Hearthstone
RNG vs skill: a false competition
Hearthstone often called an RNG fiesta, and the prevailing wisdom is that it takes less skill to play than other TCGs/CCGs because of it. I’m not here to argue whether HS, MtG, LoR etc. is the more skilful since as far as I know the concept of ‘skill’ cannot be quantified, so we’d be stuck using opinions and gut feelings which get us nowhere.
No, the purpose of this thread is to make the case that RNG, in HS as well as other (card) games, should not be regarded with the surface-level analysis that it usually receives. Namely: “you have less control of the outcome, therefore that outcome requires less skill”. To escape the ever-present debate of whether RNG in deck order counts, I'll focus more on randomness outside of card games, which helps shed a different light on things.
Chess and ‘the bamboozle play’
I start with chess: a board game where 1 player goes up against another in a fair, zero-RNG battle of wits and planning. Well, no RNG except for who gets to go first anyway. In a sense we can view chess like a card game mirror match where both players’ decks start on the board. At every point in the game you know exactly what you are up against and you know exactly how every piece is going to behave.
In such a deterministic environment you can plan several turns ahead, working out what you want to do, how you want to do it, and devising counter-plays for your opponent’s inevitable counter-plays. It’s all very skilful… if you are a good player and that description applies to you. I am not a good chess player: I know the rules, but I’m not interested enough in the game to invest the time and effort to make chess a skill of mine. Because of this, I know that if I play against a good player, my odds of winning are very small (which frankly acts as a deterrent against me wanting to play the game, and is certainly a good argument for why HS has so much RNG: to let bad players still enjoy it. But I digress).
However, while I know I’m bad at playing chess conventionally, I also know I can help even the odds by reducing my opponent’s ability too. Which brings me to what I call ‘the bamboozle play’. The idea is simple: do something the opponent won’t expect yet doesn’t do you any harm either. Often this involves moving a piece that still leaves all your key pieces protected but has no influence on the current points of tension on the board. I basically pick a piece at random and as long as it can do something safe I’m happy to move it.
The upshot of the bamboozle play is that it leaves the opponent unsure what I’m going to do, thereby negating a lot of their advantage in being able to predict future turns. The bamboozle play itself is not especially skilful; yes, I must know the rules well enough to know what is safe to do, but it doesn’t go a whole lot deeper than that. However, the very idea of the bamboozle play is quite skilful since it is designed specifically to counter my main disadvantage.
Thus, by feeding a bit of randomness into how I play, I am a more skilful player than I would be without it. Of course I could choose to be even more skilful by actually learning to play chess properly, but I have better things to do than that.
The genius of Monte Carlo simulations
Moving away from games, let’s talk about using RNG in a serious setting: to run scientific simulations and therefore better understand the world around us. The simulations in question, named after the casinos in the city of Monte Carlo (so it’s got some connection to card games through that at least), choose to ignore the known equations provided by mathematics and/or physics in favour of generating a heck of a lot of random numbers instead.
Perhaps the simplest example is calculating the value of the mathematical constant pi (i.e. the pi in the area of a circle = pi * r^2). The way to do this is to snugly put a circle inside a square so the circle’s diameter is equal to the square’s width, 2r = w, and then fire randomly generated vectors at it, each landing at a position (x,y) inside the square. Do this a lot of times, then at the end count what fraction of those vectors landed inside the circle. That will equal the ratio of circle area to square area (pi*(r/w)^2 = pi/4), so multiply it by 4 et voila! You have calculated pi!
You can do much more sophisticated things than this, and I personally have a lot of experience in running Monte Carlo simulations of polymers or swimming bacteria which need to interact in complex ways through the fluid they are in. Each random number does something that has no physical meaning, but real physics can be made to come out if you generate enough of them in the right way.
The point is that RNG can be extremely clever at a statistical level, but that only becomes apparent after a long time. If you focus on individual random numbers, then it looks uncontrolled and you might mistake the end result as an accident of chance when it is in fact just as likely to happen as if you used deterministic equations to get there.
Relating these to Hearthstone
Now to bring things back to RNG in HS.
The bamboozle play can be most easily related to random card generation, letting you do something the opponent won’t expect and plan for. That could be entirely accidental, which is often the case with casting a random spell or summoning a random minion, in which case it is probably not skill or wisdom that led you to do it. Even here though there are examples where it does involve skill, e.g. recognising your only path to victory lies in summoning a taunt.
The discover keyword provides the cleanest demonstration of this ‘bamboozle skill’. There are at least 3 tiers of skill here: 1) you just pick randomly; 2) you pick the card that best suits your deck; 3) you pick the card that best suits your deck while also acting as a counter to the opponent. There’s a lot of knowledge and understanding that goes into making the right choice.
Ultimately, I think the middle ground random card generation (i.e. it goes into your hand, but you don’t have any choice in what card it is) hides the most skill of these three. Being able to work out a good use for a card that has no obvious use arguably shows more skill than following the same old game-plan with a low RNG deck. That comparison can be debated; I’m just pointing out there’s an argument for it.
Monte Carlo’s relation to RNG in Hearthstone is usually one of win rates rather than individual games. Put succinctly, you play the random effects that statistically improve your odds of winning, even if each individual effect looks uncontrolled. The entire reason RNG makes it into strong decks is statistical, and the people who worked out the RNG cards were good (I’m not looking at you netdeckers!) were the skilled players that saw past the variance… OK, and deck-trackers build the statistics for them so they only actually need to know that a larger number is good. But that diminishment of skill is down to the deck-trackers and HS websites, not the game design itself.
Ultimately, a player’s skill in any game is just a measure of how well they can navigate the environment they are given. You can be great at chess but hopeless in HS and vice versa, not so much because one game requires more skill than the other, but because the two games require a different set of skills. To comment on the amount of RNG in HS is to comment on the game environment, not the skill it takes to play it well.
To round things off I’m going to make a comment regarding Burgle Rogue (which has long been my favourite archetype and I am therefore very biased). Given my preference for the bamboozle play in chess, it is perhaps obvious that I would gravitate to a deck whose main win condition is to bamboozle the opponent into submission by doing it so much that statistics shine through within a single game. I guess all I really want is for people to recognise that there’s a lot more skill and planning going on than it looks like when you meet me on ladder and I beat you up with an Animated Avalanche in a deck with no elementals in it.
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Tl;dr: seriously? If you really want 1500 words condensed into a single sentence I guess I’ll repeat this: To comment on the amount of RNG in HS is to comment on the game environment, not the skill it takes to play it well.
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Hearthstone often called an RNG fiesta, and the prevailing wisdom is that it takes less skill to play than other TCGs/CCGs because of it. I’m not here to argue whether HS, MtG, LoR etc. is the more skilful since as far as I know the concept of ‘skill’ cannot be quantified, so we’d be stuck using opinions and gut feelings which get us nowhere.
No, the purpose of this thread is to make the case that RNG, in HS as well as other (card) games, should not be regarded with the surface-level analysis that it usually receives. Namely: “you have less control of the outcome, therefore that outcome requires less skill”. To escape the ever-present debate of whether RNG in deck order counts, I'll focus more on randomness outside of card games, which helps shed a different light on things.
Chess and ‘the bamboozle play’
I start with chess: a board game where 1 player goes up against another in a fair, zero-RNG battle of wits and planning. Well, no RNG except for who gets to go first anyway. In a sense we can view chess like a card game mirror match where both players’ decks start on the board. At every point in the game you know exactly what you are up against and you know exactly how every piece is going to behave.
In such a deterministic environment you can plan several turns ahead, working out what you want to do, how you want to do it, and devising counter-plays for your opponent’s inevitable counter-plays. It’s all very skilful… if you are a good player and that description applies to you. I am not a good chess player: I know the rules, but I’m not interested enough in the game to invest the time and effort to make chess a skill of mine. Because of this, I know that if I play against a good player, my odds of winning are very small (which frankly acts as a deterrent against me wanting to play the game, and is certainly a good argument for why HS has so much RNG: to let bad players still enjoy it. But I digress).
