> So, is everyone in agreement that the Institute are the bad guys?

I'm not but I need more information. That said, I trust Travis and WhiteboySlim so I bet they suck

> Hearthstone is so doomed.

Hahaha, no. Competition is good and different takes on popular genres are good but Hearthstone has a nice advantage of being the first widely played digital card game.

Card Hunter (i'm playing it now) is more like a digital version of Dungeon Quest. It has cards in it, but well I guess it's a card game but I view it more like the digital version of a D&D styled board game.

That said, when I say widely I mean crazy Blizzard numbers of people.

> And solid as hell, at least in its earlier versions. I haven't played it since near launch.

It's better than ever and you should login after the Whispers of the Old Gods launch to get 3 free packs and a Legendary. Not sure when the deal will expire.

> I mean by a magnitude of 30x probably vs Duels of the Planeswalkers.

By 2015 Hearthstone had 30 million. Can't imagine that number hasn't gone up since then. I couldn't seem to find any numbers on Dual of the Planeswalkers but I did know a friend that has it on PS3 and really liked it. I had hoped the Magic app would be good but it's unplayable as I can't finish the tutorial due to some bug or some UI thing I can't figure out.

From what I played, Duals was fun. Thanks for brining it up, I need to look into picking it up on PC.

> Good luck trying to play today! LOL I tried earlier, failed, I tried again and again, more failure. I just tried again, guess what? Yeah, failure. They're aware of the issue apparently and are "investigating" it.

Yeah, I had lots of problems. I imagine the servers are on fire right now

> Now, what I'm curious about is how long will the "So Much Evil For Free" offer stands. How long do we have to get those wins to get those extra cards? It is very tempting to try that out.

You get 3 free packs for signing in. You get C'Thun and two other support minions for opening your first Old Gods packs. Then you get two quests to open another 10 Old Gods packs.

Not sure if they expire. The quests are get X wins in standard mode. So it's about as hard as any other win except it's in the new mode.

Haha, yeah. The big eyes and feet might be at play there.

Hahahaha, because Nintendo games are only made on Nintendo hardware. I bet Nintendo artists would love to do this if they could. We may see more like this on the new Zelda game for the Wii U / NX.

> It will be interesting to see if BGH gets much play. The beautify of it before was that you could drop it and have a decent minion even if the enemy never played a powerful minion. Now other forms of removal may be much better. With this nerf, I would rather have a polymorph, hex, assassinate, ect, in my deck than a BGH.

I wonder the same thing. It trades well in a world of big minions because you also get out a 4/2 but hex is so much cheaper with the 0/1 Frog downside. I'm not really sure, but I think it will still see some play in Standard.

> Also!! I thought for sure that they would nerf Auchenai Soulpreist. Is anyone else worried about AS + Corrupted Healbot?!?

That would be a very fun priest combo as Soulpriest costs 4 and Corrupted Healbot costs 5 so it might work as a late game killing stroke!

> The most interesting thing about the GPD Win, for me, is the idea of acting as a portable console, plugging it into a TV and using a gamepad to play games when you're traveling.

I agree. The thought of using this as a console or laptop is really compelling.

> As a handheld device, though, the problem is playing games that aren't designed for a 5.5" viewport. PC games aren't designed for that space.

True, but it's a 720p screen so it's not too bad. I've got the GPD XD which can stream Steam games to it and it's not too bad. Sure the text is small, but most games are not unplayable. That said, I don't recommend FTL on it.

> The button/stick layout doesn't look entirely comfortable either, even less so than the Wii U gamepad (which, admittedly, I already have bias against).

Again, it's similar to the GPD XD which isn't too bad. As good as a console controller? No, but it has to be a full system so it might not ever be as good.

> Do people really want to play large format games on a significantly smaller screen? According to the funding page, at least 1400 people might, but that's not much of a market. Bear in mind, too, that's 1400 people buying in at the heavily discounted price of $300 (they've said actual retail will be $500).

I can't say how mass market this is but I am interested in it. I look at this like I look at PC gaming in general. It's not perfect but it's pretty damn good and the ability to at least have the option to do this isn't a bad thing. You might not be able to run Skyrim on it but if you could run 40% of your Steam games on it I think that might be worth it.

Me too. Set top boxes have lots of power I guess it was a matter of time until we started seeing a laptop stuck in such a small device. If GPD can do this, I wonder what Nintendo has planned for the NX?