Generally while taking an absolute chonking off of two minions staying alive is pretty BS and could use toning down, I'd say the game has bigger problems. Namely the massive discrepancies between hero power levels and the constant power creep in that regard. I'd say it doesn't matter that much how much damage you're taking off a guaranteed loss because your opponent is Lich King, but rather that there is such a thing as guaranteed loss because your opponent is Lich King. Many heroes with lategame hero powers or slowly scaling hero powers arrive at the stage of the game where they actually get to make decisions and find that they've lost 7 games in a row so far and not one of them was winnable because the opposing hero was inherently better. The benefits that hero powers provide should be nowhere near as impactful on the outcome of the game as it is right now. Ysera getting guaranteed Dragons in her tavern to incentivise a Dragon build is fine because you still have to put in the effort to make that build work. Maiev getting guaranteed ridiculous gold and board advantage for 1 gold investment per turn takes no effort and yet is somehow way more impactful. Heroes that are harder to play should be better as a reward, easier heroes should be weaker, not the other way around.
As for the damage issue, the game could definitely do with some slowing down, but if you take that too far (and by too far I mean extending the game by upwards of 3 turns), you'll find that certain tribes just have no place in the game. What are you going to do with Mechs, Demons or Pirates in a 17 turn game? What reason is there to even go for those strategies if the end-game is going to revolve around Divine Shielded Dragons, Amalgadon Menageries. Amalgadon Poisonous Murlocs with Selfless Heroes, and Goldrinn Beasts? Demons, Pirates and Mechs thrive on being powerful early to kill people off and secure you a good position to place before you inevitably lose to one of the more powerful lategame builds. If you cut that route to success off then the game becomes a lot more samey because the powerful lategame builds will have the time they need to scale. It's like if you increased the starting health in normal Hearthstone to 50. It's just an accross-the-board nerf to all aggressive strategies, and now combo and control are the only ways to play.
TLDR: Tune down the damage, sure, but either be careful not to go too far, or bring more strategies up to an equal late-game power level.
EDIT: Since I've spilled so much digital ink already, might as well come with my own suggestion: cutting damage from minions to 1 per is ridiculous and I can't believe they're even considering it. It's obviously way too much. I'd say keep the current damage formula, but either remove tavern tier from the equation, or keep tavern tier and minion tier in, but then cut the resulting number in half, rounding up.
I've never seen anything stronger in any card game(single card combo) than an Aurelion Sol leveled up with you having the 10 mana celestial spell. I think he's fair though since getting him to level up means you are most likely winning already.
I'm back with some feedback, sorry for the delay but college is a bit of a time commitment.
In reverse order for those who haven't submitted:
thepowrofcheese: I think it could use some more flavor. I'd suggest "Cast a random Hunter Secret and Rogue Secret" but at least something to emphasize the different classes.
Pokeniner: The balance on this version is wonky. Maybe set the Overload to 1 and make it permanent? Or playing the spell has Overload unless you Combo it? I'm just not feeling it in it's current form.
Wailor: I'd reduce the health restoration on Crew Cook to 1 since Rogue isn't supposed to have good healing, you can reduce the mana on Serpentine Fang to 1 since you already have to give your hero Attack and it'll take damage, and Feed the Swarm is good as is. Serpinetine Fang is the best of the three IMO.
Neoguli: Aura effects don't normally apply to Health gains, so this one is a little weird. I like the flavor though, maybe just change the effect to be more Warrior-y (like gaining Armor or a bonus for taking damage).
TheHoax91: Not a bad idea, but it feels more like a Rogue ability than Paladin and Rogue/Mage is already in the game. Maybe switch it to Paladin spells and make it a Paladin/Rogue.
Seems like this would dramatically increase the total match length if they didn't also lower starting health across the board. But I think it's definitely worth testing.
I like the idea of changing the hero's starting health. That would allow for more precision in balancing.
If they want to make the minions do 1 damage each, they should also make token minions do no damage at all. Otherwise a token build would often be doing way more damage than a normal build. Perhaps normal minions could do 2 damage and tokens 1 damage?
