Lurker > metroid composite

New York City, Portland, and Seattle just got defunded by the federal government.

https://twitter.com/stevennelson10/status/1307984849521831937

I assume this means that these three juristictions can stop paying federal taxes yes? Because the federal government is not doing its job within these jurisdictions.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Mmm...I am growing somewhat tempted to craft Lord Barov. Just...keeps showing up in wild decklists.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Compilation of wrong predictions about scholomance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JIkGvKxbgE

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

KamikazePotato posted...

Time to leave the US (not joking about this)

Canada has somewhat recently loosened its immigration restrictions (because the country has too many baby boomers, so it needs more not-retired people).

I mean, not literally today, of course, since Canada's border is still closed to people coming from the US since the US is one of the most dangerous countries when it comes to Covid. But once Covid dies down.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Bloodychess posted...

Nah, it's over. Biden picking his own SCOTUS member was one his strongest selling points.

Ignorant masses will still think Biden is somehow an upgrade, but we're f***ed.

If there's foul play involved, Biden can just add supreme court justices; it's been done before, and political support for such a move would rise if there was perceived unfairness.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Jakyl25 posted...

Theres gonna have to be a well funded network of people willing to help those seeking abortion to make the necessary travel

I do actually think that would materialize

It's also just a drug which can be made in your kitchen; instructions are available online.

That said, in states where this has come up, if you take your own abortion drug, and then there are complications and you go to the hospital, you can be thrown in prison.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Corrik7 posted...

If it was after he lost the election, he would be a lame duck as Obama was. If it is before the election, he is not a lame duck like Obama was.

Lame duck literally just means your replacement has already been elected.

In March 2016, Obama's replacement had not been elected. Hell, both primaries were still going on.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

DoomTheGyarados posted...

Mitch has, to his credit, done his job

Going to disagree there. If he did his job, he would have brought forward a vote on Merrick Gariland.

He didn't do his job.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

I eagerly await Mitch McConnel pronouncing that, much like Merrick Garliand who was "too close to an election" when he was nominated almost a year before the election, that Trump can't nominate anyone because it's like 40 days before the election.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

So someone made a post about playing Dinomancy Quest Hunter on the Wild Hearthstone subreddit, and it...wasn't sarcasm.

(Uses the old quest with Queen Carnassa, which produces beasts for Dinomancy, and then for the second copy of Dinomancy in their deck, runs Grizzled Wizard to delete their opponent's hero power).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

red sox 777 posted...

Yes, so if you exclude all the blue states, we should be doing a fair amount better than Brazil, Italy, and Spain.

Some red states are doing worse than Brazil Italy and Spain. Ex:

Louisiana: 1,140 deaths per million

Misssissippi: 920 deaths per million

Arizona: 730 deaths per million

Others are in a similar ballpark, like Georgia Florida, and South Carolina all around 600 deaths per million.

Indiana, Texas, Alabama, are a little better but not far behind around 500 deaths per million.

So from what I'm seeing the entire deep south is....roughly on par with Spain/Italy/Brazil.

Red states in other regions like Appalachia on the whole is a little better (Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma etc) around 300 deaths per million.

And then Mountain Time states like Montana, Wyoming, and Utah are doing quite well (like...100 deaths per million)...except Arizona which, as mentioned above is one of the states doing worse than Brazil/Italy/Spain.

That said, the low population states don't actually contribute that much to the total (either in their population or in their number of deaths) so I think the red state total will be mostly dictated by the south

Best estimates...

Blue states not including NYC: 460 deaths per million
Red states not including NYC: 510 deaths per million
States containing NYC (NY/NJ/CT): 1710 deaths per million

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

red sox 777 posted...

Did he claim to be doing better than Canada? I bet the US looks good if you compare with Italy, Spain, Iran, and Brazil.

Hmmm...

USA: 597 deaths per million

Brazil: 635 deaths per million

Italy: 589 deaths per million

Spain: 642 deaths per million

Honestly, these are all about the same. Like...okay, maybe Brazil has 6% more deaths per million than the US, but it's the same ballpark.

Now to compare these to a few other countries just for fun

Germany: 113 deaths per million

Japan: 11 deaths per million

South Korea: 7 deaths per million

By the way, South Korea had a massive outbreak before the virus was even confirmed in the US--I remember watching youtube videos from Starcraft casters talking about mandatory mask rules being put in place in South Korea and thinking "huh, that's weird, but this will probably be like SARS so I won't need to worry about it in the US." 9 months later, South Korea has 367 deaths all-time, and 22,504 cases all-time. (In a country with 50 million people, whose biggest trading partner and closest friendly country is China. Which...yes, means that South Korea is utterly crushing Canada too at this point. From what I understand, South Korea got hit really hard by SARS, so they passed a bunch of laws in order to better handle the next pandemic, and it shows. I hope Canada uses them as a model).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

LordoftheMorons posted...

His claim that we'd be doing great if you ignore the blue states is certainly wrong, but NY/NJ/CT were really really bad (mostly because they were hit early on when we knew much less)

Yeah, death rate by state is...not going to tell you much about red vs blue states near as I can tell.

Like...the bottom 6 lowest death rate (per captia) states are (in order) Alaska, Wyoming, Hawaii, Vermont, Maine, Oregon. By my count, two red states and four blue states. The thing all these have in common is being relatively remote places. Not really anything to do with political leanings.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

LordoftheMorons posted...

While it's of course not surprising, I think we should take a step back and really appreciate how absolutely disgusting it is for the president of the united states to imply that deaths in "blue states" don't really count

lol

Texas and Florida both have more deaths than Canada (Canada having much higher population than either of them).

And even in red states with fewer total deaths than Canada like Georgia and Arizona, Louisiana, the population is massively smaller (those three states combined have less population than Canada, but almost double the deaths).

The main way removing the blue states changes the numbers is that it removes New York City (where yeah, things got bad). But like...California has more population than Texas, slightly more confirmed cases than Texas, and fewer deaths, even though California was one of the first places to be exposed to the virus.

So...yeah, he's just all-around wrong. Excluding blue states the US is still worse than Canada per population. And even comparing blue states to red states, in some case the blue states of comparable size and infection rates have much better survival numbers.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Corrik7 posted...

Obviously that is not an encouraging poll, but it is also like half composed of EU countries, including some countries voting for their own leaders.

Countries voting for their own leaders doesn't seem to have made too big of a difference.

One of Macron's lowest scores is from France (12% below the median). Johnson was only 3% above the median in the UK. Merkel gained a small boost from Germany (5% boost).

Though really, I don't have much of a reaction to those three. Merkel is more internationally trusted than Macron is more internationally trusted than Johnson--that's about what I would expect. Johnson being unpopular in the EU because of Brexit is also what I would expect (lol those 20s from Italy and Spain). No real surprises there.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

This poll result was so surprising

https://twitter.com/RobbieGramer/status/1306314149794910208

That I had to look it up myself, and yes, it's on pewResearch:

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/09/15/us-image-plummets-internationally-as-most-say-country-has-handled-coronavirus-badly/

Confidence in world leaders to do the right thing in global affairs. Countries polled, Japan, Australia, Canada, South Korea, and a bunch of European countries.

Merkel: 76%

Macron: 64%

Johnson: 48%

Putin: 23%

Xi: 19%

Trump: 16%

How do you lose a vote of confidence to Putin and Xi Jinping? They're so bad. o_o.

(Granted, the countries actually geographically close to China--Australia, South Korea, and Japan, all trust Trump more than Xi. So that's...something?)

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So apparently the attorney general was encouraging Sedition charges against protestors:

https://twitter.com/JamesVGrimaldi/status/1306290839946174469

Seems pretty obviously unconstitutional to me (1st amendment rights and whatnot).

