What Wild Content Do You Want To See?

Hi everyone,

Trying to get a sense of what type of wild content in terms of one-off things like a general guide to deckbuilding or long-term things like a series people would like to see. If you have any ideas or suggestions as to what you would like to see on the site for wild, comment it below.

Thanks!

Maybe revisit old archetypes that didn't make it in Standard to see if they are playable now with cards released later. For example Beast Druid, Freeze Shaman, Discolock, Handbuff.

In the case of Freeze Shaman, second time around it did make it in Standard based on the new cards alone, so there the question would be whether any of the old freeze cards are good enough to make it into a Wild deck.

In the case of Handbuff, an aggressive Handbuff Paladin saw some play in Wild already, but Hunter and Warrior not so much, neither have I seen much of a more mid-range or combo Handbuff Paladin (I have a partially refined decklist, if you're interested). Also Warlock has handbuff potential; we saw that in Standard for a short time until Imprisoned Scrap Imp got nerfed.

I would also be interested in an article about deckbuilding, since we usually only see the end results, not the process that led to it. I really liked Firebat's Deck Doctor series, for example, or Chump refining Patreon decks. But starting from just an idea instead of a deck list would be even more interesting.

Something I struggle with in particular is how many synergies to include. There are a lot of possible synergies in Wild, but some additions strengthen the deck while others make it too hit or miss and it's often not easy to see which way it is going to go. From the viewer decks I saw in the aforementioned videos, often deck builders try to do too many different things in a single deck. But sometimes it does all fit together and that makes a deck special.

Another difficult decision is how much deck slots to spend on the core of the deck and how many on support (like card draw, removal, healing/armor). Often my first draft will be top-heavy since the coolest cards often have high mana costs and then I have to drop some of them to make sure I can actually survive into the late game to play those cards. Are there some guidelines for balancing such things or is it all trial and error?

Something that I didn't realize until I had built a lot of decks is the relationship between card draw/generation, mana curve and situational/tech cards. For example, in Handlock you can afford to run more situational cards, since you draw a lot of cards and aren't going to play the majority of your hand. If you're mostly going to play cards on curve, you don't need much card draw; Seek Guidance Quest Priest is an extreme example, but also many Elemental, Spiteful and C'thun decks play cards on curve.

Another interesting topic is one-of cards. Some people don't want to see any of those at all (except legendaries), arguing that you should always include two copies of the best card. I think that's too simplistic: the best card often depends on the situation and having two different options in your hand can be superior to having the same option twice. When is consistency actually required to make the deck work versus it being an excuse to build decks that can be auto-piloted?

If you're into math, it might be interesting to do an article on the chances of finding certain cards by a certain turn. For example, what is the effect of including a two-of when running Zephrys or Reno, or a non-dragon when running Kazakusan? How many dragons do you need in your deck to reliably have one in hand by turn X? How many tutored cards do you run relative to the number of tutors: I see 3 tutored + 2 tutors quite often, but is that close to the ideal ratio or does Standard just not have enough options to allow other quantities?

For combo decks, how far into your deck can you expect to find the full combo? MarkMcKz often remarks he's very unlucky to find the last combo piece in the bottom cards of his deck, but since many of his combos require 5 or more cards, that might actually be the statistically expected outcome.

I think an in-depth guide for certain match-ups would be good for the average player and generate discussion. It could even be as simple as uploading an HSreplay and explaining why you made every play that you did.

I think Zelgadis' idea of discussing running a single copy of a card is pretty neat as well, though it does not seem exclusive to Wild.

Zelgadis - Thanks for the in depth response, will definitely think about doing something among what you said.

How about something like the evolution of a deck from first draft as it gets refined, with reasoning for each step (including thoughts about the initial step)? Generally, you can have some guidelines for something like mana but it does require trial and error because each deck will have different speeds, synergies and win cons such that it’s hard to predict if you need a higher or lower mana curve or more or less card draw without testing it out. 

