Hearthpwn

There's been a lot of chat about Neptulon the Tidehunter being remove from evole pools (or not as the chat would have it).  Do you think this is the correct approach and should this be documented somewhere in the cards it impacts? 

Imo there's no reason why this card (or any other) should be excluded from evolve (or any other random summon) mechanic.  Mechanistically it makes no sense and the fact that it's a hidden limitation is very wrong.  You might play a card in the hope that you get a card which you can never get.  Imo he is a 10 mana card and should be part of the pool just like any other 10 mana card (for good or bad).

Note that I 'm not saying evolve shaman shouldn't be nerfed - it should.  I'm just saying it makes no sense to me to have hidden rules and this absolutely isn't the way that power levels should be controled .  What's next - you can discover that spell but not this one (in secret)?  

If there is rule such as "you cant discover legendaries",  I'm cool with that, but it should be clear to those playing the game and documented somewhere in the tooltips.

In my opinion it does make sense in a practical way, as well as balancing and, kinda, flavor too. Colossal minions generate their limbs when summoned, which means that, in the context of an evolve, you'd be creating new minions, rather than strictly just evolving the minion already in play.

It makes sense on a balancing standpoint that you should not be able to generate more minions from the act of evolving, and it can make vague flavor sense that evolving a minion shouldn't make it blurt out independent limbs (which, yes, is a gameplay element more than lore, but still, the gameplay does create a conscious separation between a colossal and its limbs, into independent entities).

Generally, i think the argument "evolve shouldn't create more minions on its own" is enough reason to limit it, but i feel like it can still be vaguely argued in other aspects as well, and so is entirely justified imo. It's not like it's limiting neptulon specifically, it's limiting an entire type of minions that function differently than others.

If anything, it could make sense that if you'd try to evolve a colossal, it should evolve its limbs at the same time as if it were a single minion, but that gets into weirder edge cases that kinda contradict the earlier points and also still break the initial rule of "don't create more minions", besides being kind of a messy affair.

Evolve was a thing before the Mini set, just not as popular and it wasnt possible to evolve into colossals.

Blizz just forgott about that rule with the new discover evolve spell.

So it was a bug fix and not a nerf.

You cant generate colossals, it is a rule. You can discover them (to your hand) but not onto the board.

Quote from Xauriel >>

Evolve was a thing before the Mini set, just not as popular and it wasnt possible to evolve into colossals.

Blizz just forgott about that rule with the new discover evolve spell.

So it was a bug fix and not a nerf.

You cant generate colossals, it is a rule. You can discover them (to your hand) but not onto the board.

 Wasn't all of wild crying about priests doing that very thing with neptulon?

I have no idea how that wild interaction worked but I must assume they cheated their own copy out.

In that case it's not a generated card/minion 

It was different with priest because neptulon was in the deck, but if you drew it, the scam stopped. Think Barnes priest scam. It went turn 1 illuminate, discover shadow essence, discount it to 2. Turn 2 draw shadow essence and play it for 2, it makes a 5/5 neptulon that can be resurrected. You don’t discover a copy or evolve a copy, it’s a copy from deck which is the priest scam since Barnes and Yshaarj.

Sure, I can get that. I am just saying that if they really wanted a hard and fast rule of "Thou shall not generate on the field a copy of a minion with Colassal." then those bitter wild tears would have been avoided.

Wild is always bitter, those tears stain the pages of history.

I get what everyone is saying here about balance, but isnt balance aspect controlled by the mana cost?  10 mana cards are big and stompy and in principle all carry the same value - hence the 10 mana.  They might not all be good when resurrected/summoned (some have battlecries for example) but if you look at Thadius now, he's also game winning when he evolves from something else and isn't colossal.

If colossals were genuinely so game winning (as people imply) they would be played in every deck, and they aren't.  The real issue here is early colossals, as they're typically more difficult to deal with than single minions.

Back to the main point though, shouldn't these restrictions be documented (and I mean outside of dev. comments in patch notes)?  For me they absolutely should.  Evolve should either have a tooltip or something in the text to describe the limitation.

What if there are other interactions like this we're not aware of?  What if the devs had decided you can't discover The Scourge but no one knows... What if there are bugs about how these restrictions are implemented but you don't known because you don't know that it should (or shouldn't) happen. 

Off tangent,  there was a case in WoW where some uber-rare loot didn't drop from a boss despite hundreds of attempts.  People began to question if it was functioning properly and Blizz said that it was but was very rare, only to discover months later that it was actually impossible for it to drop.  There's no reason why something simlar couldn't happen here.

I think Colossal is a very niche keyword. Like, it only means that the minions comes into play with more minions, like murlocs already normally do. The only difference between a Murloc Tidehunter having "battlecry: summon a 1/1" or "Colossal +1" (being that the 1/1), is that you get the colossal despite casting it from your hand or not. But with this invisible restriction (you have to come to the forums to notice something not stated in the cards), a minion with colossal has to be banned from a pool because its an imbalanced (apart from unintuitive and impractical) keyword. It would have been just fine with battlecry (evolving into a slow windfury 10/10).

Shouldn't this complaint have happened back in Un'goro when you couldn't generate Quests?

It could well have done to be honest.  You see why the transparency matters though?  Without knowing, you would assume you could have gotton a quest from one of the many "add a 1 mana spell" options which were around back then. 

I can see the gameplay logic for not including them (they were so specific that they would basically have ended up dead cards) but perhaps a better solution was to make it so they were "Quest" cards rather than "spells"?  That way everyone knows that you can't get one off a "discover a spell" style mechanic.