One of the updates to Hearthstone’s Year of the Dragon is hatched early and brings a new and improved deck builder to Blizzard’s trading card game. In the past, autocomplete could technically put cards in an incomplete deck, or even create one from scratch, but it seemed negligible besides mana cost and often made nonsensical or just weak suggestions. Now, however, it uses fancy things like win rate data and machine learning. And it actually works (mostly) and brings helpful help to players old and new.

The new builder accesses Hearthstone’s internal statistics and selects cards based on the actual likelihood of winning games. When you own each card, you’ll easily find out which deck is currently best for that class. However, if you don’t (and almost no one because Hearthstone is expensive as hell) then you can still know what’s best of what you have.

If you put in a few cards yourself that you know you want to play with, it will work around them. Sometimes that means ignoring them and making the rest of the deck as powerful as possible, but often times it is actually trying to capitalize on their strengths.

This is a big departure from outside websites devoted to tracking the most ideal card combinations. Where they would likely encourage making extravagant decks to get a few extra percentages out, this new system means I’ll be making the most of what I have on hand and will be able to challenge the ladder at least a real one Setting how to win some games.

In theory, it might be some fun actually trying to come up with new decks, but I’m just not sure if a lot of people did that anyway. It’s essentially about formalizing the practice of netdecking but adapting it to your collection and using complete data in a way that gives Blizzard the edge over the third-party providers that players have turned to for as long as Hearthstone has existed.

I tested every class on my collection and found eleven decks that I actually want to get up the ladder in a place I haven’t really cared about for many months. The only thing that really didn’t like it was my warrior pick, which was tossing cards together that probably have good win rates but don’t come together to make anything cohesive. For example, Town Crier has been added, a card that will pull a servant with the keyword “Rush” off your deck without adding any of the Rush minions.

But aside from teething troubles with tricky cards like this and Keleseth, which don’t need to be another two-cost drop in the deck, it seems like a powerful tool. Not only does this help newer players learn the basics of combos and synergies, but it also gives established players clues as to what is actually going strong at any given point in time.

For example, some of my suggested decks included Genn Greymane, the card that caps your deck on cost, just in exchange for a big boost in your heroism. No wonder it’ll be banished to the Hall of Fame when the next expansion comes out.

It also encourages me to try things that I haven’t done before. My copy of King Toggwaggle has been gathering dust for over a year because it only appears to be viable in one very specific Druid deck that requires many other very expensive additions that I don’t own. But apparently the best recipe I can make for Druids still includes his deck-swapping antics. Now I want to try it out without the extra help cards just to see what happens.

It will also be exciting in the first few days of the new Rise Of Shadows expansion when we see which of the new cards go up. We’re in the early stages of the reveal season, so we give me a good excuse to post Adam Byrne’s trial video for creating the art for Spellward Jeweler, a neutral servant who will keep your hero from being attacked by spells or heroic powers until your next turn becomes. Card art is always underestimated.

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