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probably server side problems.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

DoomTheGyarados posted...

Plus every other developed country has better Healthcare tbqh.

And fewer mass shootings and political violence. (Obviously this is just the result of selective news coverage, but I've spoken to a few people living outside the US for whom the US is starting to sound like a war zone).

Still, there are definitely people who will go where they already have relatives, and go where they can get jobs in their field, and the US seems likely to still have plenty of both those things.

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RaidenGarai posted...

I envy you! I've only been to Canada once for a few hours, and it was like 25 years ago. The little bit that I saw was beautiful

It's beautiful, the healthcare is good, the politics are...not perfect, but a lot less polarized (almost no Canadian I know self-identifies with one party--most change their votes based on whichever party makes a better sales pitch that election).

But if you want to be in the top echelons of a field, most of the time historically you're looking at the US over Canada.

Like...my sister is a physicist, right now she's at the Princeton Physics institute (the one where Einstein used to hang out). The US...and specifically the west coast has Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and most of the top end game development jobs in North America (the game development jobs being the draw for me). I have to imagine people who are looking into acting would be drawn either to Hollywood for screen acting, or New York City for live theatre acting.

It's hard to imagine any of these institutions leaving for Canada. It's more that people who are able to move between countries are...(some of us) taking a break right now from the US in the hopes that the US stops fucking up.

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RaidenGarai posted...

A friend of mine just moved to Ireland last month, and she said that everybody there thinks the US is a joke now.

I mean...people in Europe and Canada making jokes about Americans goes back as far as I can remember.

But before people did it out of intimidation, out of not wanting to see their neighbours moving to the US. Because people did move to the US in relatively large numbers (I moved to the US from Canada, during George W Bush's presidency no less). In the 90s there was this serious fear that most smart Canadians were going to move to the US (and smart Canadians were moving to he US in large numbers at the time).

The feeling is different now. The people I know who move between both countries are mostly drifting in the other direction. People with dual citizenship who are now shopping for real estate in Canada. I'm spending an extended several month stay in Canada myself.

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Camden posted...

I've conceded in casual so many times just to finish quests that I can't remember the last time I played someone that wasn't running a deck of nothing but basic cards.

That's impressive, if it's for "play x games with class" quests, those don't actually complete unless you are 15 health or below when you concede, so unless you have dedicated self-damage decks half the time you're going to win before dropping below the 15 health threshold.


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UltimaterializerX posted...

https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/is83jk/fake_armor_bug_causes_player_to_miss_lethal_in/

Tournament match decided by a glitch!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHJAHAHA BLIZZARD IS GUTTER TRASH!!

I mean, it's bad obviously, they should fix the visual glitch.

Two things to note though.

1. Blizzard got lucky, and it didn't actually matter...this time (won the series anyway, despite losing one game to a glitch).
2. As long as you know about the glitch, you can play around it by writing down your opponent's real HP on a piece of paper. It is just a visual glitch after all, it doesn't actually give them more HP.

Still definitely bad, still something that definitely needs fixing, but not as bad as the initial Reddit drama made it sound.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

I've been not doing great in battlegrounds either. But both games I tried to play it recently I ended up on a mech composition, which from what I've seen of the stats is just a weak comp right now. Last time when I was okay at the mode it was mostly "Cobalt go brrr" so I'm probably overvaluing mech pickups like mechan-o-egg.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Happy to log on for challenge a friend quests, I've just been busy reading a book so haven't had hearthstone itself launched too often.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Watched a bunch of kripp's battlegrounds tournament today.

A whole lot of people going beasts in general.

(Although there was one round won by a Pogo Jandice, there definitely wasn't Jandice in every game, and even when she was there she didn't always find Pogo--although Educated Collins managed to win with Jandice without finding Pogo or Battlemaster).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

LMAO:

https://old.reddit.com/r/BobsTavern/comments/ippzpz/new_patch_insights/

On a side note, pogos is the best comp for jandice by a long shot. At 6.4k+, Jandice has an average placement of 4.33. If Jandice goes pogos, she has an average placement of 2.56. If Jandice does not go pogos, she has an average placement of 4.85.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

UltimaterializerX posted...

Dinosaurs died because some f***ing b**** t-rex held a gender reveal party with fireworks. Didn't you hear?

LMAO, nice.

In other news, I've been vaguely wondering how good Spiteful Hunter might be in wild, with 6 mana spiteful, 8 mana Call of the Wild, 10 mana Nagrand Slam. And then someone made a youtube video about it, so I can satiate my curiocity without actually spending dust on any of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT7-itA_i18

Seems...marginal, but in a spiteful deck Ace Hunter Kreen and Trueaim Crescent are apparently very good, which are two cards I hadn't even thought about. Feel like he should be running Dire Mole, though, if he's going to run Crackling Razormaw. Just...not very impressed with how often Razormaw was doing anything on turn 2.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Well yeah, Hearthstone undercut MtG, and then everyone else who came out after Hearthstone undercut hearthstone (including MtG Arena).

I continue to play mostly Hearthstone and paper MtG because I am a fucking dinosaur who is going to die due to my inefficient ways when the next asteroid hits.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

azuarc posted...

That's definitely higher than I would have predicted. But I also never DE anything that I don't have in excess, so I'm pretty sure that's going to drop the value. (Technically raise it by your argument, because the bad legendary I got was worth 1600 dust in your system, but in my mind, it's worth 0.)

Hmmm...okay, if I change it so that no epic or legendary is ever dusted, bad legendaries and epics are worth 0 dust, including bad golden epics and legendaries never getting DE'd and only having the value of their non-golden version, assume that commons and rares get DE'd (including golden commons and rares) and sticking with the 50% assumption I get...

One random legendary is worth...5.8 packs.

So...surprisingly still the same ratio.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

I ran the numbers for how many packs was equivalent value to one non-golden legendary (since some bundles have a random legendary) and the numbers...surprised me.

My conclusion: Roughly speaking, 6 packs = 1 random legendary (in terms of overall dust value).

So...how did I get to this number?

Well, I assume that about 50% of legendaries are bad and are best dusted (the other half are good and worth crafting), so the dust value of one random legendary is the average of 400 and 1600 (which is 1000 dust).

I assumed the same for epics, which means the average value of an epic is the average of 100 dust and 400 dust (which is 250).

I don't care if my cards are golden or not, so golden legendaries are always worth 1600 dust to me, and golden epics are always worth 400 dust to me.

Due to duplicate protection, I will always have all the commons and rares now, so those are always worth 5 and 20 dust (50 and 100 if golden).

I then looked up the probabilities of all of these:

https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Card_pack_statistics#Golden_cards

Plugged them all into a spreadsheet with my value of each number. And got the average dust value of a pack (counting the good epics and legendaries I got as "cards I effectively just crafted") as being...164.1. Seems reasonable enough. (225 is the dust value of a pack if you want to collect every epic and legendary. 102.7 is the dust value if you just disenchant everything. 164.1 is half-way in between, which is around where I am).

1000/164.1 = 6.1

Tweaking numbers doesn't change things too much (if I assume 33% of legendaries/epics are worth keeping and the rest are worth dusting, then 5.6 packs are equivalent to 1 random legendary. If I assume 67% of epics/legendaries are worth keeping, and the rest are worth dusting, then 6.5 packs are equivalent to 1 random legendary)

So...yeah, either way roughly 6 packs being equivalent value to a random legendary.

Packs are...higher value than I expected. I guess the unintuitive part is that dusting all golden cards and all commons/rares gets you about 62 dust per pack (371 dust across three packs), and then you add to this 1.2 epics and 0.3 legendaries (which is like...0.6 of the value of a random legendary already).

