I want to shoot a Supreme Abyssal at people. You can’t stop me.
Edit: okay, looks like I stopped myself. Because now the plan is to shoot The Darkness at people’s faces. Now you can’t actually stop me.
The card text on Supreme Abyssal is likely irrelevant for the purposes of this card. However, I don't think the card text on The Darkness is irrelevant. Pretty sure it will play out as dormant, and you won't even get the candles to make it possible to become active. "Starts Dormant" has no qualifier attached to it.
This may not be good, depending on the meta. However, it is absolutely power-creep over Stand Against Darkness, especially if you're not on odd paladin dudes. Play a 4 cost card, then this on 5, leaving 2 more mana for something else. Straight up better than Stand Against Darkness, and thus fits the definition of power creep exactly.
I find it rather disingenuous of you to make a direct comparison to a playstyle in chess that you state explicitly is not more skillful than actually playing chess normally and isn't even hard to do - and then use that to claim that using RNG in hearthstone actually IS skillful and hard to do.
Surely you have to realize that this is not a fair comparison at all. In the chess example, you are (by your own admission) less skilled than your opponent. Therefore (if you're using that as an actual analogy), in the hearthstone example of RNG, you're also less skilled than your opponent. Analogy is analogy, good sir. If you don't like it, you should use a different analogy.
Just imagine for a minute that those support buffs given by Ionia units are not temporary, but are permanent instead. These units include Young Witch, Fuzzy Caretaker (and Taric from Targon), with Pix! and Herald of Spring as honorable mentions. Now add to those support buffs the following spell buffs: Pale Cascade, Spirit's Refuge, Rush, Ghost, Twin Disciplines, and Sonic Wave (along with Resonating Strike). Again, we're imagining that these buffs are permanent additions to any unit that gets them, including the keywords (except barrier).
Now toss Lee Sin into this stew. Let that simmer for a while in your mind.
Agreed, it sounds like the opponent just knew about the stack limit, and played to it specifically. Getting outplayed is not something to be sad about. You learn and you move on. Next time you're in that kind of spot, you do the spells first and Riptide after. Lesson learned.
Honestly, the scariest thing for Lee Sin after this patch is the KDA card for Targon - 5 cost, all buffs are permanent (except Barrier) and it even draws a card to replace itself.
Good luck dealing with a Lee Sin who keeps every buff you ever give him. And presumably this means he won't have to cast a spell each round to get challenger either.
Support Lee Sin with Taric could even become a thing. Support him once with Taric, and he has Tough for the rest of the game. Support him once with Young Witch, and he has +1 strength and Quick Attack for the rest of the game. Heck, even supporting him with Pix! counts as a permanent Pale Cascade, and Fuzzy Caretaker gives him +3 strength for the rest of the game. Herald of Spring would grant him Lifesteal permanently, and Ghost would do the same with elusive. Plus his natural Barrier whenever he manages two spells, and Bastion ... and then there are the spells that would be permanent instead of temporary. Pale Cascade, Twin Disciplines, Spirit's Refuge (the lifesteal part), Sonic Wave, Resonating Strike, and Rush - all of these take on a whole new complexion when their effects are permanent.
I hope I'm over-reacting. But I kinda think I'm not.
Ok, I do realize that Swain is usually played with Bilgewater, but I just have to point out that you need to pay attention to the icon at the bottom of this card, Ravenous Flock. Hint: It's not Bilgewater. And claiming that nerfing Make it Rain was incorrect - I don't know where to begin with that, so I won't even talk about it beyond this statement.
I agree that Ravenous Flock deserves a nerf, but TF/Swain has been much less played in the last 2 weeks than it was before that, so it's not a massive problem in the metagame right now. Maybe it will get the nerf bat next time around.
And seriously, I have to say - if you're so upset with where the game is right now (and I can tell you are, because you show up on just about every post to talk about it), maybe it's time to step back for a while and chill out.
I did specifically say competitive ladder for a reason there. It's the ultimate judge of the complete card pool, with wild actually serving that purpose even better than standard.
