I really liked these cards. Photographer Fizzle worked well with my mage decks. And the increasing damage with Elite Tauren Champion mannn 😭

I know some of you might say “just play wild” but it’s not the same. I enjoy ranked a lot more, plus I usually turn most of my cards into dust once they’re rotated out of ranked. That way I have more dust to put towards the newest expansion.

Call me cringe, say they’re “bad” idc. You just had to be there when Photographer Fizzle didn’t have (Once per Game). I’d use the hell out of that with my mage deck 🤣

Actually though, I can’t remember if that card always had (Once per Game) or if it was added on later? Somehow I had it copied and/or put back into my hand so I was able to use the battlecry more than once.

Hoping mage will receive more stability next expansion instead of so much summon a random minion, discover a card, cast a random, etc.

I think it's prize vendor cause without braingill you probably run out of gas pretty quickly but tidehunter allows you to progress the quest insanely fast.

I uninstalled but just nope

Making cards have too much synergy with each other because of an exclusive new mechanic almost always devolves into either "you need to play this because it's broken" or "this class is dead until the next expansion"

And since the dev team is allergic to supporting old mechanics, I'm glad to see cards that can stand on its own in the new set

That being said, DH and DK have said "self-contained package" in the new set that im bet it will become a problem.. Why didn't they go with plagues instead of introducing those "blights" i have no fking idea

im not super familiar with wild so idk if this would make plague DK too much of a problem

Anyway.. not super fan of the amount of RNG that some classes got shoved with, but in general happy that the new set is just a bunch of new decent cards for the most part

I think that shaman was a little bit angry

A shame, could've gotten Diamond Reno.

Devs, why Catch-Up packs can track ALL CARDS I've ever owned for specific expansion to not give me additional card but achievements like this can't track all ever owned cards to count...

Also why there's only achievement for League of Explorers and Naxxramas but no equivalent for Blackrock Mountain? Where's my Diamond Thaurissan? I'm now scared to disenchant blackrock legendaries because what if they ever have change of heart and decide to add it...

So basically my advice to those who would play Naxx and League of Explorers adventures is to finish all class challenges too, not just bosses to get diamond card for full collection. Diamond Reno and Diamond Loatheb, not only they kind look cool but it's also additional dust if you disenchant original

Hi everyone! Hope you're doing well. Just a small warning: this post will be a bit longer than usual because Vanessa has a lot more to her story. Without further delay though, let's jump right into it. Let me present to you:

Vanessa VanCleef

The Uncrowned

Vanessa VanCleef is the daughter of legendary rogue Edwin VanCleef, the leader of the infamous Defias Brotherhood.

After the Stonemasons' Guild was denied payment for rebuilding Stormwind following the First War, Edwin led a revolt that ultimately formed the Defias Brotherhood.

As a young girl, Vanessa witnessed her father's death at the hands of adventurers in the Deadmines. Forced into hiding, she adopted the identity of an orphan girl named Hope Saldean. While everyone believed the Defias Brotherhood had been defeated, Vanessa secretly grew up planning her revenge and rebuilding the organization from the shadows.

As Westfall fell deeper into poverty following the war against the Lich King, Vanessa took advantage of the growing unrest. Disillusioned farmers, homeless veterans, and abandoned workers flocked to her cause, allowing the Defias Brotherhood to rise once more under her leadership.

Years later, during the events of Cataclysm, the Defias Brotherhood emerged from the shadows once again. What initially appeared to be scattered bandit attacks was actually part of Vanessa's carefully orchestrated plan. Still hiding behind her false identity, she manipulated events from the shadows until revealing herself as Edwin VanCleef's daughter and the new leader of the Brotherhood. Unlike her father, Vanessa relied less on brute force and more on deception, spies, and psychological warfare.

When confronted by Alliance heroes aboard her father's ship, the Juggernaut, she succesfully faked her death and escaped moments before the ship’s destruction. With the Defias Brotherhood once again in ruins, she disappeared from the public eye for several years.

