Hearthpwn

cardback care: 0

satisfaction from puzzle solving: ∞

I just want fun, I mean it is a free puzzle game, I love puzzle games. Like I want free stuff, but if you are gonna give me free stuff, just give me it, in this scenario the free stuff we are given is a puzzle game, and putting free stuff behind free stuff seems silly when you can just give people both free things directly.

So boomsday has a bigger meta impact than witchwood I believe, so boomsday cards are better, disenchant those cards when you want to make a deck and need dust. Frankly unless they are duplicates of good legendaries and epics, or of golden copies of good rares, then dusting them is fine, the benefit long term of keeping them is between tiny and none, so dusting them now is fine. Keep good rares and legendaries or ones you don't know are good yet. The rest of the duplicates can be burned to fuel your crazy creations.

which of those decks did you like, play it, continue, grind. This game is grind, also new expansion makes ranking up hard since the ladder is completely random and inscrutable. nothing is good right now. Right now you can play exactly what will be the best deck in a week and go 0/50 because nothing makes sense right now, give it time, don't fret, just stay calm, and have fun.

not sure deathrattle priest has a place in the meta, and I think there are better options than mechanical whelp when the meta settles. Essentially the card need deathrattle support or else it loses to silence, which will be very common when the meta settles as it has been for 2 expansions. I believe silence got better with this expansion because it stops paladin from being crazy and otherwise paladin is crazy. Basically I suspect the mechanical whelp will do well for a week, like other similar cards have done and then it will be phased out of anything it is played in over the next week. Except maybe some hunter deck because hunter has become the king of weird powerful combos with otherwise subpar cards. 

Yeah I been running a very different pogo deck, but tempo pogo is the way to play pogo I been playing something that does more traditional aggressive stuff, and has pogo, lich king and the dk hero for rogue as a plan for game where your opponents clear your stuff and you have to go long. It works decently, but it may be less good if mecha'thun is any good. I have seen a fair few mecha'thun warlocks and druids, and both have won against me. Maybe this verion fairs better but I would need a lot to make it. 

In response to the idea you have to go infinite, you don't you use pogo to finish some games with cheap 5/5 and bigger minions that you can play several of in the late game in one turn. why would you go infinite when you can put down minion that win the game. And that is what pogo hopper decks can do. I think people assumed that pogo was only for infinite and discounted the deck on the notion that infinite has never been good, except that it was, when jade druid did it, and they killed you before they went infinite too.

I like this idea, I would cut one ultimate or both (I have played other combo decks that had less draw aside from the ultimate than this has, and that still hit bottom of deck very fast when played for full card draw. not sure why someone worried about surviving to turn 10 I have survived longer with fewer tools in druid consistently in the past few weeks. And this si not with a deck that plays minions, I mean a deck equally uninvested in doing actual things until combo (it was an abombination hadronox otk druid, which takes just as long to set up and is riskier I think. Plus this runs spreading plague, which really guaruntees survival well)

So If I were making this deck I would cut the semi control vibe going on, and focus on tempo. You want a tempo based deck that adds a few pogo hoppers to your deck and draws them fast, but focuses alot on just generally having board advantage. You want elven minstrel and maybe even faldorei striders , but you also want one drops. You don't need the elekk and both lab recruiter and baleful banker is too much so cut the banker replace those cuts with more tempo minions. You want to sprint and use saps defensively to survive ti you spam pogo. But instead why not play nice tempo cards and lead into pogo shennanigans. You can finish with like 8/8 or 10/10 pogos easily. They get scary fast. But don't treat the deck as a way to maximize them, treat them as a way to finish off games with a deck. Things like cheat death can be useful but may be too slow, and prep needs to be cut along with that sprint. Not efficient draw. maybe you put in myra's element, and when you play it you are basically saying, I need to win in the next two turns anyway, so lets find my pogos and do it. Pogo makes people want to play control and make infinite value pogo stuff happen. But why not just win? I think a tempo pogo does well and replaces odd rogue in boomsday, but only time will tell.

We're going crazy here: I mean druid will be doing stupid stuff with biology project, but consider the possibility of what decks could use that to their advantage, while still crushing huge numbers of other things and just generally punishing greed. that's right, aggro and tempo decks with large amounts of draw. In that category I present to you, warlock my number 3 spot, priest (we will get back to this) my number 2 spot, and finally my number 1 shaman.

