Hearthpwn

Look, if you want to play to win, there is no reason to not play Pirate Warrior.  It is the best deck, by a lot, and it has the added benefit that its games play fast so you can rank up fast, and it has the highest rate of free wins (i.e. you win because you drew well and there's little to nothing your opponent can do about it) of all the decks today.  If you want to have the best chance to get to a high rank, you should play Pirate Warrior, that's all there is to it.

That said, the question is whether or not that's enjoyable.  Personally, I already have Golden Warrior and I want to rank up my other classes.  I also don't enjoy playing face decks; if that's what I wanted I'd play Cookie Clicker or some other stupid mindless braindead game.  I play HS because I like the interaction and the strategy, and Pirate Warrior (whether I'm playing with it or against it) removes most of that for me (yes, there is some strategy in Pirate Warrior, but much less than in most other decks).  So I've just cut back on the amount of HS I play overall, and I've spent that time and effort learning Shadowverse instead, which, as far as I've explored it, seems much more strategically deep and interesting than HS right now (although I'm still at the beginner ranks of Shadowverse).

I'll give Blizz the benefit of the doubt, because so far every set release has shaken up the meta in a huge way, so hopefully Ungoro won't be an exception and we will see the end of Pirate Warrior in a couple weeks, although since Pirate Warrior loses exactly zero cards in the rotation I'm less than optimistic.  If Ungoro slows down the meta a bit so that I can play games which actually feel interesting and interactive again, that would be awesome, and if not, I'm probably just going to convert all my HS time to Shadowverse time and be done with the RNG-fest.

I totally called it.  Everyone thought it was going to be Jade Druid everywhere, but having a 3/1 for 1 is not much worse than a 3/2.  Also since the deck loses exactly nothing, I'm probably going to skip Ungoro completely because none of the cards are relevant in the turn 5 meta (judging by what they've shown us and the speculation I've heard, although I'm going to wait for the rest of the set to decide for sure, I'm currently leaning heavily on the side of skipping the next set completely)

This is actually amazing.  Also needs to be watched at 1.5x speed, much better experience.

Dust it.  A 6/6 without Taunt for 6 mana is basically not a card in Pirates Dot Metagame, which makes this a Legendary 2 mana 2/2 vanilla, strictly worse than River Crokolisk or Bloodfen Raptor.  Heck, a 6/6 for 6 with taunt is probably crap too.  If Pirates go away then maybe I can imagine it, but I can't imagine Pirates are going anywhere anytime soon.

Basically everything with "Dragon" is dead.  Miracle Rogue goes to Tier 5, the tier of "If they have it then I lose, otherwise I win" pure RNG decks.  Pirates (Warrior, Rogue, Shaman) basically remain unchanged, while Reno decks lose the only card they have to really hose Pirate decks, i.e. Reno Jackson.

Guess you should all start practising your "ARRRRRR" now.

(Caveat: There is a new set release at the rotation with 130 new cards in it.  Maybe some of those cards will be good)

Not really.  I like the changes actually.  Basically, the cards that they shifted out are just too good for their cost.  When Aggro Shaman and Miracle Rogue and Tempo Mage and Dragon Priest are all playing 2 copies of the same 5-drop, there's probably a problem with that 5-drop, and that's why Azure Drake got hit.  Ragnaros and Sylvanas are basically the same argument, but for 6 and 8 respectively.  In addition, the issue is a lot more pronounced with higher drops because in general you play so few of them.  While an average deck might have 6 or 7 2-drops, usually they only play 2-3 5s and 1 8, and when those 2-3 5s are always Azure Drake and the 8 is always Ragnaros, that basically means that every card they print at those costs forever is just stone unplayable.  "In theory" (and whenever I use "in theory" I mean that this is what they said, not what they will necessarily do) they will print cards at those costs that are the same power level as Rag or Drake in context, but are limited in how they can be used, so that a wider variety of cards at those costs can see play without lowering the power level too much as a result.

As for the commons, basically they were uninteractive.  When you're at 25 and your opponent has a 2/2 and a 3/3 on the table and then you just die, that's not interesting gameplay.  That's why they nerfed Force of Nature, it's why they nerfed Leeroy, it's why they nerfed Gadgetzan Auctioneer, it's why they nerfed Pyroblast, and on and on.  This is just the latest feature in that line of events.  The difference is that this time, rather than nerfing again, they just moved those cards out of Standard, because the cards are not inherently too powerful but they provide a play experience that is uninteresting, and "we've seen enough of this already ok time to move on thanks"; Freeze Mage, Miracle Rogue, and Zoolock have existed, using those 3 cards, and playing that sort of "oops you're dead" uninteractive and uninteresting game play since the game was literally in Beta, and they decided it's enough already.  Although, since Wild is meant to be the place to showcase all the old strategies that some players may have had enough of but others still enjoy, you can do that in Wild now if you want.

