E02 Even dudes tilt

Guardians of the hearth

Ep 02 Even paladin

Last episode

Introduced myself Basic coverage of Hearthstone How do we learn? What is tilt Ladder system adaptation Plans for the future

This episode

Go through adapt Deckbuilding approach Mana and manacurve Build Paladin Even dudes Tilt, anger regarding emotes and roping Hearthstone and new expansion from deckbuilding perspective

Time between episodes

I want to talk a bit each week about the time between the episodes and it's been hectic for me.

Deckbuilding approach

I do hope that I can help someone to at least open their minds about deckbuilding and to take a chance to try something new and or crazy. It might actually work.

I have tried a lot of approaches to how to do the deckbuilding audio friendly and my first plan of reading through all , most of them at least, cards and discuss if they fit in the deck or not did not work out.

I recorded that and listened myself and its to hard to follow and to keep the interest.

I will try and talk through the generall concept and go through that more in dept so you can do that at home.

I will go through the results of my pondering and read through a list of the deck, that's also going to be in the episode notes.

And i’m going to talk about the deck, what its focusing on and what's it trying to do, cards to look after. Discuss techcards. Why are they there? And what should they be used on as a priority?

I will give around 2-3 different decks for each idea with different dust values.

I will also go through some replacements for cards and a list of cards to try out.

In some decks, especially in control and combo decks some cards will not be able to switch out because the whole deck circulate around them.

With odd / even, quest decks I will take away the cost of that card that are mandatory when I compare different deck variants…

Were going to go over some mechanics today. How mana and mana curve work. Also going to talk about Adapt and rush mechanics.

Mana

Are HS resource system. You start at 1 mana and gain one crystal per turn to a max of 10 mana,

Compared to Magic the gathering and other C/TCGs were they have “land” system were you have cards that give you resources

The problem with that system are that you can either get to much resources on your hand or to little, you can still only put out one per turn so Hearthstones system are better that way were you will always have a good resource gain and only need to focus on you manacurve, how your cards are distributed over the different mana costs.

Manacurve

The curve you want depends on your plan with the deck.

Aggro decks are high in the first 3 mana slots then curves out to not being many cards over 5, that's because they want to take control if the board early on and hopefully win there.

Control on the other hand tries to mostly have cards that can delay the opponent so you can get to the late game and win there. Card draw, aoe effects, healing, taunts, cards that give you more mana (for druids) or other stall type cards. You will mostly focus on getting “valuable” trades, to use one card to destroy more cards from the opponent to make them run out of ammunition. So they have their highest peak around 8 and some cards under just to be sure to get to the late cards.

Midrange have their top peak around 5-6 and are a bit of a compromise between aggro and control.

Combo decks varies with their combo. The most decks are using a lot of cheap cards with carddraw and some mechanic to be able to draw a lot of cards, usealy by casting cheap spells. They need to get all the pieces for their combo and focus on getting them and trying to stall enough to get there.

Adapt

We will go over to our mechinics of today.
Adapt is a mechanic we are going to use a bit in the deck today so i’m going to talk a bit about it.

You will get 3 choices from the pool of 10 different bonuses. That will enhance the minion a little bit.

If we want something special we have about ? chance of getting that option. Not to shabby.

Adapt is useful because what we need in that moment can be different and it gives us a option to make the best of the situations.

The choices are

Divine shield Poisionious - kill a minion that took dmg from this one, not working on divine shield +1/+1 +3 attack +3 health Stealth - Can’t be targetet by spells and abilities plus can be attacked. Can't be targeted by spells or abilities Windfury - Attacks twize Deathrattle 2 1/1 plants Taunt - Needs to die before opponent can target other minions or your hero.

Rush / Charge

Normally minions we summon or play can’t attack at all the first turn. Charge is a mechanic that come with the release of HS and made the minions able to attack directly. That created issues after a while because people created OTK (one turn kill) options and charge started to become a problem for blizzard when creating new cards.

The solution for now is rush, the minions can attack other minions the first turn but not the opponent and that creates a better situation for blizzard and make them less restricted then charge when creating new cards.

