TGT is out right now. What did you guys get from your packs? What are your general impressions so far?

I opened about 41 packs that I got from saving gold throughout the whole season. So far, i've gotten the druid legendary and the other druid cards. So, it appears I'll be working with druid first.

Had enough gold for 22 packs, got Varian, Saraad and Eadric. Sadly didn't get any of the other pieces of a mage inspire deck, and still don't have all the other legendaries for a warrior control deck yet.

Totem shaman seems affordable if you have a decent amount of dust so I'd recommend giving that a shot, assuming it's as strong as everyone thinks it will be. Of course I might have to finally suck it up and make Dr. Balanced which would just make me feel like a horrible person.

Opened 50 pack from gold, got 4 legs (Fizzlebang in the first pack). Then the game crashed when I went to disenchant stuff and haven't been able to get back in =(. From what I saw of my collection before the crash it seems like I hit the high-end as far as predicted amount of cards from 50 packs, but ofc most of the missing ones are the rares ones, so... Gonna really suck to grind out the rest through arena with the new reward system.

I got Varian, the good Hunter worm and the awful Skeleton Knight from my 50.

I opened my original 50...got 2 Gormoks and that's it for legendary cards. I bought I think 14 or 15 more packs with coins saved up and got Saraad and Eadric. I'm messing around with a Paladin deck right now. It's fun, but it's not refined yet.

Void Crusher is pretty sweet in Arena.

EU servers have been pretty chockablock so I've left it be for now. Watching some Totem Shaman from Trump and that's seemed reasonably solid. Definitely a step up from Shaman decks of late. Will report back on my pack situation later once I've actually had a chance to open up some cards.

EU servers are down (obviously) so I'll let you know when I actually get to open some damn packs.

I bought the 50 packs with my fake digital Amazon money. Got two legendaries, Chillmaw and Bolf (the guy who tanks hero damage). I also got two Twilight Guardians, so it looks like I'm going to try to make Dragon Control Paladin work?

I had a good match against another Paladin who seemed to be trying out Murloc Kinght and the joust healing Tuskarr in a Midrange deck (I even got to hit Dr. Boom with Rend!), but it's the only game I've played so far with it. I would do the same for Warrior if only I had the requisite epics and some different dragons for that deck. I should probably test it more, but I'm feeling like I probably ought to craft Alexstrasza and put her in the deck over Chromaggus, perhaps cut Volcanic Drake for BGH and/or another Aldor Peacekeeper. My card draw right now is coming from Azure Drakes and Solemn Vigil until I get to drop Nefarian or Chromaggus, which could be shaky in Control matchups.

Early totem shaman impressions: it's pretty strong.

Edit: It's actually really good. Totem golem and tuskar totemic lets you either deal with or deal out early aggression when accompanied by flametongues and defender of argus, while thunderbluff valiant and bloodlust can dish out late game burst damage. Pad out the rest with some mana tide and azure drake and the requisite zombie chow / fire elemental / Dr. Boom, and you got yourself a damn competitive deck.

Though to be fair, still haven't faced off against a face hunter yet after 8 or so games.

Just had my first run in with a totem shaman in rank...holy crap. It wasn't even a contest, and I had a great draw.

It's gonna be really annoying to play against that a lot, and I betcha many peeps are gonna build it

Like warlock zoo and face hunter, its not that it's so strong, but also that it's incredibly cheap to build that will make it common on the ladder.

Tuskarr Jouster is a guaranteed tie in arena.

Finally opened my packs. I got 15 North Sea Kraken's. So theres that. Came out with 2 legendaries, Dreadscale (shit) and Gormok, which I think is shit, but we'll see.

Also got destroyed by a Totem Shaman. YAY!

NA's starting to lag like crazy

30 packs and zero legends. Got 8 Demonfuses though, so it's not the worst thing to ever happen to me.

So I opened 70 packs. Notable highlights include:

• 6 Competitive Spirit for some reason
• 8 Void Crusher for some reason
• Eydis Darkbane
• Gormok the Impaler
• Bolf Ramshield

Got mostly neutral Epics, outside of 2 copies of Mulch. Not sure I'm really going to do much with 1 copy each of Master of Ceremonies, Crowd Favorite, Sideshow Spelleater, etc.

Also, what the fuck, when did they rename half of the Silent Knight/Holy Knight combo.

Like an hour after Holy Knight was revealed.

Opened about 40 packs, zero Legendaries. Back to the gold grind!

