Discover

Discover
Choose one of three cards to add to your hand.

Discover is an ability that allows the player to choose from three different pseudo-randomly selected cards, with the chosen option usually generated and added to their hand. Some Discover effects offer random Hero Powers, with the chosen option replacing their current Hero Power. There are also Discover effects that do not add a cards to the player's hand, such as Free From Amber or Tortollan Primalist. Discover involves strong elements of both RNG and strategy, with players having to predict their needs and what will best suit their deck.

Once Discover is activated, the player is presented with three possible options, selected from a pool of all eligible neutral and class cards matching the player's current class. The selection process is pseudo-random, with class cards weighted four times more than neutral cards. All current Discover effects feature selections restricted to specific criteria, such as being spells, Beasts, or 1-cost minions. A few exceptions instead provide random cards from a number of specific classes. Some Discover effects such as Arch-Thief Rafaam offer a more specific selection of unique uncollectible cards, while Sir Finley Mrrgglton offers basic Hero Powers from any class.

The cards offered by Discover effects are not drawn from the player's deck, and the player's deck and hand do not affect the options provided by Discover effects.

Notes

Discover in action

• Discover effects will not present duplicate options: each of the three possible choices will be different.
• Players cannot choose not to take one of the cards or Hero Powers offered by a Discover effect. They must choose one of the options. If, however, the turn timer expires before one of the Discover options is picked, the game will automatically pick the left-most option.^{[verification requested]}
• Most Discover effects offer only cards that are neutral or match the hero's current class, and have a chance to present any card that fits these requirements (as well as any additional requirements specified in the card text). However, class cards have four times the weighting of neutral cards, ensuring they are presented as options four times more often than they otherwise would be. Note though that because of the far larger pool of neutral cards than that of any given class, in many cases neutral cards are still more commonly presented options.
  • Tri-class Discover effects like Lotus Agents instead offer one random option from each of three specified classes, regardless of the player's current class; no neutral options are presented.
• Because of the variable numbers of each type of card, draw probabilities will vary between classes, and depending on the specific Discover effect. For example, as of The League of Explorers the probabilities when playing Jeweled Scarab as a warlock have been reported as a 10% chance for a class minion, 20% chance for a class spell and 70% chance for a neutral minion. This roughly matches the number of each type of card available: 3 warlock minions, 4 warlock spells, and 62 neutral minions (taking into account the 4x modifier for class cards). However, the probabilities for a mage playing Jeweled Scarab have been reported as closer to 50/50 between class and neutral cards. Again, this matches the number of cards available: 16 mage cards and 62 neutral cards.
• While the activation of Discover effects can be duplicated by Brann Bronzebeard, individual Discover events cannot. If a Discover effect is duplicated, the two will be separate events, with their own selections of cards. However, there is no special rule preventing the two Discovers from featuring some of the same options simply by chance.
• Using Discover effects as the Lord Jaraxxus hero offers cards as though you were playing as a warlock.
• However, using Discover effects as the Ragnaros hero has a different behaviour depending on the card.
  • If the card with the Discover effect is a neutral card, the game randomly picks 1 of the 9 classes and offers you cards as though you played the Discover card as that class.
  • If the card with the Discover effect is a class card, the game offers you cards as though you played the Discover card as that class.
• If a Discover effect occurs while your hand is full (such as due to Gadgetzan Auctioneer), the card will not be added to your hand, and your opponent will be able to see which card you picked in the sidebar.
• The card chosen by the Discover effect is not placed in your hand until the end of the current Sequence, meaning that it is possible for your hand to become full in the mean time, discarding the card you chose. For example, if you have a 10/10 card hand, play Raven Idol and have a Wild Pyromancer and Acolyte of Pain in play, the card chosen will float in the air, Acolyte of Pain triggering off of Wild Pyromancer's damage will fill your hand, and finally the card chosen will be discarded.
• If you play a Discover Battlecry minion, the first Discover effect will not put its card in your hand until the end of the current Sequence (e.g. after death processing following the After Summon Phase resolves). Then, if you control Brann Bronzebeard, you will get a second Discover effect. Note that the played minion does not have to be alive at this time, only Brann Bronzebeard does. Also note that normally Brann Bronzebeard has to be in your control during the Battlecry Phase.
• All cards with a Discover effect that doesn't add the selected card to the player's hand have an explicit description on the card text of what will be done with the selected card instead, except when for cards that discover a Hero Power (which can't be added to the hand). This means that, for any card text that discovers a card and that doesn't specify what is done with it, you can assume it will be added to the hand.

