Hearthpwn

The issue with Secrets IMO is the playstyle they force not on the opposing player, but on the player who actually played the secret. In general, as a person who has tried almost every version of Secret Mage under the sun, I find Secrets to be utterly awful in slower decks that go for value. The longer it takes your deck to kill the opponent, the longer the opponent has to poke and prod to figure out what kind of Secret you played, and then counter it. The end result is your opponent made a little detour in their plan, maybe played one turn a little more cautiously than he would have, and then he triggered the Secret in a way that gave you the least value. If instead your deck is ultra aggressive and plays for tempo, your opponent just cannot afford to play around the secret, they just have to play into it and pray it's not the one they are afraid of.

The result are these hyper-tempo decks like Secret Hunter and Secret Paladin (and from my experience also a hyper-aggressive Secret Mage with Crystal Runners, Lackeys, Mana Wyrms, Valet's etc.) that just go all in on their secret dump and if you manage to stabilise or counter them, they are out of fuel about 3 turns after they made their tempo play and then just fizzle out. Basically secrets only fit into a single playstle and don't offer you many options in what goals your deck has. That is, with the exception of Freeze Mage (who only plays two very specific secrets) and Midrange Hunter (who can only afford to go long only because of Eaglehorn Bow's additional damage output per secret). Any other non-tempo deck just cannot afford to play secrets because of how they work.

That argument does not hold water at all. It has been proven multiple times by multiple games over decades that you do not in any way need RNG to make every game different, force the player to think out of the box, not make the game drag out and reward both skill and knowing your outs as well as reward luck.

Luck is already inherently present in the card draw anyway, there is no need to aggravate the issue by additional layers of RNG. All RNG contributes is the moments when you know your outs and you get screwed over by a doomsayer popping out of the enemy Shredder or your Rag hitting the enemy 1/1 instead of face, and vice versa. The moments where you have exactly one out in a thousand different possibilities, you go for it and the coin flips the right way for you, and you feel rewarded. You could achieve the same by just knowing what you can draw and playing to your consistent gameplan against your opponent's consistent gameplan as best you can several turns ahead of time and being rewarded for playing it right.

Adding RNG for those clutch moments is not worth the price of sabotaging competitive or high level play by deciding entire games based on coin flips. That's like having a sport like football, except 1 out of 10 times the ball's bounce denies the laws of physics and goes in the opposite direction than it should. At that point, you cannot call it a competitive sport, and expect players at the high level who know every inch of the game by heart to not call you on your shit when they play perfectly, their opponent's outs are minimised to the utmost, and then a coin flip loses them the game on the spot. Either you have a serious competitive e-sport, or you have a crazy clown fiesta where anything can happen at any time. You can't have both and expect everyone to be ok with it.

Well, that's not quite what I was saying. I don't have an issue with these cards potentially making a strong curve deck happen. I do have an issue with the fact that some of these cards can get way out of hand, like uncontrollably, insanely out of hand if your RNG is good, or do practically nothing and lose you the game for playing them if your RNG is bad. Basically cards like the Gadgeteer, Rag, Yogg, Dr. Boom etc. have their effect overtuned in power level to compensate for being random. If you hit a streak of good RNG, they are borderline unstoppable. If you don't, they might suck. The margins are way too big. Winning or losing is significantly determined by your luck at that point, and you will keep playing the deck only as long as the RNG average over a season is good enough to reach a high rank. There is very little reward in skill and the deck's viability on ladder boils down to pure math of averages in RNG spikes.

This faction is starting to worry me. People say that it's not that obviously powerful, which is what HS needs. More intricacy, more tinkering, more exploration. Except almost all of these hand-buffing cards have the second most obvious problem in HS stamped all over them. RNG. Look at the Gadgeteer. Looks like a dead card on turn 4 right? Won't get its effect off more than once. Except if it got randomly hit by one or two of your buffing cards that you played previously. If it doesn't and something else takes the buff instead, this card will suck, it will die immediately and you lose a bunch of tempo. But if it does, and you play this as 5/4 or even 6/5, it WILL live more than one turn. And then the deck just snowballs out of control (as if having a 4 mana 5/4 with effects that warrant immediate removal wasn't enough). All dependent on if it got hit by the buffing effect. Or on what this buffs in your hand when it triggers. Does it buff an on-curve card on 5? You're on your way to victory. Does it hit an 8 drop that your opponent was going to hex anyway? Well, too bad, you just played a 4/3 for 4 to get a 10/10 ragnaros.

There is so much RNG about how the Goons will curve out that you may have games when the deck is utterly toothless, and others where there is just no stopping the madness. You thought 7/7s for 4 that overload the player to 3 mana next turn were bad? Just wait till the Goons curvestomp you out of existence.

I really dislike how hearthstone is balanced by inconsistency. Cards that are just utterly broken like Ragnaros or Yogg if they go your way but can be a complete letdown and waste of investment if they don't. I'd rather cards were just consistently good or consistently bad, and have potential for the player to make them overperform or underperform based on skill and deckbuilding rather than have cards that, on average over say 100 games are just bad, ok or good, but in one the particular game you are playing may just win you the game on the spot because of diceroll when they lost you the game just one match ago for the same reason. If, on average, the Goons RNG hits the cards that help you win the game, it will be a deck. If the curve is too weak to allow for incosistency to determine the outcome, it won't. All based on a flip and the number of cards in your hand.

If you have two 3-5 drops on board in arena by turn seven, you're in a winning position anyway. Any ol' 7 drop would do at that point, some would even be better because a 6/6 doesn't trade well with minions of its mana cost.

I wouldn't say so. Technically speaking Mistcaller was never played in anything serious so in that way he was "useless" already, but I've been including him in my totem shaman and there are a LOT of cases where you play him with only like 2 minions in hand. At that point, the fact that you draw cards with the buff already on them is a huge deal.

This is a very smart design IMO. This is unlikely to be seen in Aggro decks since it gradually gets easier and easier to kill (or just kills itself) yet it should do a good job at countering zoo. While it will only be at 5 health on your turn, the opponent will have to invest 5 damage into it to kill it on his turn 3/4, where Injured Blademaster would die to a Zoolock's one drop without an immediate Circle of Healing. In most cases your opponent will simply go face after you play this, leaving you with a minion on the board. And we all know what a priest can do when it gets on the board. The +4 health talon Priest minion alone will make sure that this thing gets at least 2 trades in, followed by a Holy Nova on turn 5 to keep it alive. Bam, by turn 6 you have the board against Zoo + potential ressurect targets if things don't go your way. And, it doesn't give ammo to Priest Inner Fire OTK since it constantly decreases its health.

I think people are looking at this wrong. The 1/1 stats are, I think, very much intentional. It gets buffed by hobgoblin when played, it gets divine shield from Steward, and even if you don't have those, if you divine shield it yourself (Argent Protector) it's going to take two AoE's to get rid of this guy. I don't see this played anywhere else ever but a swarmadin might have a place for it. There are only so many AoE's you can squeeze into a deck, and along with your hero power (potentially buffed by Justicar), the army of 1/1s will just wear your opponent down. Tempomage will eat this alive but anything else might gradually get outvalued in a longer game. Reminds me of White Weenie a lot. I'm glad Blizz is pushing out these interesting cards instead of the tired vanilla boring shit that people immediately stuff into their Zoo or Aggro Decks because "yay, tempo". Gonna go dust off my Bolvar to have some fun with this in Wild.

Looking at these individually, there are a lot of arguments to be made: Blade Flurry should have kept its cost if it got its text changed. Force of Nature should have stayed the way it was, it's Savage Roar that needs a 2 mana nerf. BGH is still too good, it should still cost 3 but deal 4/5 damage to a minion with attack 7 or more, etc. etc.

Overall though, the sum total is good: no more fucking Druid combo, which, honestly, should have been nerfed TWO YEARS AGO! I still can't forgive Blizz that it took THIS long. No more potential OTK Warlock return in the future. Face Hunter got shit on. Oil Rogue will never be such a threat in the future. The majority of derp-a-derp, me-hit-face decks are severely nerfed. More cooler minions thanks to the Master of Disguise nerf. That's all great news, these are the things that annoy me the most in the game, and we run into them all the time. However, I still don't think they fixed the big minion problem due to the lacking BGH nerf. And charge should still be looked at. Wolf Rider and Kor'kron Elite are still around just waiting for a good buffing card to make another OTK deck happen. Charge should have a heavier price attached to it if the minion has high power.