So, I think it achieves that warping effect the same way Caverns Below Rogue did, where fast decks can win pretty easily but other control decks struggle to make headway against it. @Hellcopter, I think you're using "late game deck" and "control deck" interchangeably in your original post, but several of the decks you've listed are not control decks - many are combo decks that seek to win with huge burst through Ezreal or Atrocity, and the Ensure Spiders deck is really more of an aggro deck that uses Atrocity as a finisher. The control decks you've actually got on there are the Purrsuit, Anivia, and Maokai decks. Of those, the only one with a chance against ASol is Maokai, and only if they get their win condition off early enough to toss the enemy ASols before they have a chance to come down. With ramp and Thresh driving early Aurelion Sol plays, I think that's unlikely to happen consistently.
Valid point. We can talk about the definition of what a "control" deck is to see if we are in the same page. I came from an era where control decks didn't have win conditions, so my definition of control comes literally from keeping the board under control, caring about efficient trades and then waiting until the oponnent runs out of resources. In modern card games, most decks have some kind of win condition, so trying to win by the old way is not a good plan anymore. I also believe combo and control are NOT mutually exclusive. A combo/OTK deck can also be a control deck. Freeze Mage is a deck that doesn't care about board state, so its not a control deck, while Shadow Reaper Anduim OTK does.
But what i am really want to talk is the fact i don't see why so many people think A.Sol is opressive. My point with this topic was to show A.Sol win condition is on par with other decks win conditions. It seems to me people are focusing way too hard on the strenght of A.Sol level up effect. But is it that different from a board full of AniviasBADCARDNAME? Or when Warmother's Call gets online? Or even when The Harrowing summons a bunch of Hecarim?
I played many games against A.sol, with all of my decks, even the meme ones, and i never felt hopless. Does anyone have numbers if A.Sol is stomping other control decks? It sure doesn't feel that way to me.
The Masters Tour qualifiers have pack prizes, but the Tour events itself do have real money on the line. And actually, there is no other point system than the prize money you have earned.
I saw on both the Blizzard and Battlefy sites that the prizes for participants in the tournament were Hearthstone packs - hilarious. Pretty sure anyone on that list already has access to the cards they want. Are there really no cash awards for this level of competition? Why would a current GM or other pro player want to participate? I know there's some points system that contributes to becoming a GM if you do well in tournaments, but the lack of money seems funny to me.
Name a patch of any software ever that was completely bug free. It doesn't. Happen. This is just the reality of software, especially software that runs on a huge swath of different platforms.
I can't say for certain's it's place in the meta, but from personal experience, I do better against aggro decks but lost to control/value matchups. The deck sacrifices value for more consistency.
The extra draw feels really good. It always felt that is what Pure/libram paladin missed, draw. It feels like Lady Liadrin is mainly there for the extra Librams of Hope. I can see why you are unconvinced of it's payoff
So, I guess I should hop into this discussion, as I'm being quoted a bit. With respect to my comparison to Quest Rogue (back in this thread), the goal was not to say "the original Caverns Below Rogue deck is exactly the same as ASol Control" but rather than "the original Caverns Below Rogue warped the metagame despite a relatively low winrate, and ASol Control seems to do the same thing." Obviously they're not exactly the same - the use of bounce effects in Caverns Below Rogue often made the deck entirely uninteractable, which was a big part of why control decks couldn't break up their quest completion and beat them with their own powerful late game tools. I don't think that's what's happening with ASol Control - you can still fight their minions, and with the right spells you can even break through spellshields (albeit at a high price) - but the power level of ASol with a few decent Celestial cards in hand is pretty bonkers, and the work required to level him up (i.e. playing units) isn't just easy, it's an unavoidable part of the game.
So, I think it achieves that warping effect the same way Caverns Below Rogue did, where fast decks can win pretty easily but other control decks struggle to make headway against it. @Hellcopter, I think you're using "late game deck" and "control deck" interchangeably in your original post, but several of the decks you've listed are not control decks - many are combo decks that seek to win with huge burst through Ezreal or Atrocity, and the Ensure Spiders deck is really more of an aggro deck that uses Atrocity as a finisher. The control decks you've actually got on there are the Purrsuit, Anivia, and Maokai decks. Of those, the only one with a chance against ASol is Maokai, and only if they get their win condition off early enough to toss the enemy ASols before they have a chance to come down. With ramp and Thresh driving early Aurelion Sol plays, I think that's unlikely to happen consistently.
