Hearthpwn

On another note:
I really want an anti-meta game mode.
Blizzard knows which cards see the most play and are really good.
So there could be a game mode where all cards are banned that see the most play. This could change monthly, it is to some extend another meta of itself. The deckbuilding and the user interface for this mode would be very hard to accomplish but this mode would be awesome.
There could be a freeze-shaman, elemental-mage, taunt-warrior meta... Hard to make but awesome to play, I think :)

The first expansion will be Emerald Dream, because of the druid-theme and the portal is really obvious: 
Druids will need some love after jades are rotating. Maybe more dragon/spell immune/satyr thingies?

The second expansion will be some ethereal theme. There is a spell in WoW that brings you to your home location but the animation is nearly identical to the portal of expansion 2:
 
And because I really liked this smuggler/dealer/blackmailing/artifact-trading theme I really hope for some cool stolen famous goods :>

For the third expansion I would guess Vash'ir or Azshara with an underwater theme. Maybe naga as new tribe? But the portal with its fleshy interior... I can't recall anything about it :/ Someone else?^^

When creating game modes it's always essential to consider things like:
- Replayability: Is the mode repeatable and random enough to be fun after a lot of tries? (Ladder is therefore not so good, arena is good, tavern brawl is something between ok and awesome, dungeon run is awesome)
- Multiplayer: Are players needed for starting the mode or to play against each other?
- Investment: How costly is the mode for anyone? How is the "new player experience"? (Ladder is really expensive, dungeon run has no costs, arena has an entry fee, tavern brawl is low on costs)

With that in mind I would really like something like
Pack Arena - Like the current arena but with a drafting. On your first pick you open a pack and take one card. The remaining cards go to another player who is at his second pick. He takes one of the four cards and the remaining three go to the third pick of yet another player etc. You can't choose the 5th card, because it is the last card of a pack from another player. On the 6th card you open another pack, pick one, give your pack away and get 4 new ones to choose from. The drop-chances of each rarity can (and maybe should) be different from normal packs.
Replayability: High. Like arena you won't know what you get in you packs.
Multiplayer: High. You need other players for your deckbuilding but they don't have to be online. You play against players with your deck.
Investment: Medium. Could be like standard arena. Could also be more costly if you can pick some cards from your deck to keep after your run is over.

Non-MetaLadder - Like normal ladder but you can't use cards, which were in the top ladder decks. I think Blizzard has some internal statistics that can be used to calculate the win chance of every single card. Those top number of cards can't be used in deckbuilding.
Replayability: Medium. Just like ladder there will be a meta. But you could easily switch to standard or wild ladder for fun. And when the standard-meta changes, this changes too.
Multiplayer: Medium. Deck building is your thing, playing is against other players.
Investment: High. There will be a meta and you need those cards to compete. If the best decks don't rely on legendaries or epics, it's going to be cheaper than standard or wild ladder.

1. I can see why people want an auto-squelch button but the reason is more like: The emotes don't carry an exact message and can be misinterpreted. Emotes should be very precise in its meaning.

2. Emotes should change with the length of the game. On the first turn you can use a genuinely "Greetings", once. Even if you faced the 5th jade druid in a row, he won't know if you mean it sarcastically. But as mentioned above emotes should be precise in its meaning.
After a disconnect (I'm only playing on mobile, so that happens every 3rd game) you could have an emote like "Sorry, I disconnected" and you can only use it once.
Maybe you can disable emotes while the opponent is roping, because he needs to think fast. But on your turn you can say something like "Uh, that was close", again: only once.

3. New emotes should be introduced very carefully! A "be right back"-emote could lead to players leaving for fun, just because they have an excuse for it. Others could encourage BMing, see point 1.
But I could even see an insult emote work: "Your mother was a murloc", "You smell like a leper gnome". This is funny and maybe you can let off some steam after bad RNG, without a real insult.

All in all I like the small interactions with your opponent via emotes. And I like the special emotes between some characters like Malfurion & Tyrande. But emotes need to be much more precise.

What? Summon four 3/3 wolves? For 5 mana? Well, at 10 mana together with Tundra Rhino you do 14 burst damage. (old Force of Nature + Savage Roar, anyone?)
With Freezing Trap and Explosive Trap you can gain tempo, play some sticky beasts and finish on turn 10, as long as you have this spell in your hand...
I think Lesser Emerald Spellstone card is broken.