Kind of unrelated to the above but doing a math analysis for combos is for sure interesting. If you have 5 combo pieces, you can definitely do some analysis to see the chance that at least one is in your bottom 5 cards. Not counting mulligan maybe you’d do 25/30 chance for each to be in top 25, so then 25/30 to the 5th power is the chance all are in top 25, so then 1 - that = 59.8% chance that one of your 5 combo pieces is in your bottom 5 cards. If you do count mulligan, you’d have to think about how to do this because depending on the combo deck you don’t always mulligan for combo pieces, you’d often mulligan them away for card draw and early game survival tools.

HuntardHuntard - I like the HSreplay idea, maybe that plus an in depth matchup guide for certain meta decks could be a useful tool for players trying to climb and different from the generally non competitive off meta stuff I usually do.

Maybe this is the wrong way of looking at it but regarding the single copy of one card idea. In card games where you can have deck sizes above 30, I read people still want to have the miminum deck size for consistency purposes.

For any given meta, some cards will generally perform better than others. You can see that in HSreplay stats. So, usually, I’d rather have 2 copies of the better performing card to be able to get it more consistently than 1 copy each of 2 different cards. In any meta, there’s always going to be one card that does better and then consistency is important.

One exception could be if your deck has a ton of card draw, then maybe you’d rather run 2 cards that serve 2 different purposes to be able to have both effects available in your deck rather than running 2 of the same card.

Wild Tournaments perhaps? I am sure the Wild community is craving to have their own esports scene develop, and would naturally cause content to pop out.

Meta decks. I believe this is the most important thing of all to have as a Hearthstone Content site. You already do Standard ones, we should have the wild side on the regular too.

After that, fun Deck ideas like mentioned above is a great one. Each month perhaps we could have a theme and people would put their own spin on the idea. For example, Dragon Priest could be a tempo thing, control thing, pair it with Seek Guidence, go thief priest, so on. A little community event to inspire experimentation.

Can you give an example of what kind of Standard meta decks content you like here? For Wild I know FrostyFeet sometimes does articles with top Wild meta decks based on HSreplay data. 

Tempostorm meta reports and Vicious Syndicate meta reports exist as well - are there any things different from that sort of content you’d like to see other than just the decks themselves and a few sentences on each one? VS has a ton of stats that people give them to create these meta reports, and Tempostorm has multiple high level players who come up with them. I don’t know if OoC can compete in meta reports at that level so it would probably have to have some kind of twist or unique aspect to be worth doing.

For the fun deck ideas, I will see if it’s possible to organize a competition type event for that.

Main thing for tournaments is people play on different servers, although we could try having separate tournaments for different servers. I can only organize one for NA personally so I’d have to see if anyone from different servers would be willing to be involved in such a project.

I'm not sure what kind of twist you can really do on meta decks. My whole philosophy is that of: little Timmy wants to play the game but doesn't want to get crushed by everyone. Everybody complains about OP decks like Shudderwock Shaman, Beast Druid, Shadow priest, Ping Mage, but he has no idea what those words mean. He gets what it probably refers to but druid has many beasts, mage has many hero power related cards. He is a casual player who probably doesn't know about or can't afford highly specialized meta tracking services.

So that is imo what you guys should strive to do. Teach someone who has no idea about meta, what is meta right now. What cards are core to a deck, what cards aren't. Things you can slot in if you don't have less essential cards. Tech against other meta decks. What is Beast druid? What does it consist of? it doesn't necessarily have to be a full fledged in depth 1500 words guide. A quick summary of the idea of the deck would suffice.

So maybe once a month articles going through all the top meta decks with some insights into them? Could definitely be worthwhile, I’ll look into it. Thanks for the idea!

This is definitely something that would be useful. I personally can’t stand the meta so I haven’t climbed to high legend in a while. In addition, when I do climb to legend, it’s generally with some tier 3 or tier 4 deck so I’m not sure how much replays from that would be useful.

All the tier 1 decks right now, which would be most recommended for climbing, are ones I don’t really enjoy playing. 

So I personally don’t think I can do this sort of thing now with it being useful, unless something like a replay of a Reno Paladin (tier 3 / tier 4 deck) against tier 1 decks would be useful.

I’ll keep this idea in mind, maybe somebody else will do it at some point or I will do it next expansion depending on the meta.

I don’t watch streamers but if you’re interested in this type of content maybe there are some high legend streamers who you can watch and who explain their plays?