Hearthpwn

Personally I think one of the problem cards is still Order in the Court.  It just gives far too much consistency and removes the natural variance that should be inherent in a card game, paticularly with a high impact card like The Countess.  Imo it should be a higher mana cost so that a larger number of turns are spent with the natural variance of the draw and there's a significant tempo loss associated with re-ordering your deck.

The other issue is The Garden's Grace (often) being zero mana and the combination with Keeper's Strength - either to buff the minion doing the damage or to prevent another one from the "symmetrical" damage.  You basically can't let them keep a minion no the board.

Finally Horn of the Windlord shouldn't be able to go face imo. It's a very powerful removal tool (6 mana - remove 4 minions is excellent) and it can also be used for burst when combo'd. 

I'm not suggesting all these changes, but I think what they've done probably wont be enough (though it obviously will impact the win rate slightly).

You know what I really hate about anouncements of anouncments then a huge delay before the patch?  The fact that you end up playing against all the tryhards who deliberately abuse the cards blizzard themselves have already decided are too powerful.

It suck - I'm facing more paladins than ever now...

While true as a general statement, I really believe that the hunter "OTK buffed beast" deck is one of the few decks that you can legitamately play around if you understand how it works.  Having a single big minion, locations, dormant minions etc. all massively reduce the "from hand" damage.  They can't do any meaningful damage from hand if you have no minions on board.

I'm not saying it's an easy match up because they can still pressure you with their board, but it's not like many of the other OTK decks where the strategy is "kill them quickly".

I would argue that you should never dust anything other than cards that have been recently nerfed or cards you have more than one of (or golden cards you dont think you will ever use).  The dust return is so poor that it's rarely worth it.

The way the dust/card system is designed you can fairly quickly get all the common and rare cards.  You will also get a couple of legendary cards quite quickly from the rewards track and pity timer (1 legendary in your first 10 packs of each set is garuanteed I think).  You will never get duplicates until you have all of that rarity of card, and when you do get a duplicate from the reward track you can re-roll it to something else.

In the "My Collection" section you can use the search keywords "refund"  to see which cards give full dust refund and "extra" to see your duplicate cards

As a final thought - I always tend to craft neutral legendaries in preference to class legendaries because they generally have more flexibility and you can use them with every class.  Class legendaries do tend to have more powerful and unigue effects though.

If Blizz insists on it being a minion, than I think the current cost is the way to go.  It may not fit the "theme" of the final reward for excavating, but it puts the snake in a pretty good spot - still decent but not as oppresive as it was.  I say this as someone who absolutely hates the design of the card...

They could also choose to give the snake the extra health instead of the warlock - that would punish the bouncing and actually give you a chance to kill the warlock.  I think they would still need to adjust the cost though to stop it being played multiple times per turn.

A better fix would be to make it a spell that summons a mininon.

I do hate the fact that it can be excavated twice though, so even if you survive the bouncing or steal it from hand they can just make a new one.

I think hound is broadly OK with the exception of the interaction with Always a Bigger Jormungar. 

The cleave effect is one of the few things that you can actually try to play around - either using locations or dormant minions to "block" a spot, or by playing taunts on the end.  Even if you have neither of those things you can position your biggest minion in the middle so that the hound dies.

No one thinks hound is too good in Death Knight which tells you that the problem lies with the other hunter cards, not the hound.

I run other discover cards too.  You can't hamstring yourself by avoiding a powerful mechanic even if you don't like the prevelance of the mechanic in the game.  I would prefer these cards didn't exist - but they do, so you have to use them if you want to win.

As I said in my post - I actually really like the concept of discover as a mechanic.  I just think there's far too much of it now and it often becomes the defining part of a game.

Anyone else fed up with pretty much every game being decided by discover or randomly discovered cards?

When discover was introduced I really liked it.  It gave a flexbility to the cards and allowed you to adapt your gameplan to the current game state.  It was a relatively skill based mechanic - picking the best card you were offered for the current game and deciding what card your opponent might have picked.  Discover came at a cost though - you lost tempo and only had a few discover cards in your deck.

Now it feels like every single game is decided by discover (or cards that are otherwise randomly added to hand).  I've had games where the opponent is out of gas but they discover The Sunwell into whatever, into draw into....you get the picture (in the specific example I have in mind my opponent (a mage) played The Sunwell into Fight Over Me to steal my Sister Svalna which gave them unlimited Void Scripture and Reverberations.  A game I was winning instantly became a loss because of some random BS.  The Sunwell was also discovered during the game...)

Death knight on the ropes?  You should have played around the discovered The Scourge which they got a 1 mana discount on.

Mage - their whole deck style is discovered.  You have no ability to predict or play around half the cards.  Rogues are similar, although not nearly as bad as they used to be.

The worst part is that there's often no thought to playing any of these cards and they don't even result in a tempo loss in most cases. 

For me the skill element of this game can be split into three parts. 

1) Deck design

2) Knowledge of the opponents deck

3) Which cards to play and which trades to make.

The first one is a moot point because pretty much everyone used net decked tier 1 decks and don't design their own.  The last one is still broadly player controlled (although some curvestone face decks remove most of the decision making).  The second one, however, is being slowly eroded by randomly discovered cards.  You can know every single card in your opponents deck and still have no idea which cards you need to play around because half the cards in their hand didn't start in their deck.  This is a terrible design imo.  The more random it becomes the more the game turns into a coin flip.  Nobody want to play a game where you flip a coin...

I'm not against the odd crazy game, but when every game turns into a shitshow where none of your choices mattered because you didn't play around the discovered card, it makes it all seem a bit pointless.

It's a battlecry though instead of a deathrattle which is a big difference.

Quote from Dapptastic_ >>

Priest, hands-down.  Its class identity is basically awkward teen that doesn't know who they are so they need to steal cards from their opponent and this mechanic is not random.

 

It almost always swings the tide in massive favor of the priest.  I seldom play *against* the class but every now and again, I try to tell myself the PTSD isn't an accurate recollection of how bad it was...and sure enough.  The bullshit casino "house always wins" shenanigans start.

 

Priest is THE ONLY class I refuse to play because of that exact mechanic.  It's been this way for like the last 6 expansions.

 

Eff priest...get a real identity.

 They don't steal - they copy.  Massive difference. 

If priest could consistently steal cards from the opponent then I think most people would have given up on Hearthstone a long time ago because it would be immensely frustrating.  To be fair - the only reason people play the "copy" cards in priest is because priest doesn't have many good cards of their own...

Now imagine if Priest got an Odyn style legendary which actyually gave them a win con (beyond boring the opponent to death...)

I think this could end up being decent in an arcane hunter package with limited minions.  The +1/+1 is largely irrelevant, but the targeted minion draw makes drawing an early Halduron Brightwing very possible.  Also - if it buffs a Costumed Singer you'll definitely get the hat back because your opponent cant afford to leave it alive.

Im pretty sure if you've excavated 4 times as a warlock this is the guaranteed reward for the 4th excavate.  There's no randomness to that part, only what you get for the other 3 excavates, and they increase in "rarity" with each excavation. 

I actually think it will be fairly easy for warlock to excavate 4 times. Smokestack is basically mortal coil and Kobold Miner is a perfect target for Smokestack if you don't have any other targets.  I don't think anyone knows whether an excavation deck will be good, but the act of excavating and getting the legendary is pretty easy for Warlock. 

It will be difficult (but not impossible) to get on curve, but I don't think that really matters as you're never going to want to play it on curve anyway.  More likely is that you use some bounce effects (or similar) to replay multiple times.  My point wasn't that you would want to play it on 4, more that it just shouldn't be possible to get a card this powerful on turn 4.  If it succeeds as a deck archetype in the new meta, I think Dirty Rat will be in a lot of decks...

While I agree with the sentiment I disagree with most of the cards you've used as examples and I also think there's a second component that relates to deck design.  There's no more skill using Brawl than any other board clear, and arguably brawl is one of the more powerful ones which will always be relevant regardless of minion powercreep.

Using board clears as an example, a bigger issue is the number of board clears available and the number of cards which build a board in one go.  There's no more "holding minions to play around the clear". You just vomit them down and if they have a clear, you create a new board next turn.  Paladin and totem shaman are the perfect examples of this.  Equally, just because the opponent has already used their two clears doesn't mean there aren't a bunch more.  Priest has potential for something like 8 board clears and if they got a proper win condition the deck would be clears + whatever was required for the new win condition.

Regarding synergy between cards, the way they are designed you basically just stick all of the "synergy cards" in your deck and flesh out the rest with whatever overpowered cards remain.  Odin warrior is basically draw, armour and clears.  The new excavate cards are probably going to be the same given how overpowered the legendary excavations seem to be, and dragon druid basically requires all/most of the new dragon cards. 

p.s. Identity theif is (imo) one of the more thoughtful cards in the game - not about when you play it, but what you pick to best support your gameplan (or disrupt the opponent if you're running The Harvester of Envy).

p.p.s there's also too many OTK's and too much draw now in my opinion.

I don't want to put a downer on Hearthstone, but it really feels like the devs have run out of ideas and are just reprinting cards with powercreep.  Warlock can literally discover and play The Azerite Snake to be played on curve.  I'm not saying that it's very likely or you would ever want to do that, but it just shouldn't be possible. Such a swingy card should be more akin to a quest reward or 8+ mana card.

The fact it's a minion makes replaying it more than once very likely, and at worst we have a 10 mana, 2-card combo that deals 20 damage and heals 20 health. 

The discrepancy between the classess is going to be more pronounced than ever.  I'm also very cynical about the current approach of "release stuff that's obviously very overpowered" only to nerf it 2 weeks later after everyone has suffered from a shit meta for 2 weeks.  I would say that "maybe the devs have more data than us" but history tells us that this is not the case and the obviously overpowered cards are, in fact, overpowered.

I cant decide if this is good or not, but I'm glad it's not another obvious card to support a "face-is-the-place" style hunter deck.