I was hoping to actually pull some data for this discussion, but the match-up data on Mobalytics is kind of a mess. They just do region comparisons for the match-up rankings, without any distinction for which archetypes are contributing to wins/losses, so that data can be hard to judge. The deck rankings are a bit more clear, but the top-level "matches" number seems to include all decks of that region pair, which is very confusing and obfuscates true prevalence. At any rate, here's the high level of what I think I'm seeing in both data sets:
Almost every deck with a high win rate is aggro/midrange or combo decks, and the only control decks I see are Aurelion Sol Troll Ramp, Tryndamere Troll Ramp, and Deep Sea Monsters.
The latter two decks aren't very popular, but the data that is available suggests that they're better than ASol in the context of this metagame
The Tryndamere version of Troll Ramp seems to lose to the Aurelion Sol version, which makes sense since the ASol version has access to Obliterate effects and Sunburst to easily handle Tryndamere
Deep Sea Monsters is supposedly a higher tier than ASol, but its almost non-existent in the data (I found a few lists with a total of ~1000 games played across those lists, far lower than the most common version of ASol Ramp). Its match-up data is super hard to parse because a variety of more popular and more successful SI/Bilge decks running Gangplank and/or Miss Fortune show up in the data. I think this is part of why the data reflects it as successful in the top-level deck view.
MTG Arena Daily Deals Alert - Get 500 Gems for 400 Gems or 2000 Gold Today Only!
Syr Konrad looks like a young Christopher Lee.
Blizzard is Trying Different Health Scaling and Card Tier Damage for Battlegrounds in Playtesting
Generally while taking an absolute chonking off of two minions staying alive is pretty BS and could use toning down, I'd say the game has bigger problems. Namely the massive discrepancies between hero power levels and the constant power creep in that regard. I'd say it doesn't matter that much how much damage you're taking off a guaranteed loss because your opponent is Lich King, but rather that there is such a thing as guaranteed loss because your opponent is Lich King. Many heroes with lategame hero powers or slowly scaling hero powers arrive at the stage of the game where they actually get to make decisions and find that they've lost 7 games in a row so far and not one of them was winnable because the opposing hero was inherently better. The benefits that hero powers provide should be nowhere near as impactful on the outcome of the game as it is right now. Ysera getting guaranteed Dragons in her tavern to incentivise a Dragon build is fine because you still have to put in the effort to make that build work. Maiev getting guaranteed ridiculous gold and board advantage for 1 gold investment per turn takes no effort and yet is somehow way more impactful. Heroes that are harder to play should be better as a reward, easier heroes should be weaker, not the other way around.
As for the damage issue, the game could definitely do with some slowing down, but if you take that too far (and by too far I mean extending the game by upwards of 3 turns), you'll find that certain tribes just have no place in the game. What are you going to do with Mechs, Demons or Pirates in a 17 turn game? What reason is there to even go for those strategies if the end-game is going to revolve around Divine Shielded Dragons, Amalgadon Menageries. Amalgadon Poisonous Murlocs with Selfless Heroes, and Goldrinn Beasts? Demons, Pirates and Mechs thrive on being powerful early to kill people off and secure you a good position to place before you inevitably lose to one of the more powerful lategame builds. If you cut that route to success off then the game becomes a lot more samey because the powerful lategame builds will have the time they need to scale. It's like if you increased the starting health in normal Hearthstone to 50. It's just an accross-the-board nerf to all aggressive strategies, and now combo and control are the only ways to play.
TLDR: Tune down the damage, sure, but either be careful not to go too far, or bring more strategies up to an equal late-game power level.
EDIT: Since I've spilled so much digital ink already, might as well come with my own suggestion: cutting damage from minions to 1 per is ridiculous and I can't believe they're even considering it. It's obviously way too much. I'd say keep the current damage formula, but either remove tavern tier from the equation, or keep tavern tier and minion tier in, but then cut the resulting number in half, rounding up.
Aurelion Sol - The Star Forger: Card breakdown
I've never seen anything stronger in any card game(single card combo) than an Aurelion Sol leveled up with you having the 10 mana celestial spell. I think he's fair though since getting him to level up means you are most likely winning already.
Branching Out - Card Design Competition Discussion Thread
I'm back with some feedback, sorry for the delay but college is a bit of a time commitment.
In reverse order for those who haven't submitted:
thepowrofcheese: I think it could use some more flavor. I'd suggest "Cast a random Hunter Secret and Rogue Secret" but at least something to emphasize the different classes.
Pokeniner: The balance on this version is wonky. Maybe set the Overload to 1 and make it permanent? Or playing the spell has Overload unless you Combo it? I'm just not feeling it in it's current form.
Wailor: I'd reduce the health restoration on Crew Cook to 1 since Rogue isn't supposed to have good healing, you can reduce the mana on Serpentine Fang to 1 since you already have to give your hero Attack and it'll take damage, and Feed the Swarm is good as is. Serpinetine Fang is the best of the three IMO.
Neoguli: Aura effects don't normally apply to Health gains, so this one is a little weird. I like the flavor though, maybe just change the effect to be more Warrior-y (like gaining Armor or a bonus for taking damage).
TheHoax91: Not a bad idea, but it feels more like a Rogue ability than Paladin and Rogue/Mage is already in the game. Maybe switch it to Paladin spells and make it a Paladin/Rogue.
Nirast: I like it, not much else to say.
Blizzard is Trying Different Health Scaling and Card Tier Damage for Battlegrounds in Playtesting
Seems like this would dramatically increase the total match length if they didn't also lower starting health across the board. But I think it's definitely worth testing.
Blizzard is Trying Different Health Scaling and Card Tier Damage for Battlegrounds in Playtesting
I like the idea of changing the hero's starting health. That would allow for more precision in balancing.
If they want to make the minions do 1 damage each, they should also make token minions do no damage at all. Otherwise a token build would often be doing way more damage than a normal build. Perhaps normal minions could do 2 damage and tokens 1 damage?
Hearthstone Masters Tour Montreal Online Survival Guide
Brackets for the tournament can be found here: https://battlefy.com/hsesports/masters-tour-online-montr%C3%A9al/5f3c3c6066bf242962711d60/stage/5f5b8cab513be46175c9b03a/bracket/1
This Week's Hearthstone Tavern Brawl is "Blood Magic - Standard" - Pay Health to Cast Spells
played against Priest who did nothing, won turn 4 with Inner Demon, Blur wasn't necessary but I played it anyways. So ty 4 the deck.
Aurelion Sol - The Star Forger: Card breakdown
Valid point. We can talk about the definition of what a "control" deck is to see if we are in the same page.
I came from an era where control decks didn't have win conditions, so my definition of control comes literally from keeping the board under control, caring about efficient trades and then waiting until the oponnent runs out of resources. In modern card games, most decks have some kind of win condition, so trying to win by the old way is not a good plan anymore.
I also believe combo and control are NOT mutually exclusive. A combo/OTK deck can also be a control deck. Freeze Mage is a deck that doesn't care about board state, so its not a control deck, while Shadow Reaper Anduim OTK does.
But what i am really want to talk is the fact i don't see why so many people think A.Sol is opressive.
My point with this topic was to show A.Sol win condition is on par with other decks win conditions.
It seems to me people are focusing way too hard on the strenght of A.Sol level up effect. But is it that different from a board full of AniviasBADCARDNAME? Or when Warmother's Call gets online? Or even when The Harrowing summons a bunch of Hecarim?
I played many games against A.sol, with all of my decks, even the meme ones, and i never felt hopless.
Does anyone have numbers if A.Sol is stomping other control decks? It sure doesn't feel that way to me.
Blizzard is Trying Different Health Scaling and Card Tier Damage for Battlegrounds in Playtesting
The Health changes are interesting, but they should totally remake patchwreck or make him better if that is the case
Time to Shine! 4 Fabulous Taric Decks to Take to Runeterra's Ladder
I'll believe it! since I don't really know anything about Runeterra or the game it's based from
Aurelion Sol - The Star Forger: Card breakdown
Really nice discussion guys, even i learned a few things, thanks
Dragon Focused Decks
You had a sweet (but missed) opportunity to call your deck "Tenacious D" lol
Time to Shine! 4 Fabulous Taric Decks to Take to Runeterra's Ladder
Taric definitely went there first =D
Time to Shine! 4 Fabulous Taric Decks to Take to Runeterra's Ladder
Am I the only guy who gets strong "ONiK Medhiv" vibes from this Taric dude?
Hearthstone Masters Tour Montreal Online Survival Guide
Thank you for clarifying/confirming. That makes a lot more sense.
Hearthstone Masters Tour Montreal Online Survival Guide
The Masters Tour qualifiers have pack prizes, but the Tour events itself do have real money on the line. And actually, there is no other point system than the prize money you have earned.
Hearthstone Masters Tour Montreal Online Survival Guide
I saw on both the Blizzard and Battlefy sites that the prizes for participants in the tournament were Hearthstone packs - hilarious. Pretty sure anyone on that list already has access to the cards they want. Are there really no cash awards for this level of competition? Why would a current GM or other pro player want to participate? I know there's some points system that contributes to becoming a GM if you do well in tournaments, but the lack of money seems funny to me.
Micro Mummy Has Been Removed From Battlegrounds Again Due to Mobile Issues
Name a patch of any software ever that was completely bug free. It doesn't. Happen. This is just the reality of software, especially software that runs on a huge swath of different platforms.
Libram Paladin (best version theorycraft)
The extra draw feels really good. It always felt that is what Pure/libram paladin missed, draw. It feels like Lady Liadrin is mainly there for the extra Librams of Hope. I can see why you are unconvinced of it's payoff
Quest Trading - Play A Friend!
Hey I got the quest too. Can we trade later today?
Quest Trading - Play A Friend!
Battletag: Jarvis#12448
Region: NA
Trade Only? Yes, you go first
Micro Mummy Has Been Removed From Battlegrounds Again Due to Mobile Issues
My point exactly yes...
Dean Ayala Talks Battlegrounds Parties and Matchmaking Fairness, MMR Reset Coming
You don't seriously expect math to be ready in just couple of days? It takes time to accumulate data
Aurelion Sol - The Star Forger: Card breakdown
So, I guess I should hop into this discussion, as I'm being quoted a bit. With respect to my comparison to Quest Rogue (back in this thread), the goal was not to say "the original Caverns Below Rogue deck is exactly the same as ASol Control" but rather than "the original Caverns Below Rogue warped the metagame despite a relatively low winrate, and ASol Control seems to do the same thing." Obviously they're not exactly the same - the use of bounce effects in Caverns Below Rogue often made the deck entirely uninteractable, which was a big part of why control decks couldn't break up their quest completion and beat them with their own powerful late game tools. I don't think that's what's happening with ASol Control - you can still fight their minions, and with the right spells you can even break through spellshields (albeit at a high price) - but the power level of ASol with a few decent Celestial cards in hand is pretty bonkers, and the work required to level him up (i.e. playing units) isn't just easy, it's an unavoidable part of the game.
So, I think it achieves that warping effect the same way Caverns Below Rogue did, where fast decks can win pretty easily but other control decks struggle to make headway against it. @Hellcopter, I think you're using "late game deck" and "control deck" interchangeably in your original post, but several of the decks you've listed are not control decks - many are combo decks that seek to win with huge burst through Ezreal or Atrocity, and the Ensure Spiders deck is really more of an aggro deck that uses Atrocity as a finisher. The control decks you've actually got on there are the Purrsuit, Anivia, and Maokai decks. Of those, the only one with a chance against ASol is Maokai, and only if they get their win condition off early enough to toss the enemy ASols before they have a chance to come down. With ramp and Thresh driving early Aurelion Sol plays, I think that's unlikely to happen consistently.
I was hoping to actually pull some data for this discussion, but the match-up data on Mobalytics is kind of a mess. They just do region comparisons for the match-up rankings, without any distinction for which archetypes are contributing to wins/losses, so that data can be hard to judge. The deck rankings are a bit more clear, but the top-level "matches" number seems to include all decks of that region pair, which is very confusing and obfuscates true prevalence. At any rate, here's the high level of what I think I'm seeing in both data sets: