brand new players to understand as Echo (or Magnetic) is as a mechanic. Is the new legendary with Echo, Magnetic, and Deathrattle all on one card supposed to be "easy to understand" for new players or something?
I'd really like Blizzard to stop treating everyone like a 5 year old and just make consistency changes to many cards that need it, such as:
These small inconsistencies do matter in very fringe cases, but they are cases nonetheless. For example, unstable evolution and witch's brew may be obtained by a Thief Rogue playing against a Shaman. The rogue may have a Mistwraith on board and start using evolutions, yet no buffs occur when it behaves exactly the same as Echo, and even has the same graphic effect.
Charge should simply read "Give a minion Rush", or just rename the card completely to "Rush". The only fringe scenario I can think of where this would matter is if a Warsong Commander is in play, preventing the minion from getting +1 attack. But uh... yeah.
Y'Shaarj, Rage Unbound should read "At the end of your turn, Recruit a minion from your deck". I understand Y'Shaarj came out before Recruit was a keyword, but it's not hard to just update the card to get with the times, especially since it's a played card in Wild.
Just pretty annoyed that Blizzard made a case for messing with keywords then completely go back on their word.
Reason for this inconsistency is simple. SN1P-SN4P is very understandable for current new players because Witchwood and Boomsday are in standard. And next year's new players won't have this card.
But if the printed echo card in Rise of Shadows, next year's new players would have cards with a weird keyword.
Y'Shaarj, Rage Unbound should read "At the end of your turn, Recruit a minion from your deck". I understand Y'Shaarj came out before Recruit was a keyword, but it's not hard to just update the card to get with the times, especially since it's a played card in Wild.
Wickerflame Burnbristle came out before lifesteal became a mechanic and its text was changed to lifesteal.
Y'Shaarj, Rage Unbound should read "At the end of your turn, Recruit a minion from your deck". I understand Y'Shaarj came out before Recruit was a keyword, but it's not hard to just update the card to get with the times, especially since it's a played card in Wild.
Wickerflame Burnbristle came out before lifesteal became a mechanic and its text was changed to lifesteal.
Same happened with the Mistress of Pain, they retroactively changed the old text (something like "heal for the amount of damage this minion deals") to lifesteal.
Y'Shaarj, Rage Unbound should read "At the end of your turn, Recruit a minion from your deck". I understand Y'Shaarj came out before Recruit was a keyword, but it's not hard to just update the card to get with the times, especially since it's a played card in Wild.
Wickerflame Burnbristle came out before lifesteal became a mechanic and its text was changed to lifesteal.
Lifesteal is an evergreen mechanic. Recruit is not.
I'm pretty annoyed with Blizzard's decision here, because it invites people to argue about this again - they don't re-use one-off mechanics outside of expansions they were introduced (except for this one time, sort of).
This is an exceptional case, where they are introducing a new card in an old expansion, one which they have freely admitted did not go through the normal design process. I imagine whatever quality control would normally bring up this issue didn't consult, or perhaps it wasn't considered an issue since they will still rotate out with the Echo keyword.
Either way, I agree with their decision not to re-use keywords normally, it's the better design choice imo.
When it comes to updated older cards like Charge and Y'Shaarj I can understand not going back and changing those.
When they said Witch's Brew didn't have Echo because it wasn't from witchwood and it isn't an eternal keywoard, I said fine. I don't like it but sure, it actually interacts more powerfully with Krag'wa that way.
But Snipsnap having echo? what the actual fuck? not only is it not a from witchwood nor are any of these buffs but it has no flavor to match echo. I'm not against it because I think using keywords is fine and simplifies things, but it really makes the choice of Witch's Brew not having echo look dumb. Especially because wasn't Witch's brew shaman's "callback card" where they brought back an old mecanic? Priest had forbidden words, warrior had omega, warlock had...idk who cares about warlocks, and shaman had echo, but there is no echo on the card. Seems dumb.
Blizzard likes to keep the car's text concise and simple. (Usually up to 4 lines at most.) "Repeatable this turn" would probably clog up SN1P-SN4P's text box, so they chose echo instead.
Although, I do agree, all of these should just be changed to echo, the inconsistency is really triggering, but maybe they have some weird reasoning for it.
Agree they should be more consistent. I'm pretty sure they said that Echo was a Witchwood-only keyword. So it makes no sense that SN1P-SN4P has "Echo" instead of "Repeatable this turn".
As for your question about the card Charge - this card does exactly what it says :-) it does not give Rush, it does actually give Charge. How can you test this? Summon a rush minion - wait for your next turn - your rush minion can go face now since it has been on the board for 1 turn - now try give that Rush minion Charge - your minion can no longer attack the opponents face. So card is working as intended. It has charge and rush but cannot attack enemy hero.
Y'Shaarj, Rage Unbound should read "At the end of your turn, Recruit a minion from your deck". I understand Y'Shaarj came out before Recruit was a keyword, but it's not hard to just update the card to get with the times, especially since it's a played card in Wild.
Wickerflame Burnbristle came out before lifesteal became a mechanic and its text was changed to lifesteal.
That's cause lifesteal is a keyword blizzard wanted to continue working with a lot.
The answer is simple snip snap is part of TBP which is part of the year of the raven, we could say magnetic, echo and overkill are keyword specific to the year of the raven cards.
Especially because wasn't Witch's brew shaman's "callback card" where they brought back an old mecanic? Priest had forbidden words, warrior had omega, warlock had...idk who cares about warlocks, and shaman had echo, but there is no echo on the card. Seems dumb.
Why the hate for warlock lol? I think the only callback card for warlock is Arch-Villain Rafaam, he's a callback to the Golden Monkey.
Just recently, i think in March, the developers said that in focus group testing, keywords are one of the biggest hurdles when trying to get new people into the game. Apparently, people get scared off really fast if there's a bit of bold text on the card, and they have to do a 10 second research to find out what it means, even if it is explained both in the collection and during match by hovering over the card... I don't get it either. Looking up keywords takes less time than reading through some singular Yu-Gi-Oh cards, before you even know what specific terms mean. But focus groups dictate the market, even if they mostly consist of 13 year old boys (different topic...).
Meanwhile, since Un'Goro, every expansion introduced a new keyword, and almost all of them are for one expansion and a handful of cards only: Adapt in Un'Goro, Recruit in Kobolds, Echo in Witchwood, Magnetic in Boomsday, Overkill in Rastakhan and most likely Twinspell in Shadows.
Only in some cases, they will introduce new keywords to the "core" of mechanics and print more cards with that keyword in later expansions, like Discover, Rush and Lifesteal (and Lifesteal already existed before, and older cards were changed accordingly: Wickerflame Burnbristle and Mistress of Pain).
I think they want to make more keywords to have something "new" as selling point for new expansions that they can promote the hell out of. But they don't want to have too many of them in the game to keep it simple and easy to understand for new players, and by not continuing them beyond one expansion, their number will be limited in Standard, because of couse they only ever care about bananasweet Standard.
Why adding more and more keywords and then limiting them to just a handful of cards would not confuse players, I don't know. Apparently, if only like 10 cards have something with Overkill, it's like they don't really exist. Or having 6 keywords in addition to the old Taunt, Battlecry, Deathrattle and Charge and the retroactively added Poisonous, while removing Enraged, is just the right amount so that new players are kinda confused when they start, bot not too confused to quit again immedeatly.
They probably don't want to change old cards, like the super stupid Charge spell, so that it's identifiable what is part of Classic and what isn't... even though they added "random spells" for mage and "random opponent's class card" for Rogue as new "core" concepts, even though there was NOTHING like this in the original Classic set. And with stuff like Rush getting continued anyway, it's just silly that they wouldn't change Charge. Rise of Shadows had 9 cards with Rush on it, and they will be around at least till April 2021. I mean, even if they would say (which they haven't) "we like Rush for now, but moving forward, we might want to try out something different and then it's confusing to have only one card with Rush in Standard", just look at Discover. Discover was introduced in LoE. That was over 3 (!) years ago, almost 4. And still, every expansion has a couple Discover cards, including the latest. It's not going anywhere anytime soon, and who knows how many years the game will be around anyways.
Lastly, why they refuse to add keywords (where they fit) to older cards that have rotated anyway, like with Unstable Evolution or Y'Shaarj, keeping in mind that Wild will inevitably have dozens of keyword floating around anyway, I don't know either. Perhaps again to keep mechanics identifiable with sets, but the benefit of that I can't really see.
I think it makes even less sense, because if a player says "hey, Echo is so cool, what other cards are there with this effect?" and Team5's answer would be "Just look at all of Witchwood", the player wouldn't learn about Unstable Evolution or Witch's Brew, which work exactly like Echo, just not named Echo...
Who knows, maybe they want to turn "repeatable this turn" into a new Shaman core mechanic, but then it would be strange to name them Echo, because then it's a class exclusive mechanic that appears in other classes, like giving Warlock something with Overload...
I think I read somewhere that they didn't give Witch's Brew Echo because, when Witchwood will rotate out of standard it would become the only card with such a mechanic, SN1P-SN4P is considered as a Boomsday card and as such it will rotate along the Echo mechanic. However I still can't grasp why Y'Shaarj, Rage Unbound doesn't have Recruit (Old Gods was released in the same year as Kobolds) and especially why Charge doesn't give Rush (naming aside) since it's a continued mechanic.
So with the release of SN1P-SN4P, we have a new Echo card printed, the first since the witchwood released. Blizzard has stated that they won't be using Echo again for one-off cards yet prints this? Do they honestly think Echo is a hard concept to grasp for new players if they take 5 seconds to hover over a card text to see the keywords explained? The difference between Charge and Rush is probably just as complicated for brand new players to understand as Echo (or Magnetic) is as a mechanic. Is the new legendary with Echo, Magnetic, and Deathrattle all on one card supposed to be "easy to understand" for new players or something?
I'd really like Blizzard to stop treating everyone like a 5 year old and just make consistency changes to many cards that need it, such as:
These small inconsistencies do matter in very fringe cases, but they are cases nonetheless. For example, unstable evolution and witch's brew may be obtained by a Thief Rogue playing against a Shaman. The rogue may have a Mistwraith on board and start using evolutions, yet no buffs occur when it behaves exactly the same as Echo, and even has the same graphic effect.
Charge should simply read "Give a minion Rush", or just rename the card completely to "Rush". The only fringe scenario I can think of where this would matter is if a Warsong Commander is in play, preventing the minion from getting +1 attack. But uh... yeah.
Y'Shaarj, Rage Unbound should read "At the end of your turn, Recruit a minion from your deck". I understand Y'Shaarj came out before Recruit was a keyword, but it's not hard to just update the card to get with the times, especially since it's a played card in Wild.
Just pretty annoyed that Blizzard made a case for messing with keywords then completely go back on their word.
I guess they realised that "Repeatable this turn" doesn't work well on minions and decided to just go back to using Echo instead.
I agree though - their inconsistency is very annoying and just generally cheapens the vibe of the game.
Reason for this inconsistency is simple. SN1P-SN4P is very understandable for current new players because Witchwood and Boomsday are in standard. And next year's new players won't have this card.
But if the printed echo card in Rise of Shadows, next year's new players would have cards with a weird keyword.
"Need to collect more data".
Sorry, I can't find any decent answer beside sarcasm...
Wickerflame Burnbristle came out before lifesteal became a mechanic and its text was changed to lifesteal.
Same happened with the Mistress of Pain, they retroactively changed the old text (something like "heal for the amount of damage this minion deals") to lifesteal.
Siras Terra, the Geomancer
Lifesteal is an evergreen mechanic. Recruit is not.
I'm pretty annoyed with Blizzard's decision here, because it invites people to argue about this again - they don't re-use one-off mechanics outside of expansions they were introduced (except for this one time, sort of).
This is an exceptional case, where they are introducing a new card in an old expansion, one which they have freely admitted did not go through the normal design process. I imagine whatever quality control would normally bring up this issue didn't consult, or perhaps it wasn't considered an issue since they will still rotate out with the Echo keyword.
Either way, I agree with their decision not to re-use keywords normally, it's the better design choice imo.
You can find me here! Good luck everyone!
When it comes to updated older cards like Charge and Y'Shaarj I can understand not going back and changing those.
When they said Witch's Brew didn't have Echo because it wasn't from witchwood and it isn't an eternal keywoard, I said fine. I don't like it but sure, it actually interacts more powerfully with Krag'wa that way.
But Snipsnap having echo? what the actual fuck? not only is it not a from witchwood nor are any of these buffs but it has no flavor to match echo. I'm not against it because I think using keywords is fine and simplifies things, but it really makes the choice of Witch's Brew not having echo look dumb. Especially because wasn't Witch's brew shaman's "callback card" where they brought back an old mecanic? Priest had forbidden words, warrior had omega, warlock had...idk who cares about warlocks, and shaman had echo, but there is no echo on the card. Seems dumb.
Blizzard likes to keep the car's text concise and simple. (Usually up to 4 lines at most.) "Repeatable this turn" would probably clog up SN1P-SN4P's text box, so they chose echo instead.
Although, I do agree, all of these should just be changed to echo, the inconsistency is really triggering, but maybe they have some weird reasoning for it.
Agree they should be more consistent. I'm pretty sure they said that Echo was a Witchwood-only keyword. So it makes no sense that SN1P-SN4P has "Echo" instead of "Repeatable this turn".
As for your question about the card Charge - this card does exactly what it says :-) it does not give Rush, it does actually give Charge. How can you test this? Summon a rush minion - wait for your next turn - your rush minion can go face now since it has been on the board for 1 turn - now try give that Rush minion Charge - your minion can no longer attack the opponents face. So card is working as intended. It has charge and rush but cannot attack enemy hero.
That's cause lifesteal is a keyword blizzard wanted to continue working with a lot.
The answer is simple snip snap is part of TBP which is part of the year of the raven, we could say magnetic, echo and overkill are keyword specific to the year of the raven cards.
Why the hate for warlock lol? I think the only callback card for warlock is Arch-Villain Rafaam, he's a callback to the Golden Monkey.
Nobody gets Team5's keyword policy.
Just recently, i think in March, the developers said that in focus group testing, keywords are one of the biggest hurdles when trying to get new people into the game. Apparently, people get scared off really fast if there's a bit of bold text on the card, and they have to do a 10 second research to find out what it means, even if it is explained both in the collection and during match by hovering over the card... I don't get it either. Looking up keywords takes less time than reading through some singular Yu-Gi-Oh cards, before you even know what specific terms mean. But focus groups dictate the market, even if they mostly consist of 13 year old boys (different topic...).
Meanwhile, since Un'Goro, every expansion introduced a new keyword, and almost all of them are for one expansion and a handful of cards only: Adapt in Un'Goro, Recruit in Kobolds, Echo in Witchwood, Magnetic in Boomsday, Overkill in Rastakhan and most likely Twinspell in Shadows.
Only in some cases, they will introduce new keywords to the "core" of mechanics and print more cards with that keyword in later expansions, like Discover, Rush and Lifesteal (and Lifesteal already existed before, and older cards were changed accordingly: Wickerflame Burnbristle and Mistress of Pain).
I think they want to make more keywords to have something "new" as selling point for new expansions that they can promote the hell out of. But they don't want to have too many of them in the game to keep it simple and easy to understand for new players, and by not continuing them beyond one expansion, their number will be limited in Standard, because of couse they only ever care about bananasweet Standard.
Why adding more and more keywords and then limiting them to just a handful of cards would not confuse players, I don't know. Apparently, if only like 10 cards have something with Overkill, it's like they don't really exist. Or having 6 keywords in addition to the old Taunt, Battlecry, Deathrattle and Charge and the retroactively added Poisonous, while removing Enraged, is just the right amount so that new players are kinda confused when they start, bot not too confused to quit again immedeatly.
They probably don't want to change old cards, like the super stupid Charge spell, so that it's identifiable what is part of Classic and what isn't... even though they added "random spells" for mage and "random opponent's class card" for Rogue as new "core" concepts, even though there was NOTHING like this in the original Classic set. And with stuff like Rush getting continued anyway, it's just silly that they wouldn't change Charge. Rise of Shadows had 9 cards with Rush on it, and they will be around at least till April 2021. I mean, even if they would say (which they haven't) "we like Rush for now, but moving forward, we might want to try out something different and then it's confusing to have only one card with Rush in Standard", just look at Discover. Discover was introduced in LoE. That was over 3 (!) years ago, almost 4. And still, every expansion has a couple Discover cards, including the latest. It's not going anywhere anytime soon, and who knows how many years the game will be around anyways.
Lastly, why they refuse to add keywords (where they fit) to older cards that have rotated anyway, like with Unstable Evolution or Y'Shaarj, keeping in mind that Wild will inevitably have dozens of keyword floating around anyway, I don't know either. Perhaps again to keep mechanics identifiable with sets, but the benefit of that I can't really see.
I think it makes even less sense, because if a player says "hey, Echo is so cool, what other cards are there with this effect?" and Team5's answer would be "Just look at all of Witchwood", the player wouldn't learn about Unstable Evolution or Witch's Brew, which work exactly like Echo, just not named Echo...
Who knows, maybe they want to turn "repeatable this turn" into a new Shaman core mechanic, but then it would be strange to name them Echo, because then it's a class exclusive mechanic that appears in other classes, like giving Warlock something with Overload...
I think I read somewhere that they didn't give Witch's Brew Echo because, when Witchwood will rotate out of standard it would become the only card with such a mechanic, SN1P-SN4P is considered as a Boomsday card and as such it will rotate along the Echo mechanic. However I still can't grasp why Y'Shaarj, Rage Unbound doesn't have Recruit (Old Gods was released in the same year as Kobolds) and especially why Charge doesn't give Rush (naming aside) since it's a continued mechanic.