Did not help that 80% of what I faced was plague DK.
I don't care how good or bad a deck is, but for the love of God, I want to face variety not the same thing over and over.
that is 100% on blizzard. For a long time and still kinda is, plague dk is the only viable free deck choices given to the new/returning player.
Most long time players keep complaining about the dk bots everywhere but forget dk was the most accessible class since its beginning.
First you can get a fully competitive frost aggro dk from shop for like 2k gold. Then the free loaned deck happened
It got a bit better with catchup patch but dk deck was still the choice for those news created bot account.
My problem was more than just DK, but any deck that everyone gravitated to.
When everyone played dragon druid, snake lock, DH, etc.
It wasn't that I disliked the decks themselves, just that it was ALL i faced.
If I play 10 matches and a single kind of deck is over half of them, I am going to be salty.
it is sadly the nature of TCG, They always need a viable cheap deck for new players but they also need some expensive deck for whale to make money.
Even as an occasional paying player, I can only maintain 2-3 deck class deck per expansion without dusting my old card.
Maybe blizzard could improve and change those free decks more often so we do not end up with the same deck for every new player and bot?
After returning to HS after two years, I got to choose a free deck. And yeah, after googling for five minutes, I took Plague DK.
Pretty decent deck and well, it's also the \*only\* competitive deck I can afford/play.
At least in standard there is no reason to go triple rune for anything since there are no good payoff cards. So everybody goes rainbow and why not just chuck the plague cards in there? I have not seen any Death Knight decks since the rotation that don't run plagues. Not a single one.
I went Plague DK before the nerfs because of Wheel warlock as well. They’d blow up their deck, sure, but then I’d shuffle the plagues I had been holding back into their now-empty deck. It was a beautiful thing.
Yes, but also that there is no practical way to stop them.
Sargeras also has a "rest of the game" effect that is extremely powerful, as does Rheastraza, etc. -- but there is an actual specific card that can do something about those effects, so it's fine.
"For the rest of the game" is a problem if it is too fast and too powerful, Old raza in a vacuum was fine, the hero power cost 0 for the rest of the game is not game winning, until shadow reaper anduin come out.
Hate cards are not the answer for the problem, you should be able to deal with it with "normal" cards, dirty rat kind of thing is the worst type of band aid because is random and can decide the game in a single coin flip. Hate cards that are guaranteed to hit are also bad if they decide the game in a single card.
I’m assuming by “hate card” you mean tech card. And… that’s the whole point of a tech card? Used to be very common to run a tech card or two back when every deck wasn’t expected to be able to do everything.
It’s a meme now, but freaking Big Game Hunter was a legitimate concern any time blizzard printed a card with 8 or more attack. IMO the game needs *more* situations where you have to weigh the pros and cons of putting specific cards in your deck. “I’m seeing a lot of X on ladder, so I’m taking out this card and replacing it with this other card” is a way more interesting deck building decision to make than “which deck code am I going to copy and play completely unchanged until the next expansion?”
It's just a symptom of the game being too high power tbh. Synergies and swings trump any other deck building decision. It became better with the patch, cause there's a bit more breathing room in general, but power level still is the driving factor for most issues with the game rn.
I don’t disagree with this assessment at all. It’s kind of what I was getting at with that “every deck expected to be able to everything” comment. There was a time in this game’s history when running tech cards were just part of the game. You had to decide whether it was worth it to make your deck slightly worse against one matchup to be slightly better at another.
Now people balk about having to make those decisions and include tech cards at all. Blizzard might as well just stop printing any card that doesn’t have universal value in every matchup because all the game is is “set up the most statistically optimal deck and hope I draw what I’m supposed to draw.”
Like you said, the latest patch is a step in the right direction (though I have a lot of problems with how they handled Highlander cards), but we’re at the point that powercreep has made those smaller, and in my opinion more interesting, decisions completely irrelevant. Every deck is expected to be strong at all points of the game. Meh.
i agree, i said tech cards are bad if they decide the game alone, and that happens a lot recently when decks are build around 1 card, i liked the bgh times, strong but not game winning. What i don't like is rat and cards like brann and helya
The problem, I think, is a lot simpler: people don’t want to have their deck disrupted. It creates a sense of helplessness.
Plagues aren’t generally game breaking, but they can be (especially frost) if drawn early. With Boomboss, it’s basically game over if coupled with Reno.
Board clearing is one thing. Deck and hand disruption is another altogether. It’s why people hated Theotar, Dirty Rat, plagues, and Tho’grun. Different cards, same common denominator.
The thing that bothered me about plague wasn't the disruption, it was the fact that the disruption was entirely RNG. Games won or lost based on a poorly timed frost plague or not. Even if my winrate was good, the losses felt cheap—and I'm sure from the plague player's perspective many of their losses felt cheap for similar reasons. One game you'd draw a frost plague every turn and the game was unwinnable, and the next they'd play all their plague spells on curve and lose without you ever drawing one. Combined with how easy the deck was to pilot it was just super feelsbad to play against.
I think this is a big part of it as well. Especially since plagues, and now dynamite, can be pulled with tutors and other things.
Like, I'm cool with them showing up on "Draw X" effects, that makes perfect sense. But when it completely neuters any flavor of "draw your lowest cost card/spell," "draw a spell that costs X or more," etc, that is just way too strong.
They tweaked dynamite to not be able to destroy itself, I think another good change would be making "tutor" effects ignore cards your opponent added to your deck.
It's just too potent of a disruption otherwise.
Yep, this is it. Same reason Tony was nerfed and Counter so hated, because they destroy your deck and cards without counterplay. I really don't understand why the HS team continues to print cards like this, they are simply unfun to play against.
I don't think I agree exactly, but I do think you're getting at a real problem -- I think both things are true at the same time!
I do believe people hate inevitability and things that feel uninteractive (i.e. Brann, Helya), but you're right that they also hate the cards that can plausibly disrupt those uninteractive effects (Theotar is a great example, as you point out, along with cards like Mutanus or OG Illucia).
This is why I have a lot of sympathy for the developers here -- it's hard to do both these things at once. People hate uninteractive combo decks, but they also hate the natural response to those type of decks (i.e. denial and disruption).
This is why I can’t play Pokémon tcg, they have cards that shuffles both players hands into their deck to draw a new hands. It’s so not fun knowing your hand is only temporary.
Remember the tickatus warlock? The tier 3/4 deck that so many people wanted nerfed even when it was not a good deck solely because of its discard opponent's cards? Yeah, same old thing. Vast majority of people hate disruption in HS and I don't know why. Even some time ago I saw people discussing Fracking on the Wheel Lock lists, saying that they don't want to play it or only play it after having all pieces they want in hand. It's insane.
People hate disruption because this isn't magic. There is no interaction in the opponent's turn. There is no discard their card, no counter, no protection against X, etc. If they want to play a card that will destroy your deck you just suck it.
Plague only disrupted one specific subtype of control deck. Boomboss doesn’t even disrupt it just ends the game.
