Hearthstone - Blizzard's F2P Digital Card Game

I’m still bummed I missed his promo. I would have bought that. I don’t care for either of the other mages really.

Blizzard will be revealing the next expansion or adventure in one hour’s time (11pm PDT 7/28) on their Twitch channel: playhearthstone.

In the days leading up to this announcement they’ve been hyping some sort of Party theme on Twitter, and fan rumors and speculation are focused on on some WoW dungeon called Karazhan. I’ve never heard of the place, but WoW veterans seem excited over the prospect.

Anyway, when there’s a trailer up it’ll be posted to this thread, along with relevant details like new game mechanics/cards and keywords.

Okay, so the next adventure comes out on August 11 and is called “One Night in Karazhan.” I don’t know anything about this raid from WoW, but this Hearthstone adventure is mainly focused on some party a mage named Medivh is throwing. At some point before the party starts Medivh goes missing (in the free prologue all players will have access to), and it’s up to the player to do all the missions and figure out what’s going on. There will be 13 boss battles, and the adventure will add 45 new cards to the library. It’s $20 if you decide to purchase all at once, or you can spend $6.99 or 700 gold per wing to unlock individually.

They did reveal a handful of cards, and while there aren’t any new keywords mention so far, some of these cards have pretty interesting effects for combo decks.

There’s a thread on reddit that details all known information so far. You can read it here.

The official site can be visited here, but as of this post the adventure can’t be pre-ordered just yet. Those who do pre-order will get a new cardpack with an animated disco ball on the back.

Here’s a few of the cards revealed so far. There are a few more listed in the Reddit thread linked above:
1, 2, 3, 4.

There’s also a release trailer and gameplay video of one boss battle you can see below:


Bleh, once again mages get a common spell that’ll wreck face in arena. For 7 mana, deal 5 damage and summon a random 5 drop. I really wish they’d give the classes that are dominating arena worse commons.

Oh well, maybe it won’t be that bad, just have to draft nothing but 6 health creatures.

It’s been a long time, but I believe Karazhan was the dungeon I most enjoyed in WoW (though I didn’t play after the 2nd expansion). Maybe I’ll have a fond memory or two when I see all the cards.

Kara was the first 10 man raid and was introduced during the Burning Crusade expansion. Such an excellent raid with a great variety of encounters. Plus Kara is featured in the new Warcraft movie so folks who saw that will have an idea about what it is too.

It’s especially annoying because this is an adventure set where card rarity has zero impact on actual rarity. They could have made this card an epic just to keep the arena mage in check (where it’s the best class for the hero power alone, not even accounting fo the incredible cards every set), it would have made no difference in the game whatsoever other than arena. Instead, due to the higher chance to draft new set cards, we’ll see the majority of arena mages getting this excellent card.

One effect of making adventure cards common over epic is that players won’t be able to disenchant them for 100 dust each once they move to Wild in 2018 (and as commons, they’ll only cost 40 dust for F2P Wild players to make in the future). And I wouldn’t put it past them to assign rarities to adventure cards with dust cost/benefit as a priority over perceived arena balance.

They’re going to put a particular distribution of each rarity in an adventure anyway, though. There will be epics, legendaries, and rares - the distribution only really affects the arena. I will say that this particular card may be a special case because it’s one that you get as a reward for the free thing. Apparently they want everyone to have this card, and perhaps don’t want them to be able to get a ton of dust from disenchanting a free card.

I think the true reason this card is a common is because they want to maintain a system where straightforward cards are common and weirderr more complicated cards are at least epic. Even though it doesn’t matter in this case and probably is only going to help the mage dominate arena.

Yea. And based on past adventures (not expansions), other than legendary, a decided card rarity seems little more that wholly arbitrary.

Man, after months and months of frustration I finally clawed my way back to Rank 10. Funnily enough I did it not with the Cydonia dragon warrior I’ve been playing this month but with a brief winstreak on my Yogg and Load Hunter, which I dusted off for a spell quest. By far my favorite deck to play, but not exactly consistent.

When people on reddit etc. casually talk about how easy it is to get to rank 5, I have no idea WTF they’re talking about…

Being a Priest player I sure hope we get some help.

I think this was discussed up-thread but this is the only thing I buy yearly for Hearthstone. Once the adventure is about 1/2 way released I will start saving and should have enough for over 100 packs when the next full expansion is released.

No comments on this week’s tavern brawl?

It’s an adventure - like PvE fight where you fight Stormwind, which gradually increases in strength. At the end you get minions killed/turns spent/damage done metrics, which I guess you can try to beat your record, but there doesn’t seem to be any structure to record that, so it seems kind of half baked.

It’s kind of fun though.

I fucking hate it.

I was totally confused as I played it, unclear on what was a ‘win’ condition (i.e. what would get me my card pack). I guess the purpose of the whole increasing-health-bar thing is so that it acts as a score counter for you to gauge your progress. I have no idea if there is a threshold of damage below which you don’t get your card pack.

It was sort of interesting, and I could see people crafting decks to do a lot of damage etc., but for my part I just grabbed my card pack and ran – as I do with most tavern brawls. Points for creativity, I guess, but presentation/explanation could have been better.

I thought this brawl was really terrible. The only thing it’s good for is building a deck that kills itself quickly and then lining up the 5 win quests.

It’s a brawl that’s lacking in fun and bursting with gold.

I was away when this brawl started and only got back on its last day. I was able to get my pack and do a few quests, but wasn’t able to farm the dailies. Oh well.

However, it seemed interesting if you really wanted to puzzle out how to do the most damage. Kripparian did a billion and a half damage. (Spoiler alert: It involves a priest, Divine Spirit, Inner Fire and Lorewalker Cho.)

Tomorrow is Karazhan release day. New adventure, new cards. It’s hard to judge how the new cards are going to impact the current meta. Mostly, I’m disappointed in the priest cards, since priest desperately need help to be viable in high-ranking constructed play. Current meta focuses on destroying cards as soon as they hit the table, while priest needs cards to stay on the board. The Onyx Bishop might help with that a little, but I just don’t see it as being a game changer for them.

Either way, looking forward to the new cards. I think we’ll see some fun experiments this weekend.

Screw priests. I’ve seen people losing their minds over Purify and the state of the class in the last month or so, and all I’ve done is chuckle at their collective wailing. Priest is the most toxic class in the game, and tends to find its target market with the biggest girefers and trolls.

In a perfect world Blizzard would remove the class and replace it with another one. This is the most reasonable opinion I can share about them on a public forum.

The outcry has been so severe that Ben Brode (producer) even made a video apologizing about not being up to speed with Reddit’s growing negative (meme-)opinion of the class, and stated that had they known how these particular players felt maybe they would have offered different cards for them in this expansion. Thing is, Blizzard knew exactly what it was doing, because they know how “unfun” (their words) it is to play against specific priest core cards. And I agree with them.

Screw Priest. Never liked playing against them, probably never will. Aside from daily quests, now days I tend to only play them when I’m in the mood to annoy someone on my friends list.

Eh, I think the blowup about Purify is overblown (but accurate, in some cases). The class has the lowest play-rate and win-rate in constructed right now. The fact that Blizzard doesn’t seem to know that is weird.

For me, the problem with priest is their play style in general. Low attack, high health minions along with an ability to heal those minions. The game just has too much hard removal that ignores health. Priest can win, they are just easily countered by most decks.

Today in “Praise Yogg” moments…

I was playing a tempo mage against an Anyfin paladin. I’m biding time with Iceblock up, not really having a great plan. He casts Anyfin and swamps me, triggering my Iceblock. I flamestrike all the murlocs but I only have 1 health left. Next turn, he luckily has no burst, and just plays a token soldier.

Following turn, I drop Yogg, assuming I’m a dead man – my opponent’s at almost full health and even if Yogg doesn’t kill me, he’ll probably have something to do the job with in the next turn or two.

After a few useless/random spells, Yogg casts Anyfin Can Happen! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA