Last days I was thinking It can be a good idea make a guide to new/all players about how cards works, whats the meaning of the special word that you can’t understand from just the read of the card. Then if you have experience or you have proved something using stats, please feel free to share.
Important: this is made just on my game experience. I don’t have access to game code, so I can’t verify at 100% all the info. But in my personal experience until now works like I explain.
Let’s go with some examples:
The Shuffle Mechanic:
The magic word/mechanic that I needed a lot of games to finally understand how it works specially beacause in past I was playing in Spanish and cards aren’t well translated.
When you read any card that has a shuffle, it means that this card, is going to reorder all the deck. Usually you can read 2 usual options “Shuffle a XXXXXX in your opponents deck” or " Shuffle a XXXXX in your deck" this means that the game is going to put one card in the deck and then is going to make a full shuffle.
Some people thinks that when you put the card in the deck is just that card that goes random, and it’s not, it’s a full shuffle then you get a random reorder of each of your cards.
Easy to understand until that point, but… there are other cards that shuffle the deck and it’s not explained like trade.
Trade: When you Trade, the order is you draw the first card and then the game put your traded card inside the deck and then shuffle. The animation shows you, how one card is puted inside and after one goes out, but the true is you draw the first one and then it shuffle the rest, I think this is to prevent you from drawing the traded card, but the animation can confuse you. And it’s important for you to know that you are not going to draw at random, so if you have done a previous dredge and then you trade, voila! you get the card dredged.
Discover:
When you discover the game usually force the discover to cards that you can play, so if you discover on low turns, usually is going to offer you low cost cards, that doesn’t mean that if you discover on turn 3 you never get one 8 cost, but it’s hardest, on the other side, when you have a lot of mana, it’s normal to get a card with high cost. Again it’s not 100% but the odds on discover are not random, I have been doing some stats and more than 90% of the time you are going to get 2 cards that you can play.
So the best is, if you are going to discover, do it first.
On the other side the game helps to balance the match, so if you are playing an unbalanced match and you are loosing very fast, or the enemy has a lot of minions and you no, voila, the game is going to offer you glory. This is very important if you play control decks vs tempo deck, because 90% of the times you can discover glory and don’t waste your big cards of your deck.
The great part is the think that I call “the last discover”, when you are totally lost and nothing saves you, the discover offers you top tier cards. Very funny in arena…
“Chance to hit cards/split damage cards”
Ragnaros: Again I have been doing some stats, and Ragnarok doesn’t works how it says:
“At the end of your turn deal 8 damage at random enemy”
Yes it does that, but not in a fair random. It’s around 60~65% enemy face 40~35%, to one minion on board.
It’s important to know this because if you put 7 minions to prevent the damage from ragnaros, you think, nice it’s 1/8 to hit me, sorry buddy, not even close. It’s 4~5/8 to hit you 4~3/8 to hit one of your minions.
So if you are doubting between killing ragnaros or put targets, always the best is kill him if you want to prevent damage.
On the other side, if you are doubting in use it to finish a game because you have lethal dmg, do it beacause you have a high chance of hit the enemy face.
The same goes with split dmg cards between enemys you have a high chance some of the split dmg goes to face, but usually the split damage cards are not biased as Ragnaros.
I will add more tips as soon as people explain other hidden mechanics, that they have discovered.