First version that I wrote 5 wins against Quest mage had more deathrattles without SI:7 Package but I had to change it into this because of other decks that has more taunts and big minions.
SI:7 Infiltrator is like a must have against Mage for Quest Rogue and I guess it will stay as long as Mage's hold those secrets. Really helps so much.
Dont think its a bug. Its not a 'disguise'. What it really means is that you transform into another class at the start of the game and transform back when you play a rogue card.
That would explain why youre able to discover cards from the disguise's class rather than rogue cards.
lol, I know how it works with discover. That was already what I was doing while playing with Maestra of the Masquerade. Discovering cards from other classes as much as possible then turn into Rogue to complete [Hearthstone Card (Find to Imposter) Not Found]. This was the deck I was using;
So I cracked all my new United in Stormwind packs that I was able to amass from the gold I've been saving over the past month and crafted a few of the decks for the quests and I gotta say this... Hunter and Warrior are not only ridiculously easy to do, but probably NEED to be nerfed.
I took the garden variety Dwarven Defense deck for Hunter with no changes and just ROFL stomped every single player I came across. This works even more viciously in Wild with Baku. I was able to accomplish it as soon as turn 6 and just destroy my opponent.
The Warrior quest was nearly almost as easy to complete. Once The Juggernaut hits the board, it's kinda GG for your opponent. I didn't even try to make a competitive deck, I just threw in some Pirates and Coerce into a deck and destroyed my opponents.
I've tried the Druid quest and it was lack luster to say the least but that was expected in the card reveal. I got 2-4 of the other quests that I need to try as well, but honestly, I was shocked at how easy it was to just beat your opponent with the quest rewards of those two so far, so even though the Hunter quest is the ONE thing that has got me liking that class finally after the passed 7 years of playing this game, it really needs to be nerfed as it is waaaaaaaaaaaay too easy to complete. Thoughts on this and your experiences so far?
I'm sorry but no, the biggest thing that had been holding half the classes back for years and forced them into the same streamlined archetypes was the fact that they weren't allowed to actually play their cards.
NOw we're finally at a point where Priests, Hunters, Shamans and Warriors are actually allowed diverge into different archetypes.
Power Creep is not only inevitable but also necessary unless you wanna go back to the boring slogfest that is Classic.
Were those classes really that limited in the middle years of HS? Looking between Old Gods and Descent of Dragons, before card draw started becoming really strong, you find:
Priest had res decks, Raza singleton, value-control (e.g. Galakrond), various dragon decks (including a strong tempo version in Gadgetzan), Lyra miracle stuff, tempo while Extra Arms was buffed, Mecha'thun, deathrattle quest + Seance, Nomi miracle.
Hunters had lots of beast-focused aggro/midrange sure, but also secret/spell decks, big beast recruit, Odd, mechs, singleton, Unseal the Vault was meta for a little while, hero power secret/aggro, dragons.
Shaman had totems (including Even), overload, evolve, jade, murlocs, elementals, many Sudderwock/battlecry variants (including Uldum quest and Galakrond), big decks with Muckmorpher
Warrior had C'Thun, pirates, taunt, Dead Man's Hand fatigue, Odd control/fatigue, mech control, dragons, bombs, aggro with Bloodsworn Mercenary, Galakrond (both aggressive and value focused).
None of them were one-trick ponies, and none of them needed lots of card draw to get there. Nor were these games just massive slog-fests. Some were when the intent was to go to fatigue, but most did have an actual win condition.
And yes, power creep is inevitable, but it has been far too sharp recently to be natural 'creep'. It has been propelled much faster than it needed to be. Whether that is a detriment to the game is subjective, but certainly for me it has changed the game for the worse.
Or just play arena. With witchwood coming in and deramping the power and ashes of outland being gone it's a bit better. Just whole you wait for nerfs. But you never know...
1) But I'd argue that its deliberate made that way by the devs, to increase interactivity (and therefore, subjectively, fun). Play a couple of games in classic and suddenly the game may be fairer (Lack of removals means more minion activity) but honestly unless you're specifically playing miracle rogue you're basically playing 1-2 cards per turn. The mechanics were simple, and there's very little reason to think because nearly everything is predictable: druid ramp on 2, zoo curvestone, turn 4 giant, etc.
In order to break that cycle you have to either 1) increase the rate and efficiency of card draw, or 2) increase card generation. They balance that out by designing the cards with a lower statline or at a higher cost. So in effect you're trading tempo for card draw/generation.
2) I wouldn't say that an increased in card draw efficiency makes the game less interesting. Looking at the meta in the earliest history of hearthstone and honestly, the games were fairly predictable and repetitive. The most extreme example would be to look at hunter's history. The early parts were entirely made up of face/midrange hunters that practically played nothing but curvestone. It was not until Master's Call was introduced that we had hunter actually playing off curve and keeping cards in hand for a bigger finish. Similarly shaman in barrens didn't really got anywhere until Primal Dungeoneer was introduced, which then proceed to make possible elemental shaman, doomhammer shaman, and arguably control shaman.
3) We are moving towards a phase where the old definition of control can no longer exist because hearthstone has evolved past curvestone. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. The ultimate objective should be to keep the value just low enough that control decks can exist, but high enough to give decks stuff to do instead of having their stuff repeatedly removed from board every turn. In my view, the best meta should ideally be 50-50 no matter the archetype, and avoiding polarising rock-paper-scissors games.
...
4) That is...until we were given this freakish meta to exist in.
I agree it was very likely deliberate, and I don't disagree with improving draw a bit, but I do think they have massively overshot what was necessary. I actually think priest's card draw is in a good and healthy spot right now it has some again, but it's the outlier. As with shaman a couple of months ago, it looks like it hasn't got much, only because everyone else has a tonne.
Whether it increases interactivity is questionable though. If it mostly benefits aggro and combo, then where is the added interactivity in practice?
Regarding the simple mechanics of Classic, I think that's an entirely separate matter. Part of why I disliked the Barrens meta was because it felt a lot like Classic in terms of its simplicity, and certainly not for lack of card draw. Meanwhile Hearthstone's history is riddled with fancy and interesting cards/effects that didn't need the amount of card draw we have today.
As for the statline reduction - or lack thereof - that's arguably where a lot of power creep exists. Vanilla stats haven't moved an inch since Classic, but the stat cost associated with effects (not just card draw, but including it) has reduced significantly. Tempo loss for card draw is small to nonexistent these days, which is exactly why aggro and combo can afford to run so much of it.
2)
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Since you raise hunter, I would point out you have forgotten spell and big-beast-recruit hunter, both driven largely by K&C, and both existing before Master's Call arrived. Neither had much in the way of card draw, but they still functioned fine without taking the usual play-minions-on-curve route, partly because there wasn't such a strong need for card draw. The best anyone had was Elven Minstrel, so the amount needed to compete with other classes was far lower than what we have today. Master's Call helped bring (aggro) beast hunter back, but it wasn't required for hunter to be effective as a class.
This is why I think shaman's problem in Barrens was the amount of draw other classes had, rather than truly lacking any itself.
3)
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I agree a redefinition of 'control' isn't the end of the world, but it does come with problems. Whether we are talking about control as fatigue decks or in the more Classic sense where they actually had finishers, there's a large part of the playerbase that most enjoys those decks. Those players have already taken an in-game beating for the last 16 months, and while I can only speak for myself here, I'm coming to the end of my tether with it.
The collateral damage to meme decks is huge too. These decks often only find success against slow control decks. If those are removed, then cool meme cards like Elwynn Boar might as well not exist.
Idyllic as a perfect 50:50 win rate spread would be, there must always be some degree of rock-paper-scissors, because decks are built to counter other decks. We don't want things quite so polarising as OG quest rogue, but there should be some deviation from 50:50.
4)
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I fully acknowledge that card draw is only so good as the cards it draws, and it cannot be held solely responsible. Mana reduction and burst from hand are also playing a part that is greatly inflated compared to previous years. Those two again benefit aggro and combo over control. Both have been problematic over the years of course, with a lot of burst damage being sent to the Hall of Fame and mana cheating often being cited as a load of bs.
What really concerns me is the current design philosophy seems to be to push all 3 to extreme levels, which runs completely counter to the design philosophy of the past, which had been explicitly stated to limit burst damage, and was clearly much more reserved with draw and cost reductions.
They might not be changing the core mechanics of the game, but between them they are completely changing what aggro, control and combo even mean. If aggro's not worrying about eking out every last bit of damage because it never runs out of cards, and if combo can play everything so fast it doesn't need to worry about its own survival, and is control doesn't even know what to do anymore, is it really still the same game?
I'm sure lots of people like the changes in design philosophy, but for me it is committing to every design choice that undermines the reason I was playing in the first place. Neither Wild nor Standard really let me play out the shenanigans I log on for anymore, and Classic doesn't even have the cards to try it with. The really frustrating thing is that it isn't burnout. There's lots I want to try in Stormwind, but deep down I know I'd much rather be in any meta between TGT and SoU. (I'd include DoD if it didn't mean pre-nerf Galakrond shaman *shudder*.)
5) Whoops, yes, thanks. It shows how much I use that card! I have now corrected it.
Agree, we have to temporarily sit this awful early meta out and hope that Team5 will swing with the nerf hammer hard and soon™. Until that happens, I will be completing XP achievements at rank floors and farm Questline Mages with my Questline Druid.
So satisfying 😇
EDIT: I am actually more annoyed by all the frequent UI bugs and random disconnects that were introduced by the latest patch.
Yea I agree with Voidtouched Attendant very good with Mind Tether and Psyfiend. Also got a Bag of Coins haha, and also got the stormwind achievement so if you can't win with shadow priest, least we can complete the achievement in duels
I mean, if you unironically play boar memes you can't expect not to get absolutely shat on.
Also, minion based decks still work against Warlock and Shadow Priest can catch people off guard with Illucia (which should be an autoinclude these days).
I'm not saying that the meta isn't kind of awful and a lot of the new decks need to be curbed heavily, but it's not entirely unplayable (except against Mage, fuck those guys). Just complete achievements while you wait for the whole thing to blow over.
I'm sorry but no, the biggest thing that had been holding half the classes back for years and forced them into the same streamlined archetypes was the fact that they weren't allowed to actually play their cards.
NOw we're finally at a point where Priests, Hunters, Shamans and Warriors are actually allowed diverge into different archetypes.
Power Creep is not only inevitable but also necessary unless you wanna go back to the boring slogfest that is Classic.
But I'd argue that its deliberate made that way by the devs, to increase interactivity (and therefore, subjectively, fun). Play a couple of games in classic and suddenly the game may be fairer (Lack of removals means more minion activity) but honestly unless you're specifically playing miracle rogue you're basically playing 1-2 cards per turn. The mechanics were simple, and there's very little reason to think because nearly everything is predictable: druid ramp on 2, zoo curvestone, turn 4 giant, etc.
In order to break that cycle you have to either 1) increase the rate and efficiency of card draw, or 2) increase card generation. They balance that out by designing the cards with a lower statline or at a higher cost. So in effect you're trading tempo for card draw/generation.
I wouldn't say that an increased in card draw efficiency makes the game less interesting. Looking at the meta in the earliest history of hearthstone and honestly, the games were fairly predictable and repetitive. The most extreme example would be to look at hunter's history. The early parts were entirely made up of face/midrange hunters that practically played nothing but curvestone. It was not until Master's Call was introduced that we had hunter actually playing off curve and keeping cards in hand for a bigger finish. Similarly shaman in barrens didn't really got anywhere until Primal Dungeoneer was introduced, which then proceed to make possible elemental shaman, doomhammer shaman, and arguably control shaman.
We are moving towards a phase where the old definition of control can no longer exist because hearthstone has evolved past curvestone. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. The ultimate objective should be to keep the value just low enough that control decks can exist, but high enough to give decks stuff to do instead of having their stuff repeatedly removed from board every turn. In my view, the best meta should ideally be 50-50 no matter the archetype, and avoiding polarising rock-paper-scissors games.
