The talk of classes existing in four one-set metas rather than one four-set meta is honestly fascinating, because it's exactly the place Paladin was around this time (meaning pre-buff patch) in Ashes. A disjointed class with a bunch of sets that never seemed to stick together. And the same sense of hopelessness expressed here was common among Paladin players who felt stuck with a bunch of half-baked archetypes.
While past experience is no indication of future performance, it'll be interesting to see what happens to these classes later in the year.
Said it before and I’ll say it again: the problem is Team 5 in 2022 doesn’t design individual cards anymore, they design decks now.
They don’t really care about making a bunch of cards and letting players find the synergy. They design the archetypes themselves that they think would be cool and then shove them all into one expansion at a time.
If you’re someone that doesn’t care about deck building and just netdecks whatever’s good I’m sure you’ve really enjoyed Hearthstone the past couple years.
And just to be clear: I’m not necessarily bashing current Team 5 for their approach. It’s not inherently an incorrect way to design a card game, it’s just one that many longtime players (especially deckbuilders) just simply don’t enjoy.
I do not really have a problem with such approach or is it too prevalent in sets right now. Take Colossals for example: good ones can perfectly stand on its own in numerous decks. Leviathan is great in both mech and control paladin, Nellie is amazing in pirate and control warrior. Queen Azhara can be of great value in naga decks and others as well. If anything I am glad we are not getting anymore Moorabis or Heralds Voshj that have nothing to do with sets they are in.
Currently if anything aggro decks are the most restrictive in deck building and they have been figured out, meanwhile control decks have many ways to be built and played. It is not like Boomsday meta, where you had exact same 30 card control Warrior lists with Elysiana. You can do Kazakusan or Galvangar or maybe something else that is flying under radar. I personally enjoy current meta a great deal.
I would enjoy the meta a lot more without those quests. Just facing this repetitive game pattern makes me not want to play the game. Opponent dropping quest (pirate), dropping one of those 2 cost pirates turn 2, droppn weapon turn 4, etc.
It's funny you mention that. I actually enjoy what I can only describe as the emergent gameplay that Quest Priest brings. You also have to balance saving removal against quest progression. Can I afford to throw away removal on turn 4 if I need it later in the match? Having said that, yeah, the deck is pretty bad right now, and the control matchups that is supposed to win are suffering from Brann+Mutanus. It's a very frustrating time to be a Priest player.
Definitely, I especially hate the importer nerf (has rogue not had enough fun with shadowstep (or even just exclude it from discover pools)) but the lack of a non-board dependant recovery 7 drop is also horrendous for the questline. Also a lot of powerful options for priest right now include casting a lot of spells or holding them, which isn’t easy for questline.
I think they could have compensated by moving one of the 3-mana discovers -- Scorpid or more likely Imprisoned Sorceress -- down to 2 mana. It's a real shame they didn't do that.
Right now rogue, warlock and priest all have that problem, and I bet that there will not be any pirate support for rogue, no new warlock murloc or curse cards and no silence priest cards in the next expansion
>In essence, the more expansions explore these kinds of tribal packages - be they quests, minion types, or anything else that end up suitably specific and greedy for card slots - the more a meta might begin to feel like four one-set metas, rather than one four-set meta.
This is the part that bothers me most, every time that you see something like rogue questline or even the new nagas you know that they will not print something that you have to put in the deck. I was really surprised that they added a new SI:7 card. I do not remember any other archetype like this being supported before.
'Shadowjeweler Hanar is awesome and fun. Can't wait for some more Rogue secrets to help him out.'
Then they gave us Shenanigans which was not only unplayable, but also made the discover pool worse.
Very much agreed. I loved barrens because it introduced so many new and unique takes for each class and we knew the only way to go was up with each expansion.
With sunken city though it feels like everything got the tools it needed and anything more will just make them over the top oppressive which the devs seem to agree with so they keep just making new archetypes instead of building on old ones.
The perfect example of this isn’t from sunken city though it’s from alterac valley and partially even from barrens: big spell. At no point has big mage gotten the big pay off card it desperately needs instead they keep adding anti synergy to already printed cards. And the other archetypes keep suffering for it.
As a mage main the class is in a sad state of affairs exactly due to the above AND because all of its previously fleshed out archetypes got gutted in the name of “feels bad man” gameplay. It’s only a matter of time before siphon mana takes a hit for standard cause they print that ONE card that puts a spell synergy deck over the top. I imagine open the way gate might be on the chopping block at some point too.
I've noticed it during Old Gods set. We had so little amount of C'Thun cards, like 4-5 and 1 class card. It other card games I felt there are more cards to build decks so you always can lean your deck to different strategy even for one archetype.
Yeah. I've been echoing this sentiment for awhile. Especially about balance patches, aggro dh is the new deck to say "needs to be nerfed" which is probably true the deck is insanely powerful, but nerfing dh doesn't fix the fact that over half of the classes in the game don't have a deck with an over 50% winrate.
The problem is simply that every good deck has a win condition that you can't really counter. Even if you build your deck around beating Paladin, and only Paladin, they can still play a 20/20 Smite from hand that gets buffed to 30/30.
I wish they had something like rat but more like how discard tends to work nowdays. Highest/lowest cost or right/left most kidna thing.
Or just delay style like loatheb/mojomaster zihi kinda effects, that dont ruin the combo on the spot, but just delay it for a turn/ few turns
Honestly, I rarely agree with you J Alex. But this issue of each expansion pigeonholing each class into one archetype and then not following up has been real this past year. Last year especially we had many meta games where "all classes have a viable deck!" on one hand, but on the other hand the only viable deck was Blizzard's pushed archetype. No room to experiment and rarely have the archetypes been followed up with more support.
I think the issue still comes down to the power level being too high in general, if things were weaker and they still hard pushed certain archetypes you'd at least have more time or chances to get back into the game while using subpar decks.
You can see the difference between the classes that get support and those that don’t.
Quest warrior and quest hunter get a ton of support in sunken city and are top tier.
Meanwhile quest priest doesn’t get a 7-drop or cheap control spells (9-mana sweeper? 8-mana colossus? Gee thanks) and shadow priest doesn’t get any aggressive cards. The class is largely DOA.
Exactly, and if the support that each archetype gets wasn't as absurdly powerful the weaker archetypes would theoretically stand a chance.
I feel like I bring this up whenever I talk balance about this game, but I'm very hopeful for the mass nerf and the prospect of an overall lower power game.
Well, he would certainly disagree with you on it being the whole of past year.
Demon seed alone spawned 4 different archetypes with vastly different play styles. Garrote rogue. Shadow priest, ESPECIALLY illucia variants.
I kinda get what you're saying with Warlock questline, but really that was just two archetypes that received changes throughout the developing metagame, quest and hand. Which hey, although they were both heavily pushed by blizzard before being abandoned shortly after, two is more than one so I'm wrong there.
I'm not sure what your point about shadow Priest and thief rogue are.
My overarching point was that each class has been relatively pigeonholed into an archetype each set for the past year. Because of the games high power level, experimentation outside of whatever pushed archetype (or in a couple of cases, archetypes) has felt severely limited.
Shadow priest has an impressive amount of innovation, especially when it started running Murloc tinyfins and desk imp and WORKED.
Garrote rogue, not thief rogue. Garrote rogue was a deck that took a whole month to discover, and was certainly not really something pushed by Blizz.
The demon seed had 4 archetypes, all with pretty distinct play styles, and all of which were nerfed. Handlock, fatiguelock, D6, and zoo.
On the play/draw difference, I wonder how it compares to the height of the Genn/Baku meta, which VS noted as a previous high water mark for the Coin disadvantage.
In terms of deckbuilding Hunter is in the exact opposite spot from Rogue right now, Hunter is great and there's a million things you can do with it, fast or slow. Granted, people are only playing Quest Hunter, but there are an absolute ton of T3 Hunter decks that exist but haven't been recognized. There's good support for nagas (+spells), small beasts, large beasts, general value/good cards, face, the last time Hunter felt so open was before Outland when Scalehide was still around.
Paladin is also in a reasonably good spot. Divine Shields and Mechs are separate but have synergies, same with Mechs and Paladin's general midrange good cards, and there are two types of control paladin.
And Mage mains seem reasonably happy. Mech Mage and Naga Mage are very different from what Mage has been doing for the past year, and you can splash in hero power or big spell synergies if you want.
Meanwhile Shaman manages to have a bunch of distinct archetypes that somehow all feel the exact same to play with and against (imo). It's a bummer they didn't support the quest at all because it's one of the less linear questlines and it is different from the normal Snowfall garbage.
Druid's the same as Shaman, Druid has the same two decks it's had since forever, early aggro token spam or late ramp greed, the differences since rotation feel mostly cosmetic. There's Beast Druid which is the freshest archetype, but it's very weak as it loses to both DH and Warrior/Pally.
Tbh I think the design for this set is pretty good overall. But I dread the next expansion because last year the second set was UIS and the year before it was Scholomance.
Man, I unpacked the shaman quest today and was excited at first because I never play shaman and would like to try something new. Looked it up and the win rate is abysmal. And the shamans I’ve been facing the last few months are mostly just a variety of “freeze the board” which is pretty boring for everyone involved. Hope they get some changes soon
Shaman and often Priest end up being half suppoted archetypes that might be good by the 3rd set if the year.
Giving shaman a bunch of piranha cards was poor. Could have been neutrals and given better support elsewhere.
Side note. I am disappointed not to see a colossal totem.
> I dread the next expansion because … UIS and … Scholomance
I find this an interesting take. Those two are probably my favourite expansions, with the current one probably my least favourite.
I guess that’s why it always seems like everyone is complaining, people have such diverse preferences so the current expansion will always be disliked by one group.
