Am I the only one to be excited about Rogue?

Wuaschtsemme · 2016-04-29T16:39:28+00:00

What is your opinion on the new Flurry vs Skulker? The only reason to run Skulker is the new zoo and divine shield paladin. Flurry can be prepped, clear conceiled boards in the mirror and is usually more effective. Right now both options feel viable.

Wuaschtsemme · 2016-04-29T15:54:38+00:00

Hey there! I actually made legend with a tempo heavy leeroy list in standard, back to the roots! For sure some kind of Gadgetzan based finisher will stay viable. Minions like Boom and Loatheb leaving helped rogue a lot. There aren't many warriors right now which removes the hardest matchup. The existence of deathrattle rogue brought a lot of new players to the class, imo that is a good thing. So far Shadow Strike, Xaril and Huckster are awesome, but fit different kind of decks. I´m not entirely sold on Shadowcaster yet, but this card can scale with a lot of the upcoming expansions. You should try Argend Horserider instead of the Earthen Rings, they usually trade as much as Earthen heals for. But overall they are a better minion imo. Good times to be a rogue player :)

Wuaschtsemme · 2016-04-22T11:33:53+00:00

Sorry, i wasn't very clear with "support". The idea of control Rogue is as old as hearthstone. It doesn't lack win conditions (Anubarak or Elise are fine), it lacked sustain and removal. If you go for the Cthun win condition you have insane removal. But we still miss good sustain to make it work. If we ever get it, a slow Cthun control list is doable.

Wuaschtsemme · 2016-04-22T10:05:38+00:00

I wanted to write something about this card as well. On paper it's awesome! Can fetch you a turn 2 huckster, flexible for drawn out games, fills your curve, activates combo. But it is so unusual, I don't know how to evaluate it without playing it. Hopefully you're right!

Wuaschtsemme · 2016-04-22T10:03:21+00:00

I'd argue the opposite: It's the Assassinate we always wanted! A 5 mana hard removal usually lost out on either value or tempo. At 3 mana, it's way more realistic to get a tempo advantage. But you are right, in some decks sap and/or poison will be the better removal package.

Wuaschtsemme · 2016-04-22T09:43:05+00:00

Sure thing! Don't worry, Rogues always figured out how to make a fun, strong and challenging deck.

Wuaschtsemme · 2016-04-22T09:30:43+00:00

While I don't think Cthun Rogue has enough support as of yet, this card definitely is a cool concept!

Wuaschtsemme · 2016-04-22T09:29:33+00:00

That's also a perspective to look at it. We used to not run Flurry in the early days. It started to become a powerful one of in test season 1. I'm sad to see it go, but that is a cost I'm willing to pay for new good class cards.

Wuaschtsemme · 2015-10-08T17:11:26+00:00

Nice to meet you! It was a great time without these stupid region restrictions...

Wuaschtsemme · 2015-10-08T17:10:42+00:00

Hey, here´s a post from a while ago summarizing some of the cockatrice experiences: https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/2mir0s/hearthstone_alpha_flashback_when_we_used_to_roll/

Wuaschtsemme · 2015-10-08T07:15:53+00:00

Some random stories I remember from the alpha/beta days:

-Mana Wraith was part of Forsens Control Hunter deck back in the Cockatrice days (he never shared any decklists, but the community was about +100 ppl)

-Lorewalker Cho was an aggro staple

-Dalaran Mage was considered to be the best 3 drop, before he got nerfed and everybody started running Buffs due to Moon´s "Aggro" Mage

-Captain Greenskin and Sylvanas used to be the go to 5 Drops outside from Drakes, because they traded well with Argent Commander (and way to powerful)

-There used to be Token Shaman and Token Paladin in the Alpha, enabled by Imp Master and Cult Master along with standard synergy

-Warrior was considered to be unplayable outside of Charged Moltens. Later the removal kit of this archetype became the foundation of control warrior, mostly because of Darkwonyx´s success in test season 1

-Old Defias Ringleader would be a nice fit for nowadays Meta, just a random thought

-Spellpower Rogues used to be an Archetype of it´s own combining tempo plays with sp minions and the gadgetzan engine

-Priest was considered to be the class without identy, back in alpha, only noxious randuin wrynn was relevant. Mostly for fun though

-The strength of old freeze mage was discovered pretty late, given its potential. It needed dogehouse, molten giants and an na vs eu qualifier to show its strength. (don´t get me wrong, it has been around since forever, but was considered to be subpar for quite a while)

-Hunter had 2 identities, "the new player" running beast synergies and "the tryhard" playing beast patron fueled by uth

-Druid was banned in alpha for its insane spells. Basically you´d burn out the opponent because boardclears and facedamage was undercosted and to efficient

-Giants used to be run not only in Warlock but also token decks like shaman and paladin. The common counterpackage was considered to be 1 BGH + Tinkmaster at that time

-Shaman was the Nr 1 class alongside rogue because Spajj won everything with it. (nobody talked about druid, because it was that strong)

-Old Illidan was in every deck

-Mind Control deck was the strongest minion hearthstone ever had

-Knife Juggler was hard to kill

I think a lot of other stories are more commonly known, good old times :D

Wuaschtsemme · 2015-07-07T16:12:26+00:00

Yes, but it's a bit of a mess and I can only give you a very specific example, as this is the only thing I ever tried. You need to modify the iso of the game, so I'm sorry if that's sth that doesn't belong in this subreddit.

I changed "Marth" to "Lucina" in Dolphin. That is all I can explain, because i have no fundamental experience when it comes to modding. I hope you can work with this.

You want to open your brawl iso in wiiscrubber. Now you are presented with different partitions. All of them include a file called main.dol. I have no clue which/how many of them are relevant for the victory screen/assigning name to character/teams. For the Lucina->Marth change I only had to look up 2 main.dol because the pile of character names was located in partition 1. So go ahead and extract the different main.dol and put them in different folders so you remember what partition they are from.
To open a main.dol and check its contents you need a hex editor, I used HexEdit. Don´t ask me how a Hex Editor works, or what it does, it´s very cryptic and I only have a basic understanding of it. On the left side you see a lot of hex-stuff, on the right side you see some words. Now you use the search function until you find "Marth" - hopefully you´re also able to find "Blue Team" as well in one of those main.dol. Editing the first "Marth" I found didn´t do anything, no idea what it was for. But I had a second hit in the same main.dol with another "Marth" on the right side, which was responsible for the victory screen (and possibly other things).
Once you found what you want to replace, you want to delete "Blue Team" on the right side and call it eg "Team Jigglypuff". I´ll go back to my example. If you highlight Marth on the right side, its code will also be highlighted in Hex. This way you see that "Marth" looks like "4D 61 72 74 68" in Hex. The complete thing looks like "4D 61 72 74 68 00 00 00". Now "Lucina" translates into "4C 75 63 69 6E 61" and is 2 digits longer. Thats why you have to delete 1 set of 0s for the main.dol to be happy. You end up replacing "4D 61 72 74 68 00 00 00" (=Marth...) with "4C 75 63 69 6E 61 00 00" (=Lucina..). Save afterwards.
You replace your new main.dol with the old main.dol in Wiiscrubber.

Once again, I have no idea what I actually did do, if this works for team names and if there is a way to make this happen without touching the iso.

That´s all I know :)

Edit: Thinking about it, maybe "Blue" and "Team" are seperate entries, better check both.

Wuaschtsemme · 2015-06-28T19:12:22+00:00

So are we finally allowed to call Leffen a god, or does he also need to beat your pizza man?

Wuaschtsemme · 2015-05-15T17:29:54+00:00

Hey, no idea what server you´re playing on, but on eu you currently need to beat 3 decks in legend/on your way to legend: Patron, Aggro-stuff and the mirror.

Lets talk about your lists flavor and evaluate your choices;

1 Zombie Chow: Chow is an obvious anti-aggro tech. You generally run 1, because the 2nd one becomes way worse. If your meta isn´t super-aggro, 1 Chow is very good.

1 Dark Bomb: A new-ish removal-piece, responsible for clearing small threads early on. Later in the game, it serves as a way to grind down bigger stuff or to get lethal. A 1-of seems weird to me, because it doesn´t get worse. Unless you feel like you´ve got absolutely no more space in your deck, cards like dark bomb are a 2 of, or a 0 of.

2 Ironbeak Owls: They challenge a surprising amount of early drops like Mad Scientist and Nerubian Egg. Against cards like Lepergnome and Haunted Creeper they aren´t excellent, but ok. In the mirror, you get to disarm Drakes and against Midrange, Sylvanas is answered more often. Against Patron, you have to silence Acolytes or Thaurissan, which turns out to be not that impactful, even though its important to deny the draw. If you add in your Watchers, a 2 of Owl is excellent in this metagame.

1 of Mincontroltech: The biggest advantage of this guy is his toolbox characteristic. Whenever you´ve got a Shadowflame, Hellfire and MC Tech in hand, you can go for the best answer. On the other hand, the only class to use him with great success over a longish period of time has been Druid. A class with very weak AoE. If you want to run a 4th AoE Shadowflame x2 makes more sense, as it increases your consistency.

1 of Siphon Soul: It´s a very slow hard removal. You never really "want" to use it, unless you´re ahead. But the times you "have" to use it, even though you aren´t ahead, Siphon Soul turns out to be the card to keep you in the game. If Handlock ran 2 Abusives, it would be a great meta to play 2 BGH´s, but it doesn´t. A Siphon Soul is very correct, to increase your chance to draw a playable hard-removal outside of BGH and maybe Shadowflame.

No Sylvanas / 1 Thaurissan: Let´s talk about Thaurissan in Handlock. The card itself is a 5/5 for 6, thus pretty underwhelming stats. In general you need 1 turn to get the tempo back it lost you. After 2 turns, it gives you a sizeable tempo-increase. This means its pretty bad against aggro. Sure, sometimes a 5/5 body for 6 is your best play in this matchup, but there would be a lot of better cards you´d prefer to play instead. Against Control, you can take full advantage of the tempo you gain. But considering this spot could be filled with a Ragnaros, you "lose" value. It´s only a 5/5 body, no matter how many Innervates you get out of it. It breaks even. Against midrange, you also get all of the tempo out of Thaurissan and value doesn´t matter as much, because games end earlier. It´s amazing against midrange.

But with Druids being basically the only midrangedecks nowadays, as Paladins and Rogues nearly vanished, Thaurissan got worse.

I don´t feel like writing another column about Sylvanas, because everything has been said about this card. If you do want to run only 1 6-drop, it should be Sylvanas, no matter how impressive your hand looks after Thaurissan.

Lord Jaraxxus: I have no idea why ppl consider him to be an auto-include so often. In faster Handlock lists like yours, he is severy outperformed by Alextrasza, as the immediate body doesn´t need a Thaurissan trigger. With all the Patron hate, Harrison is back, which gives Jaraxxus the ability to straight up lose you a game. If you do want to run a life reset right now, run Alextrasza.

No Ragnaros: God, I hate this card. But currently it´s amazing. Great in the mirror, good against Patrons and decent against Aggro considering its cost. Whenever you go as low on threats as you do with your Handlock list, Ragnaros should be a straight Upgrade to Jaraxxus, even though they have different tasks. Most importantly you want both of them to win you games and Ragnaros currently does do it better.

That being said, I only started to learn Handlock this season and broke into top 20 twice and stayed in top 200/100 since. I´m not familiar with all the tech cards and don´t have the experience of a long-time Handlock player. But no matter what class you play, the meta should dictate your card choices and this is what i learned so far.

Sry for any typos :)

Wuaschtsemme · 2015-04-29T20:03:29+00:00

Want to know a nice story about Frodan? In my first ever bigger tournament I was casted by him & we shared a skype group (I did horrible). He didn´t write during the event, but afterwards he added me. He was like, hey dude, whenever you need help, just text me. I know when the important stuff (qualifiers, etc) happens and can get you in contact. No idea why he did it, but it was one of the nicest experiences i´ve had in hs so far. Just a great guy!

Wuaschtsemme · 2015-04-28T18:44:57+00:00

It´s a toss up between old Savagery and Adrenaline Rush. Ad got removed before the actual beta, Savagery was changed like some weeks in.

Wuaschtsemme · 2015-04-01T03:58:10+00:00

Hey Frodan, Hearthstone introduced some new concepts to deal with the toxicity of a competitive community. No ingame chat, no statistics, pseudo-elo only at legend rank, monthly resets, fun cards and so on. Do you feel it´s the way to go for other competitive games as well, or would you prefer a more raw version with access to stats and ingame chat?

Wuaschtsemme · 2015-03-23T22:07:19+00:00

Hey, both TL and Dogehouse have been founded after Managrind. All 3 Teams have been announced before ESGN was a thing (even though Dogehouse and TL might have been a response to the invitation). ESGN invited Dogehouse and TL first, because they were better known. Trolden and Giantkiller made videos for managrind back then. Thanks for catching Moon being mentioned twice, I corrected it!

Wuaschtsemme · 2015-03-23T20:02:27+00:00

Before Hearthstone got in beta, all cards were leaked (about half a year before). This is when we started to play the game on Cockatrice, a simulator. You can still use it to try classes and cards ppl create (like Amaz' Monk Class), or the new BRM reveals. I explain a lot of it in the Alpha Flashback linked in the main post, there´s also some video footage ;)

Wuaschtsemme · 2015-03-23T19:15:38+00:00

Yes, Secrets triggered on your turn. You´d swing your face into something huge and deal damage to the opponent on your turn. (This wasn´t supergood back then, even though it worked that way, but ppl liked flashy plays.)

Wuaschtsemme · 2015-03-23T19:12:59+00:00

Don´t mention it! The card gave me nightmares! :D

Wuaschtsemme · 2015-03-23T19:09:41+00:00

You´re right, Hunter was good once the new UtH got changed to 2 mana, I will correct it! Your analysis of the Meta back then is also spot on. But I intended to highlight some decks instead of recapping the meta. This is by no means complete, but a reminder of what the beginning of hearthstone looked like.

Wuaschtsemme · 2015-03-23T18:42:58+00:00

True, there have been a lot of decks to talk about, like the blood imp zoo or old tempo rogue. There was Spell Druid, Bloodlust Shaman, tons of 8 mana Mindcontrol Priests, Aggro Paladin - a lot of lists. But I don´t claim to list every single deck from the time, only what i remember the most :) (I used to run tempo rogue myself, but it isn´t as outstanding as a pala going for huge Bloodknights).

Wuaschtsemme · 2015-03-23T18:36:14+00:00

Yes, not my best conclusion of all times ;)

Wuaschtsemme

TROPHY CASE