For Blizzard, Hearthstone's success came as a surprise. The company that made World of Warcraft and Diablo certainly didn't expect it to become a hit of such magnitude. In September, the number of active users of Hearthstone exceeded 20 million and continued to grow.
The essence of Hearthstone, like other collectible card games, is duels between users. The game offers hundreds of cards that summon magical creatures or activate spells, but only those that have been added to the deck are available during a duel.
Building decks with the most effective combinations of cards is an important part of Hearthstone. The limited deck size - only thirty cards - forces compromises. On the one hand, the deck should imply an interesting attack strategy. On the other hand, it is necessary to provide for a rebuff to popular enemy tactics.
The invention of a strong deck can transform the gaming landscape - the so-called “meta”. Old decks that do not take into account new trends quickly go out of circulation or mutate beyond recognition. Many cards that were considered strong year ago, have lost their value even without developer intervention, but Blizzard's attention is making the change even faster.
Over the summer, Hearthstone added three dozen expansion cards, “Curse of Naxxramas.” New monsters and new tactics completely changed the game. The latest expansion, Goblins and Dwarves, has four times more cards than Naxxramas. What do they give to players? Let's try to figure it out.
Mechanisms
Many creatures in Hearthstone fall into one of several types. Some of them are considered animals, others pirates, and others demons. Creatures of the same type are usually more useful together than alone - this is called "synergy". Decks with murlocs, for example, are built on this. Individually, murlocs are not particularly valuable, but when there are many of them, they enhance each other's abilities and quickly turn into a serious threat.
Greetings, dear readers! Here comes a new adventure for Hearthstone called “ Black Mountain", which means that the era of additions has come to an end Goblins and Dwarves, which gave us a huge number of cards, as many as 123!
Some cards were bad, some were good, and some turned out to be bombs and remained in the market for a long time. meta. Let's see which cards have taken root the most in the game.
Paladin
Warlock
Mal'Ganis- new legendary demon and a great addition for Demonlock (). It’s not always possible to play it with demons, mostly you can only pull it out of Void Summoner, but it’s still nice to use the hero’s power without loss. 
Merciless explosion– a removal spell that is often used by various builds of Zoolocks and Demonlocks. The map turned out great, but too random. Well, a couple of extra demons on our table are never superfluous!
Dark Bomb– one more new removal, which replaced the old one just at the moment when Soul Burn was nerfed. The dark bomb kills almost all second and third drops, which is good news.
Warrior
Protectors– unfortunately, the Warrior was given only one card that he can use on an ongoing basis, but what one! Defender has a stable 5\5 for 6 mana, but this creature still needs to be dealt with, and returning it to your hand, even though it has characteristics of 7\7, but summons 2 Explosion-bots 1\1, this turns out to be 9\9 in general, Plus, these bombs explode and hit the opponent’s table very hard. If you haven't crafted it yet, run! 
Irritant– 1\2 s mechanism divine shield, essentially an upgraded Goldshire Soldier. A very annoying creature at any stage of the game.
Ancient Healer– 3\3 for 5 mana – not enough, but it heals you for 8 health, this is slightly less than one third. This card has changed the meta, it is not only played in aggro decks. There are also frequent cases when, it would seem, a class that can heal itself, the Priest, takes this guy into its deck, this is already saying something.
Mechanical assembler- a mechanism that also changed the meta, creating a huge number of decks on mechanisms. This mechanism works great both in the early game and in the middle, giving you a huge jump in tempo if it survives at least a turn.
Manned shredder – « sticky"a mechanism that plays almost everywhere. 4\3 for 4 mana is not very cool, but the deathrattle compensates for it, even if you get 1\1, it will already be good. Of course, you don’t always get what you want; Lorekeeper Cho or Doomsayer may appear if your table is full, but the chance of this is quite small.
And what cards are from the add-on “ Goblins and Dwarves» did you like most? Write in the comments!
Thank you for your attention. Good luck in the game!
Hello, dear readers of the site
boom day- not the first time Doctor Boom and Gears appear in Hearthstone: they were also some of the core cards of the first major expansion in December 2014 Goblins and gnomes, a set that brought with it such infamous creatures as Piloted Shredder, glorious spells like Weapon Mechano Oil, and many more similar "toxic" cards.
An abundance of cards with the death rattle
Before the Goblins and Gnomes meta expansion began to seriously manifest itself, Gravedigger needed to be nerfed. The set featured two cards designed to counter Deathrattle synergy-based strategies, but unfortunately neither of them were good enough to stop the onslaught of the undead. A young exorcist would never outgrow Gravedigger, and Scarlet Sanctifier was ineffective against cards like Haunted Crawler and Nerubian Egg, so much so that one obscure Paladin deck during the Blackrock meta actually used them together to preemptively destroy the latter.
Gravedigger was eventually nerfed after an extremely long and depressing reign. It wasn't until the second month of Goblins and Dwarves that the card was finally wiped out of the meta, opening the door to some other strategies that didn't rely solely on skull-and-crossbones creatures from the bottom of the card.
Raising rates
For those accustomed to the chess-like time of the classic expansion, the strong changes in the new set that added pace to the game were a rude awakening for players. All previous methodological recommendations due to the choice of cards in the Arena became unusable. Instead of looking for more value from an extra Fire Wave or Polymorph, it's become more useful to pick as many 2-mana cards as possible. On the ladder, the stickiness of the Piloted Shredder changed the way Hearthstone was played until the introduction of Standard, and cards like Unstable Portal and Merciless Blast defined the entirety of the game during those dark times.
Likewise, Dr. Boom was a meta-bending card, single-handedly making Master Hunter the must-have card for this meta state (to the point that Brave Dwarf even got a nerf while the Blast Bot purveyor walked away unscathed), providing and good characteristics for 7 mana, and a highly variable possibility of clearing the table with the help of bots. In general, from two to eight points of damage, distributed to random creatures. Whatever you think of the original version of Yogg-Saron, at least he didn't come out on turn seven. Boom remained a part of almost every deck until its eventual departure. Is this a familiar situation?
Aggressive and control decks
Say what you want about the aggressive tools of the set, but we have to admit that control decks have also gotten a lot of great options. Priest's ever-present AoE problem was solved with Flashbomb, Warrior got a great Defender, Warlock got Mal'Ganis to build a Demon deck with Voidcaller (that card looks so weak and situational right now!), and Ancient Healer gave all classes a very strong a neutral health regen option that did more in terms of providing options for control decks than anything else. Copying this bad boy or Slime Belcher made every Control Mage happy.
These were indeed powerful tools, but this does not mean that they lacked worthy opposition. The Paladin's Shielded Mini-Bot and Call to Battle pushed the class away from a full control-based gameplan to something more midrange, prototypical of the Secrets-based Paladin archetype that would go on to terrorize ranked play during Big tournament. Shaman's Spinning Swordsword and Power Mace formed a strong base for a heavy deck with direct damage, synergizing mechanics along with Discharge while Hunters used Glaive Thrower to devastating effect in aggressive builds. And Druids still had access to their infamous Force of Nature and Savage Roar combo, which provided 14 damage per hand without any other tool.
Finding good decks on the Internet
In addition to the mechanics, the Goblin and Dwarf meta was also characterized by a rapid refinement of the deck list on the ladder, caused by the creation of meta reflections by popular sites about Hearthstone decks, such as Tempo Storm. Similar community discussions about the game had existed before, but a well-curated and regularly updated breakdown of the meta and its dominant archetypes had not previously existed. This provided easy access to a list of ranked-ready decks, "polished" for a wider player base. Original breakdowns are hard to come by and are definitely quite crude compared to the content we're used to today, where Vicious Syndicate and HSReplay provide useful alternatives.
January 9, 2015 marked the end of an era: from that moment on, all your opponents were dirty-eyed about decks on the Internet, and you rowed upstream in your canoe of creativity.
The first such decks were Control Warrior, Handlock, Zoolock, Midrange Hunter, and Midrange Paladin (originally called Control Paladin, but renamed in the second edit). And the decks are slightly worse - Face Hunter, Mech Mage, Tempo Rogue, Midrange Druid and Midrange Shaman. Unfortunately, the decklists are now lost, as they were only provided through links on imgur, which now only give a 404 error. By the third week, they started publishing them through the site's deck collector, meaning they are still available today (though still showing nerfed versions of the cards) for those interested in a similar journey into the past.
Let's add a little science
One might wonder how much similarity there will be between The Boomsday Project and Goblins and Gnomes. Looking back, it's clear that Goblins and Dwarves were well over the mark in terms of power by several levels, while some of the culprits were never nerfed, the later cards being a tacit admission of the development team's mistakes. Merciless Explosion proudly remains in its original form, but Come on! costs one more mana even with the result normalized and the synergy with Demons removed. Likewise, the almost guaranteed possibility of exchanging a Protected Mini-Bot “two” into “one” can no longer be obtained for free from
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