You mentioned Arena several times, and here's the thing about Arena - when you artificially limit the card pool to only a certain subset of all cards, some cards are still worse than others, but some otherwise-unplayable cards become playable, solely because the best cards are excluded from the format. Thus, as you mentioned, a Bloodfen Raptor could be ok, when (say) Crackling Razormaw, Huge Toad, Furious Felfin, Faerie Dragon, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Sightless Watcher, and Fallen Hero are all excluded from the format (I have no idea what the current format is, but I know for a fact that Arena is curated to be a limited card pool). I also picked only cards with the same cost and stats as Bloodfen Raptor. And every single card listed is strictly better than it, but if all other 2 cost 3/2 cards are unavailable, sure, Bloodfen Raptor might be pickable.
That's the thing about limited formats. They artificially raise the value of bad cards by excluding good ones from the pool of options. That's why I specifically referred to competitive ladder format - that is the only way to determine which cards are actually the best cards.
Anyways, this doesn't really have much to do with randomness, but it was still interesting to discuss.
The line between a competitive card and a weak one is so much thinner than people often think. So desiring to avoid imposing arbitrary constraints, looking at the entire collection is the sensible route.
Yes, but even with this caveat, there are still a numerically large number of cards that are obviously far too pathetic to include in any deck, pretty much ever. Just looking only at the 2-cost slot, and spending less than 2 minutes, I came up with: Biteweed, Bloodfen Raptor, Bilefin Tidehunter, Bladed Gauntlet, Blowgill sniper, Call Pet, Cheaty Anklebiter, and so on (just from the alphabetical listing here, you can tell I didn't go very deep). The number of genuinely unplayable cards (speaking of competitive ranked play only) is quite large at this point, honestly. Numerically, there would be literally hundreds of cards that never get played in any deck right now (and probably never have, nor ever will).
If you were looking at all cards in the game (a monumental task I must say), then your result is lower than the actual reality in actual games. Why? Because almost nobody plays cards with no text (and therefore no randomness), so every card with no text is immediately irrelevant to actual games. Yet, I'm betting you were counting those cards in your totals. There are also many other cards whose text has no randomness, but are still not actually played in any decks.
If you redid the counting using only competitively-used cards, I'm betting you'd have quite a bit higher of a percentage, assuming you include everything that's actually random (discover, Avenging Wrath-type things, any resurrect ever, and so on).
As I said, I've played a lot of discard aggro. You don't play Augmented Experimenter because you're behind on board and already lost. You play him to tempo your way to lethal. Remove a pesky guy that was in your way, draw into discard + Vision, draw into Get Excited! (either the actual thing or a second Jinx) ... it's your last gasp to find a way to win before the opponent stabilizes for good.
The current versions of discard aggro have no time to wait for value from University. It's waaaaaay too slow. And it's utterly useless without Jinx on board.
Edit - I don't think it actually matters much at this point, because the meta has caught up to discard aggro. When I started it, I was winning about 80% of my games. Now, I'm actually losing more than I win. It's not a good deck anymore at the moment.
I think the expansion is fine so far. I'm neither excited nor disappointed.
Just a quick comment about The University of Piltover - you said it would work in discard aggro. I can tell you that I picked up discard aggro for the first time last week, just after the release of Monuments of Power (ironically, since it has no cards in it from that expac). I have been playing that deck exclusively for the past week with no changes. And I can say with some certainty that The University of Piltover would make the deck worse. If I slotted it, it would take up a board spot (in a deck that needs to go wide to win), and it would have to replace Augmented Experimenter, who does basically the same thing, but is a 3/3 body that deals 3 damage to something when he comes down, and draws three cards from my own deck, which is vastly better than 3 random ones. Discard aggro does not have time for The University of Piltover to do it's thing, and Jinx usually does not stick long enough for her to get value from it either.
TL;DR - The University of Piltover doesn't do enough to synergize with discard aggro. Discard aggro is aggro first, discard second. The discarding provides a means of going very wide, very fast, but just adding more discard does not automatically make the deck better. I've never found myself saying, "Hmm, if I only I could discard my whole hand right now, then I'd be in a much better place in this game."
Ok, well it was just a big misunderstanding then. As you said, TF/Swain is generally classified as a control deck, maybe midrange, but definitely not aggro. And I was talking about Pirate Aggro, which specifically refers to Miss Fortune/Gangplank combined with Noxus.
Am I imagining things when most of these cards look too strong to me, compared to previous cards?
This card will be a staple in most or all Paladin decks. It's way too good to be side lined.
The card text on Supreme Abyssal is likely irrelevant for the purposes of this card. However, I don't think the card text on The Darkness is irrelevant. Pretty sure it will play out as dormant, and you won't even get the candles to make it possible to become active. "Starts Dormant" has no qualifier attached to it.
Has anyone tried Crimson/Soraka/Star Spring?
I just now thought of this as a possibly very interesting idea to explore.
This may not be good, depending on the meta. However, it is absolutely power-creep over Stand Against Darkness, especially if you're not on odd paladin dudes. Play a 4 cost card, then this on 5, leaving 2 more mana for something else. Straight up better than Stand Against Darkness, and thus fits the definition of power creep exactly.
Maybe it's just me, but this seems absurdly strong.
Great writeup and interesting idea!
@Angryshuckie
I find it rather disingenuous of you to make a direct comparison to a playstyle in chess that you state explicitly is not more skillful than actually playing chess normally and isn't even hard to do - and then use that to claim that using RNG in hearthstone actually IS skillful and hard to do.
Surely you have to realize that this is not a fair comparison at all. In the chess example, you are (by your own admission) less skilled than your opponent. Therefore (if you're using that as an actual analogy), in the hearthstone example of RNG, you're also less skilled than your opponent. Analogy is analogy, good sir. If you don't like it, you should use a different analogy.
Just imagine for a minute that those support buffs given by Ionia units are not temporary, but are permanent instead. These units include Young Witch, Fuzzy Caretaker (and Taric from Targon), with Pix! and Herald of Spring as honorable mentions. Now add to those support buffs the following spell buffs: Pale Cascade, Spirit's Refuge, Rush, Ghost, Twin Disciplines, and Sonic Wave (along with Resonating Strike). Again, we're imagining that these buffs are permanent additions to any unit that gets them, including the keywords (except barrier).
Now toss Lee Sin into this stew. Let that simmer for a while in your mind.
Agreed, it sounds like the opponent just knew about the stack limit, and played to it specifically. Getting outplayed is not something to be sad about. You learn and you move on. Next time you're in that kind of spot, you do the spells first and Riptide after. Lesson learned.
Honestly, the scariest thing for Lee Sin after this patch is the KDA card for Targon - 5 cost, all buffs are permanent (except Barrier) and it even draws a card to replace itself.
Good luck dealing with a Lee Sin who keeps every buff you ever give him. And presumably this means he won't have to cast a spell each round to get challenger either.
Support Lee Sin with Taric could even become a thing. Support him once with Taric, and he has Tough for the rest of the game. Support him once with Young Witch, and he has +1 strength and Quick Attack for the rest of the game. Heck, even supporting him with Pix! counts as a permanent Pale Cascade, and Fuzzy Caretaker gives him +3 strength for the rest of the game. Herald of Spring would grant him Lifesteal permanently, and Ghost would do the same with elusive. Plus his natural Barrier whenever he manages two spells, and Bastion ... and then there are the spells that would be permanent instead of temporary. Pale Cascade, Twin Disciplines, Spirit's Refuge (the lifesteal part), Sonic Wave, Resonating Strike, and Rush - all of these take on a whole new complexion when their effects are permanent.
I hope I'm over-reacting. But I kinda think I'm not.
Ok, I do realize that Swain is usually played with Bilgewater, but I just have to point out that you need to pay attention to the icon at the bottom of this card, Ravenous Flock. Hint: It's not Bilgewater. And claiming that nerfing Make it Rain was incorrect - I don't know where to begin with that, so I won't even talk about it beyond this statement.
I agree that Ravenous Flock deserves a nerf, but TF/Swain has been much less played in the last 2 weeks than it was before that, so it's not a massive problem in the metagame right now. Maybe it will get the nerf bat next time around.
And seriously, I have to say - if you're so upset with where the game is right now (and I can tell you are, because you show up on just about every post to talk about it), maybe it's time to step back for a while and chill out.
I love that you "recall her giving out triple treats." Very nice one there.
I did specifically say competitive ladder for a reason there. It's the ultimate judge of the complete card pool, with wild actually serving that purpose even better than standard.
You mentioned Arena several times, and here's the thing about Arena - when you artificially limit the card pool to only a certain subset of all cards, some cards are still worse than others, but some otherwise-unplayable cards become playable, solely because the best cards are excluded from the format. Thus, as you mentioned, a Bloodfen Raptor could be ok, when (say) Crackling Razormaw, Huge Toad, Furious Felfin, Faerie Dragon, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Sightless Watcher, and Fallen Hero are all excluded from the format (I have no idea what the current format is, but I know for a fact that Arena is curated to be a limited card pool). I also picked only cards with the same cost and stats as Bloodfen Raptor. And every single card listed is strictly better than it, but if all other 2 cost 3/2 cards are unavailable, sure, Bloodfen Raptor might be pickable.
That's the thing about limited formats. They artificially raise the value of bad cards by excluding good ones from the pool of options. That's why I specifically referred to competitive ladder format - that is the only way to determine which cards are actually the best cards.
Anyways, this doesn't really have much to do with randomness, but it was still interesting to discuss.
Yes, but even with this caveat, there are still a numerically large number of cards that are obviously far too pathetic to include in any deck, pretty much ever. Just looking only at the 2-cost slot, and spending less than 2 minutes, I came up with: Biteweed, Bloodfen Raptor, Bilefin Tidehunter, Bladed Gauntlet, Blowgill sniper, Call Pet, Cheaty Anklebiter, and so on (just from the alphabetical listing here, you can tell I didn't go very deep). The number of genuinely unplayable cards (speaking of competitive ranked play only) is quite large at this point, honestly. Numerically, there would be literally hundreds of cards that never get played in any deck right now (and probably never have, nor ever will).
If you were looking at all cards in the game (a monumental task I must say), then your result is lower than the actual reality in actual games. Why? Because almost nobody plays cards with no text (and therefore no randomness), so every card with no text is immediately irrelevant to actual games. Yet, I'm betting you were counting those cards in your totals. There are also many other cards whose text has no randomness, but are still not actually played in any decks.
If you redid the counting using only competitively-used cards, I'm betting you'd have quite a bit higher of a percentage, assuming you include everything that's actually random (discover, Avenging Wrath-type things, any resurrect ever, and so on).
@TheTrifarianGeneral -
As I said, I've played a lot of discard aggro. You don't play Augmented Experimenter because you're behind on board and already lost. You play him to tempo your way to lethal. Remove a pesky guy that was in your way, draw into discard + Vision, draw into Get Excited! (either the actual thing or a second Jinx) ... it's your last gasp to find a way to win before the opponent stabilizes for good.
The current versions of discard aggro have no time to wait for value from University. It's waaaaaay too slow. And it's utterly useless without Jinx on board.
Edit - I don't think it actually matters much at this point, because the meta has caught up to discard aggro. When I started it, I was winning about 80% of my games. Now, I'm actually losing more than I win. It's not a good deck anymore at the moment.
I love hearing things like this! Did you continue to have success with it, or did you start hitting rough matchups?
I think the expansion is fine so far. I'm neither excited nor disappointed.
Just a quick comment about The University of Piltover - you said it would work in discard aggro. I can tell you that I picked up discard aggro for the first time last week, just after the release of Monuments of Power (ironically, since it has no cards in it from that expac). I have been playing that deck exclusively for the past week with no changes. And I can say with some certainty that The University of Piltover would make the deck worse. If I slotted it, it would take up a board spot (in a deck that needs to go wide to win), and it would have to replace Augmented Experimenter, who does basically the same thing, but is a 3/3 body that deals 3 damage to something when he comes down, and draws three cards from my own deck, which is vastly better than 3 random ones. Discard aggro does not have time for The University of Piltover to do it's thing, and Jinx usually does not stick long enough for her to get value from it either.
TL;DR - The University of Piltover doesn't do enough to synergize with discard aggro. Discard aggro is aggro first, discard second. The discarding provides a means of going very wide, very fast, but just adding more discard does not automatically make the deck better. I've never found myself saying, "Hmm, if I only I could discard my whole hand right now, then I'd be in a much better place in this game."
Ok, well it was just a big misunderstanding then. As you said, TF/Swain is generally classified as a control deck, maybe midrange, but definitely not aggro. And I was talking about Pirate Aggro, which specifically refers to Miss Fortune/Gangplank combined with Noxus.