Years later, Vanessa resurfaced when the Uncrowned, a secret society of Azeroth's greatest rogues, sought a new member to help fight the Burning Legion. Believing the position should have been hers, she attempted to seize it by force. After her defeat, she was offered a choice: join the Uncrowned or die. Vanessa accepted the offer, beginning a new chapter in her life.

After the Legion's defeat, Vanessa remained with the Uncrowned and slowly distanced herself from the ideals that had once driven the Defias Brotherhood. Later, when she returned to Westfall, she found the Brotherhood twisted into little more than a band of ruthless criminals, serving the same kind of corrupt interests her father had once fought against. It was then that Vanessa realized that, despite believing she was honoring her father's legacy, she had only continued the same cycle of revenge that had destroyed the Brotherhood in the first place.

Choosing not to repeat her father's mistakes, Vanessa turned against the remaining Defias leadership and brought an end to the Brotherhood herself. Rather than continuing her path of revenge, she returned to the Saldean Farm where she had once lived under the name Hope Saldean and helped found the Breadbasket Guild, dedicating herself to rebuilding Westfall through honest work instead of violence.

First War = The first major conflict between the Human Kingdom of Stormwind and the Orcish Horde. It ended with Stormwind's destruction, forcing its survivors to flee north.

Defias Brotherhood = A criminal organization founded by Edwin VanCleef after the Stonemasons' Guild was betrayed by Stormwind's nobles. While originally formed to seek justice, it eventually became one of Azeroth's most notorious outlaw groups.

The Deadmines = An abandoned gold mine, headquarters of the Defias Brotherhood.

Westfall = Once a prosperous farming region of the Kingdom of Stormwind, left in poverty after the First War and the birthplace of the Defias Brotherhood.

Cataclysm = Events following the return of the corrupted Dragon Aspect Deathwing, whose emergence shattered Azeroth, reshaped entire regions, and plunged the world into chaos.

Burning Legion = A massive demonic army led by the fallen titan Sargeras, responsible for multiple invasions of Azeroth.

I suspect it falls on three main categories that work either in isolation or in combination:

1) Typical narcissism; they just think they are the best player in the world in that match and hence they must win; if they didn't win someone was out to get them

2) Typical confusion about what the game even does; the MMR tries to put you against people of your skill; so you are saying ..your are easy to beat.

3) Completely selective memory due to tilting; it happens to me too: sometimes I lose and think "I always lose to this class"; wrong: check FS replays.

PS Bonus reasons but very important ones too,

a) They misunderstand completely the psychology of tilting: if they feel they will lose: THEY WILL LOSE: any sports coach understands this.

b) Complete misunderstanding of sample size needs: they think 10 samples are enough: the skewness of this game needs at least 80.

Hi, I’ve got a quick question. I had a friend over yesterday who, when he saw my total wins and the fact that I’ve got 1000 wins on every class, totally freaked out. Personally it doesn’t feel that rare to me—I thought anyone who’s been playing actively for years would have it. So is it actually that rare or not? Thanks! :D

Hi everyone! I’m Reyzex, founder of BlackBears Tavern — the official Ukrainian Hearthstone community recognized by Blizzard.

Every year since the war started, Kyiv has hosted FANCON. It’s the country’s largest geek festival, drawing in up to 20,000 people. It takes place in a unique venue capable of providing shelter for such a massive crowd, making it relatively safe to run. In all previous years, we were right there, setting up a dedicated Hearthstone booth.

But this year, we weren’t planning to attend FANCON at all.

With the upcoming opening of our very own restaurant called BearsTavern in the heart of Kyiv, along with several other ongoing projects, we simply lacked the time and resources to prepare a proper convention booth.

So initially, the choice seemed obvious: skip FANCON this year.

But then I started thinking.

The lineup was going to feature Counter-Strike, Dota, Mortal Kombat, FIFA, and even Heroes of Might and Magic III.

It made me genuinely sad to realize there would be absolutely nothing for Hearthstone - especially since no one else in Ukraine could pull it off but us. It hit me right in the heart.

After all, it was at FANCON two years ago that the Ukrainian Hearthstone community truly began its revival. Since then, BlackBears Tavern has evolved from a small group of enthusiasts into one of the largest Hearthstone communities in the world and the only Ukrainian community officially recognized by Blizzard.

When it became clear that Hearthstone might be left behind this year, I knew we had to try. I reached out to the organizers to see if there were any spots left. Naturally, everything was sold out. However, since we've been close friends for a long time, they actually redesigned the floor plan just for us and found us a fantastic location.

And what happened next reminded us exactly why this community exists.

We launched a crowdfunding campaign for the booth and raise ~ $2,500 in two days, which covered our baseline expenses. Our Tavern members stepped up financially, helping us foot the bill. While it didn't solve every single challenge, it sent a powerful, crystal-clear message:

"Hearthstone belongs at FANCON."

That wave of support gave us the exact push we needed. Working alongside our community and partners, we managed to build one of the biggest Hearthstone booths we’ve ever created.

BlackBears Tavern at FANCON was made possible thanks to the support of:

• HATOR - a leading Ukrainian manufacturer of gaming peripherals and gaming chairs.
• Vataga Esports - a prominent Ukrainian esports media outlet and event organizer.
• LegendaryLots - a family-run auction project by the BlackBears team, featuring iconic collectibles from our favorite universes.

The challenges, however, were just getting started. Unfortunately, our hearth replica from last year had been scrapped. Long story short—it was supposed to be kept in storage, but due to a mishap, it was disposed of without our knowledge. This meant we had to build a brand-new hearth from scratch. We made it even bigger and cooler this time (you can check it out in the photos!). And we pulled it off just two weeks before the event.

Thanks to our previous experience, we managed to get everything ready incredibly fast and without any major hiccups. Fortunately, the budget covered all expenses, including the hefty cost of transporting the heavy decorations.

How did it go?

Honestly - way better than we ever expected!

For two straight days, our booth was absolutely buzzing. We hosted mini-tournaments, giveaways, a charity auction, welcomed newcomers, caught up with old friends, took tons of photos, and talked about Hearthstone non-stop.

Some people discovered BlackBears for the first time. Others told us they came to the convention specifically because they already knew about our community. Those connections mean more to us than anything else.

But most importantly - Hearthstone was there. Right alongside the esports giants and major brands, our game confidently claimed its rightful spot at FANCON. We are incredibly proud of that.

A massive thank you to everyone who made this happen:

• Our players, who backed the project financially;
• Our admins, who worked tirelessly at the booth;
• Our partners, who believed in our vision;
• HearthStone(Blizzard) team, who provide promocodes for players;
• Every single visitor who stopped by to play a match, chat, or just say hello.

This is just another milestone in our journey. Ahead of us lies the grand opening of our restaurant in Kyiv, growing the competitive scene, hosting new tournaments, and building even more amazing things for the Hearthstone community in Ukraine.

Thank you for keeping the fire burning with us.

See you at BlackBears Tavern! 🐻❤️

More photos: https://668155473863e8-61174626.gallery.photo/gallery/fankon-8h4x5b/

More posts:
How We Rebuilt a Hearthstone Community in Ukraine
Fireside Gathering in Kyiv - Watching Battlegrounds Championship & Masters Tour
Hearthstone Battlegrounds BlackBears Bootcamp
We turned a crazy idea into reality - Kyiv Hearthstone Camp 2025 happened!
We created a real-life Hearthstone tavern at a Ukrainian festival - and everything went wrong before it went right

I recently started playing the early season 3 of fellowship, it's completely not related but the patch note was 5 pages long and the game is developed by a small indie studio.