Priests want to build a new deck around Lesser Diamond Spellstone. I could see deathrattles work, maybe even with the quest.
In big priest, this could be ok, it doesn't have to be upgraded either. Razakus won't gain much from this.
Maybe there will be another combo-priest with 2x Radiant Elemental + Prophet Velen, maybe a Mirage Caller on Velen and finish with Mind Blast.

This card is really interesting!
It is a handbuff-card with infinite value for 6 mana, that's great! But to make it work, you regularly need to hit things, which will cost you a lot of life. So you need to heal up properly, what could be done with Lifesteal-minions. But because Lifesteal makes the minions under-stated and the lack of board impact, this will be hard to pull off.
Or you heal directly, which is easier to accomplish but has the same disadvantages regarding boardcontrol.
So your best bet is a midrange type of deck, because you regularly have minions to buff like Doppelgangster

Personally I would try a pirate tempo paladin, with Blackwater Pirate, Phantom Freebooter, a buffed Southsea Deckhand and Divine Favor for carddraw.

I think this is a pure combo-card. You have to skip a turn basically, but then you can get all the cheesy stuff, priest has to offer.
Inner Fire-shenanigans:
Scaled Nightmare/Malygos/Ysera/Alexstrasza -> Divine Spirit -> Inner Fire for 32/24/24/16 damage on the 2nd turn.
This way you can still activate Raza the Chained, because you don't need 2 copies of Divine Spirit.

Or you go for Faceless Manipulator with Prophet Velen + Mind Blast (20 or 40 damage) or Leeroy Jenkins (24 damage and you have full mana on the 2nd turn)

But the best thing is: It hard-counters Ice Block but gives quest-mages a third turn, which is almost always bad.

In the end it will be very interesting but meme-like... Like both priests have this in hand and both play them... 4 turns? :D

imo 7/10

The game needs a better newcomer mode. Like a basic only-ladder.
When you climbed it, you can choose the basic + classic ladder.
The standard-ladder should always be available, but players should not be forced to it.
I don't play wild mode and I'm not a new player, so I don't have the experience to comment on "new player on wild ladder". How hard is wild-ladder for new players, anyone?
But my friends all started playing and left 1 or 2 month into it, because they couldn't get good cards fast enough for having fun.
A more-ladder-system would maybe help there.

Regarding the nerfs: most of them are fine. They are nerfing evergreens in the basic set, to create more design space, thats good. Every weapon in the future has to be at least as good as fiery win axe in the 2 mana slot for example. 

But: nerfing base cards weakens the power level of new players. They can't compete with just the base set and some cards of the classic set. And that's my main concerne here.

Nerfing basic cards is fine, if the game had a game mode for it. Arena is really hard, when you don't know all the cards. Wild is even more frustrating. And Standard shifts often, which in turn makes you buy more classic packs for the hard earned gold. 

Why not make a basic-only mode? Because seasoned players will want to play all those new cards, the mode is for new players. They can win there and start with standard when they seem fit for it. Or to see the new cards in action.

After that basic + classic, because you bought this packs the whole time.

The standard-ladder is fine (but not great) for competitive play, but you should not be forced in it as new player.

I can see your point, because freeze mage does not rely on minion-damage to win. But just 22 cards in freeze mage are taken. This minion has consistent card draw. It's really not a problem to freeze something.
When freeze mage goes against a minion-heavy deck, aoe and hard-removal are key, but getting a little more value on board is not that bad, whether it is through trading or chipping dmg in, if you don't get this alex.

And maybe there will be a frostbolt -> face into coldwraith into fireball for the lethal :D
I would bet, that there is a viable freeze mage with this minion :)

Year of the raven: every class exept priest

BREAKING NEWS!!!

I just hacked the Blizzard's server and got a small glimpse of the next changes! Enjoy!

Wild

Aviana from 5/5 -> 3/3

Develop insights: Dragoncaller Alanna and Aviana have similar name, art and cost; so it felt natural to do the same for her stats. We are going to keep Blade of C'Thun in our sights to make sure it won't become too opressive.

