#194 - The Angry Chicken: “Return to Rogue”

1-31-17

• Garrett • Jocelyn • Dills

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Intro:  Welcome to The Angry Chicken!

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News

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Brode made a reddit post

Brode took to reddit to dive deeper into comments he made that he felt were misunderstood.

Complexity vs. Strategic Depth

• Brode prefers depth to complexity.
• Brode’s personal nightmare card?

• "Deal damage to a minion equal to it's Attack minus its Health divided by the number of Mana Crystals your opponent has. If an adjacent minion has Divine Shield or Taunt, double the damage. If your opponent controls at least 3 minions with Spell Damage, then you can't deal more damage than that minion has Health." BLECH.

• “...making cards more complicated is easy. Making them Strategically Deep is more difficult. Making them simple and deep is the most challenging, and where I think we should be shooting.”

• An individual design doesn’t need to be ‘deep’ on its own.
• Often (as in the case of Whirlwind) a card's depth exists because of how it is used in combination with other cards

Design Space

• Brode gave an example of how we can break down design space in our heads:

• All vanilla minions

• (no-text) minions. Everything from Wisp to Faceless Behemoth. Even accounting for balance variation (i.e. 5-mana 6/6 (good) and 5-mana 4/4 (bad)), there are a limited number of minions in that list. Once we've made every combination of them - that's it! We couldn't make any more without reprinting old ones. That list is the complete list of 'design space' for vanilla minions.

• Minions with just keywords on them

• Windfury, Stealth, etc. There are many here but eventually could be completed.

• When you plan for a game to exist forever, or even just when it's time to invent new cards, thinking about what 'design space' you have remaining to explore is important.
• Some design space is technically explorable, but isn't fun.

• "Your opponent discards their hand."
• "When you mouse-over this card, you lose."
• "Minions can't be played the rest of the game."
• "Whenever your opponent plays a card, they automatically emote 'I am a big loser.'"
• "Charge"

• Sometimes design space could be really fun, but because other cards exist, we can't explore it.

• Dreadsteed is an example of a card that couldn't exist in Warrior or Neutral, due to the old Warsong Commander design. (in this case we made Dreadsteed a Warlock card)
• The Grimy Goons mechanic is an example that couldn't exist in the same world as the Warrior Charge Spell and Enraged Worgen. (in this case we changed the 'Charge' spell)

Wild

• Cards that severely limit design space can sometimes be fine in rotating sets, because we only have to design around them while they are in the Standard Format, as long as they aren't broken in Wild.
• Wild will eventually have so many more cards than Standard, the power level there will be much higher. Most of that power level will come from synergies between the huge number of cards available, so sometimes being 'Tier 1' in Standard means that similar strategies are a couple tiers lower in Wild.
• We're still navigating what Wild balance should be like. It's allowed to be more powerful, but how much more powerful?

Hearthstone Made Close To $US400 Million For Blizzard In 2016

Meat of the story goes here.

Links

• http://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/01/hearthstone-made-us400-million-for-blizzard-in-2016-report/

Other news

• Hearthstone's Android App Size Drastically Reduced By Latest Update - now only 1.98 GB

• Yong seems stoked. Congrats dude!

• Patches originally was a Whelp that summoned off a Dragon being played. - Via Polygon

• Blizzard would like to improve the spectator experience, particularly in regards to the opponent's cards being upside-down.
• Brode also ducked a question from Phil about possibly releasing more, smaller sets of cards through the year: “We have some cool ideas on that, but we’re not ready to share the specifics. We will be ready to share that over the next couple months. Stay tuned for some announcements in that direction.”

• The (Winter Veil-themed) Gift Exchange Tavern Brawl is coming back this week. If you missed out on the Winter Veil card back it’s up for grabs again.

Strategy

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Miracle Rogue

Been pretty popular for a while now but we haven’t highlighted it on the cast.

Decklist:  https://tempostorm.com/hearthstone/decks/pirate-miracle-rogue-standard-meta-snapshot-jan-15-2017

Crazy Game Stories

You can send your Crazy Game Stories to TACpodcast@gmail.com.

Brohio

Greetings, Iracible Avifauna!

I was just minding my own business laddering along as Reno-Lock, when I came across another nondescript Jade Druid.  All is going well, and around turn 10 or so I throw down my JARAXUS, EREDAR LORD OF THE BURNING LEGION.

A couple turns later, he is in a tough board position and plays Yogg.  The Old God manages to kill my side of the board and summon a few minions before casting vanish, sending himself back into the Druid's hand.

A couple turns go by, I'm back in control, and out pops Yogg again!  He gets another 6 or 7 spells off, damaging my face a little bit before throwing out another Vanish to pop back to safety once again.

At this point the Jade golems are getting a little out of hand.  Next turn he throws down a huge board with a Jade Behemoth, and a Jade Spirit, landing him his 9/9 and 10/10 golems.  I mind control tech the 10/10, kill the behemoth with an infernal, and kill the spirit with another minion.  I then drop my Sylvanas and Power Overwhelming it, stealing the 9/9 and leaving him with no minions.

Third time's the charm!!  He throws down one last ditch Yogg, which proceeds to cast somewhere on the order of 15 spells.  My board is totally wiped and I am left at 2 health, he is at 5, with Yogg, an 11/11 golem, and a mirror image.

I Reno back to 15, hellfire to clear the taunt, and go for the face to face kill, only to find that one of his secrets was a Noble Sacrifice, who selflessly tells the Druid to "Get Down!!" and takes the hit, leaving me with no options but to stare in horror as Yogg and his 11/11 golem friend come barreling into my face...  G.G.

Hope you guys enjoyed!

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Mike S.

Hello,

I have been playing Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links, and I have found this game to be amazing in more ways than one.  I'm interested to know what you think of the card pack system.

Essentially, you get a "box" of boosters and the box has a set amount of packs.  Inside these packs are a set of cards, and the number of individual cards is constant in the box.  So say there are 9 "legendaries" in a box.  There is only one of each, and once you get it, you won't pull it again in a pack, unless you reset the box.  Resetting the box refreshes the count and you have another opportunity to pull a duplicate "legendary"..

I know that is probably really confusing, and I hope I explained it well enough.

What do you guys think of this system?

Stiderman

Dear Cross-Cockalorums,

I should know this, but standard doesn't make sense to me.  So basically when the first 2017 expansion goes live, Blackrock Mountain (April 2015), The Grand Tournament (August 2015), and The League of Explorers (November 2015) will ALL cycle out of Standard.  It it just me or is this incredibly jarring to lose 3 while only gaining 1?  Wouldn't it make much more sense to just rotate out a set every time a new set comes in, and an adventure when a new adventure comes in? Year of the Whatever would then only be in relation to the World Championship time frame of 365 days.

Cary

Hello resentful poultry!

On one of your previous episodes, you stated that there was a shrinking amount of major lore characters in Warcraft which haven't been explored fully in Hearthstone. However, World of Warcraft has made leaps and bounds in this disgusting new idea known as "content" consistently adding new iconic characters to the story.

The latest expansion, Mean Streets, included 5 characters actually appearing in WoW, Noggenfogger, Madame Goya, Wrathion, Beardo, and Hobart Grapplehammer. With WoW leaping bounds ahead, when do you think Hearthstone will "catch-up", to Warcraft?

I still thinking the list of major WoW characters not represented in Hearthstone is very large. We're still missing

-Arthas

-Many BC characters such as Kael'thas, Akama, Vashj.

-Dwarves: Muradin, Falstad, Moira

-The Titans & Keepers

- Archimonde

- More Wild Gods (Ursoc, etc.)

-Almost all of the Pandaria characters. (Chen, Lei Shen, etc.)

-Almost all of the Draenor characters (Kargath, Maraad)

-Etc...

Understandably, the success of Explorers and Mean Streets show that card expansion stories might be better for Hearthstone than certain raid tiers. Does Hearthstone want to catch up or explore these sections of lore?

On the other side of things, it would be great fun to make Mean Streets "canon" as a caverns of time raid. This time, the infinite flight would be attacking the future instead of the past. We could have three wings for the three gangs. I can see Don Han'Cho swatting heroes down a Bank elevator with a baseball bat!

Outro

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