Cards

Name / Desc	Rarity	Type	Subtype	Class	Cost	Atk	HP	Description
Choose Your Path	None	Spell		Warrior	1			Discover a card.
A Light in the Darkness	Common	Spell		Paladin	2			Discover a minion. Give it +1/+1. Wait, how can you have a light in the dark? If you turn on a light while it’s dark, doesn’t that mean it’s no longer dark?
Hallucination	Common	Spell		Rogue	1			Discover a card from your opponent's class. It's the good kind of hallucination.
Hydrologist	Common	Minion	Murloc	Paladin	2	2	2	Battlecry: Discover a Secret. Murloc hydrologists are pretty rare. Most murloc undergrads pick computer science.
I Know a Guy	Common	Spell		Warrior	1			Discover a Taunt minion. Well… a guy who knows a guy.
Netherspite Historian	Common	Minion	General	Any	2	1	3	Battlecry: If you're holding a Dragon, Discover a Dragon. She can tell you all about the history of people not STANDING IN THE GREEN BEAM!
Primalfin Lookout	Common	Minion	Murloc	Any	3	3	2	Battlecry: If you control another Murloc, Discover a Murloc. Lookout is a self-appointed title that's mostly an excuse to beat things up.
Stitched Tracker	Common	Minion	General	Hunter	3	2	2	Battlecry: Discover a copy of a minion in your deck. He's just exercising his right to bear arms.
Drakonid Operative	Rare	Minion	Dragon	Priest	5	5	6	Battlecry: If you're holding a Dragon, Discover a card in your opponent's deck. His job is to spy on the Goons and the Jade Lotus, but he's OBVIOUSLY a dragon so it's pretty hard work.
Eternal Servitude	Rare	Spell		Priest	4			Discover a friendly minion that died this game. Summon it. What do you mean I don't get overtime pay for this?!
Free From Amber	Rare	Spell		Priest	8			Discover a minion that costs (8) or more. Summon it. Bingo! Minion DNA!
Grimestreet Informant	Rare	Minion	General	Hunter, Warrior, Paladin	2	1	1	Battlecry: Discover a Hunter, Paladin or Warrior card. "Naw, naw. You're talkin' about Grime BOULEVARD. I ain't know nuthin' 'bout that."
Ivory Knight	Rare	Minion	General	Paladin	6	4	4	Battlecry: Discover a spell. Restore Health to your hero equal to its Cost. Do NOT call it a "horse".
Journey Below	Rare	Spell		Rogue	1			Discover a Deathrattle card. Don't stop believing there's something below.
Kabal Courier	Rare	Minion	General	Mage, Priest, Warlock	3	2	2	Battlecry: Discover a Mage, Priest or Warlock card. Hey, you park your kodo under a harpy nest, you get what you deserve.
Lotus Agents	Rare	Minion	General	Druid, Rogue, Shaman	5	5	3	Battlecry: Discover a Druid, Rogue or Shaman card. Mostly, they stand around and look cool.
Servant of Kalimos	Rare	Minion	Elemental	Any	5	4	5	Battlecry: If you played an Elemental last turn, Discover an Elemental. He's doing his best, but his mom thinks that if he had just applied himself in school Kalimos would be working for HIM.
Stonehill Defender	Rare	Minion	General	Any	3	1	4	Taunt Battlecry: Discover a Taunt minion. Briefly tried stand-up comedy under the name "Stonehill Offender", but turtles are just too thin-skinned.
Chittering Tunneler	Epic	Minion	Beast	Warlock	3	3	3	Battlecry: Discover a spell. Deal damage to your hero equal to its Cost. Ear to the ground, he carefully interpreted the chittering noises: “You wanna cast a spell? I wanna cast a spell!”
Finders Keepers	Epic	Spell		Shaman	1			Discover a card with Overload. Overload: (1) INFINITE LOOP!
Primordial Glyph	Epic	Spell		Mage	2			Discover a spell. Reduce its Cost by (2). It's the Ancient Tol'vir symbol for "Whoops!"
Shadow Visions	Epic	Spell		Priest	2			Discover a copy of a spell in your deck. This one’s a bird. And here’s a bunny!
Tortollan Primalist	Epic	Minion	General	Any	8	5	4	Battlecry: Discover a spell and cast it with random targets. I see pizza in my future.
Showing all 23 cards

Wild format

 This section contains information exclusive to Wild format.

Name / Desc	Rarity	Type	Subtype	Class	Cost	Atk	HP	Description
Dark Peddler	Common	Minion	General	Warlock	2	2	2	Battlecry: Discover a 1-Cost card. I'm offering you a bargain here! This amazing vacuum cleaner for your soul!
Ethereal Conjurer	Common	Minion	General	Mage	5	6	3	Battlecry: Discover a spell. Despite the name, he's a solid conjurer.
Gorillabot A-3	Common	Minion	Mech	Any	4	3	4	Battlecry: If you control another Mech, Discover a Mech. A-1 and A-2 went nuts, when they should have gone bolts.
Jeweled Scarab	Common	Minion	Beast	Any	2	1	1	Battlecry: Discover a (3)-Cost card. It's amazing what you can do with super glue!
Museum Curator	Common	Minion	General	Priest	2	1	2	Battlecry: Discover a Deathrattle card. He is forever cursing the kids who climb on the rails and the evil archeologists who animate the exhibits.
Raven Idol	Common	Spell		Druid	1			Choose One - Discover a minion; or Discover a spell. Was petrified when it found out it didn't make the cut for Azerothian Idol.
Tomb Spider	Common	Minion	Beast	Any	4	3	3	Battlecry: Discover a Beast. Less serious than its cousin, the Grave Spider.
Arch-Thief Rafaam	Legendary	Minion	General	Any	9	7	8	Battlecry: Discover a powerful Artifact. He's very good at retrieving artifacts. From other people's museums.
Sir Finley Mrrgglton	Legendary	Minion	Murloc	Any	1	1	3	Battlecry: Discover a new basic Hero Power. In addition to fluent Common, he also speaks fourteen dialects of 'mrgl'.
Showing all 9 cards

