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    Home Unlabelled Hearthstone PullsDay Thursday: Post Your Popped Packs

    Hearthstone PullsDay Thursday: Post Your Popped Packs

    November 20, 2019

    Hearthstone PullsDay Thursday: Post Your Popped Packs

    PullsDay Thursday: Post Your Popped Packs

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 04:07 PM PST

    Greetings Travellers,

    This is a new weekly thread to showcase your crazy or unlucky pack openings, for F2P players and whales alike!

    The goal of this thread is to draw discussion around pack openings into a centralized post every week, so that players have a dedicated place to share their pulls. Whether you got a sweet Tavern Brawl reward or Arena chest, we want to see it! You can also post in /r/HSPulls.

    Pack Openings are still relegated to a megathread on the first day of a new expansion

    Note: I am a bot. Questions or feedback regarding this thread? Message the moderators.

    submitted by /u/AutoModerator
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    Name a more Iconic trio, I'll wait :)

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 10:16 AM PST

    Lowest Battlegrounds MMR? Seems to stop at this spot

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 04:28 AM PST

    Wild needs to be fixed

    Posted: 19 Nov 2019 10:38 PM PST

    Wild has been my primary game mode for over a year. I've had success on ladder, written for sites such as Vicious Syndicate and Hearthstone Top Decks, and stream regularly. There are lots of aspects of Wild and the surrounding community surrounding that I love.

    Which is why it really pisses me off that the format has been left to rot.

    The Hearthstone team has faced plenty of criticism recently due to their complete inaction in balancing Standard. Shaman makes up close to 40% of ladder at higher ranks and the Evolve-interactions make for an incredibly unpleasant playing experience.

    This month will be the first month since legend ladder got released im not hitting legend - the current state of the game is literally unplayable. Dont get how anyone can say it's even close to fine.

    As somebody who plays this game more than almost anyone else consistently for years on end, I can't remember the last time I ever wanted to just turn it off as often. It makes me not want to play.

    after 5ish years of playing and streaming hearthstone this past few weeks is the first time i've truly felt burnt out on the game. it's a weird thing to feel so disillusioned with the game that's given me so much over the years. hope this feeling changes soon.

    This isn't simply nit-picking long-term players who are feeling particularly disillusioned. The most recent VS Data Reaper Report had their lowest number of recorded games (excluding the first couple reports they made). The response from Blizzard has mostly been variations of "we need to collect more data" or "take a break".

    However, as depressing as this has been it does serve as a reminder. Evolve will be rotating back out of Standard soon. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for Wild. The issues plaguing the format are systematic and there has been basically zero acknowledgement publicly from Blizzard, let alone solutions.

    Legend Queue Times

    At the time of writing this there are only 100 players in Wild legend on the Asia server. There are 150 on the Americas server. It's the 20th of November. Even this far into the month Wild queue times can easily eclipse 10 minutes.

    less than 150 people on NA wild legend and 8 min que times. I can understand why people do not want to hit legend now.

    update 9-18 min

    finally got a game at 11 min

    Personally, as someone who wants to stream the game this puts me in an awkward position. It's obviously not realistic for me to stream when games are over in a couple minutes and queue times eclipse 10 minutes regularly. What should I do?

    Well it's simple. I just intentionally lose dozens upon dozens upon dozens of games to avoid hitting legend.

    https://clips.twitch.tv/ArtisticOnerousTildeDancingBaby

    This isn't something that I want to be doing. I would love to be able to stream the game and try to win and do my best to hit high ranks. But it's simply not a realistic option. The vast majority of Wild streamers have said the words "I don't want to hit early legend", often avoiding legend entirely or immediately switching servers and no longer climbing once legend has been reached.

    Now this isn't an issue exclusive to players looking to stream the game. Any player who achieves the mark of hitting legend is rewarded with Queue Simulator 2019.

    Wild ladder needs to be reworked. Perhaps players should be able to more easily queue into non-legends (and MMR gains and losses should be adjusted so players aren't punished for playing). Perhaps reset could occur every two months rather than one, to increase the size of the legend player base over time. The specific fix doesn't matter, the point is any fix is needed and there are seemingly obvious solutions.

    Players being heavily incentived to intentionally do worse is an absolute joke.

    Design and Balancing

    Wild is the format where all the cards are available. It feels a little silly having to state that, yet also necessary, as there seems to be some confusion. Wild is not a format where cards and decks shouldn't be regularly balanced. Where design mistakes shouldn't be fixed. It isn't a format where Barnes should be allowed to poison the game for years. Nor is it a place where easy-to-execute OTKs in the early turns should be a regular occurrence.

    It's just the format where we can play with the sets that rotated out of Standard.

    For some reason Blizzard has shown a complete disinterest towards balancing or designing around the Wild format. SN1P-SN4P Warlock's worst matchup at higher ranks is the mirror. Turn 5 OTKs are a regular occurrence. Below legend, Secret Mage makes up close to 20% of games and Eater of Secrets sees play in close to 20% of decks.

    It's been this way since August because Wild was not given any sort of event or change or balance update.

    The problem though isn't about SN1P SN4P Warlock or Secret Mage today, or Barnes previously, or whatever problem is next. It's not deck specific, it's systematic. The Hearthstone team has shown they are clearly very reluctant to balance the format and it will continue to be this way moving forward.

    Why they believe this is the best course of action I have no idea. Design mistakes can happen in either format, they should be fixed. Decks can be broken in either format, they should be fixed.

    Wild is just a format where more cards are available. There is no reason why this means the best course of action is to put your head in the sand, ignore issues, and sell the format as "broken vs. broken hehe". It's negligence.

    I really like Wild. I just wish some of these core issues were fixed and there was even a hint of regular communication between the team and the Wild playerbase.

    Twitter: https://twitter.com/corbettgames

    Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/corbettgames

    submitted by /u/corbettgames
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    Animation Time needs to be reduced at least in Battlegrounds. Its really frustrating to play

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 12:11 AM PST

    Hearthstone had a problem with animation times for a while, but in normal game formats it never was that apparent. With Battlegrounds and classes like Dancing Deryl, you have to make so many plays that the animation times eats up your turn.

    Of course this would only fuel the Snip Snap situation in Wild if the animation times is reduced (snip snap needs a different treatment anyways). But maybe they can reduce it for Battlegrounds only. It doesnt matter for the opponent to see the animation to understand what happened here. New Players dont need to see what the opponent does when buffing its minions. And for the player itself, he knows what he is doing, so there is no real need to see it in an animation.

    Also, one thing id like to get off of my chest is, that in normal HS you can start an action and when right clicking, it will drop the card back into your hand and stop the play. But in Battlegrounds, hovering over Bob to sell a minion and then right clicking, it will sell the card instead of stopping the action. I know this problem is completely in my side and I can addapt, but it was very unintuitive when i started playing in the battlegrounds.

    submitted by /u/RDeschain1
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    22 hours from now, the reveals begin! Which one you're most excited for?

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 10:00 AM PST

    Tavern Brawl this week is... "Shake, Deathrattle and Roll!"

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 09:13 AM PST

    Description: "There's a whole lot of rattlin' going on! Choose a class and get a random deck. Every minion you play will get a copy of a random minion's Deathrattle effect!"

    Format: Prebuilt / pick a class

    Reward: 1 Classic pack for your first win

    History: This is the first time we've seen this Brawl. Though the Deathrattle theme reminds me somewhat of the Double Deathrattler Battler, where every DR minion's effect triggered twice.

    Enjoy!

    EDIT TO ADD for peeps Googling this thread in the future -- this TB went live on Wed., Nov. 20, 2019

    submitted by /u/AintEverLucky
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    Bob New Champion

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 08:59 AM PST

    Ah yes my favorite card, L̸͔͓̞͊̐ả̴̧̝͑̆v̴͈̥̥͊̄ă̸̟̭̻̌͠ ̷̗̬̤̅B̶̢̝̾ų̵̛̒͗r̷̖̟̺͐̚̚s̷͙̳͓̾̈́́t̵̜̪͚́

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 02:01 PM PST

    Mobile is fiiiine

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 03:08 AM PST

    I had all of those 4 sitting in my hand waiting for the upgrade for 5 Turns straight... 50g reroll and not one of them

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 06:22 AM PST

    "If Everything is Broken, Nothing is broken" is Wrong

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 02:52 PM PST

    Hey all, J_Alexander_HS back again today to talk about a bit of design/balance philosophy regarding "broken" and broken cards. It's an important matter to understand if you want to appreciate how Blizzard is designing Hearthstone cards, as this is part of their explicit plan (at least to the extent we are made aware of their plans). Understanding this gives insight into why the game looks as it did and as it will in the future.

    In a recent interview, Iksar shared the following tidbit of design insight:

    I like Nozdormu and Deathwing for different reasons. One thing that's fun is the reaction that you hear when people see a new card. Sometimes someone will look at a card and say, "I don't think you should do this." And that's kind of the reaction that we're looking for. You shouldn't look at a set of cards and say, "Wow, this is the most well-balanced set of cards we've ever seen." You want to feel like there's cool stuff that's going on that feels broken

    The takeaway message is that the team appears to want to make cards with big, flashy, and powerful effects because those interest players more than a deliberately-balanced set. There are several pros and cons to consider to this flavor of design

    The first big pro is that powerful effects help make sets not flop. An under-powered set is basically a set that doesn't exist because players want to win and will only tend to use the cards that help them do that. If cards in a set don't help players win, relative to what is currently on offer, they won't be used. This doesn't move packs and it doesn't add variety to the player experience. Without power, cards are non-existent to boring.

    Another pro is that these big effects can create new meta experiences and decks, rather than simply slotting into existing strategies and lists. Building on the previous point, a set that has cards which do see play (because they're good) but don't really change the meta (because they only fit into existing decks) also risks boring your players. They've already been playing with those decks for 4 months (or longer), and the process of simply refining decks doesn't provide them much value to mine from the new set. Their gains from the new cards won't feel impactful.

    Control Warrior, for instance, got a big boost from Boomsday, but ever since then the play patterns of the deck haven't really been changing in what feel like meaningful ways to me. While the deck got a bit better or worse over time, it didn't fundamentally change the way it played or was built (for example, changing Commander for Mummy doesn't help the deck feel "new" in the same way something like a more aggressive build of the deck might).

    While there are pros to this idea of powerful effects, there are cons to this design philosophy as well. The first is the clear power-creep problem: if you're making cards which huge effects, your next set will need to include even huger effects to get people to pay attention to it (or at least huge in different domains). This has the downside of making previous cards less useful or interesting, reducing the effective size of the card pool (because if the old cards are too weak now, it's like they don't even exist), while also risking changing how games play out (a point we'll return to shortly). The real risk, however, is in breaking the game.

    There are cards with big powerful-looking effects, but they end up just being powerful in theory. Maybe those cards inspire you to try and break them, but there are practical limitations that hold them back. These are the "broken" cards. The new Nozdormu might be an example of that: ramping both players to 10-mana as early as turn 3 can really change the landscape of games, but perhaps it's simply too much of a downside to give your opponent that mana first for whatever reason. This is the ideal case for these kinds of cards: they look more powerful than they end up being. In other words, they're "broken". This inspired interest but doesn't ruin the gameplay experience.

    Then there is the case where they actually do break the game. When you try to make a bunch of "broken" effects, it's likely that one or more will be broken. They don't just look powerful; they are powerful in a way that very few other things (if any) can challenge them. These broken cards warp the meta around themselves, severely limiting what people can explore, play, and have fun with because – again – people tend to derive pleasure from winning. If there's only one real way to win the game, the period of exploration after a new set releases rapidly declines and the meta gets stagnant and stale.

    This brings us to the main point I wanted to highlight today; something that people say which isn't entirely true.

    If EVERYTHING is broken, NOTHING is broken

    I'm sure you've heard that before; some of you might have even said it. The idea is that if all classes have access to legitimately broken mechanics, maybe we can have our cake and eat it too. We get our interest-inspiring cards that are powerful and beg to be explored – generating player interest – but because they're all powerful, the meta doesn't' stagnate on a single deck and players have more room to play the game the way they want.

    The issues with that are as follows:

    Everything is never broken

    Much as there's a difference between "broken" and broken, there's also "everything" and everything. If every class had two broken strategies, that would be pretty good variety. Let's say Warrior had Control and Aggro decks that were broken. So, if you want to play Warrior, you can pick deck A or B and be successful. That's fine and all, but if those two strategies mean you cannot effectively explore anything but A and B with even a decent measure of success (say, Midrange, Combo, Bomb, etc) because those other things aren't broken, that can leave players feeling too constrained and frustrated at times. That's not much of a problem if, say, every class had two successful decks that were in a constant state of flux each expansion (so next release, instead of Control and Aggro the two broken decks were Bomb and Combo). However, it's easy to miss on power level on a practical level and fail to achieve that goal. Maybe some classes only have 1 broken deck; maybe they have none and so don't get to see play; maybe they have one or two broken strategies, but they remain static from expansion to expansion because the new strategies aren't competing; maybe things are bad for three classes while the other six have a variety of broken strategies.

    If lots of things are broken, then, you may have dug yourself into a design hole where you can't effectively balance things between or within classes. For instance, right now, Shaman is broken. It's THE broken thing. When there's a single front runner in the balance department, it can effectively be targeted for nerfs because you only need to change IT. But what if 10 things are broken? Now you can't address just one of them because knocking that one out just leaves you with a meta of 9 broken things instead. All that change would accomplish would be a decrease in variety while not giving players room to explore other, new ideas that are still oppressed by the other 9 broken things.

    Indeed, that was the situation we ended up in after Knights of the Frozen Throne and Kobolds and Catacombs. The cards of the time were so massively broken (like Skull, Keleseth, Deathknights, Cube, and so on) that the next year of releases almost didn't impact the game at all. As the newer cards were relatively weaker, there wasn't a point in exploring new ideas and the meta stagnated badly. However, the balance team wasn't about to jump in and nerf something like 20-30 cards – many of which were legendary – to give these new expansions room to breathe. There were simply too many problems to address, so none got addressed.

    Everything can't be broken each expansion as a matter of practice. Instead, "everything" can be broken (read: a bunch of stuff), but that's not great either because…

    Even if everything was broken, it's still broken

    Decks aren't broken: specific interactions and cards within them are. Let's take the old Cubelock as an example: Skull was one of the most broken cards in the deck because of how it interacted with Voidlords and Doomguards, which then interacted with Cubes, Gul'dan, and the like. Cheating out tons of stats with no downside wins games.

    So what happens in the mirror match? In theory, both decks are broken so nothing is broken there…except when one deck does the broken thing while the other deck doesn't. That is, if one Warlock has Skull in the opening hand with demons while the other Warlock has the demons but bottom-decked the skull, the former player is going to be a massive favorite. One player does the broken thing while the other doesn't, and that turns games into non-games. The same could be said about a match where one deck played Keleseth one turn 1 while the other didn't do that broken thing and lost without much say in the matter.

    That's the major issue with the philosophy that if everything is broken, nothing is. That might be a statement about averages, but averages can hide bad game experiences. A meta can be balanced on the surface (every class/deck averages a 50% win rate) while also being highly polarized within matches such that almost no game involves meaningful choices. An extreme rock-paper-scissors meta. It's balanced, but it's not fun.

    As games tend to be at their best when resources matter, a meta where everything is broken isn't necessarily one where the game is better. It might not even be one where the game is good.

    So, in theory, the "if everything is broken nothing is" philosophy works, provided (a) all classes have broken things, (b) what things are broken regularly changes, and (c) within games, access to these broken tools even out instead of creating deep polarization. In practice it's easy to miss on one or more of them, as we have seen happen time and again. That might be an OK world to live in, provided balance adjustments were frequent and numerous enough to iron out these issues, but when "everything" is broken the problems may become too widespread to be worth the effort to fix.

    While solutions to the matter are no doubt tricky (balance enough but not too much, make cards powerful but not too powerful, find ways to ensure a shifting meta, etc), they are worth being mindful of to both understand the design of cards and complain about them properly.

    submitted by /u/Popsychblog
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    Sindragosa working out well for me lads ��

    Posted: 19 Nov 2019 06:33 PM PST

    After 5 years, how do we still have a broken search bar?

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 11:15 AM PST

    This will either go really good or really bad (turn 1)

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 12:55 PM PST

    Savjz Sells Brann Because of Bug

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 02:30 PM PST

    I like cats

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 02:27 PM PST

    How to beat the dalaran exspansion

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 03:59 PM PST

    No compensations for weeks of bugs that completely affected the game. Compensations are for cases like that one.

    Posted: 19 Nov 2019 07:57 PM PST

    What we all know. And what we have demanded little. The game suffered from many bugs regarding games and quests, mainly arena players were greatly affected by the bugs and crashes. I'm quite dissapointed Blizzard has given compensations in the past but this time they did nothing when the game was nearly unplayable for some.

    submitted by /u/PushEmma
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    Inner Rage-naros

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 06:55 AM PST

    Hmmm something doesn't seem right

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 08:50 AM PST

    The new Tavern Brawl reveals how flawed the Enchantment descriptions are.

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 01:02 PM PST

    When you hover your curser over a minion it tells you helpful things like

    "Copied Deathrattle from anorther card." Which one? Don't ask me.

    It's not even consistent, because sometimes it says "Copied Deathrattle from Voodoo Doll". But if you didn't remember it from when the opponent played the card (it shortly flashes the Deathrattle gained) and don't know all Deathrattles in the game by heart, you're out of luck.

    I get that this is a special mode for only a week and not worth to do much extra coding but the Enchantments and status effect descriptions are notorious for being incomplete in the other game modes too.

    submitted by /u/Hutzlipuz
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    [BR] Always start with a freeze on the turns you plan to dance with Deryl ...

    Posted: 20 Nov 2019 04:11 AM PST

    ... in case animations skew you & you don't get to buy or freeze the minion you just buffed the hell out of! Sometimes, your freeze input will not go through if you press it last, after you've just sold some minions, because hats are still going at the end of the rope. Actions can't be queued in BR like in Play Mode. Animations from previous actions need to complete for you to be able to perform another one.

    Also, consider board space for tokens & try to not buff stuff you don't need. Your buying decisions should influence where the buffs go, not the other way around. That means buying the crap before selling anything, to only buff stuff you plan to keep on the board for a long time (let's call that 'isolation').

    Try to roughly plan those dancing turns in the tavern before. Some quick maths you can do on the turn before:

    - if you plan on isolating one or two minions for buffs you need to be able to buy all the others before selling anything

    - [next turn's gold] + [what you can sell] = [your next turn's total buying power]. This can be approximated enough for you to decide where that coin will go (leveling vs buffing vs buying). Then, workout a sequence in which you're not wasting gold at the end of the turn.

    - [next turn's leftover gold after dancing] = [next turn's gold] - [isolation buys] + [sells]. This should allow you to buy one/two buffed minions, or level the tavern.

    - if you decide to leave a frozen buffed minion in the tavern, try to decide before next tavern if you're buying it then or continue to buff it, then plan accordingly.

    Have fun dancing with Deryl & may the god of APM be with you! :b

    submitted by /u/Grig_
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    I guess the Hearthstone tavern has a Gulag

    Posted: 19 Nov 2019 07:57 PM PST
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