Paladin even odd

This first week of deckbuilding were going to start with an adaption of a deck of my creation the dude paladin deck and focus on one of the new mechanics from witchwood. Even / odd decks.

Even / odd are a new mechanic and it will change your hero power.

Make it stronger with odd and cheeper with even. In some classes this should be better in others but we can always try and find a use of the odd/even effects of the hero power for all classes.

Ideally you should go through all cards in the class with your deckplan in focus first.

When you have found your core cards you want to use, you check the cost and see if the majority of those core cards are even or odd you can add the legendary card to utilize the odd / even effect.

There are pros and cons for both approaches. The way we just talked about and to decide from the start that you want to go with an odd / even deck.

Often with new mechanics people go overboard the first month or so and it usually appears that the decks without the new mechanics work better or as well as with. It's often one or two classes that the new mechanic becomes a staple.

Pro side is that you will find cards you wouldn't think of before and it's hard to go from your usual approach and cards. If you have hard to think outside of the box then decide for odd / even first would be better than to find the best cards for your idea and then check if odd/even works for your idea.

Paladins hero power is normally 2mana for summoning a 1/1 Silver hand recruit.

With Odd summon 2 1/1 SHR for 2.

With Even Summon 1 1/1 SHR for 1

We will do the even deck this episode and the odd one the next.

Paladin Even

Staple cards

Drygulch jailor, 3 SHR on death to hand

Lightfused stegodon - adapt shr

Genn Greymane - must for even decks

Budget - 2980 dust (1380 without Geen)

Mana amount Name
2 1 Acidic Swamp Ooze
2 2 Argent Protector
2 2 Drygulch Jailor
2 2 Equality
2 2 Hydrologist
2 2 Knife Juggler
2 2 Loot Hoarder
2 2 Plated Beetle
2 2 Sound the bells
2 2 Vicious scalehide
4 1 Blessing of Kings
4 1 Concecration
4 2 Cult Master
4 2 Lightfused Stegodon
4 1 Spellbreaker
4 2 Truesilver Champions
6 1 Genn Greymane
8 1 Silver Sword

The plan with the budget deck is to build a board with you 1 mana hero power and your 2 cost minions. Use buffs to do good trades or create a problem for your opponent to react to.

It’s better to use buffs when you can attack with the minion so you at least gets some value out of your cards.

Use your stegodon for at least 2-3 SHR to adapt all of them. You can use them on fewer for emergencies.

Comments

I tried to go without Knife Juggler but it's helping the deck so much so it's a staple more or less with equality and the hero power with the deathrattle from the jailor can turn a battle so quick to our advantage.

I had Dire wolf Alpha before but I think that other minions has more value for my playstyle.

The deck would be better with call to arms, use it if you have it. Battle cry minions loses some value and deathrattle minions gains value.

We can't have secrets because they cost one and the hydrologist can give us an advantage and we can choose what we need for the current game state.

I tried this right after the ladder reset and actually went 5-0 with it, from rank 8 to 6, It wasn’t easy wins but hard earned wins and we can’t expect much more for a deck on a slim budget. I Still met control warlock, odd dude paladin, even spell hunter and won.

Minions

Argent protector the bc gives a minion divine shield and it's good for trades or to save knife juggler or Cult master.

Plated beetle are a 2 /3 that gives you armor and will mostly survive the turn if played on curve.

Hydrogologist, ability to get a secret according to the situation, Noble sacrifice, 2/1 to defend instead of the target, or repentance, op next played minion reduced health to 1. Good late game to trade of bigger minions.

Vicious Scalehide - good against 1/1s to get an early advantage with rush and works well with buffs to get life or trade when you play it from your hand.

Card draw

As all aggro or midrange, as i would classify this deck, it's important to draw cards so we don't get out of fuel.

The best card draw for paladin, Divine favor, is odd costed and can't be used here so we need alternatives and i chose these two.

Loot Hoarder - 2/1 minion with DR draw card

Cultmaster - Draw a card when another of your minions dies. We need to draw cards without divine favor and this works if used correctly, try to only play when you can get a card from it, still a 4/2 minion bit usually dies quickly.

