hdmode

4.5 has been out for a few days and people have started to reach Visonary. The team has said they are using the set revivals as a place to test things out, so I think it is worth it to talk about what we are seeing.

1. Getting rid of Drafting: For anyone who doesn’t know, in 4.5 there is no drafting, as in players are not selecting from a shared bag of champions, you have your own “deck” of sorts. If all 8 players want to play Kayle, all 8 players can play Kayle and all 8 players can hit Kayle. This has been a bit of a hot button on what TFT should be, as drafting does create a lot of problems, the helplessness of feeling contested, the way that the meta can swing towards one cost because p

To start, all of this is simply my opinion and why I have had a lot less fun with this set. If you disagree and are loving the set, that’s totally fine and I’d love to hear why you disagree. However, the fact is, this set has felt like a slog the entire time. It has never clicked, and I want to talk about why the issues of this set go far beyond, “the balanced has been inconsistent” and are part of the core design.

Dragons. The more I play and think about Dragons the more I think, this is just an un-workable mechanic for what I want this game to be. It isn’t one thing, but a layering of different mechanics on top of each other that takes the mechanic from bad but maybe fixable, to somethi

We need to talk about spats. One of the biggest complains about the game for the last 2 sets have been how bad spats have felt. Due to the nature of the traits spats have felt boring and non-transformative. Sure, they might be “good” but almost entirely as a trait bot. You put the spat on a unit that would be in your comp anyway any your board is a few percent stronger.

Mort said that set 7 had the goal of making spats fun and exiting again, and in many ways they succeeded. There are a whole host of combinations that really change how you should look at a unit and, in some cases, making a unit viable all on their own (mage spat looking at you). Now some of this is just PBE balance and I’m

Mort’s announcement that riot is now allowing matchup trackers has sparked a lot of discussion about their value and the overall way match making works in a game of TFT. Mort’s comments as well as discussion in the AMA seem to indicate he is unhappy with the degree to which the matchmaking algorithm has been “solved”. He has also indicated that he would consider adding more randomness to it, as a way to force you to account for all 7 players instead of just the 3 you would to now.

I have a lot of thoughts on this but let’s start with the use of trackers. I am not going to deny that using a tracker gives you an advantage, yes it gives you no information that couldn’t be accomplished with a

We have all this talk about how the free agent market is moving at a glacial pace and all the reasons why. Obviously Harper and machado, along with the luxury tax hitting the yanks and the dodgers are major contributors. But is it also possible that we just have a group of really flawed free agents. The top 2 guys offensively: Martinez is a good power guy but he is limited to being a bad outfielder and will certainly be a full time dh as he ages. Looking through the AL there just aren't that many teams who could use that type of player. Even the most logical fit, the red Sox have a strong outfield and a right handed power hitting DH making 22 million (albeit one who struggled a ton Last year

Druid is running wild and totally dominating the ladder. The community is freaking out that something needs to be done, blizzard steps to the plate and comes out with some nerfs and the community now is up in arms that these are not the nerfs we wanted. Is this reddit freaking out for the sake of freaking out, or is Blizzard really making a major mistake here.

Now obviously reddit will always overreact to things and time will tell as to the impact these nerfs will have but there are some serious concerns with the way this set of nerfs, and frankly every set of nerfs has been handled by blizzard.

At the start of the year of the mammoth rather than nerfing classic cards, blizzard created th