With duplicate protection this ratio is unlikely to ever change (I'll always get all the commons and rares, never get all the epics or legendaries, never have to worry about duplicates shifting the calculation). Well, I guess it shifts a bit if I ever bother with another wild bundle (I might actually care about the commons and rares! But on the flip side, the percentage of cards actually wild viable is more like 15% than 50%).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

VeryInsane posted...

Micro Mummy is apparently bugged already huh

Apparently it was caught in QA and fixed on the latest build on their end, but the fix didn't make it into the patch:

https://old.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/ioy5ls/golden_micro_mummy_makes_my_pc_crash/g4guqj4/

They've removed micro mummy from the pool on the server side until they can get a hotfix patch.

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In other news, Jandice/Pogo seems about as imba/goofy as everyone expected. (If not for that, the consensus is that Jandice would be a pretty high skill ceiling character, though).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Patch is out https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/news/23509390

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

VeryInsane posted...

I really do think this strategy is comparable to the micro machine strategy with pyramad but maybe that's just me

It definitely grows a lot bigger. Like I googled "micro machine pyramad" and watched two different games of it, typically it ended up as a 20/20 on the final board, and if the game went really long it would be like 30/20.

The flip side is that this pogo definitely costs more mana. You're investing 2 mana each turn instead of 1 mana per turn with micro machine.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

LiquidOshawott posted...

Lets say you get a Pogo turn 3, trade it, and sell and buy it again

3/3
8/8
15/15
24/24
35/35

By my calculations it's...

...assuming you just sell the ranom minion you get back from bob and see pogo immediately on 5 mana...

3 mana 1/1 (5 mana turn)

5 mana 3/3 (5 mana turn)

7 mana 7/7 (6 mana turn)

9 mana 13/13 (7 mana turn)

11 mana 21/21 (8 mana turn)

13 mana 31/31 (9 mana turn)

15 mana 43/43 (10 mana turn)

Overall it's a bit like investing in a golden wrath weaver. Buying and selling a demon--2 mana spent to get +4/+4, except you can only do it once per turn, but you can get more than +4/+4 after a while.

The one thing about this is that you will struggle to get 7 unit slots filled if you keep selling the random unit you get from Bob's shop. So maybe it doesn't completely steamroll the earlygame?

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

The magnetic thing is kind-of whatever. You could also just hold a bunch of magnetic cards in hand waiting for a foe reaper, so I guess it just makes you not die while you wait for a foe reaper. That's cool with me, that's the kind of thing a hero power should do.

Battlemaster and Amalgadon are definitely scarier. But...are they scarier than Fungalmancer Flurgl when he survives till tier 5 and finds exactly the minions he wants? Well...maybe not. Right or wrong there are heroes that are weak earlygame, but get really, really scary when they get to tier 5 and don't die. Maybe a hero could have those kinds of ineractions on tier 5 and not be completely busted. Maybe.

But I just don't see how Pogo is reasonable. It's tier 2 and relatively uncontested.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

I could probably be talked into a battlegrounds party if the schedule worked out well for me.

LiquidOshawott posted...

Darkglare might be ok still in zoo tbh, Has some synergy with Kanrethad and Tour Guide with a decentish curve

I mean, yeah, sure, it's now ghetto mechwarper for self-damage cards, so it could still fit into a zoo deck with a bunch of 1 mana self-damage cards.

Darkglare Warlock might also just live on as a combo deck, cause you can draw both your Darkglares using Sense Demons, and then play both on 4 mana, get 2 mana back for each ping of self damage.

I just...don't think Darkglare slots into Even Warlock anymore.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

skullbone posted...

But the difference with Jandice is that you can keep playing the same minion every turn. So token generators will be easy goldens in the early game and she's pretty good at pogo as well. I mean you could literally just keep 1 pogo and keep replaying it every turn while playing the rest of the game normal.

Oh snap, hadn't thought about how she basically lets you repeatedly buy battecries. I was just thinking about her as a sort-of Yogg Saron random minion buy. The fact that you can buy back the minion you "sell" sounds super busted.

