Shhh.. It’s a Secret

Intro:

Welcome to the Legend of the Innkeeper.  We’re glad you could join us for our Fifty Second episode.

This week we are talking about…

Updates:

What did you do this week?

Update on Ariannwyn’s Eyes

* Surgery was completed without any complications

* Seeing the doctor on Tuesday to evaluate results

Top 3 of the week –  Top 3 Card Backs

Vastidious – Lunar New Year, Molten Core, Heroes of the Storm

Ariannwyn – Heroes of the storm, Black Temple, Icecrown

Nightfall –  3rd Maraad, 2nd Gnomes 1st Heroes of the Storm

News

 

* Possible expansion announcement on July 22? http://blizzardwatch.com/2015/07/02/possible-new-hearthstone-expansion-july-22/

Tavern Brawl

Last week – Banana Brawl

In the Banana Brawl, anytime a minion died, that player who had the minion had a banana card put into their hand. There were 4 different banana cards; +1/+1 to a minion, +2/+2 to a minion, swap a minions attack and health and 2 damage to a minion.

This week – Webspinner

This week’s brawl was similar to the Hunter challenge back with Naxxramas. Back then they had the hunter’s deck filled with nothing but Webspinners. In this version, you could choose any class to play and all the minions were Webspinners. There were class specific spells included in each deck. It made for quite the interesting results.

Core Show

Testing for Secrets

When playing against certain classes, one of the obstacles you have to better understand is secrets. Only Mages, Paladins and Hunters have secrets at this time. When your opponent plays a secret, it’s a good idea to try and figure out what that secret is so that you don’t trigger it at the most inopportune time.

We should take a moment and describe what a secret is and what they are. A secret is a spell that when played, sets up an action that will be triggered based on certain actions by your opponent. For example, the Mage has a secret called [Mirror Entity]. The card text says, When your opponent plays a minion, make a copy of it on your board. What this does is when your opponent plays a minion to the board, the secret will activate (or what we call pop) and duplicate that minion on your side of the board that you now control. Secrets can really ruin your day if you don’t have a good understanding of how they work and how you can play around them.

We should note here that if you are using Hearthstone Deck Tracker, it will display on the screen all the possible Secrets that could be in play by your opponent in a section on the screen. This helps you think about what could be in play. You can hover over each of these secrets and get pop up windows showing what the effects of the secrets are. Incredibly useful. Also if you’ve already seen two of a particular secret it will be greyed out so that you know it can’t be that secret.

Let’s break this down a little more by looking at each classes secrets and how to ‘test’ for each of them.

Mage

The Mage has 7 different secrets that they can play.

[Mirror Entity]

[Vaporize]

[Duplicate]

[Ice Barrier]

[Counterspell]

[Spellbender]

[Ice Block]

One thing you need to keep aware of with the Mage is that they have a few Mage specific minions that can benefit from having a secret in play on the board. One of those is the [Ethereal Arcanist]. If you control a secret at the end of your turn, this minion gains +2/+2. If a Mage plays this, you want to remove or silence it fairly quickly, especially if he has a secret in play. Another minion that can benefit from secrets is the [Kirin Tor Mage]. His card text reads,

Both of these minions can cause many problems to the opponent if not dea...