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- Jackwraith
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- Jackwraith
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- Jackwraith
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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.
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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.
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- Jackwraith
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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.
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But mfer, this is Wild. I have DEVOLVE. Hilarity ensued.
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- Jackwraith
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- Jackwraith
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- Matt Thrower
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That card is currently Mecha C'Thun.
I wish Blizzard did not deem this wise. That is all.
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- Jackwraith
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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.)
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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.
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- Matt Thrower
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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.
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