That's going to be good with like...Murlocs getting King Bagurgle every turn, for example. And obviously pogos (the way it's worded the pogo keeps enchantments, so you get to re-buy a 7/7 pogo and have it get +6/+6 and end up 13/13). I think I've seen people post custom hero designs that allowed bouncing a minion, and everyone in the comment section declared it broken. So uhh...yeah.

On nerfs:

Secret Passage: yeah sure. I was just speculating on strongest cards in wild, and the three I came up with based on drawn winrate stats in tier 1 decks were Reno Jackson, Kobold Librarian, and.....Secret Passage. So when you're one of the three best cards in wild, yeah, toning you down is...reasonable. (Also after refinement aggro rogue is good in standard now).

Cabal Acolyte: I'm a little surprised about this one. Good card, don't get me wrong. It was certainly in the top 5 of drawn winrate cards for Priest, but Priest isn't...really a problem deck is it? Like in the Vicious Syndicate report Priest had...two decks in tier 3.

Totem Goliath: That's going to be a scary card now for totem shaman. Card is averagish in totem shaman already. This is basically a full mana buff (removing one overload isn't a full mana buff, +1 attack isn't a full mana buff, but the two of them together kinda do add up to a full mana buff).

Archwitch Willow: O..kay?

Darkglare: You know, obviously this is a nerf targetting wild Darkglare Warlock. But I'm actually kind-of excited for this change, because they also buffed it to 2 mana which makes the card even, and wild even warlock is the deck I used to get legend a while back. I've been wanting to try out new cards like Raise Dead and Flesh Giant in even warlock. Although...with only 1 mana restored, IDK if it's good enough. Certainly Darkglare+tap on 3 doesn't do much (you get 1 mana which you...float because you're an even deck). Darkglare+tap+2 mana play on turn 4 is...fine I guess? Basically makes Darkglare a 2 mana 2/3 that draws a card and deals 2 damage to you, which is...fine, build your own ghetto Questing Explorer. On turn 5 Darkglare + tap + double Vulgar Homunculus? That's cool I guess, but Kanrethad Ebonlocke can also reduce the cost of Vulgar Homunculus to 1, and nobody is actually running that card in evenlock. Ehhh...maybe Darkglare just isn't good in Even Warlock post-nerf.

You know, I think maybe I was expecting Darkglare to be nerfed to a 4 mana 3/4 with the same card text. This would allow for some real mana shenanigams starting around turn 5 in Even Warlock, where lifetap would be a net mana gain, Vulgar Homunculus would become free, and Raise Dead would become old school innervate. But with the card text change--only 1 mana restored it's...just not that exciting. It like...reduces the cost of your self-damage cards by 1 mana, so ok cool, it's almost mechwarper for self-damage cards, but...it's really not because you still need mana to play your self damage card before you get the mana refund, so you can't do darkglare+Vulgar Homunculus on turn 3 for example (whereas you can do mechwarper+2 drop mech on turn 3).

So overall...meh. If you get it to restore 2 mana for you in ways that actually allow you to use the mana that turn and don't just cause you to float 1 mana it's...a 0 mana 2/3, which...doesn't sound bad, but might not be worth the card slot in a deck that plays 0 mana 8/8s.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

I would...lean towards pivot yeah. Murlocs can have a good endgame without megasaur, but when your highest health on any of them is 14, and you only have one poisonous, they're...not terribly close to that endgame.

Whereas you have all the endgame pieces for dragons. Nadina. Macaw to double up on Nadina. Kalecgos. Even a Brann to synergize a little with Kalecgos.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

GANON1025 posted...

I almost feel like there should be a general nerf that no card's mana cost can go below 1 (besides cards that start at 0 of course).

Eh.

Like there have been cards that had cost reduction to 0 that were never terribly strong, or at least not strong for their ability to reduce costs to 0.