Overall I'm pretty pumped about these changes, myself.

"The same timescale" is important: Yes, it is true that F2Pers like us do not get the same cards [b]as fast as[/b] the P2Pers, but that doesn't mean we don't need the same cards.  The OP said "They need 1 or 2 decks to play."  That's just not true; F2Pers need the same cards as everyone else, eventually, where "eventually" means within, like, a month or so.  But MSG has already been out for 2 months and as an F2Per I still can't build, for example, Cthun Aviana Druid (not that I'd want to, but that doesn't change the fact that I can't) whereas if MSG was an adventure with all the same cards, then I could, because I'd have them all by now.

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Quote from WhatAChamp >>

There's tons of things you can do to counter Freeze Mage. Run heal for post-Alex, Eater of Secrets to get rid of Ice Block, removal/silence for Doomsayer. However, the Aviana-C'Thun combo deck damage is completely unavoidable and can burst for 40+ in one go. I love how Blizz uses that deck as an example of a good combo deck when it's must more frustrating to lose to than Freeze Mage which you can actually prevent.

 Wait I didnt know about that deck!,hmm x1 innervate, x1 Aviana x1 Brann and x1 Cthun potentially could be like 40 damage to the board. :OOO

Ill try to build it now. 

As someone who is not an F2Per (you said "they", meaning you are not one), you shouldn't talk about what's good for F2Pers.

As a true F2Per myself (I have spent not a single penny on HS and have been playing since about 2 weeks after it left Beta), Adventures are way better for F2Pers.  We're guaranteed all the cards if we spend 2800 gold, and if you get 60 gold per day from quests (and you should, because you should be mulliganning all your 40 gold quests and sometimes you can get 80 or 100 gold ones) that works out to about a month worth of gold to get all the cards.  For an expansion, I spent about 5000 gold by now on MSG, plus the 13 bonus packs from the launch bug and still I'm missing a bunch of Legendaries (I have Kazakus, Aya, the Warrior garbage one, the garbage one that gives you a coin when it attacks, and Patches, although I had to craft Aya and Patches), and I had to craft Alley Armorsmith (a rare) for control Warrior.  Meanwhile I have like 17 Dopplegangsters and 3 STBs after I DE'd about 5 of them I got in my release packs.

Also, F2Pers need the same range of decks that P2Pers do, because otherwise F2Pers can't be as competitive.  Saying we don't need as many cards because we choose not to pay doesn't change anything.  We still need to same cards everyone else does to be competitive, we just can't get them as easily with an expansion as with an adventure, which is why adventures are better for F2P.

Definitely love the Ranked Play Floors idea!  I've been wanting to jam some not-so-overused classes to try to get golden portraits (also because I enjoy playing control and don't mind losing a bit with it just so I don't have to play SMOrc Warrior and SMOrc Shaman all the time) but then I can never rank up.

As for the nerfs, Small Time Bucaneer at 1 health means it trades with a Patches in the mirror which is kind of sweet.  As for Spirit Claws, I would have preferred a nerf somewhere else, either making it a 1/3 -> 2/3 or a 1/2 -> 3/2.  Having it cost 1 is pretty important and works well alongside the nerf to STB, so not too thrilled with that.  Good to see Blizz trying though.

The reason why is because they're releasing a scheduled patch on that date and they don't want to have to release patches every 2 weeks because getting releases on the Google Play store and Apple App Store is a pain in the ass.  They've said previously that they're looking into ways to fix this, but for now they can only do these updates by releasing a whole new client patch and this is the system we have.

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As for more or less Neutrals or whatever, I couldn't really care less.  My main problem with fewer neutrals would be that I'm a F2Per (yes, we still exist) and because a lot of the good Legendaries are Neutral, I only have to pick up 3-4 Legendaries per set to build whatever I want, and I've been playing long enough that I have enough gold/dust to get them.  If I suddenly had to pick up 11-12 Legendaries per set because I needed 2 Legendaries per class because all the ones which used to be Neutral aren't anymore, the game would become prohibitively expensive for me.

 That's why I would be in favor of fewer neutrals in Adventures, especially.

When you purchase the adventure, you are purchasing all the cards. If fewer of those cards you purchase are neutral, then the overall quality of the cards can be higher. More bang for your buck.

It'd actually be a better thing for F2P'ers.

Quote from TheRealMalfurion >>

On larger adventures: Adventures are smaller than full expansions, but if you consider the number of playable cards in them, it's actually not that small.  For example, 5 of the 40 cards in One Night in Karazhan have not seen major widespread play.  Compare to the number of unplayables in MSG, there's a lot more unplayables in MSG.  I haven't run the numbers exactly, but I would expect that the number of "playable" (i.e. sees play in a top tier Standard deck) cards in an Adventure is not a lot less than in a set.

I wasn't saying that adventures need to be larger, just that the team should make more class cards and less neutral cards (maybe to do this they would have to release a few more cards than usual, but not necessarily that many). This also ties in to the other point you highlighted from my post. By having more cards per class you can push/support more archetypes per class (from which some may fail, but some will work) that actually feel different. Even though a lot of adventure cards do see play, getting just 40 cards over a 6 month period just isn't good enough to maintain interest.

On More Archetypes: Actually, set releases seem to do pretty well at starting new archetypes, to the point that I think the game might be power creeping too much.  For example, MSG started a whole bunch of Reno decks; previously Reno Mage and Reno Priest didn't exist, and also Jade Druid and Jade Shaman, and let's of course not forget the elephant in the room, the various Pirate decks, most importantly Pirate Warrior.  These decks just didn't exist before MSG.  Before ONK there was no Resurrect Priest, and Dragon Priest was a lot worse without Netherspite Historian and Book Wyrm.  Before that, WOTOG gave us Cthun Drui and NZoth Rogue.  New sets really do have an impact, and I wonder what's going to happen after rotation.

You have a point on Reno Mage and Reno Priest, but the other examples highlight problems in the way these archetypes were designed to play. Sure Jade Druid is something new, but it plays very similarly to the old Malygos Druid. If with every new set we just change the flavor of the deck, but keep things the same (at least in how the deck plays) you will naturally get people bored quicker. A good solution would be to push Beast Druid a lot in one expansion (in this way cards like Lunar Visions would see play), which plays very differently when compared to the spell-heavy archetypes that are more popular today. I will just skip Shaman, because that class is just a mess right now (it has so many powerful cards that just fit everywhere that there isn't much point in talking without knowing where it will be after the rotation).

The Pirate decks are exactly what I am trying to talk against in my 'More Archetypes' and 'Class Focused Expansions'. Just three cards are run in 3 classes and fuel a similar strategy from all three (in my eyes they are essentially the same archetype). If instead Small-Time Buccaneer was a Rogue card then we wouldn't have so many 'archetypes' that only differ in flavor (you would just play Pirate Rogue in this hypothetical scenario). Less neutral cards would make it more likely that fewer things are broken in the neutral card pool and it would also make it easier to spot classes that have broken cards (since those will naturally be played more, which could also provide incentive to the devs to intervene more swiftly when such things are spotted).

A lot of what you said seems to be interesting:

On larger adventures: Adventures are smaller than full expansions, but if you consider the number of playable cards in them, it's actually not that small.  For example, 5 of the 40 cards in One Night in Karazhan have not seen major widespread play.  Compare to the number of unplayables in MSG, there's a lot more unplayables in MSG.  I haven't run the numbers exactly, but I would expect that the number of "playable" (i.e. sees play in a top tier Standard deck) cards in an Adventure is not a lot less than in a set.

On More Archetypes: Actually, set releases seem to do pretty well at starting new archetypes, to the point that I think the game might be power creeping too much.  For example, MSG started a whole bunch of Reno decks; previously Reno Mage and Reno Priest didn't exist, and also Jade Druid and Jade Shaman, and let's of course not forget the elephant in the room, the various Pirate decks, most importantly Pirate Warrior.  These decks just didn't exist before MSG.  Before ONK there was no Resurrect Priest, and Dragon Priest was a lot worse without Netherspite Historian and Book Wyrm.  Before that, WOTOG gave us Cthun Drui and NZoth Rogue.  New sets really do have an impact, and I wonder what's going to happen after rotation.

That would make sens, but it doesn't say so in the article above.