Hearthpwn

The idea of Duels was too ambitious from beginning. I see three main reasons why this mode died:
1) The amount of info required to play it seriously was too overwhelming for most of the players, so people quickly gave up.
2) It requires a lot of effort to balance and Blizzard isn't that good at balancing.
3) It was incorrectly promoted. It was never an Arena killer, it was another constructed mode, but they thought for some reason that Arena players instead of building new deck every time without opening packs will start to buy packs to play 20-cards super-constructed decks at 0-0. That didn't happen, and rightfully so, even Battlegrounds is more similar mode to Arena in its spirit than Duels. If they want to kill Arena they need to introduce another limited mode instead, like Cube or something, not constructed one.
It was attractive mostly for specific part of Ranked players, but turns out the part is too specific. So I feel sad for players who enjoyed the mode, but not for Blizzard. It's their big failure to put a lot of resources into a mode that was doomed from day 1. They could have easily predicted it would happen.

So you think there is a plot against Duels and it was secretly not extremely unpopular to the point they decided to close it? They definitely had enough data about Duels for a long time. The only reason why they didn't add new cards is obviously to do less work since it's gonna be removed anyway.

Yep, shop is also disabled, including purchasing tickets at the Arena

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of calling for nerfs in a new meta too early, but the deck seems too strong and has no real counters. Grasp and/or Shopper should be nerfed. People have been too focused on hating its most reliable counter, Handbuff Paladin (understandable, but the deck was less OP and kept in check by Hunters), so now there is no one to stop DH anymore.

Extra info from Ridiculous Hat: you need to watch for 4 hours in total to get all of these.

xskarma, since it's only 12 hours and quite a lot of rewards, would you be so kind to put the article on top the day before so it doesn't get buried under card reveals? People tend to forget about such things, myself included. Thanks in advance.

upd: oh, it's both Monday and Wednesday, I missed that initially.

Slow aggro, also known as fast control, actually has a name: midrange. It's an ok anti-aggro deck, but far from 58%, it's somewhere around 50% most likely. Choosing Rainbow Mage over it is a good idea. According to Vicious Syndicate's report, Rainbow Mage is a better deck right now, and the higher you are, the better it would be in comparison to Druid. At top legend it's the most popular deck and only Secret and Excavate Rogues are better.

Quote from Legend_Entomber >>

Dragon Druid is not an Aggro deck… you are playing it wrong if you just gonna go face and ignore the opponent’s board…

Aggro decks don't work like that in general in most of the matchups, but yes, it's definitely not aggro.

Quote from Zizka >>

I wouldn’t mind making the game cost something every month. I think the fact that it’s free is very appealing to leech from in the form of bots.

This way you will destroy a huge part of the player base just for fixing a minor inconvenience. It would not even solve that, someone would need to take F2P players place and this would lead to more official Blizzard's bots. F2P players are basically more skillful official bots in that sense, we are paying by giving our time to make servers populated. Ideally for Blizzard, F2P players would spend some money at some point, but most of us will never do it and they know it. If they wanted only paying players, they would not make a free to play game. Idk if the game would be better or worse, but definitely much less popular.

Quote from InfinityRocketPlastics >>

Having fun is more important than getting a high rank. 

Can't argue with that, fun is the main reason why any game exists. Or should exist, there is a sad trend of more and more games become total crap because the developers started to pursue other goals like push their agenda or make player emotional, I don't know or care, there are enough cozy and fun games for me.

Anyway, I think getting a high rank is fun for most of the people, so they don't have to choose. I don't even care too muсh about my rank, I just want to win some games and get my dose of dopamine. Bot, noob, experienced player, doesn't matter (well, playing against top pros is more exciting, not gonna lie, but high rank is basically required for that so I take that aside). My task is try to win (without too much effort, hopefully) and I don't care about what my opponent is doing. Even if I cared about the challenge, it's impossible to not face it naturally at some point.

The imaginary situation when the player is playing only against bots is also a fair point, but let's be real, if player's MMR is that low, maybe the player needs some training and beat those bots instead of complaining about the game being not challenging enough? I mean, if someone will claim that he is facing bots 100 times in a row, that would probably mean he is extremely bad and can't beat them, lies or delusional and calls real people bots.

The only situation where bots are problematic for me is that weird Chinese thing when they are made to went through arena drafts until they find a nuts deck (so their owner/buyer can destroy everybody) or if they will become better than humans at some point (huge problem in chess). As long as bots are losing, I think it's not a big deal.

Very nice! Works great

Quote from user-14157642 >>

Alternatively some more social functions would be really nice. For example if I go against one of those that just "do their dailies" it would be very different if they could just say that to me. "sorry dude but I just doing my dailies, playing x rush minions" "seriously? ugh, fine, I guess I'll help you, " instead of me conceding because that's not what I wanted to play.

That sounds narcissistic. What do you mean "sorry"? They are giving you free win by playing a bad deck, why they should be sorry for some reason? Concede If you want, they will not have any problem completing their daily quest next game. You're not helping them like when you allow them to spectate your game for "Watch and learn" quest.

Everyone should be able to play any deck they want. You should not expect other people to play a game exactly the way you want, it's not realistic for any multiplayer game. If you want more challenge and less people who don't care, climb higher. I can guarantee you that you will not see anyone who don't care at top 1k legend.

From a design perspective it's Demon Hunter, because hero power should cost the same for every class. From my personal taste perspective it's Rogue and Priest.

Hunter is very powerful, it's the best deck from bronze to diamond. The best counter is Enrage Warrior.

No abilities, can attack: "If a Titan is Silenced, they can’t use their abilities and instead can perform attacks as if they were a regular minion"

There is no trick except for overdraw situations which are rare, you just play it normally and more willing to trade it after. The tricky part of this card is not for you, but for your opponent to decide whether they prefer to fall behind in tempo by playing horrible cards or give you extra tempo eventually. It feels worse than it is because this card is made to cause your opponent problems you mostly will not see

I like your ideas! For me it would be the best if Classic become a format with rotation: first 3 or 6 added one by one over year or two and then back to vanilla so more people could play the game as they first saw it, not only ones who played from the beginning

Yep, happens from time to time to me as well