Reckless Experimenter is a good example. The cost reduction was good, It was used in a serious deck (Mech'a'thun priest) but not for its ability to reduce to zero. (It got nerfed briefly because of snip snap, and then immediately un-nerfed, when the ability to reduce echo cards to 0 was removed. Last I checked nobody was bothering with the card in wild).

The original druid quest (Barnabus) reduced all cards in your deck to 0 and it was...okay. Not the strongest quest, but also not weak to the point of unplayability, just...okaish.

Scarlet Webweaver allows for some cute meme videos with 0 mana King Krushes, but isn't considered particularly good.

Fire Plume Harbinger--I've used it in a deck, and reduced the cost of things to 0. It's okay, doesn't make the cut in most people's lists.

Frizz Kindleroost: can reduce your 2 mana dragons to 0 mana. With a couple shadowsteps you could reduce all your dragons to 0 mana. It's...a playable card, nothing special, nobody ever bothers shadowstepping it.

Or there's the new warlock quest, which the upgraded hero power is like lifetap except it reduces the cost of the card to 0. It's...kind of a medium strength Ulduum quest; not the strongest, not the weakest.

Or there's Raging Felscreamer in Demon Hunter. Can reduce the cost of a 2-cost demon to 0. Or you can stack two of them in a row, and it reduces a 4-cost demon to 0. The ability to reduce to 0 was not even the strong mode of the card, the strong mode of the card was playing Priestess of Fury on turn 5.

Or there's Mechwarper--only ever really caused problems when Snip Snap was involved. Now that it's back to being unable to reduce snip snap to 0, the card is...overall a high power card obviously, it's a 2 mana 2/3 with a relevant tribe and an upside, but I would be very surprised if it got nerfed--two of them let you dump your whole hand on turn 3 and die to a board clear, but that's not all that valuable--worth noting the relevant wild deck that runs it is packed with a lot of high power card draw spells to try and combat how quickly mechwarper decks just run out of resources.

(I also enjoy playing with a lot of these cards, and wouldn't like to see big across the board wild nerfs to cards that aren't really a problem in the format).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Well, was short on time to play this month, was plat 3 and plat 1 in wild/standard. Managed to sneak in one more game on the plat 1 to get over the line for diamond. But no epic for me this month RIP. (I'm 10 star MMR in both standard and wild, so I really just need to play to get those epics, but it's still more playing than the old system).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

I just assumed Barov would mean Lord Barov (since Lord Barov doesn't have any other names) and not Jandice Barov (who if I was going to refer to by a single name I'd call her Jandice).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

LiquidOshawott posted...

Hm Barov or Soulciologist

my heart says the latter but my brain says the former

Barov is used in slightly more decks right now, because Libram Paladin is so popular and people sometimes put him in that. He's definitely not needed for Libram Paladin. He arguably is maybe a good board clear for control warrior decks like Bomb Warrior, but there's lots of other board clears you can run instead. (And besides, would you rather run bomb warrior, or would you rather run shiny new recruit/big warrior which doesn't even want Barov?) By comparison Soulciologist is just an enabler card (you basically can't run a soul fragment deck without her. You can run a control warrior deck without Barov, it'll just be a deck that swaps out a good board clear for a slightly worse board clear).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Mr Bigglesworth is one of those heroes where the three most likely places to end up with the hero are 1st, 8th, and 7th (in that order).

Like Alextraza and Funglmancer Furgl (Better than Furgl, worse than Alextraza, but overall the same energy).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

UltimaterializerX posted...

Why the f*** is Rogue finding Raz in a stealth mirror off of Dragons Hoard if not for extreme levels of bad game design?

Why would stealth rogue run Dragon's Hoard in the first place? Like...there's rogue lists out there that run Dragon's Hoard such as Highlander and Quest Rogue, but it sounds pretty awkward in a stealth package.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Wild Even Hunter.

Was trying it out. Really only gains one new card (Manafeeder Panthera. People have tried Voracious Reader but from all I've heard your curve is too high when you're loaded up on 2-drops).

Winstreaked all the way from bronze 4 to middle of platinum.

I lost one game at the very start (to a board flood druid when I mulliganed explosive trap thinking it was an ultimate infestation druid) and one game at the very end (to a priest who played Reno Jackson twice, played super greedy on the second Reno, and actually needed it cause I got them down to 3 HP at the end).

Honestly I don't even know why this deck is winning. I guess it's a combination of generally high card quality, while being weirdly ok in a longer game (decent amount of card draw and reach).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Yeah...pure paladin is fairly consistently negative winrate for me on ladder.

Demon Hunter is doing ok for me though.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

FFDragon posted...

There's a legit Temporus deck in wild now.

For some reason this makes me happy.

Wait what? I had to look this up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEMNJyB_jFc

I guess Temporus is fine if you use it with Illucia to give your opponent an absolute garbage hand for two turns.

The deck looks a lot like Chef Nomi Priest, though--you basically have to draw Auctioneer or you lose. Actually, Chef Nomi Priest could also use wild pyro + Acolyte of pain instead of auctioneer--I wonder why he's not running Acolyte of Pain?

Regardless, the combo itself seems fine, but I don't think priest really has the draw engine to make the deck as a whole good. Needing to draw auctioneer is just rough sometimes; needing to wait until turn 6 even if you do draw auctioneer can also be rough; I notice that there's an editing cut after every game in that video, and his rank never rises above the rank floor.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

azuarc posted...

(I doubt they really care for Amalgadon.)

Amalgadon is now their only way of getting divine shield (by magnetizing a mech onto it or getting lucky with the battlecry) so...they probably care.

azuarc posted...

Mama Bear is back to +4, but now it's on tier 5, which just feels a whole hell of a lot better. This on 5 and Goldrinn on 6 makes so much more sense than the other way around. By the time you get Mama, you have to replay all your beasts to get any mileage, which means you basically have to upend your hold comp. Now at least it's more reasonable to do that. Not sure about the other beast flip-flop with Rat Pack and Pack Leader, but Pack Leader hitting early is good for the same reason as Mama.

Yeah, agreed. I don't know about these changes power-level wise (pack leader on 2 in particular is pretty jaw-dropping, like that was a good 3 drop). But in terms of feel, these feel like sensible changes. Get the beast buff cards before you pick up your beasts instead of after you pick up your beasts.

Actually, I guess maybe pack leader on 2 is fine cause there's nothing super strong to pair it with (kindly grandmother? Saurolisk? Yeah...neither of those are very scary paired with a pack leader).

Rat Pack will have fewer copies in the pool, but also be a lot less fought-over now (everyone picked it on 2 because it had good stats for a 2 drop. On 3, most people will leave it unless they are deathwing or have a pack leader/mama bear). So...might actually make rat pack easier to pick up for people going beasts.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Camden posted...

I think that it's all but guaranteed that Bloom is going to eventually be a problem again in the future.

Drawn winrate stats on Bloom are pretty similar to innervate (the nerfed innervate that gives 1 mana). In the most played Druid deck on HSReplay, it's 47.2% drawn winrate on innervate, vs 45.8% drawn winrate on lightning bloom. In the second most played Druid deck on HSReplay, they're tied (62.5% drawn winrate). Third most played Druid deck, Innervate is 59.7%, and Lightning Bloom is slightly ahead at 59.9%. Looks like statistical variation.

What about deck inclusion rate? Most Druid decks are running both right now, so that's not helpful. Looking in wild, Lightning Bloom is run in about as many Shaman decks (23%) as Counterfeit Coin is run in Rogue decks (21%).

IDK, I would be surprised if Lightning Bloom got a nerf. It's possible, of course, since mana is always kind-of dangerous, but at the moment the power-level of the card just doesn't look that high. Overgrowth is looking like the much more likely nerf when it comes to Druid mana cards.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision