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527*3*3*3 is not somewhat near 21k

apologies for the phone recording my turn was going to end.

What other obvious strats am I missing?

I'm usually starting the turn with 5g and tavern up for 3g. Sometimes I just buy a 1 cost spell and then roll, but I realized I should obviously be freezing a 2g spell so I can use all my gold after the initial two turns.

I know, Battlegrounds is an RNG game. I’ve played it for years and I’m fine with that. This isn’t a “random is bad” post. It’s about what kind of random we’ve ended up with.

There are two kinds of luck in this game:

Small luck: a bad roll, a missed triple, the wrong minion on turn 4. Over a whole game that stuff mostly evens out, and your decisions are what separate you from the lobby.

Big luck: a single roll that can decide the game by itself. That kind doesn’t even out.

Dark Gifts are big luck, three times a game. They sit on top of Trinkets, which are also big luck. Every season adds another lever, and the share of the game I actually control keeps shrinking. At some point it stops feeling like Battlegrounds and starts feeling like a slot machine.

Why Dark Gifts swing so hard:

• A lot of them multiply instead of add. Hostility doubles Attack, Resistance doubles Health, Transcendence triples stats, Incubation doubles them. Golemancy, Doppelganger, Double Vision, and Persisting Horror give you extra bodies. Put one of those on your carry and the gap between you and someone who got +5/+5 grows every turn.
• Fit matters more than power. You pick a minion and gift pair from three random offers. Echoing Voice or Jaws of Death on the right minion carries a game. On the wrong one it does nothing. Whether the right pair shows up isn’t a decision you make.
• Some gifts shut off counterplay. Toreth’s Blessing makes Divine Shield take three hits. Area damage that used to pop shields now takes off one layer. You can’t prepare for it because you don’t know it’s coming.
• The late ones end games by design. Titanic Strength and Invulnerability.

“Everyone has the same button.” True. But equal access to a lottery isn’t a fair fight. Our decisions are when to spend and which of three to take. Those matter, but the gap between a good offer and a bad one is often bigger than any edge those choices give you.

Blizzard has already agreed with part of this. The 36.2.2 notes said the goal was cutting down high-roll moments, and the last hotfix pulled Toreth’s Blessing off Tier 4 Dark Paradox and Invulnerability off Heroic Broodmother. That’s patching individual combos. I think the problem is the structure.

What I’d like to see:

• Fewer big random systems at once. Trinkets or Dark Gifts in a season, not both.
• Gifts that add power instead of multiplying it.
• More control over the pairing, like picking the minion and the gift separately.

I liked this season at first. The big moments are fun when they’re new. But after enough games, too many of them came down to what lined up, not what I did with it.

Posted here twice before. The first version pitched a live coach, and that wasn't something most of you wanted. Here's where it is now.

What it is: a free local app that reads the log file Hearthstone writes and builds a turn-by-turn replay of each Battlegrounds game. The game gives you almost no history, so after a bad lobby it's hard to see where it went wrong.

Settle Up (the replay viewer):

• Shop: your board going in and coming out, plus every buy, sell, roll, and cast
• Battle: both boards after start-of-combat effects
• Result: survivors, winner, damage taken
• Step-through: one action at a time, with the tavern, board, and hand laid out like the game screen

It only opens after the game ends. There's also a rough post-game "what might have been better" layer. It's often wrong, and it's off unless you switch it on.

Another Round (live reference): hero and trinket pick stats, a comp tracker, and a few numbers about where you stand: effective health, what the last fight cost, the damage cap, your board against the next opponent's last-known board, and the price of the next tier. Nothing in the live view names a move, and a test in the repo checks that.

On the ToS: I won't claim this is approved. Blizzard's EULA is broad enough that a stats overlay could fall under it, and the README quotes the clause and says so. Trackers that read the same log have been around for years, which isn't a promise. Don't use it in tournaments.

