Hearthpwn

by the way you wrote your post and only touched upon Reno in a highlander deck, I would say you're running aggro paladin. it's also really sad you have no understanding of the fun highlander decks can give you.

so as far as I understand he's making basically Runescape : Chronicles, which I think he might have been sponsored to play at one point... at the very least he was offered that chance. coupled that with the awful humor in this video and already jumping to topics like balance and p2w this early, I'm already troubled. well, good luck on your dreams, good sir.

I'm not sure is it the same deal as before, but some time ago I couldn't play Hearthstone on my regular PC because they updated the Unity engine but then took like 2-3 months to add the hotfix that came out soon after that was affecting Radeon and Asus hardware. 

and yeah, I have the same stutter in performance here and there, and if HS is loading in the background it might require a restart because of freezing. 

when TGT came out I correctly predicted that almost all the cards in it were worthless for my playstyle and a better approach was to craft the few that I needed. this was both aided by the fact I also played only viable control classes ; Mage, Warrior, Warlock and Priest at the time, so I didn't need to spread out too much for stuff like Mysterious Challenger and whatnot. I also took my time in waiting to see what comes up playable and just watched streamers of Kolento's caliber to get a good grasp on playability.

This turned out to be an excellent decision.

I started off as a F2P back at Naxx and it took forever to gather enough gold to get whole Naxx and whole BRM while also maintaining playable decks of Goblin and Gnomes. (which luckily featured a lot of crossover cards) skipping on Naxx and BRM really hurt my playable classes and overcoming that gap wasn't easy without crazy cards like Belcher, Loatheb, Emperor and Mad Scientist. while these are not expansions but adventures, I think it is comparable ; for both you need to spend the resource of Gold and the adventures had obvious jank cards like Maexxna that paid off in Dust, similar to pack buying except that you know the results.

Getting these adventures was almost crucial for my advancement up the ranks. 

Un'goro was another tourist trap, basically. Warrior Taunt quest was everywhere in the first week or two... then it was gone. the quests flopped hard and people lost a lot of resources to hype and lost dreams. from this set I only crafted the Open the Waygate quest, but that's because I was and still am fascinated by Exodia Mage, and have no regrets. other people might tell you differently on their experience.

in short ; take your time, there's no hurry spending resources that you don't have. people are gonna get hyped as hell and spend everything trying to test every dumb deck, but all this trash will fall off in like 2 weeks and the real winners will surface. skipping expansions is possible, you might just need a card or two for now. later when more cards appear supporting various archetypes you might need to revisit, but that's then and not now. 

1 WW, 1 KOTFT, 2 Un'Goro.

I'm not sure those who are worried about the low power level of Witchwood understand how crucial it is that this set now doesn't just obliterate in power level everything else. 

a new year is starting, with Un'goro (fairly weak, too spread out) KOtFT (strong, oppressive and F2P unfriendly because of the DKs and multiple must have Epics) and K&C (fair mixture of power I would say after the rotation, aside from Warlock needing a look) and it is a very dangerous time indeed to show overwhelming support for any archetype just yet. what you risk is to support existing powerful decks already to the point that the future sets coming out will basically need to be overpowered to all hell to even be considered playable.

remember The Grand Tournament? almost none of that shit was playable, it was a low power expansion delivered after Naxx, GvG and BRM, of which Naxx and GvG were backbreaking and BRM had some key cards for some powerhouse decks later.

in short ; the starting year should not start too strong or show too much support for any one archetype, because it might be too powerful to be stopped by anything except the blatantly overpowered. don't give up on Odd/Even and similar mechanics, they have more than a year to work out.

looks like just the right kind of card a specific Control Shaman could enjoy. however, it requires minions to be played, which sparks some interesting deckbuilding questions. I wonder if this is the Elemental Shaman payoff card.

no problem mate. I forgot to add my advice on what you can do/build but to be honest, it's going to be a real struggle without a dozen epics and DK Jaina or the Karazhan package to make a good Mage till rotation, so you might need to shelve it till then and see what comes up in Witchwood. good luck.

amount of time spent thinking per turn (should be the same no matter the complexity) lack of card hovering and selecting, illogical 'non-human' use of positioning and cards that often loses the game on the spot (because HS doesn't have a good AI that can take positioning into account, or hold back that Spellbreaker when it is obviously needed, etc)  

the first issue for me is ; why are there so many 1-offs? generally if you put a card into a deck you put it in because it either works well with the deck or is just an overall strong card - in both cases, you want as many copies as possible. tech cards are the only exception where most of the time you just want 1. (because you don't want a hand of tech cards against someone who's not the targeted group) the deck has some cards of aggro, tempo, secret, elemental and control mage decks, which is problematic to say the least. another problem with this deck is that it is not built against the meta we are in right now but also it's not strictly built to any archetype. more on that below.

secondly, there's a lot of sub-par cards to which even being a f2p with a small collection isn't an excuse. a lot of these cards you're running are not stronger than Boulderfist Ogre or Yeti. lemme run a quick run through the problem ones ; 

Mirror Image is a weak card, all in all, especially if you're not a tempo deck with Sorceresses, perhaps Questing Adventurer, the 2/1 minion that grows hp per spell and such cards. in an average game, I would guess that all Mirror Image does is maybe delays 4 face damage in a turn, which is almost worthless. looking at the meta, Paladin just freely overruns it and other classes don't care about it since they have removal that goes through taunt.