Finally, will reducing the card draw efficiency of classes that feature this identity solve the problem? Not really in my opinion. Looking at the past barrens meta, miracle rouge can draw their whole deck but not necessarily win the match, while controlock hardly ever draws outside of hp. No gameplan can exist solely by drawing cards, because card draw options are inherently tempo-losing.
That is...until we were given this freakish meta to exist in.
The current meta we live in currently isn't normal. Its that polarising rock-paper-scissors bs that pits combo on one end and hyper aggro on the other. Mage transcends that by literally having a good matchup no matter what the opposition is, and will lose only because they didn't draw their Incanter's Flow early enough, or the opponent scored a combo for lethal from 30 health at turn 5-7.
Its not the card draw. Its because team5 have ramped the power level of certain cards like Ignite, Stealer of Souls and Garrote that enabled lethal setup by turn 5. Card draw facilitated it, sure. But without these super-saiyan blue levels of bs it'll be all for naught. As I said, you can't have a gameplan that ignores everything but card draw...unless that is the very win condition in itself (which is what we have now). And that's something team5 can easily design around.
I don't like calling for nerfs this early into an expansion. But not since the bs of pre-nerf small spell mage and Solarian Prime have I ever been so desperate for a change. Even when lunacy mage was raising hell, I can still play midrange decks with a gameplan to stop them. But this meta denies me even that. I dont like playing tier 1 or hyper aggro decks; but what choice do I have?
What's the point. Priest has been successfully deleted from the game (win rate at 39.8% at the time of writing) and any minion based decks are useless against Quest Mage and Warlock which run rampant at the low levels of standard. I even battled to finish my "Win 5 games in ranked" quest coz archetypes like shadow priest, big warriors and elwynn boar memes just get rekt. Worst experience I've had in a new meta. But it's fine, there is D3 and POE to play to till blizzard fix this sh!t
It needs to be changed for Wild sake. Just went almost uncontested to D5 and the only games lost were games where my starting hand was really bad. Other than that, the amount of draw, mana cheat with Darkglare and Giant/Broom turns are making the deck unstopabble.
If I would to recommend a nerf to this I would say change the damaga required for each step from 6/7/8 to 8/7/6. Early life steal makes it much easier to play without paying attention to the enemy and since you are doing 1st and 2nd step in a turn or two, instead of hurting yourself for 13, you effectively hurt yourself for 7 which is nothing on turn 2-3. Quest is always completed before turn 4-6 and usually one turn is enough to finish off the opponent. By changing the early requirements, the quest would be punished by aggro a bit more and even slower decks would have a chance to at least develop something on the board to threat the rest of warlock's life.
Well i think expanding the Rating System would be better than an Overall Rating - i mean you could still get an overall rating after the Expanded One but with an Expanded System i can give sort of extra Points or Minus Points because of for example spelling errors - right now i can only reduct a star if there is an error so i guess this would work better in an expanded system.
Also what kinda bugged me a little since i sometimes join in the WCDC - we can't give half Stars - maybe a card is worth 3.5 but i can only give 3 or 4 ... also maybe it would be better if the votings would start all together because it seems that someone who submits a card early on has a litte bit of voting advantage ...
Cutting the Finalist Voting could be a good step because like the OP mentioned often times there will be just a push for the card you like the most etc.
Rewards would be kinda nice but i guess the rewarding system is still fine because i mostly do this for fun but if we would get some sort of reward out of it that could spike up the numbers on people competing - maybe :)
Also sometimes i feel like the WCDC Community ( or at least some votes) are way to harsh - sure we want a good and perfect card with no errors but sometimes a card is very good but does not make it to the finals because the Watermark is from a wrong expansion or the flavour is ok but not in the right kind etc. so i guess with an expanded rating system this could be improved.
Also maybe we could implement some sort of Beginners Challenge or something like that - don't know but sometimes i have the feeling that beginners or people who are pretty new to WCDC almost never have a chance against the "Old Guard" of WCDC :) :)
Very cool - this reminds me of the days when you played the Mage Minion on 1 that let`s you play a Secret for free and after that the Opponent played his "old" quest and concedes after the counter :)
Dont think its a bug. Its not a 'disguise'. What it really means is that you transform into another class at the start of the game and transform back when you play a rogue card.
That would explain why youre able to discover cards from the disguise's class rather than rogue cards.
I've been going back and forth on writing this thread for a couple of months because I couldn't find a way to frame it that I was happy with, and if I couldn't convince myself I'd never convince anyone else. But the early Stormwind meta has added some clarity to the picture, so here goes...
I'm pretty sure the state of card draw is one of, if not the biggest problem in Hearthstone right now. Put simply, its more efficient than is good for the game. There's too much of it, it's too cheap, and it too often tutors key cards. It's not just the classes that are supposed to be great at drawing cards, its everyone. To varying degrees sure - rogue is still better at it than most - but not to much significance. Even the classes that are supposedly bad at it have card draw that would have been powerful enough to be confined to classes like rogue a couple of years ago. Not to mention super powerful neutral options that guarantee any class has draws for days.
Take Elven Minstrel for example. It was a good card in a very strong expansion in a class that has always had good card draw. Compare it to the likes of Refreshing Spring Water and Primal Dungeoneer, both of which are in classes that were traditionally so-so at drawing cards, and the Minstrel is laughably weak.
Why it's an issue
Show Spoiler
OK, so there's a lot more card draw, why is that a problem? At it's heart, the problem is that card draw benefits different archetypes to wildly different extents. In particular, aggro can avoid running out of steam (as demonstrated in the Barrens meta, and quite a lot of last year too) and combo can find everything really quickly (as demonstrated in Stormwind). Normally that wouldn't be too much of a problem because card draw is slow so aggro can't afford to use it and combo has to be careful not to fall too far behind when using it, but it's all so cheap these days that it's not a problem for either archetype.
Meanwhile, control and value benefit relatively little. Both try to get as much as possible out of each card in the deck and clog up their hands if they draw too much. Plus, their win conditions barely exist when they cannot exhaust aggro's resources and they die too quickly to put any pressure on combo.
Control can at least try to respond to heavy card draw in aggro by running more removal and making use of their own card draw as best they can. That didn't work super well in the Barrens, though priest at least managed it. (It was a horrible deck to play against, but that's besides the point.) I was actually hopeful the defensive tools in Stormwind would make up the difference though. Perhaps they did? We can't say because Stormwind made a bunch of powerful combo decks that, thanks to the copious efficient card draw, can completely mess with the natural order of things and win as fast as aggro does.
In an ideal world we have the cycle: aggro > combo > control > aggro. In Standard things are set up so aggro = combo >> control <? aggro. Wild has been like that for a long time, and it's an inevitable result of lots of great cards existing, but Standard should be small enough to let control function.
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A more subtle issue is that it frankly makes the game less interesting. Decks always find the right cards, reducing variety of gameplay. There's no hope of the opponent not finding their key cards, so your decks have to be able to handle a high-roll every game. That's utterly crippling for meme decks.
Plus, from a design standpoint, classes like rogue now often receive card draw as their main payoff for synergy because that's how they establish themselves as the classes that are great at drawing in a world where everyone is. Fine, but I want to see fireworks and interesting effects, not the hundredth bloody way to draw more cards when I already have 5 times more of that than I know what to do with.
How did we get here
It's difficult to say for sure since I'm not part of the development team, but I can identify a few possible causes, all of which occurred at a similar time.
Show Spoiler
First, we had an overload of card generation in the Year of the Dragon. By the time the devs decided they had taken it too far, they had already dug the hole: how do you introduce decks that can compete with that level of resource generation without doing the same thing? Well, give them lots of card draw instead. Unless the game goes to fatigue, it will serve the same purpose.
That's all fine and dandy during the Year of the Phoenix when excessive card draw and generation existed side by side, but once the Year of the Gryphon rolled around we had some classes that weren't given the strong card draw during Phoenix and no longer had the value generation to compete with. This is where the problem really became apparent to me: shaman needed more card draw to compete with everyone else, but the problem wasn't really that shaman had too little, rather that other classes had too much. But by this point it was too late. It would take sweeping nerfs to Phoenix's draw to resolve the issue properly, verses adding 1 super strong bit of card draw to shaman. The latter route is the easy quick fix, but committing to it fundamentally changes the balance of archetypes.
Show Spoiler
There was a related issue that is specific to aggro: demon hunter was introduced as a figurehead for the change in philosophy from value to draw. It immediately set a high bar for how much card draw a class that's good at drawing has, and continued adding to it as more expansions came out. Other classes with great draw followed suit, with rogue quickly finding itself with great card draw for every conceivable occasion.
So what, 2 classes that are meant to be good at card draw have good card draw, surely that's sensible? Well, yes, except that those 2 classes are also high tempo, aggressive classes with hero powers that help win the board. So other aggro decks struggled because they would lose on both tempo and resources. They can only really catch up if their own draw is improved substantially. That was achieved via both neutral and class cards. In any case, the end result is that all aggro decks now need to have good draw because otherwise rogue and DH will stomp on them.
Show Spoiler
There was another factor at the control end too, especially with priest whose card draw was gutted in its Classic set rework. In line with its class identity of being poor at card draw, it was stripped of its primary sources: Northshire Cleric and Power Word: Shield. This didn't work out too well for the class, which performed fine overall but only through obscene value generation that the community complained about (it is no coincidence priest had the last surviving bulls*** value deck).
The reaction from the devs seems to have been that perhaps no class should be bad at card draw after all, which freed them up to print good card draw everywhere. I think the mistake here was not class identity, but how they handled priest's Classic rework. Classic always had cards outside of class identity to ensure every class had at least some options to work with. You might be able to strip away some things for the sake of class identity (e.g. they could take away rogue's AoE, as indeed they did in the Core set), but card draw is too fundamental a mechanic to take away. Leaving priest with only neutral options that don't compliment the class was bound to hit it harder than intended.
(For the record, I think priest's card draw is actually in the most sensible spot of all classes right now, so they've been doing something right.)
What's the fix
If I'm optimistic, a few nerfs to the classes quickly completing game-winning questlines will open up enough space that control can at least test how effective the defensive tools in Stormwind are against aggro. That might be able to reset the archetype match-ups.
Failing that, the best solution probably requires a lot of patience and a change in philosophy from the developers. I say change, but it's really just taking a few steps back. Just as they decided they went too far with the amount of value generation, they would need to believe they have gone too far with card draw too. Tone down card draw in the best classes (DH, rogue and warlock), and let other classes be kinda bad at it again. I appreciate that is quite difficult when DH has a questline that requires crazy card draw, but still.
They cannot realistically nerf their way out of this problem since it affects way too many cards, so we'd probably need to wait for things to rotate.
What I fear is that they 'solve' it through more power creep, by giving control completely broken tools to combat the situation. That would be the point where I might finally consider leaving since so much of my enjoyment in the game is derived from making fun but weak cards work, which is already tough enough as it is.
I couldn't stop laughing at my opponent who burned his Blightborn Tamsin because of a full hand. Hilarious!
Unfortunately, the very same thing happened to me the next game, when I played Raise Dead which filled my hand, forgetting I would be completing the questline while doing so. Bye, Blightborn Tamsin! Thank my stupidity for your getting burned!
As if that wasn't mortifying enough, I did it AGAIN in the very next game. I have never felt so embarrassed to be a Hearthstone player at that moment, I wanted to shrink out of existence
It really depends on the meta youre facing. The decklist is fine, but sphere is iffy to me. If its against mage, miracle rogue, questlock, and OTK dhunters, I'd also rather just ditch the cornelius and alliance bannerman for what seems to be the go-to anti-combo tech now: Sneaky Delinquent and Battleground Battlemaster. If this is your game, then conviction should stay, otherwise I'd get rid of it.
There's also a small consideration for Cult Neophyte, but for some reason Im seeing lots of guys fit in SI:7 Skulker into pally decks now. Maybe that's the edge it needs against all these combo decks. Havent tried that myself.
Also, if you're really a gamer, throw in Mutanus. Many quest decks dont tend to play around this card so you may just snipe out their win condition.
Hunter and Warrior Quests are Total Nerf Targets
I'm using a hybrid version that has both Quest and Deathrattle package.
Wild · SI:7 Rogue · by Almaniarra · 5 years, 1 month ago
First version that I wrote 5 wins against Quest mage had more deathrattles without SI:7 Package but I had to change it into this because of other decks that has more taunts and big minions.
SI:7 Infiltrator is like a must have against Mage for Quest Rogue and I guess it will stay as long as Mage's hold those secrets. Really helps so much.
Maestra of the Masquerade levels other classes up
lol, I know how it works with discover. That was already what I was doing while playing with Maestra of the Masquerade. Discovering cards from other classes as much as possible then turn into Rogue to complete [Hearthstone Card (Find to Imposter) Not Found]. This was the deck I was using;
Wild · SI:7 Rogue · by Almaniarra · 5 years, 1 month ago
It was just weird when I won before I turn into Rogue and I forgot about how it works with Hero cards for a moment.
Hunter and Warrior Quests are Total Nerf Targets
Are you still that opinion, OP?
Card draw power creep is a major issue
Were those classes really that limited in the middle years of HS? Looking between Old Gods and Descent of Dragons, before card draw started becoming really strong, you find:
Priest had res decks, Raza singleton, value-control (e.g. Galakrond), various dragon decks (including a strong tempo version in Gadgetzan), Lyra miracle stuff, tempo while Extra Arms was buffed, Mecha'thun, deathrattle quest + Seance, Nomi miracle.
Hunters had lots of beast-focused aggro/midrange sure, but also secret/spell decks, big beast recruit, Odd, mechs, singleton, Unseal the Vault was meta for a little while, hero power secret/aggro, dragons.
Shaman had totems (including Even), overload, evolve, jade, murlocs, elementals, many Sudderwock/battlecry variants (including Uldum quest and Galakrond), big decks with Muckmorpher
Warrior had C'Thun, pirates, taunt, Dead Man's Hand fatigue, Odd control/fatigue, mech control, dragons, bombs, aggro with Bloodsworn Mercenary, Galakrond (both aggressive and value focused).
None of them were one-trick ponies, and none of them needed lots of card draw to get there. Nor were these games just massive slog-fests. Some were when the intent was to go to fatigue, but most did have an actual win condition.
And yes, power creep is inevitable, but it has been far too sharp recently to be natural 'creep'. It has been propelled much faster than it needed to be. Whether that is a detriment to the game is subjective, but certainly for me it has changed the game for the worse.
9 More Top Legend Standard Hearthstone Decks to Complete Your Early United in Stormwind Experience
Or just play arena. With witchwood coming in and deramping the power and ashes of outland being gone it's a bit better. Just whole you wait for nerfs. But you never know...
Card draw power creep is a major issue
Responding to each point in turn:
1)
I agree it was very likely deliberate, and I don't disagree with improving draw a bit, but I do think they have massively overshot what was necessary. I actually think priest's card draw is in a good and healthy spot right now it has some again, but it's the outlier. As with shaman a couple of months ago, it looks like it hasn't got much, only because everyone else has a tonne.
Whether it increases interactivity is questionable though. If it mostly benefits aggro and combo, then where is the added interactivity in practice?
Regarding the simple mechanics of Classic, I think that's an entirely separate matter. Part of why I disliked the Barrens meta was because it felt a lot like Classic in terms of its simplicity, and certainly not for lack of card draw. Meanwhile Hearthstone's history is riddled with fancy and interesting cards/effects that didn't need the amount of card draw we have today.
As for the statline reduction - or lack thereof - that's arguably where a lot of power creep exists. Vanilla stats haven't moved an inch since Classic, but the stat cost associated with effects (not just card draw, but including it) has reduced significantly. Tempo loss for card draw is small to nonexistent these days, which is exactly why aggro and combo can afford to run so much of it.
2)
Since you raise hunter, I would point out you have forgotten spell and big-beast-recruit hunter, both driven largely by K&C, and both existing before Master's Call arrived. Neither had much in the way of card draw, but they still functioned fine without taking the usual play-minions-on-curve route, partly because there wasn't such a strong need for card draw. The best anyone had was Elven Minstrel, so the amount needed to compete with other classes was far lower than what we have today. Master's Call helped bring (aggro) beast hunter back, but it wasn't required for hunter to be effective as a class.
This is why I think shaman's problem in Barrens was the amount of draw other classes had, rather than truly lacking any itself.
3)
I agree a redefinition of 'control' isn't the end of the world, but it does come with problems. Whether we are talking about control as fatigue decks or in the more Classic sense where they actually had finishers, there's a large part of the playerbase that most enjoys those decks. Those players have already taken an in-game beating for the last 16 months, and while I can only speak for myself here, I'm coming to the end of my tether with it.
The collateral damage to meme decks is huge too. These decks often only find success against slow control decks. If those are removed, then cool meme cards like Elwynn Boar might as well not exist.
Idyllic as a perfect 50:50 win rate spread would be, there must always be some degree of rock-paper-scissors, because decks are built to counter other decks. We don't want things quite so polarising as OG quest rogue, but there should be some deviation from 50:50.
4)
I fully acknowledge that card draw is only so good as the cards it draws, and it cannot be held solely responsible. Mana reduction and burst from hand are also playing a part that is greatly inflated compared to previous years. Those two again benefit aggro and combo over control. Both have been problematic over the years of course, with a lot of burst damage being sent to the Hall of Fame and mana cheating often being cited as a load of bs.
What really concerns me is the current design philosophy seems to be to push all 3 to extreme levels, which runs completely counter to the design philosophy of the past, which had been explicitly stated to limit burst damage, and was clearly much more reserved with draw and cost reductions.
They might not be changing the core mechanics of the game, but between them they are completely changing what aggro, control and combo even mean. If aggro's not worrying about eking out every last bit of damage because it never runs out of cards, and if combo can play everything so fast it doesn't need to worry about its own survival, and is control doesn't even know what to do anymore, is it really still the same game?
I'm sure lots of people like the changes in design philosophy, but for me it is committing to every design choice that undermines the reason I was playing in the first place. Neither Wild nor Standard really let me play out the shenanigans I log on for anymore, and Classic doesn't even have the cards to try it with. The really frustrating thing is that it isn't burnout. There's lots I want to try in Stormwind, but deep down I know I'd much rather be in any meta between TGT and SoU. (I'd include DoD if it didn't mean pre-nerf Galakrond shaman *shudder*.)
5) Whoops, yes, thanks. It shows how much I use that card! I have now corrected it.
9 More Top Legend Standard Hearthstone Decks to Complete Your Early United in Stormwind Experience
Agree, we have to temporarily sit this awful early meta out and hope that Team5 will swing with the nerf hammer hard and soon™. Until that happens, I will be completing XP achievements at rank floors and farm Questline Mages with my Questline Druid.
So satisfying 😇
EDIT: I am actually more annoyed by all the frequent UI bugs and random disconnects that were introduced by the latest patch.
Fresh 12-Win Starting Decks for the New United in Stormwind Duels Meta
Yea I agree with Voidtouched Attendant very good with Mind Tether and Psyfiend. Also got a Bag of Coins haha, and also got the stormwind achievement so if you can't win with shadow priest, least we can complete the achievement in duels
9 More Top Legend Standard Hearthstone Decks to Complete Your Early United in Stormwind Experience
I mean, if you unironically play boar memes you can't expect not to get absolutely shat on.
Also, minion based decks still work against Warlock and Shadow Priest can catch people off guard with Illucia (which should be an autoinclude these days).
I'm not saying that the meta isn't kind of awful and a lot of the new decks need to be curbed heavily, but it's not entirely unplayable (except against Mage, fuck those guys). Just complete achievements while you wait for the whole thing to blow over.
Fresh 12-Win Starting Decks for the New United in Stormwind Duels Meta
Well that was an extremely good result: well played
Card draw power creep is a major issue
I'm sorry but no, the biggest thing that had been holding half the classes back for years and forced them into the same streamlined archetypes was the fact that they weren't allowed to actually play their cards.
NOw we're finally at a point where Priests, Hunters, Shamans and Warriors are actually allowed diverge into different archetypes.
Power Creep is not only inevitable but also necessary unless you wanna go back to the boring slogfest that is Classic.
Card draw power creep is a major issue
Its a nice analysis on card draw power creep.
But I'd argue that its deliberate made that way by the devs, to increase interactivity (and therefore, subjectively, fun). Play a couple of games in classic and suddenly the game may be fairer (Lack of removals means more minion activity) but honestly unless you're specifically playing miracle rogue you're basically playing 1-2 cards per turn. The mechanics were simple, and there's very little reason to think because nearly everything is predictable: druid ramp on 2, zoo curvestone, turn 4 giant, etc.
In order to break that cycle you have to either 1) increase the rate and efficiency of card draw, or 2) increase card generation. They balance that out by designing the cards with a lower statline or at a higher cost. So in effect you're trading tempo for card draw/generation.
I wouldn't say that an increased in card draw efficiency makes the game less interesting. Looking at the meta in the earliest history of hearthstone and honestly, the games were fairly predictable and repetitive. The most extreme example would be to look at hunter's history. The early parts were entirely made up of face/midrange hunters that practically played nothing but curvestone. It was not until Master's Call was introduced that we had hunter actually playing off curve and keeping cards in hand for a bigger finish. Similarly shaman in barrens didn't really got anywhere until Primal Dungeoneer was introduced, which then proceed to make possible elemental shaman, doomhammer shaman, and arguably control shaman.
We are moving towards a phase where the old definition of control can no longer exist because hearthstone has evolved past curvestone. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. The ultimate objective should be to keep the value just low enough that control decks can exist, but high enough to give decks stuff to do instead of having their stuff repeatedly removed from board every turn. In my view, the best meta should ideally be 50-50 no matter the archetype, and avoiding polarising rock-paper-scissors games.
Finally, will reducing the card draw efficiency of classes that feature this identity solve the problem? Not really in my opinion. Looking at the past barrens meta, miracle rouge can draw their whole deck but not necessarily win the match, while controlock hardly ever draws outside of hp. No gameplan can exist solely by drawing cards, because card draw options are inherently tempo-losing.
That is...until we were given this freakish meta to exist in.
The current meta we live in currently isn't normal. Its that polarising rock-paper-scissors bs that pits combo on one end and hyper aggro on the other. Mage transcends that by literally having a good matchup no matter what the opposition is, and will lose only because they didn't draw their Incanter's Flow early enough, or the opponent scored a combo for lethal from 30 health at turn 5-7.
Its not the card draw. Its because team5 have ramped the power level of certain cards like Ignite, Stealer of Souls and Garrote that enabled lethal setup by turn 5. Card draw facilitated it, sure. But without these super-saiyan blue levels of bs it'll be all for naught. As I said, you can't have a gameplan that ignores everything but card draw...unless that is the very win condition in itself (which is what we have now). And that's something team5 can easily design around.
I don't like calling for nerfs this early into an expansion. But not since the bs of pre-nerf small spell mage and Solarian Prime have I ever been so desperate for a change. Even when lunacy mage was raising hell, I can still play midrange decks with a gameplan to stop them. But this meta denies me even that. I dont like playing tier 1 or hyper aggro decks; but what choice do I have?
