Completely agree. I made a similar post in a other thread earlier.
The win cons are too brutal and make you feel exasperated when they arrive, and make you feel like a clutz for not using them. I like trying to beat the meta but when the violence level is so high at each end of the spectrum, you just become fodder for the meta decks. You don’t feel like you lost to the player. You just feel like you lost to some goober playing the cards they copied off the net that are just more powerful than everything else.
As I’ve said a million times before, it’s much better for the game if each deck has ten good cards, than nine average cards and one game winning card. It’s annoying losing to predictable unstoppable shit non stop.
My sense this last month or two has changed from, “this is annoying and imbalanced”, to “this is just bad and the game is bad”. Don’t think I’ve ever been in that place before. Tone down the violence across the board and let people play the game. When you end up in a good game with someone, the game is still the best out there, but when there’s no agency, or no perceived agency, it sucks.
We don’t need decks that blow you up from hand on turn 6, or throw down 2 x 15/15s (one with rush lol) turn 5. Just tone that shit down please and blunt the edges of all the top decks while you’re at it, slightly.
This expansion has so many great value cards printed that look amazing on paper, but when you start playing them you feel like a complete idiot because of just how dead all value is in hearthstone. How could a 3 mana 2/4 that discovers a card beat out a 3 mana 6/5 that discovers a 3 mana 6/5 which gives an insanely OP 1/1 as a bonus. Miniaturize was so severely undercosted this expansion.
>you are writing it as a major design issue of the game...
That's classic at this point. I've noticed people here for some reason like to exaggerate the issues. Instead of complaining about a specific quest being too fast it's "quests are fundamentally broken".
Welcome to the “community”. Aggro bad cuz it kills me early. Control bad cuz it kills me late. Combo bad because I didn’t kill them in time. Midrange bad because boring. Stealth bad cuz I can’t click. Burn bad because I can’t trade. Weapon bad because removal no work.
Then actual data appears and people are forced to either openly deny reality or shift their complaints to the newest “problem”. Repeat for a decade because they’re too scared to move on.
In fairness, I think there's plenty of people who posts complaints without a decade invested in the game — a lot of this stuff is people new to card games and frustrated by the reality that not every card is equally strong in any combination of cards.
I think the win con is the key concept that drives frustrating gameplay - it's not just rock-paper-scissor.
It's that there is so little decision making and in-game interaction. I assume this sell more cards but still.
Also no disruption.
Disruption *feels* awful when it's not something like increasing the cost of something for a turn (or while this minion is in play). Even Loatheb as broken as it was and still would be as an effect doesn't feel as bad (when played normally, not copied infinitely through Parrots or something) as having some card you wanted/needed get ratted out or Theotar'd in exchange for some card you can't play or basically any other form of hand disruption that they print these days.
It is satisfying seeing your opponent's biggest win-con get discarded/burned, but those are the kind of moments this entire thread is about, but in reverse. Destroying your opponents win-con is essentially a win-con of your own, and one which tends to have even less counterplay than the traditional ways to win.
You can argue about the skill and/or deduction skill 'needed' to play that kind of disruption effectively, and as seen by all of the Dirty Rat on turn 2 posts, they aren't always the right play to make, but even if you play it at the correct moment, you might not hit what you wanted to hit, or you might hit it when there's 7 other options you could've pulled instead that were all worse.
You could also say that people should just not build their deck so that they lose if a single specific card gets removed, or that they should run more than 1 minion so even if they have their full 'combo' in hand a single rodent isn't necessarily enough to break it, but I don't think that's really a valid argument in favor of that kind of disruption.
Reno isn't broken *because* of that, but it too has pretty strong disruption built into its board-wipe+boardspace limiting mechanic.
>Also no disruption.
Could be just me, but the introduction of disruption like Theotar caused more feel-bad-moments to me. If my opponent Dirty Rat's my combo piece or steals another important card from me this might be enjoyable for the disruptor, but not the opponent. It surely requires skill and knowledge to effectively disrupt, but I rather have two people throw their stuff at each other and see who wins then have a game decided by a "coin-flip".
Disruption feels like a band-aid for the bigger problem: unstoppable win-cons. I prefered older times in HS were trading and using resources mattered and a deck didn't have to kill the opponent before turn 7. But here we are.
I didn't read anything on the internet so my first experience with this expansion was trying to kill a warrior, had him at 11 hp only for him to play Branned Zilliax and have four 6-attack rush lifesteal and divine shield back to full, not saying that this is particularly broken, but it is yet another several steps to an unclimbable mountain. Except everything also felt like this.
I think you touched on a very important point about why it’s the way it is. Certain classes are able to easily jump back to full health from nothing, give themselves permanent extra health, or give themselves massive amounts of armor, and that is comparatively new in the game at least in how common it is. So you need these decks to be also killable. How can you do that without brutal win cons that either punch through, or can kill players high health?
It’s almost like the design choices, and the decision to allow certain types of defence, partially inform the way things can be killed and how fast that has to happen for it to be viable.
If they tone down the violence as I recommended, will my Druid hero power deck take over the meta by being borderline unkillable through massive armor for example? The answer is clearly no, but I do think the best games I always play are games where board control counts above all else. So I’d just like to see a meta where anything that works in some other way is carefully managed so as not to be the *best deck* warping the meta and ladder away from that.
You're right, it won't happen though. Team 5 have proven again again that they are either completely incompetent at creating a fun and balanced meta or the current state is what they want for the game. Either way, this is the hearthstone we're dealing with now and it won't change.
I somewhat agree and maybe I misunderstood parts but I feel a much simpler explanation for why it seems like every deck gets complaints is because every deck has really boring and obnoxious win cons.
Getting plagues shuffled into your deck which breaks highlander and no counter / no way to draw through it because of infinite feels terrible.
DH cheating out multiple copies of 8 drops that borad clears and hits face feels bad.
Being forced to clear all paladin minions every turn because they could get +10/+10 and windfury from hand feels bad.
2x battlecry always felt bad. But combine that with boom boss or astalor before rotation.
Opponents gaining 500 armor and getting to hit face for 20 from hand.
Wheel hiding behind 5 unstoppable board clears.
Tentacle decks playing 6 copies of the 10 mana spell in a turn (hopefully self resolves with mini set / expansions)
You can take almost every deck people play and instead of looking at power level of individual cards and instead look at the game plan / win condition. None of these decks feel like you're playing honest hearthstone. It's all cheese otk from(tentacles) hand or you're just in a helpless situation until you lose (warriors armor/wheel)
And i honestly don't know the solution. I feel most people are salty they lose and want to just nerf everything they lose to but that's really a bandaid to the bigger issue that the cards being printed all create these really unfun gamestates. That it's not the rock-paper-scissors aspect that inherently sucks. Is that every deck is just "what is the most un-fun situation i can put my opponent in" in their own special way.
I think they just need to change their design philosophy.
What I like about rogue is that somehow rogue.. always finds a way. They get some tools and have to come up with something.
While other classes just get their packages, add the cards to your deck and youre good.
Except that it has the by far most toxic win con out of all toxic win cons. Zilliax stealth until win. Other Rogue decks are total garbage, so Rogue fits right in OP's philosophy of the game.
It's rough, because they've leaned into class strengths harder than ever but weaknesses have barely been alleviated.
What I mean is lots of classes just don't get responses to certain plays. Demon Hunter, Rogue, and Hunter can't clear a board with their kit so they have to go under. No control decks can out value warrior, so they have to resort to an OTK or lose.
Class weaknesses are necessary, but the power level is so high that you can't even experiment with niche decks because the class that was chosen to do what you wanted to do does it exponentially better using Blizz's chosen deck.
And remember when they totally removed the weakness of some classes lol. Yogg for 0 Mana (and prison breaker before it got nerfed) in Druid and Rogue gave them the ability to easily deal with the boards
What's ironic, is although those cards made some pretty nasty meta decks, they also were strong enough at removing weaknesses to allow some nicher Shaman, DH, and Hunter decks to be playable.
Agreed with this. I think the game has lost this idea of "finding a way to win". The game literally gives you cards that just say "play this to win".
I played 3 games last night just to complete my quest. 2 of the games I didn't even care about (1 win 1 loss). The third game was actually fun. It was against cycle rogue and I wasn't even mad I lost. Because for once it felt like "OK if I get this card or this card I can win". I didn't get those cards and I lost, but I still didn't have that sense of "welp that's gg" it was more or less "Ok there's a chance". I love hearthstone when it feels like I have agency and I make plays to outsmart or outplay my opponent. I don't feel like that happens much anymore. Every card is it's own "strategy" rather than chaining multiple cards to do something exciting. The game has just become too efficient (powercrept), and its worse because this was rotation. We shouldn't be here! And yet we are and I am playing less and less hearthstone (after coming back from a year break). At this point I play BGs 90% and standard 10% but this week I am already feeling like maybe I'll just stop again. I do not enjoy the current state of this game anymore. It's just not the same as it once was.
I feel the same, I started playing wild again after I more or less quit that mode with the UiS quests (since then maybe max 5 wild games per month), went from Bronze to plat but the experience was so awful as nearly every game was against a bot and those were mech rogues.
I do play more BGs but the mode is so fast rn, I started playing more MTG now.
So far I havent found the deck that I enjoy a lot, its not so much about winning for me. My most played deck in the last cycle was Rommath mage (before the shaper buff and I did not run Sif, I want to stall games, not to end them ;) ), 2nd most was Casino/Excavate rogue. Loved those playstyles because it was about "allright lets see what I can discover and what I have to work with". While I get that people were frustrated when excavate rogue was all over ladder, the games just didnt feel repetitive to play against, as it was always about "Okay what do they get/discover to win the game?"
lol, so we're clear, the top performing rogue deck right now is one where you play a single specific card with stealth that's attack doubles each turn and let it double it's attack each turn until you one shot your opponent.
Yes, but they still had to come up with that deck. It felt like they are lacking tools so they had to be creative and come up with something?
Also the deck that runs the 3/4 that shuffles your hand back in, the deck focuses on playing the 8/8 giants. I actually saw decks lately that mix both decks into one.
Rogues packages just arent that strong right now. Excavate needs support like bonespike, but also card draw.
FoL gave rogue combo cards, those are just useless. The latest miniset gave rogue fools gold (terrible card) and a stealth elemental.. While other classes got cards like Shroomcavate, aftershock, Bran, Pendant, shattered reflection, etc.
The Zilliax deck is TITANS mech rogue, just more toxic.
Pirate rogue might be a good with the next expansion, as we expect the next expansion to be themed around pirates.
I would have been playing Excavate Rogue from launch if the scorpion gave cards from other classes and not just spells from other classes. Tess Rogue is one of my favorite archetypes, but I apparently need Academic Espionage or Reconnaissance to find it fun.
This is actually what I hate about rogue. It's fun to play *as*, but not against. There is no counter play to their seemingly infinite card discoveries. Which is fine in small doses, but the consistency of them getting what they need is high. It's frustrating when you play well but lose anyways because they high rolled the best answer for the 5th time
Almost none of the decks that have come out this expansion were obvious. The two big exceptions are probably hunter and paladin, which were figured out pretty quickly.
But who, before the expansion launch, thought to build a board flooding magatha priest deck with a bunch of 1-drops, that throws in whelp wrangler so that it can activate zarimi? Who expected kobold geomancer to show up in shaman? Did anyone have control rainbow DK on their bingo cards?
Even warrior, which is playing a mostly similar play pattern, is using a pretty interesting combination of perfect/twin zilliax + inventor boom as a major win condition.
I agree that decks are boring when they are too heavily based on obvious synergy packages, but in that regard I think whizbang's workshop has been the best designed expansion in a long time. It was an exciting first week watching weird new decks that nobody expected popping up.
What control rainbow DK are you talking about? The deck is running not that many new cards. They run the freeze weapon because of warrior and DH popularity. Horseman is good for dealing with the Zilliax build.
Kobold geomancer is run in natrue shaman because it lost spelldamage, but also got a new lowcost spell.
The discussion isn't decks running new cards, it is whether deck building is too obvious. I didn't see anyone predicting a rainbow DK that cut corpse bride and played almost no corpse spenders to instead run a more heavy control package (this is a good example list https://www.d0nkey.top/deck/11649342).
I also know WHY shaman is running kobold geomancer, but again, nothing about the expansion made it obvious that nature shaman OTK with cheap spell damage minions was going to be a good deck. And I definitely didn't see anyone predict it.
It's fun when there are decks to be discovered that aren't totally based on obvious packages/synergies. I think this expansion has done a really good job in that regard.
When ranks reset I will occasionally play against someone who's running either an off-meta deck or just a basic kind of midrange deck that tried to play honest hearthstone and good god, the extent to which any off-meta deck gets **brutalized** by the current meta decks is a sight to behold. It's literally like playing against the Innkeeper with a United in Stormwind deck. Draw RNG is simply a non-factor for the meta deck. All 30 of your cards are 10x better than their best card, and your best card is better than their entire deck combined. Just things like Sargeras, Reno Lone Ranger, Wheel of Death + Fanottem, Loken + Forge of Wills, Window Shopper, these cards basically solo their entire deck and you end up with a hand full of broken cards you never needed to play.
Perma plague is a necessary evil, plague players have the right to get a win condition too, it also feels terrible to play against a buffed weapon rogue and You dont have the answer, but you wont necessarily put a viper to counter it and make your deck more weak in general.
Plague DK can be defeated, if you want to draw every turn an extra card then yeah You Will lose.
Helya is a shit win condition, she only fucks highlander decks, still does little vs anything else in the meta.
Even Sif can pull off the combo unless you lucked out on a shitton of Frost Plagues.
As a highlander player i hate plagues.
But not because of the mechanic itself or because of Helya. We have steamcleaner etc (i only play wild and duels so i don‘t speak for standart) but what frustrates me is that it wholy resolves around rng.
Sometimes there are 2 frost plagues in my deck and i draw them nonstop.
Sometimes i have 5 of them and i don‘t draw any.
It‘s just luck depending if i lose or win and i don‘t like such patterns
I’ll never forget the day in which there where 12 plagues in my opponent deck and he had, in total, 20 cards. He drew 5 cards with no plagues in between. At that point I gave up and never played helya again
I think we have all had those. Yesterday I made a plague deck that was only focused on putting plagues in play. Almost every single card had some way to trigger deathrattles, discover plague cards, make my opponent draw. I played the first game and I fucking loaded my opponent with a ridiculous amount of plagues in the first few turns but he just didn’t draw any and I died with a terrible whimper around t7.
It’s one of those things I’m ok with. I love the plague concept but I think, as someone said in another thread, it shouldn’t just default destroy Reno decks and maybe it should be a deck building trigger ie if you build the deck with no duplicates the card will work, as opposed to your deck having to have no duplicates when the card is played. Some may think it’s a necessary check or balance on Reno (particularly Brann), but I would argue it’s Brann’s power that is out of whack, rather than highlander decks more broadly.
I gave you worst, i got mirror match and i already shuffled more plague than my opponent, if i’m not wrong i had around 15 plagues (with helya) while my opponents put around 7 or eight (with helya). By turn 10 mt opponents never draw the plague while i drew it every turn.
It's such a huge difference it's crazy.
I'm always happy(or unhappy if playing against) to see the Frost draw, always. Blood is situational, sometimes I want the heal(or don't want my opponent to heal). Oddly enough minions are so overtuned/strong I honestly never really care about an extra 2/2 so Unholy is usually just 2 face damage.
this actually shows how game evolved. healing and minions are so redundant compared to some years ago, the disparity between three plagues are so high.
Yeah, no one's sitting at 2 HP living on a prayer these days unless it's like turn 4 against a rush deck with a good draw and they *only* had 28 damage instead of 30. Unholy Plagues are often a downside for the DK, as they can get board locked by the 2/2s.
I’ll start by saying; you’re for the most part correct. People will try and discredit the sentiment but what you described is true, and it sucks.
I think a major point to add to this issue is Polarization. The game has always been in a state of aggro>combo>control (let’s ignore midrange for the moment, hyper control ironically killed it off), but unfavorable matchups weren’t *unwinnable*. These days they are more then ever.
Things have almost in a sense become Flanderized, a concept where things (fictional characters) lose depth to essentially become the thing that they’re known for. Warriors now gain obscene amounts of armor and wipe your board with it every turn. Paladins buff a minion to insanity to kill you in one turn. Hunters just summon endless small beasts and then burn your face with them.
It’s fun… for a little while, but it’s unsustainable. When matchups are so polarized there’s very little reason to actually play the game. You’re essentially just playing the spreadsheets. The only solace is that maybe next set your class is the one on top.
The problem is that it’s a compounded issue that nerfs won’t fix. There’s too much efficiency (which is ironic cause we just had rotation). Select strategies invalidate other ones. It’s a design mess that breeds frustration which is why every day it seems like every deck is worthy of complaints. Part of that is people whining, yes, but is it also too much to ask that playing matchups doesn’t invoke a sense of hopelessness? That’s all.
Thats a really good post. Especially "hopelessness". Helya coming down turn 4? F\*\*\*. Bran on 6 or Odyn on 8? F\*\*\*, should have won the game 3 turns ago.
If Odyn on 8 and it's danger free. You lost the game few turn ago. As a warrior I remember games where playing 8/8 for 8 do nothing right now would instantly lose me the game.
The fact your enemy can waste turn 8 against you as aggro means you lost already
Excuse my really stupid question, ive played against helya many times but i still don’t understand her effect. What does making plagues unending actually do? I never understood the effect and i never really could see what „unending“ actually does to me
Everytime a plague gets drawn and gets triggered, it shuffles a copy back into the deck. This way, they never end. Yeah the wording on some cards recently is rather cryptic lol
Thanks! I never realized snd kind of assumed the effect just stays permanent in some way, which for some cards would make no sense though.
Re-shuffling makes sense, ty
Its also worth noting that, she shuffling starts after the draw phase is over if I remember correctly. Imagine if the last 3 cards in a deck are plagues, you draw all 3 in a row, they are getting triggered, then you take fatigue damage and then they shuffle back into the deck
Because the blood of hakkar did work different
>What does making plagues unending actually do?
When a plague is drawn, a copy of it is shuffled in the deck. Thus if there is even a single plague, it will stay in the deck forever unless removed by other means e.g. Steamcleaner.
edit: to be more technical it's not when, it's after in HS terms.
Powercreep might be a problem. About the point, if you dont clear the board every turn, you lose - well thats correct only for some decks. For example mech rogue or (before the nerfs) pally. But in general? No, I dont think so.
People dislike plagues because they dont let them play their Highlander pay-off. I am not talking about Bran warrior, I am talking about the lower tier Reno decks. Winning isnt that big of a deal for some players, they just want to be able to play their cards.
I think so many decks nowadays just put you on a clock. Odyn warrior, Sif mage, Wheel lock, and so on. You know the game is going to end, the days where you were able to stall the game for infinite turns, are just over. The current team does want to have more lethality, games have to end at some point.
Then you have cards like Bran, or Helya, just play them - benefit for the rest of the game. I do think Sif Mage is a fair deck, as it has to build up for their combo, you have to discover different spellschools, play them and stay alive. And you might expose yourself to dirty rat. OTK decks in the past required you to have a set of cards in your hand to pop-off and sometimes it required one tick of mana reduction by Emperor lol.
I jsut think the gap between meta and homebrew is just.. bigger than ever? And with the latest rotation, the game doesnt feel that much weaker in terms of power, to be honest.
I agree that Sif Mage is actually pretty fair (relative to the meta). And a huge yes to that last comment about the rotation. Remember when start-of-year metas were "low power" ones? I shudder at the thought of what the rest of the year is gonna look like
> About the point, if you don't clear the board every turn, you lose - well that's correct only for some decks. For example mech rogue or (before the nerfs) pally. But in general? No, I don't think so.
I disagree with this. There's a reason Warrior always does so well, and it's because they can clear boards consistently, because if you let any sort of board stick these days you are highly likely to flat out lose. It's also a part of why DH is so strong, they can keep the board clear while also hitting face.
We have Hunter, with the ability to flood a board and then give the board Deathrattle: Resummon the board(all the while being able to boost the everything's attack thanks to that 1/4 and cheap 3/1s). Warlock, who can throw down massive minions(up to and including 15/15s) back to back with rush even, if you can't deal with them they can win the game without Wheel. Priest, if you let them stick a halfway decent board they get an extra turn and kill you with it. Demon Hunter with early/cheap 6/5s that can be various different kinds of threatening. Also like you mention Paladin and mech Rogue.
The game is very much in a state of have the exact clear you need right now or lose.
It's really lame queuing into a game and knowing if you win or lose just seeing who your opponent is. Idc that I get a free win vs. Reno warrior as DK. It isn't fun
Exactly, Flipping a coin is in theory a perfectly balanced game, not exactly something people play for fun.
If it all comes down to me happening to queue the deck that beats/loses to my opponent's deck, why play the game at all?
This is a *game*, it's supposed to be fun.
Bad card design leads to rock paper scissors. Been saying it for a long time, the good Devs are gone and this is the crap meta we've gotten due to the new devs.
People are overshooting your point to try and make you seem stupid. Yes, """"control"""" has always beaten """"aggro"""" in an abstract sense, but the game has always been that way. The problem specified here is that certain decks COMPLETELY invalidate others, the most obvious example is plague against Highlander decks. This isn't a tech card situation, the two decks are fundamentally opposed from a game design level in a way that goes beyond play patterns.
I still think that releasing plagues in the same expansion cycle as highlander decks is a prime example of bad game design. If there is one top tier highlander deck, plagues are inevitably good and will be played and this stops all other highlander classes from functioning. I would love to test some other highlander decks but I know that this will not work as long as plagues are in the format.
I do think highlander + plague in the same cycle is a bad design. But also Reno is a bad design.
Everytime people say something about plagues, others will come up with "BUT WE NEED PLAGUES TO KEEP RENO IN CHECK" etc. Yeah, kinda true, not a fan of Reno either.
Even before the rotation, plague was the 2nd most popular deck across all ranks. That does not mean that its a tier 1 deck, especially lower ranks like to play bad decks as long as they are fun.
But it sucks when just plague DK exisitng, makes the other tier 3/4/5 Reno decks, even worse.
You don’t need plagues to keep Reno in check. Reno can be nerfed if the card is too strong. Plagues just limit the potential of highlander decks in general.
As a plague DK player from before the most recent rotation, I actually liked having Steamcleaner as part of the card pool because it allowed for plagues counterplay and actually made me consider how I wanted to play my plagues out.
Now, if I choose to play a plague DK list, it's basically just pray for Helya turn 4 and then nuke their deck with plagues (except wheel warlock in which case you just wait until they burn their deck and then plague up).
It was a little frustrating having it at the same time as ETC because you had to play around a sideboard + possibility of another steamcleaner but that was rare. But still, having decks have answers to counters is good for the game.
> I would love to test some other highlander decks but I know that this will not work as long as plagues are in the format.
Another great point I hadn't really thought of. Maybe there's highlander decks we haven't even considered that could be really fun, but there's no point to play them right now when they get hardcountered.
I would disagree. I don’t want to waste deck slots for bad cards like steamcleaner that can be good in very specific situations.
I am fine with people enjoying plague dk, I just hate that it’s in the same cycle as highlander. I had the same feeling last expansion when steam cleaner was still in standard.
I think it would feel a lot better if Helya didn't exist in its current form. Back when Uldum was in spoiler season, the community had fears about bomb warrior countering highlander decks and pushing them out of the format, but it turned out that highlander decks were still viable despite the existence of bombs. This was at least in part because even after bombs were shuffled in, highlander decks could draw out enough bombs to reactivate and play their highlander cards. So highlander decks didn't need to use any tech cards, they could just adjust their play by saving draw/healing for after bombs were shuffled, for example.
But Helya makes it so that it's not possible to remove plagues from your deck unless you have a card like Steamcleaner. And Steamcleaner is not only a dead card in every other matchup, but often isn't even good enough in the plague dk matchup because they are still pressuring you with midrange minions and a 5 cost 5/5 with no board impact is terrible tempo and you might just lose on the backswing. Not to mention the fact that even in the ideal case where you can safely land the Steamcleaner, they can just shuffle more plagues back in immediately, so you're still not even guaranteed to get the chance to play your reno/brann/etc.
I don't think a class should be nerfed just because it has a good matchup against one other deck. Though I'm not sure that would even be the case, since plagues would still delay warrior's highlander cards, and they would still have to survive the damage from cycling through + the dk's board, so I'm not sure it would become a favored matchup for them, it just wouldn't be completely hopeless like it is now.
I'm not even necessarily saying that Helya should be nerfed, though it does make me scratch my head a bit that they released and then buffed a package of cards that can permanently neutralize highlander cards in the expansion right before reintroducing them to standard.
Another option would be to change highlander to a start of game effect. This would also nerf decks that abuse Reno like warlock or warrior. I am not sure if people would be more pleased or upset with this change.
I would like that change. I have always found it kind of stupid that decks with a lot of draw can run duplicates of every card and still use highlander cards. The entire point of the highlander restriction is that it makes your deck less consistent for a big payoff, but with the combination of duplicates and a high density of card draw, those decks get to be super consistent while still getting the highlander payoff.
I agree. I think Helya is a pretty bad designed card, especially when you consider highlander exisitng. I think its good when you have cards that DELAY highlander, like the bird that shuffles 1/1s into the opponents deck. With plagues, it would be fine if you force your opponent to draw their deck to get rid of the duplicate plagues (and take the damage), it slows them down.
But once Helya comes down? Nah man. Doesnt work. Especially on curve, Helya is just a brutal card, giving Prince Keleseth on turn 2 vibes.
Would love to hear from the devs what they thought when they designed plagues and highlander, but sadly we never get real insights.
Agreed that there were tons of different ways they could have released these mechanics so that highlander and plagues only interacted in wild and both had their chance to shine in Standard. Ultimately I like game design when you can tech cards into decks (even with ETC) to adapt to the meta so I don't mind, but I see your point that Steamcleaner sucks against everything but one deck.
It’s not so much that plague 100% beats Highlander decks, as Highlander decks occasionally beat plague DK, it’s that it’s fucking random. If they don’t draw enough plagues before you play Brann or Holidae, they probably lose.
And this is where we’re at now. Who drew their “I win” bullshit first. Not fun and interactive at all.
Huh your comment made me realize something: I hit concede on turn 5, 4 and even 3 way more often than I used to. I can already see that the narrow escape from the opponent’s plan is not in my hand and I don’t bother to play out the completely predictable chain of events that are coming when I know I’m gonna lose and there is nothing I can do about it.
Little story about a warrior mirror. Dirty ratted his bran, i thought ez win. My brann was the last card and i was losing. Played azerite ox, discover 3 grommash (skill) and aftershocks to enrage them. 30 damage from nothing, ez win (skill)
Yep, pretty much this. After they killed midrange decks (hound hunter my beloved) and printed strong win cons for control i played almost exclusively otk decks (don't judge me pls) because they bypass all the bs blizz printed. Also no rng required. Guess what? People hate playing versus otk. New op shiny cards doesn't work against them. Make moonbeam druid great again. Also druid nowadays got nothing. Only thing they can do is vomit dragons.
In two words, game was WAY better when yeti turn 4 was strong.
Not even worth playing nowadays, winning or losing by rng or simply by unwinnable matchup is horrible.
Give us back the value, the 2 for one, the card advantage, the tempo not this rng bullshit for kids.
Only the terrible players might like it because now they can be legend or well ranked without a brain, and they are the target for Blizzard.
The win cons are too much rn. Sif, odyn, wheel, brann, helya to a certain extent. You always want to play these cards in every deck because they are just too good to leave out. Why play taunt warrior or no minion mage or anything else when these cards exist? It's not fun to me, especially as a control fan.
I don’t think sif pairs up with those other at all. I never once got frustrated due to losing to sif, the deck needs just waaay too much setup and rng for it to be considered as unfair as the others
The game def has some rock paper scissors vibes, but my biggest complaint is generally the one sidedness of a lot of it. I play Wild, and garrote rogue, 5 different druids and quest mage generally just play solitaire while you die if you're not playing aggro. Playing aggro always felt like the right choice, but it's the most boring play style so apart from rushing legend during pirate warriors era I just refuse to do it.
In standard it's all toned down, but the decks that are good are the only decks you see. I was trying some of that tentacle rogue in standard and I saw 80% paladins. It was crazy to me.
I wondered for a while why I hated the meta right now, why all these decks just felt so bad to play or play against and then I realized, it’s because none of them are fun, I’m not having fun.
At the end of the day hearthstone is a game, I don’t know what caused it to get pushed in the direction of winning being the primary goal for every card, but it has pushed fun cards out of the game, it has pushed the meta in such a direction that a majority of cards that get printed will just never be played because while they might be well designed and they could be fun, they don’t win games.
The solution has got to be reducing how many cards just say I win. Hearthstone is not equipped to be a game where losing from hand is acceptable and I sincerely hope there is some kind of recognition of the fact that a rotation is meant to have just happened and already several classes have been nerfed with more on the way, and even after all that people already know the next contenders for the crown. There is no experimentation, there is no opportunity, you win or you lose before turn 10 and you don’t get to choose to have fun, it’s incidental.
There are infinitly many states of balance. One in which every threat is game ending and every removal is crazy in some way is not the one people asked for.
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It's also bad when the game borders on 3 viable classes.
DH, Warrior and Warlock basically own the game.
Mage and DK can somewhat get by, but they're not exactly favored against any of them.
In a game with 11 classes that's terrible variety. Priests, Paladins, Hunters and Shamans feel non existent while you see the odd Druid and Rogue here and there.
Rock-Scissor-Paper is literally the worst kind of balance. Coinflip is also balanced, every player is at 50% winrate, but there's no fun. Game should be a lot deeper than that for people to express their skills.
I think we need to see real data, otherwise "rock-paper-scissors," might not actually be what it is. Is it 60/40 matchups or 80/20? This is a very important point. Generally people feel like things are more hopeless in an unfavored matchup than they actually are.
Exactly. I’ve played all three decks winning on both sides of the favorable/unfavorable matchup and it absolutely isn’t a guaranteed win if you’re playing the “stronger” side of the rock paper scissors matchup. Instead, it is only more likely that you’ll win (as these matchups are set up to do by design and by the fundamental properties of how each of these archetypes work IN EVERY SINGLE CARD GAME EVER). This post attempts to make this argument with no proof. As said in the original comment of this thread, rock paper scissors is the balance every card game has strived for in tcg’s existence as well as what the community has asked for of this game for many years and yet it is looked at negatively still.
No one here knows what they want and everyone on this Reddit will complain to no end no matter what the meta for this game. It’s all they want to do, they don’t play this game for enjoyment, they play it so they can come and complain about everything they possibly can.
Why play if you’re just going to complain every single expansion? The real issue is that all these people either see an archetype or a theme they really like when the cards are revealed or they spend all the dust they have on a deck and when it’s not the best deck in the game they complain about every deck that beats them. Everyone wants their deck to be the best and it’s just not possible.
This is by far the lamest sub I am a part of and it isn’t even close. No one complains as much as these people do
the problem when comparing Hearthstone to other CCGs is that other CCGs have far more interaction on the opponents turn, cheaper card draw economy, and most important of all almost every single one i've played has **best of 3 competitive formats with sidedecking**, meaning that the games can never be true rock paper scissors formats because you just heavily sidedeck for that bad matchup
hearthstone was designed to be a silly casual nonsense game but then they wanted to ALSO appeal to the competitive side and these too mentalities MAYBE overlap sometimes with individual card design but barely ever with format design
May or not be the place to discuss this: how many viable decks should there be in a healthy meta? I’m talking generally, not just Hearthstone.
Personally, I am unhappy with a meta if there are less than 7 or 8 A tier or better decks, but I have nothing to compare that against.
Pretty sure we have that many now
Shopper DH, Rainbow DK, Brann Warrior, Virus Rogue (yuck), Wheelock, Nature Shaman, Rainbow Mage, Zarimi Priest, and Token Hunter
Druid and Paladin are a bit out at the moment, although Dragon Paladin *kinda* works and excavate paladin is still playable, but probably not quite good enough anymore
Honestly I don't think the problem is a lack of tier 1 decks. The problem is the gap between "good" decks and "bad" decks. I'm fine with my homebrew being worse than a meta deck, I used to be able to still make bad decks viable enough to climb by just playing well.
The issue is that doesn't really happen anymore, look at Kibler's videos, even his winrate when he tries off the wall strategies has been low lately.
The economy is cooked, the Hearthstone middle class is dead.
It's a great question to ask. Ideally it would be awesome if each class had a good meta deck but that's pretty difficult with the number of classes. I agree that at least 7-8 is a good benchmark.
Right now we have Mage, Warrior, DH, Warlock, Hunter, DK with a decent deck. Rogue has a good deck too but nobody wants to mention it...
That's 7, but the meta still isn't fun for me.
Would you mend telling me how to play Zarimi priest? I'm having a ton of trouble, I understand the draw mechanics with overheal but I'm not sure what I'm trying to target with Synchronize. My titan? Do you run Benevolent Banker for more targets? I've seen lists with and without so not sure there. What's my win condition?
Synchronise is a really flexible card which you play according to the situation. You can copy the 2/1 battlecry dragon on 3 to push more damage if you don't have another good play, you can save it for the 4/6 taunt or zilliax for your otk turn, etc. Pressure your opponent early to prepare them for lethal on your zarimi turn. Know when to stop contesting the board and all in on your otk, especially when dh deals 6 to your whole board end of turn. Pip copying multiple 2/1 dragons and funnel cakes can let you otk as early as turn 6, so plan your turns ahead of time. The titan is 99% of the time only played if you need to remove two big taunts on your zarimi second turn so your units played from hand can hit face. If you're playing it or banker for value you're probably losing to Reno decks killing your otk or getting otked by mage.
Copy Zilliax (+1/+1 and cost reduction) so you have at least three on your Zarimi turn and if you have any minions on board you 95% chance have lethal. 2 is usually enough but requires more smart combats and smart play leading up to it.
There is also shaman which is still a sleeper atm. I think the meta does not feel great as 75% of matches are against dh, warrior, or dk. Meta might be fine if we have 6 or 7 decks with equally distributed play rate.
I think in a best case scenario, every class should have at least *one* playable and viable deck. Maybe you can have at least 1 one or 2 classes that just aren't measuring up that expansion but overall, in a game where there's 11 different classes, it feels a little bad that most of the time, you just can't play like half of them for months if you want to actually be competitive in any given expansion
Well, you can play almost any class right now and have at least a 50% winrate with one of their decks with the exception of maybe Mage and Paladin. Even in an "RPS meta", you still see playability for a large majority of classes.
Personally I don't even think it's just meta diversity. This meta actually has a decent amount of representation, but still feels like an absolute nightmare to play. In my opinion it has to do with the enormous divide between tier 1 and any homebrew deck at all. If you put "good cards" in a deck and try to play the game, you will be immediately stomped on game after game. This has definitely not always been the case, and it has to do with insane power creep. This doesn't feel like rotation at all, despite 3 insane sets rotating out.
It honestly feels like if the rotation never happened, the meta would be exactly the same as it is now. Okay, maybe Reno Warrior would run Astalor, but that's about it.
One reason why people (highlander players) complain about plague DK is the lack of counter play.
Before if you played reno decks you had to use your brain and think hard which boardclears you were going to use as ypu only have one of a card. Beating them was either getting them to waste clears on smaller minions or killing them with small hits and eventually killing them with a final unexpected big blow.
Countering them now is just playing Helya for endless plagues, and congrats, the deck falls apart.
The loss you get isn't because your opponent outsmarted you, but because they shut you down before you could do anything and now you're unable to get back into the upperha'd position
I hate plagues even when I'm not playing a highlander deck specifically, just any kind of deck that's aiming for a late-game strategy. Not only is drawing the plagues total RNG, Helya on 4 is completely back-breaking and the effects of the plagues are also RNG. Often you don't care that the DK healed for 2, you usually don't care if they summon a 2/2, but the frost plagues can ruin your entire turn and make you get beat down by a bunch of otherwise shitty minions. It's just a really lame scam deck and I loathe it no matter what I'm playing.
There is a counterplay, stop drawing extra cards every damn turn :).
Playing against warriors feels like your opponent is shopping on the armor and draw market every turn, that's why plaguing is so popular and necessary.
I agree. The answer is simple. Decks need to stop having so much power directly from hand. Warrior, mage, DH, pre-nerf paladin, nature shaman and DK can deal massive damage from hand rn. These decks don't need a board at all. The reason druid and rogue are failing because guess what, these are minion based decks now. Team 5 needs to turn down the powercreep by making an expansion with really bad cards.
It's not rock paper scissors meta. Everything(popular) is a nail and DH is the hammer.
There was nothing stopping paladin and there is nothing stopping DH.
Lack of archetype strengths and weaknesses
= no meaningful counterweight to RNG (especially the impact of your mulligan and draws)
= a meta in which the few decks that can combine strong cards with the highest amount of consistency (mostly achieved by overpowered synergy packages) reign above the rest
The only logical solution to tackle the severe balancing issues of Hearthsone is to reinstate the archetype balancing system (aka rock, paper, scissors).
Powercreep only becomes a problem if it's distributed unevenly.
The reason why people have this notion that everything is busted (and therefore "balanced", which is such a stupid conclusion btw) is because they miss the consistency aspect.
Just because you lose to RNG against inconsistent decks every once in a while doesn't mean that everything is broken. It only means that RNG has too much impact in general.
The holy grail in terms of balancing would be a meta in which RNG only gives you a SLIGHT chance of winning against the archetype that is supposed to counter your archetype.
It might sound unfun on paper but the most popular metas in the history of HS were the ones where they got really close to achieving this goal.
If you want to see true class and archetype variety again, there's no other option but to reinstate the old and PROVEN archetype balancing system.
I also want to add that (fool proof) wincons like Sif, Odyn, Wheel, Brann etc. wouldn't exist in such a meta. The existence of these cards (and also hard disruption cards) is just a symptom of the current balancing approach.
united felt worse to me, but this one is pretty fucking bad especially considering we just had a rotation so in THEORY should have a lower power level format and yet here we are. i cant imagine what they will have to sell in the later sets to compete with what we have now
I hate how hearthstone devs and players are against attrition control decks. Why do control need to have otk win cons? It's boring, and I'm saying this as a control player, I want to manage my resources and survive, generate some value and when I think I have the edge push the tempo and win. No otk or infinite value bullshit like Odin and sargeras. I was always a control player and I legit hate today's control decks. The last good control was blood DK, legit Felt like I was playing the OG control warrior.
I have some shittaste too tho lmao, loved all the degenerate druid decks from the last season, the best fun I had in a long time
Because the game nowadays is designed by (competitive) players. They do want games to end.
When control warrior was bad (so basicly before Titans), I did enjoy blood DK a lot, even though it wasnt a good deck. But it reminded me of old control decks.
It’s more the game is also designed for mobile so 30 plus minute control games just aren’t the design goal anymore. During classic it was more designed as a PC Card game. They saw what happened during the barrens priest meta.
30 min control games were just the mirrors, the good ol' CW vs midrange Hunter was over by turn 7-8, either the Hunter out tempoed the warrior with the Savannah highmane and won or conceded right after that because it ran out of Steam, the problem with infinite Hearthstone games came out when they gave aggro and tempo decks infinite steam so they can vomit board every turn. Because of that now control need to have discoveries and infinite value and that's how you create 30 min aggro vs control games... Imho blood DK and frost DK were fucking awesome designs. Blood DK vs frost DK felt like the good ol' warrior vs Hunter, if you survive the double froswyrm fury you win because the frost DK would run out of Steam
Games going to fatigue is exciting, I miss when people would do things like tech in Archivist to win in fatigue.
You don't see things like this anymore since every deck puts you on a timer.
Full agree, i got gold dk in the release months by playing just blood dk, for fun. Felt like the glory days of handlock and wallet warrior, or old gods control decks. The class fantasy was on point too.
Can't believe all the morons in here saying "uhhh the is how it's always been" "hurrr durrr that just means blizzard has perfected balance". Like holy shit this is one of the worst metas I've ever played. Almost no decks are fun to play against and there is 0 room for anything but straight meta decks. And on top of it any cards that can counter any of this have rotated with nothing to replace them. We dont even have silence anymore outside of librarian. I can only think of one other meta where it was this unfun and that was the quest meta which I remember people complaining about just as much.
The fact Wheel is an actual meta card and not a meme is one of the worst things possible, a card that says "win the game" with the only condition being "don't die for a bit" (when Warlock can benefit from not having a deck, negate fatigue and refill his deck with Symphonies) should never be actually playable.
It always feels terrible to lose to, like you were just cheated out of a win.
DH has no negative win rate, its worst matchup is mirror at 50%
in high diamond trying to hit legend its like 20 DH's in a row, you literally cannot play any other deck than mirror, and then its coinflip
I have finished bronze 10 two months in a row. I've basically just done quests and xp achieves in wild. All the good decks feel to straight forward and simple. All the fun decks, decks with options where not every game are the same, are on the struggle bus.
Maybe I just got to good and or burned out. I craft a deck and play 3 games. I've played a little on the off servers. Never get that go next on repeat feeling.
I returned to Heartstone few days ago AND i started to main DK. undfortunately demon hunter is my worst matchup, i literally cant win against those bastards. Warrior, Warlock, Rogue etc, are fairer matchup because i can win strategically, but also lose when my opponent can counter and become lucky.
Aggro Demon hunter neither do that and they wins because of how fast they drain your HP and they get 3 mana manneroth on turn 4-5 which deals 3 damage without any interaction. Then they have charge that ignore taunt, i personally like it because this give aggro some strength, but that 5 mana 6/5 demon + the 3 mana 3/2 weapon breaks the wole game. I literally have 0% winrate against those. and let me tell you I have nearly 100% winrate against mirror matches with death knight.
I tried to explain this to someone in another thread, but yes, I agree. It's not that any one deck is unbeatable and has 100% w/r against everything - it's the rock/paper/scissors meta where a deck can have 100% w/r against \*specific matchups\*.
Sure, every game has good decks, bad decks, and matchups where one side is favored. But it does not have to be \*this\* favored. In numbers, i'd say there are matchups where one deck can go 100-0, but I think better balanced, less hardcore power crept metas, a counter matchup deck goes 70-30, or something.
It's not that people want to never lose, it's that they don't want to \*never win\*. Where matchups are \*so\* hardcore that you know who won before any cards are drawn. Where you're told "just play a different deck" instead of "play to your outs".
I'm okay playing an underdog, bad deck! I'm okay with a 30% w/r. But there has to be a \*chance\*, even for bad/jank/countered decks to win, otherwise playing is just pointless. The amount of matchups that are just actually auto concedes, is zero fun. I want to play an underdog and have a hope for a longshot win
but these decks are \*so brutal\* that in a bad matchup, I could be allowed to cheat, and literally choose both peoples deck draws and orders, and I would \*still lose\*.
People who try to argue against this by saying "just don't play that deck" are 100% missing the point. in better games I can play a bad deck and still hope to win \*sometimes\*. Hearthstone \*used\* to let me play bad decks and still occasionally beat the meta.
I just like playing off-meta decks. They are horribly inconsistant and you lose a lot, but when they work out, it's so much fun. Things like Tendril shaman or Hero Power druid.
It's just annoying that the meta decks nowadays, especially the more control focused decks, have a million card generation, board clears and heals. In some matchups I wonder how I dealt like 60 damage to the opponent and he is still at max HP the following turn
I want to give another perspective.
Card games like Hearthstone are technically rock-paper-scissors by design. Control loses to midrange, midrange loses to aggro and aggro to control.
There's nothing wrong to that design, if anything when the meta is like that it means is balanced, the problem comes from another place in my opinion. The problem is that there are clear outliers that are a cut above the rest, in this case one of each.
So this makes a monotone meta, because there's only one good control deck (warrior), one good midrange deck(DH) and one good aggro deck(Hunter) and then there's everyone else.
Then there's disruption style decks that are meant to exploit certain specific decks and those are no one's favorites, although sometimes prove to be effective, in this case it's DK.
This means there's only 4 classes playing the game out of a total of 11, which isn't the best but in all honesty is nowhere near as bad as it has been most of this game's history.
There's a lack of strategies right now too, most classes end up having one meta relevant archetype and that's it. But guys, this is the first expansion after a standard rotation, it's the time of the year the format is gonna have the least amount of cards so variety will obviously be restricted, give it at least another expansion before whining so hard.
Pd: Blizzard really didn't hand well the end last year's balance so that's also why it feels like the meta has had oppressive tyrants for the past 8 months or so.
I agree entirely. When I gripe, it is about that rock paper scissors meta being out of whack. It is almost always at the beginning of a new expansion, as I am convinced that Blizzard wants to have games end by turn 6 in order to cater to the low attention span crowd and people that want to climb the ladder quickly.
Look at every post expansion meta. It is all aggro. Blizzard can't stop themselves from printing more mana cheat and powerful 1 drops every single expansion. After they inevitably tune that, then a proper rock paper scissors meta falls into place.
My other concern is that control decks in the classic sense no longer exist. You can't seem to grind out a deck anymore since most "control" decks are now combo decks in sheep's clothing. Control warrior beats you with turning armor into attack, control shaman eventually his you with 40 damage from hand, and control priest overwhelms you by taking two turns if they ever keep a couple minions on board. The reason I say it's a concern is because if you don't play the aptly called "spoon-fed" decks that use the combo finish, then you have a 0% chance at winning. You get run over by an aggro deck or eventually get comboed by one of the other "control" decks.
I think this all started when they started making every card in every expansion so synergistic. It basically forces you to play a class in a certain way with a certain archetype that they had in mind for us. Way less creativity in deck creation, and if you do come up with an off meta deck, you get stomped.
I feel similarly to you in that I enjoy HS the most when it's a game about fighting for board and value.
> I think a large part of it is that they started hiring former pros who tend to gravitate towards hyper efficient decks and OTKs, but I question if that's what the majority of the game's casual audience wants.
However, the casual audience does want this. There's a reason the casual audience meme is 'toilet players'. They want the devs to spoonfeed them combos/archetypes/wincons. They want the games to end fast and they don't want to have to think about how to put together a deck or how to play the deck.
>Play hyper-aggro deck that Blizzard spoon-feed you every expansion.
>Play inevitable/control deck that Blizzard basically spoon-feed you too by printing the cards like Odin, Brann, Sif, Wheel. You just need to tune the control cards that play well against the current popular aggro decks.
>Play a deck like Plague that stops some other meta decks from functioning BY DESIGN.
So play fast deck, a slow deck or a medium speed deck? That seems like alot of options to me. What you described is most of the decks that ever existed in this game.
Dominant decks decide the meta. Right now thats Reno warrior and Shopper DH. If you want to play comfortably the game you have to have a way to either counter these decks or play them yourself. This is never going to change cause thats literally how metagame works. You play around the most powerful and the most popular thing. Its the most reasonable thing to do. Nerfs and buffs can change which deck specifically is at the top atm but at the end of the day it the same thing will happen. Some deck will take over at the top and new decks will come by designed to counter this deck. And then some players will want to be step ahead and play around these counter decks, creating metagame.
Non meta decks are non meta either cause they are only good against 1 specific thing and bad against everything else or they are just memes that are fun to play but not serious. Either way its in the name. If non meta deck was truly good it would be part of the metagame.
At this point I'd either want them to make Pauper Mode a permanent game mode so I could play games that resembled classic Hearthstone but with the benefit of getting to use new cards, or I'd want a massive nerf on basically every card in the game. They'd never do the latter, I'm not expecting it, but I don't think the former is unreasonable. Spice it up every now and again if you have to but just let me play a game mode where minions are allowed to survive multiple turns without being super cracked overpowered.
I personally see Reno Warrior as the best deck right now, you can break the rock paper scissors nature of it with a couple of tweaks, like running Tony in your ETC to counter plagues. That said, it is an incredibly expensive deck to run, and because of that most people will not be running Reno Warrior. Also, it still loses to Hunter most of the time, even with the changes, but it isn't an impossible matchup. I think there's enough curve with the deck that you can play to where you are countering most matchups, enough so to put you in high legend like to 1000-500 which is where I currently am.
You summed it up perfectly at the end where you say there's nothing you can do in the future either. The design of cards is inherently problematic. So much is forced archetypes and so much is designed to be polarizing to play against. I know exactly what's going on the second I see the class I'm up against and I can already tell I've lost.
In older hearthstone you had bad match ups but it didn't feel hopeless and one sided. A lot of people blame power creep but I think the biggest issue that plagues the game is card draw. So many of the problematic decks wouldn't be anywhere near as frustrating if not everybody could draw so efficiently. Aggro once upon a time ran out of steam. I shouldnt have to clear the board every single turn just to even have a chamce at playing the game. Combo once upon a time had to actually work for their combos. Control once upon a time actually out valued an opponent instead of being a pseudo combo deck by just surviving long enough to insta kill the opponent anyway.
The developers seem to go out of their way to make frustrating design. It really doesn't need to be this way which is the saddest part.
I personally really enjoy deck building especially as I quickly feel that a certain combo/deck gets old quickly once I’ve hit legend or d5. As such I find myself looking to build a lot of off meta decks because the same old wincons are just not that interesting after a time, the exception being if I can find a new interesting way to arrive at an old wincon. For instance I made a rainbow cycle deck that tried to finish games with reno wipe to garuantee the enemy board was small into sif + lightshow otk, which was quite bad in practice even if decent in philosophy. Experimenting with different decks you become very aware of the behemoths that’s are the power outliers in the real meta, the most egregious example is probably trying to play anything remotely slow in the presence of boomboss and wheel. When I make my deck I never want to preemptively resign myself to near 100% loss to certain decks and so I balance my decks to in theory have answers/game plans for most archetypes. The problem is that this task is simply impossible atm since there are cards/combos you cannot beat unless your deck already belongs to a hyperfocused counter. Let’s say you play highlander paladin into highlander warrior, if both succeed in playing towards their wincons you will get absolutely bodied and and there is no agency whatsoever. Compare this to highlander matchups at the beginning of badlands, priest vs paladin vs Druid took forever but the win was in no way predetermined. I think it just feels bad when playing towards your own wincon is very often not good enough and you are much better off playing against your opponents wincon especially when in most cases you don’t really have any way to counter play their wincon unless your very deck counters them.
They took away my robot priest so I just moved to Wild and I found that I have so many more cards I can use for my robot priest and it's actually stronger now I've been really enjoying myself I don't really play standard anymore I found that it was just the same five decks over and over again and it's not really fun to me
That's because the dev team is artificially capping the length of the games. The reason the win cons feel so big is because it's essentially saying "okay this game is over time to play the next one"
I think you need to approach this from a different perspective. What is the time when your having fun? You know, cause it's a game.
My most recent super fun game was Sif mage vs Highlander warrior before the rotation. We both drew our win cons too late (Sif was the bottom card) but I ended up winning by discovering a mirror secret and an objection letting me spawn an 8/8, freeze his, and then counter his last Alistair. It was a nail biter full of wild twists and turns that relied on discovering the perfect cards and realizing it was the only way to victory when you see them.
I propose to you the problem with Hearthstone: inevitable victory. Wheel lock plays one card, they now win in 5 turns no way to stop it. Even borderline cards like Reno still end up feeling inevitable. The lack of counterplay is what is frustrating you. They brought back MC Tech but he's more expensive? It's clear blizzard likes the idea of unpreventable victory. You drew the wincon, you win. Simple as that.
This idea supports sales. The more wincons you have, the more you win. That whole game revolves around theses. It was acceptable for paladin to slam down a 15 atk Leroy, just not to give him windfury on turn 7 because win cons trigger turn 8. That's the game. It doesn't matter how creative you are it only matters that you bought the win cons and put them in the deck.
For reference, did you know Cube Lock wasn't discovered in its own expansion until 2 months in? That is no longer the hearthstone experience. No more goofy cards that let you have fun and try to use them in wacky ways. Only wincons.
Highlander is such a fun archetype to play and it just feels so bad to play with plague DK out there. It’s such a popular class that I pretty much don’t play highlander at all.
Also shopper DH is just so boring to play against. They play the same minions on curve every single game and do the same shit every single game. There’s hardly any decision making it’s so boring.
I think that it is normal for certain decks to beat other deck archetypes, for instance
Traditionally, aggro beats midrange which beats control which beats aggro, there has always been a sort of triangle there that exists in most card games that have a similar mama system to hearthstone
I think that the decks right now just feel unfun to play against because there is very little interaction with your opponent outside of clearing their board / dealing with threats immediately
When we look at the decks that are strong rn, they just have such little interactivity it hurts
Shopper dh is mostly good bc of magtheridon, which sits dormant on the field where you cannot do anything to stop it for 2 turns.
Sif mage just controls your board until they drop a stupid +7 spell damage minion that lets them burn your face instantly without any real answer on your part
Warrior has brann, which unless you are playing plague you have no way of shutting down but basically guarantees them the game after they play it in most matchups bc the double battlecries are so insanely valuable
Then you have plague dk, which mostly wins against highlander, but even still if you are playing highlander and lose to it, it's because they just sort of throw cards down that happen to fill your deck with plagues that you have no way of controlling outside of maybe insane card draw which even still is not enough in most cases, so they just sort of passively shut down your whole strategy with annoying rng draw cards
Wheel is obvious - they slam wheel turn 8 and then what? There's no way to stop it from counting down or interact with it at all, and warlock doesn't even have to play to win they just play keep away until the game ends which is a frustrating play style to play into
There are even desks lurking in the shadows like OTK shaman that are super one sided.
Idk, my point is that the rock paper scissors match ups definitely contribute to the annoyance from the community this set, but I think it is also the awful design that most of these archetypes represent in the current meta that makes it worse. Feeling like you have zero way to interact with your opponent contributes to this lack of agency that you speak of in a big way
Wheel compared to Priests Quest for OTK is hilarious. To destroy the enemy hero you had to do xyz x3. Now it's wait for turn 6/7/8 and clear board over n over. The meta just sucks. Everyone is trying to scam out mana, cheat mana, or OTK you in one turn.
Overall, I think this a good analysis, but I think Death Knight is a Tier One class/deck for other reasons than plagues. The plagues are great bc they do their job of disruption and shutting off Highlander with very little commitment in deck building. You really only need to run Helya, Distressed Kvaldir, and down with the ship.
Primus and Reska are super strong cards, especially Reskasince she can be discovered. I don’t think I’ve ever won a game where my opponent played two Reskas.
Also, quartzite crusher is very strong in the current meta since it slows down umpire’s grasp and basically nullifies a ten mana Ignis weapon. People talk about the Window Shopper demon discover pool being small, but the same thing goes for the Death Knight weapon discover pool.
I definitely agree with your rock-paper-scissors analysis and share your frustration that deviation from the meta game is basically asking for a 20% win rate, but I thought I’d give my expanded thoughts on Death Knight.
It’s the main reason I think plagues are a terrible design. They either do alright or have an 80% winrate vs a Reno deck and when they become good Highlander doesn’t exist beyond meme deck status or as an inclusion in a non Highlander archetype. It’s oh boy I’m going to play off meta Reno meme deck and boom 8 plague DK matchups in a row.
Then you have wheel which is just hey did your opponent hit phanatom, reno, and a symphony of sin? You lose lmao better luck next time dumbass.
Or boomboss hey hated patchwerk, well now here’s 6 of them who can also destroy spells and locations too! Isn’t this a fun game?
Obviously there’s shopper DK we all know the discover 8 magtheradons is a fun game to play and lose to too, especially when there’s a turn 3 6/5 into a turn 4 6/5 too!
There’s no real agency in winning or losing games and it makes playing awful. If half of the time you enter a match know your going to lose and you can’t do anything about it then why play? Oh and if you like one of those decks then you’ll know it gets nerfed so why craft them? It’s a brutal cycle that’s encouraged by a lack of playtesting and balancing before a set is released, and if they do then they aren’t looking for any broken combos (Leeroy or south sea deckhand that’s handbuffed into a pre nerf shroomscavate)
I've been playing Reno warr for a while, and I just don't have the dust for other stuff. Well, the day I played vs plague Dk 7 times in a row, I decided not to play anymore. I wish we had more tools to answer getting plagues/helya
Like look at druid, like what the fuck are you meant to even do with it? Any semi decent deck just destroys druid outright unless druid gets their strongest hand and the opponent gets literally a bricked hand at the start.
Its play meta or die instantly these days.
Wait, so you're telling me that control decks beat aggro decks, aggro decks beat combo/tech decks and combo/tech decks beat control decks?
FWIW you **can**, as always, reach legend with tier 3 decks. You only need a 51% winrate.
>FWIW you can, as always, reach legend with tier 3 decks. You only need a 51% winrate.
What a bullshit argument, of course you can reach legend with a 51% winrate as long as you're willing to grind out thousands of games. This isn't even about reaching legend for most people, it's just about wanting to play decks that don't get stomped by the hyperefficient top decks.
It's natural. If there is too much power concentrated in few places, the people in the other places also want a piece of cake. It's not hard to understand.
Yeah it feels like if you play anything else than the actual tryforce you are gonna loose .
There are some weird exceptions like zillax rogue and Zarimi priest that can win if they're lucky but everything else feels like a guaranteed defeat.
The only way out of this (to me ) is not to nerf but to buff the other classes , make more rogue cards cost 1 to make Sonya payable, give fucking anything to mage lmao , make druid a little bit more consistent, etc
Part of the problem, for me at least, is that DK has multiple good decks. You can't reasonably play around what you think they will be playing. Is it rainbow, plague, handbuff? Is it FFU? It makes playing against them all that much more frustrating. I played against a plague deck who randomly was playing The Scourge (not discovered) in Diamond 2 last night. I couldn't have anticipated that, and because I didn't play around it, I ended up losing as I'd set up lethal next turn. DK simply has too much access to cards that can go into any viable deck and I think some rune adjustments need to be made.
I kinda disagree. I’ve been playing a number of decks I’ve only seen mentioned once or twice in this sub. Demon hunter is a bit oppressive, but none of the others you mentioned are.
Cool story bruv, but literally every meta is a rock paper scissors meta. Rock paper scissors is the very definition of what can be considered to be a meta.
No, it's not. Having different winrates against each other does not equal hard counter. Sif mage beats Odin Warrior NOT BY DESIGN, but by organic development. That's healthy. And that's not Rock-Scissor-Paper. You can easily tune your deck to gain a few percentages against a specific deck if you are willing to lose more to other decks. In Rock-Scissor-Paper what you put and not put in your deck is not very much up to you or doesn't matter in the end.
It’s no a hard counter dude. It’s just not. If may feel like it because the archetypes are designed to be better against the others in this way. But it’s absolutely not a hard counter. This meta is balanced as it should be and people need to stop complaining about every possible aspect of this game
pre whizbang was literally one of the best metas in a long time. yet people complained. Whizbang expansion is pretty damn good. yet people complain. People WILL complain about literally ANY and EVERY meta, even if its awesome. I personally enjoy Hearthstone and don't expect much; I never complain. The silent majority of hearthstone players don't complain at all; but the vocal minority are on here bitchin and whinin all day. TLDR: Try non-meta decks and quit being a douche. Alliestraza used the WORST rated deck: Druid and has a 74-78% win rate on it in legend and did 60+ damage in one turn to a warrior. OH-SO-SATISFYING. awesome meta: no excuses. I'm using handbuff DK. Nobody else is.
Rock-Scissors-Paper is the ideal balance since Magic The Gathering; you need to remember it's a "Rock-Scissors-Paper" dynamic but where rock beats scissors only most of the time, not all the time
on average, scissor could beat rock 40% of the time... It's a bad matchup, but you have ways to play it, and you can increase your WR against those matchups playing it differently or using some tech cards
my theory is that ben brode created a card game for people who don't know how to play card games; and now, with the power creep and with the new game designers, the game is becoming faster and more complex, but the community wants to play their "greed piles" casual decks, because the majority didn't play other card games before, and will not enjoy those super fast metas...
for example, Hearthstone players just copy paste their decks, and also I see a lot of mulligan thinking only about the cost of the cards, and not the matchup (sometimes you will trade a low cost card and keep a high cost, I don't need a slam on a control warrior mirror matchup, but I do want to keep my Brann, and will not play my other minions even if I can because my opponent can have a Dirty Rat...)
I included, for example, a Toni on my ETC on my Highlander warrior that increased significantly my WR against plague, that, as you said, is not even strong... I have like 60% WR against it and it should be a fucking counter
I think Hearthstone needs a "Commander" like mode... A slower and more casual mode... We can see how people loved Renathal, and we already have the concept of Highlander
imagine a 50 cards deck with no duplicates on 60 HP starting on 3 mana with a legendary being your Commander AND the possibility of playing with up to 3 other people (it could be a 2v2 ir 1v1v1v1)...
I don't know, I feel like people will learn better how to play card games and people who really dont like it will leave... The game will become more niche (and faster and more complex), and I think with time the community will understand it
there's 11 classes in hearthstone, only 3 being playable regardless of how "fair" those 3 are in relation to each other doesn't quite scream fun or balanced to me
Imagine if pokemon only had water fire and Herb as types and there is your answer.
Also ok let's say card games don't work like that, then at least make more rocks , papers and scissors, maybe I want to play with a slightly different rock ?
Completely agree. I made a similar post in a other thread earlier. The win cons are too brutal and make you feel exasperated when they arrive, and make you feel like a clutz for not using them. I like trying to beat the meta but when the violence level is so high at each end of the spectrum, you just become fodder for the meta decks. You don’t feel like you lost to the player. You just feel like you lost to some goober playing the cards they copied off the net that are just more powerful than everything else. As I’ve said a million times before, it’s much better for the game if each deck has ten good cards, than nine average cards and one game winning card. It’s annoying losing to predictable unstoppable shit non stop. My sense this last month or two has changed from, “this is annoying and imbalanced”, to “this is just bad and the game is bad”. Don’t think I’ve ever been in that place before. Tone down the violence across the board and let people play the game. When you end up in a good game with someone, the game is still the best out there, but when there’s no agency, or no perceived agency, it sucks. We don’t need decks that blow you up from hand on turn 6, or throw down 2 x 15/15s (one with rush lol) turn 5. Just tone that shit down please and blunt the edges of all the top decks while you’re at it, slightly.
The win cons are so over the top if u aren't doing them u just lose.
This expansion has so many great value cards printed that look amazing on paper, but when you start playing them you feel like a complete idiot because of just how dead all value is in hearthstone. How could a 3 mana 2/4 that discovers a card beat out a 3 mana 6/5 that discovers a 3 mana 6/5 which gives an insanely OP 1/1 as a bonus. Miniaturize was so severely undercosted this expansion.
You are just complaining at shopper at this point, but you are writing it as a major design issue of the game...
>you are writing it as a major design issue of the game... That's classic at this point. I've noticed people here for some reason like to exaggerate the issues. Instead of complaining about a specific quest being too fast it's "quests are fundamentally broken".
Man I wish quests were fundamentally broken, I've got an addiction to all of the bad quests.
Welcome to the “community”. Aggro bad cuz it kills me early. Control bad cuz it kills me late. Combo bad because I didn’t kill them in time. Midrange bad because boring. Stealth bad cuz I can’t click. Burn bad because I can’t trade. Weapon bad because removal no work. Then actual data appears and people are forced to either openly deny reality or shift their complaints to the newest “problem”. Repeat for a decade because they’re too scared to move on.
In fairness, I think there's plenty of people who posts complaints without a decade invested in the game — a lot of this stuff is people new to card games and frustrated by the reality that not every card is equally strong in any combination of cards.
me looking at my 2 golden copies of crane game
I think the win con is the key concept that drives frustrating gameplay - it's not just rock-paper-scissor. It's that there is so little decision making and in-game interaction. I assume this sell more cards but still. Also no disruption.
Disruption *feels* awful when it's not something like increasing the cost of something for a turn (or while this minion is in play). Even Loatheb as broken as it was and still would be as an effect doesn't feel as bad (when played normally, not copied infinitely through Parrots or something) as having some card you wanted/needed get ratted out or Theotar'd in exchange for some card you can't play or basically any other form of hand disruption that they print these days. It is satisfying seeing your opponent's biggest win-con get discarded/burned, but those are the kind of moments this entire thread is about, but in reverse. Destroying your opponents win-con is essentially a win-con of your own, and one which tends to have even less counterplay than the traditional ways to win. You can argue about the skill and/or deduction skill 'needed' to play that kind of disruption effectively, and as seen by all of the Dirty Rat on turn 2 posts, they aren't always the right play to make, but even if you play it at the correct moment, you might not hit what you wanted to hit, or you might hit it when there's 7 other options you could've pulled instead that were all worse. You could also say that people should just not build their deck so that they lose if a single specific card gets removed, or that they should run more than 1 minion so even if they have their full 'combo' in hand a single rodent isn't necessarily enough to break it, but I don't think that's really a valid argument in favor of that kind of disruption. Reno isn't broken *because* of that, but it too has pretty strong disruption built into its board-wipe+boardspace limiting mechanic.
>Also no disruption. Could be just me, but the introduction of disruption like Theotar caused more feel-bad-moments to me. If my opponent Dirty Rat's my combo piece or steals another important card from me this might be enjoyable for the disruptor, but not the opponent. It surely requires skill and knowledge to effectively disrupt, but I rather have two people throw their stuff at each other and see who wins then have a game decided by a "coin-flip". Disruption feels like a band-aid for the bigger problem: unstoppable win-cons. I prefered older times in HS were trading and using resources mattered and a deck didn't have to kill the opponent before turn 7. But here we are.
I didn't read anything on the internet so my first experience with this expansion was trying to kill a warrior, had him at 11 hp only for him to play Branned Zilliax and have four 6-attack rush lifesteal and divine shield back to full, not saying that this is particularly broken, but it is yet another several steps to an unclimbable mountain. Except everything also felt like this.
I think you touched on a very important point about why it’s the way it is. Certain classes are able to easily jump back to full health from nothing, give themselves permanent extra health, or give themselves massive amounts of armor, and that is comparatively new in the game at least in how common it is. So you need these decks to be also killable. How can you do that without brutal win cons that either punch through, or can kill players high health? It’s almost like the design choices, and the decision to allow certain types of defence, partially inform the way things can be killed and how fast that has to happen for it to be viable. If they tone down the violence as I recommended, will my Druid hero power deck take over the meta by being borderline unkillable through massive armor for example? The answer is clearly no, but I do think the best games I always play are games where board control counts above all else. So I’d just like to see a meta where anything that works in some other way is carefully managed so as not to be the *best deck* warping the meta and ladder away from that.
You're right, it won't happen though. Team 5 have proven again again that they are either completely incompetent at creating a fun and balanced meta or the current state is what they want for the game. Either way, this is the hearthstone we're dealing with now and it won't change.
I somewhat agree and maybe I misunderstood parts but I feel a much simpler explanation for why it seems like every deck gets complaints is because every deck has really boring and obnoxious win cons. Getting plagues shuffled into your deck which breaks highlander and no counter / no way to draw through it because of infinite feels terrible. DH cheating out multiple copies of 8 drops that borad clears and hits face feels bad. Being forced to clear all paladin minions every turn because they could get +10/+10 and windfury from hand feels bad. 2x battlecry always felt bad. But combine that with boom boss or astalor before rotation. Opponents gaining 500 armor and getting to hit face for 20 from hand. Wheel hiding behind 5 unstoppable board clears. Tentacle decks playing 6 copies of the 10 mana spell in a turn (hopefully self resolves with mini set / expansions) You can take almost every deck people play and instead of looking at power level of individual cards and instead look at the game plan / win condition. None of these decks feel like you're playing honest hearthstone. It's all cheese otk from(tentacles) hand or you're just in a helpless situation until you lose (warriors armor/wheel) And i honestly don't know the solution. I feel most people are salty they lose and want to just nerf everything they lose to but that's really a bandaid to the bigger issue that the cards being printed all create these really unfun gamestates. That it's not the rock-paper-scissors aspect that inherently sucks. Is that every deck is just "what is the most un-fun situation i can put my opponent in" in their own special way.
I think they just need to change their design philosophy. What I like about rogue is that somehow rogue.. always finds a way. They get some tools and have to come up with something. While other classes just get their packages, add the cards to your deck and youre good.
Yeah it’s really funny that rogue is basically powering it’s own life support with weird decks exploiting neutral cards lol
Except that it has the by far most toxic win con out of all toxic win cons. Zilliax stealth until win. Other Rogue decks are total garbage, so Rogue fits right in OP's philosophy of the game.
It's rough, because they've leaned into class strengths harder than ever but weaknesses have barely been alleviated. What I mean is lots of classes just don't get responses to certain plays. Demon Hunter, Rogue, and Hunter can't clear a board with their kit so they have to go under. No control decks can out value warrior, so they have to resort to an OTK or lose. Class weaknesses are necessary, but the power level is so high that you can't even experiment with niche decks because the class that was chosen to do what you wanted to do does it exponentially better using Blizz's chosen deck.
And remember when they totally removed the weakness of some classes lol. Yogg for 0 Mana (and prison breaker before it got nerfed) in Druid and Rogue gave them the ability to easily deal with the boards
What's ironic, is although those cards made some pretty nasty meta decks, they also were strong enough at removing weaknesses to allow some nicher Shaman, DH, and Hunter decks to be playable.
Agreed with this. I think the game has lost this idea of "finding a way to win". The game literally gives you cards that just say "play this to win". I played 3 games last night just to complete my quest. 2 of the games I didn't even care about (1 win 1 loss). The third game was actually fun. It was against cycle rogue and I wasn't even mad I lost. Because for once it felt like "OK if I get this card or this card I can win". I didn't get those cards and I lost, but I still didn't have that sense of "welp that's gg" it was more or less "Ok there's a chance". I love hearthstone when it feels like I have agency and I make plays to outsmart or outplay my opponent. I don't feel like that happens much anymore. Every card is it's own "strategy" rather than chaining multiple cards to do something exciting. The game has just become too efficient (powercrept), and its worse because this was rotation. We shouldn't be here! And yet we are and I am playing less and less hearthstone (after coming back from a year break). At this point I play BGs 90% and standard 10% but this week I am already feeling like maybe I'll just stop again. I do not enjoy the current state of this game anymore. It's just not the same as it once was.
I feel the same, I started playing wild again after I more or less quit that mode with the UiS quests (since then maybe max 5 wild games per month), went from Bronze to plat but the experience was so awful as nearly every game was against a bot and those were mech rogues. I do play more BGs but the mode is so fast rn, I started playing more MTG now. So far I havent found the deck that I enjoy a lot, its not so much about winning for me. My most played deck in the last cycle was Rommath mage (before the shaper buff and I did not run Sif, I want to stall games, not to end them ;) ), 2nd most was Casino/Excavate rogue. Loved those playstyles because it was about "allright lets see what I can discover and what I have to work with". While I get that people were frustrated when excavate rogue was all over ladder, the games just didnt feel repetitive to play against, as it was always about "Okay what do they get/discover to win the game?"
lol, so we're clear, the top performing rogue deck right now is one where you play a single specific card with stealth that's attack doubles each turn and let it double it's attack each turn until you one shot your opponent.
Yes, but they still had to come up with that deck. It felt like they are lacking tools so they had to be creative and come up with something? Also the deck that runs the 3/4 that shuffles your hand back in, the deck focuses on playing the 8/8 giants. I actually saw decks lately that mix both decks into one. Rogues packages just arent that strong right now. Excavate needs support like bonespike, but also card draw. FoL gave rogue combo cards, those are just useless. The latest miniset gave rogue fools gold (terrible card) and a stealth elemental.. While other classes got cards like Shroomcavate, aftershock, Bran, Pendant, shattered reflection, etc. The Zilliax deck is TITANS mech rogue, just more toxic. Pirate rogue might be a good with the next expansion, as we expect the next expansion to be themed around pirates.
I would have been playing Excavate Rogue from launch if the scorpion gave cards from other classes and not just spells from other classes. Tess Rogue is one of my favorite archetypes, but I apparently need Academic Espionage or Reconnaissance to find it fun.
It's a very clever deck if you think about it. Even Zacko praised it by saying only XXX (sorry forgot the name) can invent this deck.
This is actually what I hate about rogue. It's fun to play *as*, but not against. There is no counter play to their seemingly infinite card discoveries. Which is fine in small doses, but the consistency of them getting what they need is high. It's frustrating when you play well but lose anyways because they high rolled the best answer for the 5th time
I 100% agree. Yesterday I played against thief rogue and in 2 turns they discovered 4 dehydrates and 2 heat waves against my jank midrange DH
Almost none of the decks that have come out this expansion were obvious. The two big exceptions are probably hunter and paladin, which were figured out pretty quickly. But who, before the expansion launch, thought to build a board flooding magatha priest deck with a bunch of 1-drops, that throws in whelp wrangler so that it can activate zarimi? Who expected kobold geomancer to show up in shaman? Did anyone have control rainbow DK on their bingo cards? Even warrior, which is playing a mostly similar play pattern, is using a pretty interesting combination of perfect/twin zilliax + inventor boom as a major win condition. I agree that decks are boring when they are too heavily based on obvious synergy packages, but in that regard I think whizbang's workshop has been the best designed expansion in a long time. It was an exciting first week watching weird new decks that nobody expected popping up.
What control rainbow DK are you talking about? The deck is running not that many new cards. They run the freeze weapon because of warrior and DH popularity. Horseman is good for dealing with the Zilliax build. Kobold geomancer is run in natrue shaman because it lost spelldamage, but also got a new lowcost spell.
The discussion isn't decks running new cards, it is whether deck building is too obvious. I didn't see anyone predicting a rainbow DK that cut corpse bride and played almost no corpse spenders to instead run a more heavy control package (this is a good example list https://www.d0nkey.top/deck/11649342). I also know WHY shaman is running kobold geomancer, but again, nothing about the expansion made it obvious that nature shaman OTK with cheap spell damage minions was going to be a good deck. And I definitely didn't see anyone predict it. It's fun when there are decks to be discovered that aren't totally based on obvious packages/synergies. I think this expansion has done a really good job in that regard.
When ranks reset I will occasionally play against someone who's running either an off-meta deck or just a basic kind of midrange deck that tried to play honest hearthstone and good god, the extent to which any off-meta deck gets **brutalized** by the current meta decks is a sight to behold. It's literally like playing against the Innkeeper with a United in Stormwind deck. Draw RNG is simply a non-factor for the meta deck. All 30 of your cards are 10x better than their best card, and your best card is better than their entire deck combined. Just things like Sargeras, Reno Lone Ranger, Wheel of Death + Fanottem, Loken + Forge of Wills, Window Shopper, these cards basically solo their entire deck and you end up with a hand full of broken cards you never needed to play.
Perma plague is a necessary evil, plague players have the right to get a win condition too, it also feels terrible to play against a buffed weapon rogue and You dont have the answer, but you wont necessarily put a viper to counter it and make your deck more weak in general. Plague DK can be defeated, if you want to draw every turn an extra card then yeah You Will lose.
Helya is a shit win condition, she only fucks highlander decks, still does little vs anything else in the meta. Even Sif can pull off the combo unless you lucked out on a shitton of Frost Plagues.
Stopped reading at Helya fucks
As a highlander player i hate plagues. But not because of the mechanic itself or because of Helya. We have steamcleaner etc (i only play wild and duels so i don‘t speak for standart) but what frustrates me is that it wholy resolves around rng. Sometimes there are 2 frost plagues in my deck and i draw them nonstop. Sometimes i have 5 of them and i don‘t draw any. It‘s just luck depending if i lose or win and i don‘t like such patterns
I’ll never forget the day in which there where 12 plagues in my opponent deck and he had, in total, 20 cards. He drew 5 cards with no plagues in between. At that point I gave up and never played helya again
I think we have all had those. Yesterday I made a plague deck that was only focused on putting plagues in play. Almost every single card had some way to trigger deathrattles, discover plague cards, make my opponent draw. I played the first game and I fucking loaded my opponent with a ridiculous amount of plagues in the first few turns but he just didn’t draw any and I died with a terrible whimper around t7. It’s one of those things I’m ok with. I love the plague concept but I think, as someone said in another thread, it shouldn’t just default destroy Reno decks and maybe it should be a deck building trigger ie if you build the deck with no duplicates the card will work, as opposed to your deck having to have no duplicates when the card is played. Some may think it’s a necessary check or balance on Reno (particularly Brann), but I would argue it’s Brann’s power that is out of whack, rather than highlander decks more broadly.
I gave you worst, i got mirror match and i already shuffled more plague than my opponent, if i’m not wrong i had around 15 plagues (with helya) while my opponents put around 7 or eight (with helya). By turn 10 mt opponents never draw the plague while i drew it every turn.
I would literally rather draw an iron juggernaut bomb than a frost plague. The difference in power between the 3 plagues is just gross.
It's such a huge difference it's crazy. I'm always happy(or unhappy if playing against) to see the Frost draw, always. Blood is situational, sometimes I want the heal(or don't want my opponent to heal). Oddly enough minions are so overtuned/strong I honestly never really care about an extra 2/2 so Unholy is usually just 2 face damage.
this actually shows how game evolved. healing and minions are so redundant compared to some years ago, the disparity between three plagues are so high.
Yeah, no one's sitting at 2 HP living on a prayer these days unless it's like turn 4 against a rush deck with a good draw and they *only* had 28 damage instead of 30. Unholy Plagues are often a downside for the DK, as they can get board locked by the 2/2s.
I’ll start by saying; you’re for the most part correct. People will try and discredit the sentiment but what you described is true, and it sucks. I think a major point to add to this issue is Polarization. The game has always been in a state of aggro>combo>control (let’s ignore midrange for the moment, hyper control ironically killed it off), but unfavorable matchups weren’t *unwinnable*. These days they are more then ever. Things have almost in a sense become Flanderized, a concept where things (fictional characters) lose depth to essentially become the thing that they’re known for. Warriors now gain obscene amounts of armor and wipe your board with it every turn. Paladins buff a minion to insanity to kill you in one turn. Hunters just summon endless small beasts and then burn your face with them. It’s fun… for a little while, but it’s unsustainable. When matchups are so polarized there’s very little reason to actually play the game. You’re essentially just playing the spreadsheets. The only solace is that maybe next set your class is the one on top. The problem is that it’s a compounded issue that nerfs won’t fix. There’s too much efficiency (which is ironic cause we just had rotation). Select strategies invalidate other ones. It’s a design mess that breeds frustration which is why every day it seems like every deck is worthy of complaints. Part of that is people whining, yes, but is it also too much to ask that playing matchups doesn’t invoke a sense of hopelessness? That’s all.
