Legend of the Innkeeper : A Hearthstone Podcast for Casual Players

 

 

News

Expansion Announced: Journey to Un’Goro

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAHwjbKQi04

Release Date: Early April

We will see more cards starting on March 17th.

http://www.ungoro.com

135 new cards

New game board

Pre-order will be available for $49.95 which includes 50 packs and a special card back, “Fossil”.

A new tribe called Elemental.  Some older cards will gain this tribe, such as:

Rumbling Elemental, Fireguard Destroyer, Ice Rager, Unbound Elemental, Magma Rager, Earth Elemental, Anomalus, Ragnaros the Firelord, Neptulon, Baron Geddon, Ragnaros, Lightlord, Al’Akir the Windlord and Water Elemental. An official list has not been released yet.

New Quest cards which are Legendary Spells and count as spells.  

You can have only one in your deck and they are always in your opening mulligan.

You can choose to mulligan them away. https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/5wiex4/journey_to_ungoro_announcement_video/deabnbl/

The Quest says ‘Summon’, which means that N’Zoth’s minions count. https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/5wiex4/journey_to_ungoro_announcement_video/deab2hs/?st=izohuid4&sh=46e32e84

The rewards they generate are not collectable cards, they are tokens.

New keyword called Adapt.  It’s like the Discover mechanic and it lets you choose 1 option of 3 (from a pool of 10 options) to add to your minion.

Some of the options revealed so far:

Liquid Membrane – Can’t be targeted by spells or Hero Powers

Flaming Claws – +3 Attack

Crackling Shield – Divine Shield

Living Spores – Deathrattle: Summon two 1/1 Plants

Massive – Taunt

Lightning Speed – Windfury

Volcanic Might – +1/+1

Rocky Carapace – +3 Health

Shrouding Mist – Stealth until your next turn

Poison Spit – Destroy any minion damaged by this one

Yong Woo – each class will be getting a normal Legendary minion and a Quest Legendary Spell. https://twitter.com/ywoo_dev/status/836324443722919936

Peter Whalen – There will only be five Neutral Legendaries in the set.  https://twitter.com/LegendaryFerret/status/836340952843214848

This means there are 23 Legendary cards in total. (Old Gods had 21, Gadgetzan, GvG and TGT had 20).

New Cards so far….

Shaman card: Volcano – 5 mana, Deal 15 damage randomly split among all minions Overload (2)

Mage Legendary: Pyros – 2 mana, 2/2 Elemental minion; Deathrattle: Return this to your hand as a 6/6 that costs (6).

Pyros #2 – 6 mana, 6/6 Elemental minion; Deathrattle: Return this to your hand as a 10/10 that costs (10).

Pyros #3 – 10 mana, 10/10 Elemental minion.

Druid card: Verdant Longneck – 5 mana, 5/4 Beast; Battlecry Adapt

Priest Quest card – Awaken the Makers, 1 mana; Quest: Summon 7 Deathrattle minions. Reward: Amara, Warden of Hope.

Priest card – Amara, Warden of Hope, Legendary minion – 5 mana, 8/8 minion; Taunt. Battlecry: Set your Hero’s health to 40.

Gentle Megasaur – Neutral – 4 mana, 5/4 Beast – Battlecry: Adapt your Murlocs. (source)

News

Year of the Mammoth

Rotating Out:

Blackrock Mountain

The Grand Tournament

The League of Explorers

6 cards from Classic moving to Wild-only. Calling it the “Hall of Fame set”. If you own any of these cards, you will get to keep them and gain dust equal to their creation value when the rotation goes live. These cards will no longer be found in packs once the update occurs.

It’s recommended to craft these cards if you don’t have them so that you get the free dust from Blizzard. (especially the Golden versions)

You can still dust them afterwards if you don’t want them for free dust.

If you own a regular and Golden version of a card, you will only get the full dust value of the Golden version.

Only get dust for the copies you can include in a deck.  If you have 3 Azure Drakes, you only get dust for 2, so disenchant one now.

Azure Drake

Sylvanas Windrunner

Ragnaros the Firelord

Power Overwhelming

Ice Lance

Conceal

No Adventures this year.  We will see 3 ~130 card expansions

The 2nd and 3rd expansions will feature a playable story, like an adventure. More details coming later on this.

Cards will come only from card packs.

A Heroic Tavern Brawl will be going live sometime after the first expansion releases, using the Wild format.

Blizzard is going to work on more Wild Tournaments

Daily Login rewards – At the start will include Dust, Gold, Expansion packs and a “few other surprises”

New Hero: Rogue – Maiev Shadowsong

Win 10 games of Hearthstone in Standard or Casual mode when the rotation happens.

There will be some Deathrattle build-arounds in upcoming sets.

Fireside Gatherings are getting more attention this year. Adding additional in-client features to support Fireside Gatherings.

Blizzard considering un-nerfing Molten Giant and putting it in the Hall of Fame set for the 2018 rotation.

Yong Woo stated they are thinking of adding a profile page with a player’s favorite decks and cards. — Get clarification

Developer Insights Q&A – Live Stream here https://www.twitch.tv/videos/123747776

Will see a blog post later this week about the upcoming changes to Arena.

Missions in the expansions will be harder than they were in Adventures.

Don’t plan current to do heroics.

40% of all players on ladder are around rank 20.

They are experimenting with Stealth, Deathrattle and Tricks with Rogues.  Some Thievery too.

Espo Mode ~ Blood Magic

“How much are you willing to sacrifice for power? All your spells will cost health instead of mana!”

Violet Illusionist does work and can be used to prevent damage to yourself when using spells.

Animated Armor will reduce any damage you take from casting a spell to 1.

You can’t play a spell if you don’t have enough health regardless of if you have Violet Illusionist and Animated Armor.

Gadgetzan Auctioneer saw lots of play by me (Espo) in my Druid deck

Lots of heal spells were used with Druid

Getting Better

I just tweeted at lotipodcast 2 candidates for your fun deck challenge, wanted to mention a few things about my decks.  My Twitter handle is @mherrick84.

1:  klepto priest- the dream is stealing an opponent’s minion “until end of turn” but then brewmastering into hand, or transforming with Tinkmaster (because who can pass up a chance to play Tink!). The dream is shadow madness or potion of madness an opponent’s ...

News

Blizzard posts Top 100 Arena Leaderboard for January 2017

Kripparian is the top player with an average of 7.78 wins over 37 games

Hafu (6.91) at 30 and Merps (6.54), of Grinning Goat at 90

A group features prominently on the chart with players names starting with Meow. Apparently, according to this Reddit thread, when the China server had issues earlier this year, this arena fan group decided to switch over to the NA server during the outage. About this time it was announced that there will be an Arena leaderboard so they continued playing to get their 30 games in.  14 players finished their 30 games in January and 13 made it on the leaderboards, 7 of those in the top 15.  https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/5t1nni/top_100_arena_playersjanuary_2017/ddjfyg1/

Dean Ayala posted on Reddit a few interesting things about the future of Arena.  Source

They are testing a 20% increase in spell occurrences with Arena picks.

Considering making Arena use just Standard cards.

“There are a number of game-to-game quality changes coming for arena”. Final changes to be announced “in the nearish future”

HSReplay, has released a report that shows that if you go first in the Arena, you increase your chances of winning.

https://hsreplay.net/articles/4/mulligan-luck-arena

If you go first and draw a 1 cost card, your win rate increases by 5% to 13% depending on class.

Over 280,000 matches were analyzed in this study.  Warlock leads the win rate.

Getting Better

Arena Discussion

When I was looking back at our original Arena guides back in Episodes 10-12, I came across something that was just awesome.  It was an email from a listener in episode 12.

I recently found your podcast on itunes. I’ve been listening to others and found that L.O.T.I. is more my speed. You touch on the casual side of the game while still appeasing my appetite for the competitive side.

I’ve also heard that you all are in N.C.  I live just south of Raleigh! I used to hold WoW TCG nights at my local comic shop. But I’m sad to say that since the game has passed, the shop does not have a need for the game. We still play, just not at the shop. So… I’ve gotten into Hearthstone! But alas, my WoW TCG friends refuse to play the CCG version.

Keep up the great work and I appreciate the work that you do with the podcast.

Thomas Esposito

We actually covered the Arena over 3 separate shows back then primarily because we were going over how to approach the Arena for completely new players.  Some of what we covered still applies for someone who has never tried the Arena before.  So I would say if you are completely new to the Arena you might go back and listen to episodes 10-12.  

However, a lot has changed in the game since then. And there are a lot more resources out there to help.