Kun the Forgotten King -> no longer has the option to choose from 10 armor

Develop insights: Hosting long games in our servers that last over 5 mins has proven to be too expensive for our small indie company. Also, when asked "When/where do you play heartstone the most?" the most voted answer was: "while taking a dump". So in order to better serve our customers, we need to ajust the metagame to align with the average "dumping time". Getting extra 10 armor on turn 10 onwards cleary goes against it.

Juicy Psychmelon -> Juicy Wild Players Tears

Develop insights: After many many many MANY weeks of carefull consideration on the wild meta subject, we came to the following conclusion: Juicy Psychmelon is the most balanced card in the history of hearthstone. 
It has a winrate of EXACTLY 50.00%. Half of the time the card wins and the other half it loses to another Druid. We are very proud of this achievement! Since a lot of players are still unhappy because it "feels bad" to lose half of the time to it, we decided a change was necessary, so we changed the card's name to make sure our costumers know how much we care about them and their opinions.

Now, a final word from our new president: Allen Brac!

"- You Think You want those changes, But You Don't"

Great card, but I believe most people are overrating it. Don't get me wrong, this will see lots of play and will probably work in many cases because it is such an obvious support for no-spell mage, but let's look at which secrets we will actually be choosing between. The pool will be 8 secrets once Ice Block and Potion of Polymorph rotate out. I've made a personal rating on each as to whether I think each secret would generally be a good or subpar outcome:

1. Frozen Clone: This represents 0 tempo and 100% value. The quality of this option depends on whether your deck is a more tempo- or control/value-oriented one. I would imagine that most no/low-spell mage decks will be tempo-oriented, and as such this card will be a poor choice most of the time. Tempo decks do not want to be running a 4 mana 2/2 that does not impact the opponent's board and has an inconsistent, pure value upside. It's inconsistent because you could just get two meaningless token minions, and, because three of mage's secrets are triggered when the opponent summons a minion, you can expect them to be playing around this by playing a small minion (unless they are really desperate not to take Explosive Runes face damage). This is a subpar outcome.
2. Ice Barrier: If we run with the previous assumption that most no/low-spell mages will be tempo-oriented, this is another poor option. Most of the time, tempo decks should not care too much about their life total. If a tempo deck is in a position where getting Ice Barrier seems desirable, they were probably nearing a loss anyway. It's possible that healing for 8 may then give them just enough breathing room to stabilise, but again if they were already in a weak position beforehand, stabilisation would still prove challenging a lot of the time. Value/control decks would like this more, however these decks would still be minion-oriented and so would probably be looking for secrets which impact the board state, which Ice Barrier doesn't. This is a subpar outcome.
3. Mirror Entity: The main problem with this is that it's inconsistent. Of course it's a good outcome if your opponent plays something large into it, but I think it would be rare that this happens. If the opponent plays more than around 3/4 of stats in to this, you've then paid 3 mana for more than 3 mana's worth of vanilla stats. However, to warrant choosing this secret (and so to warrant the tempo loss of playing a 4 mana 2/2) you should really be expecting to get more than just a vanilla 3-mana minion's worth in stats/tempo. As mentioned, your opponent should be looking to play a small/low-value minion in to a random secret unless they really care about their life total, so Mirror Entity should be bad most of the time. There are other cases where your opponent will get a good outcome regardless of which 'triggered on play of minion' secret you've played, most notably Possessed Lackey. Lastly, there is the problem which has always affected Mirror Entity, which is that your minion is summoned on their turn, so they have the initiative to interact with your board and secure any value trades before you do. This is a subpar outcome.
4. Counterspell: Again consistency is a (smaller) problem for this secret. If you've gone first and they haven't yet played the coin, you should never pick Counterspell. If they went first or have already played the coin, Counterspell will usually get some value. I would think that Counterspell would usually be attractive to a no/low-spell mage because spells are frequently removal, and you will be aiming always to have minions on board. Protecting your board while using up some of their mana is great. Similarly, blocking your opponent's buffs and other board-impacting spells (most notably Call to Arms) is also great for your objective of winning the board. This is a good outcome.
5. Explosive Runes: This is an excellent choice. You either negate a big threat and so make it much easier for you to establish and retain board dominance, or you negate a small threat but deal a reasonable amount of face damage (which is important because, due to the fact that you will almost always have minions on board, you will be dealing continuous incremental damage, and so even a small burst from Explosive Runes could be enough to push for lethal). This is a good outcome.
6. Mana Bind: My analysis of this would be very similar to my analysis of Frozen Clone. Like for Frozen Clone/Mirror Entity, the opponent will be trying at all costs to play a small spell to test for Counterspell, and so a lot of the time you won't get enough of a pay-off. Like for Mirror Entity, if they play a 3 mana spell, you've broken even on value, but again to pick this secret you will be wanting more value than this. There is a slight difference here though: Mana Bind gives a tempo boost on a later turn of your choosing, because you can choose when you want to play it for 0. Compare this with Frozen Clone, which duplicates the card (value boost) as opposed to reducing its cost (tempo boost). As mentioned, I would imagine that no/low-spell mage would prefer tempo over value, and so perhaps Mana Bind would be better on average than Frozen Clone. Still, I think you'll be getting a low-cost/low-value spell more often than not. This is a subpar outcome. 
7. Vaporize: This is infamous for being a bad secret. The only other mage secret which is triggered by the opponent going face is Ice Barrier, and Ice Barrier doesn't have an impact on an attacking minion. This means that your opponent should be attacking in with a small or otherwise unimportant minion every time, if they're able to. As well as this, the fact that you should always have minions on board means that your opponent will likely be aiming to make value trades with their minions and so will be doing this (as opposed to going face) most of the time. If they're a zoo/aggro deck it's much more likely that they will be wanting to go face more often than others, but if they're a zoo/aggro deck they will have lots of small minions in their deck and on the field, so Vaporize will not get enough value. For all other decks, it's conceivable that a Vaporize played on turn 4 might not be triggered for 2 or more turns, and such a delayed payoff when you payed 4 mana for a 2/2 is not what a tempo deck should be looking for. This is a subpar outcome.
8. Spellbender: I believe Spellbender is better in no/low-spell mage than it is ordinarily. As mentioned, you will be caring most about winning the board. Spellbender is only activated when a minion is targeted, and so you will either steal the opponent's tempo (if they try to buff their own minions) or negate it (if they try to remove one of your threats). Both of these outcomes are great for your gameplan of establishing and retaining board dominance, however as before, the tempo stolen/negated needs to have been worth the tempo loss of paying 4 mana for a 2/2. I'm not sure whether on average it would be. I can't confidently analyse this as good or subpar, so: this is a variable outcome.

There you have it:

• 5 subpar outcomes;
• 1 variable outcome
• 2 good outcomes.

It's important to note a couple of things. First: you discover a secret, which means you have a 75% chance of being offered at least one of my good outcomes.

Edit:

Thank you SDhn2a for correcting my statistics. You have a 64.29% chance of being offered a 'good' outcome.

This statistic alone may make Arcane Keysmith seem playable. Second: the above ratings obviously cannot account for specific matchups and specific situations during any one game, and so a 'subpar' secret may occasionally be game-winning in certain situations. It seems that the recurrent question which you need to ask of Keysmith is this: if you are running this in a minion-based tempo deck, is it worth the tempo loss of paying 4 mana for a 2/2 given the probabilities of getting a worthwhile outcome?

The difference is that C'Thun will never have another directly synergistic minion in wild. Quests, on the other hand, will only get better and better as time goes on. Already several quests have become far more viable with the addition of K&C (druid recruit deck, pally buffs, rogue bounce). Sure you have to design your deck around quests but that's how it works with many types of decks. Raza had the restriction of single copies, Cubelock couldn't include more than Doomguard and Voidlord, Big Priest can't run any small minions aside from Barnes, and Tempo Rogue couldn't have two drops. They are all highly successful decks and require specific deckbuilding.

• Resolved an issue with the Collection Manager that could allow the set filter to be interacted with behind the “Done” button.

Thank you, that was annoying af. 

I know you're not supposed to judge cards too hard before they come out... But this is insane. 

It's a selective Resurrect. If you're running Dragon Priest, that's a Bone Drake or a Deathwing, Dragonlord.

Big Priest, That's two Obsidian Statues or a Sylvanas Windrunner in wild. 

This card also gives Awaken the Makersthe ability to run it as Highlander, as you no longer have to fill it with trash deathrattles and can be more selective about what you resurrect/count towards your 7 deathrattles. 

Just... Damn. 

Can't say for certain if Priest will dominate or not, but god knows they're gonna piss a lot of people off. 

As a new game developer, this helps me to understand some things that happen in the game development process