Crowd control

We know from the start that most decks will have bigger and stronger minions then us so we need to even out the odds a bit.

Swamp Ooze bc destroy op weapon, good against weapon decks, still a good 2 drop. 3/2 minion

Knife juggler - whenever you summon a friendly minion do one dmg at random enemy.works awesome with Equality and the hero power.

Equality - Reduces all minions to 1 health and it hurts the op more than you, trade with minions or kill off with knife juggler

Consecration - 2 dmg to all enemys, AoE, can be used with equality to kill the entiere op board

Spellbreaker - bc silence, good against taunts or DR minions, a lot of uses but great against control warlock and their 3/9 taunt who spawn 3 new taunts or the minion with deathrattle that puts in a demon from their deck.

Truesilver champions - 4/2 Weapon with 2 health gain per attack for trading of minions and get the board advantage

Sound the bells - 1/2 Buff with echo, can be used to do great trades and get board advantage.

Blessing of kings - 4+4 buff to be used as finisher or trading, or just give a huger question to force the opponent to answer.

Business Dudes - 4620 dust, 3020 without Genn

Mana amount Name
2 1 Argent Protector
2 2 Drygulch Jailor
2 2 Equality
2 2 Hydrologist
2 2 Knife Juggler
2 2 Loot Hoarder
2 2 Plated Beetle
2 1 Sound the bells
4 1 Concecration
4 1 Cult Master
4 2 Lightfused Stegodon
4 1 Spellbreaker
4 2 Truesilver Champions
4 2 Call to Arms
6 1 Genn Greymane
6 2 Crystal Lion
6 1 Spikeridge steed
8 1 Silver Sword
10 2 Sea Gigant

Changes

1 Acidic swamp ooze 1 argent protector 1 sound the bells 2 vicious scalehide 1 Cult master 1 Blessing of kings

2 Crystal Lion - Cheeper with more SHR and have div shield

2 Sea Gigant - Cheeper with more minions on the board and a huge gigant as well. Hard for some classes to do something about.

2 Call to arms - Great value to get out 3 of your 2 costed minions and I cut one protector because I think it’s better to have Deathrattle minions with CtAs. 1 Spikeridge Steed - Good 2/6 buff and gets a stegodon when killed

Going a little bit more for the bigger creatures that we might be able to get out cheaper. Gives us a little bit more questions that the opponent need to answer.

First class even - 6660 dust, 5060 without Genn

Mana amount Name
2 2 Drygulch Jailor
2 2 Equality
2 2 Knife Juggler
2 2 Loot Hoarder
2 1 Sound the bells
2 2 Vicious Scalehide
4 2 Concecration
4 1 Cult Master
4 2 Lightfused Stegodon
4 2 Spellbreaker
4 1 Truesilver Champions
4 1 Call to Arms
6 1 Genn Greymane
6 2 Crystal Lion
6 2 Spikeridge steed
6 1 Val'anyr
6 1 Sunkeeper Tarim
8 1 Silver Sword
10 2 Sea Gigant

Changes

1 argent protector 2 Hydrologist 2 plated beetles 1 Call to arms 1 Truesilver Champions

2 Vicious scalehide 1 Consecration 1 Spellbreaker 1 Spikeridge steed 1 Valányr - Leg weapon 4/2 with DR gives rng minion hand +4+2 and DR equip Valányr, can be useful for a long time and the buff can fall on the right minion on hand to make things lighter, the rush minion wouldn’t sadden me if he got that. 1 Sunkeeper Tarim - All other minions becomes 3/3, often buffs yours and nerfes the opponents minions, can be used as a win condition.

This variant are more heavy towards the late game, Val’anyr makes a lot of work and oozes do not really affect it as long as you have a minion on your hand. Silence on the minion is the only thing that makes Val’anyr stop getting value.

I iterated some and as I said before your deck need to change depending on what you are facing.

I've seen a lot of control warlocks and think overall for me that 2 consecrate and 2 spellbreakers is the best for where I'm at.