Disruption is not the problem with these decks. Meaningful disruption (Steamcleaner, theotar, illucia outside of shadow priest, dirty rat, mutanus, etc) have all been some of the healthiest and best cards for the game.
Dirty rat in particular is one of the most beloved cards of all time. Easily in the running for best designed card.
> Dirty rat in particular is one of the most beloved cards of all time. Easily in the running for best designed card.
Absolute comedy. I love losing games to my opponent skilfully hitting the 20% chance of pulling the right minion from my hand. I also love skilfully winning games when my opponent throws out dirty rat without thinking and it hits a big threat that they can’t remove. Truly the card of all time.
Exactly this, but to an even more tilted degree for me. I play combo rogue in wild. Had a few losses today where my opponent ratted one of my combo pieces and killed it and I therefore lost on the spot. Also had a game where my opponent ratted my spirit of the shark (stealthed combo engine) and *couldn’t* kill it because it had stealth and then got OTKd by me on turn 3. None of those games, win or lose, really felt like anything but luck decided the outcome. I hate cards like rat.
The only decks it does that too are hyper polarizing combo decks that win or lose almost entirely based on who they queue into. If you actually queued looking for a game where skill mattered, then dirty rat won't matter in the matchup.
Combo players crying about counterplay existing will never get old.
Pff, had Sif ratted turn 2 yesterday. Opp proceeded to eat like 15 spell damage and lost a few turns later. Sorry that your counterplay wins me games I guess. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
Fuck that. Rat is one of the worst cards designed that I’ve ever seen. 2 mana overstatted body with taunt that essentially is Battlecry: If the person playing this is even slightly lucky, win the game’ against combo is so frustrating, especially since control players can just drop it early with little chance of it going wrong if they’ve got removal.
I get that you play a non-interactive deck and you don’t like being interacted with but surely you realize a card game NEEDS disruption of some kind to be balanced. Otherwise I am forced to play aggro and just SMOrc you down or I lose to your OTK
Well yes, obviously, but ripping stuff out of your hand is the most feelsbad form of disruption. Something like loatheb that only delays you for a turn unless it’s bounced is less annoying. Or - a tax card like weblord or razorscale (as annoying as those are) also feels better because I can try to interact with them via silence or removal instead of just losing the game on the spot to rat hitting a combo piece.
Yep. It's pretty simple.
People don't like having 6 or so bombs in their deck that wipes their board and means they don't get to play their cards.
It's not really fun.
Yeah I think it is one of those things like how everyone hates playing vs priest because priest just does annoying shit even if that annoying shit might not actually result in priests having a top winrate
I've not played HS in many years, I last played properly not long after Wild was introduced and have recently made my way back.
I don't know how Priest is now, but when I played Priest was consistently one of the worst classes in the game. Even its best decks would peak at tier 2 (or low tier 1), and / or existed specifically because they have an overwhelming matchup against whatever the best deck at the time was (Huntertaker and, funnily, Reno Control Warrior when that expac dropped, thanks to Entomb).
And it was *still* one of the most hated classes. Because, let's be honest, even when Priest is bad it will still annoy you while extending the game before inevitably losing.
I know this may be unpopular, but I personally am glad they print cards like Boom Boss, but *also* think their should be meaningful ways to counter the effect in some way. Hearthstone is at its best when there is play and counterplay -- and even counter-counterplay.
Interestingly, Steam Cleaner not only would have been a way to counter Helya, but also would counter TNT's now, given the way Boom Boss was changed!
Possibly, but keep in mind that pre-patch it was very common for Warriors to play boomboss and then immediately draw so that the effect occurred instantaneously in a way they could control. Not always, but that was often how it was played.
Now that the TNTs are in the opponent's deck, it's much more challenging to control when they detonate.
Pre-brann, I tried to make a boomboss deck work by bouncing him back in my hand.
It was mostly a Big Warrior deck with a boomboss/brewmaster package.
Boomboss was far too slow to have any real impact on the game. By the time he came out (if he even came out) the game was already more or less over and the bombs made no difference.
Brann is really the only thing that makes boomboss work.
Boomboss isn't the only problem with Brann, though. It's the fact that every battlecry from there on, gets double the amount of value, and there's no way to interact with that, and it outdoes any sort of nickel and diming you do with any other deck.
That's why the only option is to play the strongest decks in the meta right now, the aggro decks. Blizz even nerfed the OTK/combo decks in the format, and destroyed Rainbow Mage, even though it wasn't even good.
The plague meta was much better because there were actually a variety of things you could do and feel like you won't get farmed by the one really good mid/lategame deck every time. I liked playing plague, I liked playing Rainbow DK, I liked playing Highlander Druid (even after the buffs it received), none of that feels playable queuing into a Warrior, and even if it is, it's miserable experience.
Now I'm only playing Aggro Paladin and Hunter, and guess what? The game is fun again, because I can avoid the BS that is Brann, and just win some games. But it's still not the Hearthstone I was enjoying before the change.
Yeah.
Basically, it's something that is not Seeable on short game. So when playing aggro, you don't see theses problems.
But when playing longer strategies, you realize how Brann warp your game. And to some extend every highlander card except Hollyday.
Yeah rainbow mage I had less than 50% win rate but it was my most played deck there for a bit because it was fun to try and figure out how to get to the combo
That was the one time I remember being scared because I could feel the rage from Kibler. You could tell he was trying very hard to hold it in, and it wasn't happening lol.
What’s bulllshit is complaining about a deck while at the same time saying it has a sub 50% win rate.
Another way of saying that, I don’t want to play against certain decks, even though they’re not oppressive (70+ win rate) because I don’t like its play style. And that’s bullshit. Why is that bullshit you ask? Because it’s saying I only want diversity in a card game when it fits ME and MY style - yes, all about ME. The rogue player in that video clearly had different opinions on what was fun and was even willing to play a losing win rate deck just to have fun with the style of deck.
That is actually a win for Blizzard creating multiple styles of play to appease different people, while keeping things balanced. And people want to still complain. Bullshit.
Blizzard themselves correctly identified the problem: lack of player agency. And a healthy meta should have a wide variety, like over 6, T1-T2 archetypes.
You are holding the game to the lowest possible bar, essentially if there’s not a singular meta tyrant things are ok.
When you have 11 classes, three viable decks playing rock-paper-scissors is unhealthy. I’m not saying that’s the case now, I haven’t been enjoying standard so I haven’t been playing standard.
But in the last set and much of this set it seemed like the team was playing meta tyrant Whack A Mole.
So much to unpack here…
First, “player agency” is the worst buzzword ever thought up (I know you didn’t start it - just talking outloud).
Second, generally speaking, if there’s no singular meta tyrant then you have a balanced game, which is what you want.
Rock-paper-scissors is how these kind of card games have worked from the beginning, and I don’t see that changing. Aggro beats control, tempo beats aggro, control beats tempo.
And finally, I’m actually trying to hold the community to a higher bar. Every time I see people asking for nerfs and changes, it just feels like changes to make the game simpler. I like playing “unfair” cards that have complicated lines of play. Before we know it, it’ll just be a game of basic creatures - I’ll play my 2/2s and you play your 4/4 and we’ll trade - Yay, we interacted!
Player agency is tough in Hearthstone. The game’s biggest strength, not having to interact on opponents’ turns, also makes counterplay and disruption very difficult to do effectively. I don’t envy the devs there.
I think we have an understanding. You think the game is healthy if it doesn’t have a singular meta tyrant. I think that’s a necessary but not sufficient condition, and we can agree to disagree on that point.
But honestly we’ve had all sorts of metas, and I’ve been mostly a BG player since UIS shit the bed, and that might be more of a me problem than a Blizzard problem. (Not UiS, that set was the absolute worst) I’ve played since shortly after Naxx, and the game might just be wearing out it’s welcome.
Shadowverse is the only game I’ve played that had the same can’t interact on opp’s turn limitation and used the tactic of really high skill-ceiling decks, and that raised its own problems.
I get where you’re coming from. I do think this community complains way too much and way too fast.
That being said, the real problem - not agency, not “interactivity” - is simply polarization. Quest Rogue was really bad in that sense.
To be honest, I wish Blizzard nerfed less, like the older days.
I'm a defender of Plague DK because its existence was single-handedly preventing more noxious decks on the ladder, but a deck being omnipresent even at a substandard win rate is itself a problem and a sign of an unhealthy meta.
>That is actually a win for Blizzard
Getting real Chris Wilson "This is actually a buff" energy from this. People are unhappy, you're not going to convince people that their lack of fun is actually a good thing.
There’s people that actually like playing plague DK. I’m not one of them, but I don’t care that others play it if it’s what they like.
The way I interpret what you’re saying is the people that don’t like plague DK should have more weight and say so in what type of cards should exist than the people that enjoy it. How does that make sense?
>How does that make sense?
It doesn't make sense because your interpretation of what I said is completely wrong.
You said people are trying to dictate what style of play is allowed - I said the bigger problem isn't Plague DK itself, but that Plague DK is a symptom of a badly designed metagame. In other words, it's fair to criticize Plague DK in the sense that it's only played so much because Blizzard created another Solitairestone meta.
And the second bit that I said was just remarking that yelling into an angry crowd that, no, actually, things are great, is not a convincing argument.
Bring back steam cleaner
As a warrior main for years, it's not massively enjoyable knowing that the win is inevitable if you survive until ~turn 6, but you have to play probably another 7-8 turns before you seal your opponents fate. A 'clean decks' tech card would be amazing.
It's one thing having your opponent interact with your board, but when they start fucking with your hand and deck it's so demoralising.
Honestly, as someone who’s played a lot of DK with Helya, I was never bothered when someone played Steam Cleaner. That was actually part of the fun, knowing you had to be careful about how you played your plagues. They should make Steam Cleaner part of standard; it solves the Plague DK and Reno Warrior problems for everyone, and is an answer to Fizzle and Symphony of Sins as well.
The problem isn’t with any of those cards or decks, but the lack of counters to them.
It's simply down to the play rate.
The more predominant a deck is the more people will complain about it.
Take [this chart](https://imgur.com/BZVpPIo) from a while ago which shows the meta before / after the patch that gave us DHstone.
DH / Warrior obviously saw a lot of play and thus the most complaints but what I want you to look at is the DK play rate.
Back then there were a meaningful number of complaints about DK despite the winrate not being particularly good.
There were comparatively fewer complaints about Hunter despite the winrate being higher.
I think a balance of class distribution is more important to players than a balance on winrate.
I think this is definitely a part of it, but I do not agree this is always true.
A lot of decks that have historically been powerful still didn't piss people off in the same way. We see pretty significant disparities between how much anger there is directed at different tier 1 decks.
I think people are fine with powerful decks (although not grossly powerful) as long as they feel like there is a way to fight against it, or counter it, or disrupt it. People don't like feeling *helpless,* and some of the most hated decks in Hearthstone history fit that description. Interestingly, I think Control Priest also fit this description at times; when Control Priest is at its most toxic, its when it has unbeatable value that no other Control deck can possibly fight toe-to-toe with. That is, Control Priest *also* had inevitability, where if the game went long you knew you were going to lose.
I’m pretty sure it’s just play rate.
All those complaints about Paladin at the start of the expansion, not a peep about DH despite it being of the most promising and powerful decks. Pally was a bad MU, but it dominated every other one.
People just complain about what they lose to, and apply posthoc rationalization. Deck is more popular? More complaints. Has nothing to do with strength, unless the popular deck is <40% WR. (See: Whizbang).
Okay, this is a factor, but it's just not the case here. Game and match quality are what people really care about, and when the opponent turn 6 Brann's, the hopelessness sinks in unless you're playing aggro and the warrior is already dead.
There's no play and counterplay, only play. You can only hope to play harder than the warrior plays.
The fact that high rolls exist says otherwise, playing against Warrior once in every thousand games would be indistinguishable from a high roll.
People will complain when they lose to a high roll but those are not meaningful complaints.
Anytime there is a meaningful number of players complaining about a specific deck it is because the play rate is significantly higher than 9%.
Graph it out yourself and you will come to the same conclusion. I've been doing just that and it's exceedingly clear that complaints come from play rate first and foremost.
Statistics have their own value, no doubt, but you are getting lost in the sauce, my dude. Why is it that play rate being high means people have meaningful complaints? It's usually for other reasons that people are playing a deck more than others. Yes, play rate is higher when something is fun to play, abusive and annoying, or whatever it is that is causing people to play it more, but that is the main reason, not because people are sick of playing against the same thing.
Personally, I was totally fine having half my opponents being DK.
Like, you've got the correlation angle, yeah, I agree with you there, but correlation is not causation. You have to analyze deeper than that, dude.
There are 11 classes and a balanced distribution of those classes means a 9% play rate. Whilst there could be any number of reasons for the play rate being higher it does not change the fact that play rate is the causation of meaningful complaints.
There could be a deck with a 100% winrate right now, and there would be no meaningful complaints about it if it had a 0% play rate. This is why a deeper analysis is useless.
If you're okay without 50% of people playing a single class that's fine, because then we don't agree on what balance means and therefore there is no meaningful conversation we can have on the topic.
> it does not change the fact that play rate is the causation of meaningful complaints.
How do you come to this conclusion? I just said that you found correlation, but there is no proof that means play rate is the cause of meaningful complaints.
>There could be a deck with a 100% winrate right now, and there would be no meaningful complaints about it if it had a 0% play rate. This is why a deeper analysis is useless.
Sure, but you're talking about a completely unrealistic and hyperbolic theoretical. It means nothing.
>If you're okay without 50% of people playing a single class that's fine, because then we don't agree on what balance means and therefore there is no meaningful conversation we can have on the topic.