A small note: You referenced Primordial Explorer in the third paragraph, which I assume should be Primal Dungeoneer instead
Furyhunter's Lifesteal Quest Demon Hunter
How come there's only one Persistent Peddler? I'm assuming it's just used for trading and never actually played
9 More Top Legend Standard Hearthstone Decks to Complete Your Early United in Stormwind Experience
What's the point. Priest has been successfully deleted from the game (win rate at 39.8% at the time of writing) and any minion based decks are useless against Quest Mage and Warlock which run rampant at the low levels of standard. I even battled to finish my "Win 5 games in ranked" quest coz archetypes like shadow priest, big warriors and elwynn boar memes just get rekt. Worst experience I've had in a new meta. But it's fine, there is D3 and POE to play to till blizzard fix this sh!t
#ZeddyRantOver
New Warlock Spell - The Demon Seed
It needs to be changed for Wild sake. Just went almost uncontested to D5 and the only games lost were games where my starting hand was really bad. Other than that, the amount of draw, mana cheat with Darkglare and Giant/Broom turns are making the deck unstopabble.
If I would to recommend a nerf to this I would say change the damaga required for each step from 6/7/8 to 8/7/6. Early life steal makes it much easier to play without paying attention to the enemy and since you are doing 1st and 2nd step in a turn or two, instead of hurting yourself for 13, you effectively hurt yourself for 7 which is nothing on turn 2-3. Quest is always completed before turn 4-6 and usually one turn is enough to finish off the opponent. By changing the early requirements, the quest would be punished by aggro a bit more and even slower decks would have a chance to at least develop something on the board to threat the rest of warlock's life.
WCDC Season 4 Suggestions
Well i think expanding the Rating System would be better than an Overall Rating - i mean you could still get an overall rating after the Expanded One but with an Expanded System i can give sort of extra Points or Minus Points because of for example spelling errors - right now i can only reduct a star if there is an error so i guess this would work better in an expanded system.
Also what kinda bugged me a little since i sometimes join in the WCDC - we can't give half Stars - maybe a card is worth 3.5 but i can only give 3 or 4 ... also maybe it would be better if the votings would start all together because it seems that someone who submits a card early on has a litte bit of voting advantage ...
Cutting the Finalist Voting could be a good step because like the OP mentioned often times there will be just a push for the card you like the most etc.
Rewards would be kinda nice but i guess the rewarding system is still fine because i mostly do this for fun but if we would get some sort of reward out of it that could spike up the numbers on people competing - maybe :)
Also sometimes i feel like the WCDC Community ( or at least some votes) are way to harsh - sure we want a good and perfect card with no errors but sometimes a card is very good but does not make it to the finals because the Watermark is from a wrong expansion or the flavour is ok but not in the right kind etc. so i guess with an expanded rating system this could be improved.
Also maybe we could implement some sort of Beginners Challenge or something like that - don't know but sometimes i have the feeling that beginners or people who are pretty new to WCDC almost never have a chance against the "Old Guard" of WCDC :) :)
So this just happened...Quest Pally vs Quest Mage. Turn 1 Win
Very cool - this reminds me of the days when you played the Mage Minion on 1 that let`s you play a Secret for free and after that the Opponent played his "old" quest and concedes after the counter :)
Maestra of the Masquerade levels other classes up
Dont think its a bug. Its not a 'disguise'. What it really means is that you transform into another class at the start of the game and transform back when you play a rogue card.
That would explain why youre able to discover cards from the disguise's class rather than rogue cards.
Maestra of the Masquerade levels other classes up
Did not know that but i guess the chances of ending a game as another class with Maestra is still pretty low - also i think it is not a bug !
Card draw power creep is a major issue
I've been going back and forth on writing this thread for a couple of months because I couldn't find a way to frame it that I was happy with, and if I couldn't convince myself I'd never convince anyone else. But the early Stormwind meta has added some clarity to the picture, so here goes...
I'm pretty sure the state of card draw is one of, if not the biggest problem in Hearthstone right now. Put simply, its more efficient than is good for the game. There's too much of it, it's too cheap, and it too often tutors key cards. It's not just the classes that are supposed to be great at drawing cards, its everyone. To varying degrees sure - rogue is still better at it than most - but not to much significance. Even the classes that are supposedly bad at it have card draw that would have been powerful enough to be confined to classes like rogue a couple of years ago. Not to mention super powerful neutral options that guarantee any class has draws for days.
Take Elven Minstrel for example. It was a good card in a very strong expansion in a class that has always had good card draw. Compare it to the likes of Refreshing Spring Water and Primal Dungeoneer, both of which are in classes that were traditionally so-so at drawing cards, and the Minstrel is laughably weak.
Why it's an issue
OK, so there's a lot more card draw, why is that a problem? At it's heart, the problem is that card draw benefits different archetypes to wildly different extents. In particular, aggro can avoid running out of steam (as demonstrated in the Barrens meta, and quite a lot of last year too) and combo can find everything really quickly (as demonstrated in Stormwind). Normally that wouldn't be too much of a problem because card draw is slow so aggro can't afford to use it and combo has to be careful not to fall too far behind when using it, but it's all so cheap these days that it's not a problem for either archetype.
Meanwhile, control and value benefit relatively little. Both try to get as much as possible out of each card in the deck and clog up their hands if they draw too much. Plus, their win conditions barely exist when they cannot exhaust aggro's resources and they die too quickly to put any pressure on combo.
Control can at least try to respond to heavy card draw in aggro by running more removal and making use of their own card draw as best they can. That didn't work super well in the Barrens, though priest at least managed it. (It was a horrible deck to play against, but that's besides the point.) I was actually hopeful the defensive tools in Stormwind would make up the difference though. Perhaps they did? We can't say because Stormwind made a bunch of powerful combo decks that, thanks to the copious efficient card draw, can completely mess with the natural order of things and win as fast as aggro does.
In an ideal world we have the cycle: aggro > combo > control > aggro. In Standard things are set up so aggro = combo >> control <? aggro. Wild has been like that for a long time, and it's an inevitable result of lots of great cards existing, but Standard should be small enough to let control function.