Shouting about powercreep and shouting about Evil Heckler and Ice Rager are two different things. Evil Heckler is not power creep. It is a strictly better card than a trash card, but that doesn't make it power creep, since there is no actual power involved. Both cards are irrelevant, even in arena heckler is a below average card. Chillwind Yeti vs Piloted Shredder is power creep. Nobody shouts about that because those cards aren't directly comparable, but nobody in their right mind would pick Yeti over Shredder, arena or constructed. The game is experiencing power creep, but not in the blunt way people expect. There was a time when Cairn Bloodhoof was a good legendary. Nowadays, there is so much better stuff to do in the game at 6 that a powerful card like Cairn doesn't even get a spot.

This looks dreadful at first but considering the potential (as the already mentioned Anima Golem) I bet that either a) there will be another card in this set that works even better with it than Anima Golem does or b) some two sets down the line this thing will be a vital piece in a combo deck. I'm definitely not playing this shit now but I'm not disenchanting this either. There is no way Blizz made this without it ever getting anything to work with. I mean even now, in a very controlly Warlock, you can combine this with Power Overwhelming and Shadow Flame for good board clear. Most of the time the worry is in such a control deck that you'd have to play the creature you want to blow up on the same turn and need just way too much mana. This gives you a guaranteed minion available on the board for the combo no matter what. If an opponent wastes silence on this, be my guest.

People are making out this card like it requires such dream scenarios to get any value out of it. It's actually pretty easy to get it running. As long as you are not going up against a class that has a 1 damage hero power (even if you are, many players will not hero power on turn 2) or a crapton of 1-drops, all you need if you go second is coin loot hoarder or thalnos. Turn 2 your opponent is guaranteed to play something (a lot of decks miss turn 1 but only Handlock and Warrior can affort to miss turn 2 as well). Next turn, you innervate Communion and run your hoarder into whatever your opponent played. All you needed was 3 cards (and a coin) and now you're set. The rest of your deck consists of the other innervate, the other communion and then nothing but card draw and fatties with a LOT of taunt (no removal). Anything you draw that turn from hoarder and any turn after this outside of the other communion and innervate gives you insane tempo, and your taunts are likely to stop an aggressive deck dead in its tracks. And since facehunter goes face, the one deck that is extremely likely to have a 1-drop will not be willing to run it into your loot hoarder. In fact, the only thing stopping this plan from working is a) if the deck becomes so popular that people will be willing to throw silences, removal and hero powers on loot hoarders turn 2 every time they see them or b) control decks that happened to have drawn Zombie Chow or Northshire. If built well and mulliganed aggresivelly, I don't think this deck requires as much dream scenarios as people think.

This + Majordomo = 40 dmg a turn. You can protect yourself with secrets. Issue is, how the hell do you play this and have it survive a turn?

Unless they give Wisps an ability (Whenever a Wisp damages a Demon Lord, destroy that Demon Lord and all trees around him) or create a minion-based Gadgetzan, Wisps won't be a thing outside Casual. Decks are getting way too efficient these days.

Something about eggs and baskets comes to mind. Can't quite put my finger on it.

This seems like a pretty risky card. If your opponent has an answer, you might as well concede because this guy is an investment. You'll easily get 3-4 for 1-ed if you go too all out on him. On the other hand, if your opponent doesn't have an answer, this will ball out of control quickly, especially in Priest (has the right stats to survive till next turn when you drop it turn 4 against every single card except Shadow Word, Crackle and Fireball; and we all know what happens when you don't finish off a Priest's minion). It's more all-in than Adventurer or Gazlowe, since you have to stack it all on him (while Adv just grows on his own as you develop your board and Gazlowe compensates the investment by expanding your deck) but this has much better stats for the cost than both the cards mentioned. If this drops on curve when the player already has board control, good luck clearing the board of all the threats. If it doesn't or gets topdecked - mmmmeh. It won't replace anything in mechmage but might find a spot in combo-ey decks like Gazlowe rogue (which is only a thing in my decklists and nowhere else apparently) and will fit perfectly into an OTK priest deck. Definitely does better than Turtle, Lightwell or Lightspawn.