Hearthpwn

I would have thought that he would quit just because of how frustrating Ancient Shieldbearer is to play against. 

10 armor for 1.5 mana is preeeetty dumb. 

I thought you could only dust adventure cards after they left Standard. 

Quote from Morpha123 >>

Quote from RagingAlphaWalrus >>

It needs to be a 9 mana.  The fact that you can drop 2 of those before turn 10 is insane and shouldn't be allowed

 CotW is basically strictly a win-more card in my experience. If the hunter is so far ahead of you and he drops it, then your'e toast. If he's so far behind on the board it won't even begin to help him come back. This is based on my extensive playing with the card, of course. 

I think it's fine at 8 mana, but there's an argument on both sides. 

Battletag: UranoMetria#1387

Region: Europe

Have the 80 g quest but no friends on my secondary account

Thanks

I noticed that Lightforge Arena has given this card a score of 28 - Terrible. 

I've drafted it twice in Arena so far, and I would rank it as below average - around 41.  It's not *that* bad - it's awkward for your opponent to deal with. 

Maybe Shield Slam should remove an amount of armor equal to the minion's attack. 

Everyone else has in the last three weeks, so why not join the bandwagon?

Moat Lurker is very good, and near broken.  You can use it to either unconditionally remove any of your opponent's minions temporarily or you can use it to trigger one of your own death rattles twice.  And once you've killed your own Sylvanas, the Moat Lurker becomes a 3/3 minion with anti-taunt.  So many options - expect to see it a lot. 

It's really fishy that they increased the cost of Purify because people weren't using as it was intended.  If you make a borderline bad card, it's actually *good* that it's flexible so that it can see general play.  It's almost like they think that Power Word: Shield is flagrantly OP.  Do they not get that in most cases, silencing his own minion is a cost for a priest, not a benefit?  Do they not realize that people play Power Word: Shield on their opponent's minions if they don't have any of their own, thus making Purify an inferior card draw alternative?  

Blizzard: just buff the card before its release.  Oh, and make it rare.  I know it's painful, but it's the right thing to do.      

Yesterday I started my season in Wild with a Mech Paladin deck that I can't play in Standard.  It's totally fun. 

There really is a diversity in the decks you play against in Wild. 

Also, I spent gold on GvG packs, and gosh darn it, I'm going to use those cards! 

I've watched Kripparian's rant about Firelands Portal, and I've read the response by the Blizzard developer:  "We *have* to have one rare and two commons per class in the adventure; Firelands Portal and Babbling Book are equally good in Arena; we randomly decided between the two equally good cards to make Babbling Book rare."

My question is: what good does it serve to make rares and epics rarer in Arena? 

Rarity does not necessarily equal power or utility.  A lot of rares and epics are, in fact, garbage. 

Rares are drafted with rares, and Epics are drafted with Epics, and yet there is no common denominator among cards of those rarities. 

Commons are king in Arena, and so we keep seeing the same good neutral commons over and over and over: Gilblin Stalker, North Sea Kraken, Kvaldir Raider, Bog Creeper.  Meanwhile the classes with the best common spells are the best in Arena.

Blizzard should consider making commons, rares, and epics equally available in Arena.  (Legendaries are a different story...)

At least then they wouldn't have to hear Kripp whine about Mages....

Quote from Morpha123 >>

Call of the wild guarantees only 5 damage done. In the vast majority of cases that I have played it, it has been board cleared almost instantly (especially weak to flamestrike and circle of healing + auchenai, aka the 0 mana flamestrike that priests have). 

I just fail to see the "broken" aspect of this card. Out of all the time's I have played it, it only sealed the game for me in a few (and I was vastly ahead on the board anyway). People just love hating hunters I guess. 

I agree with OP.  Even though the meta before WOTOG could be infuriating, it felt more varied and more fun than the current meta. 

The current meta feels very stifling.  The most powerful decks don't really have counters.  The only way to oppose them is to have an ultra powerful deck yourself and hope you get a better draw.  Not surprisingly the new archetypes revolve around deliberately over-powered cards like Flamewreathed Faceless, Darkshire Councilman, Call of the Wild, Ancient Shieldbearer, and N'Zoth.  In the previous meta, it felt like there was more of a possibility to be able to counter existing power-decks with all the different classes.  Sure, you had to have your Shredder, Belcher, and Boom, fine. Often you could answer threat for threat.  Now to answer the OP cards, you have to spend all our resources and you have none left over to win, much less survive the follow-up huge threat.   

Before making an OP card, designers should ask themselves if others can counter that card in a reasonable way.  If it requires more than two cards or twice as much mana to counter a card, maybe they should have rethought it.  I think C'thun was a great success from a design perspective since the game play for C'thun decks is very interactive with lots of give and take and because there are reasonable answers to C'thun.  C'thun might kill you, or not.  But answers to N'zoth that fills up the board with the most powerful minions?  Answers to double Call of the Wild?  Answer to 30+ armor gain?  Answer to Shaman and Zoo who flood the board while simultaneously removing all your minions with mana to spare?  The answers against the power cards are so expensive for most decks that those decks have to be abandoned.  There's just less variety of options because of the huge, deliberate variance in card power. 

I think one problem is that they deliberately nerfed non-Warrior combo/burst decks and have chosen  not to give new combo options with the new set.  Those kind of decks were harder to play and could often play around the heavy-handed meta decks.  (They couldn't nerf Freeze Mage because it relies on Basic and Classic cards.)   Non-healing Rogue can't have Blade Flurry, but invulnerable Warrior can have Grommash and/or Raging Worgen. 

Of course OP is right.  Good skill can mitigate bad draft choices, but if all you get is garbage to choose from, or your best choices consistently are offered at the same time, you're just not going to do so well.  If you don't get offered removal spells, you are going to lose to those who got offered removal spells. 

I wish they would stop grouping rares and epics together and instead mix them with all the rest of the cards.  In general there isn't a big enough difference in quality from commons to warrant it, and I'm tired of seeing the same commons show up in every game. 

Yeah, I got this on my f2p European account, where I don't have any friends. 

Gonna reroll whenever it lets me, because it's too much trouble to start sending friend requests to random strangers I've played against. 

Oh Blizzard, why are you trying to stop me from being antisocial?