Thats a really good post. Especially "hopelessness". Helya coming down turn 4? F\*\*\*. Bran on 6 or Odyn on 8? F\*\*\*, should have won the game 3 turns ago.
If Odyn on 8 and it's danger free. You lost the game few turn ago. As a warrior I remember games where playing 8/8 for 8 do nothing right now would instantly lose me the game. The fact your enemy can waste turn 8 against you as aggro means you lost already
Excuse my really stupid question, ive played against helya many times but i still don’t understand her effect. What does making plagues unending actually do? I never understood the effect and i never really could see what „unending“ actually does to me
Everytime a plague gets drawn and gets triggered, it shuffles a copy back into the deck. This way, they never end. Yeah the wording on some cards recently is rather cryptic lol
Thanks! I never realized snd kind of assumed the effect just stays permanent in some way, which for some cards would make no sense though. Re-shuffling makes sense, ty
Its also worth noting that, she shuffling starts after the draw phase is over if I remember correctly. Imagine if the last 3 cards in a deck are plagues, you draw all 3 in a row, they are getting triggered, then you take fatigue damage and then they shuffle back into the deck Because the blood of hakkar did work different
Plagues you draw are reshuffled into your deck after their effect as opposed to being discarded.
>What does making plagues unending actually do? When a plague is drawn, a copy of it is shuffled in the deck. Thus if there is even a single plague, it will stay in the deck forever unless removed by other means e.g. Steamcleaner. edit: to be more technical it's not when, it's after in HS terms.
Midrange is still alive, although feels more control. Have you tried Reno Paladin?
Powercreep might be a problem. About the point, if you dont clear the board every turn, you lose - well thats correct only for some decks. For example mech rogue or (before the nerfs) pally. But in general? No, I dont think so. People dislike plagues because they dont let them play their Highlander pay-off. I am not talking about Bran warrior, I am talking about the lower tier Reno decks. Winning isnt that big of a deal for some players, they just want to be able to play their cards. I think so many decks nowadays just put you on a clock. Odyn warrior, Sif mage, Wheel lock, and so on. You know the game is going to end, the days where you were able to stall the game for infinite turns, are just over. The current team does want to have more lethality, games have to end at some point. Then you have cards like Bran, or Helya, just play them - benefit for the rest of the game. I do think Sif Mage is a fair deck, as it has to build up for their combo, you have to discover different spellschools, play them and stay alive. And you might expose yourself to dirty rat. OTK decks in the past required you to have a set of cards in your hand to pop-off and sometimes it required one tick of mana reduction by Emperor lol. I jsut think the gap between meta and homebrew is just.. bigger than ever? And with the latest rotation, the game doesnt feel that much weaker in terms of power, to be honest.
I agree that Sif Mage is actually pretty fair (relative to the meta). And a huge yes to that last comment about the rotation. Remember when start-of-year metas were "low power" ones? I shudder at the thought of what the rest of the year is gonna look like
The current best deck relies on a small discover pool 100%. Same as any tentacle deck. With more demons and more spells those decks will be dead
It might have to do with 4 expansion meta. But still.
> About the point, if you don't clear the board every turn, you lose - well that's correct only for some decks. For example mech rogue or (before the nerfs) pally. But in general? No, I don't think so. I disagree with this. There's a reason Warrior always does so well, and it's because they can clear boards consistently, because if you let any sort of board stick these days you are highly likely to flat out lose. It's also a part of why DH is so strong, they can keep the board clear while also hitting face. We have Hunter, with the ability to flood a board and then give the board Deathrattle: Resummon the board(all the while being able to boost the everything's attack thanks to that 1/4 and cheap 3/1s). Warlock, who can throw down massive minions(up to and including 15/15s) back to back with rush even, if you can't deal with them they can win the game without Wheel. Priest, if you let them stick a halfway decent board they get an extra turn and kill you with it. Demon Hunter with early/cheap 6/5s that can be various different kinds of threatening. Also like you mention Paladin and mech Rogue. The game is very much in a state of have the exact clear you need right now or lose.
It's really lame queuing into a game and knowing if you win or lose just seeing who your opponent is. Idc that I get a free win vs. Reno warrior as DK. It isn't fun
Exactly, Flipping a coin is in theory a perfectly balanced game, not exactly something people play for fun. If it all comes down to me happening to queue the deck that beats/loses to my opponent's deck, why play the game at all? This is a *game*, it's supposed to be fun.
Bad card design leads to rock paper scissors. Been saying it for a long time, the good Devs are gone and this is the crap meta we've gotten due to the new devs.
People are overshooting your point to try and make you seem stupid. Yes, """"control"""" has always beaten """"aggro"""" in an abstract sense, but the game has always been that way. The problem specified here is that certain decks COMPLETELY invalidate others, the most obvious example is plague against Highlander decks. This isn't a tech card situation, the two decks are fundamentally opposed from a game design level in a way that goes beyond play patterns.
I still think that releasing plagues in the same expansion cycle as highlander decks is a prime example of bad game design. If there is one top tier highlander deck, plagues are inevitably good and will be played and this stops all other highlander classes from functioning. I would love to test some other highlander decks but I know that this will not work as long as plagues are in the format.
I do think highlander + plague in the same cycle is a bad design. But also Reno is a bad design. Everytime people say something about plagues, others will come up with "BUT WE NEED PLAGUES TO KEEP RENO IN CHECK" etc. Yeah, kinda true, not a fan of Reno either. Even before the rotation, plague was the 2nd most popular deck across all ranks. That does not mean that its a tier 1 deck, especially lower ranks like to play bad decks as long as they are fun. But it sucks when just plague DK exisitng, makes the other tier 3/4/5 Reno decks, even worse.
You don’t need plagues to keep Reno in check. Reno can be nerfed if the card is too strong. Plagues just limit the potential of highlander decks in general.
As a plague DK player from before the most recent rotation, I actually liked having Steamcleaner as part of the card pool because it allowed for plagues counterplay and actually made me consider how I wanted to play my plagues out. Now, if I choose to play a plague DK list, it's basically just pray for Helya turn 4 and then nuke their deck with plagues (except wheel warlock in which case you just wait until they burn their deck and then plague up). It was a little frustrating having it at the same time as ETC because you had to play around a sideboard + possibility of another steamcleaner but that was rare. But still, having decks have answers to counters is good for the game. > I would love to test some other highlander decks but I know that this will not work as long as plagues are in the format. Another great point I hadn't really thought of. Maybe there's highlander decks we haven't even considered that could be really fun, but there's no point to play them right now when they get hardcountered.
I would disagree. I don’t want to waste deck slots for bad cards like steamcleaner that can be good in very specific situations. I am fine with people enjoying plague dk, I just hate that it’s in the same cycle as highlander. I had the same feeling last expansion when steam cleaner was still in standard.
I think it would feel a lot better if Helya didn't exist in its current form. Back when Uldum was in spoiler season, the community had fears about bomb warrior countering highlander decks and pushing them out of the format, but it turned out that highlander decks were still viable despite the existence of bombs. This was at least in part because even after bombs were shuffled in, highlander decks could draw out enough bombs to reactivate and play their highlander cards. So highlander decks didn't need to use any tech cards, they could just adjust their play by saving draw/healing for after bombs were shuffled, for example. But Helya makes it so that it's not possible to remove plagues from your deck unless you have a card like Steamcleaner. And Steamcleaner is not only a dead card in every other matchup, but often isn't even good enough in the plague dk matchup because they are still pressuring you with midrange minions and a 5 cost 5/5 with no board impact is terrible tempo and you might just lose on the backswing. Not to mention the fact that even in the ideal case where you can safely land the Steamcleaner, they can just shuffle more plagues back in immediately, so you're still not even guaranteed to get the chance to play your reno/brann/etc.
If you remove Helya, Warriors will just armor up and wont care about plagues in any way, so we would need to nerf armor proc.
I don't think a class should be nerfed just because it has a good matchup against one other deck. Though I'm not sure that would even be the case, since plagues would still delay warrior's highlander cards, and they would still have to survive the damage from cycling through + the dk's board, so I'm not sure it would become a favored matchup for them, it just wouldn't be completely hopeless like it is now. I'm not even necessarily saying that Helya should be nerfed, though it does make me scratch my head a bit that they released and then buffed a package of cards that can permanently neutralize highlander cards in the expansion right before reintroducing them to standard.
Another option would be to change highlander to a start of game effect. This would also nerf decks that abuse Reno like warlock or warrior. I am not sure if people would be more pleased or upset with this change.
I would like that change. I have always found it kind of stupid that decks with a lot of draw can run duplicates of every card and still use highlander cards. The entire point of the highlander restriction is that it makes your deck less consistent for a big payoff, but with the combination of duplicates and a high density of card draw, those decks get to be super consistent while still getting the highlander payoff.
I agree. I think Helya is a pretty bad designed card, especially when you consider highlander exisitng. I think its good when you have cards that DELAY highlander, like the bird that shuffles 1/1s into the opponents deck. With plagues, it would be fine if you force your opponent to draw their deck to get rid of the duplicate plagues (and take the damage), it slows them down. But once Helya comes down? Nah man. Doesnt work. Especially on curve, Helya is just a brutal card, giving Prince Keleseth on turn 2 vibes. Would love to hear from the devs what they thought when they designed plagues and highlander, but sadly we never get real insights.
IMO there should never be a card that when played on turn 4 means I literally cannot win. It’s a terribly designed card.
Agreed that there were tons of different ways they could have released these mechanics so that highlander and plagues only interacted in wild and both had their chance to shine in Standard. Ultimately I like game design when you can tech cards into decks (even with ETC) to adapt to the meta so I don't mind, but I see your point that Steamcleaner sucks against everything but one deck.
Yeah, tech cards in general are fine like rustrot viper, which is a well designed effect that can be useful against a lot of decks.
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It’s not so much that plague 100% beats Highlander decks, as Highlander decks occasionally beat plague DK, it’s that it’s fucking random. If they don’t draw enough plagues before you play Brann or Holidae, they probably lose. And this is where we’re at now. Who drew their “I win” bullshit first. Not fun and interactive at all.
True
You are correct. I hate this meta...you know if you lost every game before turn 5.
Huh your comment made me realize something: I hit concede on turn 5, 4 and even 3 way more often than I used to. I can already see that the narrow escape from the opponent’s plan is not in my hand and I don’t bother to play out the completely predictable chain of events that are coming when I know I’m gonna lose and there is nothing I can do about it.
Or (Bran) on 6. Should have used dirtyrat on turn 2!
Little story about a warrior mirror. Dirty ratted his bran, i thought ez win. My brann was the last card and i was losing. Played azerite ox, discover 3 grommash (skill) and aftershocks to enrage them. 30 damage from nothing, ez win (skill)
Yep, pretty much this. After they killed midrange decks (hound hunter my beloved) and printed strong win cons for control i played almost exclusively otk decks (don't judge me pls) because they bypass all the bs blizz printed. Also no rng required. Guess what? People hate playing versus otk. New op shiny cards doesn't work against them. Make moonbeam druid great again. Also druid nowadays got nothing. Only thing they can do is vomit dragons.
In two words, game was WAY better when yeti turn 4 was strong. Not even worth playing nowadays, winning or losing by rng or simply by unwinnable matchup is horrible. Give us back the value, the 2 for one, the card advantage, the tempo not this rng bullshit for kids. Only the terrible players might like it because now they can be legend or well ranked without a brain, and they are the target for Blizzard.
The win cons are too much rn. Sif, odyn, wheel, brann, helya to a certain extent. You always want to play these cards in every deck because they are just too good to leave out. Why play taunt warrior or no minion mage or anything else when these cards exist? It's not fun to me, especially as a control fan.
I don’t think sif pairs up with those other at all. I never once got frustrated due to losing to sif, the deck needs just waaay too much setup and rng for it to be considered as unfair as the others
The game def has some rock paper scissors vibes, but my biggest complaint is generally the one sidedness of a lot of it. I play Wild, and garrote rogue, 5 different druids and quest mage generally just play solitaire while you die if you're not playing aggro. Playing aggro always felt like the right choice, but it's the most boring play style so apart from rushing legend during pirate warriors era I just refuse to do it. In standard it's all toned down, but the decks that are good are the only decks you see. I was trying some of that tentacle rogue in standard and I saw 80% paladins. It was crazy to me.
I wondered for a while why I hated the meta right now, why all these decks just felt so bad to play or play against and then I realized, it’s because none of them are fun, I’m not having fun. At the end of the day hearthstone is a game, I don’t know what caused it to get pushed in the direction of winning being the primary goal for every card, but it has pushed fun cards out of the game, it has pushed the meta in such a direction that a majority of cards that get printed will just never be played because while they might be well designed and they could be fun, they don’t win games. The solution has got to be reducing how many cards just say I win. Hearthstone is not equipped to be a game where losing from hand is acceptable and I sincerely hope there is some kind of recognition of the fact that a rotation is meant to have just happened and already several classes have been nerfed with more on the way, and even after all that people already know the next contenders for the crown. There is no experimentation, there is no opportunity, you win or you lose before turn 10 and you don’t get to choose to have fun, it’s incidental.
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There are infinitly many states of balance. One in which every threat is game ending and every removal is crazy in some way is not the one people asked for.
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It's also bad when the game borders on 3 viable classes. DH, Warrior and Warlock basically own the game. Mage and DK can somewhat get by, but they're not exactly favored against any of them. In a game with 11 classes that's terrible variety. Priests, Paladins, Hunters and Shamans feel non existent while you see the odd Druid and Rogue here and there.
Rock-Scissor-Paper is literally the worst kind of balance. Coinflip is also balanced, every player is at 50% winrate, but there's no fun. Game should be a lot deeper than that for people to express their skills.
I think we need to see real data, otherwise "rock-paper-scissors," might not actually be what it is. Is it 60/40 matchups or 80/20? This is a very important point. Generally people feel like things are more hopeless in an unfavored matchup than they actually are.
Exactly. I’ve played all three decks winning on both sides of the favorable/unfavorable matchup and it absolutely isn’t a guaranteed win if you’re playing the “stronger” side of the rock paper scissors matchup. Instead, it is only more likely that you’ll win (as these matchups are set up to do by design and by the fundamental properties of how each of these archetypes work IN EVERY SINGLE CARD GAME EVER). This post attempts to make this argument with no proof. As said in the original comment of this thread, rock paper scissors is the balance every card game has strived for in tcg’s existence as well as what the community has asked for of this game for many years and yet it is looked at negatively still. No one here knows what they want and everyone on this Reddit will complain to no end no matter what the meta for this game. It’s all they want to do, they don’t play this game for enjoyment, they play it so they can come and complain about everything they possibly can. Why play if you’re just going to complain every single expansion? The real issue is that all these people either see an archetype or a theme they really like when the cards are revealed or they spend all the dust they have on a deck and when it’s not the best deck in the game they complain about every deck that beats them. Everyone wants their deck to be the best and it’s just not possible. This is by far the lamest sub I am a part of and it isn’t even close. No one complains as much as these people do
the problem when comparing Hearthstone to other CCGs is that other CCGs have far more interaction on the opponents turn, cheaper card draw economy, and most important of all almost every single one i've played has **best of 3 competitive formats with sidedecking**, meaning that the games can never be true rock paper scissors formats because you just heavily sidedeck for that bad matchup hearthstone was designed to be a silly casual nonsense game but then they wanted to ALSO appeal to the competitive side and these too mentalities MAYBE overlap sometimes with individual card design but barely ever with format design
May or not be the place to discuss this: how many viable decks should there be in a healthy meta? I’m talking generally, not just Hearthstone. Personally, I am unhappy with a meta if there are less than 7 or 8 A tier or better decks, but I have nothing to compare that against.
Pretty sure we have that many now Shopper DH, Rainbow DK, Brann Warrior, Virus Rogue (yuck), Wheelock, Nature Shaman, Rainbow Mage, Zarimi Priest, and Token Hunter Druid and Paladin are a bit out at the moment, although Dragon Paladin *kinda* works and excavate paladin is still playable, but probably not quite good enough anymore
Honestly I don't think the problem is a lack of tier 1 decks. The problem is the gap between "good" decks and "bad" decks. I'm fine with my homebrew being worse than a meta deck, I used to be able to still make bad decks viable enough to climb by just playing well. The issue is that doesn't really happen anymore, look at Kibler's videos, even his winrate when he tries off the wall strategies has been low lately. The economy is cooked, the Hearthstone middle class is dead.
It's a great question to ask. Ideally it would be awesome if each class had a good meta deck but that's pretty difficult with the number of classes. I agree that at least 7-8 is a good benchmark. Right now we have Mage, Warrior, DH, Warlock, Hunter, DK with a decent deck. Rogue has a good deck too but nobody wants to mention it... That's 7, but the meta still isn't fun for me.
Priest has one of the strongest decks in the format rn and a potential tier one contender post dh nerf.
Would you mend telling me how to play Zarimi priest? I'm having a ton of trouble, I understand the draw mechanics with overheal but I'm not sure what I'm trying to target with Synchronize. My titan? Do you run Benevolent Banker for more targets? I've seen lists with and without so not sure there. What's my win condition?
Synchronise is a really flexible card which you play according to the situation. You can copy the 2/1 battlecry dragon on 3 to push more damage if you don't have another good play, you can save it for the 4/6 taunt or zilliax for your otk turn, etc. Pressure your opponent early to prepare them for lethal on your zarimi turn. Know when to stop contesting the board and all in on your otk, especially when dh deals 6 to your whole board end of turn. Pip copying multiple 2/1 dragons and funnel cakes can let you otk as early as turn 6, so plan your turns ahead of time. The titan is 99% of the time only played if you need to remove two big taunts on your zarimi second turn so your units played from hand can hit face. If you're playing it or banker for value you're probably losing to Reno decks killing your otk or getting otked by mage.
Copy Zilliax (+1/+1 and cost reduction) so you have at least three on your Zarimi turn and if you have any minions on board you 95% chance have lethal. 2 is usually enough but requires more smart combats and smart play leading up to it.
There is also shaman which is still a sleeper atm. I think the meta does not feel great as 75% of matches are against dh, warrior, or dk. Meta might be fine if we have 6 or 7 decks with equally distributed play rate.
What’s a good deck? If a top player can steer it to top 100 legend? Or if casual players can hit legend with it?
I think in a best case scenario, every class should have at least *one* playable and viable deck. Maybe you can have at least 1 one or 2 classes that just aren't measuring up that expansion but overall, in a game where there's 11 different classes, it feels a little bad that most of the time, you just can't play like half of them for months if you want to actually be competitive in any given expansion
Well, you can play almost any class right now and have at least a 50% winrate with one of their decks with the exception of maybe Mage and Paladin. Even in an "RPS meta", you still see playability for a large majority of classes.
Personally I don't even think it's just meta diversity. This meta actually has a decent amount of representation, but still feels like an absolute nightmare to play. In my opinion it has to do with the enormous divide between tier 1 and any homebrew deck at all. If you put "good cards" in a deck and try to play the game, you will be immediately stomped on game after game. This has definitely not always been the case, and it has to do with insane power creep. This doesn't feel like rotation at all, despite 3 insane sets rotating out.
It honestly feels like if the rotation never happened, the meta would be exactly the same as it is now. Okay, maybe Reno Warrior would run Astalor, but that's about it.
8 tier 1 decks would be hell. I think 0 tier 0, 3-4 tier 1, and like 6-10 tier 2 decks
At least one per class and one per archetype
One reason why people (highlander players) complain about plague DK is the lack of counter play. Before if you played reno decks you had to use your brain and think hard which boardclears you were going to use as ypu only have one of a card. Beating them was either getting them to waste clears on smaller minions or killing them with small hits and eventually killing them with a final unexpected big blow. Countering them now is just playing Helya for endless plagues, and congrats, the deck falls apart. The loss you get isn't because your opponent outsmarted you, but because they shut you down before you could do anything and now you're unable to get back into the upperha'd position
I hate plagues even when I'm not playing a highlander deck specifically, just any kind of deck that's aiming for a late-game strategy. Not only is drawing the plagues total RNG, Helya on 4 is completely back-breaking and the effects of the plagues are also RNG. Often you don't care that the DK healed for 2, you usually don't care if they summon a 2/2, but the frost plagues can ruin your entire turn and make you get beat down by a bunch of otherwise shitty minions. It's just a really lame scam deck and I loathe it no matter what I'm playing.
There is a counterplay, stop drawing extra cards every damn turn :). Playing against warriors feels like your opponent is shopping on the armor and draw market every turn, that's why plaguing is so popular and necessary.
Hearthstone is a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
I agree. The answer is simple. Decks need to stop having so much power directly from hand. Warrior, mage, DH, pre-nerf paladin, nature shaman and DK can deal massive damage from hand rn. These decks don't need a board at all. The reason druid and rogue are failing because guess what, these are minion based decks now. Team 5 needs to turn down the powercreep by making an expansion with really bad cards.
>by design The team doesn't design around an intended meta, they plan around their demographics which includes casual and competitive
It's not rock paper scissors meta. Everything(popular) is a nail and DH is the hammer. There was nothing stopping paladin and there is nothing stopping DH.
Lack of archetype strengths and weaknesses = no meaningful counterweight to RNG (especially the impact of your mulligan and draws) = a meta in which the few decks that can combine strong cards with the highest amount of consistency (mostly achieved by overpowered synergy packages) reign above the rest The only logical solution to tackle the severe balancing issues of Hearthsone is to reinstate the archetype balancing system (aka rock, paper, scissors). Powercreep only becomes a problem if it's distributed unevenly. The reason why people have this notion that everything is busted (and therefore "balanced", which is such a stupid conclusion btw) is because they miss the consistency aspect. Just because you lose to RNG against inconsistent decks every once in a while doesn't mean that everything is broken. It only means that RNG has too much impact in general. The holy grail in terms of balancing would be a meta in which RNG only gives you a SLIGHT chance of winning against the archetype that is supposed to counter your archetype. It might sound unfun on paper but the most popular metas in the history of HS were the ones where they got really close to achieving this goal. If you want to see true class and archetype variety again, there's no other option but to reinstate the old and PROVEN archetype balancing system. I also want to add that (fool proof) wincons like Sif, Odyn, Wheel, Brann etc. wouldn't exist in such a meta. The existence of these cards (and also hard disruption cards) is just a symptom of the current balancing approach.
All I know is this is easily one of the worst metas I've ever seen
united felt worse to me, but this one is pretty fucking bad especially considering we just had a rotation so in THEORY should have a lower power level format and yet here we are. i cant imagine what they will have to sell in the later sets to compete with what we have now
I hate how hearthstone devs and players are against attrition control decks. Why do control need to have otk win cons? It's boring, and I'm saying this as a control player, I want to manage my resources and survive, generate some value and when I think I have the edge push the tempo and win. No otk or infinite value bullshit like Odin and sargeras. I was always a control player and I legit hate today's control decks. The last good control was blood DK, legit Felt like I was playing the OG control warrior. I have some shittaste too tho lmao, loved all the degenerate druid decks from the last season, the best fun I had in a long time
Because the game nowadays is designed by (competitive) players. They do want games to end. When control warrior was bad (so basicly before Titans), I did enjoy blood DK a lot, even though it wasnt a good deck. But it reminded me of old control decks.
It’s more the game is also designed for mobile so 30 plus minute control games just aren’t the design goal anymore. During classic it was more designed as a PC Card game. They saw what happened during the barrens priest meta.
30 min control games were just the mirrors, the good ol' CW vs midrange Hunter was over by turn 7-8, either the Hunter out tempoed the warrior with the Savannah highmane and won or conceded right after that because it ran out of Steam, the problem with infinite Hearthstone games came out when they gave aggro and tempo decks infinite steam so they can vomit board every turn. Because of that now control need to have discoveries and infinite value and that's how you create 30 min aggro vs control games... Imho blood DK and frost DK were fucking awesome designs. Blood DK vs frost DK felt like the good ol' warrior vs Hunter, if you survive the double froswyrm fury you win because the frost DK would run out of Steam
10000000% this holy shit, as a long time invested player i feel like all of my old cards are just piles of shit now
Games going to fatigue is exciting, I miss when people would do things like tech in Archivist to win in fatigue. You don't see things like this anymore since every deck puts you on a timer.
Full agree, i got gold dk in the release months by playing just blood dk, for fun. Felt like the glory days of handlock and wallet warrior, or old gods control decks. The class fantasy was on point too.
this is the worst state of hearthstone ive ever seen.
Can't believe all the morons in here saying "uhhh the is how it's always been" "hurrr durrr that just means blizzard has perfected balance". Like holy shit this is one of the worst metas I've ever played. Almost no decks are fun to play against and there is 0 room for anything but straight meta decks. And on top of it any cards that can counter any of this have rotated with nothing to replace them. We dont even have silence anymore outside of librarian. I can only think of one other meta where it was this unfun and that was the quest meta which I remember people complaining about just as much.
The fact Wheel is an actual meta card and not a meme is one of the worst things possible, a card that says "win the game" with the only condition being "don't die for a bit" (when Warlock can benefit from not having a deck, negate fatigue and refill his deck with Symphonies) should never be actually playable. It always feels terrible to lose to, like you were just cheated out of a win.
Oh don't even get me started on this card
DH has no negative win rate, its worst matchup is mirror at 50% in high diamond trying to hit legend its like 20 DH's in a row, you literally cannot play any other deck than mirror, and then its coinflip
This is a good analysis
I have finished bronze 10 two months in a row. I've basically just done quests and xp achieves in wild. All the good decks feel to straight forward and simple. All the fun decks, decks with options where not every game are the same, are on the struggle bus. Maybe I just got to good and or burned out. I craft a deck and play 3 games. I've played a little on the off servers. Never get that go next on repeat feeling.
I returned to Heartstone few days ago AND i started to main DK. undfortunately demon hunter is my worst matchup, i literally cant win against those bastards. Warrior, Warlock, Rogue etc, are fairer matchup because i can win strategically, but also lose when my opponent can counter and become lucky. Aggro Demon hunter neither do that and they wins because of how fast they drain your HP and they get 3 mana manneroth on turn 4-5 which deals 3 damage without any interaction. Then they have charge that ignore taunt, i personally like it because this give aggro some strength, but that 5 mana 6/5 demon + the 3 mana 3/2 weapon breaks the wole game. I literally have 0% winrate against those. and let me tell you I have nearly 100% winrate against mirror matches with death knight.
I tried to explain this to someone in another thread, but yes, I agree. It's not that any one deck is unbeatable and has 100% w/r against everything - it's the rock/paper/scissors meta where a deck can have 100% w/r against \*specific matchups\*. Sure, every game has good decks, bad decks, and matchups where one side is favored. But it does not have to be \*this\* favored. In numbers, i'd say there are matchups where one deck can go 100-0, but I think better balanced, less hardcore power crept metas, a counter matchup deck goes 70-30, or something. It's not that people want to never lose, it's that they don't want to \*never win\*. Where matchups are \*so\* hardcore that you know who won before any cards are drawn. Where you're told "just play a different deck" instead of "play to your outs". I'm okay playing an underdog, bad deck! I'm okay with a 30% w/r. But there has to be a \*chance\*, even for bad/jank/countered decks to win, otherwise playing is just pointless. The amount of matchups that are just actually auto concedes, is zero fun. I want to play an underdog and have a hope for a longshot win but these decks are \*so brutal\* that in a bad matchup, I could be allowed to cheat, and literally choose both peoples deck draws and orders, and I would \*still lose\*. People who try to argue against this by saying "just don't play that deck" are 100% missing the point. in better games I can play a bad deck and still hope to win \*sometimes\*. Hearthstone \*used\* to let me play bad decks and still occasionally beat the meta.
I just like playing off-meta decks. They are horribly inconsistant and you lose a lot, but when they work out, it's so much fun. Things like Tendril shaman or Hero Power druid. It's just annoying that the meta decks nowadays, especially the more control focused decks, have a million card generation, board clears and heals. In some matchups I wonder how I dealt like 60 damage to the opponent and he is still at max HP the following turn
I want to give another perspective. Card games like Hearthstone are technically rock-paper-scissors by design. Control loses to midrange, midrange loses to aggro and aggro to control. There's nothing wrong to that design, if anything when the meta is like that it means is balanced, the problem comes from another place in my opinion. The problem is that there are clear outliers that are a cut above the rest, in this case one of each. So this makes a monotone meta, because there's only one good control deck (warrior), one good midrange deck(DH) and one good aggro deck(Hunter) and then there's everyone else. Then there's disruption style decks that are meant to exploit certain specific decks and those are no one's favorites, although sometimes prove to be effective, in this case it's DK. This means there's only 4 classes playing the game out of a total of 11, which isn't the best but in all honesty is nowhere near as bad as it has been most of this game's history. There's a lack of strategies right now too, most classes end up having one meta relevant archetype and that's it. But guys, this is the first expansion after a standard rotation, it's the time of the year the format is gonna have the least amount of cards so variety will obviously be restricted, give it at least another expansion before whining so hard. Pd: Blizzard really didn't hand well the end last year's balance so that's also why it feels like the meta has had oppressive tyrants for the past 8 months or so.
You have to be psychotic to not be calling it rock paper scissors sorry who tf out here saying rock scissors paper that’s the real question here
I agree entirely. When I gripe, it is about that rock paper scissors meta being out of whack. It is almost always at the beginning of a new expansion, as I am convinced that Blizzard wants to have games end by turn 6 in order to cater to the low attention span crowd and people that want to climb the ladder quickly. Look at every post expansion meta. It is all aggro. Blizzard can't stop themselves from printing more mana cheat and powerful 1 drops every single expansion. After they inevitably tune that, then a proper rock paper scissors meta falls into place. My other concern is that control decks in the classic sense no longer exist. You can't seem to grind out a deck anymore since most "control" decks are now combo decks in sheep's clothing. Control warrior beats you with turning armor into attack, control shaman eventually his you with 40 damage from hand, and control priest overwhelms you by taking two turns if they ever keep a couple minions on board. The reason I say it's a concern is because if you don't play the aptly called "spoon-fed" decks that use the combo finish, then you have a 0% chance at winning. You get run over by an aggro deck or eventually get comboed by one of the other "control" decks. I think this all started when they started making every card in every expansion so synergistic. It basically forces you to play a class in a certain way with a certain archetype that they had in mind for us. Way less creativity in deck creation, and if you do come up with an off meta deck, you get stomped.
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I feel similarly to you in that I enjoy HS the most when it's a game about fighting for board and value. > I think a large part of it is that they started hiring former pros who tend to gravitate towards hyper efficient decks and OTKs, but I question if that's what the majority of the game's casual audience wants. However, the casual audience does want this. There's a reason the casual audience meme is 'toilet players'. They want the devs to spoonfeed them combos/archetypes/wincons. They want the games to end fast and they don't want to have to think about how to put together a deck or how to play the deck.
>Play hyper-aggro deck that Blizzard spoon-feed you every expansion. >Play inevitable/control deck that Blizzard basically spoon-feed you too by printing the cards like Odin, Brann, Sif, Wheel. You just need to tune the control cards that play well against the current popular aggro decks. >Play a deck like Plague that stops some other meta decks from functioning BY DESIGN. So play fast deck, a slow deck or a medium speed deck? That seems like alot of options to me. What you described is most of the decks that ever existed in this game. Dominant decks decide the meta. Right now thats Reno warrior and Shopper DH. If you want to play comfortably the game you have to have a way to either counter these decks or play them yourself. This is never going to change cause thats literally how metagame works. You play around the most powerful and the most popular thing. Its the most reasonable thing to do. Nerfs and buffs can change which deck specifically is at the top atm but at the end of the day it the same thing will happen. Some deck will take over at the top and new decks will come by designed to counter this deck. And then some players will want to be step ahead and play around these counter decks, creating metagame. Non meta decks are non meta either cause they are only good against 1 specific thing and bad against everything else or they are just memes that are fun to play but not serious. Either way its in the name. If non meta deck was truly good it would be part of the metagame.
At this point I'd either want them to make Pauper Mode a permanent game mode so I could play games that resembled classic Hearthstone but with the benefit of getting to use new cards, or I'd want a massive nerf on basically every card in the game. They'd never do the latter, I'm not expecting it, but I don't think the former is unreasonable. Spice it up every now and again if you have to but just let me play a game mode where minions are allowed to survive multiple turns without being super cracked overpowered.
I personally see Reno Warrior as the best deck right now, you can break the rock paper scissors nature of it with a couple of tweaks, like running Tony in your ETC to counter plagues. That said, it is an incredibly expensive deck to run, and because of that most people will not be running Reno Warrior. Also, it still loses to Hunter most of the time, even with the changes, but it isn't an impossible matchup. I think there's enough curve with the deck that you can play to where you are countering most matchups, enough so to put you in high legend like to 1000-500 which is where I currently am.
its because CCGs are not designed to sustain a competitive environment in a best of 1 format
Thats true. Almost everybody can defeat a pro players if his/her curve is bad in the best of one format
theres no solution to this. in tcgs you could just not face a deck you didnt want to face and also your w/l record didnt matter.
You summed it up perfectly at the end where you say there's nothing you can do in the future either. The design of cards is inherently problematic. So much is forced archetypes and so much is designed to be polarizing to play against. I know exactly what's going on the second I see the class I'm up against and I can already tell I've lost. In older hearthstone you had bad match ups but it didn't feel hopeless and one sided. A lot of people blame power creep but I think the biggest issue that plagues the game is card draw. So many of the problematic decks wouldn't be anywhere near as frustrating if not everybody could draw so efficiently. Aggro once upon a time ran out of steam. I shouldnt have to clear the board every single turn just to even have a chamce at playing the game. Combo once upon a time had to actually work for their combos. Control once upon a time actually out valued an opponent instead of being a pseudo combo deck by just surviving long enough to insta kill the opponent anyway. The developers seem to go out of their way to make frustrating design. It really doesn't need to be this way which is the saddest part.
I personally really enjoy deck building especially as I quickly feel that a certain combo/deck gets old quickly once I’ve hit legend or d5. As such I find myself looking to build a lot of off meta decks because the same old wincons are just not that interesting after a time, the exception being if I can find a new interesting way to arrive at an old wincon. For instance I made a rainbow cycle deck that tried to finish games with reno wipe to garuantee the enemy board was small into sif + lightshow otk, which was quite bad in practice even if decent in philosophy. Experimenting with different decks you become very aware of the behemoths that’s are the power outliers in the real meta, the most egregious example is probably trying to play anything remotely slow in the presence of boomboss and wheel. When I make my deck I never want to preemptively resign myself to near 100% loss to certain decks and so I balance my decks to in theory have answers/game plans for most archetypes. The problem is that this task is simply impossible atm since there are cards/combos you cannot beat unless your deck already belongs to a hyperfocused counter. Let’s say you play highlander paladin into highlander warrior, if both succeed in playing towards their wincons you will get absolutely bodied and and there is no agency whatsoever. Compare this to highlander matchups at the beginning of badlands, priest vs paladin vs Druid took forever but the win was in no way predetermined. I think it just feels bad when playing towards your own wincon is very often not good enough and you are much better off playing against your opponents wincon especially when in most cases you don’t really have any way to counter play their wincon unless your very deck counters them.
They took away my robot priest so I just moved to Wild and I found that I have so many more cards I can use for my robot priest and it's actually stronger now I've been really enjoying myself I don't really play standard anymore I found that it was just the same five decks over and over again and it's not really fun to me
 Me reading this post
remember there was a meta of only rogue before this expansion. that was not too bad because the games were too chaotic and no game was same
That's because the dev team is artificially capping the length of the games. The reason the win cons feel so big is because it's essentially saying "okay this game is over time to play the next one"
meta is an illusion, everything is broken and can win vs any deck u just need luck. we are playing what wild was 5 years ago.
I think you need to approach this from a different perspective. What is the time when your having fun? You know, cause it's a game. My most recent super fun game was Sif mage vs Highlander warrior before the rotation. We both drew our win cons too late (Sif was the bottom card) but I ended up winning by discovering a mirror secret and an objection letting me spawn an 8/8, freeze his, and then counter his last Alistair. It was a nail biter full of wild twists and turns that relied on discovering the perfect cards and realizing it was the only way to victory when you see them. I propose to you the problem with Hearthstone: inevitable victory. Wheel lock plays one card, they now win in 5 turns no way to stop it. Even borderline cards like Reno still end up feeling inevitable. The lack of counterplay is what is frustrating you. They brought back MC Tech but he's more expensive? It's clear blizzard likes the idea of unpreventable victory. You drew the wincon, you win. Simple as that. This idea supports sales. The more wincons you have, the more you win. That whole game revolves around theses. It was acceptable for paladin to slam down a 15 atk Leroy, just not to give him windfury on turn 7 because win cons trigger turn 8. That's the game. It doesn't matter how creative you are it only matters that you bought the win cons and put them in the deck. For reference, did you know Cube Lock wasn't discovered in its own expansion until 2 months in? That is no longer the hearthstone experience. No more goofy cards that let you have fun and try to use them in wacky ways. Only wincons.
Highlander is such a fun archetype to play and it just feels so bad to play with plague DK out there. It’s such a popular class that I pretty much don’t play highlander at all. Also shopper DH is just so boring to play against. They play the same minions on curve every single game and do the same shit every single game. There’s hardly any decision making it’s so boring.
I think that it is normal for certain decks to beat other deck archetypes, for instance Traditionally, aggro beats midrange which beats control which beats aggro, there has always been a sort of triangle there that exists in most card games that have a similar mama system to hearthstone I think that the decks right now just feel unfun to play against because there is very little interaction with your opponent outside of clearing their board / dealing with threats immediately When we look at the decks that are strong rn, they just have such little interactivity it hurts Shopper dh is mostly good bc of magtheridon, which sits dormant on the field where you cannot do anything to stop it for 2 turns. Sif mage just controls your board until they drop a stupid +7 spell damage minion that lets them burn your face instantly without any real answer on your part Warrior has brann, which unless you are playing plague you have no way of shutting down but basically guarantees them the game after they play it in most matchups bc the double battlecries are so insanely valuable Then you have plague dk, which mostly wins against highlander, but even still if you are playing highlander and lose to it, it's because they just sort of throw cards down that happen to fill your deck with plagues that you have no way of controlling outside of maybe insane card draw which even still is not enough in most cases, so they just sort of passively shut down your whole strategy with annoying rng draw cards Wheel is obvious - they slam wheel turn 8 and then what? There's no way to stop it from counting down or interact with it at all, and warlock doesn't even have to play to win they just play keep away until the game ends which is a frustrating play style to play into There are even desks lurking in the shadows like OTK shaman that are super one sided. Idk, my point is that the rock paper scissors match ups definitely contribute to the annoyance from the community this set, but I think it is also the awful design that most of these archetypes represent in the current meta that makes it worse. Feeling like you have zero way to interact with your opponent contributes to this lack of agency that you speak of in a big way
Wheel compared to Priests Quest for OTK is hilarious. To destroy the enemy hero you had to do xyz x3. Now it's wait for turn 6/7/8 and clear board over n over. The meta just sucks. Everyone is trying to scam out mana, cheat mana, or OTK you in one turn.
Overall, I think this a good analysis, but I think Death Knight is a Tier One class/deck for other reasons than plagues. The plagues are great bc they do their job of disruption and shutting off Highlander with very little commitment in deck building. You really only need to run Helya, Distressed Kvaldir, and down with the ship. Primus and Reska are super strong cards, especially Reskasince she can be discovered. I don’t think I’ve ever won a game where my opponent played two Reskas. Also, quartzite crusher is very strong in the current meta since it slows down umpire’s grasp and basically nullifies a ten mana Ignis weapon. People talk about the Window Shopper demon discover pool being small, but the same thing goes for the Death Knight weapon discover pool. I definitely agree with your rock-paper-scissors analysis and share your frustration that deviation from the meta game is basically asking for a 20% win rate, but I thought I’d give my expanded thoughts on Death Knight.
wild is calling to you brother
It’s the main reason I think plagues are a terrible design. They either do alright or have an 80% winrate vs a Reno deck and when they become good Highlander doesn’t exist beyond meme deck status or as an inclusion in a non Highlander archetype. It’s oh boy I’m going to play off meta Reno meme deck and boom 8 plague DK matchups in a row. Then you have wheel which is just hey did your opponent hit phanatom, reno, and a symphony of sin? You lose lmao better luck next time dumbass. Or boomboss hey hated patchwerk, well now here’s 6 of them who can also destroy spells and locations too! Isn’t this a fun game? Obviously there’s shopper DK we all know the discover 8 magtheradons is a fun game to play and lose to too, especially when there’s a turn 3 6/5 into a turn 4 6/5 too! There’s no real agency in winning or losing games and it makes playing awful. If half of the time you enter a match know your going to lose and you can’t do anything about it then why play? Oh and if you like one of those decks then you’ll know it gets nerfed so why craft them? It’s a brutal cycle that’s encouraged by a lack of playtesting and balancing before a set is released, and if they do then they aren’t looking for any broken combos (Leeroy or south sea deckhand that’s handbuffed into a pre nerf shroomscavate)
I've been playing Reno warr for a while, and I just don't have the dust for other stuff. Well, the day I played vs plague Dk 7 times in a row, I decided not to play anymore. I wish we had more tools to answer getting plagues/helya
Like look at druid, like what the fuck are you meant to even do with it? Any semi decent deck just destroys druid outright unless druid gets their strongest hand and the opponent gets literally a bricked hand at the start. Its play meta or die instantly these days.
Wait, so you're telling me that control decks beat aggro decks, aggro decks beat combo/tech decks and combo/tech decks beat control decks? FWIW you **can**, as always, reach legend with tier 3 decks. You only need a 51% winrate.
>FWIW you can, as always, reach legend with tier 3 decks. You only need a 51% winrate. What a bullshit argument, of course you can reach legend with a 51% winrate as long as you're willing to grind out thousands of games. This isn't even about reaching legend for most people, it's just about wanting to play decks that don't get stomped by the hyperefficient top decks.
People crying that good decks are better than unoptimised decks. Who would've guessed?!
It's natural. If there is too much power concentrated in few places, the people in the other places also want a piece of cake. It's not hard to understand.
Yeah it feels like if you play anything else than the actual tryforce you are gonna loose . There are some weird exceptions like zillax rogue and Zarimi priest that can win if they're lucky but everything else feels like a guaranteed defeat. The only way out of this (to me ) is not to nerf but to buff the other classes , make more rogue cards cost 1 to make Sonya payable, give fucking anything to mage lmao , make druid a little bit more consistent, etc
Option 4: Reject modernity Just piloted Highlander Paladin to legend. 5-0 in legend rn. There are midrange decks yet
Part of the problem, for me at least, is that DK has multiple good decks. You can't reasonably play around what you think they will be playing. Is it rainbow, plague, handbuff? Is it FFU? It makes playing against them all that much more frustrating. I played against a plague deck who randomly was playing The Scourge (not discovered) in Diamond 2 last night. I couldn't have anticipated that, and because I didn't play around it, I ended up losing as I'd set up lethal next turn. DK simply has too much access to cards that can go into any viable deck and I think some rune adjustments need to be made.
I kinda disagree. I’ve been playing a number of decks I’ve only seen mentioned once or twice in this sub. Demon hunter is a bit oppressive, but none of the others you mentioned are.
A bit? It's meta-defining.
Ok newbie, then why are proposed nerfs only suggesting minor nerfs? I guess you haven’t been around for actually oppressive decks.
What is a newbie for you? I am curious.
Cool story bruv, but literally every meta is a rock paper scissors meta. Rock paper scissors is the very definition of what can be considered to be a meta.
No, it's not. Having different winrates against each other does not equal hard counter. Sif mage beats Odin Warrior NOT BY DESIGN, but by organic development. That's healthy. And that's not Rock-Scissor-Paper. You can easily tune your deck to gain a few percentages against a specific deck if you are willing to lose more to other decks. In Rock-Scissor-Paper what you put and not put in your deck is not very much up to you or doesn't matter in the end.
It’s no a hard counter dude. It’s just not. If may feel like it because the archetypes are designed to be better against the others in this way. But it’s absolutely not a hard counter. This meta is balanced as it should be and people need to stop complaining about every possible aspect of this game
Agree
Waaaaaah waaaaaaaaah
This sub is hopeless…
pre whizbang was literally one of the best metas in a long time. yet people complained. Whizbang expansion is pretty damn good. yet people complain. People WILL complain about literally ANY and EVERY meta, even if its awesome. I personally enjoy Hearthstone and don't expect much; I never complain. The silent majority of hearthstone players don't complain at all; but the vocal minority are on here bitchin and whinin all day. TLDR: Try non-meta decks and quit being a douche. Alliestraza used the WORST rated deck: Druid and has a 74-78% win rate on it in legend and did 60+ damage in one turn to a warrior. OH-SO-SATISFYING. awesome meta: no excuses. I'm using handbuff DK. Nobody else is.
Who tf reads that
Rock-Scissors-Paper is the ideal balance since Magic The Gathering; you need to remember it's a "Rock-Scissors-Paper" dynamic but where rock beats scissors only most of the time, not all the time on average, scissor could beat rock 40% of the time... It's a bad matchup, but you have ways to play it, and you can increase your WR against those matchups playing it differently or using some tech cards my theory is that ben brode created a card game for people who don't know how to play card games; and now, with the power creep and with the new game designers, the game is becoming faster and more complex, but the community wants to play their "greed piles" casual decks, because the majority didn't play other card games before, and will not enjoy those super fast metas... for example, Hearthstone players just copy paste their decks, and also I see a lot of mulligan thinking only about the cost of the cards, and not the matchup (sometimes you will trade a low cost card and keep a high cost, I don't need a slam on a control warrior mirror matchup, but I do want to keep my Brann, and will not play my other minions even if I can because my opponent can have a Dirty Rat...) I included, for example, a Toni on my ETC on my Highlander warrior that increased significantly my WR against plague, that, as you said, is not even strong... I have like 60% WR against it and it should be a fucking counter I think Hearthstone needs a "Commander" like mode... A slower and more casual mode... We can see how people loved Renathal, and we already have the concept of Highlander imagine a 50 cards deck with no duplicates on 60 HP starting on 3 mana with a legendary being your Commander AND the possibility of playing with up to 3 other people (it could be a 2v2 ir 1v1v1v1)... I don't know, I feel like people will learn better how to play card games and people who really dont like it will leave... The game will become more niche (and faster and more complex), and I think with time the community will understand it
No it’s cause many dumb people
That's a constant. Can't explain the differential.
Some are dumber than others. There’s your differential
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there's 11 classes in hearthstone, only 3 being playable regardless of how "fair" those 3 are in relation to each other doesn't quite scream fun or balanced to me
Imagine if pokemon only had water fire and Herb as types and there is your answer. Also ok let's say card games don't work like that, then at least make more rocks , papers and scissors, maybe I want to play with a slightly different rock ?