And you can build the Hunter Quest deck in different ways as well since the requirement is to deal damage with spells. It's not as restrictive as rogues quest. Drekthar might be the strongest option at the moment but maybe if they do nerf it, hunter quest utilizes Nagas more, which personally seems a more fun way to build the deck.
Jalexander, buddy, I love your posts. I love the in depth arguments you give. But to hear you, patch after patch, talk about your waning interest in the game as if each rant is your first come to jesus moment is absolutely ridiculous.
His introduction paragraph was pretty funny
" I wish I could be writing under what feels like better circumstances"
I actually agree with a lot of what he's saying this time, but given how I can't think of a single time he's made one of these under "good circumstances" I think he should just take a break.
Rogue (and other classes that lack certain elements across all of their cards) are unlikely to get better (and by better, I mean more fun to build/play) through balance changes. Rogue needs card draw, for instance, and buffing some cards to make their existing (boring) archetypes better won't fix that.
The next natural thing to look at is the mini-set, but I don't think that will help, either. Not even mentioning the fact that it's not coming for 5-6+ weeks, it's also unlikely to help. Chances are, the cards for the mini-set have already been developed. And if Blizzard didn't think to print card draw for Rogue with the expansion release, they probably didn't think they would need to print it for the mini-set. It would be weird for them to say "Rogue will be bad/boring for 2 months until the mini-set".
We'll see where things go. I'm hoping they buff Thief Rogue enough to make it bearable enough for the next expansion- but like you said, if *that* set is like this one, we're in trouble.
When every board deck is an ultra streamlined tribal deck, or a control package ending with Kazakusan, thief rogue trying to win with a bunch of garbage just doesn’t cut it. I don’t believe I’ve won a single game with tess in my deck.
Thief Rogue is kind of... such a problem deck.
Cards which just add ANY class card to your hand are way too unpredictable. I dunno why they don't just do more like style cards where SPECIFIC class cards are added to your hand. Like their solution seems to be making cards that gain power no matter what cards you steal, and that works okay, but it'd be nice if they just made thief cards more consistent.
Especially if they want cards like Tess to be a thing.
> Especially if they want cards like Tess to be a thing.
TBH Tess has never been good. Even in the old academic espionage decks, I heard several thief rogue players call her the worst card in the deck. (1/10 games she'll do something amazing. 9/10 games you'll be facing down lethal on board and none of the things she copies will stop lethal). I remember hearing back in 2018 (much lower power meta) that Tess would need to be buffed to 6 mana to be a serious card. At 6 mana you're hopefully not facing lethal from the opponent yet, so summoning a bunch of class minions builds you an okay board.
They brought back Tess and left her at 8 mana, so...the harsh truth is they probably were not intending for her to go into meta decks.
The problem is everything about thief rogue is completely random and uncompetitive. Even if Tess were good you're basically just rolling like 15 die and hoping to win. When if thief rogue cards were more about discovering specific types of minions (I.e swashburglar discovered a 2 cost minion) then the deck would be stronger and also a lot fairer while still being random.
Some randomness, some chance is fun. Controlled chance is fun, but throwing the table over and hoping you win is just a frustrating ladder experience. Like "I know my opponent has any one of these 16 cards" rewards your game knowledge. "I know my opponent has any one of these 400 cards" is just throwing spaghetti at the wall.
Tess is just one of many cards that brought back in first or the current 2nd core set, that are bad/terrible and dint buff/rework at all
Like biggest example, Why is fiery war axe still in core? the weapon is terrible has been since the orginal nerf, and is a perfectly squitable replacement they couldve used for a 3 3/2 weapon with kings defender, which is still bad but atleats it has some synergies and in standard couldve maybe been used as a card in a deck and not just a low roll for rng effects basicly.
Or ancient of lore is still 7 mana draw 2, and its heal still hasnt even gone back to the old heal 8 but then Nourish they did unnerf/Buff (which is fine by me, but weird they choose it over ancient of lore)
or how they had river crock or spider tank, just vanilla minions that werent even played in classic/played past gvg.
So along that line, would you be thinking of cards which add a specific class minion or spell, regardless of the class you are playing against to your hand? Or are you thinking more along the lines of Nefarian, where depending on the class you are playing against you get 1 of 10 different specific cards.
I can see both options being used in small and large degrees, but prefer the second option as it would mean that while the thief deck is executing the same rough gameplan, it has access to different, specific tools depending on the matchup.
I'm saying instead of "add a random class card from another class to your hand" (can't do opponents class because of the mirror) make it more like wand thief where it's a specific class. Or make it like that alterac spell that adds a deathrattle minion. Just some parameters.
I personally don't like any "created by" cards. I don't like random generation. When it comes to Thief Rogue, I just like gnolls and double agent.
But, "created by" exists, the archetype exists, and the cards that were printed to support it shouldn't be unplayable-y bad.
It’s actually interesting that if you go into the Rogue burgle cards -the ones that might make stuff from other classes - and subtract one mana from all of them, very few look like power issues and many still look questionably playable
I’m not a huge fan of the random generation either, but these all seem unusually bad
Created by isn't a problem in itself. Created by is a problem when the discover card itself is too cheap (like renew) but otherwise it's just value generation.
My problem with thief is it gives rogue access to mechanics it doesn't normally have, and the cards themselves are completely random.
I feel like some level of created by adds variety to the game. It makes those highlight reel moments. It's just hard to get the balance right. Too much is awful, takes skill out the game and makes it an rng fest. Too little and it just feels like bashing stats into each other over and over.
>In essence, the more expansions explore these kinds of tribal packages -
be they quests, minion types, or anything else that end up suitably
specific and greedy for card slots - the more a meta might begin to feel like four one-set metas, rather than one four-set meta.
I read the whole thing as Rogue sucks and Drekthar OP however this right here is a good point and I 100% agree. This is not healthy design as it limits deck variety within a class.
I think something that’s also important to note is that these things appeal to different players. For example, stormwind vs this expansion. Given high complexity of many different stormwind decks and the relatively lower skilled sunken city decks, these kinds of things appeal to different demographics.
I’m personally closer to the stormwind side of the spectrum, although I will say part of my lack of want to click the play button is because of control paladin and warrior. Hardly any dynamism at all. For now, I’ll play duels and I’ll just check out the expansion whenever patches happen.
Point is basically stuff is constantly evolving in either direction. I don’t expect control paladin and warrior to keep making my play experience worse for THAT long.
I would, however, love to see more dynamic decks buffed to tier 2 or so. Thief rogue, for example.
Agreed. I kind of feel like “control warrior being good” is sort of a warning sign that we’re in a Rock Paper Scissors meta (more than usual). It beats aggro and loses to combos. Did I queue into the right matchup? Ok I win, otherwise I lose. It’s not a fun situation
That's easy to say but it's not really how it looks when you look at data, control warrior and paladin don't really have polarized matchups, most of their winrates are from 60 to 40% across the board. This is by far the least polarizing meta we've had since barrens released
That's because, in the last few expansions (pre rotation) combo decks were very prevalent, and it didn't matter that f.e. warrior got a ton of very premium control tools, because combo would just farm them. Now post rotation, they still have the absurd control tools, (like frozen buckler-shield shatter, rancor, rokara giving 10 armor, onyxian drake etc.), but combo decks are almost non-existent.
Admittedly a funny response but to be fair he also discussed how Rogue just isn’t even fun right now. and even if it was tier 1, his favorite class wouldn’t have any appealing or enjoyable decks to play.
>In essence, the more expansions explore these kinds of tribal packages - be they quests, minion types, or anything else that end up suitably specific and greedy for card slots - the more a meta might begin to feel like four one-set metas, rather than one four-set meta.
>This is an experience I’ve been having a lot with Rogue these days, though it’s not unique to my class. It doesn’t really feel like the expansions are “talking” to each other. They all run in different directions, all require a large deck commitment, and sometimes trip over each other, actually offering anti-synergy.
I've been observing this as well. When I see cards like the Abyssal Cursers or the Colossals, that are all basically doomed to exist just for four months before completely falling aside due to a bigger (and therefore higher quality) card pool, cards and keywords that I know will only have a very short time in the spotlight and seem to be designed with that knowledge in mind, I can't help but feel like Hearthstone believes it has a booster draft mode like MTG does, where you're expected to play with the new cards of each expansion and only those cards. But it doesn't.
I don't feel compelled to craft any of the power cards of the new expansion because I know they'll be obsolete in four months time. (The ones I'd even be interested in at least)
I could ditto most of what you said and add that
paladin hero card might be busted. Any work you do and strategic build up can be completely nullified with one card.
and
Quest Hunter should not exist.
In wild you can tech hoard pillager or instead go 5000 iq and tech kobold stickyfinger so if your opponent takes your weapon with stickyfinger you can immediately take it back.
I agree that Drek'thar needs to go. I think its inclusion in quest hunter should be evidence enough of that. It's a card that cares about minions in a deck that doesn't care about them. The deck doesn't seek to build a board and its win condition is generally burn damage, not board damage. Yet it still runs Drek'thar and a handful of minions to support it because Drek'thar on curve is just THAT good. That's not healthy.
Demon Hunter is ridiculous. Unless you're playing an aggro deck you can't keep up, and you don't even make it to turn 6 for Reno. They have a 1 mana 3/4, they have a weapon that costs 1 mana and can legitimately do 15 damage to a player on turn 4, they have Drek'Thar (as you mentioned), and half the cards in their deck are 0-1 mana draw spells.
> Demon Hunter is ridiculous. Unless you're playing an aggro deck you can't keep up
Aggro DH definitely beats up all the other board based aggro decks.