I was watching Kripp the other night on Twitch, since he was listed in the Arena leaderboards and saw him draft a new Arena deck.  Turns out he’s using the tool I was going to recommend.  It’s Heartharena (windows only).  http://www.heartharena.com/overwolf  They have a new client you can download and install that overlays suggestions for drafts right on the game itself. And it tracks your performance over time as well.

Also, I would recommend checking out Kripp’s videos on the Arena.  He has lots of them. And from my experience watching his stream the other night, be warned, he swears quite a lot.

News

Hearthstone : Lost Secrets of Un’Goro?

On Monday, one of the voice actresses who has worked with many Blizzard titles apparently added a new entry to her resume in which the game was listed as Hearthstone: Lost Secrets of Un’Goro.  Shortly after this was spread like wildfire around the internet, it was removed and she started sending out tweets to numerous news sites asking them to retract the news item stating that it might be trouble for her because of an NDA.  Later that evening, those messages were removed from Twitter as well.

You can now buy Hearthstone packs with WoW tokens

You can now use World of Warcraft in game gold to buy WoW tokens.  You can then convert those tokens into either WoW game time or $15 of Battle.net currency, in which you can buy packs.

Blizzard officially announces the Hearthstone Global Games

Will feature teams from 48 different countries, fighting to make it to the finals later in the year.

Top player in each country is invited to represent their country. And additional 3 players per team is voted on by the community.

Format: Best of five, class vs class format with nine unique classes per team. Each player will have 2 classes they can play and the ninth class is designated as the “Ace deck” and is played in game five.

Phase 1: Separated into 8 groups, each group of 6 teams play each other, top 3 teams from each group advances to Phase 2.

Phase 2: 24 remaining teams placed into six groups, each groups of 4 teams play each other. Top 2 teams from each group and the four highest 3rd place teams advance.

Phase 3: Remaining 16 teams go into single elimination bracket.  Top 4 teams go to the live Global Games finals.

Finals: Best of 9, class vs class format.  Single elimination.

Prizes: 1st place, $15,000 per player on winning team; 2nd $10,000; 3rd & 4th $5,000.

Ben Brode posted another update

In the past 2 weeks, 30% of players were playing Shaman on the Legend ladder

17% of players were playing Shaman when all ranks are included.

This includes all types of Shaman decks

For reference, the worst point in history, balance wise, was Undertaker Hunter, where Hunter was being played by 35% of players across all ranks.

The ‘pirate package’ of Small-time Buccaneer and Patches the Pirate is being played in roughly 50% of decks above rank 5.

The average win-rate for Aggro Shaman is 53%, which is currently the highest win-rate deck in the meta.

There has never been a ‘best deck’ with a lower win-rate than this.

It only has a 35% win-rate against Control Warrior, which is tuned against it.

There will be a patch at the end of the month.

An announcement about balance changes will be made around a week or so before that.

Espo Mode

The Gift Exchange Brawl

Great Father is dropping crates on the battlefield! Get a gift each time you smash your opponent’s crate… or your own!

Notable cards:  Crazed Alchemist, Kooky Chemist, Confuse, etc.

If you complete this brawl, you will earn the Holiday card back.  If you already had the cardback, you got a Classic pack instead.

Mean Streets Warrior

Reviews and Emails

iTunes Reviews: 0

Emails: 0

Twitter: @Turarts Next week we will have @XcMtbGamer on the show! Should be a bloody good time! @TheGameCase and I are stoked!

Facebook Shoutout:  Wil

When you think you aren’t doing that well in Hearthstone, remember that even getting to rank 17 puts you in the top 45% of all players!

Outro

That does it for this episode.  You can email the show at [email protected].  You can also visit our website at legendoftheinnkeeper.

News

Hearthstone earned $395 million last year – https://mmos.com/news/digital-ccg-hearthstone-earns-395m-2016-shadowverse-100m

7.6% spend real money on in-game content.

Hearthstone China releases personalized yearly stats, based on your gameplay from the last year. You visit a webpage that shows the stats within Hearthstone cards.  The stats shown are as follows:

The Personal Stats

The number of days you played Hearthstone in 2016, as a percentile of all players.

The amount of gold you earned.

The total amount of packs you opened.

Ladder wins and the regional average (2016 avg for China was 246 ladder wins per acc)

Number of brawl rounds played, and the brawl you played the most of.

How many friends you played with.

Whether or not you met the same player on ladder twice [and we’re assuming this would state the number if any]

Highest number of times you played with one friend.

A stat about beating wings in Karazhan? (“I beat first wing of Karazhan.”)

Number of times you’ve won a game with 1 health remaining.

Number of times you’ve won a game with 30 health remaining.

Total amount of Arena runs and how many of those were 12 wins.

The card back you played with the most by amount of games played.

Ben Brode clarifies his statements

“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.”  There is more but that’s the best quote.  http://www.hearthpwn.com/news/2195-ben-brode-on-defining-complexity-depth-and-design

Android players can rejoice.  The last update reduced the size of the install from around 3Gb to 1.5Gb in size.

Yong Woo posted on the forums, that they are “actively looking into ways to grant access to new Heroes and card backs that some players may have missed out on.”  This comes from the situation where you could get Tyrande during the launch of the Twitch Prime service.  “We’ll make an announcement once our plans are solidified.”

On the Tyrande note, Hearthstone is celebrating the Lunar New Year in Asia by making the hero available between now and Feb 10th when you purchase a 40-pack bundle ($49.99 in the US).  Your Battle.net account country of residence must be Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam or the Philippines to qualify.

Espo Mode

Boss Battle Royale

“Ever wonder which dungeon bosses are strongest? Find out – choose a class and we’ll give you a corresponding boss to play!”

This weeks brawl is great for new players (if they have a class at 20 or above)

Choose a hero and you get to do battle as one of the following corresponding Bosses with their hero power and deck!

 

Druid

Razorgore the Untamed

The Rookery

 

Hunter

Skelesaurus Hex

Ancient Power

 

Mage

The Curator

Gallery Protection

 

Paladin

White King

Castle

 

Priest

Gothik the Harvester

Harvest

 

Rogue

Grobbulus

Poison Cloud

 

Shaman

Lady Naz’jar

Pearl of the Tides

 

Warlock

Noth the Plaguebringer

Raise Dead

 

Warrior

Grim Guzzler

Pile On!

Brawl this week will be the Holiday Brawl.  If you didn’t get the Winter Veil Wreath card back, now you can.  If you already have it, you get a Classic pack instead.

MSoG Shaman

News

Max McCall, a game designer at Blizzard, posted on the Hearthpwn forums a little peek behind the curtains this week.  Here are some of the highlights. (Max McCall)

Most cards in a set stop changing about two months before release.

There are two design teams that work on sets, the initial designers and the final designers.

The developers responsible for card sets work on multiple sets at the same time.

The setting, theme, mechanics, and deck archetype ideas of the set.

The names, art, and flavor for cards.

Make the set as fun as possible, balance the cards, and make sure each card belongs in the set in its current form.

Play. Testing. Lots of playing with the new cards.

Process takes 3-4 months.

The rest of the Hearthstone crew, which includes production, engineering, art, sound, and QA, work on the set.

Flyswatter: Bugs get crushed during this stage.

If there’s any tweaks they want to make to cards due to what the live game looks like or it’s related to a future set, they’ll make them here.

Process takes a couple of months.

Initial Design

Final Design

The Final Countdown

Reminder that there are still others on the HS team always working on Brawls, Fireside Gatherings, Adventures, New Systems, User Interface, & More

Interview in PC Gamer with Ben Brode had a few more interesting things: PC Gamer

They don’t want to announce a nerf too far out from it actually happening. If they would, people would feel bad losing against a card they know is going to get nerfed.

Ben Brode agrees that Small-Time Buccaneer is the problematic card in the Pirate package, not Patches the Pirate. If they decide to change something, it would be Small-Time Buccaneer.

They intentionally nerfed Molten Giant really hard because they didn’t want people to play that card anymore as it was hurting the ability for Standard to change.

Hypothetically, if they would ever decide to move Classic cards to Wild it would probably be cards like Ragnaros the Firelord because they limit the design space for their mana cost a lot and limit the ability for Standard feel more fresh.

Ben is not sure if he agrees with Brian Kibler that cheap weapons are a problem in general or if it’s only a problem with a few specific weapons.

The team was a bit disappointed that Shaman got even more popular after Karazhan, as that was not their intention.

For example, Spirit Claws was intended for a new type of Shaman deck, and not for the current Shaman decks at the time.

Ben worries about a big expansion concept / theme failing to land.

C’Thun was one of the most risky things they have ever done and it turned out perfect from a balance perspective.

Ben thinks the Grimy Goons mechanic will be used more in the future, once the meta slows down a bit.

They try to have a good balance in ‘obvious’ mechanics like Jade where you just put as much of them in your deck as you can, and cards that require a bit more deck building skill to utilize.

NetEase in China lost power which affected services to Hearthstone.  The power outage corrupted data and they had to revert to a backup that was 4 days old.  They compensated players with 1,000 gold and 15 packs.

Espo Mode

Spellbook Duel

“Choose your spellbook carefully, champion! Pick 10 cards, and anytime you would draw a card, you instead Discover a copy of a card from your deck.”

Mage (Espo)

Arcane Missiles, Arcane Explosion, Duplicate, Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Arcane Intellect, Flamewaker,

News

Interview with Mike Donais at IGN

No plans right now for more cards like Reno

Jade Lotus –

Jade Golem mechanic was set in stone early on, Jade Idol playing out as expected and don’t expect more Jade Golem cards in the future.

But might see cards that improve them (like Brann Bronzebeard)

Grimy Goons –

Each class needed to be different even though using a similar mechanic (Paladins their hand, Warriors taunt minions and Hunters beasts).  

Wanted the obvious combo with hand-buffing so each class got one. GG Pali and Hunter aren’t very popular now, but might see boost with future sets.  

And by the end of testing, Paladin felts the most interesting to play since it had reliability and potential.

Kabal –

Originally it was all about spending your mana in a turn and getting a bonus for doing so.  It didn’t work out because you should be already spending your mana.  

Tried bonuses for not spending all your mana and that didn’t feel good.  

They tried mechanic of changing your mana into red crystals but didn’t like it.

Some cards would change your blue mana into red mana.

Cards could interact by gaining power based on the number of red mana available or spending the red mana.

One issue of red mana was that it didn’t work well on mobile.

It also didn’t feel cool enough.

Might look at this in the future.

Originally potions weren’t a thing in the Kabal. The team wanted to do more than just the Reno-effect Legendaries for the Kabal classes. They decided to rename the spells except one, to Potions.

Inkmaster Solia originally had the Kazakus effect.

Kazakus

Potions didn’t change much from early on.  Only two effects that were tested didn’t make it in.

There was a thoughtsteal effect

And something else.  (Mike couldn’t remember)

Wanted to capture different themes from each of the Kabal classes. The exception was the Armor potion, it was still good for those in desperation.

The Sheep effect was originally, 1-mana: Sheep a minion, 5-mana: Sheep 2, 10-mana; Sheep all minions.  It turned into what it is today.  The random sheep a minion for 1 mana didn’t feel good when it backfired.

Raza the Chained

Raza was a brand new idea that wasn’t something that they were sitting on.  It became a thing when they realized it would have the Reno restriction.  Priest needed help, so they made Raza the strongest of the Reno cards.

Inkmaster Solia

She was a 5-mana 5/5 early on but it was too good.

Krul the Unshackled

They didn’t want to simply make Reno better, they wanted to go in a different direction if you wanted to play Krul

Hunter

Mike thinks the class needs just more cool themes in order to succeed. They are normally good in the aggro meta, but slower than Pirates (which hurts)

Priest

Dragon Priest was made strong so that they could deliver on the fantasy before half the cards rotated out.

More “tricky” card will be seen going forward. (think Pint-sized potion and potion of madness)

Mike thinks that Priest may have the best shot at Reno decks in Standard once Reno rotates out, thanks to Kazakus and Raza.

Misc

Cards which make the game swing back and forth, such as board clears, large taunts, and large heals can be really fun. There may be room for more but they don’t want to overdo it.

Drakonid Operative was originally know as Investigator.  There was not a Dragon requirement on the Battlecry.

Cabal Leader was a 6 mana 4/8 Legendary.  At the end of your turn if you have unspent mana,

News

The HCT Winter Championship will be in the Bahamas from March 23rd, 2017 to March 26th, 2017.

Elon Musk says his kids play Hearthstone

Ben Brode posts on the forum, goals behind Standard mode.  

The ultimate goal is to keep Standard fresh every year.

If the same Basic and Classic cards appear too frequently, that won’t be them achieving their goal.  

Releasing new cards is better than buffing cards from the Classic and Basic sets.  

They have no issues with moving problematic cards out of the Basic and Classic sets.  As result he said, “We might rotate some additional Classic cards to Wild.”

Ben followed up with a question to the community: “Do you prefer some evergreen cards to be nerfed, rotated to wild, or kept in Standard even if it results in a staler meta?”

Ben Brode also addressed the new player experience.  (https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/5m6cjz/the_biggest_problem_with_the_new_player/dc1dsox/ )

Revealed that the win rates for new players in Casual have gone up while Ranked continues to grow increasingly difficult.  He says that new player win rates have increased by ~15%.

Espo Mode

The Dark Wanderer – Celebrating Diablo’s 20 years.

A hooded stranger sits to play, holding a grim deck in his hands. Can you unravel the secrets surrounding this dark wanderer?

2 Phases

Phase 1 – The Dark Wanderer

If you reveal all 3 secrets, Twisting Nether is played and the Enigmatic Portal is opened and you move to Phase 2.

Phase 2 – The Cow King

The Cow King is your opponent.  And it’s cows, all the way up.

Getting Better

Druid cards

Mark of the Lotus – 1 mana; Give your minions +1/+1

Jade Blossom – 3 mana; Summon a Jade Golem. Gain an empty Mana Crystal.

If you play it after you have 10 mana, you do NOT get Excess Mana. You just get the Jade Golem.

Jade Behemoth – 6 mana; 3 Attack; 6 Health; Taunt; Battlecry: Summon a Jade Golem.

If you can get a few Jade Golems out before you play this it’s even more intimidating.

Jade Idol – 1 mana; Choose One – Summon a Jade Golem; or Shuffle 3 copies of this card into your deck.

If you are playing this early in the game, almost always choose to shuffle copies into your deck. Having a bunch of these in your deck is nuts, especially if you have Gadgetzan Auctioneer on the board.

Virmen Sensei – 5 mana; 4 Attack; 5 Health; Battlecry: Give a friendly Beast +2/+2.

Seems out of sync with all the other cards for Druid in this batch (except for Mark of the Lotus).  

Celestial Dreamer – 3 mana; 3 Attack; 3 Health; Battlecry: If a friendly minion has 5 or more Attack, gain +2/+2.

Lunar Visions – 5 mana; Draw 2 cards. Minions drawn cost (2) less.

Many compare this to Nourish, because you get 3 cards and when combined with Fandral, it’s nice.  However, this also helps speed up some Jade Golem decks.

Pilfered Power – 3 mana; Gain an empty Mana Crystal for each friendly minion.

This DOES give Excess Mana, if you use it and it pushes you over 10 mana.  

If you can pull it off, Turn 1 – coin, Wild Growth; Turn 2 – Innervate, 2x Living Roots then Pilfered Power

Kun the Forgotten King – 10 mana; Choose One – Gain 10 armor; or Refresh your Mana Crystals.

Super fun when combo’d with Aviana.

Hints and Tips

Don’t forget to re-roll quests for higher gold.

Reviews and Emails

iTunes Reviews: 2

Amateurish

★ in iTunes by _RVA_ from USA on January 3, 2017

News

New Brawl this week?  Dark Wanderer Tavern Brawl – Diablo themed brawl

“In this Tavern Brawl, a hooded stranger awaits, holding a grim deck in his hands. Will you unravel the secrets surrounding this dark wanderer?.”

New themed card back

Datamined info: Heroes: Dark Wanderer and The Cow King

Powers:

Diabolical Powers – Summon a random Imp

So Many… – Whenever a Hell Bovine dies, draw a card

New spells, minions and tons of secrets?

Espo Mode

Party Portals!

“The Medivas are putting on a special show, and you’re the star! Summon minions with various portals to create a most excellent performance.”

 

Permanent minions reduce the cost of portals by 1

Mark Moonwalker

Susie Sizzlesong

Wanda Wonderhooves

 

Moonglade Portal

Firelands Portal

Unstable Portal

Silvermoon Portal

Maelstrom Portal

Ironforge Portal

Party Portal – Mime 5/6 (always silenced), Party Elemental (summons 3 3/2 minions), Red Riding Hood 3/2 (Taunt, Deathrattle: Enemies can’t attack this turn), Romulo 3/4 (At the end of your turn, restore 3 health to your hero)

Ms. Mage

Reviews and Emails

iTunes Reviews: 1

Virtually unlistenable

V-kurts

Sorry guys, you seem enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the game, but this is a bad podcast. The audio quality is horrible on Espo’s end, and his raspy voice doesn’t help. It’s personal preference, but when he laughs I cringe. It’s too bad he’s the more knowledgeable of the two main hosts. But the worst problem is the apparent lack of preparation. The result is frequent fits and starts in the conversation, times when one host is so surprised at the other’s answer (or lack thereof) that the podcast totally stalls, and critical failures to identify cards or deck details being discussed. Defeats my purpose in slogging through this podcast! Thanks for the effort guys, but I’ll try to find a more well-produced Hearthstone podcast to spend my time on.

Emails:

Twitter: MattatArms – Gif response to “Thoughts on the new MSoG cards”

Facebook Shoutout: Steven – Rank 5 Goal achieved!!!!

Outro

That does it for this episode.  You can email the show at [email protected].  You can also visit our website at legendoftheinnkeeper.com where we will post the show notes with the episode that has links to all the information we discussed.

Our YouTube channel is www.legendoftheinnkeeper.com/YouTube

You can follow us on Twitter

LOTI Podcast – @LOTIpodcast.  

Espo – @Xcmtbgamer

You can support the show through Patreon at :  www.patreon.com/Legendoftheinnkeeper

Be sure to subscribe and rate us on iTunes!

Until next show, Happy gaming!

Credits:

Music by James Marantette – https://soundcloud.com/james-marantette

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News

Blizzard sent out an email that had a statistic from each of their games from the past year.

WoW: 169,559,870 Squirrels caught in the Aw, Nuts! World quest.

Diablo: 601,875 Hardcore deaths in Sanctuary

Overwatch: 217,817,802 Payloads delivered

HotS: 42,981,967 Dragon Knights unleashed

Starcraft: 25,127,453 Victories for Aiur

Hearthstone: 5,829,905,234 Murlocs played

Espo Mode Clockwork Card Dealer – Standard

“Tinkertown gnomes are testing their prototype card-bot: Optimotron! The card you draw on turn 1 will be a 1-cost card, if you have one. On turn 2, a 2-cost card…”

Hunter Cards in Mean Streets of Gadgetzan

Deck spotlights:

Yogg N’Zoth Hunter – Rat Pack, Smugglers Crate

Beast Hunter – Alleycat, Smuggler’s Crate, Hidden Cache, Trogg Beastrager, Grimestreet Smuggler, Rat Pack, Shaky Zipgunner, Dispatch Kodo, Doppelgangster, Don Han’Cho

Face Hunter – Alleycat, Rat Pack, Dispatch Kodo

SecretCrush – http://www.hearthpwn.com/decks/706080-3rank-secret-meta-crusher

Reviews and Emails

iTunes Reviews: 0

Emails: 1

MothballWizard

Subject: Brawl

Hey guys, I’m a little late with this, but I was listening to episode 121 where you were discussing the latest deathrattle brawl and Espo was giving Vastidious a hard time about playing Face Hunter in the brawl. He was said to be ignoring the spirit of the game and ruining others fun (in partial jest). I love Espo’s passion for the Hearthstone experience and I get where he was coming from with his comments, but I wanted to some light on the topic from a different direction.

As a new player, the brawls where you are given a deck are a ton of fun. You get to play with new or old cards that you don’t have in your collection and don’t have the dust to craft. However, the brawls like the deathrattle brawl wind up being extremely frustrating for me. I want to buy into the theme and go and craft a deathrattle deck, so I open up my collection, do a search for “deathrattle” and gaze upon my glorious collection of… 5 deathrattle cards. About half of these did damage to MY face, so they weren’t really viable to build a deck on. I still gave it my best shot, but after about five games where I only made it to turn 4-5 before either conceding or having my face bashed in, I was pretty frustrated and had to stop playing for awhile. That one pack a week is really valuable to a new player, so I eventually took Vastidious’s approach and came back to the game, constructed a mid-range hunter, and won my next three matches.

I want to get into the game and enjoy the brawls, but sometimes a new player collection can be really limiting. We can’t win all the time, but what would you recommend to new players who are faced with a situation like this so that we can engage in the rich world that the Hearthstone team crafts for us …and still get our packs while having fun?

Throwing another log on the fire,

MW

Twitter:

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Wanted to shout out fellow podcasters for Happy Holidays2: @CoinConcede @LotiPodcast @HeroPower_Cast @GWpodcast @TheOverViewGG

Facebook Shoutout: Dusharmo:

Omg! You aren’t going to believe this. I know you guys are going to think I was sniping, but I promise it was all luck. I played Kripp again! I played the first match and was freaking out, because I saw my name on his stream (post below this on...