Glacial Shard is a nice card, but is best in a different deck. in this meta and with this deck, there's not a lot of value in delaying an attack for one turn. Cubelock doesn't care, too weak against Secret Mage, Priest doesn't care and Paladin has too many targets.

Shimmering Tempest is a weak card. you're likely to lose board control just to risk getting a possibly unplayable random card. 

Mana Bind is terrible in this meta 90% of the time (so many crap spells to get, like Dark Pact) and Vaporize can be played around and is easily countered by some crap minion. 

Cone of Cold isn't worth running (just a weak card overall) and Frost Nova generally needs to be combo'd with another card to be worth running. 

Red Mana Wyrm is a disaster. just compare it to Boulderfist Ogre or Chillwind Yeti ; it is a poor card standalone, requires you to setup a turn with at least another spell just to have a 4/6 minion (if you're thinking Mirror Image, no, that's still not good enough) and in this meta with silences, Warlock and Priest (and even Paladin can deal with it behind blockers) it should usually achieve nothing. 

Ancient of Blossom is simply put, poorly stated. you're looking for minions that can actually deal enough damage to kill their competition in mana slots. there's also the consideration that for a 'late' drop it does nothing against slow decks but is also too slow against fast decks. 

why Gadgetzan Auctioneer? what are you trying to cycle or get to? 

this is a late game deck, according to how you built it... but you have no good late game card to win the game (ideally it would be DK Jaina) so my question is, how do you plan to win? if you're a control deck, you lack late game cards. (or card, since it's mostly just Jaina) if you're an aggro/tempo/secret deck, why are you running these control freeze cards? the final archetype you're mixing your deck with is a midrange elemental deck, but you are lacking the good elemental cards. 

I only play ranked mode since there's no point or incentive to play casual ; I meet the same things in both places. I'd even argue that in my personal experience casual was more competitive, perhaps some players bringing tier1 decks into casual to either quickly do their quests or players just finished building a meta deck and testing it out. 

to me the question is really is the game fun for you, and the answer is 'a lot of the time, no', especially at year's end. I guess some people will discuss meta decks and similar topics to this to talk about their disatisfaction or lack of enjoyement, but I personally have accepted the fact that some people are not deckbuilders, are not interested in anything but piloting a deck, and play this game like a driver buying a car - why would they buy a crappy car when they can drive a better one? 

I believe it to be reasonable that they will give away these cards, as with rotation a lot of players will be gutted for resources. not everyone has the Ice Blocks and so on to bounce some dust back from this loss as well, and releasing a big set that might be very oriented towards this mechanic but not give away the thing that might make it viable - could be a too big hit for a lot of people to bother playing.

on the other hand though we have a suspicion that we will be given 20 packs (and when Whispers was around we got around 12 + C'Thun I believe) so it is quite possible we will have enough resources to build anything. we also must assume that this even-odd thing is too janky and there will be way more reasonable curve decks around.

I believe so, they haven't said it yet but that was the old case ; if you had 1 wing already of Naxx or BRM, you could unlock any other wing whenever you please. 

to be honest, Priest was never the fun class and in my opinion (and it is my favorite class) it should never be given power enough for tier 1 until some of the core cards and mechanics get changed. like, it has been built with the core set as THAT annoying class. there's no good response to anything the class does. it's simply the annoying class and it has been contributed to greatly by switching over the 'fun' cards with annoying but powerful ones. I think another big reason is that deckbuilding in Priest has become a lot less interesting.

Shadow Madness is kind of a bad card, generally you run it if you know exactly what you want to steal. just put in 2x Potion of Madness now, the card is nuts, there's like always a target for it and costs 1 mana! 

Shadowform is a ton of fun to build around with - but why do that, when now we have Shadowreaper Anduin. 

Thoughtsteal is no longer run ; just play Drakonid Operative. get whatever you want! how exciting.

putting in a Cabal Shadow Priest used to be a very specific plan ; I'll ready up Shrinkmeister to get your Ysera, or just use it on Imp Gang Boss, etc. well now you got a better Aldor Peacekeeper in Priest, just take whatever you want. 

it's been a while since I enjoyed playing my favorite class. I'll wait for it to rotate these overpowered cards and be garbage tier again so only me and a few other fans of it can actually enjoy playing it again with our crummy comboish builds. oh, and no more dragons, please. give them to Paladin or something.

I believe MSOG was objectively the worst expansion.

- it was Blizzard's attempt to mirror a failed experiment done by Wizards in MTG, which was ; create a easy to control meta of rock paper scissors that they could easily monitor and balance from that point on. of course, most the classes were unplayable, a lot of matches were "oh you're playing rock to my scissors? guess I lose"

- every aggro deck had to have the same package of pirates, and Pirate Warrior was beyond obnoxious to play against

- all the creativity of like offbeat Reno decks was gone ; it was clear now, Mage, Warlock and Priest had Kazakus, there was no point in playing a Reno deck without it. a lot of vs aggro deck games were determined by "did I get Reno", unless of course you died to Warrior by turn 4

- Jade is not a fun mechanic to play against, and it kept most decks out of the game and it powercreeped C'thun and other older archetypes to become obsolete ; and C'thun was intended to be a easy ticket for new players to build cheap decks in every class

- handbuff was a disaster, and it became the thing that ran everything off balance ; you were supposed to have Jades killing control, control killing aggro, aggro killing jades, and then the fourth element that shook things up. that element never worked, leaving the meta in a triangle of 10% or 90% winrate matches.

it was awful, really. I did like the flavor of it and it had those small quests you do for each guild, but in the end it is by far the most harmful expansion the game has had.