OK, so I put Gormok into this deck, which is a deck I like to play to troll netdecking bastards (yes, I am aware of the irony) instead of the Kezan Mystic. It actually works because of the amount of stuff you have on the board. The taunts and divine shields and all the secrets make sure your shit doesn't get removed so the battlecry is actually very consistent. I just went 6/0 against such favourites as Patron Warrior and Face Hunter. Gormok's 4 plus everything else you happen to have out equals hella burst damage. Probably the only deck I could get it to work in, but I'm still probably gonna keep hold of it instead of turning it into sweet, sweet dust.

Got the 50 pack pre-order and 10 packs with gold. Got 3 legendaries; The Skeleton Knight and 2 Mistacaller's, 11 Lowly Squires, and 10 Demonfuses. Everything else was underwhelming... Though I play Priest mostly, so this whole expansion is kinda lame for Priests. I was hoping to get most of an Inspire Mage deck, because shenanigans. I've got a lot of dust, so am trying to think of Legendaries to craft. What is everyone's top legendaries from this expansion?

Welp good expansion everyone it's been fun back to patron warrior and face hunter see you in six months for the next one.

Druid got some good stuff in this, living roots, Darnassus Aspirant is amazing, I also really like savage combatant. Idk how good the druid legend is at 9 mana I would rather Rags, Vsera, or Boom I wish she was a 7/7.

@nime said:

BUT WHAT ABOUT MY OVERLY CONVOLUTED DISCARD-BASED DEMON DECK THAT ALSO USES DEMONFUSE?

@turambar said:

Well they fucked up.

Do you get any free packs for logging into this? Or do you have to buy everything to get started?

@rorie: Nothing's free. Hope you have some gold saved up.

@spunkyhepanda said:

Yeah, that's kinda BS. When Goblins vs. Gnomes launched, if you logged in during the launch week, you got something like 3 free packs.

I wonder if Hearthstone's ARPU is getting worse or not improving the way they would prefer or something, prompting the Blackrock Mountain preorder incentive (give us money to get this cardback!), the wildly overpriced "skins" you can buy for some of the heroes, and the Grand Tournament preorder incentive (give us money to get this cardback! also get slightly more packs than you normally would for that much money!), and the evaporation of getting free card packs when the expansion launches.

It has definitely felt like a money grab lately, compared to when Naxxramas and Goblins vs. Gnomes launched in an inoffensive fashion. You either have to be in the trenches grinding out gold every couple days, or they'd really like you to spend some money.

All of which is interesting because they've been very much non-shitty about purchase options in WoW. WoW of course has a subscription model that feeds them most of their money, but they've been remarkably even-handed about not filling it up with a huge amount of crap. Part of that might be that they already implemented into the base game the kind of stuff that other F2P MMOs sell (heirlooms already have XP boosts up the wazoo and are easy to get, for example), but still - they seem to have good instincts when it comes to the F2P stuff, or at least enough money on hand that they don't have to worry about getting gross about it. Who knows, though; I'm sure their investors want to see Hearthstone sell you "i win" buttons.

Every mage that you play against in the arena (still 99% of players) will have Coldarra Drake 100% of the time.

I've got more money than sense so I bought the 50 pack deal. Really wasn't prepared for the sheer amount of crazy duplication. I get that common cards are common and random is random but to have gotten so many of certain commons and only 1 of others just boggles the mind. I ended up with 3 Legendaries, which seems about average, 7 golds and 100 of the 132 cards in the set.

Highlights:

• Gormok the Impaler
• Justicar Truehart (Gold)
• Confessor Paletress

Lowlights:

• King's Elekk x12
• Boneguard Lieutenant x9
• x5+ of too many commons to list
• Only x1 of too many commons to list

After all dupes were dusted I ended up with 630 dust.

All-in-all I'd say I was disappointed by my first non-Adventure purchase in Hearthstone though in retrospect I don't know exactly what I expected.

Well after getting spanked by it, I decided to switch to Totem Shaman, and my god it's amazing. I ended with an 80%+ winrate, and my only loses were against the new kind of
'Secret Paladin', and that deck looks insane and probably impossible to beat with Totem Shammy. (I'd try it but have none of the legendaries for it)

To be fair, they've also begun essentially giving a free vanilla pack to everyone each week with the introduction of brawls, something very useful for new players.

Damnit I really wanted to talk about how shitty Mistcaller probably is then I went and bought 10 packs after running the mage arena gauntlet for like 4 hours and got this (also Gormok):

@fredchuckdave: Well I don't have Mistcaller so I can still talk about how I think he's shitty. I think he's pretty shitty.