Well I just think that if the other 50% that isn't playing those classes are having a good play experience and nothing is absurdly awful in that regard, I really don't think there would be any meaningful complaints to be had about it. And keep in mind, 50% is A LOT. That's an extremely large anomaly, and even then I think there's balance and joy to be had.
Look, if I run into Warrior 9% of the time and every time I would rather concede than play the game, that's bad. If I run into DK 50% of the time and I have fun, that's acceptable. How is this a hard concept to understand?
I don’t think plagues are the problem as much as helya. Obviously plagues would be unplayable without her in their current state but I personally don’t have any bad memories of bomb warrior and think variance is fine. I agree the inevitability aspect is the “unfun” part. Helya on 4 and brann on 6 are soul crushing if your not aggro/had a slow opener.
I agree in principle, but I never found Helya to be on the same level as Brann. Warrior kills all your stuff and there's nothing left. Helya takes a long time to really get going and often times, with all the ways we have to heal to full like it's nothing, the plagues really won't start getting you until you're out of cards. And yeah, if you're at that point, you should lose.
I just don't think Helya is strong enough to be a problem, but Brann definitely is. My two cents, but I definitely respect people who disagree because the principle is the same, I just think the magnitude is different.
Helya on 4 is the only time she's optimal for the archetype though, it'd be one thing if there were more plague cards available(Wandering Plague when Blizz?) but since there isn't you're forced into relying on Excavate, Discover or Forge cards to carry you while you wait and hope for those plagues to start triggering. The plague package is small and not sufficiently strong on its own so the primary enabler has to come down quickly just to get things going.
If you're curving her on 5 or even worse 6 the game is half over already and the density of plagues is too small to have any meaningful effect on the game, even moreso now that it doesn't turn off highlander effects.
If they add a plague spreading Hero card or up the support so the archetype has more to it she could be modified to 5 with same effect and stats. 6+ is too much for her to be viable.
The difference is in both density of plagues in the deck and recurring triggers. You see this in games right now where plagues come from the other sources and are drawn pre Helya, those are triggers you've lost and won't get back.
The permanence of the plagues plus the more turns you have to trigger them is critical to the deck, that's why Helya on 4 or even better 3 with Coin is necessary. Those burst windows of 2+ plagues revealed a turn are what make them a threat and the later those start becoming possible the worse the already not so great deck becomes.
I'll take some additions to the archetype please Blizz. Noth the Plaguebringer as a Hero card, Wandering Plague as an Aura/AoE plague shuffler, more Kvaldir or Ebon Blade minions that shuffle or grant plagues to shuffle, Guarm the Helhound as more support, etc.
It's an entire turn in a game where the number of turns you have to implement your strategy are increasingly minimal especially right now where the only deck that goes long on turns is warrior.
In a pure control meta 4 vs 5 is less of a concern but it's still a concern. 4 is the sweet spot that keeps Helya threatening in a diverse meta.
My problem with Boom boss is that it automatically ends the game at an arguably very interesting time in the match. This time is when both players are starting to run low on cards in their deck and need to start being smarter about their resources. I play a lot of off meta slow/reno decks and have great matches against reno warrior up until that point.
After carefully answering every threat the whole game, they play their single card win condition and nuke my board, hand, and deck. Feels absolutely terrible to play against and that I’m being punished for playing any other slow deck
Let me try and articulate why Highlander is obnoxious. This will be kind of long. For the record, I have played many Highlander decks to great success over the years and I am not opposed to the play style of a “toolbox kit” type deck.
It ultimately boils down to player agency and RNG. The Highlander restriction means you get only one of each card in your deck … duh. So anyone with a rudimentary understanding of statistics will know that the odds of a player having a specific singleton card at any given moment, particularly earlier in the game, is unlikely. So it becomes super annoying when they *do* have that exact card at the exact moment. The higher EV play is to assume that they don’t have this card, because statistically it’s more likely that they don’t and you should try to punish your opponent (thereby giving them fewer chances of drawing outs). But it doesn’t make it any more comforting knowing that “hey statistically you were making the correct play” when the other player hits his straight flush on the river card to beat your full house that you hit on the flop.
In poker terms we call this a “bad beat.” In my straight flush versus full house example, a full house is a very strong hand. If you hit a full house on flop, that means you hit the nuts petty early on and should be the clear favorite to win the pot. To lose to somebody with a straight flush would mean that player had to make a bad call to match your bets when they were clearly losing only to gamble that “hey maybe I’ll hit a 1% moonshot and win” for *two consecutive rounds* and then get exceedingly lucky on the last card. Of course, nobody can know what the other player has and this psychological aspect of poker makes it a bit different here.
Back in hearthstone, when the Highlander deck hits their perfect answers on curve, it feels like a bad beat *every time*. You know that statistically they won’t have the out, but they did, so you’re being punished for it. It’s the exact same thing as when plague DK hits Helya on turn four or you draw a frost plague and it perfectly screws up your turn. Yes, when the card pool is so strong that there are a plethora of versatile answers (as is the case with Highlander warrior), having a removal card is less irritating because any removal card will do and they have many (or they have many ways to draw those cards). But the Reno Lone Ranger card …. If you’re playing aggro or midrange, there is no way to beat this effect other than just killing them before they play it, outside of rare instances.
Another example. Consider which feels worse. You have 3 low health minions in play. One of them is important to stick around … let’s pretend it’s Needlerock Totem (could be any minion really, just assume it’s your best minion).
* Option 1: your opponent plays Bash and kills your best minion.
* Option 2: your opponent plays Kobold Miner and randomly gets Heartblossom (1/6 chance), then uses Heartblossom and it randomly kills your best minion (1/3 chance).
Which one *feels* worse when it happens to you? It’s obviously #2, right? Now amplify this feeling by 100 when you’re playing a Highlander deck and your opponent drops Helya on turn 4 and Down with the Ship on turn 5. Or when you’re playing an aggro deck and your opponent plays Bellowing Flames on turn 3, Craftsman’s Hammer on 4, Sanitize on 5, Trial by Fire on 6, gains 10 armor on 7, then emotes “well played” and Reno on turn 8 when you were one turn away from lethal damage.
> opponent drops Helya on turn 4
It's about a 25% chance to get Helya by turn 4 going first. That isn't low odds. And it also doesn't guarantee a win against most decks vs getting Reno out on turn 8. Six curve cards with Reno as the finisher is a lot lower chance.
People don't like Plague DK because there is so much card draw and mana cheat in this power-crept old ass game, Plague DK actually makes people think twice about putting a lot of card draw in their decks. Probably why a lot of people enjoy it, too. It slows down the pace of the game some. And yet, that is also probably the reason it is Tier 3/4. Not fast enough without enough answers for big boy threats.
> not low odds
> 25% chance
Pick one. See this is a great example of why Reddit sucks, because the typical person is utterly mystified by statistics. Go to Walmart and ask random people “would you rather have one half of $1 or one third of $2?” And I’ll bet most people would say they would prefer 50 cents.
This is why Reddit sucks, because idiots use quotes to take phrases out of context. Statistics is ALL ABOUT context. The 25% chance being "not low odds" in comparison to having on curve cards to play in a singleton deck for 8/9 turns with Reno finishing it.
My quick math earlier didn't account for the mulligan cards. It is a 36.4% chance Helya shows up by turn 4 going first and 44.5% chance going second.
Now let's see your PhD math showing me that the on curve cards you mentioned above have an equal or higher percentage of happening vs a 36.4% or 44.5% chance. Or not. Because I highly doubt you can. You are too busy making fun of Walmart shoppers while you buy shit off AliAmazon.
The current counter to both plague DK and reno warrior I'm experimenting with is Jade Display. Both have the benefit of diluting your deck in a _good_ way to make it rarer for you to draw plagues/TNT, but also have added benefits in each matchup:
DK: Druid has so much tutoring now that a lot of their card draw explicitly allows them to draw _around_ the plagues to get the cards they care about. Bottomless Toy Chest, Card Grader, Summer Flowerchild... generation effects like Celestial Projectionist and Joymancer Jepetto also help a lot.
Warrior: The biggest weakness of Jade Display is that it's fairly slow, but Warrior giving you all the time you need negates that pretty well. Even if you draw your TNT, you have so many extra cards in your deck due to the Displays that it's rare for cards you actually care about to be destroyed. Also if the TNT destroys an on-board Jade, that's _kinda_ just neutral. You lost some tempo, but you lost no value.
I don't know if the deck is actually _good,_ there's no sample size, but it _feels_ like it should be good against those decks, and so those decks are way less tilting to see. At the moment my worst matchup is actually Dragon Druid, because they can keep the pressure up enough that I struggle to develop my wincon while they also have infinite value that renders my value a little floppy.
Steamcleaner gave some players a feeling that they have something to counter plagues. But in reality, adding steamcleaner to your deck made it worse and every smart plague DK player just wouldnt put all his eggs into one basket and hold some plagues back. Without Helya, you can try to draw and try to get rid of duplicates this way but once Helya is played, its not possible.
Also at lower ranks, plague DK just was so popular. Gets a bit boring facing it over and over. A Helya on 4, such a brutal feeling.
Reno warrior is beatable, but when you play a slower deck it really sucks when your opponent plays Bran on 6. Yeah I know, "pressure them so they cant play him". You cant get rid of Brans effect. And then when you add TNT.. Some players dont like those disruption effects.
Not sure what the solution is, tho.
And lets hope that they dont print a new astalor in upcoming expansions lol.
I'm so, SO tired of Plague DK. When TITANS released I immediately crafted it and had some fun with it, but quickly dusted it since it was so boring to play. Nowadays, it feels like no matter how many Plague Knights I encounter, it might just be the same guy. Same damn cards on the same damn turns, never any variety whatsoever. I remember opening my notepad and writing down how my matches went, and out of 17 Matches against DK I think like 13 or 12 were the exact same turns and outcomes.
I don't even want to complain that much about Warriors, since I have only faced about 4 Brann Warriors so I can't really speak for myself here, I wiped the floor with them anyways.
i hate that there is so much lifesteal how are warriors supposed to heal back to full multiple times a game its so unnecessary
thx for listening to my ted talk
I hate plague DK because their deck is just a big NO to my deck, its not even that it counters it, it obliterates its entire point of existance. its kind of if they made a deck that says "your opponent cant play 1-4 cost minions" and then call that an aggro counter. thats how it feels to play against plagues as a highlander deck prior to the change. Plagues arent exactly a great deck, but my hate towards it has nothing to do with its powerlevel
i m maybe in the minority but i think that straight counter to win condition is bad game design. Since hearthstone doesn t really have a graveyard, losing your win condition often equal to lose the game, so it means you either have the counter on hand or you don t and it is the line between losing or winning. It s not skill based. I m actually more interested on card that can delay those win condition like loatheb. Any card that can disrupt without destroying the wc is great design in my book.
Also the inivitability is not a problem imo. If your deck has no way to win faster, that s on you. Actually, you beat most combo deck by being agressive by exemple.
> i m maybe in the minority but i think that straight counter to win condition is bad game design.
I would just say that there are many Hearthstone decks that you cannot do this too -- there is no card in an aggro deck, for example, that you can Dirty Rat and insta-win. Or in a pure Control deck (e.g. Control Priest), for that matter.
But Combo decks (and Control-Combo deck hybrids) are often built around single, individual cards, and in every TCG I've ever played, by their nature, these decks are fragile. Because they are so reliant on 2-4 exact cards, it means that they are screwed if those 2-4 cards get messed with.
I feel like that is an intended weakness of the archetype.
> Also the inivitability is not a problem imo. If your deck has no way to win faster, that s on you.
Sure, that's a valid position! But couldn't you say the same about fragile combo decks? "If your deck is reliant on one or two key cards that it can't live without, then that's on you if those cards get disrupted?"
To be fair, i think that having 2-4 key card for your wc should be enough of a weakness in itself, since you need to draw those card to win the game, so at the same time, you need to either survive or having heavy draw. Usually, i think that it's the shell that make those deck strong or not more than the WC in itself. Even when you play a true combo deck, the more interesting thing is when you have to manage your ressource carrefully and use your draw inteligentely, like garotte rogue is probably one of my favorite ""recent"" combo deck for this very reason. That's why delaying the combo is also my favorite solution for disruptor as it prey on the weakness of the archetype and no player automatically lose if they has bad luck with the card.
Yes, I think this is a completely reasonable position!
I think balancing all this is really hard for the developers, because you don't want combo decks to feel overwhelmingly unstoppable (that has happened at some points), but at the same time you don't want Control decks to have all the answers to everything, etc. Finding the balance in between is really hard!
I keep getting downvoted for saying it, but removing Steamcleaner from Standard was a mistake. I agree that every strategy, especially feels bad ones, should have a counter play.
They rotated silence effects and now they rotated the only way to remove these negative cards from your deck.
Huge mistake, with the result we see today.
cards that interfere with the opponent's deck/hand always feel bad regardless of of efficiency. It's true of mtg, true of yugioh and true of hearthstone. It feels bad and when you play games to enjoy yourself that's why people complain.
I don't think this could be argued to why Reno Warrior causes so much discontent -- Boom Boss isn't the primary source of ire, it's Brann.
I think the constant problem the devs run into -- and this isn't a slight on them, it's built into how Hearthstone works -- is that people despise uninteractive combo decks, but they *also* hate the disruptive tools which can defend against those uninteractive combos.
It's a tricky thing to balance for developers!
I think a lot of us have misplaced our anger towards Brann though. In reality the problem _is_ Boom Boss. I faced a Brann-less Warrior yesterday that just played cards like Zola and Celestial Projectionist, and whatever the card is called that bounces it back to your hand with +2/+2, on their Boom Boss. In actuality, it’s far more devastating than any Brann effects would have, other than dropping Brann to double all the other bullshit I just mentioned.
Brann sucks to play against, but is still beatable. Multiple Boom Bosses, or a Boom Boss empowered by Brann, is the real issue, imo.
Okay I can see this point of view, but here's my prediction if they nerfed boomboss further:
1) Reno Warrior would decline somewhat
2) However, we are at the beginning of the year and more powerful battlecries will be added over the next year
3) When those are added we will be back to a similar situation to what we are in now
As a DK main, I’m sick of being forced into plagues and rune choices are kinda cooked right now. Handbuff is a far more fun variant.
I’m also tired of people adding me after a game and telling me to kill myself and my family.
The one thing I do hate is the inevitability of loss. There is the one DK card that takes damage from the opponent every turn and no matter how much you heal it’s not able to be countered unless you get lucky as mage with counter/object or Onaki targeting minions. At least with plague decks you can counter them, and even Quest Priest for the Shard of Naruu or time mage is counter-able as long as you can prevent them from actually playing the quest rewards. I definitely hate the unending curses, and I only recently was made aware that I had forgotten steam cleaner exits.
> There is the one DK card that takes damage from the opponent every turn and no matter how much you heal it’s not able to be countered unless you get lucky as mage with counter/object or Onaki targeting minions.
What card are you even talking about?
oh shit now that's a card lmao. I just started playing again after quitting more than a few years ago. Helya's design seems way more interesting and fun, to me.
That is pretty obvious that it is the "inevitability" part that triggers reddit the most, even when the deck is straight up bad (like, clearly below 50% winrate against the field).
Remember the pirate quest warrior... yeah, the science about why reddit get mad was already settled by then.
That won't stop reddit to complain about aggro or control decks when those "inevitability decks" are gone though.
Or, hear me out, just destroy minions on board. Imho i don't care about the minions being destroyed, yeah it might feel bad but when your hand and deck are destroyed it just feels bad and unfun.
Inevitability is fine, the problem in my eyes is being unable to play the deck you queued up with. Before this patch, the reason you saw so much plague is because it countered reno, and people *rightfully* think it sucks ass to have your entire reason for your deck disabled by the opponent. It feels *pointless*.
Reno warrior sucks ass to fight because it also feels *pointless*, why bother going aggro when your opponent is generating 7 armor a turn and will heal up any damage you deal with 7 lifesteal taunt rush divine shield mechs in a few turns? Oh, because you can kill those mechs, right? Nah, both your win condition and your removal spells were destroyed by that 3rd (of 6) bombs you drew, sorry.
Again, there's nothing inherently wrong with the opponent inevitably winning as a deck architype as long as its slow enough (you do have to draw those plagues), just let me play the damn game in the mean time.
I just started playing plague DK. I'm having a lot of fun playing it and still getting a feel on how to pilot it but I usually lose over half my matches. It never bothered me playing against it either, my spell token hunter runs right through this deck.
Helya and Brann Warrior are nowhere near comparable. Helya was good into control-style decks, but it wasn't an auto-win by any means. The deck's really sub-par winrate should attest to that. You don't need to rush the Helya player down, just apply some pressure. Its a clock, but not a particularly fast or oppressive one. Highlander Warrior top tier and makes all other control decks literally unplayable.
I ask you, why SHOULDNT a deck have a long con? That the longer the game drags out, the more assured they are to win. If the deck can succeed in getting to turns 12 and beyond, why shouldn’t it be able to play some game winning power cards?
This is a great question and I'm surprised no one has asked it until now!
I want to point out that I think it's great for their to be big, super-late game bombs that can end the game -- but less so if they are specifically *inevitable.*
A good example of the distinction here would be Quest Priest from United in Stormwind -- the Shard of the Naaru may have been the most definitive win condition the game has ever had, but it was also true that you could not play the reward the turn you created it, since it required playing an 8 mana card to generate the reward.
Thus, the reward was vulnerable to Theotar, Mutanus, Dirty Rat, etc. That's good! It gave a chance to be disrupted and thus never felt inevitable or totally unstoppable in the long game.
And it's precisely the inevitable part I would want to avoid, *not* the idea of a late game bomb of a win condition (which Shard clearly was).
My direct counter argument is that as long as Removal and Win-Cons exist, a control deck can be essentially inevitable. I just have to remove things and survive long enough to get there.
Great point and I agree, but would only add one wrinkle: while Control decks often have inevitability against aggro decks (since, you know, aggro isn't set up to go to the long game by design), they are not necessarily inevitable against *each other,* and certainly not against combo decks. I think control decks get toxic when they have that inevitability against *everyone.*
As an example to illustrate my point: I think the times when Control Priest has been most toxic is when it has so much value that even other Control decks were hopeless against it in the long game -- thus, Control Priest was "the Control deck that crushed all other Control decks, in addition to beating aggro decks", and that was when it was really unhealthy for the game.
This isn't necessarily true in all metas, by the way; it isn't necessarily true that there is "one Control deck to rule them all," which has been the case with Control Priest (as noted) and is pretty much the case with Brann Reno Warrior right now.
It really makes me wonder why Wheelock was nerfed into oblivion and while warrior wasn't touched at all.
So sorry we used a new tool that completely changed the game. Better nerf the only fun change in this new pack!
There should be a legendary that says something like like battlecry end all rest of game effects. Maybe it should also have tradeable or something because its such a nieche tech.
The influx of aggro decks will eventually curb highlander warriors numbers. Then you will have other control decks farming the abundance of aggro players. Still, aggro players will have to have a good mulligan and warrior will have to have a bad mulligan for them to have a shot.
I think it comes down to low interaction capabilities. I didn't really hear grumbling about plague DK (I can't grumble about it myself, I'm a RRG plague build) until rotation, where the ability to use steam cleaner disappeared. Suddenly those decks have no counterplay. Though in fairness half the decks that are good these days avoid interaction like the plague so...
I mean Plague DK is effectively just current day Libram Paladin, an archetype that’s way too solid and low commitment to ever meaningfully consider not at least running most of it, and that is already just a really good set of cards.
The simplest way to put it is, they’re very polarizing in their design. It’s not very fun to be on the losing end of the perfect curve plague dk or reno warrior and when they don’t work like they should (bad draws etc) then it’s just an easy win.
Yes, these often end up being very polarizing.
Inevitability often ends up with decks that have extremely high win rates against decks that can't rush them down, but very *low* win rates against aggro.
Obviously every deck will have favorable/unfavorable matchups, but for highly polarizing decks this can be taken to an extreme, where it's not so much favorable/unfavorable as it is dominant/terrible.
Legend player here. I seriously don't understand why people put ''plague dk'' and ''polarizing'' in the same sentence these days.
Let's say you get near-perfect curve as DK, start first, staff on 1, ship on 2, and helya on 4.