However, while I know I’m bad at playing chess conventionally, I also know I can help even the odds by reducing my opponent’s ability too. Which brings me to what I call ‘the bamboozle play’. The idea is simple: do something the opponent won’t expect yet doesn’t do you any harm either. Often this involves moving a piece that still leaves all your key pieces protected but has no influence on the current points of tension on the board. I basically pick a piece at random and as long as it can do something safe I’m happy to move it.
The upshot of the bamboozle play is that it leaves the opponent unsure what I’m going to do, thereby negating a lot of their advantage in being able to predict future turns. The bamboozle play itself is not especially skilful; yes, I must know the rules well enough to know what is safe to do, but it doesn’t go a whole lot deeper than that. However, the very idea of the bamboozle play is quite skilful since it is designed specifically to counter my main disadvantage.
Thus, by feeding a bit of randomness into how I play, I am a more skilful player than I would be without it. Of course I could choose to be even more skilful by actually learning to play chess properly, but I have better things to do than that.
The genius of Monte Carlo simulations
Moving away from games, let’s talk about using RNG in a serious setting: to run scientific simulations and therefore better understand the world around us. The simulations in question, named after the casinos in the city of Monte Carlo (so it’s got some connection to card games through that at least), choose to ignore the known equations provided by mathematics and/or physics in favour of generating a heck of a lot of random numbers instead.
Perhaps the simplest example is calculating the value of the mathematical constant pi (i.e. the pi in the area of a circle = pi * r^2). The way to do this is to snugly put a circle inside a square so the circle’s diameter is equal to the square’s width, 2r = w, and then fire randomly generated vectors at it, each landing at a position (x,y) inside the square. Do this a lot of times, then at the end count what fraction of those vectors landed inside the circle. That will equal the ratio of circle area to square area (pi*(r/w)^2 = pi/4), so multiply it by 4 et voila! You have calculated pi!
You can do much more sophisticated things than this, and I personally have a lot of experience in running Monte Carlo simulations of polymers or swimming bacteria which need to interact in complex ways through the fluid they are in. Each random number does something that has no physical meaning, but real physics can be made to come out if you generate enough of them in the right way.
The point is that RNG can be extremely clever at a statistical level, but that only becomes apparent after a long time. If you focus on individual random numbers, then it looks uncontrolled and you might mistake the end result as an accident of chance when it is in fact just as likely to happen as if you used deterministic equations to get there.
Relating these to Hearthstone
Now to bring things back to RNG in HS.
The bamboozle play can be most easily related to random card generation, letting you do something the opponent won’t expect and plan for. That could be entirely accidental, which is often the case with casting a random spell or summoning a random minion, in which case it is probably not skill or wisdom that led you to do it. Even here though there are examples where it does involve skill, e.g. recognising your only path to victory lies in summoning a taunt.
The discover keyword provides the cleanest demonstration of this ‘bamboozle skill’. There are at least 3 tiers of skill here: 1) you just pick randomly; 2) you pick the card that best suits your deck; 3) you pick the card that best suits your deck while also acting as a counter to the opponent. There’s a lot of knowledge and understanding that goes into making the right choice.
Ultimately, I think the middle ground random card generation (i.e. it goes into your hand, but you don’t have any choice in what card it is) hides the most skill of these three. Being able to work out a good use for a card that has no obvious use arguably shows more skill than following the same old game-plan with a low RNG deck. That comparison can be debated; I’m just pointing out there’s an argument for it.
Monte Carlo’s relation to RNG in Hearthstone is usually one of win rates rather than individual games. Put succinctly, you play the random effects that statistically improve your odds of winning, even if each individual effect looks uncontrolled. The entire reason RNG makes it into strong decks is statistical, and the people who worked out the RNG cards were good (I’m not looking at you netdeckers!) were the skilled players that saw past the variance… OK, and deck-trackers build the statistics for them so they only actually need to know that a larger number is good. But that diminishment of skill is down to the deck-trackers and HS websites, not the game design itself.
Ultimately, a player’s skill in any game is just a measure of how well they can navigate the environment they are given. You can be great at chess but hopeless in HS and vice versa, not so much because one game requires more skill than the other, but because the two games require a different set of skills. To comment on the amount of RNG in HS is to comment on the game environment, not the skill it takes to play it well.
