Why are there no elementals or dragons in battlegrounds?
Well at least not many.
Elemental synergy relies on “Played an Elemental last turn”.
Dragon synergy relies on “Holding a Dragon in your hand”.
Also many of the synergistic cards for both tribes have effects that don’t work well in Battlegrounds like adding spells to your hand, dealing damage as a battlecry or other stuff that simply won’t work in the mode.
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OK genius, pray tell us why we want to comp Dragons or Elementals?
They have no health buffs, very few relevant deathrattle effects, and their keywords translate horribly. I mean you have to hold an extra Dragon in hand to get the Dragon effects.
They’ve created new cards for Battlegrounds already with more coming.
No reason why they couldn’t create new dragon & elemental cards for it too.
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Yes, they could. But given the existing elementals & dragons synergies, where the majority of cards are drawn from, they are a long way off. DoD might give enough support to dragons, but dont expect elementals any time soon. The existing synergies for both tribes simply dont work, and I doubt they are gonna dedicate the amount of resources required to making them viable tribes in BG’s if most of them arent also a part of the main game.
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They filled in gaps as required for Beasts, Mechs, Demons, and Murlocs.
For Dragons and Elementals they would have to fully recreate the whole tribes, possibly having to create new keywords. That’s an order of magnitude higher to make them work, and not something you expect to see before full release. Additionally, the DoD Dragons revealed so far do absolutely nothing to help bridge that chasm.
It’s far easier to introduce some SoU Reborn minions, or one off minions like Sylvanas.
And let’s not forget that there’s also no Pirates. Similarly their Weapon based synergies don’t work either.
Making Dragons work and keeping them consistent with their existing Hearthstone cards might be as hard or even harder than introducing all new BG exclusive tribes.
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Because the mode was released a 3 weeks ago.
New types will come, don’t worry.
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Handbuff and handbased battlecries can work in BG.
Only thing is that quite a few BG-only cards need to be designed specifically for such archetypes.
Another issue perhaps, is the minion pool; dilluting it too much with minions that only work in very specific archetypes can be terrible for the mode.
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Well having a dragon in hand is not hard to do.
It might slow you down a bit, but dragons are suppose to be late game anyhow.
Actually this could work out well with that Deathwing card that summon all dragons from your hand. Ya this could be a new kind of archetype, get bonuses on the amount of dragons you have in hand, hand buff cards, build your board and your hand as well. That would be pretty expensive and late game.
As for elementals, I can see it being a bit tricky and expensive playing an elemental every turn. but there are elementals that generate more elementals.
You usually keep one or two spots on the board for rotating cards anyhow.
Diluting the minion pool could be a bad or good thing, on one hand you may not get the same metta power board every time, on the other so would everyone else, making mix and diverse boards more common.
Pirates would make more sense imo?
Ships canon, captains…maybe weapons could be introduced to help this synergy go.
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And then what? Dragons don’t have buffs except for Dragon Speaker. Are you holding 5 Dragons on hand for 5 turns? On the hope you get Dragon Speakers every turn? Or the Rastakhan guy to double your Dragons in hand?
What Dragons have is Battlecry effects that affect the board. Which once again don’t transfer over to BG well at all. They would have to develop a new Dragon keyword to replace the “If you have a Dragon in your hand”. And then the community is going to complain about it not being in the play mode, because you know we love to complain.
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Elementals are cool. Some battlecries are already useful, e.g. Fire Fly without requiring playing a turn before or Servant of Kalimos for value.
That shaman elemental with Brewmaster effect and +2/+2 might be so OP.
Pyros is great elemental generator for all the effects turn by turn if you accept a poor 6/6 on the battlefield with no buff possibilities it is itself a cost for that value. Add that 2/3 which gives you two 1/2 when dies and with Fire Fly you have 3 great token-generators for battlecries turn by turn. They should not give you gold when sold and when this change is implemented, everything is alright.
For effects like 7 mana 6/6 with battlecry damage, it may target random enemy minion at the start of next turn. Bonfire elemental might refresh Inn for free as battlecry, Ozruk might have great outcome, Ragnaros can do the damage at the start of the battle, Water Elemental can influence RNG of attacks.
Some elementals like Arcane Artificer probably cannot be matched into BG without 100% re-design which is nonsense, but I can easily think of pool like 15-20 elementals that fits battleground.
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Haha nice! I like your positive Ideas.
Ozruk meta?
Count me in.
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I imagine they’re waiting until Dragons Decent before releasing any dragon-related cards to Battlegrounds.
Remember; Battlegrounds is still in Beta, so there’s a lot of wiggle room to add more stuff down the road. They’ve already added new (and removed underpowered) Heroes.
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I fully expect them to add more mechanics to bgs as time goes on.
Dragon in hand is solid as long as the payoff is worth a slower board.
Elemental last turn played mechanic is a gamble and as long as the payoff is good it could be viable.
I think they can also introduce some spells to arena so that minions that generate spells can work. Reincarnation, secrets, two 1/1 recruits, healing touch, etc.
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I’m hoping to see Water Elemental show up. Freeze mechanics could be rather a different approach.
I’m concerned it might be a little confusing with the Tavern hold-for-next-round mechanic and things like Sindragosa’s hero power, but I think people will understand they’re different.
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Just updating with news of dragons confirmed!
I guess the naysayers will be protesting out in front of blizz HQ soon.
Look at the Dragon pool. Only 1 card does anything Cobalt Scalebane almost everything else as just big vanilla stat sticks. Also Coablt Scalebane is a little too good for tier 4 and crap for tier 5 so where do you put it. So for Dragons you have 1 tier 4.5 unit in Cobalt Scalbane and 1 tier 1 unit in Faerie Dragon. Pretty much to have Dragon they have to make almost and entire new card pool and that is a total disconnect from Hearthstone.
Now look at Elementals we have Anomalus which is just not good for this mode because it damages both sides, Menacing Nimbus they can put at tier 4, Volitile Elemental they can put at tier 2 and Firefly which could work at tier 1 but is probably overpowered because you can hold the thing your generate in hand for triples compared to other token things that take up a board slot so its harder to get the token triple due to board space issues. Then you have the same issues with dragons you have to create a ton of cards to fill out the rest.
The reason Dragons and elementals didn’t make it in yet is there just isn’t much going on there with current hearthstone cards and introducing this game mode they want that connection to base Hearthstone game before they make a bunch of new stuff that doesn’t exist in any other mode.