just want to say, this deck got me from rank 15 to rank 4 in no time. really nice.
I personally changed the 2 Flame Imp for 2 Loot Hoarder, put 2 Leper Gnome instead of the 2 Zombie Chow and it really helped me, way more value, Undertaker is almost always being boosted instantly or right after turn 1.
2
Your opponent only has a limited number of silences to play. If they use one on a Sludge Belcher that's one less to use on other threats. So, a silenced Sludge Belcher loses value compared to a Doomguard, but you likely more than make up for that lost value on another card (like an egg) that your enemy can't silence because they used it on the Sludge Belcher. The only time you come out behind is if they would have wasted a silence when there was nothing useful to use it on and the Sludge Belcher provides a target to make it not go do waste, but with the number of deathrattles in this deck that certainly doesn't happen very often.
2
Trying to have 2 of both would just be too many expensive cards for a Zoo deck. You could always play with one of each, though, which has the added benefit of being able to track how often you wish you had the other card in a given situation to see if you'd be better off with 2 of one or the other.
As for the silence, Sludge Belcher doesn't lose a ton of value in this case. The deathrattle is only 1/2 and you lose the taunts, but compare that to silence on an egg (lose a 4/4) or Undertaker (lose +X/+X) or even Haunted Creeper and Harvest Golem where you lose 2x 1/1 or a 2/1. Sludge Belcher certainly isn't significantly worse than most other silence targets, so I don't that vulnerability is really much of a downside.
2
Zoo is all about getting maximum value out of each card. A 5/7 charge for 5 mana is certainly very good value, but comes with the downside of having to discard 0-2 cards (based on how effectively you can clear your hand by the time you want to play it). Sludge Belcher is effectively 4/7 with double taunt for the same 5 mana. It can also provide an extra +1/+1 to one or both of your Undertakers if they are in play. Under ideal circumstances for each card I think they are pretty comparable, but as soon as you have to discard for the Doomguard I feel that the Sludge Belcher starts to pull ahead. If you 2-for-1 with the Doomguard but had to discard to get him on the board you haven't really gained anything. Really, though, it just comes down to different late-game play styles. Doomguard can win you the game in a kill-or-be-killed situation while Sludge Belcher can protect your board for a turn or two while you try to draw that silence that will let you clear his taunt and swing in for the kill with your minions.
Dark Iron Dwarf's battlecry is certainly helpful for trading up and/or activating the egg, but with 2x Abusive, 2x Dire Wolf Alpha, and 2x Defender of Argus there are enough buffs to get by on. For the silence, I feel like Owl is almost always worse when playing on curve than any other 2-drop you would have to give up to include him whereas Spellbreaker is almost always better than Dark Iron later in the game when there are bigger threats to deal with.
1
The official Hearthstone site links to Blizzard's generic Battle.net Terms of Use. Section 12.C. "No Data Mining" is the relevant section:
You agree that you will not (a) obtain or attempt to obtain any information from the Service or any Game using any method not expressly permitted by Blizzard; (b) intercept, examine or otherwise observe any proprietary communications protocol used by a Game client or the Service, whether through the use of a network analyzer, packet sniffer or other device; (c) use any third-party software to collect information from or through a Game client or the Service, including without limitation information about your character, any Account registered to you, virtual items, other players, or other Game data.
So, yes, this is technically against the ToS, but so are any other programs that extract data from any Blizzard game or service in any way. Basically it's designed to allow them to ban people for basically any reason without having to justify it. Realistically, though, I believe they only use that power for things they consider to be exploiting the game and/or things that may impact the experience of other players.
I obviously can't say that it's impossible for people to get banned for using this program (or another program like the screen scraping one to log your wins and losses that somebody else has been working on), but I think it's unlikely to happen. If Blizzard does decide that this is something they want to actively prohibit, then I would hope they would contact me first so I could shut the site down or make any required changes to appease them before they would start going after users.
Right now the game uses two different connections. The "main" connection to Battle.net is encrypted. It's used to log you in and for all communication that isn't part of an actual game. This includes the store, friends list, deck building, play mode selection, etc. While it would technically be possible to decrypt this connection, it would require scanning the Hearthstone.exe's memory when the connection is being setup to read out the randomly generated session key. Even at that, it would still be very difficult to accomplish and is something I will absolutely not attempt to do as it would most certainly be a bannable offense.
Once an opponent has been found for a game, a new connection is opened that is used only for that specific game and then closed when the game finishes. This connection is unencrypted and handles all the updates that pertain to a specific game. My program captures the entire contents of this stream and just adds a simple header with the current game version as well as timestamps for each game message that it sees and compresses that data to save on your computer as well as upload to the server.
Because I don't have access to any of the messages in the "main" connection I actually miss out on some useful information. I have no way of knowing what play mode the log is for (I can make some assumptions if a deck contains more than 2 copies of a card or has a golden version of a card, but there's no way to tell ranked vs unranked). I can't tell what your full deck was going into the game--only cards that you draw are revealed in the log (though, it may be possible to piece together the full deck if it is used several times in a row). And I can't tell what the battle tags of either player are.
This "game" connection could potentially be encrypted in the future, but I don't think it's very likely. The "main" connection is handled by Blizzard's standard battle.net.dll (which is written in C++) while the "game" connection is handled by the Unity game engine (which runs C#). In order to add encryption they would have to re-implement their encryption code in C# (or setup a different method) and even then it would be trivial to see how the encryption is being handled since the C# code is very easy to disassemble. They could still do it in a way that would require somebody to hook into the Hearthstone.exe app to read a random seed value, but again, it would be much easier for a malicious user to perform those hooks into the C# code. Overall, I think they are much better served just making sure there is no critical info in the unencrypted stream.
The point of open sourcing the logger is mostly to allow people to review the code if they are concerned that I might be trying to steal their battle.net accounts or something. I intentionally left the parsing for the server to handle because I've put a lot of work into this site so far and don't want to see people just take that and setup a similar site based on all my hard work.
That said, I don't mind talking in general about how the log messages work and such, and if there are useful features that I could expose through and API for other people to use I'd definitely be open to setting those sorts of things up (suggestions welcome).
1
They added new tags to the cards in this patch with messages for how to earn normal and golden versions of cards that are earnable.
For example, you get the golden Core Hound at Hunter level 50 apparently (http://www.hearthlog.com/e/CS2_201/Core%20Hound). Another example is Animal Companion which is unlocked at level 2 with the golden version at level 40 (http://www.hearthlog.com/e/NEW1_031/Animal%20Companion).
From those descriptions it looks like you'll get 2x golden copies at the same time, just like with normal versions.
1
I posted this on reddit, but somebody said I should post here as well:
Here's an example with the Miracle Rogue deck. (You can also use it with decks created in the Forge.)