Hearthstone Players!

That's why I called Ruby a mild success, because it was almost totally dependent on one card (Ice Block) or another (Frost Nova) if the Exodia Mage was facing a creature deck. One card depending on randomly acquiring another which then got HoF'd, leading to the disappearance of the Spellstone, seems like too much of a flaw to deem it genuinely successful. I included Sapphire in the same strata because when you can actually play it effectively, it's great. If it cost 5 instead of 7, it might've been brilliant. But it didn't, so it wasn't.

At five, I wonder if Sapphire is crazy broken. The play is obviously Earth Elemental into Spellstone. Is that even that big a deal? Three 7/8 Taunts on Turn 10? Seems solid, but turn 10 is forever. Maybe some trick with Far Sight hitting a Lich King, and getting three of -those-. That's game over.

Sure. But how often would that actually happen? More often than rolling Ice Block with Ruby? Doubt it. Plus, you're talking about the perfect scenario: Having had Sapphire in your hand long enough to fully charge it AND Farsighting into Arthas. Would you still be alive at that point? That was always my complaint about the EE combo is that you can't do it at any point before turn 10, which is when most games have already been decided. If you cast EE, there's not enough mana left to cast your hopefully fully-charged spellstone. Next turn, unless it's turn 10 or beyond, you still can't cast it. So, you're potentially waiting three turns to use one card. No other spellstone had this problem except for the other ones I mentioned as failures; mostly because their charging conditions were inefficient or random.

And bouncing off that Spellstone comparison and tying in with your comment about how the devs have a lot to keep track of: I agree. They do have a lot to keep track of. But if I were the one leading the team instead of Donais, I'd have/add at least one baseline rule of development: For every card we're adding to the game, give me one reasonably competitive decklist where it will work. It doesn't have to work spectacularly (Emerald.) It just has to work decently (Diamond.)

Case in point: Pearl Spellstone. They dumped a bunch of cards like Flash of Light and Zandalari Templar into the last set to try to make Healing Paladin a thing, since the Spellstone had never taken off and cards like Glass Knight were niche. I put a deck together early with Templar that you mentioned had too much healing in it and you were right. Since healing is generally a slow/inefficient move in Hearthstone, there was no win condition in the deck. It was basically a list just waiting to die and dying would take longer than normal.

So, when it comes to making the Spellstones, my first question would have been: "In what list or with what other cards does a conditional card that can make anything from a 2/2 to a 6/6 get included?" The answer in every meta for the past year since Kobolds would have been: "None." It's just not worth the card slot and/or there are simply not powerful enough effects around healing to make the card ever have real impact on the game. Same is true for Onyx and Mithril. The same is true for 60% of the Shaman cards in Knights, aka the Freeze Failure. Interestingly, if you look at Knights, a similar story is true for Mage. They tried to emphasize the Freeze theme and most people ignored it. The glaring difference was that there were more of them in Shaman which had never utilized the Freeze theme before.

I know the counter-argument is that the Timmys of the world just want to do crazy things with crazy cards and I get that. But I'd still say: Show me the list that said crazy card will operate in, because even crazy lists won't include Cryostasis or Moorabi; one because even Timmy will recognize that they're awful cards (especially Cryo in a game where offense controls combat, as you said) that aren't interesting enough to be qualified as "crazy". Neither are any of the fail Spellstones.

They could solve a couple of issues with Healadin by saying Heals happen even at full health. They have some cool cards that "count" healing, but you can't book credit on them if your stuff/face isn't hurt. Another loser compared to Armor. The stats on the default Pearl Spellstone dude are ok,: 2/2 Taunt for 2. From a vanilla perspective, that's fine. As you note, there isn't a Paladin deck that wants to play this kind of stats. Paladins either rush rush rush and it's too slow or they never want to play a 2-drop that doesn't wipe the board or give them 29 Armor.

There is no way you can tune each card to fit into a "reasonable competitive" deck though. From time immemorial in CCGs, bad cards are used as skill-tests for deck-builders. (Not to mention how Arena works). One of the items pointed out above is that deck-building has been outsourced to hsreplay, and this skill-test is moot on the competitive level. Which has some irony, because deck-building novelty is so powerful in this game! If you play something out of the ordinary, you can score a lot of wins because the "meta" is so tight it can't handle anything out of the "meta." People make a lot of choices about what will happen based on what they think you are playing. If you can keep them guessing (wrong), you can win. This aspect of the game is mooted by non-interactive decks like the ones we complain about above, though.

But, see, I don't think the "bad cards as skill-testers" is really a valid theory for any kind of design, especially in the Internet era. No one needed to be told even prior to The Dojo that Gray Ogre and Hill Giant were bad cards. What they were was filler for packs. If your business model is rare-chasing in packs, then you need cards other than lands to fill them out. Thus, the vanilla stuff that no one plays unless they have to. Hearthstone functions on a similar, but much smaller principle: You don't need to fill out 15-card packs; just 5. I can certainly amend my earlier statement and say that all CLASS cards need a reason to exist, leaving the chaff for neutrals. But I just disagree with the "skill testing" aspect. No decent designer spends time and money (art) resources on cards that no one will play four weeks into an expansion. Especially in the case of class cards, there has to be some motivation behind them.

Ben Brode gave a perfect example during the Purify debacle. He said that the in-house team had enjoyed playing the "silence the Ancient Watcher" deck and so they put it into Karazhan. I think he was exaggerating to try to cover that colossal fuck-up, but at least he could make a salient argument about one card in a group of three in an adventure expansion. What tripped them up was the timing of the fact that Priest was virtually non-existent in competitive play (as he responded to me that day, the Karazhan design was too far along for them to see how bad it was) and they decided to drop a "fun" card into the mix. The response to that error, as noted before, was Mean Streets, where nine of ten cards for Priest saw consistent, if not constant, play. That's never been duplicated, before or since. So they saw an opening for a "fun" card for Priest and implemented it with that purpose in mind.

But the Spellstones are clearly competitive cards targeted to specific decks and playstyles. Like I said, there's been no instance since they were released that Pearl has been a good idea. Any pointed assessment would have shown that for reasons you've stated (can rarely be played for advantage in the early game if you don't take and heal enough damage) and based on obvious comparisons (Why would i ever play it over Righteous Protector, which costs one less, is universally applicable, and always takes two hits to get past, unlike any of the Pearl minions?) There's no skill involved in figuring out that Pearl is a bad card. It's just dead weight in the set for Paladin, the same way all of those Freeze cards were for Shaman.

Playing some Reincanate Shaman in Wild. Very greedy deck, but it climbs because most Wild players around my Rank (13/14) are here for good times. Found someone today playing the Standard "Wall Priest" deck! This works in Standard because it just puts Taunt after Taunt after Taunt into play and recycles them with Spellstones, Servitude, and all that. In Standard, no one is playing Silence effects, for the most part, so this can work.

But mfer, this is Wild. I have DEVOLVE. Hilarity ensued.

Yeah, I kept thinking that Mossy Horror could be an answer to Wall Priest, but most of the taunts are actually strength 3. Lame.

And, of course, that deck is absolutely the argument in favor of keeping Equality around in Even Paladin. What is Mosh'Ogg Enforcer but a direct answer to aggro and aggro-y midrange decks like Even? But Equality makes it a Righteous Protector.

Finally went back and won Rastakhan's Rumble. I was inspired by the Tavern Brawl actually, and managed to secure a win with each Hero in that mode. It's not easy winning as Warlock (Loa = Cast spells for Life) or Warrior (Loa = your minions have Overkill: can attack again), I tell you what. And my Priest win (Loa = Get a random priest spell every time you cast a spell) was induced by boredom in my opponent as turns take the FULL NINETY when I am playing.

Blizzard seems to have deemed it wise to ensure that at any given time there is at least one card in the game for fun-murdering tossers to build a frustrating, slow, alienating combo deck around.

That card is currently Mecha C'Thun.

I wish Blizzard did not deem this wise. That is all.

There was much lamenting on this topic a couple pages back. Sorry, Matt. That's a drag. Kind of an issue with low-to-no interaction decks at the moment. There isn't really a good way to deal with them. My Control decks lean towards Priest and my game plan is to jam their deck with a Psychic Scream to try to buy time after Hemet comes out.

Heh. I peeked in on the HS Reddit this morning (almost always a river of "Look at me!" trash) and one of the posts was a Mecha'Thun Druid player lamenting how unfair Heal Zoo is with a screenshot of turn 2 with two ghouls, a kobold, and witch doctor facing his empty board (play Kobold Librarian, heal with Witch Doctor, two free Happy Ghouls.) Needless to say, the sympathy was non-existent when people looked at his hand in the screenshot and noted that he had two Innervates and two armor cards that would doubtlessly keep him alive long enough to get to his combo. In addition to the fact that he was clearly playing Mecha'Thun.

There's been a lot of talk about an Iksar tweet from a couple days ago, asking people if HS used to be their main game and no longer was, what could they do to bring people back. The response has been effusive (I chimed in on Twitter: tournament mode, more frequent updates, rotate the classic set) with many pros like Dog writing lengthy responses, including what you're complaining about, Matt (too much combo, not enough room for control decks aka making decisions that matter in the game; too many games lost before they're started, etc.) I think that's an indication that player numbers have well and truly dropped and real change needs to happen (like with Genn and Baku, as Jeb and I have been discussing.)

As someone who has been out for awhile, the entire concept of odd and even decks based on some legendary build-arounds seems objectively terrible.

It was never my main game though... maybe for just a brief period of time when Grim Patron and then a cheap aggro Warrior Pirate deck were good. I scaled higher with pirate warrior (pre that legendary that auto came in) than I did with Grim Patron.

I also really liked trying to clear the dungeons on heroic mode, which is something that they no longer do at all.

Jackwraith wrote: ncluding what you're complaining about, Matt (too much combo, not enough room for control decks aka making decisions that matter in the game; too many games lost before they're started, etc.)

Yeah, this is exactly my beef. I'm still a regular player and will remain so, but it's more of an automated time-filler now.

"Decisions that matter" is a problematic statement because you make plenty of "decisions that matter" in a MechaC'thun deck or in Togwaggle or whatever shitbird combo you're running. They're decisions that keep you alive long enough to crap out your pathetic OTK. These decks are not uninteresting to play, they're just uninteresting to play against.

So in terms of "decisions that matter" it's ensuring those decisions exist for both players. That's what's gone, too often from the current game - described, accurately above, as games that are lost before they're started.

The meta is actually better for this now than it has been for a while. Hunter builds don't have an OTK combo and they're among the most effective counters to that style of play. But players will still run them because some people get a kick out of ruining other people's fun. It's the fact that it happens at all that's a problem. OTK decks did not exist at all in the early game, and it was much better for it.