The silence are not dead against other matchups either and the ability to board clear have it's uses against more or less everyone. I took away one bell and one call to arms. The latter because they run out of things to fetch on the second one.

Scalehides works really well with Val’anyr and the other buffs.

You can try and alter the buffs a bit as well. Dinosize can be good but are a dead card if you don’t have a minion on board and the taunts from Spikeridge steeds are more useful even to use on a SRH to keep you alive against aggro decks.

Sea giant works good when it works but against decks with fewer minions on board the Mountain giant could be better because I often have a lot of cards on hand, or one of each.

Matchups 6-4

Got 10 wins from the brawlaseum

Replacements or cards that didn't make this cut.

There could be a lot of other cards in the deck. Especially if you are in a budget and don't have the cards I listed.

Here is a list of cards you could try out. Most a budget variants or tech cards and I don't think they would work better overall then the cards I choose.

My play style is more mid range or control based. You can alter the deck to a more aggro style and cards like dire wolf alpha should be better then.

Basic 0 dust

Hammer of wrath- 4 mana 3 target dmg and draw a card

Novice engineer- 2 mana 1/1 Battlecry draw a card - instead of loot hoarder

Common 40dust

Dire wolf alpha - gives +1 attack adjecent, good to add some dmg.

Potion of heroism - 2mana spell gives a minion divine shield and draws a card,

fallen sun cleric 2 mana 2/1 bc +1/+1 minion

Lost spirit 2 mana 1/1 Dr your minions gets +1 attack. (Could be hard to setup as youbwoukd like but when it works it can do some value)

Ravasaur runt 2 mana 2/2 if you have 2 other minions adapt this one, hard to setup and the gain are uneven

Dark iron dwarf 4 mana 4/4 bc add 2 attack on minion this turn.

Bonemare 8 mana 5/5 that give a a minion +4/+4 ant taunt, a bit expensive after the nerf but can be an alternative to valinyr or other buffs.

Rare 100 dust

Sunfury protector - 2 mana 2/3 bc adjacent minions taunt

Defender of argus - 4 mana 2/3 bc adjacent minions +1/+1 and taunt , booth can be good if you feel that you need more taunts.

Mad hatter -

Epic

Dinosize - a minion to 10/10 for 10

Corpsetaker - But need to build deck around it to get use of the stats, perhaps in the future

Avenging Wrath - 6 mana spell 8 dmg to enemy minions, good with equality

Legendary

Tirion - can use but don’t gives any synergies, is more if you have him and want to use instead of Tarim or a weapon

Black knight - Tech card against taunts 6 mana ? battlecry destroy taunt

Tiltsegment Anger in game, card reviews, matchups, deckbuilding

Anger comes a lot of times from lack of knowledge. We talked about the learning curve last time and that we need to learn to control our Emotions to be able to decrese tilt.

Unfortuantly there are things all around us that can trigger our emotions.

In most cases it is we that gets angry at something, not someone or something that makes us angry. I do know that some of you will disagree but anger/irritation is something we create and let it control us.

Example, Road rage is a common thing. A lot of people on the roads are morons, we do know that and we are sitting and yelling in our own cars about how stupid everyone else are.

In most cases we get irritated because someone did something we wouldn’t have done. Could be an overtaking, stopping for a pedestrian when it wasn’t “necessary” and other things. We chooses to make that annoy us, for some people that irritation goes with them the whole day. We can’t control all factors in our lives but hopefully we can agree on that destroying our own day because another person were “stupid” is not reasonable, for us at least.

I have a quite silly approach to that specific situation. I think that there are a lot of people going to the maternity ward today. Is that true? Most likely not but it makes me laugh or break my irritation because that could be the case. There could be good reasons for people misbehaving.

Back to hearthstone and gaming in general.

We are getting irritated by a lot of things. In my opinion booth fact based and emotion based things.

Emotes in game

We can’t talk with our opponent in Hearthstone but we do have emotes. They are built in ways to say something. They have all voice overs and says different things depending on with character you are playing as.

I generally uses the emotes in the same way regardless of character.