Development

• Discover is intended to provide a balance between random generate effects like Unstable Portal and regular card draw. While the latter can make games more predictable through accelerating the player's progress through their deck, and the former can prove too unpredictable due to the extremely large and non-class limited pool of potential cards, Discover effects are intended to add variety to games without excessively disturbing class balance, and while still allowing players some control over which card they gain.
• The Discover ability was originally called "Treasure", a name which is still found in the game's strings. The original idea was pitched by Mike Donais, before design work had started on The Grand Tournament, but the developers did not start experimenting with adding it to cards until they began work on The League of Explorers.
• The developers tried different places for the Discovered card to go, including the top of the deck, and shuffling it into the deck at random. The former proved problematic because of shuffle into deck effects, which not only adds cards to the player's deck, but also shuffle the entire undrawn deck; as a result, activating such an effect after a Discover effect would cause the chosen card to become lost in the player's deck, losing much of the value and making the mechanic less reliable. Conversely, if this didn't happen, the card drawn at the start of the next turn would already be known by the player. This removed the surprise at the drawing of an unknown card, and in tough situations often led to a feeling of powerlessness, since the player would know in advance that they were not going to draw next turn a card that was capable of dealing with the state of the board; or otherwise know in advance that they would draw the card they needed, thus taking "the drama and excitement" out of the game. The idea of shuffling the chosen card into the deck was likewise discarded due to the likelihood of the match ending before the card was drawn, thus making the effect feel unimportant and unreliable. In addition, adding the card to the top of the player's deck was an a further innovation on top of the Discover effect itself, and the designers felt it wiser "not try to do too many things all at once in a new mechanic".
• In terms of card balance, through playtesting the designers found that Discover was in most cases fairly similar in value to a card draw effect. This allowed them to use the established weighting of card draw effects to guide them in choosing stats for Discover minions.
• One of the last decisions made during the development of Discover was to restrict the effect to neutral and class cards. Prior to this, Discover effects were able to generate any card. With a far larger card pool to choose from, this made it much harder for players to predict which card an opponent's Discover effect had provided, and making the effect almost impossible to play around. The game-wide card pool also produced too much "class bleed", with other classes gaining access to the cards of other classes on too frequent a basis, weakening class uniqueness.
• The final tweak to the ability was to increase the likelihood of class cards appearing, eventually set to four times the normal chance. This was made in order to balance the far larger number of neutral cards, ensuring that class cards would be well-represented. A similar solution had already been put in place for Arena.
• After exploring the ability with The League of Explorers, the developers began experimenting with ways to feature Discover in a Tavern Brawl, partly because they were also working on the first round of Tavern Brawls at that time.
• It was eventually decided for the Discover mechanic to debut through the Captain Blackheart's Treasure Tavern Brawl in October 2015. However, technical problems prevented this, and the keyword was instead announced in November at BlizzCon 2015 with its accompanying adventure, The League of Explorers.
• Discover was developed "kind of" independently of The League of Explorers. Ben Brode states, "We just kind of smashed them together and it turned out that they felt very natural together." The name change from "Treasure" to "Discover" was influenced by the keyword's debut with the adventure, though.

Trivia

• When the Discover mechanic was introduced, all cards with this mechanic would add the chosen card to the player's hand. This is still reflected in the tooltip that is shown when hovering the mouse over a card with this ability, even though this is no longer true in all cases.

Gallery

Discovering a new Hero Power

References

	Cards
By type	Hero card Minion Spell Weapon
By class	Druid Hunter Mage Paladin Priest Rogue Shaman Warlock Warrior
By minion type	Beast Demon Dragon Elemental Mech Murloc Pirate Totem General
By ability	Adapt Auto-Attack Auto-cast Battlecry Cast spell Charge Choose One Combo Copy Deal damage Deathrattle Destroy Discard Discover Divine Shield Draw cards Elusive Enrage Equip Forgetful Freeze Gain Armor Generate Immune Inspire Joust Lifesteal Mega-Windfury Modify cost Overload Permanent Poisonous Put into battlefield Put into hand Quest Refresh Mana Remove from deck Replace Restore Health Return to hand Secret Shuffle into deck Silence Spell Damage Spend mana Stealth Summon Taunt Take control Transform Unlimited attacks Windfury
By effect type	Area of effect In-deck effect In-hand effect On-draw effect On-discard effect Ongoing effect Positional effect Random effect Triggered effect
By card set	Basic Classic Whispers of the Old Gods One Night in Karazhan Mean Streets of Gadgetzan Journey to Un'Goro
	Blackrock Mountain Grand Tournament The League of Explorers Goblins vs Gnomes Naxxramas Hall of Fame
By rarity	Free Common Rare Epic Legendary