True, the biggest problem I see is that mechanics are naturally supposed to be stronger in some regions, and weaker in others. For example "Tough" is a mechanic you'd expect to see in Demacia, but not something you'd expect to see in Shadow Isles.
Elusive has some smattering of units in each area. But for reference:
Demacia: 1
Freljord: 0
Ionia: 10 + 1 spell that grants elusive
Noxus: 0
P&Z: 5 + multiple other cards that grant elusive through various means.
Shadow Isles: 0
To VictorVonVox's point, this kind of asymmetry is okay - you want each region to feel meaningfully different, much as the colors do in MTG.
Quote From Sykomyke
Point being that the region restriction is both LoR biggest draw as well as it's biggest weakness. Want to counter elusives? Guess you have to run Ionia as 1/2 your deck.
I'm not even sure at this point how they balance some of the stuff (not even talking about elusives at this point) because it seems like they've dug themselves into a corner.
This is really the big problem. It's fine for mechanics to be stronger or weaker in different regions, but you can't have a mechanic that is simultaneously concentrated in a small subset of regions and inherently stronger than other mechanics (mostly because Ionia has counters and burst speed buffs to protect their largely untouchable units from the few answers that exist today).
Most CCGs would solve this in simple ways (higher mana costs, lower stats for Elusives, etc.), but Riot seems reluctant to do that broadly for fear that they'll make Elusives too weak/invalidate a large part of the Ionia identity. In that way, I agree that they've put themselves in a corner, but only for Ionia, not for the game writ large.
This is why I think they need to just print a lot more cards - either to add other things to the Ionia identity so that they can reasonably nerf Elusives, or to make lots of real counters across other regions so that they're not inherently oppressive.
In terms of mechanics, having a defensive version of Quick Attack seems pretty reasonable to me, but from a flavor standpoint it's radically different from elusive, and feels more appropriate in a region like Demacia (which is a lot more focused on establishing a board of big, tough guys).
The fix for Elusive is ultimately to print more cards across regions that can deal with Elusive units (cheap removal, AOEs, challengers, etc.) so that the metagame can consistently re-balance itself when Elusives are a problem.
I reached legend in wild this morning and since then I've been able to see the ranks of my opponents again. So far I've only played 3 or 4 matches, all of them against players between diamond 9 and diamond 5. I don't like this very much. I don't want to be in the way of people who are still trying to climb but I can't concede every single match. And then there's OPs problem of me trying to play meme decks and constantly running into T1 decks.
On the bright side, I'm sure the devs are monitoring the new ladder closely and as fast as they act these days, maybe we'll get a fix for this soon.
I don't think it's fair to read too much into the new system based on how the wild ladder's MMR works - wild is known to have far fewer players, so it's naturally going to be harder to get a decent match-up for every game
I'm glad to see Sac Pact changes coming. Not only does it completely spoil the Demon Hunter archetype I was actually excited for (i.e. the Big Demon version), from a WoW flavor point it's pretty silly that you are allowed to use it on enemies - it's supposed to be a way to sacrifice your own demons to heal you.
Maokai seems like a pretty dumb Champion. Build your whole deck around him and execute on this Toss/Mill win condition and your prize is that your opponent will auto-lose...soon...if you can survive for several more turns despite having tossed most of your deck to get to this point.
I went on to HSReplay this morning to check up on the latest Demon Hunter lists. They have the win rate of the most played version of Tempo Demon Hunter at 57.4% in the list view, but that same deck list in the drilldown's "Overview" section shows a 63.8% rate, and specifically a 62.9% win rate against Warlocks. Given the fact that Warlock has access to Sacrificial Pact and is at the top of the HSReplay rankings, I don't really see how that could be true.
I'm not sure if this is just an odd fluke with how their drilldown views handle trend data/what they include in their win rate averaging, but it's very confusing.
- Your argument of a weakness to big minions is apt. They do have a weakness to them, except they do have some answers to them. Most of their minions have aggressive stat lines. So if you happen to be in a class without board clears, your big minions will likely just die to the board. In a pinch there is cards like Illidari Felblade and the completely insane Eye Beam. And when push comes to shove, they can clear it with their face, which isnt so much a problem since they can heal, like a lot. I've been playing control galakrond, with 2x Abyssal Summoner and 2x Twilight Drakes. He cleared all of them, and an Alexstrasza, no problem.
I don't know which specific DH deck you're referring to when you mention clearing all of your large minions. The Kael'thas Combo version is capable of dealing with big minions in the late game and is incentivized to trade in the mid game, but the others are remarkably bad at dealing with medium to large minions and/or taunts with reborn. And if they're not the OTK combo version, the tempo cost to getting through those minions is expensive for Demon Hunter.
Quote From dapperdog
- Board flooding is what they do, at least unintentionally. Draws are so good, with Skull of Gul'dan for reload. I cleared three boards before I saw a big minion from them, simply because they draw very well. AoE is devastating, except not all classes can do an AoE, hence why hunters cant do anything to them. And unlike token decks, they dont need cards like Savage Roar to be effective.
I think the key point here is "unintentionally." The decks were seeing have lots of cheap, weak minions and lots of card draw. So, inevitably they'll be good at putting a lot of early pressure on with a board flood. But they're not a "board flood" class the way that Paladin or Druid is - they have very limited ways to generate large swarms of minions, they can't buff their swarms, and they lack any useful ways to stick their swarm to the board between turns (e.g. Never Surrender! or Soul of the Forest).
