I'd argue the deck cycling is more OP. You wouldn't be seeing so many non-highlander decks using the highlander legendaries if they weren't able to go through their decks so easily.
In other card games such as Yu-Gi-Oh they restricted then banned many powerful card/deck cycling (Pot of Greed & Graceful Charity in the early days) because it made certain strategies particularly consistent. Perhaps HS could adapt their approach on deck cycling.
And in Yu-Gi-Oh decks are 40 cards, not the 30, with generally less powerful cycling than HS. Drawing even a couple cards from your 40 card deck with one card is pretty powerful. In HS it's easy to draw 3+ cards from a 30 card deck with little to no cost exchange.
If the pool of dragons is what you're concerned about that is an easy fix. Release 3-4 lower to mid quality dragons and it makes the highrolls less consistent. No need to nerf the cards directly.
Got to nerf the reason to run highlander in the first place. I fear they'll nerf the dragons from alex to 1 mana, which imo makes the card pretty terrible to be honest. An Alex with 1 mana dragons played at turn 9 means you are dropping a vanilla 8/8 that does nothing and does not affect the board. An Alex with 1 mana dragons played at turn 10, assuming the best high-roll, means you are dropping 2 8/8's on the board, which for a turn 10 play is extremely lackluster.
Nobody is going to competitively play highlander in standard if the rewards for making your deck inconsistent get neutered.
EDIT: I also don't know how they would plan to nerf Zeph, or why. You know how to play around the card because you always know what he could offer the opponent at the various mana break points. A good player is never surprised by the result of Zeph.
Sometimes you have to just take the plunge and stop 'cold turkey', finding other fun games or hobbies to occupy the time you spent on HS. I haven't quit HS, but I did quit WoW, one of the games I loved playing, despite having played it for 10 years, almost 300 mounts at the time (including multiple TCG mounts, some retired mounts, RBG mounts, and many 1% drop dungeon/raid mounts). Not to mention all of the other achs, pets, transmog, etc.
It can be hard to walk away from any game after spending a lot of money/time/effort put into it. Just got to have other fun and enjoyable things to do in its place if/when you want to come back.
Tog's pretty important for getting through your deck quickly, while sometimes dropping some cheap reduced stuff that also lets you play your Galakrond easier for even more cycling. Without him it will feel slower getting the combo together, but if you don't have him right now I'd through in another cheap card draw instead.
There's a difference between releasing a few cards that need retuning/reworking and having to nerf almost the entire class set you gave to the players for the game's new class. Imo that's a disaster from a design stand point.
Playtesting the power level & efficiency of a new class' aggro and/or burst potential isn't even hard compared to much harder things to detect, such as some obscure interaction between a new card and some other unrelated years old card. All they had to do to test DH was have devs play top tier decks and the other guy play the pre-nerfed DH cards, then see how quickly a game would end on average. That is the opposite of extensive testing so I find it incredibly baffling they released the class how it was.
It's clear the playtesting on class balance and/or card interactions is nothing like Blizzard's bigger game (WoW) and their design/balance team.
The class was released overtuned to make the class attractable and worth playing, and subsequently nerfed multiple times. Obviously we know the class was built with a very aggro oriented identify, but to less successful degrees has seen some control & big demon potential. The class is still too new to have meaningful OTK potential.
So what do you want to see out of the class in the future? More small minion aggro stuff? More big demons? More weapon support? Something new like handbuffing, better removal, more defensive sturdy minions?
It's still not enough. The dragons she generates should be 1-cost.
What would be the point of the card then? When played at 9 mana you're summoning an 8/8 that doesn't affect the board. At 10 mana you're maybe playing 2 8/8's if you highroll.
At the best case scenario 1 mana dragons would essentially make Alex worse than that DH legendary that can summon 2 other high cost minions when fully upgraded. The rewards for making your deck less consistent are supposed to have a desirable payoff or there's no point in making your deck singleton.
I actually have this weird habit of wanting to try out some of the old meta top tier decks after they've been nerfed, rotate out, or fall out of favor. Happened with Spiteful Priest too, Cubelock, and Reno Dragon Priest. Often times they're still fairly decent in wild, but when you play them you still can get the occasional person friending you wanting to know why you're playing a tier deck in casual lol xD
I play a lot of meme combo decks and I have fun showing off the combo during the game before pulling off the win. So if I'm wining, but it is by a mile, I'll intentionally delay the game and make bad trades so that I can play the deck as intended. Unless the opponent is BMing badly I don't want to just win a normal boring way.
I also play whatever decks I want in casual, whether total memes or top tier decks. Imo, that is what casual is for, to play what you want without having to play against the same decks or stress winning/losing as much.
I have no qualms in keeping my opponent in a match longer, if the situation calls for it. I'm a big time Ice Cream Shaman player (with my personal armor high score getting a few hundred shy of 10k armor), and I also at times play with infinite Nozdormu/'infinite' turn shenanigans to get that -600+ damage pillager on the opponent.
I can see why people have issue with Jihad. However, the KKK reference is confusing because that is very different than the religious christian crusades of european history, which destroyed entire communities of color and termed 'barbarous' white european pagan tribes people.
Cleanse is an absolute projection of social tensions on a card that is not racist whatsoever. Hell, the card art depicts nothing humanoid looking whatsoever, and the black reference is because black is one of the five core colors of the game. People are not "creatures". Black refers to much more than race or skin tone. And the fact that they are cleansing monster illustrated creatures is much more likely it is referring to "cleanse" in a more religous/spiritual sense (ie cleansing demons/devils/monsters) of evil and corruption. Or in other words, think of cleanse like exorcism.
You also missed my point about mental health. I was not saying losing 7 cardstock cards in a card game was what would cause stress and mental health stresses, but that people who enjoy card games might use the card game as a way to take a break from the constant stream of distressing stories bombarding the news constantly about how people are being treated, or constant fighting on both sides of the human rights/police behavior arguments. Trying to make "black creatures"="black humans" in a card game is akin to shoving politics into the card game. Not everybody wants politics shoved into their entertainment when we have more appropriate mediums to support or argue against the recent social tensions.
I don't have an opinion on whether the cards are usable or not since I'm not a MtG player.
What I really don't like is politics being shoved into what I'm sure many actual MtG players use for enjoyment, and maybe even for destressing/deescalating from the distressing news about what is being done to people.
I feel it is essential to stand up for injustices against human beings, but at some point you need a breather where you can say "Stop. I need a little time to disengage from the intense emotional and social back-and-forth", and do this in a way that is positive, productive, and/or enjoyable.
When you start shoving politics into something that wasn't advocating to be political (ie the MtG card game) it just puts it back in to people's faces at a time when maybe they've grown tired of depressing news stories, fights back and forth between people, etc. It isn't healthy to continually stay engaged and charged up by everything going wrong in the world (this is not to say don't care about it or advocate for it, but mental health is a real thing and there are times and places for everything).
If Wizards, as a company and apart from the cards in their game, wants to advocate for human and racial rights such as by donating to important groups, or another worthwhile means of support then I think that is a positive thing, but trying to connect dots of racism where the dots don't even exist? That is something that bothers me.
The thing is we can't keep tip toeing around all of the conflict of the real world. People have a good point about not wanting real world problems shoved into our games, which is understandable, but at the same time when you can't even dare put simple colors like black and white in a competitive game, that also is akin to forcing real world problems into games.
We assign all sorts of abstract meanings to color, it's a part of who we are as humans. However, people start getting really weird ideas that make huge assumptions about what they think or feel color in a card game 'really means' (ie that a card saying "Destroy all black creatures" is akin to "[Harm] black people", or that it is some inside meaning to racial cleansing. I can't even fathom how somebody could make such a jump because it is such an unbelievable jump in logic. Imo you'd have to have a pretty sick mind to even think a card game is trying to tell you that.
What happened to colors in a game, or art, or entertainment meaning something other than race dynamics and contention? Somebody else mentioned earlier in a brief post if we are supposed to get rid of chess because it uses polarazing opposite colors.
It also speaks volumes that cards like Cleanse are suddenly a problem. Nobody talked about the card until today. Why now? Did it suddenly decide to become offensive and violent, or are social issues being projected onto it?
The whole trope/concept of white representing good and life versus black representing evil and death is becoming problematic in many games.
I think this is grossly oversimplifying the symbolism going on in many games and just culture in general.
White and black symbolism isn't always referring to race. In fact, through most of history it actually referred to other meanings before different ethnicity of people. For example, many ancient cultures actually referred to black as being dangerous or scary not because it referred to skin tone, but because things like disease often lead to death and decay, which resulted in the flesh of living things eventually turning all sorts of colors, including black. That symbolism has existed in ancient cultures much longer in the world than attaching the color to race.
Another example, many ancient cultures valued the color white positively, not because of race, but because they had some form of commodity in the culture that was of economic or spiritual value. One great Asianic example of this were ancient trading/farming cultures that frequented white rice (although other colors of rice were just as common, if not more, than white rice depending on the time period, economic status, & specific people. However, for the wealthy factions of people that did depend on white rice the whiteness being the 'good' color had more to do with the white food bringing bounteous wealth. That has nothing to do with skin tones.
Another example of ancient cultures assigning 'bad' feelings to the color black because black was sometimes associated with night time/darkness, which in some time periods and cultures placed people at greater fear of warding off invasions, pillaging, and injury/death from said invaders in the night.
However, there are also many examples of the 'goodness' and 'badness' associated with white or black being flip flopped as well, such as wealth and prosperity for a minority few being found in the "black gold" of coal, or various black/darker toned ores. You also see black being the 'good' color during times when pepper and other dark spices were extremely sought after and lucrative spices. White has also been the 'bad' color for many cultures and time periods when the white of frost, or impending snowy weather/storms brought about rampant death of both individual people, communities, and crops if they were caught unprepared.
This general list could go on and on, but I think it is grossly misleading and oversimplifying historic and ancient symbolism to say video games often use white as 'good' and black as 'bad' is just because of race/skin tone.
Never played MtG so I'm coming at this from an outside perspective not based on any interest in the cards themselves, and if the original art is what is depicted in the above 7 cards the claim there's racism going on here or hate towards anyone is really baffling to me, and seems to be reaching a lot.
Without reading most of the comments here yet so that I don't bias myself before posting and have to really go far out there to be able to say a knight or some demons (monsters?) getting sucked into some nether portal thing, or two dudes, a horse, and a woman are racist I think that is pretty telling over the whole argument.
I've seen old racist propaganda posters, comics, or just grotesque and cruel literal or symbolic pictures/imagery, and these look nothing like any of that. Agree to agree, or disagree, but this really seems to be reaching.
Sounds like a really interesting mode, but the 50 card limit would be majorly limiting. 50 cards means combo decks will not be a thing at all because you'd never be able to live long enough if you got crucial cards in the last 20, let alone 10, cards of your deck. It also makes playing control more punishing against aggro because the likliehood of drawing into a high mana vs a low mana hand is greater.
So while the mode sounds awesome on paper it would encourage aggro decks to win quickly. Now if you had the standard 30, maybe 40 cards, and that could be a different matter.
I'd argue the deck cycling is more OP. You wouldn't be seeing so many non-highlander decks using the highlander legendaries if they weren't able to go through their decks so easily.
In other card games such as Yu-Gi-Oh they restricted then banned many powerful card/deck cycling (Pot of Greed & Graceful Charity in the early days) because it made certain strategies particularly consistent. Perhaps HS could adapt their approach on deck cycling.
And in Yu-Gi-Oh decks are 40 cards, not the 30, with generally less powerful cycling than HS. Drawing even a couple cards from your 40 card deck with one card is pretty powerful. In HS it's easy to draw 3+ cards from a 30 card deck with little to no cost exchange.
If the pool of dragons is what you're concerned about that is an easy fix. Release 3-4 lower to mid quality dragons and it makes the highrolls less consistent. No need to nerf the cards directly.
Got to nerf the reason to run highlander in the first place. I fear they'll nerf the dragons from alex to 1 mana, which imo makes the card pretty terrible to be honest. An Alex with 1 mana dragons played at turn 9 means you are dropping a vanilla 8/8 that does nothing and does not affect the board. An Alex with 1 mana dragons played at turn 10, assuming the best high-roll, means you are dropping 2 8/8's on the board, which for a turn 10 play is extremely lackluster.
Nobody is going to competitively play highlander in standard if the rewards for making your deck inconsistent get neutered.
EDIT: I also don't know how they would plan to nerf Zeph, or why. You know how to play around the card because you always know what he could offer the opponent at the various mana break points. A good player is never surprised by the result of Zeph.
Sometimes you have to just take the plunge and stop 'cold turkey', finding other fun games or hobbies to occupy the time you spent on HS. I haven't quit HS, but I did quit WoW, one of the games I loved playing, despite having played it for 10 years, almost 300 mounts at the time (including multiple TCG mounts, some retired mounts, RBG mounts, and many 1% drop dungeon/raid mounts). Not to mention all of the other achs, pets, transmog, etc.
It can be hard to walk away from any game after spending a lot of money/time/effort put into it. Just got to have other fun and enjoyable things to do in its place if/when you want to come back.
Tog's pretty important for getting through your deck quickly, while sometimes dropping some cheap reduced stuff that also lets you play your Galakrond easier for even more cycling. Without him it will feel slower getting the combo together, but if you don't have him right now I'd through in another cheap card draw instead.
Thanks for the highlight :)
More fun decks this week as usual. Keep up the good work everyone
There's a difference between releasing a few cards that need retuning/reworking and having to nerf almost the entire class set you gave to the players for the game's new class. Imo that's a disaster from a design stand point.
Playtesting the power level & efficiency of a new class' aggro and/or burst potential isn't even hard compared to much harder things to detect, such as some obscure interaction between a new card and some other unrelated years old card. All they had to do to test DH was have devs play top tier decks and the other guy play the pre-nerfed DH cards, then see how quickly a game would end on average. That is the opposite of extensive testing so I find it incredibly baffling they released the class how it was.
It's clear the playtesting on class balance and/or card interactions is nothing like Blizzard's bigger game (WoW) and their design/balance team.
Man T5 really failed with introducing DH didn't they? What DH cards haven't they nerfed now?
Super poorly executed and received it seems.
I may not like the mode, but I'm curious why those who do enjoy it do so. What do you enjoy about BGs?
The class was released overtuned to make the class attractable and worth playing, and subsequently nerfed multiple times. Obviously we know the class was built with a very aggro oriented identify, but to less successful degrees has seen some control & big demon potential. The class is still too new to have meaningful OTK potential.
So what do you want to see out of the class in the future? More small minion aggro stuff? More big demons? More weapon support? Something new like handbuffing, better removal, more defensive sturdy minions?
What would be the point of the card then? When played at 9 mana you're summoning an 8/8 that doesn't affect the board. At 10 mana you're maybe playing 2 8/8's if you highroll.
At the best case scenario 1 mana dragons would essentially make Alex worse than that DH legendary that can summon 2 other high cost minions when fully upgraded. The rewards for making your deck less consistent are supposed to have a desirable payoff or there's no point in making your deck singleton.
I actually have this weird habit of wanting to try out some of the old meta top tier decks after they've been nerfed, rotate out, or fall out of favor. Happened with Spiteful Priest too, Cubelock, and Reno Dragon Priest. Often times they're still fairly decent in wild, but when you play them you still can get the occasional person friending you wanting to know why you're playing a tier deck in casual lol xD
Seems like this patch also fixed the bug where Nozdormu leaving the board on your turn during the rope would reset the rope & your turn.
Unfortunately this kills a couple fun meme decks, but probably good for the game in the long run.
I play a lot of meme combo decks and I have fun showing off the combo during the game before pulling off the win. So if I'm wining, but it is by a mile, I'll intentionally delay the game and make bad trades so that I can play the deck as intended. Unless the opponent is BMing badly I don't want to just win a normal boring way.
I also play whatever decks I want in casual, whether total memes or top tier decks. Imo, that is what casual is for, to play what you want without having to play against the same decks or stress winning/losing as much.
I have no qualms in keeping my opponent in a match longer, if the situation calls for it. I'm a big time Ice Cream Shaman player (with my personal armor high score getting a few hundred shy of 10k armor), and I also at times play with infinite Nozdormu/'infinite' turn shenanigans to get that -600+ damage pillager on the opponent.
I can see why people have issue with Jihad. However, the KKK reference is confusing because that is very different than the religious christian crusades of european history, which destroyed entire communities of color and termed 'barbarous' white european pagan tribes people.
Cleanse is an absolute projection of social tensions on a card that is not racist whatsoever. Hell, the card art depicts nothing humanoid looking whatsoever, and the black reference is because black is one of the five core colors of the game. People are not "creatures". Black refers to much more than race or skin tone. And the fact that they are cleansing monster illustrated creatures is much more likely it is referring to "cleanse" in a more religous/spiritual sense (ie cleansing demons/devils/monsters) of evil and corruption. Or in other words, think of cleanse like exorcism.
You also missed my point about mental health. I was not saying losing 7 cardstock cards in a card game was what would cause stress and mental health stresses, but that people who enjoy card games might use the card game as a way to take a break from the constant stream of distressing stories bombarding the news constantly about how people are being treated, or constant fighting on both sides of the human rights/police behavior arguments. Trying to make "black creatures"="black humans" in a card game is akin to shoving politics into the card game. Not everybody wants politics shoved into their entertainment when we have more appropriate mediums to support or argue against the recent social tensions.
I don't have an opinion on whether the cards are usable or not since I'm not a MtG player.
What I really don't like is politics being shoved into what I'm sure many actual MtG players use for enjoyment, and maybe even for destressing/deescalating from the distressing news about what is being done to people.
I feel it is essential to stand up for injustices against human beings, but at some point you need a breather where you can say "Stop. I need a little time to disengage from the intense emotional and social back-and-forth", and do this in a way that is positive, productive, and/or enjoyable.
When you start shoving politics into something that wasn't advocating to be political (ie the MtG card game) it just puts it back in to people's faces at a time when maybe they've grown tired of depressing news stories, fights back and forth between people, etc. It isn't healthy to continually stay engaged and charged up by everything going wrong in the world (this is not to say don't care about it or advocate for it, but mental health is a real thing and there are times and places for everything).
If Wizards, as a company and apart from the cards in their game, wants to advocate for human and racial rights such as by donating to important groups, or another worthwhile means of support then I think that is a positive thing, but trying to connect dots of racism where the dots don't even exist? That is something that bothers me.
The thing is we can't keep tip toeing around all of the conflict of the real world. People have a good point about not wanting real world problems shoved into our games, which is understandable, but at the same time when you can't even dare put simple colors like black and white in a competitive game, that also is akin to forcing real world problems into games.
We assign all sorts of abstract meanings to color, it's a part of who we are as humans. However, people start getting really weird ideas that make huge assumptions about what they think or feel color in a card game 'really means' (ie that a card saying "Destroy all black creatures" is akin to "[Harm] black people", or that it is some inside meaning to racial cleansing. I can't even fathom how somebody could make such a jump because it is such an unbelievable jump in logic. Imo you'd have to have a pretty sick mind to even think a card game is trying to tell you that.
What happened to colors in a game, or art, or entertainment meaning something other than race dynamics and contention? Somebody else mentioned earlier in a brief post if we are supposed to get rid of chess because it uses polarazing opposite colors.
It also speaks volumes that cards like Cleanse are suddenly a problem. Nobody talked about the card until today. Why now? Did it suddenly decide to become offensive and violent, or are social issues being projected onto it?
I think this is grossly oversimplifying the symbolism going on in many games and just culture in general.
White and black symbolism isn't always referring to race. In fact, through most of history it actually referred to other meanings before different ethnicity of people. For example, many ancient cultures actually referred to black as being dangerous or scary not because it referred to skin tone, but because things like disease often lead to death and decay, which resulted in the flesh of living things eventually turning all sorts of colors, including black. That symbolism has existed in ancient cultures much longer in the world than attaching the color to race.
Another example, many ancient cultures valued the color white positively, not because of race, but because they had some form of commodity in the culture that was of economic or spiritual value. One great Asianic example of this were ancient trading/farming cultures that frequented white rice (although other colors of rice were just as common, if not more, than white rice depending on the time period, economic status, & specific people. However, for the wealthy factions of people that did depend on white rice the whiteness being the 'good' color had more to do with the white food bringing bounteous wealth. That has nothing to do with skin tones.
Another example of ancient cultures assigning 'bad' feelings to the color black because black was sometimes associated with night time/darkness, which in some time periods and cultures placed people at greater fear of warding off invasions, pillaging, and injury/death from said invaders in the night.
However, there are also many examples of the 'goodness' and 'badness' associated with white or black being flip flopped as well, such as wealth and prosperity for a minority few being found in the "black gold" of coal, or various black/darker toned ores. You also see black being the 'good' color during times when pepper and other dark spices were extremely sought after and lucrative spices. White has also been the 'bad' color for many cultures and time periods when the white of frost, or impending snowy weather/storms brought about rampant death of both individual people, communities, and crops if they were caught unprepared.
This general list could go on and on, but I think it is grossly misleading and oversimplifying historic and ancient symbolism to say video games often use white as 'good' and black as 'bad' is just because of race/skin tone.
Never played MtG so I'm coming at this from an outside perspective not based on any interest in the cards themselves, and if the original art is what is depicted in the above 7 cards the claim there's racism going on here or hate towards anyone is really baffling to me, and seems to be reaching a lot.
Without reading most of the comments here yet so that I don't bias myself before posting and have to really go far out there to be able to say a knight or some demons (monsters?) getting sucked into some nether portal thing, or two dudes, a horse, and a woman are racist I think that is pretty telling over the whole argument.
I've seen old racist propaganda posters, comics, or just grotesque and cruel literal or symbolic pictures/imagery, and these look nothing like any of that. Agree to agree, or disagree, but this really seems to be reaching.
Sounds like a really interesting mode, but the 50 card limit would be majorly limiting. 50 cards means combo decks will not be a thing at all because you'd never be able to live long enough if you got crucial cards in the last 20, let alone 10, cards of your deck. It also makes playing control more punishing against aggro because the likliehood of drawing into a high mana vs a low mana hand is greater.
So while the mode sounds awesome on paper it would encourage aggro decks to win quickly. Now if you had the standard 30, maybe 40 cards, and that could be a different matter.