Obviously zoo lock got a few tools this expansion and also it is zoo, so it will be decent, it can capitalize off of the mana bio project gives to pump out scarier stuff faster, and apply even more pressure druid has to deal with.

Priest seems weird, but looking at the cards they printed, I see a lot of ways to make small minions scary in priest, combine that with the mana druid gives them, and the burst priest can do (tainted zealots plus mindblast and holy smite get you 22 damage, and all those cards can be useful in zoo style priest. I know this is a long shot idea, but for a year now it has been on the it just might work someday list, and I think now is the time for it to work. In addition the versions I have tried have been running like 10 draw cards, because you want to empty your deck to find your burst lethal one can tone that aspect down and tone up the board presence if one likes and that could turn the deck into a veritable destroyer of druid (I have won games against both hadronox and maly druid with the current deck, so tuning it more to that matchup and overall buffing the deck with new cards will do nothing but wonders.)

Finally Shaman, oh shaman, you beautiful stupid class. I have been running a bunch of decks i like to call spam shaman decks. They are usually even shamans focused very heavily on minion spamming and boardwide buffs and stuff. Shaman got tools for both even and non-even styles of spam shaman in the form of many cards that summon multiple minions, some of which are decent, and some of which have nice face damage in addition to minion summoning because of the deathrattles on goblin bombs. I think there should be some way shaman can pull off a very fast zoo-like deck this expansion. In addition shaman has like 5 finishers for such a deck if it needs to run them in the meta we have. One might ask how this shaman deck fits the criteria of high draw I care about so much in an aggro deck to kill druid. and it does so with everything from a few draw cards like loot horder and novice engineer (or in non-even an acolyte of pain) thrown in to earthen might to having some big stuff thrown in for the top end after the hoarde of 2 drops and handful of 4 drops. but the main way shaman keeps a good hand of cards is by hero powering all the time, why not every turn, you have the mana after all, and those minions get scary when you have a sneaky devil on the board and a flametongue totem, and maybe a dire wolf. 

The problem druid faces is these decks can keep threats coming if built right, while jumping out of the gate fast with lots of damage. When I dealt a total of 60 damage to a taunt druid's face using one of my spam shamans (one of the more low end of the curve ones too) through several taunts and some removal that was well placed I was not surprised. I was surprised when he played star storm and stabilized but that is another story. Most of the time these decks have the resources to put out huge amounts of pressure, while continuing to have resources for when that pressure is dealt with. Then they reestablish pressure and  eventually they find a win. This is why I am not going with any of the standard choices for top dog, but with aggro shaman. 

In terms of counters, hunter and rogue. They can meet the pressure with similar force, and then can pop out a control plan on you if thing go poorly for their tempo. Rouge will do so with pogo hoppers, and hunter with deathrattle hunter and the dk. They have enough removal to make it through the first few waves and then enough power afterward that establishing board can be hard.

I have spent none, and plan on spending none, my money will go to games that don't drain my soul from me, that being pretty much only single player games and board games. I enjoy games that drain my soul because of addictive cycles, but I refuse to let addiction eat my money as well as my soul. Not judging anyone who spends money on F2P games, it would just be bad for me to let myself do it.

I like me so stupid crazy OTK decks, I am wondering what crazy stuff you all are theorycrafting because there is some weird stuff already, I expect a lot of Mecha'thun and a little less Malygos because I want stuff that is weird, nothing obvious.

I will get started with two of my own decks 

A Mecha'thun priest because I think priest has a good shot of living to pull off the combo and can pull it off a few ways

Vex crow hybrid mage that lets you otk with antonidas apprentice one cost spells double leyline fireballs all after pocket universe.

And finally the stupidest most risky paladin otk, the goal is to dinosize double blessed champion a stonetusk boar all in one turn by cheapening 2 of the spells to be really cheap. I might be able to add some four drop minions and still get by but I dunno if that is a great idea.

