Hearthpwn

So this is something I've been gathering the presentation to for a while.

A whole new mechanic, Area of Effect! Now, you may say : AoE already exists! Cards like Flamestrike or Explosive Trap. But these are not truely Aoe. These cards just influence everything on your enemy's board. What I'm talking about, is the more traditional Area of Effect. You pick an area, and it gets a unique effect.

by "area", I mean area on the board! So, how will this work, well. Thus : When you drag an AoE card onto the board, areas in the board will light up as target marks.

You pick one, the spell targets it. Simple enough. Now because I want there to be tactical thinking and positioning of minions, I have made the center of the board un-targetable by AoE, because its no fun that way - there's no thinking and planning.

My idea works a lot like Cone of Cold or Explosive Shot, but instead of targeting a minion, you're targeting the board itself!

Some example AoE cards :

When the mage casts ring of frost, he will be required to target one of the zones. 

The little bold writing and number at the beginning of the text are to state it is an AoE spell, and how many turns it lasts. This lasts 2 turns (Note, the count-down ticks down at the END of a the turn of the player who has the AoE on their side of the board!) Any minion summoned into the zone will freeze for the first turn in play! Once I pass the turn to the opponent, it will have 2 more turns lasting. Once his turn ends, it will have 1 turn lasting, pass to him again, 1 turn lasting, his turn ends again, AoE is gone.

This AoE lasts 3 turns and minions played into the zone will get beefy and taunty! As for the count-down on this, when my turn ends, it will go down to 2. Opponent plays, passes to me, I play, my turn ends again, counter down to 1, opponent plays, passes back to me, I play, I pass, AoE disappears. Important to note that even after the AoE disappears, the effects it caused will remain, unless stated otherwise! So minions played into the zone will still be +1/+1 and taunt.

I wanted to add some clarifications. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to turn this relatively complex idea to somethng that would fit Hearthstone's "Keep it simple" feel. This is why there are four designated zones AoE can influence, and casting aoe is very simple. You drag and target the zone. As for making the count-down obvious, I assume there could be some UI on top of it, or perhaps if you mouse over it it shows the turns remaining.

About minion positioning.

If there is ONE minion on your side of the board, he will sit in the DEAD ZONE. Any other minion played, will be considered played INTO one of the Friedly Zones. Even though after the minion comes in, your first minion would move to the side and it would now appear that the two minions are half-inside the DEAD ZONE and half inside the 2 friendly zones, that doesn't matter. The Area of Effect only checks the position you -put- the minion into when you play it.

P.S I'm not suggesting this to Blizzard, this is just a thought I had so I figured, why not share. It is an interesting idea overall.

I'm gonna work on some images to create clarifications.

I like it, but I don't think they would ever implement this,  claiming that it will consider players too much. 

Dude, fix your spelling and grammar please, there is an edit button for a reason. It's difficult to read "ont he board!" Like, c'mon man. Sorry, I was rough. Your grammar is mostly fine elsewhere throughout the post.

Anyway. AOE is too difficult to keep track of, so that's why it won't be implemented. Also, balancing will be a great issue. Neat idea though.

Nice idea. Dont give up. Maybe we'll see it in the future

So basically just like with the lanes in The Elder Scrolls Legends?

A solution would change gameplay (in a bad way), but add interaction (in a good way?). The solution is to mimic YuGiOh. In YGO, a player is only allowed 5 monsters at one time. The Monster Card Zone has five sub-zones where monsters can be played. If something like this was implemented into Hearthstone, we will have seven zones for monster play across the board.

Bad for gameplay:

Simply because of those Adjacent^[1] abilities. Having seven available zones means that our minions could be very far a part from each other. This could be fixed by forcing certain zones to be 'locked' unless the zone itself is adjacent to a minion in play. Then again, the hyperlink also shows beneficial cards. Not saying this is the greatest issue in the gameplay, but it does greatly affect current gameplay. 

Good for interactions:

Some cards in YGO have an effect referencing the cards in the same column (zone). This also allows Zone Control like the YuGiOh card Ground Collapse, depending on Blizzard's choice of interaction. Last but not least, it allows the zone effects that you're talking about, Oogahound. 

In conclusion, is this worth it? It'll take alot from the engineers and designers to implement, as well as a good number on the developers to find an accurate, playable balance between Zone Control, interaction, and cards with adjacent effects.

1. Cards also affected by the change which are not on the link: Betrayal, Cone of Cold, Powershot, Foe Reaper 4000, and Magnataur Alpha. 

I feel that having the ability to move your minions to different positions would be really neat and create some interesting situations, strategy wise, but I can also understand how that could be confusing for new players and could potentially create some balancing issues since the game hasn't been built from the ground up with this kind of stuff in mind. 

Still, it's a pretty neat idea.  

Nice idea but Blizzard don't want to involve new players with difficult mechanism, they want the game to be simple as it is possible.

The zones aren't really the problem here. The problem is the long-lasting effect. In hearthstone, spells can't have continuous effects, only minions can. If you want a spell that has a continuous effect, it has to give a minion that effect. It's not like in MTG where we have Enchantments that stay on the board independent of minions.

Also, let's look at your first spell, Ring of Frost. Say you cast it on the left side of the board, well then your opponent will just summon all their minions to the right side and completely ignore it! If you place it on the right side of the board, then it's totally OP against Paladin and sometimes Shaman.

What I would prefer is to see more cards like Cone of Cold and Explosive Shot, but useful enough to get run more often.

Quote from michalsuch429>>

There's exactly nothing that separates minions from spells. Minion is just a body + ability. Spell is nothing more than an ability without body.

Sorry I didn't realize you weren't OP.

Ok I get what you're saying now, but it's still just. It's adding more than necessary. If you add these type of effects, you need to add removal for these types of effects, and other workarounds, that people need to start putting into their 30-card decks.

MTG has a ton of different types of effects, because it's built for that. There are not only creatures, but enchantments like I mentioned, artifacts, lands. And you get a 60-card deck to include all sorts of counters and workarounds to all of those different types of things.

In hearth, things that would be considered artifacts in MTG - like Summoning Stone, Lightwell - are just minions. And it doesn't really make sense, because you shouldn't be able to give Summoning Stone an attack value and then attack with it. But it keeps things simple, it keeps decks at 30 cards, and it keeps the board clear and organized. It's just an unnecessary way to cause effects that are better accomplished in different ways (though maybe not exactly the same).

Personally, I'm okay with the idea of AOE spells in the game. In keeping track with the time, Blizzard could always utilise an unknown area of the board to keep track of it, similar to how C'Thun is shown at the left of the left-most position of the board.

That being said though, I feel that your current AOE spells is quite complicated for the simple design philosophy that HS subscribes to. I would rather it be simplified to affecting the whole board rather than forcing it to affect a part of the board to be honest. Then again, this is the Fan Creations forum, so you shouldn't have a limit to your creativity! ;)