Is there a science to Disenchanting in Hearthstone?

Question

I have been too chicken to disenchant any cards in Hearthstone. I have heard rumors they (Blizzard) were upping the amount of dust you got back from each card. I don't know the validity; but, it has made me not want to even test this feature.

That said I would like an explanation of what I am looking at on the card disenchantment screen:

• What are the Green (left side) and Red (right side numbers)?
• Do I have to "learn" any cards before I can make them?
• Are there certain cards that are more cost effective to disenchant?
• Is the "disenchant all 'extra' cards" button safe?
• Does it disenchant all card stacks over two cards?

Answer 1

Wojtek addressed most of your questions, but I'm just going to add details to this one question.

**Are there certain cards that are more cost effective to DE? ** There are two things that affect how much dust you get when you disenchant a card.

• Card rarity
• Foil/non-foil

Card rarity can be found by looking at the gem in the center of the card. Common cards have a white gem and give 5 dust when you disenchant them. The colors match the colors in World of Warcraft, with the highest being orange (legendary). Cards that are more rare will disenchant into more dust (you can see how much as Wojtek explained). Also, the cards you get as you level your hero to 10 are considered "basic" cards and don't have a rarity gem. They can't be disenchanted.

-          Normal           Gold    
-          Craft    DE      Craft   DE  
Common      40      5       400     50  
Rare        100     20      800     100  
Epic        400     100     1600    400  
Legendary   1600    400     3200    1600  

If you go through the math to complete a complete set of 2 copies of every card (leaving all of the disenchanting and crafting until last), you're much more likely to need to disenchant commons and craft legendaries. source

Sometimes you can find gold (foil) versions of cards when you open packs. These cards functionally play exactly the same, but if you disenchant them (and keep the non-gold versions of the card) then you'll get more dust. On the other hand, gold versions are animated (some are QUITE nice) and a nice thing to show off.

So, to answer your question, it is generally more cost effective to disenchant the gold cards, if you don't care about the aesthetics and status of using the gold cards.

Another fact to note, if you use the "disenchant extra cards" button, it will automatically keep 2 regular and 2 gold copies of each card (for a total of 4 copies of the card). You have to manually decide which cards you want to keep and disenchant the others.

Answer 2

Well, let me go through this

How to get Dust

You can get dust in 2 ways.

1. You can get an X amount of dust from finishing an Arena run, I don't know the exact amount but for getting 9 wins you can get a good amount. Up to 50 even more
2. The most common way of getting dust is by disenchanting

How to disenchant

You disenchant by going into the My Collection menu and click on the Crafting Mode button on the top right corner of the card book. In there it shows you all the cards you have that you can disenchant but also all the greyed out cards are cards you can make. By clicking on a card you have(A card that has colour in it) you get a disenchant prompt, here on the left side it will show you how much dust the card will give you if you disenchant it and the numbers are green because you gain dust and on the right side it shows you how much dust you need to make the card the numbers are red because that's the dust you are going to lose. So on the left side it will show you +X(X being the number you gain) & on the right it will be -X

Answering your questions directly

• Are there certain cards that are more cost effective to DE?* I'm not sure what you mean, but the more you pay the better the card.
• "DE all 'extra' cards" button safe? Does it DE all card stacks over 2 cards? It will disenchant all cards that you have stacked over 2.
• Do I have to "learn" any cards before I can make them? No,you can make any card in the game, the higher the rarity the more dust you will have to pay.

Answer 3

In addition to other answers, it is worth noting that when a card's mechanic is changed, it can be disenchanted the value it would take to craft.

So you should wait until you want to craft a new card to disenchant.

Answer 4

In addition to the accepted answer, as described over here there's a quick way to find Dustable cards that you have more than two copies of in a mix of common and gold.

If you search for the keyword “extra”, then the collection viewer will show every card you have extra copies of (>2 for non-legendary and >1 for legendary), counting regular and golden cards together. This is not the same as Mass Disenchant, which counts them separately.

This lets you find Golds that are safe to DE without losing any functional cards. If you just DE all your golds you might be left with only a single non-foil version or even no copies of a particular card at all.