In this way, they're much weaker at swarming, and certainly much weaker at reloading a swarm once you've killed their early pressure. So, where a traditional aggro deck might be able to keep pressure up between turns to provide consistent pressure turn over turn, Demon Hunter swarms are basically thrown out at the end of the turn.
Quote From dapperdog
- This one should be a no brainer. Not every class can clear a 10/6 that destroys your board and a 6/7 that snowballs when not removed.
This is the second point you've made on the basis of "not every class can do that." The fact is, not every class has to. A metagame is built on the kinds of rock-paper-scissors relationships that different classes have as a result of their specific strengths and weaknesses. We only need a couple decent control decks to keep Demon Hunter in check, and then some other class can come in and prey on those control decks.
Now, even when you're playing the paper to Demon Hunter's scissors in that set up, you'll want to have access to some ways to try and mitigate those losses. Waste Warden and Doomsayer are probably decent AoE tools for a class that lacks it's own AoE and needs to clean up a board of small demons, and Big Game Hunter is around for clearing those pesky large minions. And if you're struggling against the combo version or their powerful outcast cards, run Unseen Saboteur. This is fundamentally what these various tech cards are for - to shore up your class weaknesses against the metagame.
Quote From dapperdog
- Oh and as a bonus, I was drawing like any decent handlock would. And when I did beat them they were ahead of me on cards. That, my friend, is not normal. Especially when dhunters maintaining full tempo while doing so.
I don't know about "not normal," but it's certainly new. Demon Hunter is brilliant at burning hot - drawing tons of cards, playing tons of cards, but they also run out of stuff when they do that. Today they're not super punished for doing that, but I think it's only a matter of time before that changes.
The complaints about Priestess of Fury seem like overreactions to me. She's great at killing boards full of tiny stuff, but is wildly inconsistent when your opponent has one or two bigger minions.
Honestly, Demon Hunter is probably closer to balanced than people here seem to think.
All of its early game minions and many of its midgame minions have aggressive statlines, so they're very vulnerable to board wipes.
For as much card draw as Demon Hunter has, its ability to flood the board is limited, so AoE can be pretty devastating to them.
Their options for burst require assembling combos, or is dealt to random enemies (or both in the case of Wrathscale Naga)
Apart from the crazy Kael'thas Sunstrider Combo Demon Hunter, the class has just about no great way to deal with even just a few medium to large minions (other than to punch through them)
So in theory you can start to see how a control deck easily beats most Demon Hunters by wiping the early minions, dropping a few bigger threats, and then just managing the board and healing into the late game. The big caveat to all of this is Imprisoned Antaen. Against aggro decks his randomly spread 10 damage often kills the board and hits face, and against control decks he's a massive punishment for playing AoE because he's dormant at the critical points of the game when the AoE would come down to swing the game. (I've played midrange mirrors where his damage was spread across enough bodies that he wasn't impactful, but the "don't beat em, join em" win isn't really what we want to see as a counter.)
With that in mind, I think that even a modest nerf to Imprisoned Antaen could be enough to make Warlock and Priest good control counters to Demon Hunter. Both have meaningful board wipes at several key points on the mana curve, and both have decent healing for the matchup (Warlock in the form of Sacrificial Pact and Nether Breath, and Priest in the form of its entire class identity...).
I managed to reach rank 5 in two days and the losses I had didn't stop me from progressing. Now imagine what it would have been if I had started the season with a multiplier of 11. Imagine how I would have been able to reach Legend with a casual deck, cuz I would have gained 2 stars per win. And if I had reached Legend with it, nothing would have stopped me from doing the same thing in the upcoming month. Is this what someone would call competitive ladder?
My problem comes from the height of the multipliers. For me they are by 1 number too high. Losses just don't feel like punishments anymore, rather they feel like mild inconviniences, which imho also destroys the meaning of competitiveness. Reaching rank 5 Diamond for me felt like a straightforward "quest", where the path to the goal was certain. It felt more like a friendly Tavern Brawl rather than a rough arena, so reaching that rank didn't feel special anymore. New players might not consider this to be the case right now, but if they do their best to reach that level, as you said, they could feel it eventually.
I hear you on feeling that losses don't matter when you have a multiplier. In a lot of ways, I think this is a feature (e.g. you can play non-optimized meta decks or tier 2, 3, and 4 decks and still make progress), but it also makes things easier. But the question I have is, what sense of accomplishment did you get out of getting back to rank 5 in the old system? It sounds like you were pretty worn out in October by the grind of it, and I can sympathize a lot with that sense of ladder anxiety when you're close to a goal. The first few times I reached a new ranked floor it felt like an accomplishment, but for me getting back to the Rank 5 - Legend range every season has felt like a chore for a long time - not really an accomplishment so much as an obligation, like I was punching below my weight if let my rank slip.
You ask if I'd call this new system a competitive ladder. I absolutely would, but I think it's competitive in a way that isn't as clear as the old system. The old system was designed to be bottom heavy, and to make it much harder to get to the highest ranks. In that sense, it was a competitive ladder - most players were low on the ladder, some were in the middle, fewer still were in the highest ranks. It looked the way a competitive ladder should look, but as we know, there was a lot of grinding out ranks that didn't really reflect skill growth or competitive ability.
In the new system, there may be nothing stopping you from getting back up to Legend every season with a tier 2 or 3 deck, but it's not really an accomplishment either, and you're not really competing. This new system lets you "hang out" at a rank if you're satisfied with just getting there and stopping. You still have to log in and work your way back there (of course, because Blizzard needs to incentive you to keep playing), but it's no longer hard to just post up at a rank and be done. And that's fine - if you want to bask in your success and just enjoy racking up bonus packs and card backs, go ahead. But if you want to compete, then each season you need to push on to the next rank floor or beyond. And if/when you reach legend, you need to push to increase your legend rank.
At the end of the day, your competitive ranking for the Hearthstone ladder isn't your league/rank pair, it's your MMR. The leagues and ranks are a shiny veneer to make ranking up feel good and to keep you engaged while you're competing for higher MMR. But the MMR is the heart of the competitive game.
If you're looking for safe crafts, craft the powerful legendaries in the DoD expansion.
As far as I'm concerned, though, the right things to craft on day 1 are the things you think you'll have the most fun with. I crafted Lyra the Sunshard on day 1 of Un'Goro, despite all the hate for the card at launch, and had a blast with it. (Eventually she did see some play in more serious Priest decks.)
This time around, I think the legendaries I'm most excited for are Akama and Shadowjeweler Hanar - they seem to support some pretty fun archetypes for Rogue - and maybe Teron Gorefiend, since he seems like he'll make some pretty silly things happen with Primes and other deathrattles (and probably some less fun things happen with Toxic Reinforcements). And, obviously, crafting the DH legendaries makes sense simply because the class is new and exciting.
A few people have said that Blizzard should consider adding more stars for higher leagues. I think that point of view shows a bit of "high ranking" blinders. When you're a player who is finding that they're easily climbing the ladder all the way to the top, it's tempting to think that the ladder climb isn't hard enough, and that they should add more stars to create larger gaps in the upper leagues and make players work harder as they get higher up.
I think this is anathema to what they're trying to do with the ladder. The reason so many people hated the old ranking system is because it often felt like the ladder tested your amount of free time more than your skill. Taking myself as an example, I'm someone who has hit Legend in the past, but who rarely had enough time to play back up to Legend rank in any given season because of how long it took to go from Rank 5 to Legend. (It doesn't help that I prefer slower, grindier decks...) And that sense of stagnation on the ladder was amplified if, in a given month, I simply had very little time to play. I'd just end up lower than normal at the start of the next season, stuck wasting my limited play time at lower ranks.
I think the big question to me is "if you're a highly skilled and/or competitive player, why do you even care about the lower leagues?" In this new system, you're going to get to Legend fairly quickly and then your rank will simply be your MMR (which is ultimately a much more precise way to measure your ranking anyway). If you're not at that level yet, the ladder will provide you with an opportunity to make progress month over month until you reach that level.
Taking the 2019 ranked data as a reference, that means something like 6% or 7% of players are going to skyrocket to the top and start using MMR as their benchmark, and the rest are going to have rewarding laddering experiences for the first time in a long time. The ~93% bulk of players are really who the various intermediate leagues were made for.
I don't play much Wild, but it looks like Pirate Warrior and Secret Mage are two good ways to pressure down Razakus Priest before it can assemble its combo.
To preface all of this, I think you're probably wrong about The Ruination being OP - in fact, I think it's being punished by a separate and more insidious issue with the game's balance. But let's break this down a little bit.
Quote From NerdExtrodinare
Runeterra, card economy is supremely valuable. Any card that gives you the card advantage is supremely valuable. Ruination is that on steroids.
The part about card economy is entirely true. Card draw is limited, there's no "enemy discard" tools, and there's not a ton of AoE. On top of that, the powerful AoE in the game is fairly slow (e.g. Shadow Flare, Trueshot Barrage, Judgment, and The Ruination - all are expensive, and all of which have a power level that scales with cost.)
The Ruination gives you a lot of card advantage, but it's very slow, so I'm not sure "on steroids" is quite right.
Quote From NerdExtrodinare
It's never a bad draw. Ever. Either you're already winning on the battlefield in which case you're good. If you're not, it's a complete wipe of the board. And unless the opponent has been playing slow (giving just more opportunity for the ruination deck to draw said card) you'll kill pretty much everything they have.
This is plainly wrong, and frankly it's kind of obviously wrong based on your point about card advantage.
Control decks rely on card advantage and inevitability, so in a game where it's harder to get card advantage, aggro is "naturally stronger." That doesn't mean there cannot be any effective control decks, or bad aggro decks, it just means it's easier than usual to make optimal aggro decks, and harder than usual to make optimal control decks.
So, because the game favors board-centric and aggro strategies, there will always be match-ups and turns where drawing a 9-drop spell is terrible for you. Your "two exceptions" basically demonstrate that aggro issue, but interestingly your first argument for it never being bad is exactly when it would bad in a control mirror. If you draw a big, expensive board wipe in a game where the board is under control, that's bad because that's exactly when you want to be drawing your big threats.
Quote From NerdExtrodinare
It only costs 9. That's by sixth turn. And unless the opponent is playing a facedeck you'll get there.
…
I'm all for balancing things, I just can't think of any way to make Ruination not stupidly overpowered. Making it cost 13 would help, but it'd still be a soft "I win" button.
Notably I'm skipping the middle sentence here (mostly because I think the theme of killing your own units in Shadow Isles is a good one, and that it's okay for The Ruination to play well with that in general).
I think this actually highlights the real balance problem, and it's a problem I've been thinking about for a little while with Runeterra. I think the Spell Mana bank is actually a bad thing for balance.
The Spell Mana bank was one of the things that originally drew me to Runeterra because it seemed like a really cool concept to enable players to think several turns ahead, and to enable "unusually powerful" cards like Warmother's Call. Part of having that bank, though, is a requirement that any spell that costs less than 10 mana must be balanced against being played three turns early or essentially "for free." I think there are a lot of CCGs where a 6 mana symmetric board wipe is actually considered very fair. Because of the Spell Mana bank, though, you could never make The Ruination cost 6 - it would be able to come down way too early. So, The Ruination (and really all of the AoE and big card draw tools) incurs a tax on its cost to make up for that mechanic.
But as anyone who has played Hearthstone for long enough can tell you, mana cheating a card out is one of the biggest threats to balance, and Spell Mana basically represents a constant threat of mana cheating. And decks playing spells right on the sweet spot for the mana bank (2 or 3 drop spells), making your cards essentially free is a much more powerful and problematic thing than making your AoE come down a little early. In fact, this cheap spell balance problem is exactly why Deny had to be nerfed from 3 to 4 mana - to get it out of this "free spell" breakpoint in the Spell Mana mechanic.
Some might say that you're not really cheating the mana - you're paying for it by making inefficient plays on previous turns. But in the early turns your opponent doesn't have enough mana to punish you that much for your inefficiency, and in the late turns the issue is moot because you've got enough mana to play everything you want to.
A good example of this false payment was the Solitary Monk + Stand Alone combo - dropping a 7/6 elusive unit on turn 3 is a major threat, and the 1/1 or 2/2 that your opponent has been threatening you with hasn't pressured you enough to make that combo bad. (I know the meta has kind of moved past this combo and the Lux/Karma decks, but it makes for a good example of what I'm talking about.)
really? I think that would just hurt their consistency and force you to run a bunch of less powerful cards to fill up 30. Is Zephrys really that important to DH.
It seems like a powerful deck, but the sample size here from that theorycrafting stream is pretty small, and most streamers were trying lots of classes/archetypes (some of which were not very successful), so I'd take that video with a grain of salt.
The lack of reward for Battlegrounds left me not wanting to play it beyond a break from ranked. I truly appreciate the input on this thread. It is why I cam to outof.cards to ask.
Specifically speaking to this point, I also really enjoy Battlegrounds as a break from ranked play - it has a freshness that's rewarding in a way that Arena never was. I don't think that I'd want to play Hearthstone exclusively for Battlegrounds, but I definitely enjoy the entire game more thanks to having it as a truly fun option to break up my laddering efforts.
TL;DR: The current metagame is fine/not great, but rotation is coming so don't let that make your decision. The new ranked system feels dramatically better from a progression standpoint, and I think long-term it could change the way people play ladder in a way that makes the game a lot more fun.
Right now the metagame is kind of odd - Hall of Fame and de-nerfs have gone into effect, but the game hasn't had its rotation yet. This means some cards that people have been hating forever are gone, but the cards they've left standard for aren't in, while other cards that folks have PTSD from (e.g. Dr. Boom, Mad Genius) are back in full force. It's fine - I've played in metagames that I've enjoyed more, but I'm having fun with this one. If you use the metagame as a barometer for coming back, I would only use that to decide whether or not to return today or next week - I think the metagame will be a lot more exciting once the rotation hits.
That said, the ranked system is dramatically better.
The old system felt like a grind at every level, and the payoff for that work wasn't that great. If you didn't have a lot of time to play in a given month, you'd slip way behind because of how slow progress could be. Losses near ranked floors felt terrible. The only opportunities you had to play off-meta decks were at rank floors because once you move past them, if you're serious about trying to rank up, you can't afford to lose stars, so you netdeck whatever's good in the metagame and push your way to the next floor.
The inclusion of more floors is neutral for players who rarely got above rank 15, but helps mitigate that feeling of grinding considerably for any player who ever made it past rank 15:
Old System: Starting at Rank 20, 4 floors (including Legend), with 15, 20, 25, and 25 stars between them, no win streaks for the last 25
New System: Starting at Bronze 10, 10 floors (including Legend), 15 stars between each, no win streaks for the last 15
Having all those extra ranks and stopping points helps you feel like you're making progress, and getting bonus stars for getting to a rank floor once also helps you to get back there.
But the biggest thing about the new ranking system is something that's going to require a shift in thinking from the players. Now, thanks to the bonus stars, you can actually get back to your previous rank with relatively low win rates. Take the base case* for example, where you made it one rank floor up and are trying to get back there. You get 2 stars for each win and 4 stars for a win streak. Since each win recoups two losses, you'd need a win rate below 33% to actually lose rank over time, and you only need a 50% win rate to make progress. Even the worst classes in any given metagame have been able to field decks with win rates around 50%. This opens a lot of possibilities to play low tier/off-meta decks and still make considerable progress getting back up to your previous rank.
If you're someone who just loves climbing and wants to play the best netdecks, that's fine, but for folks who want to play their fun homebrews, they won't have to trade ladder progress for fun anymore. I think it's gonna take some time before people start to think differently about what decks are viable for ranking up, but when people start to see that they can play more decks and more classes and still see progress on the ladder, I think you'll start to see a much more consistently healthy game.
*Technically the base case is that you never made it to Bronze 5, and have no bonus stars, but a majority of players won't be in that bucket, and the ones who are are probably newer/have very limited collections.
Priestess I won't conede purely on the basis of Voodoo Doctor and Earthen Ring Farseer. Compared to those two she just flops hard. I guess making her a 4/4 would work too, however, in terms of stats, she is worse than the previous two because she can't heal minions, meaning that she should, in theory get above average stats. Also 5/4 is oveall weaker than 4/5 in terms of board impact.
"Big healing" is a class feature for Priest, which is why you see more flexible small healing in neutrals than you do big healing. The comparisons to Voodoo Doctor and Earthen Ring Farseer makes some sense, but you yourself pointed out that the rules differ between low and high cost neutrals (at least when it comes to splitting stats). This is just another example where a neutral card is intentionally weak to make room for class identity/differentiation.
While this is obviously very good for Pirate Warrior, I'm not as convinced as others here that it will be inherently oppressive.
First, the addition of Demon Hunter as a Weapon Class (and the near certain odds of tons of DHs on day one of the meta) means weapon removal will be at an all-time high. Second, Warrior doesn't have a ton of card draw, especially in aggro variants (which is a big part of why Ancharrr is so good), so you can't afford to draw "blank cards" when you need your finishers. To avoid having this turn into a "blank card," you need to run several weapons. That, in turn will decrease the odds of playing Corsair Cache into Ancharrr.
Dragonling Mechanic: I think your basic theory around splitting across bodies is based too heavily on what class cards do. Some examples include Shrubadier is slightly above vanilla, Sky Claw is vanilla but includes a buff, Duskbat is a little over vanilla). But class cards are supposed to be stronger than neutral cards. Murloc Tidehunter is vanilla, Razorfen Hunter is vanilla. This choice to buff just seems pretty arbitrary.
Silvermoon Guardian: If this card were a Scarlet themed card, I'd agree with your change, but as the two cards are not thematically related, I think the 3/3 statline is fine here.
Priestess of Elune: Your recommendation here amounts to bundling two basic cards (Chillwind Yeti and Radiance) for exactly the cost of both. There are two big problems with this - first, Priest is supposed to be the best at healing, and having healing tools that are equal (or better) than Priest's takes away from that identity. Second, bundling needs to cost some tax because if it doesn't, playing the bundled card in place of the other two is basically like getting a free card slot in your deck.
It kinda feels like all of these reveal and showcase videos were made on Prezi, and it's pretty disorienting.
To VictorVonVox's point, this kind of asymmetry is okay - you want each region to feel meaningfully different, much as the colors do in MTG.
This is really the big problem. It's fine for mechanics to be stronger or weaker in different regions, but you can't have a mechanic that is simultaneously concentrated in a small subset of regions and inherently stronger than other mechanics (mostly because Ionia has counters and burst speed buffs to protect their largely untouchable units from the few answers that exist today).
Most CCGs would solve this in simple ways (higher mana costs, lower stats for Elusives, etc.), but Riot seems reluctant to do that broadly for fear that they'll make Elusives too weak/invalidate a large part of the Ionia identity. In that way, I agree that they've put themselves in a corner, but only for Ionia, not for the game writ large.
This is why I think they need to just print a lot more cards - either to add other things to the Ionia identity so that they can reasonably nerf Elusives, or to make lots of real counters across other regions so that they're not inherently oppressive.
In terms of mechanics, having a defensive version of Quick Attack seems pretty reasonable to me, but from a flavor standpoint it's radically different from elusive, and feels more appropriate in a region like Demacia (which is a lot more focused on establishing a board of big, tough guys).
The fix for Elusive is ultimately to print more cards across regions that can deal with Elusive units (cheap removal, AOEs, challengers, etc.) so that the metagame can consistently re-balance itself when Elusives are a problem.
I don't think it's fair to read too much into the new system based on how the wild ladder's MMR works - wild is known to have far fewer players, so it's naturally going to be harder to get a decent match-up for every game
I'm glad to see Sac Pact changes coming. Not only does it completely spoil the Demon Hunter archetype I was actually excited for (i.e. the Big Demon version), from a WoW flavor point it's pretty silly that you are allowed to use it on enemies - it's supposed to be a way to sacrifice your own demons to heal you.
Maokai seems like a pretty dumb Champion. Build your whole deck around him and execute on this Toss/Mill win condition and your prize is that your opponent will auto-lose...soon...if you can survive for several more turns despite having tossed most of your deck to get to this point.
I went on to HSReplay this morning to check up on the latest Demon Hunter lists. They have the win rate of the most played version of Tempo Demon Hunter at 57.4% in the list view, but that same deck list in the drilldown's "Overview" section shows a 63.8% rate, and specifically a 62.9% win rate against Warlocks. Given the fact that Warlock has access to Sacrificial Pact and is at the top of the HSReplay rankings, I don't really see how that could be true.
I'm not sure if this is just an odd fluke with how their drilldown views handle trend data/what they include in their win rate averaging, but it's very confusing.
Okay!
I don't know which specific DH deck you're referring to when you mention clearing all of your large minions. The Kael'thas Combo version is capable of dealing with big minions in the late game and is incentivized to trade in the mid game, but the others are remarkably bad at dealing with medium to large minions and/or taunts with reborn. And if they're not the OTK combo version, the tempo cost to getting through those minions is expensive for Demon Hunter.
I think the key point here is "unintentionally." The decks were seeing have lots of cheap, weak minions and lots of card draw. So, inevitably they'll be good at putting a lot of early pressure on with a board flood. But they're not a "board flood" class the way that Paladin or Druid is - they have very limited ways to generate large swarms of minions, they can't buff their swarms, and they lack any useful ways to stick their swarm to the board between turns (e.g. Never Surrender! or Soul of the Forest).
In this way, they're much weaker at swarming, and certainly much weaker at reloading a swarm once you've killed their early pressure. So, where a traditional aggro deck might be able to keep pressure up between turns to provide consistent pressure turn over turn, Demon Hunter swarms are basically thrown out at the end of the turn.
This is the second point you've made on the basis of "not every class can do that." The fact is, not every class has to. A metagame is built on the kinds of rock-paper-scissors relationships that different classes have as a result of their specific strengths and weaknesses. We only need a couple decent control decks to keep Demon Hunter in check, and then some other class can come in and prey on those control decks.
Now, even when you're playing the paper to Demon Hunter's scissors in that set up, you'll want to have access to some ways to try and mitigate those losses. Waste Warden and Doomsayer are probably decent AoE tools for a class that lacks it's own AoE and needs to clean up a board of small demons, and Big Game Hunter is around for clearing those pesky large minions. And if you're struggling against the combo version or their powerful outcast cards, run Unseen Saboteur. This is fundamentally what these various tech cards are for - to shore up your class weaknesses against the metagame.
I don't know about "not normal," but it's certainly new. Demon Hunter is brilliant at burning hot - drawing tons of cards, playing tons of cards, but they also run out of stuff when they do that. Today they're not super punished for doing that, but I think it's only a matter of time before that changes.
The complaints about Priestess of Fury seem like overreactions to me. She's great at killing boards full of tiny stuff, but is wildly inconsistent when your opponent has one or two bigger minions.
Honestly, Demon Hunter is probably closer to balanced than people here seem to think.
So in theory you can start to see how a control deck easily beats most Demon Hunters by wiping the early minions, dropping a few bigger threats, and then just managing the board and healing into the late game. The big caveat to all of this is Imprisoned Antaen. Against aggro decks his randomly spread 10 damage often kills the board and hits face, and against control decks he's a massive punishment for playing AoE because he's dormant at the critical points of the game when the AoE would come down to swing the game. (I've played midrange mirrors where his damage was spread across enough bodies that he wasn't impactful, but the "don't beat em, join em" win isn't really what we want to see as a counter.)
With that in mind, I think that even a modest nerf to Imprisoned Antaen could be enough to make Warlock and Priest good control counters to Demon Hunter. Both have meaningful board wipes at several key points on the mana curve, and both have decent healing for the matchup (Warlock in the form of Sacrificial Pact and Nether Breath, and Priest in the form of its entire class identity...).
I hear you on feeling that losses don't matter when you have a multiplier. In a lot of ways, I think this is a feature (e.g. you can play non-optimized meta decks or tier 2, 3, and 4 decks and still make progress), but it also makes things easier. But the question I have is, what sense of accomplishment did you get out of getting back to rank 5 in the old system? It sounds like you were pretty worn out in October by the grind of it, and I can sympathize a lot with that sense of ladder anxiety when you're close to a goal. The first few times I reached a new ranked floor it felt like an accomplishment, but for me getting back to the Rank 5 - Legend range every season has felt like a chore for a long time - not really an accomplishment so much as an obligation, like I was punching below my weight if let my rank slip.
You ask if I'd call this new system a competitive ladder. I absolutely would, but I think it's competitive in a way that isn't as clear as the old system. The old system was designed to be bottom heavy, and to make it much harder to get to the highest ranks. In that sense, it was a competitive ladder - most players were low on the ladder, some were in the middle, fewer still were in the highest ranks. It looked the way a competitive ladder should look, but as we know, there was a lot of grinding out ranks that didn't really reflect skill growth or competitive ability.
In the new system, there may be nothing stopping you from getting back up to Legend every season with a tier 2 or 3 deck, but it's not really an accomplishment either, and you're not really competing. This new system lets you "hang out" at a rank if you're satisfied with just getting there and stopping. You still have to log in and work your way back there (of course, because Blizzard needs to incentive you to keep playing), but it's no longer hard to just post up at a rank and be done. And that's fine - if you want to bask in your success and just enjoy racking up bonus packs and card backs, go ahead. But if you want to compete, then each season you need to push on to the next rank floor or beyond. And if/when you reach legend, you need to push to increase your legend rank.
At the end of the day, your competitive ranking for the Hearthstone ladder isn't your league/rank pair, it's your MMR. The leagues and ranks are a shiny veneer to make ranking up feel good and to keep you engaged while you're competing for higher MMR. But the MMR is the heart of the competitive game.
If you're looking for safe crafts, craft the powerful legendaries in the DoD expansion.
As far as I'm concerned, though, the right things to craft on day 1 are the things you think you'll have the most fun with. I crafted Lyra the Sunshard on day 1 of Un'Goro, despite all the hate for the card at launch, and had a blast with it. (Eventually she did see some play in more serious Priest decks.)
This time around, I think the legendaries I'm most excited for are Akama and Shadowjeweler Hanar - they seem to support some pretty fun archetypes for Rogue - and maybe Teron Gorefiend, since he seems like he'll make some pretty silly things happen with Primes and other deathrattles (and probably some less fun things happen with Toxic Reinforcements). And, obviously, crafting the DH legendaries makes sense simply because the class is new and exciting.
A few people have said that Blizzard should consider adding more stars for higher leagues. I think that point of view shows a bit of "high ranking" blinders. When you're a player who is finding that they're easily climbing the ladder all the way to the top, it's tempting to think that the ladder climb isn't hard enough, and that they should add more stars to create larger gaps in the upper leagues and make players work harder as they get higher up.
I think this is anathema to what they're trying to do with the ladder. The reason so many people hated the old ranking system is because it often felt like the ladder tested your amount of free time more than your skill. Taking myself as an example, I'm someone who has hit Legend in the past, but who rarely had enough time to play back up to Legend rank in any given season because of how long it took to go from Rank 5 to Legend. (It doesn't help that I prefer slower, grindier decks...) And that sense of stagnation on the ladder was amplified if, in a given month, I simply had very little time to play. I'd just end up lower than normal at the start of the next season, stuck wasting my limited play time at lower ranks.
I think the big question to me is "if you're a highly skilled and/or competitive player, why do you even care about the lower leagues?" In this new system, you're going to get to Legend fairly quickly and then your rank will simply be your MMR (which is ultimately a much more precise way to measure your ranking anyway). If you're not at that level yet, the ladder will provide you with an opportunity to make progress month over month until you reach that level.
Taking the 2019 ranked data as a reference, that means something like 6% or 7% of players are going to skyrocket to the top and start using MMR as their benchmark, and the rest are going to have rewarding laddering experiences for the first time in a long time. The ~93% bulk of players are really who the various intermediate leagues were made for.
I don't play much Wild, but it looks like Pirate Warrior and Secret Mage are two good ways to pressure down Razakus Priest before it can assemble its combo.
To preface all of this, I think you're probably wrong about The Ruination being OP - in fact, I think it's being punished by a separate and more insidious issue with the game's balance. But let's break this down a little bit.
The part about card economy is entirely true. Card draw is limited, there's no "enemy discard" tools, and there's not a ton of AoE. On top of that, the powerful AoE in the game is fairly slow (e.g. Shadow Flare, Trueshot Barrage, Judgment, and The Ruination - all are expensive, and all of which have a power level that scales with cost.)
The Ruination gives you a lot of card advantage, but it's very slow, so I'm not sure "on steroids" is quite right.
This is plainly wrong, and frankly it's kind of obviously wrong based on your point about card advantage.
Control decks rely on card advantage and inevitability, so in a game where it's harder to get card advantage, aggro is "naturally stronger." That doesn't mean there cannot be any effective control decks, or bad aggro decks, it just means it's easier than usual to make optimal aggro decks, and harder than usual to make optimal control decks.
So, because the game favors board-centric and aggro strategies, there will always be match-ups and turns where drawing a 9-drop spell is terrible for you. Your "two exceptions" basically demonstrate that aggro issue, but interestingly your first argument for it never being bad is exactly when it would bad in a control mirror. If you draw a big, expensive board wipe in a game where the board is under control, that's bad because that's exactly when you want to be drawing your big threats.
Notably I'm skipping the middle sentence here (mostly because I think the theme of killing your own units in Shadow Isles is a good one, and that it's okay for The Ruination to play well with that in general).
I think this actually highlights the real balance problem, and it's a problem I've been thinking about for a little while with Runeterra. I think the Spell Mana bank is actually a bad thing for balance.
The Spell Mana bank was one of the things that originally drew me to Runeterra because it seemed like a really cool concept to enable players to think several turns ahead, and to enable "unusually powerful" cards like Warmother's Call. Part of having that bank, though, is a requirement that any spell that costs less than 10 mana must be balanced against being played three turns early or essentially "for free." I think there are a lot of CCGs where a 6 mana symmetric board wipe is actually considered very fair. Because of the Spell Mana bank, though, you could never make The Ruination cost 6 - it would be able to come down way too early. So, The Ruination (and really all of the AoE and big card draw tools) incurs a tax on its cost to make up for that mechanic.
But as anyone who has played Hearthstone for long enough can tell you, mana cheating a card out is one of the biggest threats to balance, and Spell Mana basically represents a constant threat of mana cheating. And decks playing spells right on the sweet spot for the mana bank (2 or 3 drop spells), making your cards essentially free is a much more powerful and problematic thing than making your AoE come down a little early. In fact, this cheap spell balance problem is exactly why Deny had to be nerfed from 3 to 4 mana - to get it out of this "free spell" breakpoint in the Spell Mana mechanic.
Some might say that you're not really cheating the mana - you're paying for it by making inefficient plays on previous turns. But in the early turns your opponent doesn't have enough mana to punish you that much for your inefficiency, and in the late turns the issue is moot because you've got enough mana to play everything you want to.
A good example of this false payment was the Solitary Monk + Stand Alone combo - dropping a 7/6 elusive unit on turn 3 is a major threat, and the 1/1 or 2/2 that your opponent has been threatening you with hasn't pressured you enough to make that combo bad. (I know the meta has kind of moved past this combo and the Lux/Karma decks, but it makes for a good example of what I'm talking about.)
It seems like a powerful deck, but the sample size here from that theorycrafting stream is pretty small, and most streamers were trying lots of classes/archetypes (some of which were not very successful), so I'd take that video with a grain of salt.
Specifically speaking to this point, I also really enjoy Battlegrounds as a break from ranked play - it has a freshness that's rewarding in a way that Arena never was. I don't think that I'd want to play Hearthstone exclusively for Battlegrounds, but I definitely enjoy the entire game more thanks to having it as a truly fun option to break up my laddering efforts.
TL;DR: The current metagame is fine/not great, but rotation is coming so don't let that make your decision. The new ranked system feels dramatically better from a progression standpoint, and I think long-term it could change the way people play ladder in a way that makes the game a lot more fun.
Right now the metagame is kind of odd - Hall of Fame and de-nerfs have gone into effect, but the game hasn't had its rotation yet. This means some cards that people have been hating forever are gone, but the cards they've left standard for aren't in, while other cards that folks have PTSD from (e.g. Dr. Boom, Mad Genius) are back in full force. It's fine - I've played in metagames that I've enjoyed more, but I'm having fun with this one. If you use the metagame as a barometer for coming back, I would only use that to decide whether or not to return today or next week - I think the metagame will be a lot more exciting once the rotation hits.
That said, the ranked system is dramatically better.
The old system felt like a grind at every level, and the payoff for that work wasn't that great. If you didn't have a lot of time to play in a given month, you'd slip way behind because of how slow progress could be. Losses near ranked floors felt terrible. The only opportunities you had to play off-meta decks were at rank floors because once you move past them, if you're serious about trying to rank up, you can't afford to lose stars, so you netdeck whatever's good in the metagame and push your way to the next floor.
The inclusion of more floors is neutral for players who rarely got above rank 15, but helps mitigate that feeling of grinding considerably for any player who ever made it past rank 15:
Having all those extra ranks and stopping points helps you feel like you're making progress, and getting bonus stars for getting to a rank floor once also helps you to get back there.
But the biggest thing about the new ranking system is something that's going to require a shift in thinking from the players. Now, thanks to the bonus stars, you can actually get back to your previous rank with relatively low win rates. Take the base case* for example, where you made it one rank floor up and are trying to get back there. You get 2 stars for each win and 4 stars for a win streak. Since each win recoups two losses, you'd need a win rate below 33% to actually lose rank over time, and you only need a 50% win rate to make progress. Even the worst classes in any given metagame have been able to field decks with win rates around 50%. This opens a lot of possibilities to play low tier/off-meta decks and still make considerable progress getting back up to your previous rank.
If you're someone who just loves climbing and wants to play the best netdecks, that's fine, but for folks who want to play their fun homebrews, they won't have to trade ladder progress for fun anymore. I think it's gonna take some time before people start to think differently about what decks are viable for ranking up, but when people start to see that they can play more decks and more classes and still see progress on the ladder, I think you'll start to see a much more consistently healthy game.
*Technically the base case is that you never made it to Bronze 5, and have no bonus stars, but a majority of players won't be in that bucket, and the ones who are are probably newer/have very limited collections.
"Big healing" is a class feature for Priest, which is why you see more flexible small healing in neutrals than you do big healing. The comparisons to Voodoo Doctor and Earthen Ring Farseer makes some sense, but you yourself pointed out that the rules differ between low and high cost neutrals (at least when it comes to splitting stats). This is just another example where a neutral card is intentionally weak to make room for class identity/differentiation.
While this is obviously very good for Pirate Warrior, I'm not as convinced as others here that it will be inherently oppressive.
First, the addition of Demon Hunter as a Weapon Class (and the near certain odds of tons of DHs on day one of the meta) means weapon removal will be at an all-time high. Second, Warrior doesn't have a ton of card draw, especially in aggro variants (which is a big part of why Ancharrr is so good), so you can't afford to draw "blank cards" when you need your finishers. To avoid having this turn into a "blank card," you need to run several weapons. That, in turn will decrease the odds of playing Corsair Cache into Ancharrr.
Some immediate thoughts on the neutrals:
Dragonling Mechanic: I think your basic theory around splitting across bodies is based too heavily on what class cards do. Some examples include Shrubadier is slightly above vanilla, Sky Claw is vanilla but includes a buff, Duskbat is a little over vanilla). But class cards are supposed to be stronger than neutral cards. Murloc Tidehunter is vanilla, Razorfen Hunter is vanilla. This choice to buff just seems pretty arbitrary.
Silvermoon Guardian: If this card were a Scarlet themed card, I'd agree with your change, but as the two cards are not thematically related, I think the 3/3 statline is fine here.
Priestess of Elune: Your recommendation here amounts to bundling two basic cards (Chillwind Yeti and Radiance) for exactly the cost of both. There are two big problems with this - first, Priest is supposed to be the best at healing, and having healing tools that are equal (or better) than Priest's takes away from that identity. Second, bundling needs to cost some tax because if it doesn't, playing the bundled card in place of the other two is basically like getting a free card slot in your deck.