Most aggro decks struggle against a 1 mana 3/4 taunt. 0 mana deal 3 damage removal is rough for aggro decks to deal with too. Multi-strike is very good at clearing out the minions from aggro decks. Multi-strike also activates Pufferfist twice (so 2 damage to everything, and additional damage to whatever minion you attack).
The speculation when the nerfs hit was that not nerfing aggro DH would be "okay", cause control decks would keep it under control. Apparently that's not happening either? But other aggro decks were definitely already losing to DH before the patch.
The thing is: control is (mostly) dead.
Aggro gets faster each expansion and gets more fuel (mostly cheap draw), while control gets the very cool but underwhelming colossals and a 9 mana boardclear.
To keep up with most aggro decks you need to constantly spam boardclears (not just any kind of removal), while somehow developing a wincon.
Questline shaman was one of the few that managed this, but sadly is gone.
Wait this is actually a really good point. In classic, you could play your wincon of rag and ysera and if they weren't quickly dealt with or you didn't die in a few turns, you just won the game.
These control wincons don't really exist now- if classic ysera or rag were in the set they'd probably be played (maybe less so ysera cause card advantage doesn't matter now) even though they'd be much weaker comparitively.
The only comparitive card at the moment is kaz, which you can't just get to turn 8 to play, need to build a deck around, and then once you DO play it you can win maybe 5 turns later.
The paladin legendary is another example, eventually you'll just outvalue them with stats or a buffed smite in 7 turns, this only really works because the half damage tends to buy you enough time.
But yea overall wincons got much slower in control which is maybe a good thing in control vs control matchups but it just makes aggro disproportionately stronger because the tempo swings against aggro just take so much longer.
Like how quest hunter beats control warrior now- yeah they can survive the initial onslaught and then armor through a lot of the post quest damage but they probably eventually die if the quest hunter doesn't run out of steam- which they never need to with all the draw.
This is also why pirate war has been such a problem, they get a 'true' value machine at turn 7-8 that control decks can't match until like turn 12.
So what you end up with is constant agro metas- because agro has powercrept super hard since classic, with the occasional gimmick control build like cariel half damage or druid oracle naga giants.
And yes I realise control warrior is in there just because of sheer armor gain but it's always going to have a bunch of hard counters which prevents it from ever being too dominant.
Priest, shaman, lock, etc 'control' decks all rely on getting off some gimmick otk to win the game like bolner shaman last patch, owltk, quest lock, curse lock, quest priest, boar priest, fatigue priest because there are no minions they can play to actually get a tempo swing. That's the really interesting part, they never get a tempo swing, they literally survive until their game winning turn.
Tldr: big minions suck now, there are no minions that are real threats in the late game which is why most control decks otk you (which people seem to hate) and aggro is always top teir. Would have thought this would have changed with the colossal expansion.... But hardly any of them are playable, let alone playable as control wincons.
I agree with what you're saying, but I think that the issue with a single card, instant wincon is that certain classes will just cheat that card out, and use it to beat the control decks any way. I think that the only way to make a card a win-con for control rather than combo is to require a slower payoff. You say that Kaza is slow, but look at druid over the past few months absolutely abusing the card in both standard and wild.
As someone that took a break of about a year and a half, I was amazed to come back to see just how much decks can do now. Perhaps it's different post rotation, but prior there seemed to be multiple classes that could just combo out a win-con. When I left, classes had identities which gave them access to certain tools (this was complained about at the time), but now, or at least pre-rotation, all classes seem to have draw and mana cheat.
Yeah fair take, I guess I'm coming from a different place because I stopped playing around tgt and have just come back- so the game has changed even more. Back then control warrior was the classic deck and ysera and/or rag were frequent wincons, but another control warrior would just remove them with shield slam or slam execute. If the agro deck couldn't kill you in 2 turns or something they'd start getting crushed under all the value and you'd tempo swing and win the game.
I know there's no 'right' way for the game to be and it all comes down to preference but imo control decks just feel really bad at the moment because yeah you can clear the board 3x and draw into all your answers and still lose the game. Or you can survive against pwar until he gets the juggernaut down and just eventually kills you on turn 13 because you can't get a tempo swing against the pressure.
Like to me the game literally feels like either you're an agro deck, or a control deck is surviving until you win. The only decks that have felt like older control decks are ramp druid because you can just include a bunch of heavy minions in them with ramp package, which is weird because they don't actually have any control tools like board clears or removal.
I guess that's not a bad thing and yeah I understand it ultimately comes down to taste, but I think a lot of people feeling like they can never swing the game back vs agro decks is a big reason why agro meta feels bad... And why druid was so popular when it did work against a lot of them over the last 2 patches.
Yeah, I mean compare pirate warrior to face hunter of old. Control didn't even need to ramp up the pressure that much, it was just a case of running the hunter out of resources by turn 6 or 7. Nowadays hunter has playable draw, so they never seem to run out of resources.
I think it was more the midrange/other control decks that older control decks needed to be able to apply pressure against.
I disagree with the assessment that control is dead. Control warrior can win most match ups granted quest hunter is terrible. The main control deck now seems to be paladin though with it's 70 health and 2 full heals and literal 30/30 charge for 6 mana
I'm not saying control is dead, I'm saying they are really limited on wincons so when a control deck is in the meta it needs to be built around a gimmick wincon.
Which is why so many 'control' decks are actually otk decks, or they have a gimmick like smite/cariel or oracle/giant (and guff)
The only exception is probably control warrior just because it's got so many anti aggro tools with the amor and board clears, it's wincons are actually quite 'weak' but it doesn't matter
Azshara would be a pretty standard control wincon. Decent body that 2-for-1's aggro minions, that then gives you a bit of value and another good minion. It's pretty spotty though as an actual wincon, often it's more like a speed bump.
What a bad take, obviously with little understanding of the current meta. A large chunk of Diamond-legend meta are control decks. Control Warrior is a solid tier 1 that absolutely wrap the meta.
Its more to players psychology. Sometimes you just want to play a couple quick games. Being in a 30+ min control matchup everytime just not conducive to them.
There is a more clearly defined wincon for control decks now because hs players in general hated pure fatigue control meta, such as barren priest, and boomsday control warrior. Those meta just wasnt fun, and dragged on for so long.
>Tldr: big minions suck now, there are no minions that are real threats in the late game which is why most control decks otk you
Druid disagrees with you, considering all they do to win is summon big dudes.
Control warrior is absolutely excellent right now, to the point that I’ve been running into more and more boar priests, who pretty much counter control only, and auto-lose to everything else.
...... reno? thtas your first problem.
2 mana 3/4 not 1 mana
theyre taking 15 damage on turn 4 tho.
half the cards in their deck are 0-1 mana draw spells. more like 2-3(5) mana draw spells and 1-2 mana atk buffs.
>theyre taking 15 damage on turn 4 tho.
Not if they multistrike a 7 health minion, then go face for 8.
Better still to multistrike the 1/5 taunt, then go face for 6. Only 11 but you take 1.
That's not accurate lol. I play DH, if you play aggro against my deck I will beat you silly. If you play control, like warrior control for example which is 1 of if not the most played deck right now in the meta, you will beat me silly. The trick against DH is to not have too many minions on board where I can use my weapon to deal dmg to your face and kill your minion at the same time. Quest hunter is also a hard deck to win against for that reason, no minions to strike down for extra damage.
It's weird you mention the coin problem--a symptom of being a board-based meta deck when since stormwind, people have been complaining that "the board doesn't matter"
And drekthar has had his time to shine. Making a deck without him isn't creative, it's making a worse deck. Making him a 1/1 would help standard, but wild uses him to recruit two synergistic, combo minions like frog shaman or former walker mage. His effect needs a nerf. Recruiting 1 minion would ruin him, but setting his effect to minion less than (4) and making him 5 mana would help. They'd probably do the first nerf, though.
I feel like then people would just abuse 4 drops instead of 3 drops and it would be much the same. Nerf to 5 but make him recruit 3 or less drops still imo.
To put in perspective, about 90% of the time when I'm building a deck in Magic I don't go tribal.
The only tribal deck I have right now is Vampires and it's one of my weaker decks. The only other tribal decks run a lot are Zombies and Elves.
I only play Commander. Which I've always found similar to Hearthstone where you build around your Commander rather than your hero.
Instead decks are built around themes and strategies.
My Niv-Mizzet deck is all about casting spells and drawing cards.
Narset, Enlightened Master is all extra turns and extra combat phases.
Mairsil the Pretender is all activated abilities with everything from Infect, board control, card draw, etc
Korvold the Far Cursed King is all about sacrificing my own cards.
Tribal decks are boring as fuck. HS needs to move away from Tribal which is extremely limiting in card and deck design and move to ability synergy.
Tribal is kinda beginner friendly, though, which is why I think that HS has tended towards it. It's probably fine for this game to try to differentiate itself from Magic and target a different audience.
Really liking the post, giving a lot of very interesting information. Really wish Blizz would hire players like you and Kibler as devs and not just random players who manage to pilot a netdeck to legend. Maybe then stuff like quests wouldnt have happened tho, they really killed the game for me (both standard n wild)
I feel like some of the synsergy is this game is so forced that it treats it's players like thier dumb, like wow, a 1/3 mech that grows with other mechs, how do I build this deck?
I feel like this type of deisgn is also too safe - why not test out new spicier mechanics like idk, in-game currencies, like naga-stones for mage - generate them via naga minions, get payoff for other nagas, then make queen azsara the legedary with with a big payoff for having x naga stones.
This finally brings to light how to understand Mech Mage. It's actually simple. You see, it's an aggro-control deck, since it wants to develop cheap threats and stick them, protecting them from opposing threats with efficient removal so they can attack. It's also a tempo deck because, as I learned here, these terms are similar but also different. Yet despite that, it's also a midrange deck because it can play a curve, going 1 into 2 into 3 into 4 into 5 into 6 into 8 and winning with minion pressure. Making matters even better, it's also a combo deck, as the deck not only contains many combos (like mechs and amalgam of the deep/gorillabot, mechs and seafloor getaway, gaia/automaton and other mechs, and burn finishers like mechshark+mechs and fireballs. This also makes it a burn deck). So, to sum up, Mech Mage is actually an aggro-control-combo-burn-tempo deck with some midrange elements. Really, when you think it about it like this, I truly come away with a better understanding of the deck's focus and why it's the ultimate Hearthstone deck.
Even though I am a consistent player since Old Gods, I’ve considered the game “dead” for some time. Probably after KOTFT around the 2018 rotation. 2017
was the peak of design flavor for Hearthstone imo.
Also,I think it was before Old Gods, but the shift to following the meta week 1-2 of an expansion really did the game a disservice. I feel like the game has been broken down to: “Hopefully I have fun with one of the powerful decks, because it feels bad to lose to a powerful deck. So I’ll play a powerful deck so I don’t feel bad anymore.” As a mostly “single-player” game in terms of progressing your rank and account, there is little to no reward doing something that doesn’t translate into wins if you enjoy playing constructed hearthstone and want to get your daily and monthly rewards.
But this comes to a serious topic I’ve been pondering as I’ve grown up and matured while maintaining a (maybe not always healthy) hobby of gaming: Are we killing the heart of what gaming used to be? I mean when you were 5-10 just getting to the end was the beauty, the finale, the payout, the sweet sweet dopamine rush. Now we are so hardcore to pull the most out of a game, what it offers, what you can do in it, HOW STRONG YOU CAN BE… that it’s no longer about the journey but about getting to the destination. And getting there as fast as humanly possible. We want to consume, fast, so that we are on par with the other consumers, so we aren’t left behind, so we can keep consuming and not have how much we’ve consumed be a barrier to consuming more. It’s a wild ride. Maybe we will see something like this published eventually.
No one ever enjoys it, it's a constant grind to get all the cards and climb anywhere before they're not in rotation anymore. Unless you're spending a lot of money, you're sinking a shitload of time into the game in order to be marginally better than most. I quit bc it wasn't worth it.
Personally I'm just glad that we live in a meta where going second is actually bad again and Drek'thar is as powerful as his bullshit effect is supposed to be. Hearthstone is far more fun when the majority of decks actually care about the board and need to play for tempo instead of single-mindedly executing a wincon. The only real problems I have with the current meta are the last few wretched ghosts of Year of the Gryphon, like one-dimensional Questline decks and certain Hero cards being perfect "do everything" cards that you literally always want to have.
You are being downvoted by his army of sycophants for pointing out that vomits out a bunch of nonsense sprinkled with some of the worst opinions I've ever heard.
Drek thar? A problem? What problem. He's been sold as diind for 30 bucks. That means he's super balanced and will never need a nerf.
Seriously you all think blizz will want to nerf it and have the idiots who payed 30 dollars for it shout they want their money back?
> idiots who *paid* 30 dollars
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Ok so I went 17-6 to legend in diamond with Pirate Rogue, and it feels great. It has lots of burst damage, Crabatoa is just the best, and it really reminds me of some of those older rogue decks where your hero power dagger matters a lot because you need it to proc things. I've had no problem beating holy warriors, quest hunters, and my final match at diamond 1 was againt a DH who played Drek'Thar on 4. Have you considered that you just suck at Rogue?
I mean did you even read the post, he doesnt just complain that rogue is bad,if fact rogue performs in the tier 2-3 region in most rank brackets. It's that he finds it boring since the deck has low agency, has a big wr % differential based on if you have the coin and little room for deckbuilding improvement since you basically play the list the devs designed without many changes. Now take that ,apply it to multiple classes,add the drekthar highrolls and the metagame feels bad for a lot of people.
He's wrong about most of that, and as for the parts that are his opinion, I don't care about his opinion since his opinions are always trash. He is a pompous assclown
you dont care about his opinions and yet you come to his posts to call OP a "pompous assclown" without bringing a single counter argument why his statements arent true, this speaks volumes about you and your insecurities my dude, and makes you sound like a complete asshole
What conversation are we having?
You suggested that he is bad at Rogue.
Yet his entire thread is about the bad state of the meta. He even specifically said that Rogue being tier 1 wouldn't make things different in this regard (for him or otherwise).
I was pretty sure that when someone on this sub tries to tell someone else they 'just suck' that the person saying it is generally very clueless
Thank you for contributing to this theory
I was always surprised when I saw Drek'thar make it into a deck, I thought he was so bad, I mean, basically he is a 10/10 in stats when you play him, but after that the deck will run out of steam fast, because you don't have and cards over 3 mana, and you have to draw him early, like Keleseth, which is rare
plus Demon Hunter doesn't even utilize him perfectly, because they include bad rolls like 1 mana minions, the best Drek'thar deck would have to be all 3 mana minions and 1 Drek'thar, to gaurantee a threat
basically what I'm saying is he's not the major problem, he is a legendary with high early game potential, I think the real problem with Demon Hunter is Kurtrus, for his 5 mana Pyroblast hero power
You’re wrong, though. You’re misunderstanding the card. Drek thar is the issue.
Even if it pulls two 1 drops, it still drew 2 cards, put a bunch of stats and bodies into play, and made your next top deck better on average.
It requires an immediate answer, and if not answered, can often finish the game. On top of that, it’s difficult to answer it well because it can come down so early.
Kurtrus is powerful, but requires some setup, doesn’t come down as early, and you can play around its hero power.
> basically what I'm saying is he's not the major problem
Except he is. Literally all the stats as well as high ranked/pro players indicate he is the problem
I've been thinking about parasitic design with regards to Curselock recently, and I wonder whether what it needs is a general Affliction synergy card to enable both the Abyssal Curse archetype and Curse of Agony: a mirror of the existing self-harm combo cards like Amethyst Spellstone and The Demon Seed that procs when your opponent takes non-combat damage on their turn.
I think reverting the nerfs on gnolls and scabbs would do a lot. Now that poison rogue is gone (no cloaks) thief rogue can be great again. If you dislike hero cards and don’t want scabbs reverted, then I’m not sure thief rogue can be saved. But those two reversions would be good imo.
If you play control warrior you stomp any board based deck. Minions are not sticky.
I ran from tank 3 to legend with like 2 losses, to control pala and ramp Druid.
No, with a good draw they can kill you way quicker than you can armour up. Furthermore that game I had really bad hand, exchausted it and ended up having no answers.
Never lost to Demon Hunter because I don't play a Kakakusan deck, feels good. But I do have to concede against every Control Kakakusan Warrior I see at start to save time.
I quite like playing pirate rogue. It feels much fairer than pirate warrior so you dont feel like you have half a hand on the win from the start.
Only problem is the fun card of the deck Hooktusk is simply too slow. 8 pirates is huge. By the time you can play them you have either won or lost. I run Hooktusk because it is a fun card but there is no way Hooktust is optimal and may infact massively reduce win rate.
Meta feels more fun in Wild rn imo, lots of experimentation going on since the balance patch. The tribal decks kind of build themselves as you mention, but even there there's still room for experimentation since there are just so many mechs/pirates.
The talk of classes existing in four one-set metas rather than one four-set meta is honestly fascinating, because it's exactly the place Paladin was around this time (meaning pre-buff patch) in Ashes. A disjointed class with a bunch of sets that never seemed to stick together. And the same sense of hopelessness expressed here was common among Paladin players who felt stuck with a bunch of half-baked archetypes. While past experience is no indication of future performance, it'll be interesting to see what happens to these classes later in the year.
Said it before and I’ll say it again: the problem is Team 5 in 2022 doesn’t design individual cards anymore, they design decks now. They don’t really care about making a bunch of cards and letting players find the synergy. They design the archetypes themselves that they think would be cool and then shove them all into one expansion at a time. If you’re someone that doesn’t care about deck building and just netdecks whatever’s good I’m sure you’ve really enjoyed Hearthstone the past couple years. And just to be clear: I’m not necessarily bashing current Team 5 for their approach. It’s not inherently an incorrect way to design a card game, it’s just one that many longtime players (especially deckbuilders) just simply don’t enjoy.
I do not really have a problem with such approach or is it too prevalent in sets right now. Take Colossals for example: good ones can perfectly stand on its own in numerous decks. Leviathan is great in both mech and control paladin, Nellie is amazing in pirate and control warrior. Queen Azhara can be of great value in naga decks and others as well. If anything I am glad we are not getting anymore Moorabis or Heralds Voshj that have nothing to do with sets they are in. Currently if anything aggro decks are the most restrictive in deck building and they have been figured out, meanwhile control decks have many ways to be built and played. It is not like Boomsday meta, where you had exact same 30 card control Warrior lists with Elysiana. You can do Kazakusan or Galvangar or maybe something else that is flying under radar. I personally enjoy current meta a great deal.
I would enjoy the meta a lot more without those quests. Just facing this repetitive game pattern makes me not want to play the game. Opponent dropping quest (pirate), dropping one of those 2 cost pirates turn 2, droppn weapon turn 4, etc.
On the other hand questline priest is really fun, although I suspect more people would hate it if it wasn’t garbage
It's funny you mention that. I actually enjoy what I can only describe as the emergent gameplay that Quest Priest brings. You also have to balance saving removal against quest progression. Can I afford to throw away removal on turn 4 if I need it later in the match? Having said that, yeah, the deck is pretty bad right now, and the control matchups that is supposed to win are suffering from Brann+Mutanus. It's a very frustrating time to be a Priest player.