Some characters says things a bit more salty and aggresive then others.

The choices are

Thanks Well played Greetings Wow Oops Threaten

In the regulars sports we learn to greet our opponents in the start of a match and usually everyone stands on a line and takes each others hand afterwards and thanks for a good game, REGARDLESS of the outcome. If one team gott fully anahlated they still does this out of respect to each other. If someone wins over me I take that as a learning experience and if I win I’m thankful for that.

I use Greetings in the start of the game, if I can remember. But I always use Well played after a game, win or loss. I do know that I sometimes had the perfect draw and that the opponent didn’t and sometimes vice versa. I and they can still played the best of their abilities and it's a way to politely thank for the game.

Thanks I use in response to a emote from OP during the game, often WP or Oops.

Wow I use seldom but often it's when all MY rng goes in the perfect way possible.

Oops I use to acknowledge my own mistakes in the game or if I see that the OP played things in a bad order. The last one we need to use with heart and mind in the right place because that can be offensive for some. But i think it could be fine to show that someone did a mistake but it need to be based on facts. To play all minions first and then drop a knife juggler that's shots 1 dmg per minion he/she summons are a misplay, if there aren’t any secrets up that the player might play around. To play a card that didn’t had the outcome someone hoped to isn’t a misplay.

In general terms I do think that using emotes as little as possible could be good not to step on someone's toes.

Problem I see is that people interpret the emotes as they will and often they are already in tilt or irritated that the lost or of other things and see all things as “evil”.

I have gotten friend requests from people that been yelling at me because it wasn’t well played or that I BM and should take my own life our other not nice things…

There are on the other hand a lot of trolls out there, using emotes all the time. Using well played when we fill the board with minions just so they can take them away with an aoe or other things. You will notice quickly if someone actually tries to taunt you with emotes and either you squelch them or you need to learn not to care.

Taunting your opponent has been a part of sports a long time, I’m not saying that's nice or okey but people will do that against you and why? Because it works… :-) We are getting affected, we are getting irritated and we are playing worse, it’s a strategi to try and taunt your competition, to make them lose concentration or just be more aggressive.

Once again I will enforce that I don’t like this and I’m not defending this behavior but we need to know that it exist and why are they doing that. Because we makes it worth it ,

In hearthstone I analyze my own play all the time, I do miss plays from time to time but I notice them myself so I don’t really care what the other player says to me. If a player wants to spam emotes that’s his/hers problem, I don’t care.

I usually tries to see the best in them and their intentions. Even if I know I’m wrong. You can try that, it's actually fun.

Just try to see all emotes as given with nice intentions and your experience will probably be better. It might be wrong in some cases but as of today I do think that we read in bad intentions were none were given so this will even things out and it don’t make a difference if we are right or wrong in this situation. If we will feel better about it then it is better.

Roping

The rope is a visualisation of the time limit in the round. We have 75 seconds each turn to take our actions. Blizzard changed this time for the first 2 turns recently to around 45 seconds.

When it's around 20 seconds left a rope start to burn to show you that you don’t have that much left of your turn.

The expression roping has been a thing for a while. Some players always wait until the rope appears and then play their cards.

One PRO player were famous for this, Lifecoach, or ropecoach as a lot called him and he were really good at the game and made smart decisions etc. He said that he used the time he were given from the game not only to think about this turn but to think 4-5 turns ahead. To try to visualise what his opponent might play and what his best choices can be. Also to remember and calculate RNG effects and possible outcomes, especially bad ones that could destroy for him.

This is good and a smart approach if you actually think during this time. A lot of players are playing to quick that they actually miss better, often trickier, plays.

Today a lot of “trolls” are doing this intentionally to irritate the opponent and hopefully make them to concede.

Some players has realized that it's more effective to give up and start a new game instead of playing against slow opponents or control decks that takes a long time to play against.

This can be true but the problem with this kind of “min/maxing” is that you have a lot of things to irritate you. As we hopefully know by now, irritation doesn’t help us with winning.

I do understand the irritation when people stall just to annoy me but to be irritated is like giving them a win, or put more fuel on their fire.

Everyone don’t do this and it’s more or less the same as the examples above, don’t see trolls everywhere, will just hurt you.

I’m often a quick player, I do my turns often in about 10 seconds, I have already thought about the options I have and what might be the best play for me. I do rope sometimes as well when it's a lot to do and it might be hard to alter the time because control and combo decks might be more difficult to play because of this. I read someone give a suggestion of have a lower base timer but add 3s per played card or something like that and that might work better but it needs to be tested a lot.

I play hearthstone mostly when I do other stuff at the same time. I like HS because I don’t need to be active every second, I can play a game and if something happends with my son I can check that and still be able to play the rest of the game. I can’t plan when he is going to poop and I can’t always be on alert for that either and not do other things and sometimes I do play HS and change diapers at the same time and the rope might turn up those times but my intention is not to irritate my opponent, it's to solve the issues at home and still be able to play. I think that I can’t be alone with this. I have stopped playing most other games because I “can’t” be sure to have that 30min- 1 hour undisturbed time to play a game. I can always exit the game but then I will damage my teams chances to win and that's not nice either.

Thinking the whole turn might be good if you need the time to think the future turns through but at the same time you are giving your opponent more time to think as well. Depending on your own playstyle and deck to play quick might be advantageous for you because your “slower thinking” opponent gets less time and might be stressed over that you are playing fast. It’s a balance between fast play and strategic play, you shouldn’t play quicker then your own mind can handle.

Punishments

I heard that a lot of players want to have punishments in the game for BM, bad manners, which is good. We need to be able to sort out players that are bad for the community but who should be judging?

If it's BM or not is hard to see, it's depending on our own perspective. As I have seen a lot people today throw accusations left and right to everyone that doesn't do the same thing as they would have done, it is not necessary that they broke any rules or had bad intentions with their actions, it's mostly based on like “I do get irritated when the opponent do this action and that's must be my opponents plan”. If you tell someone to stop their behavior and they continue that could be to irritate you but it's impossible to know what would trigger a person if they don’t communicate that. So it can’t be malicious before they are informed of your opinion, if it's regarding common actions, things that are already breaking rules are always wrong.

I don’t want to get a system were tilters ban good players because of their own troubles with emotions and “trollvision”.

I would rather start to sort out those players that are sending friend requests just to make death threats first and go from there, that should not exist and are not okay regardless of how angry you are.

With roping,

Blizzard has put in these times for a reason, and they should alter them if it would be necessary but all players need different amount of time to do their turn. To use the time given from the game shouldn’t be classed as a “crime”, even if I get irritated of that sometimes as well, especially when i'm in a hurry. But that is my own fault for hoping that the game would go faster.

When I played magic you had 1 hour to do a Bo3 game and no turn limit. MTG games takes a lot longer than HS because you can do things on the opponent's turn and need to get confirmation that they don’t want to do something before you continue.

In theory you could win the first game in 45 minutes and then stall out the second game and after the hour is up do the last 5 turns and actually get a win or in the worst case a draw because you stalled. That could be an issue, in HS it isn’t because we have a limit that's reasonable. It's our own stress that creates the problem.

Dev shoes - New expansion from a deck building perspective

Blizzard has tried a lot of things with the expansions and I do think that they are getting better and better at it, regardless of the general opinion.

We do compare the power level of the cards to much between expansions. The first years we had cards that were played in more or less all classes and types of decks. Best in slot cards. That’s convenient for budget players but it's not fun. We as a community don’t want to have a stale meta, same decks all the time without change.

We want to be able to use the new cards and therefore the devs need to try and make cards less “broken” and work more with synergi. That depending on your type of deck, tribe, aggro, spell, minion the best in slot cards changes to ensure more cards being played from the set.

A few new mechanics were released in the latest expansion and I want to talk a bit of them

Echo

Cards that can be replayed the same turn for the same cost.

Some cheaper cards have always had a problem with being drawn late in the game that they wouldn’t do anything to the current board state and therefore would be a dead card.

Echo gives a new opportunity, some cards have abilities that utilizes playing minion or spells and the echocards will work with them as well.

