Hearthpwn

in wild. he is a sure thing. If you only play standard... I would hold off. 

Lyra the Sunshard and Medivh, the Guardian are my favorite minion artworks. Lyra has a commanding presence and Medivh just looks like he is here for a good time. 

The Marsh Queen and DOOM! are my favorite spells. Golden quest has the queen on the prowl, and DOOM just screams mayhem. 

Gladiator's Longbow is a sweet looking weapon.

Medivh best alt hero NA. 

Predicting the cards without playing them is like trying to guess the nature of an electron. You can guess and hypothesis all you want, but it only becomes true once it is observed. Even if KotFT flops (I doubt it), it does set a precedent for design going forward: big cards will have bigger impacts. If that is the only success (again I really doubt it) there is still hope for future sets. Also, remember that even if this expac sucks now, it can always find its time in the sun eventually. Evolve and Eater of Secrets are good examples of this. 

I really appreciate that they made the Death Knight flavor-text badass and serious. The Mindbreaker, Professor Putricide, and Arfus text are also pretty funny.

You know what, the reason Jungle Giants sucked (partially) was because you would eventually reach a state where the difference 10 mana and 0 mana meant nothing because you were toptecking due to burning the 0 cost cards rapidly. This card really does fix that problem! Good catch!

A certain turtle that defends a hill of a stony variety could hook you up. but you should really get Tirion because he is one of the best legends in the game.   

This is actually pretty sweet. Bloodmage Thalnos will kick up some blue fire when played and will give a similar effect when his deathrattle procs. Deathwing flies over the board, roast everything, then comes in to land while everything fucking dies. 

 The team never lied to us. What is "meant to be" hardly ever ends up being so in the realm of game design. Players always look for the most powerful and broken mechanics, even using them in ways they were never intended to be used. A lie would have been along the lines of "Guaranteed 1 rare or better in each pack" and you get a pack of all commons. Something that is verifiable to be true or false is a lie. Not a statement of intent. 

I would down vote the OP if I could, because the arrogance and vitriol they display for a totally baseless attack on Team 5 is just appalling. They have botched their fair share of cards (buffs, nerfs, and most of the Karazan expansion) and made a few questionable business choices, but they never lied. 

The power rankings: 

Bottom - Warrior and Druid. Simply put, neither of them have the kind of speed the other classes are afforded by their various means of securing a discount/ tempo play. 

Below Average - Shaman, Mage, and Paladin. Their unfair advantages are nice, but they tend to have little or random impact on the faster decks. The funny thing is Paladin can beat god tier Priest with some RNG. The Shaman's portals do not have a lot to impact the board. Mage's Unstable Portals can only be cast starting at turn 2, and the faster decks can crush them by turn 3-5. 

Average - Warlock and Rouge. Warlock only because of the starting 3 mana, otherwise, it would be trash. The extra mana affords Warlock some sustained (randomly acquired) heavy hitters that can ALMOST keep up with the better decks. Rogue can get some nice tempo plays out of the spells, but it can become problematic if the minion is bad or the spell is useless. (Hard removal tends to come out a little too late.)

Above Average- Hunter. Get a Turn 1 Swamp King Dred or Savannah Highmane and win the game. Unlike a lot of the other RNG classes, there is a buffer for Hunter, as cost never go up. Keeping a hand of 1 or 2 early plays and the rest being big minions has no risk. Most of the time, Hunter just wins minion combat. 

God - Priest. Unless you are stupid unlucky, the amount of raw stats Priest can put out in the first few turns makes every other class a joke. Priest just wins before anyone else can get started. Paladin can get an off chance board clear, and maybe Hunter gets out a bigger minion faster, but otherwise, one or two Offensive Plays wins the game. 

The power rankings: 

Bottom - Warrior and Druid. Simply put, neither of them have the kind of speed the other classes are afforded by their various means of securing a discount/ tempo play. 

Below Average - Shaman, Mage, and Paladin. Their unfair advantages are nice, but they tend to have little or random impact on the faster decks. The funny thing is Paladin can beat god tier Priest with some RNG. The Shaman's portals do not have a lot to impact the board. Mage's Unstable Portals can only be cast starting at turn 2, and the faster decks can crush them by turn 3-5. 