Went and tested Astral Communion, the fact that this card doesn't refill your mana if you're at 10 mana (no matter if you have spent any or not) basically means it will never be playable. It has such a limited window of where it's not complete trash that you will never see any consistency with it in the deck. It's unfortunate really, their "fix" to making it "not useless" at 10 mana ends up breaking the interesting part of the card. If they had just left it as is, without giving excess mana it could've actually spawned a completely new druid archetype.

@turambar: One of the Tavern Brawl loading tips seems to imply that they may phase out the free pack you get once per week with Tavern Brawl.

Started the day telling myself I wouldn't get angry, and happy to say I managed to keep my temper. But oh god, sometimes I can't believe how much bad luck one person can have. The first few runs were fine, but then the shit drafts came along, and then finally at the end of the day came the top-deck champions...

As for the cards, I'm positively surprised by Argent Horserider, seems way more useful than I thought at first. Also had a bunch of success with Kvaldir Raider in arena. He's basically just a better Floating Watcher since you can play him in classes that don't kill themselves by activating it. North Sea Kraken also seems to be an arena champion to the point that I would almost count it as having a good legendary in your deck. It can pretty much do about as much work as any other legendary in arena. And finally Lance Carrier seems like a top-notch card that I can imagine even will end up in constructed agro decks.

The more negative ones on the other hand, the most notable is the Totem Golem. The tempo loss is very real, and he's not really that "invulnerable". I've also not been very impressed with Polymorph Boar. It just never seems to do what I want it to do, but I think I'm just struggling with figuring out how to actually play it. Pit Fighter also seems quite disappointing. Sure it might get a face hit or two in, but compared to the Jormungar it tends to not have too much impact on the board.

Overall, had a good time today, there's a lot of playable arena cards in the expansion. Inspire works really great for the arena format where things tends to stay around a bit more, although looking back the decks I had the most success with was mech and dragon synergy decks.

Mistcaller is okay in ridiculously slow games, makes fire elemental a BGH target though. You definitely want a copy of elemental destruction for other slow decks since no one will play around a third board clear.

Face hunter destroys totem shaman if you don't draw healing wave, not a favorable matchup otherwise. Not very many on the ladder right now but I'm sure they'll be back in a week or so. You could play an anti face hunter shaman deck that would lose to everything else if you wanted.

It seems the first competitive decks to make use of the new cards Dragon Priest and Totem Shaman.

Dragon Priest is getting some buzz ever since Reynad used it on his stream. I've seen it in action and it looks like the dragon deck we wish Paladin was in Blackrock mountain. It even uses the Rend Blackhand card to great effect. I really want to try this as soon as I get I get the cards for it. Unfortunately, the deck can get quite expensive since it requires that you also have Voljin to handle late game big creatures, ysera against control decks in general and Chillmaw for those patron decks.

The Totem Shaman was a deck recently made by Trump. I've played this one myself since it is relatively cheap to make. I am finding great success with this deck against control warrior, but it does not seem that great against hunter. I feel that this deck will need refinement as time passes.

Remember when I said it would take a week for face hunters to reappear en masse? I lied, it was less than a day.

I think Totem Shaman crushes Dragon Priest, especially if you have an elemental destruction.

Okay, got my packs and decided to do an experiment.

I've been meaning to buy some packs for an age but never got around to it. The lure of a pre-order card back tempted me in (for some reason they really get me, more so than cosmetic heroes and such which I don't really care too much about) so I chose the moment to go all-in crazy and pick up 60 Classic and 60 GvG packs and see what served me best. Feel free to join me on my journey, or I'll put the legendaries in this spoiler box below.

Will see what decks I end up with in the long run, but I'm primarily super interested in running arenas now and seeing how things go. I watched Hafu for a good chunk of yesterday while working and seems like there's some really interesting mixups with the new set (Paladins everywhere, gotta use that Murloc Knight), although it's tough to say how the meta will end up shifting yet. Definitely a lot of weird drafts whether by choice (testing out new cards) or purely being unsure what is good so far.

Murloc Knight fits in real well with my midrange Paladin deck. Haven't taken the time to really look at too much else but I did get a couple of legendary hunter pets so I might look at what I could build there.

Okay, after a couple days and a lot of games, here are my thoughts:

Packs: Opened about 90 packs from pre-order and gold combination and only got Justicar, Bolf and Fjola. Pretty disappointing. Only crafted Varian and Chillmaw so far. Gonna wait before I decide what to spend the rest of my dust on. Should have enough for maybe 3 or 4 more legendaries. I'm thinking about Eadric, Rhonin and Skeleton Knight(for fun!)

Varian: He's pretty great but as you would expect it's insanely difficult to find the time to play him. If you're against an aggressive deck, you're either under so much pressure that he's completely dead in your hand or you've already won the game and he's just the victory lap. Against control/midrange he's actually lost me a few games by driving me into fatigue. I think I've pulled about 10 BGH's with him which is kind of crippling against any deck that runs Boom. I've also run into this scenario a lot: empty Shaman board, play Varian, pull a bunch of small stuff like Acolytes and Armorsmiths, Shaman rolls spell power totem and clears my whole board with spells. Annoying. Before TGT came out I heard a few people saying, "oh he's just going to fatigue you, you're just playing into AOE, he costs too much" and I rolled my eyes and thought they were just being negative but he does have his downsides. It's possible my decks weren't greedy enough to take advantage of his ability.

Dragon Warrior: I agonized over what to put in this deck for a long time. There's so little room and so many quality cards. It feels really weird cutting stuff like Execute and Brawl that have been staples in Control Warrior forever. Twilight Guardian is so good, 6 health is such a huge deal on turn 4. Alexstrasza's Champion almost always trades 2 for 1 in the early game against aggro. Being able to proc Freezing Trap with a low cost minion is nice too. I'm going to keep experimenting with the list and maybe post it later when it's refined more. By the way, FYI Blizzard: Chillmaw doesn't kill Frothings with his deathrattle :/ plz buff thx

Justicar Trueheart: I've only player her in Warrior and Paladin but I love this card. Getting double 1/1's a turn is kind of disgusting. Hitting a Quartermaster on 4+ Recruits without using Muster is ridiculous.

The Inspire Mechanic: I tested a few Inspire decks and I think it might be stronger than it looks on paper. All the Inspire cards basically have taunt and I found that my opponents were using a significant amount of resources to remove my board each turn. I ended up really enjoying my time playing with these cards and only wish they made more of them!! And hey, why is Recruiter a 5/4?? Saraad gives you spells(much more valuable) and has 5 life but Recruiter just gives you 2/2's but has 4 health?? He could easily be a 5/5 or 3/6 for what he does. Also, I think we may have underestimated Tournament Medic. He's not terrible.

After two and a half days of grinding arena I think I managed to encapsulate the experience in two pictures.

I'm done.... I have no idea how people manage to draft those constructed-style decks I regularly meet. Or well, I guess I do, I got one at the end of yesterday after what was probably 15-20 drafts. While the new expansion brought a lot of "decent" cards the diluted cardpool has made it way harder to draft actually good decks. Guess it's time to play constructed and get some bad draws there as well...

(ehm, how do I fix this editing?)

@ares42: That's basically the reason I've stopped playing Arena. Months ago.

Look, I like the occasional draft of Magic: The Gathering, and Dominion is as great drafting-based card game. Hearthstone's Arena is not a good drafting format. You're not really drafting against anybody since you aren't sharing from a pool of cards, so why the fuck can I only look at 3 cards at a time, and why can't I just scroll back and change my pick before I "lock in" the deck and actually start playing people. Magic has another format called sealed, where you open an amount of cards that is like triple what a deck would contain, then put together the best thing you can; you get screwed by luck sometimes, but at least you can choose the best of the bunch. Arena basically lets you, just you, choose from 90 cards, but fuck you, it's going to show them to you in an arbitrary, stupid way.

Arena is the worst of both formats. You're always picking from a subset, but there's no tension because instead of passing those cards to anybody else, they just cease to exist. And you don't even get to just choose from the full card pool like you would in sealed. It just feels like shittier sealed.

And yeah, it gets tiring drafting a perfectly reasonable deck that goes 3-3 because you encounter people with ranked-quality synergies and value cards even when you're already at 2 losses.

I agree that the arena format has some major problems, but that scenario seldom happens, especially when you're in a 0-2 bracket of some kind. Arena has its own overarching deck building strategies to follow and play styles to adopt before accounting for luck of any kind. Otherwise, players that do well in arena fairly consistently wouldn't exist.

I opened a bunch of packs on Monday and the best card I ended up getting was The Mistcaller. It's a pretty sweet Shaman Legendary who's Battlecry gives all minions in your hand and deck +1/+1. Ither than that I got all the cards to make Totem Shaman. I like most of the cards added though the expansion and while I'm not the most creative deck builder I do look forward to seeing what crazy decks end up being made by talented people.