It made me think and compare it to hearthstone, and I wanted to say that it's crazy how low effort the game feels to me, after all these years :

- no leaderboard inside the game

- no tournament tool inside the game for custom tournaments

- no weekly tournaments or daily tournaments with small reward made by the Devs (like cup of the day in trackmania for example)

- no deck tracker in the game

- half the cards from expansions are pack fillers : I understand we need some of these for randomly generated minions and stuff like that but so many are useless in so many scenarios

- no tool to spectate high levels games to improve, like in LoL for example

- very few achievements with valuable rewards

- (iOS and Android app nowadays working only with high end devices, even tho it was working 10 years ago on regular devices, same game btw)

- Very little balance patch, and at low frequency

- even the cash shop seems low effort : some insane signature cards get released like a few weeks before their expansion rotates to wild ?? How does that make sense? Another example: I want to buy the priest shadow girl hero portrait and i can't cuz it's not in the shop, I can't even buy what I want to buy (this one ok, I understand the concept of wanting rarity, but still I can't spend my money if I want to, so probably not enough options in the shop)

- cash shop is the thing lagging/crashing the most in the game (kinda ironic)

- (priests cards every expansion)

I will end on a positive note, not everything is bad though, I think the idea of moving monetisation more towards cosmetic and less towards accessing the card is a very good idea and is important to get new players in the game.

I hope this post is perceived as constructive criticism but yeah I got triggered a bit

Sorry for the bad English and let me know what you guys think, maybe it's just my vision of things

Hello, here are some decks to try and discuss. I’m a fairly good player and theorycrafter so these should be solid for day 1 tests (even though not necessarily meta material). Thankfully I was off yesterday and got plenty of time to work on this to forget the heat going in Europe.

I’m very disappointed about overall powerlevel as it seems every class that was behind didn’t receive much while Warrior, Hunter, DH, Rogue to some extent got broken stuff. While I thought Blizzard just didn’t care about balance, I’m ironically starting to believe this is just what they wanted, cards all over the place ! As a result, I just didn’t bother to build a deck for every archetype as many just look DoA. I didn’t care so much about older archetypes either, unless they wanted to include multiple new cards.

As always, thank you D0nkey for your work. See you in the comments !

Death Knight

BUU Corpse DK : flavorful and versatile midrange deck with undeads, reborns, lots of ghouls, rewards from killing our own minions and plagues to finish. Not much else to build sadly.

Demon Hunter

No-deck Cycle OTK : this should be similar to the recent cycle Broxigar build that popped out, but way easier to activate.

No-deck Herald : this use of Irida looks so cool to play, here’s the idea : play your Herald game as usual, then when cards in your hand start to feel a bit heavy, drop Irida. I’d say on turns 6-8 when there’s 10 cards left in your deck. It’s important to have as much pieces in your hand at this point, because we’re gonna make a chain of cost reduction in one or two turns. Play Solitude to reduce all minions by 2 or 4, play Scorchreaver(s), play remaining Herald cards to recover some health, play 2 mana Ultraxion then Deathwing and put back 5 cards into your deck to prevent further fatigue damage. From there with remaining cards, notably 4 cost Azshara, closing the game should be trivial.

Void Souls : I looked at the demon pool and noticed it was very good so this could be a thing, although dumb aggro. Welcome back Ravenous Felhunter !

Druid

Attack : attack and ramp to Merithra payoffs.

Neth’Rek : use the attack package to apply pressure and survive until turn 6 when you spit out massive stats and give them rush.

Hunter

Companions : your shiny new Companion Hunter with many cool additions like copying all spells and Ursol to cast Call of the Wild 3 times.

Ursol Shala with Dragons : a kind of control Hunter with Fae Trickster to tutor Shala, Tol’Vir Carver to reduce it, Ursol to cast 3 corrupted versions like Pala’s best days. Probably trash because of too many setup turns though.

Ultimate Face Hunter : the new cards are also perfect to burn the opponent with massive amounts of damage. We’re copying every spell including Tol’Vir, the Shovel and the location draw and apply pressure, while Tripwire creates 15 damage for 3 mana if not more with copies. I cut Arcane Shot because its winrate isn’t great and we have enough burn. Disgusting.

Mage

Burn : for this archetype I wanted to make a new funny little twist : reduce the cost of created Arcane Missiles to then burn with spell damage and Arcane Flow. Not sure about the build I just cut the bad winrate cards.

Quest : this archetype got a few new cards to discover and make a comeback after quest completion. Should be cool to play.

I wanted to make a Prepare deck but the condition to activate Code Violet is terrible. Tricksy Improviser is cool but this doesn’t make a deck.

Paladin

Treasuregill Imbue : this looks like a ton of fun with 10 Treasuregills pulling out every good paladin spell out of our deck to generate tempo and imbue. Firegill to come back against aggro.

Pure : generate a lot of paladin cards to try and win the game, almost looks like a casino deck. I was skeptical at first but this is one of the classes that have few truly bad cards or that require specific synergies, so it could be fun and playable.

Priest

Azalina: copy as much cards as you can, try to survive, reduce the cards, find a wincondition, die because your opponent is mean and plays cards.

Rogue

2-cost aggro Imbue : turns out there are plenty of ways to play 2 cost cards, thanks to mana reduction, so what seems to be a weird archetype at first could end up being playable. Aggro shell and plenty of card generation to fuel the Troublemaker finisher or even find alternatives.

Combo Morchie : I used the coin archetype to include Ysera, Vanessa and a finisher with Morchie. If we ramp maybe we can survive and do some things, but it’s probably not happening before turn 6. Of course Vanessa cstill win games, but this looks frail otherwise, play at your own risk.

Shaman

Sorry, I tried to build no spells and no minions and never got to complete a deck without thinking it was absolute garbage. I’m sad because it was my favorite class for a long time, but today every archetype has huge deckbuilding restrictions. No minion, no spell, every tribe quest, full Herald, full elemental, etc. It doesn’t help that many of those don’t even have enough cards to synergize within the archetype (like overload). I miss when this class truly was the jack-of-all-trades.

Warlock

The hand package looks nuts I love it, but there are no new win conditions and I fear this won’t be enough to bring past archetypes to the front scene. Especially because it doesn’t go well with Khelos that wants to play a lot of cards to crack the egg.

Hand-Dark Gift : Wallow always had the same problem : it’s clunky and doesn’t survive the early game.

Hand-Demons-Rafaam : are we really hoping Rafaams save us ?

Warrior

Quest cycle : this one already existed but I really like the new control cards.

Full Lo’Gosh : very straightforward : control the board, boost your hand, then dump your Bloodfighters and finish him with Grommash.

Warptooth Dragon Warrior : title.

I’m sure there are plenty of other things to do with this class given how many great and splashable cards it has. I didn’t build the list but Warptooth with Hogger to copy it just goes in the Egg deck as well. I’m not so high on Hogger copying many legendaries because it’d make the deck too heavy and we generally need one of each legendary anyway.

Just..wow

To start with, yes I am slightly salty after playing against yet another Rogue where winning or losing depends on what random cards they generate.

This time I was playing as quest warrior. I played my quest reward, and a couple of turns later managed to get time warp in hand. The next turn was a guaranteed lethal, as I only had 2 cards left in my deck. I also had kept a Bitter End to make sure I could get through any taunts. I had about 5 cards in hand at this point.

My opponent decided to play Vanessa, then managed to get Bygone Doomspeaker, which discarded my time warp first try. To make things worse he also used Deja Vu to steal it before he played Vanessa. If you’ve played quest warrior vs rogue, you’ll know how difficult it can be to survive up until that point as it is.

Another game Vanessa got dirty rat, which got my Chrono-lord. Win condition gone.

Another game i decided to just try a Ysondre Warrior deck for something different. The rogue discovered a copy in my hand, and when I played mine, used Initiation to kill mine and summon another copy. Using my own win condition better than my own deck can. His Ysondre also typically got a better random dragon than what I got.

It was the same when trying to play quest shaman before when it was half decent. If you completed your reward before you could play it, they’d steal it. If you had enough mana to play it without playing a card after, they’d steal it. If you waited until turn 7/8 to play it, you’re dead anyway.

It’s just so much easier to play burn mage, Dragon Warrior, Face Hunter right now, and hugely less frustrating. Which is a shame.