I wish you all happy science.

yeah I say a c'thun or marin like gift would be cool with this card, and I know, now that they always give one legendary from a random class to players, saying that we should get another because we did in the past is a poor argument, but I kinda just want this given out like that because it helps new players feel like they can play the game semi-competitively and it also teaches them more about playing the game as a whole by throwing different decks at them. It was a year before I was any good at the game because I exclusively played one class for long periods of time and only rarely changed which class that was, when I finally did diversify I started to understand a lot more, but also became sad I could not use any of the good cards in those classes. A card that offers new players a way to try many things that are not quite optimal, but somewhat good, and that encourages them in both giving them a fun way to play and something to work toward (having the ability to play the decks they like when they want) is a great way to get and keep players and the loss they have from not having it in packs is minimal. I think that whizbang should not only be given for free, but also always in standard. I think that maybe they worried or the executives worried it would decrease revenue, but I am certain that it would increase sales or have no overall effect. Much of their money is from whales anyway and making whizbang free and forever for all would not affect whales at all, and more conservative spenders of money would be more inclined to play the game, and therefore more likely to be potential revenue sources for blizzard because they play the game that makes the money, and may have some money to spend. People like me who spend no money and have just ground it out will technically also be more common, which might lead to a need for more servers as the total player base increases, which costs money, but I think that if hearthstone is lucrative now doing something that basically just increases new player interest and retention cannot be bad because it would just scale up the current system.

so in my opinion the counter to shudderwock is to play decks that beat it before it wins, which it looks like every class can do in this next expansion (The ones we were missing were warrior, mage, and druid; warrior might be able to make a tempo deck with mechs and rush, mage got stuff great for tempo, and druid got more ramp making all of its decks faster. Priest had some combo decks that won faster that saw some play already so it could do it anyway if you were thinking priest could not, also as much as it is a meme aggro priest totally destroyed shudderwock in my experience of playing like 50 games of aggro priest.)

I am genuinely not worried about shudderwock because I actually was fine with its place in the meta. It was fun for me to play with and against after both the speeding up of the animation and the nerf that made the deck actually viable in the meta. I also feel like if you want to complain about not having counters to combo decks, worry about malygos decks more. Or maybe Mecha'thun (It is a meme but it may be a real thing someday). Or you can worry about abombination hadronox druid (I frickin love this deck btw). Or maybe just exodia mage. Like why complain specifically about shudderwock because it is the one that is good right now, and not even particularly toxic. 

Counters to combo might be nice, we have one for warlock to use in the next expansion, and it will probably see play because it might be able to give you something good if used right while ruining your opponents plan if you are lucky (though luck is major with that card). Anyway I am basically certain that there won't be any more counters of the single card variety to combo decks this expansion, but instead we have counters in the form of decks that win first or make the combo too unweildy, or in the form of removing the druid weapon because that is the combo to fear anyway not shudderwock. 

Rejoice in the fact that there are ways to beat decks by playing other decks, and stop worrying about how we don't have a single card that fixes everything. I don't want a single card that fixes everything, that makes the game feel dumb. I want a way to win any matchup in any class by making a specific deck in that class that wins the matchup.  I want most of those decks to be bad because having that many good decks is chaos and makes it impossible to make a deck of your own that has any chance of doing well. Finally, I want druid to get nerfed because I hate what I feel like it will become and it will limit my first want by making decks that are very hard to beat.

So I like this, probably because I have played a lot of minion spam shaman, and I play a bunch of hagatha shaman, and sometimes i do both at once. Also even shaman with hagath can find this so that is cool. I kinda want to pull my totem shaman out of the dust now (crafting pun fully intentional) and try putting this in it. that deck was very good at getting a board and keeping it, but kinda terrible at doing anything with it. Like I would constantly have a full board and be like, please just draw my activators so this board does something. Having the ability to throw hagatha in and this now maybe makes the deck able to do something often enough that it works. 

Well if you are running Augmented Elekk you can use it to escape death by Aluneth forever. You basically start spamming it and Baleful Banker making sure to use Baleful Banker on itself and Augmented Elekk and then you have enough cards in your deck to avoid fatigue. Maybe you do kill the Aluneth but it takes a lot of work to do so, seeing how much durability it has and what it takes to destroy it (a minion that is bad surviving 2 turns or having 2 copies of it and making it survive 1 at least once. 

Heck why not double Augmented Elekk and double Baleful Banker as your play every turn for the rest of the game, in fatigue it won't really matter that the cards are mediocre stat wise (5/6 for 5 or 10/12 for 10 is not bad but stats are worse late so you would prefer to have more stats if you could, maybe some turns you play some cheap minions you made.

Anyway all this thought is kinda silly, since you shoulda won already.