To round things off I’m going to make a comment regarding Burgle Rogue (which has long been my favourite archetype and I am therefore very biased). Given my preference for the bamboozle play in chess, it is perhaps obvious that I would gravitate to a deck whose main win condition is to bamboozle the opponent into submission by doing it so much that statistics shine through within a single game. I guess all I really want is for people to recognise that there’s a lot more skill and planning going on than it looks like when you meet me on ladder and I beat you up with an Animated Avalanche in a deck with no elementals in it.
----------------------------------------------------
Tl;dr: seriously? If you really want 1500 words condensed into a single sentence I guess I’ll repeat this: To comment on the amount of RNG in HS is to comment on the game environment, not the skill it takes to play it well.
I think the problem with randomness in hearthstone is the amount of variance.
Back when i played yugioh before i quit when they introduced pends i would play one single deck. A randomness deck. This deck would include cards like:
You get the point. Basically a deck designed to be as annoying to play against and luck dependent as possible to win with or win against. And it was fun to play. But do you see the difference? On each of these cards me and my opponent know the outcome of every effect. It's either one thing or another. That's why cards like First Day of School and Magic Trick, i think aren't as oppressive as say Primordial Glyph(excluding magic trick into Evocation obviously) I never had an opponent concede against me out of pure frustration when i played many games with this yugioh deck. That is because me and my opponent knew the odds, and the die rolls or coin flips weren't in either of our favor. Or if they were locked out by particular effects like Tour of Doom or Fairy Box they knew they had potential draws that would negate these effects. But in hearthstone it's different. The amount of variance you can bring forth just by a 1/1 minion that was randomly generated off another minion that discover's a spell, is ridiculous, and there is nothing your opponent can do to limit that effect.
Walk the Plank is considered a joke card to many people that play hearthstone, but i doubt there's not a single person that has fought against a lackey rogue, that hasn't had their lackey rogue opponent discovere it from a randomly generated witchey lackey and won the game off it. The variance is too high.
TL;DR: Variance in hearthstone is a good thing, but not when it causes you to lose to factors out of both player's control. In the future they should either limit discover effects ala Magic Trick to limited card pools, or introduce cards which counter discover mechanics.(if your opponent is holding cards that weren't in their deck originally destroy them or something of the like.)
Living like that.
I think you hammered that nail nicely on the head.
But then again, I just came back from a game where my opponent (who by my judgement makes too many small mistakes) just beaten me because he managed an rng ride from a solarian prime (into puzzlebox, no less) that completely flip the board in his favor, then proceeded to taunt me with Jaina's trademark 'hello's.
Was it skill that got him that win? Not by my judgement. Could I have possibly played better? I was in the lead all the way up until then, getting him to 5 health, so my answer is no. How many evocations was played that game? Three. How often have this happened? Way too many times over the last 6 months.
You're right in pointing out the flaws in the statement 'you have less control of the outcome, therefore that outcome requires less skill'. Unfortunately, that doesn't detract from the point that that outcome was entirely out of my hands (and my opponent's hands as well), my opponent was not as skilled and yet still won, and no amount of mathematical equations could have saved me from my untimely fate.
Often its not merely rng. Its also the amount, and its impact. And there are quite a few rng card generators in hearthstone that wins games on its own. That I think is the real issue at heart. There's no playing around with cards like puzzlebox. If they play it, then its time to start praying.
In principle I agree. I would like to adress one point however. RNG in HS often does not mean having less control of the outcome of a situation, but having no control at all. One (quite extreme) example would be the new Yogg card. Play it and you can instantly win or lose the game. There is absolutely no skill or control involved here, just pure randomness. There are different levels of RNG, some just influence the current game situation to varying degrees and some decide the game outright. The latter pretty much negate any skill.
You are saying that "To comment on the amount of RNG in HS is to comment on the game environment, not the skill it takes to play it well." which is right, but does not take into account that besides the amount of RNG there is also the "quality" of RNG which matters. As described above some RNG just gives you an advantage while other forms completely negate any skill.
English is not my native language, so please excuse occasional mistakes
I completely agree, and this touches very much on @Dapperdog's comment too.
I personally take issue with how Puzzle Box, Amazing Reno and Solarian Prime work. In general I am in favour of RNG to hand much much more than RNG straight to the board. I attempted to separate them in the "Relating these to Hearthstone" section, but since the aim was to take the side of RNG on the whole my disdain for on-board RNG was muted a bit. I tried to convey that there is some skill that can be associated with this type of RNG, but the bigger and flashier versions do go way too far, to the point where variance far outweighs the influence skill can have.
I think this is a very high quality thread. I think Hearthstone could benefit from having variance particularly in the start of the game reduced by a little bit. Examples of this:
* Players start with one or two more cards each.
* Players start the game with a little bit more life, like 35 (To reduce the chance of noninteractive early game steamroll matches).
However I am a huge fan of the emergent complexity and gameplay that arises from mechanics that include a degree of randomness. This is why discover is my favourite mechanic.
Edit: Maybe also relevant to the discussion: I play wild exclusively.
I don't personally have much of an issue with the size of card pools, but perhaps that is because I have spent years working with statistical physics and its continuous distributions (i.e. infinite possibilities). I instead view things more as a comparison of the variance (or strictly the standard deviation = square root of variance) and the mean (average) value.
For example, if you have 100 possible 2-drops to get from Piloted Shredder, and nearly all of them have a sensible 2-drop stat-line (e.g. 2/3, 3/2, 2/2 etc) with mild effects, and there's only a small handful of outliars (e.g. Millhouse Manastorm and Doomsayer) then the ratio of average to variance is actually quite small. The end result is that you know to expect a sensible 2-drop, even if you need to keep contingency plans in the back of your mind for rare outliars.
To me, that is more predictable than a coin flip on whether something happens or not, as happens with Time Wizard and is common in physical card games. Setting heads = 1 and tails = 0, that's a mean of 1/2 and a variance that ends up 1/4 (hence a standard deviation = 1/2). That's a standard deviation as large as the mean, so while I might know exactly what the two outcomes are, I don't actually have any idea which to expect.
There is a definite matter of preference in there, but in the end I'm glad HS has so few coin flips.
As for issues with Walk the Plank being generated: I'm surprised it catches you off-guard so much. If there is any type of spell/effect I would expect a rogue to discover it is hard removal. Meta decks might not play them very often, but the class has a ton of them. Also, when was Walk the Plank a joke card? I seem to recall it being played for a little while, and a 4-mana destroy a minion spell with only a minor restriction is pretty solid.
Getting steamrolled due to bad draws certainly sucks, although I expect increasing the opening hand size will have some complications beyond just improving early draws. I'm not entirely sure whether it would favour aggro or control, since aggro has more fuel while control has better odds of having answers. I guess it's a good sign that it is not obvious who benefits most.
I would be most wary of both suggestions for combo decks. Having 1 extra card at the start reduces the clock for decks to beat them in by 1 turn, which is occasionally a huge deal. Meanwhile, having a higher health total will make combo decks who don't already have 35 damage reach fall off the face of the game completely. Ultimately, I think cards for combo decks are balanced so much around the size of the starting hand, the starting health total and the maximum 10 mana crystals that changing any of them might cause balance problems even if all other archetypes are fine with it.
Since I actively avoided touching on the variance in card draw in my initial post, I haven't given full thought to whether early game variance could be optimised. It's certainly an interesting topic of discussion, especially with regards to how the game has evolved since the simpler days of Classic.
This brings me to another flaw with the game, as I see it: The lack of options for interacting with your opponent's game plan. I can see why one would be wary of introducing cards like these: losing key cards due to discard mechanics or similar is not fun, and one could certainly make a case that too much meddling with your opponents' resources could in itself result in a non-interactive game environment. For instance: There are decks in MTG whose plan is to discard their opponent's entire hand and thus leave them with no ways to interact. That has the potential to be oppressive in and of itself.
I think the key word here is 'moderation'.
Having some viable ways to interact with the hands and decks of your opponents I imagine will create an environment where people are less inclined to zero in on a deterministic, non-interactive game plan where your entire deck revolves around building up to one key turn while minimizing the ways in which your opponent can interact with you. Conversely, if you lose one of your key cards, you more or less lose the game. I am not opposed to these "tunnel-vision" combo decks in principle, but I do think there needs to be reasonable answers to these decks for every class and archetype. Otherwise, in theory at least, we end up in a rock-paper-scissor environment where combo beats control, control beats aggro and aggro beats combo. My philosophy is that any class or archetype should have a reasonable chance to win against any other class or archetype.
By introducing some more disruption tools we encourage players to diversify their decks, including a number of threats instead of throwing every apple in one basket. Personally I like the idea of that.
@Joesson
I think at its heart this is all the result of the basic rules of the game, especially not being able to play cards on your opponent's turn. This obviously stops you being able to directly mess with your opponent's turn, but more subtly (and possibly more importantly) it also stops them being able to counter any disruption cards you play. In games like MtG, I believe you can counter your opponent's counter, which makes it safer to print lots of disruption cards. So in Hearthstone a disruption card is more potent than it's equivalent in MtG, and I can understand why they are rarer. There are also smaller decks and fewer copies of each card in Hearthstone, making it even more impactful to, say, discard a card.
The more I think about it, the more I like the way disruption cards have been handled, even with how different classes get their own flavour of disruption, while neutral disruption cards get printed if anything becomes a general problem (e.g. Skulking Geist in response to Jade Druid).
I personally like that the classes in HS are truly distinct and cannot share their cards like they do in most other games. It changes the question from, say, "which class has the best control cards?" to "which class has good control cards but also has a way to deal with the current strongest combo deck?". That might mean you'd choose priest over warrior because you have Mindrender Illucia, but if you target aggressive decks instead then maybe warrior would be the better choice.
I suppose it is not so much a rock-paper-scissors between aggro, control and combo, but that there's in principle 10 options for each of those broad archetypes (obviously some are very weak), and those can each have different strengths and weaknesses against each other. For a janky example, I know 'control rogue' struggles against aggro, but it always ends up being a control killer.
Anyway, coming back to disruption cards, I thought it would be good for my own understanding of the game's design to try to establish what the 'flavour of disruption' is for each class. I admit I was quite liberal with the use of the word 'disruption', and didn't really distinguish between destroying the opponent's card before it is played and just making it weak/useless when it is. What can I say, I like to generalise things. Besides, we've already strayed from my original post on RNG so it seems fine to stray a little further.
You may like how tech/disruption has been handled (for neutrals atleast) in HS but i dont at all.
I dont think cards like stickyfinger, platebreaker ,geist(to lesser extend) drity rat,hecklebot and all are good/healthy design at all.
A much better design of tech is delay ala loatheb or zihi. They DELAY not DESTROY and they arent random.
Gnomeferatu,hecklebot or drity rat,demonic project are rng which shouldnt be for tech imo at all, or if rng should be like discard nowadays more controlled.
can hold 10minions in hand and dirty rat can still take the 1 minion you need for your win conditon/combo and is nothign can do about it. Or say a mechathun deck and oponent plays gnomeferatu and htis your mechathun well now you lost and is nothing can do about it.
Tech should help you and Delay. NOT win the matchup for you and it shoudlnt be random. And like yeah it sucks loosing vs a combo deck or whatever but does it for them to randomly loose /insat losoe cause you played 1 card that destory all chance they had of winning on its own.
I guess I would refer you to @Joesson's opinions more than my own, since from what they said it sounds like they would prefer combo decks to have an alternate win condition so they don't insta-lose by a single lucky tech card. (Hopefully I'm not putting the wrong words in their mouth.) To a large extent I agree: if your deck only has 1 route to winning, then you accept the risk that carries when you build the deck. From the perspective of game theory that sounds perfectly reasonable game design to me.
As for whether it is better to be beaten by Loatheb or Mojomaster Zihi instead of a lucky Dirty Rat, from the cold-hearted perspective of statistics it really doesn't matter if they both help to a similar degree. The more emotional answer has to balance how bad it feels to have your win condition destroyed by a dice roll* against how bad it feels to start a game you know you cannot win because there's not nearly enough delay options for you to put on enough pressure. There will be no right answer here, but I tend to agree with the idea that it is better to play every game believing there is at least a chance. This goes both ways: if I feel like there's no real chance of losing I won't be interested, especially if I'm just playing the same combo I've used a hundred times before.
* Note this should also take into account how good it feels when they miss and you have a rush of relief, which realistically doesn't come alongside much disappointment from your opponent since they knew it was a long-shot anyway.
Great article!
Does it take into consideration where cards interact. Like [Hearthstone Card (Sorcerer's Apprentice[\card] effects. Do they add weighting in your comparison?
Taking to a silly (and obvs theoretical) extreme, if I could get infinite hand size and infinite mana reduction, then one "fill my hand with spells" would win me the game. That would be the ultimate deck, no need to build anything else. So, presumably at some point the RNG + cost reduction + hand fill will take away skill. Is that point realistically not likely? Maybe you just run out of time trying to find the card you want in the 100s in your hand :D
) Not Found]I tried not to consider interactions between cards too much because they expand the space of card/game design so much that it becomes difficult to make any simple statements, but your questions actually go to the heart of how I view game design, which I now cannot resist blurting out. This is going to get pretty abstract, so brace yourself… (also, I'm putting this all into words for the first time as I write, so I'm sorry if it goes off on tangents).
You get and axis, and you get and axis. Everybody gets an axis!
If you like you can view the space of card game design as this vast, many-dimensional graph on which each card game sits in the little part that has the parameters that that particular game uses. In this viewpoint, the maximum hand size is viewed in a very similar way to RNG: they are both distribution functions along their respective axes of the graph. The hand size is a very narrow distribution (it would just be a single point if it wasn't for Valdris Felgorge), while RNG is more of a splodge because it has much more variance. Hearthstone sits entirely within the cross-section of the RNG splodge and the tiny hand size 'splodge'. As you go up into higher dimensions of game design (including everything from how mana works to general art style), you constrain what Hearthstone is more and more.
Similarly MtG has it's own overlap of however many splodges of design parameters there are, as do LoR, Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon TCG, Blackjack, Poker, Snap etc. (the last few I include to make the point that different games can of course share a lot of design space).
Anyway, your hypothetical extreme essentially just moves HS around on the hand size axis, as well as the corresponding changes on the other relevant axes. From this abstract viewpoint do that is fundamentally the same as the explosion in RNG in HS that came when GvG was released, which gave HS a big old shunt along the RNG axis (a shunt it has never really come back from).
But where's skill in all of this?
That's all great, but here's the kicker: I am adamant that there is not an axis for skill. To make my point, there's nothing stopping 2 terrible chess players from playing chess, so there is never anything saying "you need X skill to play chess". Perhaps we should start by defining skill…
At first glance, a sensible metric for how skilful a game is would be the correlation between player skill and win rates: In the hypothetical perfect skill game, the player with the higher skill will always win, while in the hypothetical zero skill game the odds are always 50:50. The issue here is that there is no independent measure of player skill. Since we have nothing better, we say someone has higher skill because they have a higher win rate, so the whole thing goes around in circles.
A better approach would be to look at the spread of win rates across players. The higher the spread, the more 'tiers' of skill there are and the easier it is to tell good and bad players apart.
While the spread of win rates will depend on the splodge of game space a game occupies, it is not something you could realistically hope to deduce from the properties of the splodge. It is what I would call an 'emergent phenomenon', and is quite a lot like friction: there is nothing at the molecular level that would lead you to predict friction exists, but it certainly does when you zoom out enough. The second part of the analogy is that friction looks different for solids and fluids, so also depends on how molecules 'choose to use' the physical laws they are given.
Likewise, the phenomenon of skill is a real thing and some games are more skilful than others, but it only exists with the addition of players (not part of HS itself) who make choices which ultimately lead to the emergence of skill. A different series of choices might lead to different metas even with the same cards present, and those metas might differ in skill. Hence, it is important to distinguish between skill and a game's rule set (aka splodge in game space), even if they are connected.
To actually answer the question…
If you want to make a game that looks a lot like HS but moves it to the patch of space with infinite hand size and mana, and supply it with the extreme card you suggest, then that's not ridiculous at all from my abstract perspective. That said, it is basically just making a super convoluted coin flip, which is why it is so easy to know it will reduce skill to (almost) zero. Interestingly, your suggestion is a perfect example of what I was talking about with Monte Carlo simulations: there's so much RNG that you know exactly what it is going to do.
Returning to the effect of card interactions in the real version of HS, I now think I can confidently say that they are just as easy to factor into skill as a vanilla minion would so. In neither case do you have any idea until you look at the distribution of win rates of players. I guess the irony is that the devs are the one group of people we never hear discuss skill, but also the only ones who have the complete data set to actually quantify it with.
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I find it rather disingenuous of you to make a direct comparison to a playstyle in chess that you state explicitly is not more skillful than actually playing chess normally and isn't even hard to do - and then use that to claim that using RNG in hearthstone actually IS skillful and hard to do.
Surely you have to realize that this is not a fair comparison at all. In the chess example, you are (by your own admission) less skilled than your opponent. Therefore (if you're using that as an actual analogy), in the hearthstone example of RNG, you're also less skilled than your opponent. Analogy is analogy, good sir. If you don't like it, you should use a different analogy.
First addressing the analogy itself, perhaps my point here would benefit from being expressed in another way. We first have to consider what we even mean when we say someone is more skilled than someone else. That is something I attempted to define in my previous response, under the heading "But where's skill in all of this?".
Essentially, all we have to work with (or at least all I could come up with) are win rates. Of course these aren't perfect, especially in games like Hearthstone where decks can counter each other and skew them, but win rates should be pretty good in a game like chess where the two sides are equal (assuming each player goes first the same number of times).
OK, so my point is if I tried to play chess conventionally with my current ability (note I'm distinguishing between 'ability' and 'skill'), my win rate would be lower than if I inject some randomness. So by the only metric of skill I have, the use of randomness is increasing my skill. That statement is not invalidated by the fact that I could increase it more by learning to be good at playing conventionally. Mathematically you could crudely capture the idea with something like S = A + (A0 - A)B, with S = skill, A = conventional ability, B = bamboozle skill, and A0 is some reference value of A below which B is a net gain but above which B is a loss.
Put simply, being skilled in any game is about knowing your best route to victory, and that depends on your current ability. It is undoubtedly a skill to acknowledge your disadvantage against an opponent and to make unorthodox choices to help offset that, and that is what the bamboozle play is all about.
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Regarding "and then use that to claim that using RNG in hearthstone actually IS skillful and hard to do". To be clear, that is not actually what I said. I made a case that RNG in HS can require skill to navigate effectively, but I also point out that not all RNG is equal in this regard and I never tried to quantitatively compare skill in HS to anything else. I left it completely open as to whether HS is more or less skill-intensive than chess or MtG or Monopoly etc.
The entire point of the thread is that skill and RNG are not inherently connected to each other, and that it is a mistake to treat them like they are, which is what many people do. That works both ways: more RNG does not by itself say anything about whether more nor less skill is required. Different types of RNG will push it in different directions, and even the same type may go in different directions depending on the surrounding meta.
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I want to add, that if you have a useful definition of skill that doesn't come from the win rate I'd be interested to hear it. It will then become a matter of semantics, where what I said above applies with my definition of skill, but might not with yours.
This post kind of goes along with what I heard some devs say a long time ago (might have even been Brode) about how the RNG element of Hearthstone can almost be more skill testing. To paraphrase the comment as I remember it: Yes, the RNG factor requires luck and not skill, however, it also takes skill from the players to know their possible outs in regards to generated or discovered cards. (Or in other words, the skill is in how the player manages the environment as you said.)
Which kind of comes back to your comparison of your "bamboozle" play and picking your discovered cards in Hearthstone having three skill levels. Not always knowing what to take, but in some cases even knowing if you can play a Discover card now and just pick something that might fit my deck, or if it's more beneficial to wait until you might NEED something.
Overall, very good points in this thread from both OP and comment section. :)
Quick! Someone give me something clever to write here.