Like the paladins quest to play 6 spells on minions will be at lot easier now to complete because of their echo card, 2mana 1/2 buff an you can repeat that one but you are only using up one card slot in your deck for potentially 5 plays.

The echo cards will not be overpowered by themselves but they gives an option to building decks that didn’t exist before.

You trade of a little bit of stats for the possibility to play several copies instead and I think that some echo cards will find a use in decks.

Rush

We talked about this earlier in the episode and charge were becoming a big problem so we haven’t seen any “good” charge cards for a while.

With the option to hit face the first turn blizzard opened a whole new world of options for them when creating new cards.

Blizzard want the game to be about the board control not about getting the right cards in your hand at the right time then play out your cards and win without the opponent being able to counter that in any way. It's not a fun playstyle for the people who lost because they couldn’t do anything to avoid that, except perhaps kill them of before they got the cards.

Rush cards with other abilities or regular buff cards might have a better chance of seeing play today then before. It weren’t enough charge cards to build a deck around that mechanic because of the overpowered factor.

Rush makes older unplayed cards better, not always in the higher tiers but for the casual players it might open up new cards and types of decks that still will work.

All tribes

Nightmare amalgam is a new card that are unique it that he is all the tribes at the same time.

This is awesome for deckbuilding purpose.

Some tribes has been hard to build decks around because of the low number of synergetic cards for that tribe or class.

With the All tribe we do have one minion that's well stated for it's cost that gives us a great filler to be able to use our tribes. Exceptionally if we would get one more card that are a member of all the tribes.

The door that has been opened the most with this new card are the possibility to do multi tribe decks. As an example dragons are often heavy costed and cards that works well with them needs a dragon on our hand. Often we need to have a expensive card just sitting in our hand from the start of the game. Other tribes utilizes minions we have on the board or if we played them last turn as with the elementals.

Amalgam gives us an oportunity to combine tribes and lower the amount of tribal cards we need in our deck for it to be worth it. We might be able to build decks like murloc dragon, murloc decks are mostly good in the early game and dragons late game. Combining them might create new decks that aren’t as “one trick pony-like” as many of the tribal decks has been before.

We have often used cards we have considered as bad to be able to play a tribe but we might be able to use amalgam and only the value giving cards from different tribes to make decks.

I’m not saying that this will be a huge thing now but the ability to make tribes viable exists more now than efter. We might need more tribal cards to be able to combine tribes in top decks but I don’t know.

The option Blizzzard opens for us with this one card is amazing for the future and I hope that we will be able to create new archetypes.

Even / odd

We have had some other variants from blizzard were they introduced ways to change the rules of the game at a cost or as some people thinks, forces you to build your deck around a card.

As I said before, with new mechanics people will flock to them and try to fit them in everywhere but after awhile it will stop. It's the normal process that will happen when we do get new toys to play with.

Blizzard added 4 cards, I think, that utilizes the new mechanics and that you more or less need to use even or odd decks to get value from the cards… 6cards including the two legendarys that make this new deckbuilding type to work. That's not that many… So the arguments that Blizzard tries to force us on how to use the cards with the expansions are wrong, in my opinion.

They added a few cards to open a whole new type of decks and that will make the game more versitile then less when you want to buiild new decks.

Most decks have standard cards they use for each slot. Card draw then you use theese cards depending on with class you are using and a lot of cards that are doing the same things will not be used because the options are a litle bit better or at least the general opinion of them.

The new even / Odd mechanic enables a lot of old cards to be played. It forces the player to think outside of the box because some of their go to cards will not be available anymore and this creates options and new type of variations.

If Even and Odd will be a standard with decks or not will be showed over time but I think that they will die out in the top tiers with a few exceptions and we will see regular decks as well.

Overall the way Blizzard are making cards today it seems like we can try and build other types of decks than we are used to and that you can make different decks for each class and still be able to compete.

Next week

Deckbuilding: We will create an odd Dude paladin deck.

Tilt: Elitism and it's problem.

Dev shoes: Elitism and communication.