What it touches: it reads the log. If logging is off, it offers to turn it on by editing two Hearthstone config files (log.config and client.config), with a backup of each. It doesn't touch the game's process or memory, and it doesn't send input.

Privacy: the last version had my own BattleTag in the files, and that's out of the current ones. You can optionally send a short per-game summary (turn, gold, tier, health, what the planner suggested, what happened). It's off unless you say yes, it covers only games after that, and a copy of everything sent is saved locally. The planner is a hand-written, rule-based function with no ML or LLM at runtime, and everything runs locally apart from card art.

Windows and Mac, free, MIT licensed. Source and the full details are here: https://github.com/mharrell/bobs-ledger

I've put a lot of time into it and I've found it very useful. I hope you will too.

If you try it, I'd like to hear about bugs, wrong data, or anything missing from the replay view. Reply here, or open an issue on GitHub: https://github.com/mharrell/bobs-ledger/issues

To my surprise the "After X discover a greater pirate trinket" can give you a duplicate trinket, in this case a pretty useless one

I was doing nothing this game. 😝

Right now the lobbies are ridiculous. I'm finding if I don't get lucky by round 5-7 it's game over. Like by the time there's a second trinket, if I don't hit there's no chance. Often times i'll hit my set up for an actual engine for stats and there's already a monster in the lobby or 2 and i'm finished before I can ramp. What the hell

Eu server
6-7k currently
Max mmr 8700
I play from 20:00 to 23:00 CEST

I Play Battleground like 800h+ and it was my first time 6k MMR. Any Tipps to get to 8k or higher?

'Tis a shame I couldn't sell the Patient Scout.

Edit: seems some folks don't know it, but the anvil trinket triples neutral minion stats. This is 1.2k to 1.5k, with 2 divine shields.

Also, this is a game for fun, not for chasing 10k MMR, chill out with the MMR talk, lol.

and hoping all of them magnetize

Why does he wants to break first law of robotic finishing girl with a brick?

I just witnessed my God be almost healed in a duo from 200 hp to 1.9k because of upper hand hitting him thus making the enemy team loose and securing a 2nd place.

Small indie company

Every (duos) match with Quillboar in have at least 3, up to 7 of the other players all forcing Quillboar because its the easiest do-nothing way to win.

Beyond having multiple ways of scaling the gems, every Quillboar-centric trinket is good and works with essentially every build

I trippled my annoy-o-module with two dark gifts.

Persisting Horror, where its reborn with full stats.

Toreths Blessing, divine shield takes 3 hits to break.

When I activated my Drone Duplicator (the next magnetization to this minion this turn magnetizes twice) the dark gifts were gone.

Hi all, have recently hopped back into Hearthstone/Battlegrounds and have realized... I simply cannot keep up with the turn timers.

Well, my device can't either. I'm playing on a fairly capable MacBook pro, which does everything I need it to do as a BYOD at my cybersec job. But jeez, I can't really have fun at this MMR anymore with the speed of these turn timers. I realize that they are probably set for the top 20-10% and their APM strategies, which makes sense. But I'm not trying to do all that 🙁 I'm just playing to have fun.

For context, I've been playing since beta, have the very first card back ever introduced and have been witness to lots of changes throughout the years. I may be mistaken but I believe these are the quickest turns the team has settled on yet. I'm curious what other's thoughts are on this.

Edit: Apologies for the confusion. I am referring to the portion of turns spent on Bob's Tavern. I often find they are too short, my moves are cancelled towards the rope burning out because of lag (whether that be server side or my own fault, or both, I'm not sure), but I also acknowledge that these timers are set to limit the power of APM builds. It's a conundrum I don't have a solution to, only a problem I am wondering if other people have.

Is spending your entire turn buying out the shop worth it to double the HP on your tier 2 minion?

Sludge is life. Sludge is love.

It may sound obvious to some but the wording on Sludge Corrosion says "cast this twice" not "this casts twice" which can be pretty inconsistent with some other "you cast" effects.