Average - Warlock and Rouge. Warlock only because of the starting 3 mana, otherwise, it would be trash. The extra mana affords Warlock some sustained (randomly acquired) heavy hitters that can ALMOST keep up with the better decks. Rogue can get some nice tempo plays out of the spells, but it can become problematic if the minion is bad or the spell is useless. (Hard removal tends to come out a little too late.)

Above Average- Hunter. Get a Turn 1 Swamp King Dred or Savannah Highmane and win the game. Unlike a lot of the other RNG classes, there is a buffer for Hunter, as cost never go up. Keeping a hand of 1 or 2 early plays and the rest being big minions has no risk. Most of the time, Hunter just wins minion combat. 

God - Priest. Unless you are stupid unlucky, the amount of raw stats Priest can put out in the first few turns makes every other class a joke. Priest just wins before anyone else can get started. Paladin can get an off chance board clear, and maybe Hunter gets out a bigger minion faster, but otherwise, one or two Offensive Plays wins the game. 

Interactivity in HS is a bit subjective - there isn't any interaction at all, in the typical sense of "interrupting the opponent's action," as is common in IRL games. HS is designed from the ground up for each player to input a complete set of commands during their turn, without any opportunity for the opponent to interrupt that set of commands.

HS has a kind of pseudo-interaction - one player does something on their turn, and the other player potentially reacts to it. But often enough, they don't - lots of decks in HS can be weakly interactive in this sense. Aggro decks might ignore the opponent's board if there are no Taunts; Control decks often simply whiff, and don't have any early game plays, or simply pass in the early- to mid-game and clear everything with AoE, or they heal, or they freeze, etc.; Combo decks often spend a turn or two drawing their combo, rather than responding to the opponent's developing board; Mid-range usually wins with burst damage, and will "go face" in order to set up a next-turn lethal through burst damage from hand, etc . . .

In the olden days, folks used to complain that the most interactive deck in the game, Zoo, was weakly interactive for the opposite reason - all it did was interact with the opponent's board, often clearing it, and going face with whatever it had remaining, thereby depriving the opponent of any opportunity for them to interact with their own board . . .

Quote from FirePalyHSplayer >>

Quote from RavenSunHP >>

As a Wild main, i prefer a pro-active mode of nerf on possibly broken interactions, rather than a "Wild is Wild" way of life.

 

 As a Wild main, i prefer a re-active mode of nerf on possibly broken interactions, rather than a "let's nerf it before we can figure out how strong it is in the meta" way of life.

 

Fair enough, at least we agree that "Wild is Wild" is BS.

Now, on point, Old Dreadsteed + Defile would be broken.

What you are asking, if we agree that Wild shouldn't just be Wild, is either to nerf old cards (Boxer, Steed) or stop releasing innovative cards (Defile).

Since i prefer innovation, i am ok with old, and nearly irrelevant atm, cards getting nerfed. 

Because innovation keeps the game going.

Quote from The_Duke >>

Hunter is just insane. Correct me if I am wrong.

What did blizzard expect? They printed with rexxar a fairly cheap death knight. Included four expansions of insane beasts for his heropower for nearly unlimited versatile value.

Printed cards to make spellhunter viable (Rhok`delar, spellstone, wandering monster, crushing walls).

This expansion they added a new neutral minion that recruits a beast from your hand for recruit hunter. For the spellhunter friends they just included a new HERO, that fits perfectly into the deck and the other very good spells hunter has already.

Lastly they nerfed druid insanely untimely into the ground when it didn't even have a tier 1 deck. They reasoned that everybody would include the same op cards in druid (hello rexxar, hello candleshot, hello hunters mark, hello unleash the Hounds). 

As a result we got a new hunter meta that polarises  between hunters, hard counters and hunted. This is actually worse that witchwood. Before, you met the same 6 decks all the time. Now you meet a hunter every third game on average. 

Team5 actually don't have a clue about their own f**ing game. They couldn't have made it more ******** if they'd intended it. 

 Well, Rexxar did almost nothing to improve the hunter class when it was printed or the expansion after(no new beasts added to rexxar pool).  I can't blame them for deliberately improving his beast pool either considering how little impact he had on the game.

Spellhunter too had little to go on at first.  Being nothing special upon release, it lost 3 sets of cards the following expansion while only gaining 2 possible deck additions, 1 of which actually put minions into your deck.   So again, adding more cards to the game that improved an average deck probably wasn't much of a concern for them.

Oondasta was almost certainly not designed specifically for recruit hunter.  Sets are created 2 expansions in advance after all.  Zul'jin on the other hand was likely created with spell hunter in mind.  The card is very strong, often game winning in some matchups, while doing little more than force the opponent to save a board clear in others.

The druid nerfs might seem untimely to some given how druid wasn't the dominant class of the current 2 week old expansion, but I can't remember an expansion where they weren't floating around the top tier sooner or later.  I love it when a class has enough good options to make multiple strong decks.  It's frustrating having to wait until my opponent has zero cards remaining in his deck before being able identify what they are playing though.  Along those lines I agree with the nerfs.  Of the hunter cards you mentioned, only 2 will remain in standard.  Release the hounds and hunter's don't compare to wild growth and nourish IMO.  Hunter's mark saw an average amount of play at best before candle shot.  My only complaint about rexxar is how random it is.  This amount of randomness from a single card over a long game is not a great design.  Repeatedly failing to get the beasts you need or being on the receiving end of the perfect zombeast turn after turn is a miserable experience.

Is this "Hunter Meta" really worse than Meta's in the past?  Decks like pirate warrior, jade druid, raza priest, cubelock and others were all dominant at times.  If there is a perceived best deck, a lot of people will play it and these were all popular enough to queue into 1/3 of the time.  Except these were decks and not just a class.  Hunters have 5 decks atm with a winrate over 50%.   I do face a lot of hunters, but rarely the same deck twice in a row.  Is the problem that you have to guess when you mulligan?

Personally I think hunter is in a great spot atm, all their good decks have a reasonable amount of counters(all of which are fine in their own right).  When classes have only 1 playable archetype for a long time, that's when I feel the design team has failed.

Quote from Dendroid >>

His predictions of cards are just pathetic, he has little idea of what makes cards strong or potentially strong. 

 I disagree. I think although his analysis on many cards have been well off the mark on many an occasion, his reasoning is well founded. Let’s take what most people take to be the most egregious example, his analysis of Warlock’s KotFT cards (and this actually ties into some confusions people have about his rating system).

Trumps rating system is not based on the individual strength of a card. He believes (correctly, in ny opinion) that it is ridiculous to do a rating system based on the isolated power level of a card because cards are never isolated. They always exist within the context of other cards. In addition, when you make a claim about a card that’s based on pure powerlevel it’s impossible to ever actually prove it wrong since no matter what happens you can just say “the conditions aren’t right for it.” For this reason Trump designed a rating system which does not attempt to say how good the card is but instead only tries to predict the amount of play it sees. As trump admits, this makes his rating system much riskier as you can actually prove him wrong or right once the cards come out.

Now onto his Warlock predictions. Prior to Frozen Throne, Warlock was in such a bad shape that Trump believed that it was probably impossible for one set to pull Warlock out of the dumpster no matter how good the cards it got were. As it turned out, Warlock got some pretty crazy cards in Throne and Trump acknowledged this in his review. His assertion was that there still wasn’t a way for Warlocks to win games despite all of the insanely powerful defense tools they got (which he actually said were insanely powerful) since they didn’t have any kind of reliable wincon. The reason he was wrong was because practically everyone reviewing the set, including him, underestimated the independent strength of Bloodreaver Gul’Dan. Gul’dan is so good that you could make a serious arguement that Warlock wouldn’t see play right now we’re it not for Gul’dan, which actually means that we’re it not for Gul’Dan, all of Trumps other predictions on the Warlock cards would have been correct as none of them would see any play because Warlock would not see any play.

"One man's trash is another rat's treasure!"

The idea behind Shadra is that she would be played in an Even Hunter, taking advantage of the cheaper Hero Power to maximize her potential for board control. With the imminent rotation of Deathstalker Rexxar , the Hunter needs new tools for mid- and late-game defense.

Before you say "2-mana Assassinate ? Crazy OP!" keep in mind Vilespine Slayer is much easier...and you can run two D:

Edit: After much debate, enough people have convinced me to remove the "to them" at the end of the sentence.