Night Before Old Gods

Thanks to a reddit post pointed out by Kripp I got things ready for tomorrow's Hearthstone release. Boiled down to:

• Did you pre-purchase the 50-pack bundle of Whispers of the Old Gods? Yes.
• Have you got your (golden) Old Murk-Eye yet? I do now.
• Are you done with your GvG set? Not really but oh well.
• Have to unlocked Naxx? Yes.
• Do you have an open quest slot? Yes. 

The nerfs that came down were pretty annoying. I was getting comfortable with and enjoying combo druid—*sigh*. Other than druid class cards that got hammered the nerfs all seemed in-line. Knife Juggler is fine doing two damage. Three mana for the Ironbeak Owl is still effective. Losing one attack on Leper Gnome was painful but it's still doing work. 

The only nerf that really annoyed me was to Arcane Golem. Losing a high damage Neutral with charge was fucking lame. Wish I understood more about what Blizzard dislikes in the current meta. 

Oh well. So far the only nerfed cards I dusted were a golden Master of Disguise and an extra copy of Master of Disguise. Will probably kill the Golems. Not something I have to do right away. Currently sitting at 2390 Dust and 4525 Gold.

Currently watching apDrop stream. Thinking I might take his advice. While everyone is dicking around with new decks and concepts you can climb with aggro decks. Not sure it will be that easy since most the play testing shouldn't be done ranked. But I might be able to throw a Tempo Mage or Aggro Shaman together…

Firebat Tweeted With Me!!

I generally dislike social media because of the commercial abuse. Sometimes I'm okay with the exploitation for little moments like this:

Firebat talked to me!! *teen giggle*

So maybe we didn't really talk. But it was interaction with one of my favorite Hearthstone players. Despite being an exceptional player, he's very accessible and he has an excellent sense of humor. Sorta felt bad I didn't know about his early loss in the BlueStacks Invitational thing. He's really been pushing to get Blizzard points wherever they're available.

Lately I've been using a Kolento mid-range Druid on the ladder. Initially tried it out since I had all the cards in his list and really liked it. Since then I've kept an eye out for Druid insights. Firebat's observations were really concise and all made sense to me.

Unfortunately I can't make all the tech swaps since I don't have the cards. Not going to do any more crafting until Old Gods comes out. Being able to understand the points was helpful regardless.

50 Packs Means What

It's been a while since statistics so it's nice to find someone doing this for me…

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Out of 50 packs, about how many of the 130 cards should the average person get? And how much dust would 50 packs get?

TLDR: 93% of commons, 62% of rares, 21% of epics, 14% of legendaries and 1100 dust, equaling a total value of 18245 dust

Almost forgot to answer the original question from the title: 89 unique cards out of the 132.

I assumed that TGT has the exact same rarity distribution as GvG, plus 9 extra commons (1 for each class), which makes it: 49 commons, 37 rares, 26 epics and 20 legendaries. I also assumed that you don't care about golden cards, so you only keep golden cards if you don't have enough non-golden copies of the same card. Sadly, I don't have the time to properly analyze the data, so I just averaged it all together. (I could sort the runs and show some values for the top and bottom 10%, maybe in a separate post later.) So the average result is:

• Commons: out of 49, you have both copies of 43 and a single copy of 5, that equals 93% (I'm sure that single card missing is the best common of the set)
• Rares: out of 37, you have both copies of 17 and a single copy of 12, that means no copies of 8, equaling 62%
• Epics: out of 26, you have both copies of 2, and a single copy of 7, no copies of 17, equaling 21%
• Legendaries: 3 unique legendaries (duplicates have been auto-disenchanted), it was 2.8 on average, so it's 14%
• Dust: from duplicates, you ended up with 1100 dust
• Total value: 18245 dust, which equals 365 per pack. This is the crafting cost of all the cards summed up plus the dust from disenchanting. (This slightly differs from the sum of the previous values, because of the rounding errors.)

I hope the information was useful for you. I'll maybe do a proper analysis with confidence intervals and all the fancy statistics, if I have enought time for that, sometime later in a separate post.
Good luck actually opening your 50 packs! Cheers!

My Fishou

Had a Mage Dominate daily quest to do last night. Noticed AJ Sacher mention a deck that had worked well for him on the ladder. Hadn't heard about it but apparently TheFishou had some EU fun with it. Naturally I didn't bother looking up what it was supposed to do, I just tried to build it the best I could then headed on over to ranked play:

Sadly I'm missing a core card—Bloodmage Thalnos. It has spell power, death rattle, and card draw! *sigh* For now I'm subbing Haunted Creeper. Novice Engineer and Kobold Geomancer might also work. Stupid Legendaries. Crazy mage deck overall though. No Flamestrike! No Polymorph! No ... et cetera.

Anyway. With all the low cost cards it was obviously aggro. I'm still awkward with aggro since I like to keep the board clear; this made for good practice. Took eight games to win my five so that's an okay ratio. Biggest problem was a Priest who had every damn taunt in the game, early to mid, so I conceded. Came up against a ZooLock and a HandLock—destroyed them both. Fun deck.

Sometimes It Just Works

Been playing with different Constructed decks. It's been a little frustrating at time but I have learned a number of things. And there have been some laughs...



This video is based on a Bouncy Rogue deck that I tweaked. Also tried some Priest Zoo and Rogue Tim. Still haven't found "my" deck.