If dusting is the only surefire way to get the card I want. It's worth it.
I can't borrow your card. I can't pay someone else or Blizzard to give me that card. I have to buy or earn packs and rely on luck to get that one card I want.
A legendary mage card doesn't help me if I don't use it. I rather put the effort into one good deck for ranked.
Arena and Tavern Brawl don't care about what cards I own. I only play casual if I'm trying something out or trying to do a quest.
Always Dust Cards if a patch/nerf has changed them. This disenchant value is significant to craft other things even if you end up re-crafting them later. Knife Juggler is still useful post-patch, but Arcane Golem and Blade Flurry? Hello 400 Dust! Also, always dust cards that are deemed worthless by the community and never see competitive/fun play. Magma/Amgam Rager, for example or crap legendarily like Millhouse.
If you have to pick and choose, go with it, but the research helps.
When you open a typical pack you get 4 commons and a rare. That's 260 dust worth of cards. If you already have 2x of all those cards, then those extra copies are worthless. Any card beyond the 2nd copy has no value to you. If you dust all those cards with the blue button, and now your collection has increased in value by 40 dust.
Now let's say you dust a bunch of cards from one class to get cards in another class. You dust a single rare card, that was worth 100 (because it was your only copy) and you get 20 dust. Your collection just decreased in total value by 80 dust. In order to make up for that loss, you have to open two packs. Unless you get lucky, those two packs will increase the value of your collection by 80. You think you destroyed one card, but actually you destroyed 10 cards worth.
If you keep doing this, you keep getting stuck. You keep decreasing the value and size of your collection, and you can't get enough packs to grow it. Every time the game changes, you can't change your decks around. Think of all the people who dusted all their "worthless" Shaman cards in the past since it was the worst class. Now it's the best, and they are so so sorry. You need to have a big collection to be able to keep adapting your decks to keep pace with the ever-changing meta.
Focusing on just one class also great hurts your ability to do quests. Let's say you get a 60 gold dominance quest, but you don't play either of the two classes. What are you going to do? Make a crappy deck for those classes and try to win 5 games? Good luck. Will you throw away that 60 gold quest and try to get a quest you can do? If you get a 40 gold quest instead, congratulations. You just lost 20 gold. That's 1/5th of a pack. You just lost an entire card.
Trust me. Whatever you want to believe, the fact is that I have a fuckton of cards, and you probably don't. I can play every class and do every quest. I can build any of the top tier decks you see online with very few substitutions, if any. It's because I have followed this system. I maximize the total value of my collection. I only dust extra copies of cards. Also I dusted less useful golden legendaries to get very useful non-golden legendaries.
Yeah, it's a grind. They made it that way on purpose. You know that going in. Accept it, or pay money. But dusting cards you don't have extra copies of is only hurting yourself. Like, you're a wizard in an RPG and you put on some item that gives you -30 STR and +1 INT. Yeah, INT is more important for a wizard, but even a wizard could make use of that 30 STR more than that 1 INT.
Completely agree with Scott here. I debated dusting cards and consolidating into 2 or 3 classes, but decided it just wasn't worth it, because one day I will wind up wanting to play the other classes.
I've kept up my moderate Hearthstone habit since Cure of the Old Gods launched. When I stopped playing (just before the first expansion hit), I was purely Mage. Now I've expanded into Rogue and Paladin decks.
The big question here: do I bother buying Grand Tournament packs with my gold? These will be disallowed sooner than Old Gods stuff, but on the other hand, I don't have a single Grand Tournament card. They'll all be new.
If I was seeking specific cards to enable a specific deck or strategy, this would be an easier question, but I'm not at that point yet. Also considering putting some money in. Hearthstone lets you use Google Play credit when you make a transaction, and I've made more than $10 on stupid Google survey notifications this month alone. Might as well turn it into packs.
Standard format will be updated with the first new Expansion released each year. When that happens Standard format will be updated to include card sets from the current and previous calendar year. The Basic and Classic card sets are always part of the Standard format.
Grand Tournament came out last year. When the first expansion of 2017 is released, Grand Tournament cards will no longer be permitted in standard play, but will always be permitted in wild play.
Some people who are only interested in standard play have dusted all of their wild cards. I have not done so. The main reason is that Tavern Brawl is wild. When you get amazing brawls like the "pick 2" from a few weeks ago, you'll be sad if you don't have those crazy old wild cards.
Also, my life would not be complete without cards like Unstable Portal. I can always play wild mode if I want to.
If you buy Grand Tournament cards, they will be useful now, and will continue to be useful for the rest of the year. It's not really a bad purchasing decision, but I can see an argument for taking a pass. If you stick to Old Gods, or just save your gold, with a lot of patience you can really kick it into high gear next year. Once Grand Tournament rotates out, you'll be in a terrific position on cards as far as standard mode is concerned.
Tough call. Glad I don't have to think about things like that.
When you deal 18 damage in one turn, bringing the other player down to one health, and they bust out that Reno Jackson....
my salt knows no bounds
If you don't see them repeat play any popular cards, and you see some less-optimal cards, you have a good bet its a Reno deck. But people don't like to spend their Reno too early. You have to cleverly get them in kill range, without them knowing they're in kill range. Alternatively, since you know they are playing the reno game, you also play the slow game. Play control instead of aggro to counter their control.
I decided to drop my $10 credit on Grand Tournament packs. It paid off, as I've mostly been playing Mage, and I feel like I haven't earned a single useful Mage card in the many packs I've earned since I jumped in. I pulled a Mage legendary and rare (the 8-cost guy who gives you 3 Arcane Missiles when you die, and the low-cost guy who turns your hero power fireball into 2 damage). These don't seem like slam dunk, must-use cards, but they're better than what I had. I'm bouncing around levels 19 and 18 at the moment. I might actually be at the point of reading up on some strategy here and crafting some cards.
Those cards... aren't that good. Rhonin isn't useless, but he shows up pretty rarely. He synergises with Archmage Atonidas, FlameWaker, or cards with +spell power. You get a bunch more spells than you could possibly include in your deck. The problem is that they just came out with Cabalist's Tome, which does the same thing even better. Pretty much all the Rhonins I've seen have been replaced by Tomes.
Fallen Hero is not so great. It's one of those cards that doesn't say the truth on it. Let me tell you what it really says.
2 mana for a blank 3/2 minion.
OR
4 mana for a 3/2 battlecry: deal 2 damage to target that can be targeted by a hero power.
This gives you a tiny bit more versatility since you can get value from the card whether you pay 2 or 4. However, it's just worse than your other options for cards that cost 2 (Sorcerer's Apprentice) and just worse than your other options for cards that cost 4 (Dark Iron Dwarf, Defender of Argus, Water Elemental, FlameWaker + 1-cost spell)
It's at least slightly useful in the current Tavern Brawl since you can play it on 2 and use it on 3 without it being dead. It's also slightly better in arena than in constructed.
Yeah I can tell my deck construction needs a lot of work. When I pop up to level 18 I get slammed right back down again.
Don't worry about level so much. Until you reach legend, level is more about grinding than being good. Because of bonus stars from consecutive wins, you can actually have a losing overall record, but increase in rank. Let's say you win 3 in a row. You get 1 star, 2 star, 2 star. That's 5 stars. Now lose 4 games in a row. Your record is 3-4, but you have increased one star from where you started.
Likewise, no matter how good your deck is, you won't make legendary rank without grinding. I will go online and exactly copy decks that other people used to achieve legend rank. I won't achieve legend rank with those same decks simply because I don't play enough games during the season. No matter how good your stuff is, or how high your skills, the game still has a ton of luck. Also the rock/paper/scissors element of bad matchups comes into play. You will lose a lot of games no matter what. The only way to make high rank is to play a TON and to win at least slightly more than you lose (since the win streak bonus ends at a certain point).
Once you get to Legend, you are taken off the ladder and put into the Legendary pool where rank is more ELO-ish.
Maybe I'll pick a season and really try for Legendary once. The best part is that once you get in, your rank at the beginning of the next season is like, single digits. Then it becomes somewhat easier to get back into the legendary pool every following season. My brother manages it, but I think he's been stuck in single digits again since the card rotation.
One more thing. When the season is coming to a close (around now ish) it's easier to rank up. Because they de-rank everyone at the start of the season, people in the high teens have to play against people who do not belong as such a low rank. Later in the season, most of the players are closer to the rank where they really belong, so the path is more clear for the slightly above par players to make it from high teens to low teens.
Also, remember this:
Rank 19 is 50% Rank 18 is 50% Rank 17 is 45% Rank 16 is 40% Rank 15 is 30% Rank 14 is 25% Rank 13 is 20% Rank 12 is 13-15% Rank 11 is 12% Rank 10 is 9% Rank 9 is 7% Rank 8 is 5% Rank 7 is 4% Rank 6 is 3% Rank 5 is 2% Rank 4 is 1% Rank 3 is 0.5% Rank 2 is 0.33% Rank 1 is 0.25% Legend is 0.25%
Even at rank 18 you are better than half of all Hearthstone players. I think I'm rank 13 now. I can probably make single digit this season if I play enough. So I'm better than 90% of all Hearthstone players.
Today's Irony in Hearthstone: Playing the Mage challenge in Blackrock, where the deck is nothing but 30 Unstable Portals. First Portal returns Reno Jackson.
Today's Irony in Hearthstone: Playing the Mage challenge in Blackrock, where the deck is nothing but 30 Unstable Portals. First Portal returns Reno Jackson.
Hearthstone fatigue setting in. I don't have enough cards to netdeck. Don't feel like putting money in. Grinding appears to be a huge pain in the ass at the beginning of the month. Plan now is to just do the minimum for quests, and use gold to play Blackrock and Explorers. See what I've got at that point.
Same boat. I don't have enough cards to play well, and I don't play enough to get the cards. If I'm poopin, instead of playing Hearthstone I just read or play Carcassonne against AIs. If I'm at a real computer, Overwatch, CounterStrike, or Civ V.
I'd say the same thing if I looked at X-Wing today. I got sucked back into Hearthstone because I thought I might have a chance at cracking back into it with two sets being phased out, and a bunch of free packs for the newest set. Not gonna be the case. Now just a question whether I poke around with it on occasion, or not at all.
I'd say the same thing if I looked at X-Wing today. I got sucked back into Hearthstone because I thought I might have a chance at cracking back into it with two sets being phased out, and a bunch of free packs for the newest set. Not gonna be the case. Now just a question whether I poke around with it on occasion, or not at all.
To its credit, the F2P pathway does allow you to catch up. If you keep playing you will eventually get a point where you will start hoarding gold since you need no more cards. Then when the next expansion/rotation hits next year you will be able to cash in on that gold and compete. There's just no short-term gratification during the grind phase.
Really, it's not much different than World of Warcraft. Everyone is level a zillion, and you are a nub. Gotta grind up to the high level to get to the real game.
Or pay money. Stupid WoW made you pay money, but you still had to grind!
Have you used the Inn Keeper application from Hearthpwn? I was looking at downloading that when I got home. If I'm just occassionally whipping up class desks to beat quests once they stack up, and earn gold for single-player/hoard it for future, then it might help me maximize what I've already got.
Have you used the Inn Keeper application from Hearthpwn? I was looking at downloading that when I got home. If I'm just occassionally whipping up class desks to beat quests once they stack up, and earn gold for single-player/hoard it for future, then it might help me maximize what I've already got.
I've seen a lot of auxiliary apps for Hearthstone, but have never tried any of them. Not necessary.
There's one use I've found for them. Calculating what packs to buy (with gold) to maximize the chances of getting a card you don't already have. That's like 90% better than crafting so you want to do as little crafting as possible.
There's one use I've found for them. Calculating what packs to buy (with gold) to maximize the chances of getting a card you don't already have. That's like 90% better than crafting so you want to do as little crafting as possible.
The only legendaries I want, but don't have, are Grommash Hellscream, Justicar Trueheart, Xaril, VanCleef, and Shifter Zerus. 2 from Expert, 2 from the old gods, one from the Grand Tournament. However, there are still a handful of epic cards from the Old Gods that I don't have. Therefore, I buy pretty much only Old Gods packs right now. I don't need an app to tell me that.
I just checked one out for that reason. Curious to see how much Classic I had actually collected back in the day. I have 431/723 Classic and 136/247 WoG when you consider having 2 of each card for a full set.
Comments
If you have to pick and choose, go with it, but the research helps.
Now let's say you dust a bunch of cards from one class to get cards in another class. You dust a single rare card, that was worth 100 (because it was your only copy) and you get 20 dust. Your collection just decreased in total value by 80 dust. In order to make up for that loss, you have to open two packs. Unless you get lucky, those two packs will increase the value of your collection by 80. You think you destroyed one card, but actually you destroyed 10 cards worth.
If you keep doing this, you keep getting stuck. You keep decreasing the value and size of your collection, and you can't get enough packs to grow it. Every time the game changes, you can't change your decks around. Think of all the people who dusted all their "worthless" Shaman cards in the past since it was the worst class. Now it's the best, and they are so so sorry. You need to have a big collection to be able to keep adapting your decks to keep pace with the ever-changing meta.
Focusing on just one class also great hurts your ability to do quests. Let's say you get a 60 gold dominance quest, but you don't play either of the two classes. What are you going to do? Make a crappy deck for those classes and try to win 5 games? Good luck. Will you throw away that 60 gold quest and try to get a quest you can do? If you get a 40 gold quest instead, congratulations. You just lost 20 gold. That's 1/5th of a pack. You just lost an entire card.
Trust me. Whatever you want to believe, the fact is that I have a fuckton of cards, and you probably don't. I can play every class and do every quest. I can build any of the top tier decks you see online with very few substitutions, if any. It's because I have followed this system. I maximize the total value of my collection. I only dust extra copies of cards. Also I dusted less useful golden legendaries to get very useful non-golden legendaries.
Yeah, it's a grind. They made it that way on purpose. You know that going in. Accept it, or pay money. But dusting cards you don't have extra copies of is only hurting yourself. Like, you're a wizard in an RPG and you put on some item that gives you -30 STR and +1 INT. Yeah, INT is more important for a wizard, but even a wizard could make use of that 30 STR more than that 1 INT.
The big question here: do I bother buying Grand Tournament packs with my gold? These will be disallowed sooner than Old Gods stuff, but on the other hand, I don't have a single Grand Tournament card. They'll all be new.
If I was seeking specific cards to enable a specific deck or strategy, this would be an easier question, but I'm not at that point yet. Also considering putting some money in. Hearthstone lets you use Google Play credit when you make a transaction, and I've made more than $10 on stupid Google survey notifications this month alone. Might as well turn it into packs.
Some people who are only interested in standard play have dusted all of their wild cards. I have not done so. The main reason is that Tavern Brawl is wild. When you get amazing brawls like the "pick 2" from a few weeks ago, you'll be sad if you don't have those crazy old wild cards.
Also, my life would not be complete without cards like Unstable Portal. I can always play wild mode if I want to.
If you buy Grand Tournament cards, they will be useful now, and will continue to be useful for the rest of the year. It's not really a bad purchasing decision, but I can see an argument for taking a pass. If you stick to Old Gods, or just save your gold, with a lot of patience you can really kick it into high gear next year. Once Grand Tournament rotates out, you'll be in a terrific position on cards as far as standard mode is concerned.
Tough call. Glad I don't have to think about things like that.
my salt knows no bounds
Fallen Hero is not so great. It's one of those cards that doesn't say the truth on it. Let me tell you what it really says.
2 mana for a blank 3/2 minion.
OR
4 mana for a 3/2 battlecry: deal 2 damage to target that can be targeted by a hero power.
This gives you a tiny bit more versatility since you can get value from the card whether you pay 2 or 4. However, it's just worse than your other options for cards that cost 2 (Sorcerer's Apprentice) and just worse than your other options for cards that cost 4 (Dark Iron Dwarf, Defender of Argus, Water Elemental, FlameWaker + 1-cost spell)
It's at least slightly useful in the current Tavern Brawl since you can play it on 2 and use it on 3 without it being dead. It's also slightly better in arena than in constructed.
Likewise, no matter how good your deck is, you won't make legendary rank without grinding. I will go online and exactly copy decks that other people used to achieve legend rank. I won't achieve legend rank with those same decks simply because I don't play enough games during the season. No matter how good your stuff is, or how high your skills, the game still has a ton of luck. Also the rock/paper/scissors element of bad matchups comes into play. You will lose a lot of games no matter what. The only way to make high rank is to play a TON and to win at least slightly more than you lose (since the win streak bonus ends at a certain point).
Once you get to Legend, you are taken off the ladder and put into the Legendary pool where rank is more ELO-ish.
Maybe I'll pick a season and really try for Legendary once. The best part is that once you get in, your rank at the beginning of the next season is like, single digits. Then it becomes somewhat easier to get back into the legendary pool every following season. My brother manages it, but I think he's been stuck in single digits again since the card rotation.
One more thing. When the season is coming to a close (around now ish) it's easier to rank up. Because they de-rank everyone at the start of the season, people in the high teens have to play against people who do not belong as such a low rank. Later in the season, most of the players are closer to the rank where they really belong, so the path is more clear for the slightly above par players to make it from high teens to low teens.
Also, remember this:
Rank 19 is 50%
Rank 18 is 50%
Rank 17 is 45%
Rank 16 is 40%
Rank 15 is 30%
Rank 14 is 25%
Rank 13 is 20%
Rank 12 is 13-15%
Rank 11 is 12%
Rank 10 is 9%
Rank 9 is 7%
Rank 8 is 5%
Rank 7 is 4%
Rank 6 is 3%
Rank 5 is 2%
Rank 4 is 1%
Rank 3 is 0.5%
Rank 2 is 0.33%
Rank 1 is 0.25%
Legend is 0.25%
Even at rank 18 you are better than half of all Hearthstone players. I think I'm rank 13 now. I can probably make single digit this season if I play enough. So I'm better than 90% of all Hearthstone players.
Or I might just delete the app again.
Same boat. I don't have enough cards to play well, and I don't play enough to get the cards. If I'm poopin, instead of playing Hearthstone I just read or play Carcassonne against AIs. If I'm at a real computer, Overwatch, CounterStrike, or Civ V.
I'd say the same thing if I looked at X-Wing today. I got sucked back into Hearthstone because I thought I might have a chance at cracking back into it with two sets being phased out, and a bunch of free packs for the newest set. Not gonna be the case. Now just a question whether I poke around with it on occasion, or not at all.
Really, it's not much different than World of Warcraft. Everyone is level a zillion, and you are a nub. Gotta grind up to the high level to get to the real game.
Or pay money. Stupid WoW made you pay money, but you still had to grind!