Exactly. League of Explorers was worth every cent - not so much for the cards themselves (although the four League members were super cool, make no mistake), but for the awesome encounters and boss fights. I loved that shit! I’m probably not dropping the same amount of cash on booster packs. Not digging that.
I don’t mind buying packs. I’ve spent $60 in Horizon Zero Dawn and finished it in 30 hours, never to look back at it again. Hearthstone has kept me entertained for over 1000 hours (I guess, I haven’t kept track). $50 every 4 months seems like a bargain to me. It’s about the same price as a World of Warcraft subscription (at the time when I was still playing it, no idea what the price is now).
I guess collectable card games aren’t exactly part of the same wave, but I hate the way that everything is changing to dopamine-pumping random item monetization designed to get 1-3% of players addicted and spending way too much on the game, so I’m generally refusing to support buying any sort of random loot system. I guess CCGs aren’t quite the same thing, but I don’t like buying a random chance at something nor generally want that sort of monetization model to continue.
I understand what you say, but at least in Hearthstone’s case, buying $50 worth of packs minimizes the randomness of your purchases considerably. I’ve kept track of the cards I drew when I bought my $50 pack of Mean Streets. In the end I ended up with 100% of the commons, 80% of the rares and epics, and one or two of the legendaries. And with the dust I gathered from duplicates I could easily create the few epics that I needed for a good deck.
And now with the change of no duplicate legendaries, I guess your money goes even further.
The new trick of adding an additional Legendary for each class is really a kind of stealth price increase … and the things range from unplayable to meh to already nerfed.
It will now cost over $200 per expansion to get to about 80% complete – well over $600 per year for a free to play game – and much more for those who get hooked on the micro-transactions and/or really want a complete set.
I’m with [b[SenorBeef** in disdaining this kind of marketing.
I’m not following this reasoning. How does adding 9 cards translate to 4 times the cost to get to 80% complete? Especially with the recent changes that you can’t get more than 2 of the same card in one pack, and never opening a duplicate legendary?
Searching for “how much does hearthstone cost?” brings up a lot of info … here’s one:
https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/65a3li/how_much_does_ungoro_actually_cost/
I’d say you were extremely lucky to get 80% of the epics in 50 Mean Streets packs. I just did an actual count and I am short 20 epics from that set – and I bought a lot more than 50 packs during its run. (All with gold, no cash. I am totally F2P.)
I’ve can’t find the Excel file I kept on MSoG, so I can’t look it up, but I’m pretty sure it was close to 80%. However, it could be that I also spent some saved up gold on a few packs, but that couldn’t have been more than 20 packs or so. I could keep track again when the next expansion comes out to give an estimate on completion rate after 50 packs (and again after 80 since I have about 3000 gold saved up)
I had a shaman play a jade deck in this week’s brawl. Then I switched over to normal play, and had a rogue playing a quest deck. He put out an elemental on turn 1, used a ferryman to recall it on turn 3, then… played his quest on turn 4.
ponder
while i agree with you, what alternatives do you suggest? their current model offers a certain longevity to the game; they can continue pumping out cards so long as they keep the whales interested, and the whales won’t bite as much if they can just quickly buy everything out with certainty.
I played one game of brawl with Aggro Druid. Turn one Generic 1-drop (forget which) -> Innervate -> Bloodsail Corsair + Patches -> Mark of the Lotus and swung for 6. My opponent conceded. 
Well as one idea, occasionally they could release an expansion pack in which you’d buy it in its entirety and everyone would have access to the same new cards and maybe play some single player content to unlock all the cards.
the expansion pack was too cheap gold-wise. simply saving from announcement date to release was enough to buy all the wings iirc.
Anybody know if the “No duplicate legendary” thing is in effect yet?
I got burned on it the last pack I opened … now have three unopened Classic packs from Tavern Brawls, and still (after all this time) have 15 missing legendary cards in the Classic set.
Nope. Not until next expansion.
Thanks. Another black mark for Blizzard – nice of them to give it to us but really stupid to announce it so far in advance of implementing it.
Welll shit. I wasn’t too hyped about Hearthstone any more, but if they’re printing cards like THIS…
Yeah, it’s bad. I was hoping for a little more priest love this expansion. They did pretty decent with Un’goro, so I thought they finally had figured priest out. But it seems they are still struggling to make this a tier 1 class.
Still, have hope. Remember when everyone thought Purify was bad? A few expansions later it’s pretty much staple in Silence Priest.
Are you kidding? I love this! Between this and the 4 mana ancestors call spell, Priest will be meme supreme! I’m actually really hoping I open these cards. If you want to actually win, play midrange hunter or something, will probably be cheaper too.
Besides, Priest will never be tier 1 unless utterly broken cards are printed for it. I’m not sure if I actually want to play in a meta where there is a tier 1 priest deck…
Why not? I’ve heard something like this mentioned on other forums as well. Why is it such a bad idea to have all classes in Hearthstone be viable competitively? Or at least have them shift classes between expansions.
And what does your horror scenario look like if priest is tier 1?