This may just be me but I've always loved matchups that flip the traditional game on its head. I never played much Final Showdown once it started to catch on, but the song and dance of learning the ins and outs of a specific matchup and how precisely to navigate it is always so satisfying to me. Granted, given how the OTK Final Showdown list operated, I can definitely see it getting old eventually as its just two people playing solitaire, but atleast for those initial weeks of people playing the deck it seemed like it was a ton of fun.
Also its always so much more satisfying getting good predictions before a set comes out, they definitely outweigh the negatives. While in the back of my head I'll always remember that I called Maiev Shadowsong one of the strongest cards in the game, I'll atleast be able to drown it out knowing that I predicted Rebuke to be awful. Its honestly a big reason why I try to have strong opinions on every card since while sometimes it leads to me being very wrong, atleast its fun to laugh at.
I'm pretty curious to where Rogue is going to stand after the nerfs honestly. Mech Rogue definitely seems like its going to benefit the most from these given the fact that none of their cards got touched, but Yogg was definitely one of the stronger cards in the secret/miracle lists solely from Shadowstep/Breakdance effectively giving you 1-4 extra copies. I'm having a bit of a hard time being able to justify what is more or less a value 9 drop in a deck that is usually trying to close out the game by turn 9, even if being able to rebuy it constantly could be helpful in matches that do end up going long. Like you said though, definitely think the Yogg nerf is more or less for the best, even though I will be upset that my turn 5, 6, and 7 mind controls aren't going to work anymore.
I'm 100% on board with the fact that Theotar was nerfed solely because Sire Denathrius, though as much as I hate playing against Denathrius I'm more or less fine with that. Since Denathrius was the free legendary from the set, giving every player access to it definitely helped F2P players with building stronger decks for cheap is definitely a plus to me. Granted this also just made the issue even worse since all sudden everybody could run him if they wanted to, but its definitely a give or take.
As for Mindrender Illucia and Tickatus, I only really think that Mindrender was an issue since it was just being used as a 2 mana time warp and nothing else. If it was being used for its original purpose, that card would've been perfectly fine. With Tickatus on the other hand, only issue I could see with it is just that its annoying to see cards being burned from your deck. Warlock has typically always had a real strong endgame in their control decks and I've always seen having 5-10 cards of my deck burnt to push me into fatigue to just be a variant of it and I'd much rather just lose on the spot than slowly lose from being drowned in 3/4 taunts, 6/6s, or whatever garbage DK Gul'dan would bring back, though that is probably just a me thing.
Yeah card generation and also redundancy for these pieces can definitely blow any issues with them out of proportion. Having enough disruption in the meta is necessary especially as more cards like Odyn, Prime Designate are released, but too much is definitely a bad thing as it just takes away any agency the opponent might have. I am much more on the side of erring on the side of caution for card generation over disruption since it gets to a certain point where playing around random cards is unreasonable.
And yeah secret mage has been fairly annoying a lot of the time, but I still can't help but love how secrets impact how a match can be played, even if more often than not its going to be an explosive runes or counterspell.
Pretty much this entire expansion I've been fully loaded on hand disruption and its crazy how resilient Druid is. Renathal variants can shrug off things like Brann + Patchwerk since most of the time, they'll still be left with at least 1 combo to win the game.
That being said, I feel like there might still be some counterplay possible. Plaguespreader causes the game to devolve into a hot mess very quickly when it gets resummoned a couple times. It is still a bit clunky given that its a 4 drop, but against decks that have cards stick in their hand for a bit, they either are either forced into Plaguespreaders or they have to topdeck the combo fairly quickly. It still struggles against Celestial Alignment since that deck does such a great job of just drawing an ungodly amount of cards, but I feel like there's something there worth messing around with.
The new set symbol isn't available yet in the program we use to model the cards so we are just using the classic one for now. The actual set symbol will be on all the cards once the reveal season properly starts.
I'm on the side of being for an auction house for Hearthstone, depending on the implementation. Being able to trade gold for someone else's cards would be a great way to not only let newer players have the ability to 'pick and choose' what cards they want instead of having to rely on good pulls to disenchant, but also just give players more options to control their collection. Converting it to actual money it gets a bit sloppy, I know MTGO has been able to keep it that way for a while but just due to the nature of the games its not really possible to bot it and cause any reasonable form of inflation.
As for the polarization comments, I think that mainly just comes down to you and Ayala are using different interpretations of the word. Ultimately at the end of the day, winrates aren't affected by how a matchup feels. Like at the start of the expansion, quest mage vs handbuff paladin definitely felt bad for the paladin, but overall the matchup was much more even than it actually felt. The polarization that I believe Iksar to be referencing is stuff with the case of original Quest Rogue, where it would have some absolutely horrid matchups against some of the field, yet dominated a good chunk of the rest of it.
Ultimately I think that polarization is just thrown around too much to say a meta is bad. Ultimately different people like different types of metas, a more polarized one lets the player have more leniency to specifically target a deck while in a more level meta this would just be unreasonable. Hell, one of my favorite metas was the RPS meta back in MSOG and the post quest rogue Un'goro meta, despite both of them being heavily polarized.
Finally for your last point about not addressing the quests, I feel like this is mainly done as a way to try and keep hype for the new expansion up. Seeing cards that were literally the main attraction of the set get nerfed is not a good look hence why a lot of post-launch nerfs target older cards unless the newer ones are 100% the culprit, such as the case with Galakrond Shaman or Battleground Battlemaster. I can understand them not messing with the quests just yet, especially assuming there is going to be another mini expansion to hopefully give the underperformers new toys, as well as non-quest decks as a whole.
The same situation is already happening with people trying to complete achievements for battlepass xp. Way I see it, this idea just gives players another alternative to grinding with the meta decks and still be rewarded even if they have a subpar winrate compared to the best option.
Ultimately, this just gives another alternative to getting xp and because of that I'm 100% for it.
Thanks! It was fun doing all the math behind the questlines, except for DH. Playtesting for 4-5 hours where maybe like 3 and a half of it is spent shuffling Soul Fragments isn't my definition of fun, but the ends justify the means. Provided we see more cards that can get those types of breakdowns, expect more like them!
The Oasis Ally stuff is true, when deckbuilding I had an oversight and forgot that Flurry (Rank 1) existed. If I were to play this deck, I would swap the two.
As for the spells that target minions, while also true that they cannot be cast if there are no minions to target, I think its pretty safe to assume that the opponent is going to play some minions at some point that can be targeted. While this can mess up the application of the math against some decks that do not play many minions, it is a bit unreasonable that the opponent will not have play anything on the board. All of these articles assume a hypothetical 'ideal scenario', where the opponents aren't applying much pressure, but do have creatures on board if there needs to be some targeting.
We've gotten clarification from two different sources saying two different things and I haven't had the time to check out all the theorycrafting streams to see if it works the way I think it does. That being said, the Pen Flinger -> Blessed Goods -> Pen Flinger example you provided was accounted for in the math. The only time Pen Flinger speeds things up would be when you draw it in an earlier step, and then finish that step, allowing you to use Pen Flinger for more progress.
I can definitely see this card existing in a build of pirate warrior in wild, though I'm not sure if just fitting it into a typical list would work that well. Stuff that is normally very good in that deck, like Patches the Pirate and Parachute Brigand unfortunately do not progress the quest, and for the case of the Brigand, definitely hurt the completion rate of the quest.
As for this quest being "a solid win condition", while true that inevitably will win a game, I am concerned about decks that have their own dedicated late game plan. Stuff like Lord Jaraxxus kinda puts the reward to shame or with a hypothetical Quest Dude paladin having a button that creates 2 5/3 divine shields per turn. We've had slow value win conditions in the past, mainly Lakkari Sacrifice, and while this one is significantly easier to complete, it still runs into the main issue that slow incremental value is typically too slow.
While hand size issues can become a bit of an issue, especially when Field Contact is still on the board, I think that Rogue is still able to dump their hand on the board fast enough to make this not much of an issue.
As for running minions that draw like Loot Hoarder, thats a good idea, but then the issue becomes it does not really synergize that well with the rest of the deck. We'll just have to see how the quest turns out ultimately as with this one, theres lots of room to try different things out.
As for the 'no more benefit from the reward' part, I'm not quite sure what your getting at. A lot of the time there was still a decent chunk of the deck left to draw, mainly due to Glide, so you are getting some value out of it. On top of this, more often than not there is still a decent amount of card draw, so you can reasonably draw the rest of the deck and hit people fairly hard with Lion's Frenzy. The questline is certainly weird and definitely looks bad at first glance, but I definitely think there is potential, whether its just as a fun pet deck or even a tiered deck.
While I did not say this in the article, I completely agree with that take. For aggro matchups, the quest is just too risky to try and rush, but against a slower control deck, you can just go to town on yourself since there's not much they can do against the quest, especially if you finish the last step and play Tamsin in the same turn.
Going the elemental route to use things such as Primal Dungeoneer more effectively is undoubtedly pretty strong given that Elemental Shaman is already a very strong deck. The main reason why I didn't want to do that is simply because the overload and tempo loss from a lack of a 1 drop is too much. I can certainly be wrong about that, especially given some of the other new toys shaman has been given, but I just dont see the two mixing well.
As for running cards like Investment Opportunity and Overdraft, this is mainly because I like testing out new cards and seeing how they line up. I'd totally understand if this quest does eventually just turn into only nature spells because a 3 mana 2/3 draw 2 is just too powerful most the time.
And yeah, the double overload once the quest is completed is kind of a big deal as well.
Yeah questlines are probably the best flavor legendaries they've done in a long time. It makes me wish that Blizzard would try doing more story telling on the cards instead of just saying stuff like "oh yeah and this thing was here as well".
This may just be me but I've always loved matchups that flip the traditional game on its head. I never played much Final Showdown once it started to catch on, but the song and dance of learning the ins and outs of a specific matchup and how precisely to navigate it is always so satisfying to me. Granted, given how the OTK Final Showdown list operated, I can definitely see it getting old eventually as its just two people playing solitaire, but atleast for those initial weeks of people playing the deck it seemed like it was a ton of fun.
Also its always so much more satisfying getting good predictions before a set comes out, they definitely outweigh the negatives. While in the back of my head I'll always remember that I called Maiev Shadowsong one of the strongest cards in the game, I'll atleast be able to drown it out knowing that I predicted Rebuke to be awful. Its honestly a big reason why I try to have strong opinions on every card since while sometimes it leads to me being very wrong, atleast its fun to laugh at.
I'm pretty curious to where Rogue is going to stand after the nerfs honestly. Mech Rogue definitely seems like its going to benefit the most from these given the fact that none of their cards got touched, but Yogg was definitely one of the stronger cards in the secret/miracle lists solely from Shadowstep/Breakdance effectively giving you 1-4 extra copies. I'm having a bit of a hard time being able to justify what is more or less a value 9 drop in a deck that is usually trying to close out the game by turn 9, even if being able to rebuy it constantly could be helpful in matches that do end up going long. Like you said though, definitely think the Yogg nerf is more or less for the best, even though I will be upset that my turn 5, 6, and 7 mind controls aren't going to work anymore.
I'm 100% on board with the fact that Theotar was nerfed solely because Sire Denathrius, though as much as I hate playing against Denathrius I'm more or less fine with that. Since Denathrius was the free legendary from the set, giving every player access to it definitely helped F2P players with building stronger decks for cheap is definitely a plus to me. Granted this also just made the issue even worse since all sudden everybody could run him if they wanted to, but its definitely a give or take.
As for Mindrender Illucia and Tickatus, I only really think that Mindrender was an issue since it was just being used as a 2 mana time warp and nothing else. If it was being used for its original purpose, that card would've been perfectly fine. With Tickatus on the other hand, only issue I could see with it is just that its annoying to see cards being burned from your deck. Warlock has typically always had a real strong endgame in their control decks and I've always seen having 5-10 cards of my deck burnt to push me into fatigue to just be a variant of it and I'd much rather just lose on the spot than slowly lose from being drowned in 3/4 taunts, 6/6s, or whatever garbage DK Gul'dan would bring back, though that is probably just a me thing.
I'm in shambles D:. Going to pretend this never happened.
Yeah card generation and also redundancy for these pieces can definitely blow any issues with them out of proportion. Having enough disruption in the meta is necessary especially as more cards like Odyn, Prime Designate are released, but too much is definitely a bad thing as it just takes away any agency the opponent might have. I am much more on the side of erring on the side of caution for card generation over disruption since it gets to a certain point where playing around random cards is unreasonable.
And yeah secret mage has been fairly annoying a lot of the time, but I still can't help but love how secrets impact how a match can be played, even if more often than not its going to be an explosive runes or counterspell.
Pretty much this entire expansion I've been fully loaded on hand disruption and its crazy how resilient Druid is. Renathal variants can shrug off things like Brann + Patchwerk since most of the time, they'll still be left with at least 1 combo to win the game.
That being said, I feel like there might still be some counterplay possible. Plaguespreader causes the game to devolve into a hot mess very quickly when it gets resummoned a couple times. It is still a bit clunky given that its a 4 drop, but against decks that have cards stick in their hand for a bit, they either are either forced into Plaguespreaders or they have to topdeck the combo fairly quickly. It still struggles against Celestial Alignment since that deck does such a great job of just drawing an ungodly amount of cards, but I feel like there's something there worth messing around with.
Yep, you only get 1 choice if it is activated.
The new set symbol isn't available yet in the program we use to model the cards so we are just using the classic one for now. The actual set symbol will be on all the cards once the reveal season properly starts.
I'm on the side of being for an auction house for Hearthstone, depending on the implementation. Being able to trade gold for someone else's cards would be a great way to not only let newer players have the ability to 'pick and choose' what cards they want instead of having to rely on good pulls to disenchant, but also just give players more options to control their collection. Converting it to actual money it gets a bit sloppy, I know MTGO has been able to keep it that way for a while but just due to the nature of the games its not really possible to bot it and cause any reasonable form of inflation.
As for the polarization comments, I think that mainly just comes down to you and Ayala are using different interpretations of the word. Ultimately at the end of the day, winrates aren't affected by how a matchup feels. Like at the start of the expansion, quest mage vs handbuff paladin definitely felt bad for the paladin, but overall the matchup was much more even than it actually felt. The polarization that I believe Iksar to be referencing is stuff with the case of original Quest Rogue, where it would have some absolutely horrid matchups against some of the field, yet dominated a good chunk of the rest of it.
Ultimately I think that polarization is just thrown around too much to say a meta is bad. Ultimately different people like different types of metas, a more polarized one lets the player have more leniency to specifically target a deck while in a more level meta this would just be unreasonable. Hell, one of my favorite metas was the RPS meta back in MSOG and the post quest rogue Un'goro meta, despite both of them being heavily polarized.
Finally for your last point about not addressing the quests, I feel like this is mainly done as a way to try and keep hype for the new expansion up. Seeing cards that were literally the main attraction of the set get nerfed is not a good look hence why a lot of post-launch nerfs target older cards unless the newer ones are 100% the culprit, such as the case with Galakrond Shaman or Battleground Battlemaster. I can understand them not messing with the quests just yet, especially assuming there is going to be another mini expansion to hopefully give the underperformers new toys, as well as non-quest decks as a whole.
The same situation is already happening with people trying to complete achievements for battlepass xp. Way I see it, this idea just gives players another alternative to grinding with the meta decks and still be rewarded even if they have a subpar winrate compared to the best option.
Ultimately, this just gives another alternative to getting xp and because of that I'm 100% for it.
Thanks! It was fun doing all the math behind the questlines, except for DH. Playtesting for 4-5 hours where maybe like 3 and a half of it is spent shuffling Soul Fragments isn't my definition of fun, but the ends justify the means. Provided we see more cards that can get those types of breakdowns, expect more like them!
The Oasis Ally stuff is true, when deckbuilding I had an oversight and forgot that Flurry (Rank 1) existed. If I were to play this deck, I would swap the two.
As for the spells that target minions, while also true that they cannot be cast if there are no minions to target, I think its pretty safe to assume that the opponent is going to play some minions at some point that can be targeted. While this can mess up the application of the math against some decks that do not play many minions, it is a bit unreasonable that the opponent will not have play anything on the board. All of these articles assume a hypothetical 'ideal scenario', where the opponents aren't applying much pressure, but do have creatures on board if there needs to be some targeting.
We've gotten clarification from two different sources saying two different things and I haven't had the time to check out all the theorycrafting streams to see if it works the way I think it does. That being said, the Pen Flinger -> Blessed Goods -> Pen Flinger example you provided was accounted for in the math. The only time Pen Flinger speeds things up would be when you draw it in an earlier step, and then finish that step, allowing you to use Pen Flinger for more progress.
I can definitely see this card existing in a build of pirate warrior in wild, though I'm not sure if just fitting it into a typical list would work that well. Stuff that is normally very good in that deck, like Patches the Pirate and Parachute Brigand unfortunately do not progress the quest, and for the case of the Brigand, definitely hurt the completion rate of the quest.
As for this quest being "a solid win condition", while true that inevitably will win a game, I am concerned about decks that have their own dedicated late game plan. Stuff like Lord Jaraxxus kinda puts the reward to shame or with a hypothetical Quest Dude paladin having a button that creates 2 5/3 divine shields per turn. We've had slow value win conditions in the past, mainly Lakkari Sacrifice, and while this one is significantly easier to complete, it still runs into the main issue that slow incremental value is typically too slow.
While hand size issues can become a bit of an issue, especially when Field Contact is still on the board, I think that Rogue is still able to dump their hand on the board fast enough to make this not much of an issue.
As for running minions that draw like Loot Hoarder, thats a good idea, but then the issue becomes it does not really synergize that well with the rest of the deck. We'll just have to see how the quest turns out ultimately as with this one, theres lots of room to try different things out.
Glad you enjoyed it!
As for the 'no more benefit from the reward' part, I'm not quite sure what your getting at. A lot of the time there was still a decent chunk of the deck left to draw, mainly due to Glide, so you are getting some value out of it. On top of this, more often than not there is still a decent amount of card draw, so you can reasonably draw the rest of the deck and hit people fairly hard with Lion's Frenzy. The questline is certainly weird and definitely looks bad at first glance, but I definitely think there is potential, whether its just as a fun pet deck or even a tiered deck.
While I did not say this in the article, I completely agree with that take. For aggro matchups, the quest is just too risky to try and rush, but against a slower control deck, you can just go to town on yourself since there's not much they can do against the quest, especially if you finish the last step and play Tamsin in the same turn.
Going the elemental route to use things such as Primal Dungeoneer more effectively is undoubtedly pretty strong given that Elemental Shaman is already a very strong deck. The main reason why I didn't want to do that is simply because the overload and tempo loss from a lack of a 1 drop is too much. I can certainly be wrong about that, especially given some of the other new toys shaman has been given, but I just dont see the two mixing well.
As for running cards like Investment Opportunity and Overdraft, this is mainly because I like testing out new cards and seeing how they line up. I'd totally understand if this quest does eventually just turn into only nature spells because a 3 mana 2/3 draw 2 is just too powerful most the time.
And yeah, the double overload once the quest is completed is kind of a big deal as well.
They do not care about the order at which the cards are played, it just matters that the right mana cost card is played on a given step.
Yeah questlines are probably the best flavor legendaries they've done in a long time. It makes me wish that Blizzard would try doing more story telling on the cards instead of just saying stuff like "oh yeah and this thing was here as well".