Hearthstone

I use him in my mage secrets deck. I agree it's all about bringing him out at the right time, there have been a few cases where I still had him in hand for multiple turns because there was never an ideal situation to bring him out that utilizes his potential. If a belcher is already on the board, it's usually GG assuming the opponent has minions on the board to attack with.

Barraco Bisi_sl said:

Anything that combines Stalagg, Feugen, or Cairne with KT is scary as fuck.

I just noticed the Cairne card note the other day.

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Cairne also says something different when you play him against a warrior, similar to how Illidan says something different when you play him against a druid.

Late to the party, but making the Buzzard 3/2 is fucking retarded. It is like Blizz doesn't even play their own damn game. Even 2/3 would have been better, but 5 mana for 2 health is pants-on-head levels of stupidity.

EDIT - They are even more stupid than I thought. From what I can see, there are exactly two 5 cost minions in existence with less than 4 health. One is Faceless with a base health of 3 but will never matter and the other is Stormpike Commando which is a neutral common that is unplayable in constructed and a last resort pick in arena. At 5 mana it should be at least 2/3 but probably even 3/3.

They are just nerfing it for Blizzcon, they said they will revisit it later.

Man0warr_sl said:

They are just nerfing it for Blizzcon, they said they will revisit it later.

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So they just want to fuck Hunters for the World Championships?

Maximum retardation confirmed.

LiquidDeath_sl said:

Late to the party, but making the Buzzard 3/2 is fucking retarded. It is like Blizz doesn't even play their own damn game. Even 2/3 would have been better, but 5 mana for 2 health is pants-on-head levels of stupidity.

EDIT - They are even more stupid than I thought. From what I can see, there are exactly two 5 cost minions in existence with less than 4 health. One is Faceless with a base health of 3 but will never matter and the other is Stormpike Commando which is a neutral common that is unplayable in constructed and a last resort pick in arena. At 5 mana it should be at least 2/3 but probably even 3/3.

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You sound like you really know what you're talking about. Please tell me more.

Gavinmad_sl said:

Cairne also says something different when you play him against a warrior, similar to how Illidan says something different when you play him against a druid.

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"The eyes of the Earth Mother are upon you."
vs
"Garrosh! You are unfit to rule the Horde!"

I love little easter eggs like that.

Barraco Bisi_sl said:

Its a terrible and lazy nerf. OTOH I hate hunters so much that I welcome the shitnerf.

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One of my friends has never usually been below rank 9 and is now about to hit legend with a Deathrattle hunter that he started ranking up with yesterday

Its a terrible game, and it gets worse per patch. I got my fun out of it for a year, so I guess it was worth it.

And the Blizzard game circle of life is complete. Show's over boys, Column says its horrible.

Wizards could learn a few things from Blizzard on UI design and software polish, though. Hearthstone nails it in both those points - it's seriously pushing people away from digital Magic because how bad Hasbro has managed Wizard's digital content (both website and Magic Online). Magic mechanically is better in every way but they are losing tons and tons of money and mindshare to Hearthstone.

Two of their Hall of Famers and biggest stars - Brian Kibler and Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa - have started streaming Hearthstone everyday and playing in invitational tournaments since Magic Online v4 became required. They only use it as a preparation tool for tournaments at this point, no one uses it casually anymore because it's so buggy and an awful user experience.

The Master_sl said:

After Hunter fades out the new Mage decks will actually become more common and, for the most part, they are doing really well against the current Priest decks. It'll be interesting to see how that shakes out.

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I agree with this, the only thing that was holding them back was flair destroying them. So without hunters expect to see the rise of the mages again

Man0warr_sl said:

Wizards could learn a few things from Blizzard on UI design and software polish, though. Hearthstone nails it in both those points - it's seriously pushing people away from digital Magic because how bad Hasbro has managed Wizard's digital content (both website and Magic Online). Magic mechanically is better in every way but they are losing tons and tons of money and mindshare to Hearthstone.

Two of their Hall of Famers and biggest stars - Brian Kibler and Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa - have started streaming Hearthstone everyday and playing in invitational tournaments since Magic Online v4 became required. They only use it as a preparation tool for tournaments at this point, no one uses it casually anymore because it's so buggy and an awful user experience.

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So obviously by my above comments, Hearthstone is no longer scratching the itch. So I've been learning the digital version of Magic, and it seems very cool, but that interface is god awful.

Its the only thing holding me back from dumping Hearthstone completely, and just playing Magic.

Yeah it's crazy that a company like Hasbro won't hire a competent software studio to make their game client - it's all done by foreign contractors supposedly.

The new version (v4) is worse than the last one, and the last one was BAD.

It has to be on purpose at this point. They just don't want a top notch digital product for any of their licenses. The 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons was supposed to launch with a digital table and everything necessary to run campaigns online and that never, ever showed up. Someone high up at that company has to feel that if they invest in digital that it will do long term damage to physical sales.

Man0warr_sl said:

Wizards could learn a few things from Blizzard on UI design and software polish, though. Hearthstone nails it in both those points - it's seriously pushing people away from digital Magic because how bad Hasbro has managed Wizard's digital content (both website and Magic Online). Magic mechanically is better in every way but they are losing tons and tons of money and mindshare to Hearthstone.

Two of their Hall of Famers and biggest stars - Brian Kibler and Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa - have started streaming Hearthstone everyday and playing in invitational tournaments since Magic Online v4 became required. They only use it as a preparation tool for tournaments at this point, no one uses it casually anymore because it's so buggy and an awful user experience.

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Blizzard made the rules fit the platform, porting Magic to computer is fairly difficult thanks to the stack and phases of the turn. You also have to wait for your opponent with every action, which makes the experience much worse. In Hearthstone you just queue up all your actions and hit end turn. One the other hand, everybody who ever looked at Magic thought "why can't I play this online." Fuck, make it lag behind card releases or something, but make it usable and maybe cheaper and watch the money roll in. Even if they made standalone releases from every block ala DotP with unlimited deckbuilding instead of the crippled versions they keep releasing, they would be just raking it in.

Deathrattle priest with undertaker/undertaker/lepper gnome/deathlord start is fun

Magic Online is already behind on card expansions - usually takes like a month I think before they get them online.

Magic is a much more complicated game with an order of magnitude more cards in its library (and thus more interactions that must be coded) - but that part of it mostly works on Magic Online. The big issues are user interface design and polish - this is shit you hire someone who has expert knowledge in. Designing user interfaces is a full time job now.