A more subtle issue is that it frankly makes the game less interesting. Decks always find the right cards, reducing variety of gameplay. There's no hope of the opponent not finding their key cards, so your decks have to be able to handle a high-roll every game. That's utterly crippling for meme decks.
Plus, from a design standpoint, classes like rogue now often receive card draw as their main payoff for synergy because that's how they establish themselves as the classes that are great at drawing in a world where everyone is. Fine, but I want to see fireworks and interesting effects, not the hundredth bloody way to draw more cards when I already have 5 times more of that than I know what to do with.
How did we get here
It's difficult to say for sure since I'm not part of the development team, but I can identify a few possible causes, all of which occurred at a similar time.
First, we had an overload of card generation in the Year of the Dragon. By the time the devs decided they had taken it too far, they had already dug the hole: how do you introduce decks that can compete with that level of resource generation without doing the same thing? Well, give them lots of card draw instead. Unless the game goes to fatigue, it will serve the same purpose.
That's all fine and dandy during the Year of the Phoenix when excessive card draw and generation existed side by side, but once the Year of the Gryphon rolled around we had some classes that weren't given the strong card draw during Phoenix and no longer had the value generation to compete with. This is where the problem really became apparent to me: shaman needed more card draw to compete with everyone else, but the problem wasn't really that shaman had too little, rather that other classes had too much. But by this point it was too late. It would take sweeping nerfs to Phoenix's draw to resolve the issue properly, verses adding 1 super strong bit of card draw to shaman. The latter route is the easy quick fix, but committing to it fundamentally changes the balance of archetypes.
There was a related issue that is specific to aggro: demon hunter was introduced as a figurehead for the change in philosophy from value to draw. It immediately set a high bar for how much card draw a class that's good at drawing has, and continued adding to it as more expansions came out. Other classes with great draw followed suit, with rogue quickly finding itself with great card draw for every conceivable occasion.
So what, 2 classes that are meant to be good at card draw have good card draw, surely that's sensible? Well, yes, except that those 2 classes are also high tempo, aggressive classes with hero powers that help win the board. So other aggro decks struggled because they would lose on both tempo and resources. They can only really catch up if their own draw is improved substantially. That was achieved via both neutral and class cards. In any case, the end result is that all aggro decks now need to have good draw because otherwise rogue and DH will stomp on them.
There was another factor at the control end too, especially with priest whose card draw was gutted in its Classic set rework. In line with its class identity of being poor at card draw, it was stripped of its primary sources: Northshire Cleric and Power Word: Shield. This didn't work out too well for the class, which performed fine overall but only through obscene value generation that the community complained about (it is no coincidence priest had the last surviving bulls*** value deck).
The reaction from the devs seems to have been that perhaps no class should be bad at card draw after all, which freed them up to print good card draw everywhere. I think the mistake here was not class identity, but how they handled priest's Classic rework. Classic always had cards outside of class identity to ensure every class had at least some options to work with. You might be able to strip away some things for the sake of class identity (e.g. they could take away rogue's AoE, as indeed they did in the Core set), but card draw is too fundamental a mechanic to take away. Leaving priest with only neutral options that don't compliment the class was bound to hit it harder than intended.
(For the record, I think priest's card draw is actually in the most sensible spot of all classes right now, so they've been doing something right.)
What's the fix
If I'm optimistic, a few nerfs to the classes quickly completing game-winning questlines will open up enough space that control can at least test how effective the defensive tools in Stormwind are against aggro. That might be able to reset the archetype match-ups.
Failing that, the best solution probably requires a lot of patience and a change in philosophy from the developers. I say change, but it's really just taking a few steps back. Just as they decided they went too far with the amount of value generation, they would need to believe they have gone too far with card draw too. Tone down card draw in the best classes (DH, rogue and warlock), and let other classes be kinda bad at it again. I appreciate that is quite difficult when DH has a questline that requires crazy card draw, but still.
They cannot realistically nerf their way out of this problem since it affects way too many cards, so we'd probably need to wait for things to rotate.
What I fear is that they 'solve' it through more power creep, by giving control completely broken tools to combat the situation. That would be the point where I might finally consider leaving since so much of my enjoyment in the game is derived from making fun but weak cards work, which is already tough enough as it is.
Devouring Swarm
I have been comboing this with Starving buzzard, Wolpentinger and alleycat. Absolutely awesome card.
Group Therapy! Need to blow off some steam? Mega salty? Here's the place!
I couldn't stop laughing at my opponent who burned his Blightborn Tamsin because of a full hand. Hilarious!
Unfortunately, the very same thing happened to me the next game, when I played Raise Dead which filled my hand, forgetting I would be completing the questline while doing so. Bye, Blightborn Tamsin! Thank my stupidity for your getting burned!
As if that wasn't mortifying enough, I did it AGAIN in the very next game. I have never felt so embarrassed to be a Hearthstone player at that moment, I wanted to shrink out of existence
So this just happened...Quest Pally vs Quest Mage. Turn 1 Win
I hate to be that guy, but that's technically a turn 2 win :P
It's hilarious though, it was only a matter of time before that kind of thing happened.
Randomonium
Got 2 puzzle boxes of Yogg Saron in the opening draw, needless to say it was a quick one
So this just happened...Quest Pally vs Quest Mage. Turn 1 Win
It really depends on the meta youre facing. The decklist is fine, but sphere is iffy to me. If its against mage, miracle rogue, questlock, and OTK dhunters, I'd also rather just ditch the cornelius and alliance bannerman for what seems to be the go-to anti-combo tech now: Sneaky Delinquent and Battleground Battlemaster. If this is your game, then conviction should stay, otherwise I'd get rid of it.
There's also a small consideration for Cult Neophyte, but for some reason Im seeing lots of guys fit in SI:7 Skulker into pally decks now. Maybe that's the edge it needs against all these combo decks. Havent tried that myself.
Also, if you're really a gamer, throw in Mutanus. Many quest decks dont tend to play around this card so you may just snipe out their win condition.
Oh and never put Hand of A'dal into this deck. The point is for Knight of Anointment to always fetch you Blessed Goods.