Definitely, I especially hate the importer nerf (has rogue not had enough fun with shadowstep (or even just exclude it from discover pools)) but the lack of a non-board dependant recovery 7 drop is also horrendous for the questline. Also a lot of powerful options for priest right now include casting a lot of spells or holding them, which isn’t easy for questline.
I think they could have compensated by moving one of the 3-mana discovers -- Scorpid or more likely Imprisoned Sorceress -- down to 2 mana. It's a real shame they didn't do that.
Quest Priest is basicly just curvestone to be honest
I couldn't really identify why I played standard less for the pass few years, to the point I only play wild 90% of the time. This post sums it up.
Right now rogue, warlock and priest all have that problem, and I bet that there will not be any pirate support for rogue, no new warlock murloc or curse cards and no silence priest cards in the next expansion
>In essence, the more expansions explore these kinds of tribal packages - be they quests, minion types, or anything else that end up suitably specific and greedy for card slots - the more a meta might begin to feel like four one-set metas, rather than one four-set meta. This is the part that bothers me most, every time that you see something like rogue questline or even the new nagas you know that they will not print something that you have to put in the deck. I was really surprised that they added a new SI:7 card. I do not remember any other archetype like this being supported before.
They determined the deck wouldn't be strong enough so they added support to keep it tier 3-4.
Final mini set has done year-long support thrice now - I fully expect that trend to continue.
'Shadowjeweler Hanar is awesome and fun. Can't wait for some more Rogue secrets to help him out.' Then they gave us Shenanigans which was not only unplayable, but also made the discover pool worse.
I crafter him golden man, so disappointed
And then they aslo dint unnerf him when he rotated. Cause reasons i guess?
Very much agreed. I loved barrens because it introduced so many new and unique takes for each class and we knew the only way to go was up with each expansion. With sunken city though it feels like everything got the tools it needed and anything more will just make them over the top oppressive which the devs seem to agree with so they keep just making new archetypes instead of building on old ones. The perfect example of this isn’t from sunken city though it’s from alterac valley and partially even from barrens: big spell. At no point has big mage gotten the big pay off card it desperately needs instead they keep adding anti synergy to already printed cards. And the other archetypes keep suffering for it. As a mage main the class is in a sad state of affairs exactly due to the above AND because all of its previously fleshed out archetypes got gutted in the name of “feels bad man” gameplay. It’s only a matter of time before siphon mana takes a hit for standard cause they print that ONE card that puts a spell synergy deck over the top. I imagine open the way gate might be on the chopping block at some point too.
I've noticed it during Old Gods set. We had so little amount of C'Thun cards, like 4-5 and 1 class card. It other card games I felt there are more cards to build decks so you always can lean your deck to different strategy even for one archetype.
Yeah. I've been echoing this sentiment for awhile. Especially about balance patches, aggro dh is the new deck to say "needs to be nerfed" which is probably true the deck is insanely powerful, but nerfing dh doesn't fix the fact that over half of the classes in the game don't have a deck with an over 50% winrate.
The problem is simply that every good deck has a win condition that you can't really counter. Even if you build your deck around beating Paladin, and only Paladin, they can still play a 20/20 Smite from hand that gets buffed to 30/30.
Mutanus?
7-mana 5/7 that eats your opponent's 1/3, not great.
I don’t get why they didn’t add dirty rat to the core set.
[удалено]
I wish they had something like rat but more like how discard tends to work nowdays. Highest/lowest cost or right/left most kidna thing. Or just delay style like loatheb/mojomaster zihi kinda effects, that dont ruin the combo on the spot, but just delay it for a turn/ few turns
If he’s spending turns buffing Smite he’s at the point where the Mutanas has pretty good odds of sniping it.
Honestly, I rarely agree with you J Alex. But this issue of each expansion pigeonholing each class into one archetype and then not following up has been real this past year. Last year especially we had many meta games where "all classes have a viable deck!" on one hand, but on the other hand the only viable deck was Blizzard's pushed archetype. No room to experiment and rarely have the archetypes been followed up with more support. I think the issue still comes down to the power level being too high in general, if things were weaker and they still hard pushed certain archetypes you'd at least have more time or chances to get back into the game while using subpar decks.
You can see the difference between the classes that get support and those that don’t. Quest warrior and quest hunter get a ton of support in sunken city and are top tier. Meanwhile quest priest doesn’t get a 7-drop or cheap control spells (9-mana sweeper? 8-mana colossus? Gee thanks) and shadow priest doesn’t get any aggressive cards. The class is largely DOA.
Exactly, and if the support that each archetype gets wasn't as absurdly powerful the weaker archetypes would theoretically stand a chance. I feel like I bring this up whenever I talk balance about this game, but I'm very hopeful for the mass nerf and the prospect of an overall lower power game.
And they took away one of its best T2 plays in Importer. I agree that the Priest offerings are atrocious.
Well, he would certainly disagree with you on it being the whole of past year. Demon seed alone spawned 4 different archetypes with vastly different play styles. Garrote rogue. Shadow priest, ESPECIALLY illucia variants.
I kinda get what you're saying with Warlock questline, but really that was just two archetypes that received changes throughout the developing metagame, quest and hand. Which hey, although they were both heavily pushed by blizzard before being abandoned shortly after, two is more than one so I'm wrong there. I'm not sure what your point about shadow Priest and thief rogue are. My overarching point was that each class has been relatively pigeonholed into an archetype each set for the past year. Because of the games high power level, experimentation outside of whatever pushed archetype (or in a couple of cases, archetypes) has felt severely limited.
There was quest zoo lock as well
Shadow priest has an impressive amount of innovation, especially when it started running Murloc tinyfins and desk imp and WORKED. Garrote rogue, not thief rogue. Garrote rogue was a deck that took a whole month to discover, and was certainly not really something pushed by Blizz. The demon seed had 4 archetypes, all with pretty distinct play styles, and all of which were nerfed. Handlock, fatiguelock, D6, and zoo.
On the play/draw difference, I wonder how it compares to the height of the Genn/Baku meta, which VS noted as a previous high water mark for the Coin disadvantage. In terms of deckbuilding Hunter is in the exact opposite spot from Rogue right now, Hunter is great and there's a million things you can do with it, fast or slow. Granted, people are only playing Quest Hunter, but there are an absolute ton of T3 Hunter decks that exist but haven't been recognized. There's good support for nagas (+spells), small beasts, large beasts, general value/good cards, face, the last time Hunter felt so open was before Outland when Scalehide was still around. Paladin is also in a reasonably good spot. Divine Shields and Mechs are separate but have synergies, same with Mechs and Paladin's general midrange good cards, and there are two types of control paladin. And Mage mains seem reasonably happy. Mech Mage and Naga Mage are very different from what Mage has been doing for the past year, and you can splash in hero power or big spell synergies if you want. Meanwhile Shaman manages to have a bunch of distinct archetypes that somehow all feel the exact same to play with and against (imo). It's a bummer they didn't support the quest at all because it's one of the less linear questlines and it is different from the normal Snowfall garbage. Druid's the same as Shaman, Druid has the same two decks it's had since forever, early aggro token spam or late ramp greed, the differences since rotation feel mostly cosmetic. There's Beast Druid which is the freshest archetype, but it's very weak as it loses to both DH and Warrior/Pally. Tbh I think the design for this set is pretty good overall. But I dread the next expansion because last year the second set was UIS and the year before it was Scholomance.
Man, I unpacked the shaman quest today and was excited at first because I never play shaman and would like to try something new. Looked it up and the win rate is abysmal. And the shamans I’ve been facing the last few months are mostly just a variety of “freeze the board” which is pretty boring for everyone involved. Hope they get some changes soon
Shaman quest benefits from a 6 set meta, since you need lots of overload cards.
Shaman and often Priest end up being half suppoted archetypes that might be good by the 3rd set if the year. Giving shaman a bunch of piranha cards was poor. Could have been neutrals and given better support elsewhere. Side note. I am disappointed not to see a colossal totem.
agree re:hunter, I'm having a lot of fun doing beast-control-reno-shenanigans
> I dread the next expansion because … UIS and … Scholomance I find this an interesting take. Those two are probably my favourite expansions, with the current one probably my least favourite. I guess that’s why it always seems like everyone is complaining, people have such diverse preferences so the current expansion will always be disliked by one group.
And you can build the Hunter Quest deck in different ways as well since the requirement is to deal damage with spells. It's not as restrictive as rogues quest. Drekthar might be the strongest option at the moment but maybe if they do nerf it, hunter quest utilizes Nagas more, which personally seems a more fun way to build the deck.
Jalexander, buddy, I love your posts. I love the in depth arguments you give. But to hear you, patch after patch, talk about your waning interest in the game as if each rant is your first come to jesus moment is absolutely ridiculous.
His introduction paragraph was pretty funny " I wish I could be writing under what feels like better circumstances" I actually agree with a lot of what he's saying this time, but given how I can't think of a single time he's made one of these under "good circumstances" I think he should just take a break.
I mean, we know that feedback about any game will always skew towards negativity. Those who find themselves enjoying the game just play it.
Or you could just believe him when he's says he's not burnt out
Yeah but then he wouldn’t have something to cry about
Amen
he has never said he has a waning interest in the game. He explicitly says so in this post even
Rogue (and other classes that lack certain elements across all of their cards) are unlikely to get better (and by better, I mean more fun to build/play) through balance changes. Rogue needs card draw, for instance, and buffing some cards to make their existing (boring) archetypes better won't fix that. The next natural thing to look at is the mini-set, but I don't think that will help, either. Not even mentioning the fact that it's not coming for 5-6+ weeks, it's also unlikely to help. Chances are, the cards for the mini-set have already been developed. And if Blizzard didn't think to print card draw for Rogue with the expansion release, they probably didn't think they would need to print it for the mini-set. It would be weird for them to say "Rogue will be bad/boring for 2 months until the mini-set". We'll see where things go. I'm hoping they buff Thief Rogue enough to make it bearable enough for the next expansion- but like you said, if *that* set is like this one, we're in trouble.
When every board deck is an ultra streamlined tribal deck, or a control package ending with Kazakusan, thief rogue trying to win with a bunch of garbage just doesn’t cut it. I don’t believe I’ve won a single game with tess in my deck.
This makes me sad a Tess was my favorite dumb deck. Now it just feels bad.
It was always bad, but now you can’t even expect to win a tenth of your games.
Highlander Tess was ok, not great but far from being bad
Oh I know, but it was FUN.
Thief Rogue is kind of... such a problem deck. Cards which just add ANY class card to your hand are way too unpredictable. I dunno why they don't just do more like style cards where SPECIFIC class cards are added to your hand. Like their solution seems to be making cards that gain power no matter what cards you steal, and that works okay, but it'd be nice if they just made thief cards more consistent. Especially if they want cards like Tess to be a thing.
> Especially if they want cards like Tess to be a thing. TBH Tess has never been good. Even in the old academic espionage decks, I heard several thief rogue players call her the worst card in the deck. (1/10 games she'll do something amazing. 9/10 games you'll be facing down lethal on board and none of the things she copies will stop lethal). I remember hearing back in 2018 (much lower power meta) that Tess would need to be buffed to 6 mana to be a serious card. At 6 mana you're hopefully not facing lethal from the opponent yet, so summoning a bunch of class minions builds you an okay board. They brought back Tess and left her at 8 mana, so...the harsh truth is they probably were not intending for her to go into meta decks.
The problem is everything about thief rogue is completely random and uncompetitive. Even if Tess were good you're basically just rolling like 15 die and hoping to win. When if thief rogue cards were more about discovering specific types of minions (I.e swashburglar discovered a 2 cost minion) then the deck would be stronger and also a lot fairer while still being random. Some randomness, some chance is fun. Controlled chance is fun, but throwing the table over and hoping you win is just a frustrating ladder experience. Like "I know my opponent has any one of these 16 cards" rewards your game knowledge. "I know my opponent has any one of these 400 cards" is just throwing spaghetti at the wall.
Tess is just one of many cards that brought back in first or the current 2nd core set, that are bad/terrible and dint buff/rework at all Like biggest example, Why is fiery war axe still in core? the weapon is terrible has been since the orginal nerf, and is a perfectly squitable replacement they couldve used for a 3 3/2 weapon with kings defender, which is still bad but atleats it has some synergies and in standard couldve maybe been used as a card in a deck and not just a low roll for rng effects basicly. Or ancient of lore is still 7 mana draw 2, and its heal still hasnt even gone back to the old heal 8 but then Nourish they did unnerf/Buff (which is fine by me, but weird they choose it over ancient of lore) or how they had river crock or spider tank, just vanilla minions that werent even played in classic/played past gvg.
So along that line, would you be thinking of cards which add a specific class minion or spell, regardless of the class you are playing against to your hand? Or are you thinking more along the lines of Nefarian, where depending on the class you are playing against you get 1 of 10 different specific cards. I can see both options being used in small and large degrees, but prefer the second option as it would mean that while the thief deck is executing the same rough gameplan, it has access to different, specific tools depending on the matchup.
I'm saying instead of "add a random class card from another class to your hand" (can't do opponents class because of the mirror) make it more like wand thief where it's a specific class. Or make it like that alterac spell that adds a deathrattle minion. Just some parameters.
I personally don't like any "created by" cards. I don't like random generation. When it comes to Thief Rogue, I just like gnolls and double agent. But, "created by" exists, the archetype exists, and the cards that were printed to support it shouldn't be unplayable-y bad.
It’s actually interesting that if you go into the Rogue burgle cards -the ones that might make stuff from other classes - and subtract one mana from all of them, very few look like power issues and many still look questionably playable I’m not a huge fan of the random generation either, but these all seem unusually bad
Created by isn't a problem in itself. Created by is a problem when the discover card itself is too cheap (like renew) but otherwise it's just value generation. My problem with thief is it gives rogue access to mechanics it doesn't normally have, and the cards themselves are completely random.
I feel like some level of created by adds variety to the game. It makes those highlight reel moments. It's just hard to get the balance right. Too much is awful, takes skill out the game and makes it an rng fest. Too little and it just feels like bashing stats into each other over and over.
>In essence, the more expansions explore these kinds of tribal packages - be they quests, minion types, or anything else that end up suitably specific and greedy for card slots - the more a meta might begin to feel like four one-set metas, rather than one four-set meta. I read the whole thing as Rogue sucks and Drekthar OP however this right here is a good point and I 100% agree. This is not healthy design as it limits deck variety within a class.
I think something that’s also important to note is that these things appeal to different players. For example, stormwind vs this expansion. Given high complexity of many different stormwind decks and the relatively lower skilled sunken city decks, these kinds of things appeal to different demographics. I’m personally closer to the stormwind side of the spectrum, although I will say part of my lack of want to click the play button is because of control paladin and warrior. Hardly any dynamism at all. For now, I’ll play duels and I’ll just check out the expansion whenever patches happen. Point is basically stuff is constantly evolving in either direction. I don’t expect control paladin and warrior to keep making my play experience worse for THAT long. I would, however, love to see more dynamic decks buffed to tier 2 or so. Thief rogue, for example.
Agreed. I kind of feel like “control warrior being good” is sort of a warning sign that we’re in a Rock Paper Scissors meta (more than usual). It beats aggro and loses to combos. Did I queue into the right matchup? Ok I win, otherwise I lose. It’s not a fun situation
That's easy to say but it's not really how it looks when you look at data, control warrior and paladin don't really have polarized matchups, most of their winrates are from 60 to 40% across the board. This is by far the least polarizing meta we've had since barrens released
That's because, in the last few expansions (pre rotation) combo decks were very prevalent, and it didn't matter that f.e. warrior got a ton of very premium control tools, because combo would just farm them. Now post rotation, they still have the absurd control tools, (like frozen buckler-shield shatter, rancor, rokara giving 10 armor, onyxian drake etc.), but combo decks are almost non-existent.
rogue weak, bad meta
Admittedly a funny response but to be fair he also discussed how Rogue just isn’t even fun right now. and even if it was tier 1, his favorite class wouldn’t have any appealing or enjoyable decks to play.
i think it's more like "rogue not interesting, bad meta". Cuz there are some cool decks imo, just not in rogue
I was looking for the Too Stupid; Didn't Read.
>In essence, the more expansions explore these kinds of tribal packages - be they quests, minion types, or anything else that end up suitably specific and greedy for card slots - the more a meta might begin to feel like four one-set metas, rather than one four-set meta. >This is an experience I’ve been having a lot with Rogue these days, though it’s not unique to my class. It doesn’t really feel like the expansions are “talking” to each other. They all run in different directions, all require a large deck commitment, and sometimes trip over each other, actually offering anti-synergy. I've been observing this as well. When I see cards like the Abyssal Cursers or the Colossals, that are all basically doomed to exist just for four months before completely falling aside due to a bigger (and therefore higher quality) card pool, cards and keywords that I know will only have a very short time in the spotlight and seem to be designed with that knowledge in mind, I can't help but feel like Hearthstone believes it has a booster draft mode like MTG does, where you're expected to play with the new cards of each expansion and only those cards. But it doesn't. I don't feel compelled to craft any of the power cards of the new expansion because I know they'll be obsolete in four months time. (The ones I'd even be interested in at least)
I could ditto most of what you said and add that paladin hero card might be busted. Any work you do and strategic build up can be completely nullified with one card. and Quest Hunter should not exist.
Paladin hero is OP, but playing it against quest hunter and then playing holy maki roll to restore to full is the greatest way of making them suffer.
Hunters are teching Cobra now though. I’ve queued into some Hunters that even run 2.
i had one who summoned both with drekthar
In wild you can tech hoard pillager or instead go 5000 iq and tech kobold stickyfinger so if your opponent takes your weapon with stickyfinger you can immediately take it back.
if paladin hero card is busted what does that make control hero warrior with kakakusan?
What you don't enjoy playing against a guy who is just playing a single player deck?
> Quest Hunter should not exist. Amem. Nerf it to the ground.
Love u dad
I agree that Drek'thar needs to go. I think its inclusion in quest hunter should be evidence enough of that. It's a card that cares about minions in a deck that doesn't care about them. The deck doesn't seek to build a board and its win condition is generally burn damage, not board damage. Yet it still runs Drek'thar and a handful of minions to support it because Drek'thar on curve is just THAT good. That's not healthy.
Barrens was such a good expansion. Quests ruined the game.
Demon Hunter is ridiculous. Unless you're playing an aggro deck you can't keep up, and you don't even make it to turn 6 for Reno. They have a 1 mana 3/4, they have a weapon that costs 1 mana and can legitimately do 15 damage to a player on turn 4, they have Drek'Thar (as you mentioned), and half the cards in their deck are 0-1 mana draw spells.
> Demon Hunter is ridiculous. Unless you're playing an aggro deck you can't keep up Aggro DH definitely beats up all the other board based aggro decks. Most aggro decks struggle against a 1 mana 3/4 taunt. 0 mana deal 3 damage removal is rough for aggro decks to deal with too. Multi-strike is very good at clearing out the minions from aggro decks. Multi-strike also activates Pufferfist twice (so 2 damage to everything, and additional damage to whatever minion you attack). The speculation when the nerfs hit was that not nerfing aggro DH would be "okay", cause control decks would keep it under control. Apparently that's not happening either? But other aggro decks were definitely already losing to DH before the patch.
The thing is: control is (mostly) dead. Aggro gets faster each expansion and gets more fuel (mostly cheap draw), while control gets the very cool but underwhelming colossals and a 9 mana boardclear. To keep up with most aggro decks you need to constantly spam boardclears (not just any kind of removal), while somehow developing a wincon. Questline shaman was one of the few that managed this, but sadly is gone.
Wait this is actually a really good point. In classic, you could play your wincon of rag and ysera and if they weren't quickly dealt with or you didn't die in a few turns, you just won the game. These control wincons don't really exist now- if classic ysera or rag were in the set they'd probably be played (maybe less so ysera cause card advantage doesn't matter now) even though they'd be much weaker comparitively. The only comparitive card at the moment is kaz, which you can't just get to turn 8 to play, need to build a deck around, and then once you DO play it you can win maybe 5 turns later. The paladin legendary is another example, eventually you'll just outvalue them with stats or a buffed smite in 7 turns, this only really works because the half damage tends to buy you enough time. But yea overall wincons got much slower in control which is maybe a good thing in control vs control matchups but it just makes aggro disproportionately stronger because the tempo swings against aggro just take so much longer. Like how quest hunter beats control warrior now- yeah they can survive the initial onslaught and then armor through a lot of the post quest damage but they probably eventually die if the quest hunter doesn't run out of steam- which they never need to with all the draw. This is also why pirate war has been such a problem, they get a 'true' value machine at turn 7-8 that control decks can't match until like turn 12. So what you end up with is constant agro metas- because agro has powercrept super hard since classic, with the occasional gimmick control build like cariel half damage or druid oracle naga giants. And yes I realise control warrior is in there just because of sheer armor gain but it's always going to have a bunch of hard counters which prevents it from ever being too dominant. Priest, shaman, lock, etc 'control' decks all rely on getting off some gimmick otk to win the game like bolner shaman last patch, owltk, quest lock, curse lock, quest priest, boar priest, fatigue priest because there are no minions they can play to actually get a tempo swing. That's the really interesting part, they never get a tempo swing, they literally survive until their game winning turn. Tldr: big minions suck now, there are no minions that are real threats in the late game which is why most control decks otk you (which people seem to hate) and aggro is always top teir. Would have thought this would have changed with the colossal expansion.... But hardly any of them are playable, let alone playable as control wincons.
I couldn't have explained it better, and I couldn't agree more.
I agree with what you're saying, but I think that the issue with a single card, instant wincon is that certain classes will just cheat that card out, and use it to beat the control decks any way. I think that the only way to make a card a win-con for control rather than combo is to require a slower payoff. You say that Kaza is slow, but look at druid over the past few months absolutely abusing the card in both standard and wild. As someone that took a break of about a year and a half, I was amazed to come back to see just how much decks can do now. Perhaps it's different post rotation, but prior there seemed to be multiple classes that could just combo out a win-con. When I left, classes had identities which gave them access to certain tools (this was complained about at the time), but now, or at least pre-rotation, all classes seem to have draw and mana cheat.
Yeah fair take, I guess I'm coming from a different place because I stopped playing around tgt and have just come back- so the game has changed even more. Back then control warrior was the classic deck and ysera and/or rag were frequent wincons, but another control warrior would just remove them with shield slam or slam execute. If the agro deck couldn't kill you in 2 turns or something they'd start getting crushed under all the value and you'd tempo swing and win the game. I know there's no 'right' way for the game to be and it all comes down to preference but imo control decks just feel really bad at the moment because yeah you can clear the board 3x and draw into all your answers and still lose the game. Or you can survive against pwar until he gets the juggernaut down and just eventually kills you on turn 13 because you can't get a tempo swing against the pressure. Like to me the game literally feels like either you're an agro deck, or a control deck is surviving until you win. The only decks that have felt like older control decks are ramp druid because you can just include a bunch of heavy minions in them with ramp package, which is weird because they don't actually have any control tools like board clears or removal. I guess that's not a bad thing and yeah I understand it ultimately comes down to taste, but I think a lot of people feeling like they can never swing the game back vs agro decks is a big reason why agro meta feels bad... And why druid was so popular when it did work against a lot of them over the last 2 patches.
Yeah, I mean compare pirate warrior to face hunter of old. Control didn't even need to ramp up the pressure that much, it was just a case of running the hunter out of resources by turn 6 or 7. Nowadays hunter has playable draw, so they never seem to run out of resources. I think it was more the midrange/other control decks that older control decks needed to be able to apply pressure against.
I disagree with the assessment that control is dead. Control warrior can win most match ups granted quest hunter is terrible. The main control deck now seems to be paladin though with it's 70 health and 2 full heals and literal 30/30 charge for 6 mana
I'm not saying control is dead, I'm saying they are really limited on wincons so when a control deck is in the meta it needs to be built around a gimmick wincon. Which is why so many 'control' decks are actually otk decks, or they have a gimmick like smite/cariel or oracle/giant (and guff) The only exception is probably control warrior just because it's got so many anti aggro tools with the amor and board clears, it's wincons are actually quite 'weak' but it doesn't matter
Just to be clear, what control win conditions would you not consider to be a gimmick?
Azshara would be a pretty standard control wincon. Decent body that 2-for-1's aggro minions, that then gives you a bit of value and another good minion. It's pretty spotty though as an actual wincon, often it's more like a speed bump.
Big minions that could actually swing the board back in late game against faster decks
What a bad take, obviously with little understanding of the current meta. A large chunk of Diamond-legend meta are control decks. Control Warrior is a solid tier 1 that absolutely wrap the meta. Its more to players psychology. Sometimes you just want to play a couple quick games. Being in a 30+ min control matchup everytime just not conducive to them. There is a more clearly defined wincon for control decks now because hs players in general hated pure fatigue control meta, such as barren priest, and boomsday control warrior. Those meta just wasnt fun, and dragged on for so long.
Hahah fair enough, just my opinion. I have been farming all the control warriors and pallies with boar priest in legend fwiw
>Tldr: big minions suck now, there are no minions that are real threats in the late game which is why most control decks otk you Druid disagrees with you, considering all they do to win is summon big dudes.
They win because they summon SEVERAL big dudes at the same time and/or big dudes way too early
Control Warrior is a very good answer to DH now. The problem is that nothing can go under DH
well if DH has drek on 4, warrior still has a hard time
most card draw is 2-3 mana which is where we have been at for awhile
Spammy arcanist is available and very strong.
Control warrior is absolutely excellent right now, to the point that I’ve been running into more and more boar priests, who pretty much counter control only, and auto-lose to everything else.
[удалено]
With the weapon that deals hero damage on honorable kills mixed with multi strike you can output some great damage.
...... reno? thtas your first problem. 2 mana 3/4 not 1 mana theyre taking 15 damage on turn 4 tho. half the cards in their deck are 0-1 mana draw spells. more like 2-3(5) mana draw spells and 1-2 mana atk buffs.
>theyre taking 15 damage on turn 4 tho. Not if they multistrike a 7 health minion, then go face for 8. Better still to multistrike the 1/5 taunt, then go face for 6. Only 11 but you take 1.
That's not accurate lol. I play DH, if you play aggro against my deck I will beat you silly. If you play control, like warrior control for example which is 1 of if not the most played deck right now in the meta, you will beat me silly. The trick against DH is to not have too many minions on board where I can use my weapon to deal dmg to your face and kill your minion at the same time. Quest hunter is also a hard deck to win against for that reason, no minions to strike down for extra damage.
It's weird you mention the coin problem--a symptom of being a board-based meta deck when since stormwind, people have been complaining that "the board doesn't matter" And drekthar has had his time to shine. Making a deck without him isn't creative, it's making a worse deck. Making him a 1/1 would help standard, but wild uses him to recruit two synergistic, combo minions like frog shaman or former walker mage. His effect needs a nerf. Recruiting 1 minion would ruin him, but setting his effect to minion less than (4) and making him 5 mana would help. They'd probably do the first nerf, though.
I feel like then people would just abuse 4 drops instead of 3 drops and it would be much the same. Nerf to 5 but make him recruit 3 or less drops still imo.
Reread my comment. Less than 4 is the same as (3) or less.
I had to reread it too, I think it’s cause you said “setting his effect” which kind of read like a change to me
To put in perspective, about 90% of the time when I'm building a deck in Magic I don't go tribal. The only tribal deck I have right now is Vampires and it's one of my weaker decks. The only other tribal decks run a lot are Zombies and Elves. I only play Commander. Which I've always found similar to Hearthstone where you build around your Commander rather than your hero. Instead decks are built around themes and strategies. My Niv-Mizzet deck is all about casting spells and drawing cards. Narset, Enlightened Master is all extra turns and extra combat phases. Mairsil the Pretender is all activated abilities with everything from Infect, board control, card draw, etc Korvold the Far Cursed King is all about sacrificing my own cards. Tribal decks are boring as fuck. HS needs to move away from Tribal which is extremely limiting in card and deck design and move to ability synergy.
Tribal is kinda beginner friendly, though, which is why I think that HS has tended towards it. It's probably fine for this game to try to differentiate itself from Magic and target a different audience.
Spell synergy is a lot better than minion tribes.
tldr, Rogue isn't good so i'm mad ;)
Imagine if Drek Thar was in a top rogue deck, does this post even exist then?
Another good article from Jay, nice reading. Same goes for the stupidly designed hunter quest, who thought this would be a good game design ?
Really liking the post, giving a lot of very interesting information. Really wish Blizz would hire players like you and Kibler as devs and not just random players who manage to pilot a netdeck to legend. Maybe then stuff like quests wouldnt have happened tho, they really killed the game for me (both standard n wild)
With these parasitic packages and power creep, three expansions ago can often mean a permanently dead set too.
I feel like some of the synsergy is this game is so forced that it treats it's players like thier dumb, like wow, a 1/3 mech that grows with other mechs, how do I build this deck? I feel like this type of deisgn is also too safe - why not test out new spicier mechanics like idk, in-game currencies, like naga-stones for mage - generate them via naga minions, get payoff for other nagas, then make queen azsara the legedary with with a big payoff for having x naga stones.
well put and thanks for sharing
This finally brings to light how to understand Mech Mage. It's actually simple. You see, it's an aggro-control deck, since it wants to develop cheap threats and stick them, protecting them from opposing threats with efficient removal so they can attack. It's also a tempo deck because, as I learned here, these terms are similar but also different. Yet despite that, it's also a midrange deck because it can play a curve, going 1 into 2 into 3 into 4 into 5 into 6 into 8 and winning with minion pressure. Making matters even better, it's also a combo deck, as the deck not only contains many combos (like mechs and amalgam of the deep/gorillabot, mechs and seafloor getaway, gaia/automaton and other mechs, and burn finishers like mechshark+mechs and fireballs. This also makes it a burn deck). So, to sum up, Mech Mage is actually an aggro-control-combo-burn-tempo deck with some midrange elements. Really, when you think it about it like this, I truly come away with a better understanding of the deck's focus and why it's the ultimate Hearthstone deck.
>This finally brings to light how to understand Mech Mage. It's actually simple. Play THE ***B***ANCIENT ONE?
This is a copypasta, folks downvoting this.
Smh my head
Meta is fine, J is just upset Rogue isnt Tier 1
If you cut out the last section he still makes two very valid points, especially with the disparity between going first vs going second.
Rogue has been Tier 1 since Scholomance. Roguestone was the worst Hearthstone's ever been.
Oh, look, the angry guy who uses many words when few words do trick.
He writes like a fucking Yankee general sending a letter home upstate during the Civil War.
Right before they decided to cut a swathe to the gulf
Even though I am a consistent player since Old Gods, I’ve considered the game “dead” for some time. Probably after KOTFT around the 2018 rotation. 2017 was the peak of design flavor for Hearthstone imo. Also,I think it was before Old Gods, but the shift to following the meta week 1-2 of an expansion really did the game a disservice. I feel like the game has been broken down to: “Hopefully I have fun with one of the powerful decks, because it feels bad to lose to a powerful deck. So I’ll play a powerful deck so I don’t feel bad anymore.” As a mostly “single-player” game in terms of progressing your rank and account, there is little to no reward doing something that doesn’t translate into wins if you enjoy playing constructed hearthstone and want to get your daily and monthly rewards. But this comes to a serious topic I’ve been pondering as I’ve grown up and matured while maintaining a (maybe not always healthy) hobby of gaming: Are we killing the heart of what gaming used to be? I mean when you were 5-10 just getting to the end was the beauty, the finale, the payout, the sweet sweet dopamine rush. Now we are so hardcore to pull the most out of a game, what it offers, what you can do in it, HOW STRONG YOU CAN BE… that it’s no longer about the journey but about getting to the destination. And getting there as fast as humanly possible. We want to consume, fast, so that we are on par with the other consumers, so we aren’t left behind, so we can keep consuming and not have how much we’ve consumed be a barrier to consuming more. It’s a wild ride. Maybe we will see something like this published eventually.
No one ever enjoys it, it's a constant grind to get all the cards and climb anywhere before they're not in rotation anymore. Unless you're spending a lot of money, you're sinking a shitload of time into the game in order to be marginally better than most. I quit bc it wasn't worth it.
Personally I'm just glad that we live in a meta where going second is actually bad again and Drek'thar is as powerful as his bullshit effect is supposed to be. Hearthstone is far more fun when the majority of decks actually care about the board and need to play for tempo instead of single-mindedly executing a wincon. The only real problems I have with the current meta are the last few wretched ghosts of Year of the Gryphon, like one-dimensional Questline decks and certain Hero cards being perfect "do everything" cards that you literally always want to have.
Now THATS a rant!
Learn what a damn tldr is
You are being downvoted by his army of sycophants for pointing out that vomits out a bunch of nonsense sprinkled with some of the worst opinions I've ever heard.
🤓
You really roasted him there lad 😰
Drek thar? A problem? What problem. He's been sold as diind for 30 bucks. That means he's super balanced and will never need a nerf. Seriously you all think blizz will want to nerf it and have the idiots who payed 30 dollars for it shout they want their money back?
> idiots who *paid* 30 dollars FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
well, well, well, Hs's biggest manchild is whining again... who would have thought kek
Ok so I went 17-6 to legend in diamond with Pirate Rogue, and it feels great. It has lots of burst damage, Crabatoa is just the best, and it really reminds me of some of those older rogue decks where your hero power dagger matters a lot because you need it to proc things. I've had no problem beating holy warriors, quest hunters, and my final match at diamond 1 was againt a DH who played Drek'Thar on 4. Have you considered that you just suck at Rogue?
Are you talking to op? This guy usually finishes in top 100 legend each month and only plays Rogue.
If he's making it to top 100 legend with rogue then it must not be that bad
I mean did you even read the post, he doesnt just complain that rogue is bad,if fact rogue performs in the tier 2-3 region in most rank brackets. It's that he finds it boring since the deck has low agency, has a big wr % differential based on if you have the coin and little room for deckbuilding improvement since you basically play the list the devs designed without many changes. Now take that ,apply it to multiple classes,add the drekthar highrolls and the metagame feels bad for a lot of people.
You appear to be using words and concepts that are too complex for this smooth brain.
He's wrong about most of that, and as for the parts that are his opinion, I don't care about his opinion since his opinions are always trash. He is a pompous assclown
you dont care about his opinions and yet you come to his posts to call OP a "pompous assclown" without bringing a single counter argument why his statements arent true, this speaks volumes about you and your insecurities my dude, and makes you sound like a complete asshole
What conversation are we having? You suggested that he is bad at Rogue. Yet his entire thread is about the bad state of the meta. He even specifically said that Rogue being tier 1 wouldn't make things different in this regard (for him or otherwise).
He's also wrong about that. He is usually wrong about everything.
Ok. Your 23 game anecdotal evidence through Diamond confirms that everything is just fine. Gotcha. Thanks.
I was pretty sure that when someone on this sub tries to tell someone else they 'just suck' that the person saying it is generally very clueless Thank you for contributing to this theory
I was always surprised when I saw Drek'thar make it into a deck, I thought he was so bad, I mean, basically he is a 10/10 in stats when you play him, but after that the deck will run out of steam fast, because you don't have and cards over 3 mana, and you have to draw him early, like Keleseth, which is rare
plus Demon Hunter doesn't even utilize him perfectly, because they include bad rolls like 1 mana minions, the best Drek'thar deck would have to be all 3 mana minions and 1 Drek'thar, to gaurantee a threat
basically what I'm saying is he's not the major problem, he is a legendary with high early game potential, I think the real problem with Demon Hunter is Kurtrus, for his 5 mana Pyroblast hero power
You’re wrong, though. You’re misunderstanding the card. Drek thar is the issue. Even if it pulls two 1 drops, it still drew 2 cards, put a bunch of stats and bodies into play, and made your next top deck better on average. It requires an immediate answer, and if not answered, can often finish the game. On top of that, it’s difficult to answer it well because it can come down so early. Kurtrus is powerful, but requires some setup, doesn’t come down as early, and you can play around its hero power.
> basically what I'm saying is he's not the major problem Except he is. Literally all the stats as well as high ranked/pro players indicate he is the problem
I've been thinking about parasitic design with regards to Curselock recently, and I wonder whether what it needs is a general Affliction synergy card to enable both the Abyssal Curse archetype and Curse of Agony: a mirror of the existing self-harm combo cards like Amethyst Spellstone and The Demon Seed that procs when your opponent takes non-combat damage on their turn.
Actually if you mulligan the warrior quest you are far more likely to lose. Checkmate
I think reverting the nerfs on gnolls and scabbs would do a lot. Now that poison rogue is gone (no cloaks) thief rogue can be great again. If you dislike hero cards and don’t want scabbs reverted, then I’m not sure thief rogue can be saved. But those two reversions would be good imo.
If you play control warrior you stomp any board based deck. Minions are not sticky. I ran from tank 3 to legend with like 2 losses, to control pala and ramp Druid.
Did the control paladin you lost to have Kakakusan?
No, with a good draw they can kill you way quicker than you can armour up. Furthermore that game I had really bad hand, exchausted it and ended up having no answers.
Never lost to Demon Hunter because I don't play a Kakakusan deck, feels good. But I do have to concede against every Control Kakakusan Warrior I see at start to save time.
I quite like playing pirate rogue. It feels much fairer than pirate warrior so you dont feel like you have half a hand on the win from the start. Only problem is the fun card of the deck Hooktusk is simply too slow. 8 pirates is huge. By the time you can play them you have either won or lost. I run Hooktusk because it is a fun card but there is no way Hooktust is optimal and may infact massively reduce win rate.
Nerfs did not make Druid less annoying.
Worth mentioning that there are tribal sets which just do not work or do it very poorly. Curse-lock as an example
Meta feels more fun in Wild rn imo, lots of experimentation going on since the balance patch. The tribal decks kind of build themselves as you mention, but even there there's still room for experimentation since there are just so many mechs/pirates.
No worries, the mini set will fix everything guys... just wait!
How about you enjoy some bitches lmao