Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft

If both players have taken lethal damage once all card effects resolve, it's a draw. (I've had a draw happen exactly once, due to an opponent's Abomination killing both of us with its deathrattle.)

It can also happen with any AoE effect that triggers a Leper Gnome.

edited 26th Aug '14 4:08:31 PM by Fighteer

Hellfire is the most obvious double-kill spell.

So turns out Ragnaros cannot actually kill Kel'Thusad

Depends on the order they're played. And we already knew and discussed this in the thread. It has to do with the order "end of turn" effects are processed. Ragnaros also can't kill Gruul for the same reason.

If Gruul has 8 health, he gains 1 at the same time that Ragnaros hits him, leaving him at 9/1. That's logical. What isn't logical is Kel'Thuzad resurrecting himself.

Repeat after me: there are no truly simultaneous events in Hearthstone. To re-iterate:

The order of Gruul and Ragnaros doesn't matter. If Gruul was just played (still a 7/7) or took prior damage that dropped him to 7 health or lower, and gets hit by Ragnaros, his effect doesn't keep him alive. If he's at 8 health, either way their effects resolve, Gruul will live as a 9/1. If he has 9 or more, cleary Rag couldn't kill him anyway.

Kel'thuzad is different, and the order does matter. If Rag is played first, Kel'thuzad prevents him from killing any minion (including said lich himself), heavily limiting Ragnaros's effectiveness. If Kel'thuzad is played second, Ragnaros not only can kill Kel'thuzad, but any other minion Rag kills cannot be rezzed by Kel's effect. The two soft counter each other depending on who is played first, which is perfectly reasonable from a balance perspective.

In addition, if you combine Kel'thuzad and Gruul on one side and Ragnaros on the other (somehow), in theory things will get really weird. If Ragnaros was played before Kel'thuzad, Ragnaros kills Gruul, and then Gruul's own effect keeps it alive...then Kel'thuzad will "revive" an additional Gruul, giving a player two of them (one at 1 health, but still). I'm not sure if this additional Gruul would immediately go to 8/8, or be stuck at 7/7 for a turn.

edited 28th Aug '14 9:45:29 AM by TotemicHero

Kel'thuzad resurrecting himself is a bug, Ben Brode commented on that on Twitter. He should still resurrect other minions that die that turn, but never himself.

I'm not convinced it's a bad bug, though. Ragnaros is a hard counter to Secrets play, which has seen a definite uptick since Naxx came out, leading to an increase of Rag play. If they correct this bug, Rag still remains a soft counter to Kel'thuzad, so it's a slight buff to it.

I don't think Rag really needs any buffs, be they direct or by proxy nerf.

The bug here is that KT shouldn't ever rez himself, regardless of obscure play-order effects.

I didn't say it wasn't a bug. I said that it wasn't a bad thing to have in the game. After all, I doubt they will be adding any additional Ragnaros-style effects into Hearthstone any time soon, and currently only Ragnaros has problems with Kel'thuzad.

The problem is that it's completely unintuitive and absolutely no one expects it to happen before it does. That's just bad game design.

Yes, but in one of those ways he heals himself from 0 to 1, which is unintuitive and weird and exactly what Kel'Thuzad is doing.

edited 28th Aug '14 7:27:26 PM by Clarste

Oh, if you want me to make a list of all the things in Hearthstone that aren't intuitive, I can do that. This is hardly the only case, and actually makes more sense than some of the goofier ones.

"Give 2 Bananas to the opponent's hand"?

...This is one of those "People die when they are killed" problems again, isn't it?

Oh, that's not even close to weird or totally inconsistent. Here's a short list, from the basic to the really bizarre:

• Bouncing an opponent's minion when they have a full hand not only kills the minion, but will trigger any Deathrattle they have.
• Silencing a frozen minion removes the frozen status.
• Molten Giant and Gurubashi Berserker actually have different functional definitions for the word "damage" in their card text.
• Druid of the Claw and Ancient of War have the same card text, but work completely differently (former is a transformation, the other is a straight buff). #lollore
• If Void Terror eats a Raid Leader and another minion buffed by said Raid Leader, the stats gained by the Void Terror include that +1 Attack, despite the fact that the Raid Leader should have died before this calculation was done.
• Don't get me started on Stormwind Champion, the buggiest card in the game. When the opponent has damaged minions with one health on the board, those minions may immediately die if the Champion is killed...or not, depending on how (un)lucky you are. There are even reports of them actually getting to keep the +1/+1 buff after the Champion dies! The Murloc Warleader, which functionally works the same way, does not have these problems.
• Naxx gives us the Mad Scientist, which has a few issues of its own. If it's killed with an AOE along with one other minion and pulls the Paladin secret Redemption, Redemption will immediately proc and revive the earliest played minion that isn't the Mad Scientist. (I assume the same is true of the mage secret Duplicate, but I haven't been able to test that one yet.)
• Secretkeeper does not get a buff if Mad Scientist puts a secret into play. Undertaker, however, does get a buff if your opponent's Deathlord puts a Deathrattle minion into play. Both cards use the word "put" in their text.

And that's just what I came up with off the top of my head. I'm sure there are other things I'm not thinking of right now or don't know about.

That is 100% intuitive if you stop to think about it for even a second. Silence removes all effects on the card. I figured it out on my own the first time the opportunity arose.

It eats them at the same time they die. I don't see the problem. I think it would be kind of weird if it worked the other way.

This is obviously a flavor thing and doesn't even matter unless they're already on the board and you can see them in front of you.

edited 28th Aug '14 9:30:00 PM by Clarste

It does matter for a number of gameplay mechanics.

For example, Kel'thuzad will revive the Druid of the Claw with whatever choice it had. However, Kel'thuzad revives an Ancient of War, it's just a vanilla 5/5 with no effects.

On the other hand, if the Druid is bounced back to your hand, it's stuck with whatever you chose, either the Taunt or the Charge. But if you have the Ancient of War bounced back, you can change its effect when you play it again.

And silences do a lot more damage to the Ancient of War than they do to the Druid of the Claw...

edited 28th Aug '14 9:37:40 PM by TotemicHero

I said it didn't matter until they were already on the board, which is exactly true with all the examples you gave (and further examples I could come up with). As in, you can tell what will happen to them before you do it, because they're sitting right there on the board. And you can look for green numbers or mouse over them to see if it's a transformation or a buff. It is impossible to get caught off guard by this because the answer is always right in front of your eyes.

This is not true for the Ragnaros/Kel-Thuzad interaction because even with them both on the board you have to know which one came first. And you have to know that this is relevant.

...And why is that unusual? A Druid of the claw in bear form is a different card than the regular Druid of the claw. Different art. Different stats. Who aren't in green. Bounce a druid of claw and you get a DOTC Bear form card. It's unaffected by silence

Ancient of War is buffed. His stats are in green. Can be silenced

Resurrected minions never resurrect with their buffs.

...And that's true for every card that's a transformation. Bounce something that's polymorphed, you get the sheep. Bounce a hex, it'll be a frog. Bounce something that's been Thinkmaster'ed, you get Devilsaur/Squirrel. A transformation transforms the card into a different card (it's why we call them transformation!). The cards don't even LOOK THE SAME. Why would anyone ever expect to get the original card back when it's no longer on the board.

Silence doesn't affect transformation because it only affects card text or buffs that appear under a card when you mouse over it. Since the card became a new card, there's no text for it to silence. You're silencing the new card, not the old card, which is no longer present on the board

Notice that when you transform a minion, they also lose all external buffs. That's because the card is replaced by a new card for the transformation effect. The Before and After Minion during a transformation effect are effectively completely separate entities.

Frozen is clearly labeled under a card like any other silenceable buffs/debuffs. Why would you assume it cannot be silenced? It's in no way different from silencing a divine shield.

edited 29th Aug '14 1:35:58 AM by Ghilz

So what have you guys been up to? Myself, I've managed over the last few days to go from about rank 12 to rank 8 so far

I finally got off my butt and bought all of the rest of the wings and cleared them today.

That was fun, except now it's time for class challenges & heroic mode. Which should be frustrating.

Debating whether or not it's worth it to gild my murlocs.

I had a funny occurrence when I was playing my tempo priest against another priest. We’d been trading minions and getting big hands through cleric in early and mid game, turn 9 I play thoughtsteal, not realising that brought me up to 10 cards. One of the stolen cards was a mind control. His next turn he plays Ragnaros and hits face. On my next turn, I burn a card which also happened to be Rag. He goes, “I’m sorry”. I go, ‘stolen MC into steal his Rag’, “thank you”. Priest versus priest games can get wacky. Especially with multiple clerics on the field. I learned my lesson about that one a while back.

This season, I decided to see how well my druid Murloc deck would fare in ranked play.

It turned out that I am not the only one with that idea. So far today, 75% of my opponents in ranked were also running Murloc decks.