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- Michael Barnes
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Playing Mage (against Shaman), I go second.
Turn 1: Coin, Unstable Portal, get Van Cleef, play him for zero mana and he is a 6-6.
Turn 2: Unstable Portal, get Demolisher. Play it.
Turn 3 & 4: Other fun stuff.
He's dead by turn 5. Like all the way dead, not resigned.
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End of the month/beginning of the month can be rough out there as folks jockey on the ladder. Be careful out there. Or play FaceHunter, whichever.
My son had a turn 4 win, IN ARENA. Damnedest thing. Shaman, turn 1 pass, turn 2, Whirling Zap-o-matic. Turn 3, Whirling Zap-o-matic #2, first one deals 6. Turn 4, Flametongue Totem + a Rockbiter Weapon on one of them, they deal 26. #gg MAKE SURE YOU DRAFT/MULLIGAN FOR 2-DROPS.
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- Michael Barnes
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They really ought to do something about incentivizing ladder better, because it's just not tremendously rewarding if you're without a quest. Ten gold for three wins isn't worth my time. I'm all for playing just to enjoy it and so forth, but don't throw me a dime and suggest that I not spend it all in one place. That's a really shitty incentive to keep playing ranked, especially if you're struggling at your level.
That said, I love how there's always SOMETHING fun you can do with the game WITHOUT paying for anything, especially if you have the PVE sets.
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And yet, it happens to me all the damn time.
This is my new Arena Priest, after the old one bombed out. (yeah, I keep getting like Priest-Warlock-Warrior. derp.)
link
I've had a bunch of quests that didn't work well in Arena, so I've been playing other stuff. On a 5-win Priest/Lock now, so I'll play Arena until I burn through it or lose.
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I have no idea why Arena is still GvG-only but I wouldn't be surprised if they're making too much money off Classic packs to include them as a choice in Arena.
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- Jackwraith
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Ladder incentives have been a running topic for the last few weeks (both Kripp and Noxious have weighed in.) Back in the Beta, it was 10 gold for 5 wins, so they have improved, but I think there needs to be a better reward structure for reaching higher ranks other than just stars. The ridiculous thing is that even if you reach the low single digits (1-3), you still end up in the high teens next season and have to slog your way through the Face Hunter hordes to get to something different. At this point, once you reach legend, you never have to bother laddering again unless you're aiming for major tournament placement, since you have the only reward (card back.) Since there's no visible standings as there is for things like SC or Diablo's seasons and Rifts, there's really no point to grinding away. They either need to guarantee higher placement from season to season or include things like packs, gold, and/or dust for reaching higher ranks.
In that same vein, I'm really wondering about the meta over the next few months until the (presumably) fall release of the next expansion. Naxxramas had real impact on the meta and decks were still shifting around (albeit under the cloud of Undertaker) right up to GvG. The fact that many Naxx cards are still staples of constructed play (Sludge Belcher, Nerubian Egg, Haunted Creeper, Mad Scientist, Zombie Chow, Deathlord, Loatheb, Webspinner, Dark Cultist, Death's Bite, Duplicate) demonstrates that. Blackrock Mountain isn't even close. At the moment, there are 2 cards that have really impacted the meta: Grim Patron and Imp Gang Boss. The former actually spawned a new deck and the latter revived Zoo. Emperor Thaurissan also shows up as an option in some control and combo decks (like Grim Patron!) That's it. Other cards have a bit of a presence (Fireguard Destroyer, Quick Shot, Flamewaker) but they're far from defining and the Dragon decks are a non-presence, because the cards are just too slow or conditional to see widespread use. After that, you have decks almost exclusively using GvG or standard cards. The hottest thing for the two worst classes at the moment (Shaman and Priest) is Mech, with one of them actually using a BRM class card to fill a curve gap (Fireguard) and the other not using its class cards at all. That means the meta basically won't change for the summer and a reason why a lot of people are talking about BRM right now as kind of a failure. I know I certainly wouldn't recommend it to new players at this point, since the important cards for constructed play are all in Naxx.
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Blizzard could solve this problem by having more than one "meta." Right now, there is only one way to play constructed. On the ladder or in Casual, you don't see a lot of variety--there's benefits to playing aggro nonsense in both pools, so the game gets stagnant quickly. New cards come out--"Can this make me go faster? Yes, it's in, No, it's out." As you note, the only real game changer with BRM has been Grim Patron. The dragon synergy ideas are cool, and some of their mechanics are neat as hell (Chromaggus/Nefarian are well-designed cards), but they don't work in or against aggro, so why bother? That's a problem.In that same vein, I'm really wondering about the meta over the next few months until the (presumably) fall release of the next expansion. Naxxramas had real impact on the meta and decks were still shifting around (albeit under the cloud of Undertaker) right up to GvG. The fact that many Naxx cards are still staples of constructed play (Sludge Belcher, Nerubian Egg, Haunted Creeper, Mad Scientist, Zombie Chow, Deathlord, Loatheb, Webspinner, Dark Cultist, Death's Bite, Duplicate) demonstrates that. Blackrock Mountain isn't even close. At the moment, there are 2 cards that have really impacted the meta: Grim Patron and Imp Gang Boss. The former actually spawned a new deck and the latter revived Zoo. Emperor Thaurissan also shows up as an option in some control and combo decks (like Grim Patron!) That's it. Other cards have a bit of a presence (Fireguard Destroyer, Quick Shot, Flamewaker) but they're far from defining and the Dragon decks are a non-presence, because the cards are just too slow or conditional to see widespread use. After that, you have decks almost exclusively using GvG or standard cards. The hottest thing for the two worst classes at the moment (Shaman and Priest) is Mech, with one of them actually using a BRM class card to fill a curve gap (Fireguard) and the other not using its class cards at all. That means the meta basically won't change for the summer and a reason why a lot of people are talking about BRM right now as kind of a failure. I know I certainly wouldn't recommend it to new players at this point, since the important cards for constructed play are all in Naxx.
When I see folks asking about whether or not to spend money on the game, the default guidance is "Buy Naxx, then the first wing of BRM." That sad bit of advice conveys a lot of information about BRM as a source for competitive cards. There are some cards (e.g., Fireguard Destroyer) that are legit good cards. There are some cards (e.g. Resurrect) that are close to being good cards. Or even are good cards, except that the meta is so fast they can't be used. I think that once Blizzard starts to stratify the constructed game a little more, or works harder to drive the community to stratify (e.g, but not giving gold or counting wins towards portraits for Casual), we'll see things go stale for a bit. That's why Arena is fun, you have to make do with what you have, and what you have can be sick or sickening.
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- Michael Barnes
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But any time you have rankings, ladders and all that...that overrides the "fun" value of everything else. Which is why I don't ever play casual, I want my wins to count toward something (mainly getting gold/completing quests) even if I am really more of a casual player.
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I think as an experiment next season I will just build a Hunter deck and see how far I can plow in the first ten days.
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- Michael Barnes
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Warbot is a fixture in my Patron deck, I don't know why folks wouldn't use it. Cheap and useful for early control. Sucks to draw it on turn eight, but hey.
You are right on the money about making constructed fun for those that want progress but NOT to play the current meta, which means you are punished if you don't keep up...which CAN mean you get punished if you don't have the right cards, which is definitely the wrong message.
If they just made quests, across the board, valid for casual play...then that might fix a lot of the problem there.
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- Jackwraith
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Michael Barnes wrote: It doesn't really matter if the BRM cards add to the meta- it was a fun adventure, the bosses were good and some of them were quite challenging. The class challenges were good too. I think it's a mistake it is to rate the success or failure of an expansion by what it did to meta. I would agree that the cards are less useful in general and they aren't as good as Naxx, but I would also argue that there's plenty of fun in building dragon decks and seeing what works.
Sure. I'm right there with you. I played hardcore during the beta and was a 3-star legend or whatever and I burned out, so now I do play Ranked to test stuff but I spend a lot of time just trying out new formulations of things (I'm back to running a Velen deck in Priest. It kinda works.) I don't consider BRM to be a failure, either, since it was fun and some of the class challenges were ridiculously so (the Mage one stands out.) I'm just kinda concerned that going effectively a year without new cards (since the BRM ones aren't having the impact that Naxx did) will lead to the game being nothing but Grim Patron and Face Hunter, which is a pretty toxic environment, IMO. As much as I do just test out decks in the lower ranks, I'd like to actually test them, as opposed to getting routed off the board by turn 5.
I don't think the answer is to deny rewards for Casual play, either. I think the answer may be to enhance rewards for Ranked play, as I was talking about earlier. If you take away rewards, no one will play Casual. Instead, they'll play Ranked and get their ass whipped, which means they'll stop playing altogether and HS will become just another esport like Starcraft. Many people stopped playing SC2 because the intervening years had turned it into a competitive sport, period. If you tried playing random matchups, you got hammered. So your choices were to compete with the real playas or do the campaign; no in-between. I think maintaining a casual option, especially in a game as versatile and flexible as a card game, is essential.
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