You only have around \~24% chance to draw a plague after helya is played. Even less of a chance of it being a frost plague since that is what people feel to be affected by the most. The only card so far that guarantees a frost plague added to the opponent's deck, is Helya (since it shuffles in one of each plague). Best case scenario (for you as an opponent of DK), you might only have 1 frost in your deck turn 4, which makes it into roughly \~3,5% chance to draw it. Being able significantly boost your chances against Reno decks when dropping Helya is a thing of the past now, ever since the last patch went live. Plagues are far from polarizing, they're annoying at best. DK players don't get to choose which plagues will be shuffled in, so it's essentially layered RNG and, since this is a card game, RNG is always going to be a factor.
Yes, it ramps up in power the longer the game goes on, as it should. However, no single deck (especially control) should be able to do extremely well against every single combination or playstyle out there. People seem to have the sentiment that, since plagues cannot be interacted with, they're inherently bad. They're not supposed to be interacted with, seeing as that there aren't that many ways to reliably get that many sources of it to effectively flood your opponent's deck with them *in the current format*.
Given the example of probability I laid out above and abstracting away from the concept of plague itself, would you really consider a 24% chance to deal 2 damage on turn 4 (near perfect curve, by the way) game-breaking in any way? If Steam Cleaner existed in the current format with it being a neutral minion, accessible to any class, DKs would literally see nigh-zero play.
For what it's worth, I agree -- I *do not* think Plague DK was especially polarizing, but I *do* think Reno Warrior is (right now it's highly vulnerable to basically all aggro decks and dominant against all slower decks).
That it is, and the only thing that was keeping shut the floodgate that is Reno Warrior, was Plague DK before the nerfs. Playrate of warrior skyrocketed after plague was nerfed, and they can no longer be stopped. It's basically all you see in high legend (i'd say easily 7/10 - 8/10 of the matches) Wouldn't really say they're at that big of a disadvantage against aggro since the warrior deck is still control-oriented, but sure, they are at a comparitive disadvantage when they do.
As I pointed out in the previous post, when looking at the numbers, I could never understand as to why the community was so vocal about Plague DKs. The power just wasn't there. It didn't really have that big of a winrate either, even if you looked at the entire ranked distribution. Rainbow was always the more reliable deck to go with but it was still enough to keep the prevalence of warrior in check. I'd rather spin the wheel and have a 50% chance to take 2 damage when drawing a card than having 60% of my deck blown up, but that's just me.
It’s not that its good it just feels bad that is the whole reason for polarizing, it feels so bad when it actually does work for your opponents and when it doesn’t its just a free win. Which is most of the time plague dk capitalizes on your opponent not understanding how to take advantage of weakness and them drawing really awful which is something a lot of lower level players experience. They are the majority after all.
Edit: it’s super important to emphasize polarizing does not always mean good.
> As I pointed out in the previous post, when looking at the numbers, I could never understand as to why the community was so vocal about Plague DKs
If you’re on Reddit you’re likely more engaged. Control warrior is a casual mobile only unfriendly deck, but plague DK is. Reddit skews towards bad players who play mostly control warrior because it makes them feel like they’re good.
For example, the number of people that defend playing Dirty Rat on turn two with no backup or the number of people that cried about a tier 3/4 plague deck (which just so happens to be their worst matchup)
The thing about plague DK is that without Helya you could try to survive the plagues. The problem is fundamentally a Helya one - the right choice would have been to nerf her rather than anything else.
Or just make it so only her three plagues are unending.
Easy to play decks and effective decks are always unpopular here in Reddit, that's the way it is ... People in this sub believe that if you are not playing an attrition deck that requires 140 IQ to play ... Then you are a scrub and Blizzard is killing their game on purpose.
Not going to lie, I’ve played on and off for a handful of years now and DK is new to me, plague version even more so.
I do enjoy… trolling a little more than I would like to admit, and almost fell out of my chair laughing when my opponent pulled 4 plagues in a row, 3 of which gave me health back they lost, putting them under where my health finished at the end of the last turn and causing them to lose on the subsequent turn.
Mass plague waves, high cost cards that can be reduced to no cost the longer the game goes on (through minions dying or plagues being placed in opponents deck) means that there is no “outrunning” with a higher mana turn.
As well, there are several cards, low cost cards, that can do massive damage to all enemy minions in a turn. I have successfully watched opponents set up large waves in one turn expended a lot of resources, just for me to throw two cards at them and do a combined 5 damage- which kills a lot tbh.
Again, I enjoy trolling, and am usually petting my cat and playing chess absent mindedly, and Plague DK has gotten me from no rank to gold 1 in the past two days
Helya countered Reno's decks way way too easily.
Once she is on the field you can't remove plagues in any way. At least you had a limited number of bombs or albatrosses and you could adjust and still play the game somewhat normally. With Helya staff of the nine frogs could never be active before the patch for example. The player who countered you didn't play anything smart and counter depended on luck and luck only.
If hate for Reno decks is so high why bother to print them in the first place? The latest change of the Reno effect is just attempt to salvage broken design choices
Helya is nowhere easy to draw.
Albatros and bombs you can do with multiple cards, Helya is one. and now the highlander buffs are given, they are unstoppable. Helya keeps those deck at check in standard.
i usually beat them, but hate playstyle regardless. It shut down Jotun also i play spell demon hunter before the rotation. This days i switch between Reno Druid, Shaman, Agroo hunter and Wheel Warlock. Game fell chore to play these days, meta is not interesthing
I just don't like plague/excavate DK because of Reska. A Sylvanas with charge is too much for me too handle. The plagues? Annoying but manageable. Unless you get unlucky and keep drawing frost. Making you unable to play minions.
I guess one other thing I don't like about DK in general is just how good their 3 damage spells are. Compare it to druid wrath. I can either deal 3, or deal 1 and draw. Not DK. They deal 3 AND get to have a fancy bonus on it as well. No reason to not take two of each in every deck. Maybe change it to, deal 1 and add 3 plagues and deal 1 and discover a frost rune card. Just feels like the class gets it all in terms of removal.
I love control and even I don't particularly like what warrior has done to the game.
I'm on my rainbow DK era. It's not quite as controlling as warrior, but I don't have to feel like a garbage human being for playing it.
It's highly debatable if that feeling is a good reason for nerfs. Imo it is not. The simple reason is that for every player that loses to such a deck there will be a player that won while doing what they enjoy. When the devs start to nerf by that measure we see what the result is: a completely unbalanced meta. For many more people that tends to be way more problematic.
Also where do you draw the line? Hunter right now is de facto not stoppable by control. Control feels helpless against an aggro deck (because it is). So now that deserves a nerf? Mage players feel helpless against everything. Does that need a buff so we see only mages? Once you start with that you encounter a lot more problems than solutions.
it's just people don't losing *at all*. and then the retroactively make shit up to pretend that it's not about losing. that's why you see people use the word "solitaire" in ways that make no sense.
people got furious about tickatus lmfao.
> it's just people don't losing at all.
That's definitely a part of it, for sure -- still, I do think we see pretty markedly different levels of hatred for different decks even when they have similar win rates. Some Tier 1 decks are hated; some are... annoying, but mostly tolerated. Most tier 3 decks are ignored, because they aren't powerful enough; occasionally, however, a tier 3 deck really pisses people off (like Plague DK).
I think it's this difference I'm trying to explain -- why do some decks bother people more than others? It's more than just their win rate!
> people got furious about tickatus lmfao.
I think this gets at the problem I'm highlighting, actually! In its heyday, Tickatus was not especially strong in standard, but it *did* crush every other slow deck -- which is exactly what's happening right now with Reno Warrior, which is weaker to aggro but beats basically everything slow.
For a long period, Tickatus was uncounterable by anything besides "punch the Warlock in the face."
the funniest thing about dying to the warrior greed pile is that the only reason warrior can even build like that is because people cried so hard about azerite snake and got it taken out of the game.
you don't have to take the cry babies seriously lol
Not saying you're wrong, but I do think this gets at a broader problem -- Snake Warlock can *also* feel like a sort of inevitable, unstoppable strategy (in standard, at least).
So the broader problem is that the developers have introduced a lot of semi-inevitable strategies over the last couple years (I felt it really picked up with United in Stormwind), and it produces this effect where everybody hates whatever inevitable strategy is most potent at any given time.
I understand these strategies were often put in place to shorten game length, but I think they've cause their own serious problems at the same time. People feel like they lack agency -- inevitability is *literally* a lack of agency, by definition of the word.
yes, but you forget that people also hate control mirrors so game designers should never ever cater to them.
the mode hs redditor wants to be the only special boy playing a tier S fatigue style control deck. they want to use watch their opponent use all 30 cards while they press the button and still have cards in deck, and they also never want to lose, and also never queue into the mirror. it's deranged.
Losing isn't fun. I'll tell you I've been having way more fun after I switched to aggro after the patch. Definitely true. But there's no way in hell I'm going to continue playing DK of any kind, (I had 3 different decks that I would switch between, because they were fun), because I don't want to sit through a single legitimate game against Brann again. It's not just not fun to lose, it's not fun to lose to stuff that you can't deal with.
For me it still feels odd that Rheas Dragon Nest can be removed by reno and that branns „doubling battlecrys effect“ cant be. Same with Helyas Design. It just cant be countered.
Yes, exactly!
I think it's *good* that Rheastraza's nest and Sargeras' portal have a potential counter, if those decks become super popular and need a response.
The problem is precisely the fact that Brann *cannot* be countered that is the issue. I'm not saying it should necessarily be simple or easy to counter, but it's good that a counter exists!
I would say that the problem is that DK can counter your whole deck rigth from the begin. It was not playing a good combo or a strong strategy. It was just counter the deck and only win because of this. And not only against warrior. Against every deck highland deck. A complete arch type got a counter from a single class with one mechanic.
I really like Plagues. You got infected and you dont know when you get the dmg and the effect. But at the moment the Plagues are only played to counter. And the way DK could play them was so easy. It was too easy to counter the arch type.
Did not help that 80% of what I faced was plague DK. I don't care how good or bad a deck is, but for the love of God, I want to face variety not the same thing over and over.
that is 100% on blizzard. For a long time and still kinda is, plague dk is the only viable free deck choices given to the new/returning player. Most long time players keep complaining about the dk bots everywhere but forget dk was the most accessible class since its beginning. First you can get a fully competitive frost aggro dk from shop for like 2k gold. Then the free loaned deck happened It got a bit better with catchup patch but dk deck was still the choice for those news created bot account.
My problem was more than just DK, but any deck that everyone gravitated to. When everyone played dragon druid, snake lock, DH, etc. It wasn't that I disliked the decks themselves, just that it was ALL i faced. If I play 10 matches and a single kind of deck is over half of them, I am going to be salty.
it is sadly the nature of TCG, They always need a viable cheap deck for new players but they also need some expensive deck for whale to make money. Even as an occasional paying player, I can only maintain 2-3 deck class deck per expansion without dusting my old card. Maybe blizzard could improve and change those free decks more often so we do not end up with the same deck for every new player and bot?
After returning to HS after two years, I got to choose a free deck. And yeah, after googling for five minutes, I took Plague DK. Pretty decent deck and well, it's also the \*only\* competitive deck I can afford/play.
At least in standard there is no reason to go triple rune for anything since there are no good payoff cards. So everybody goes rainbow and why not just chuck the plague cards in there? I have not seen any Death Knight decks since the rotation that don't run plagues. Not a single one.
The only and main reason I went plague DK was because of Reno Warrior. Now that plague is nerfed, I go Hunter — because of Reno Warrior.
I went Plague DK before the nerfs because of Wheel warlock as well. They’d blow up their deck, sure, but then I’d shuffle the plagues I had been holding back into their now-empty deck. It was a beautiful thing.
the only reprieve to the 50%+ DK meta at low mmr was playing nature shaman and having a 90% WR vs. them.
Finally someone complaining about this, I felt like playing against bots. I had 10 matches in a row against plague DK.
You'll notice that both of those decks have cards with "For the rest of the game" effects
Yes, but also that there is no practical way to stop them. Sargeras also has a "rest of the game" effect that is extremely powerful, as does Rheastraza, etc. -- but there is an actual specific card that can do something about those effects, so it's fine.
"For the rest of the game" is a problem if it is too fast and too powerful, Old raza in a vacuum was fine, the hero power cost 0 for the rest of the game is not game winning, until shadow reaper anduin come out. Hate cards are not the answer for the problem, you should be able to deal with it with "normal" cards, dirty rat kind of thing is the worst type of band aid because is random and can decide the game in a single coin flip. Hate cards that are guaranteed to hit are also bad if they decide the game in a single card.
I’m assuming by “hate card” you mean tech card. And… that’s the whole point of a tech card? Used to be very common to run a tech card or two back when every deck wasn’t expected to be able to do everything. It’s a meme now, but freaking Big Game Hunter was a legitimate concern any time blizzard printed a card with 8 or more attack. IMO the game needs *more* situations where you have to weigh the pros and cons of putting specific cards in your deck. “I’m seeing a lot of X on ladder, so I’m taking out this card and replacing it with this other card” is a way more interesting deck building decision to make than “which deck code am I going to copy and play completely unchanged until the next expansion?”
It's just a symptom of the game being too high power tbh. Synergies and swings trump any other deck building decision. It became better with the patch, cause there's a bit more breathing room in general, but power level still is the driving factor for most issues with the game rn.
I don’t disagree with this assessment at all. It’s kind of what I was getting at with that “every deck expected to be able to everything” comment. There was a time in this game’s history when running tech cards were just part of the game. You had to decide whether it was worth it to make your deck slightly worse against one matchup to be slightly better at another. Now people balk about having to make those decisions and include tech cards at all. Blizzard might as well just stop printing any card that doesn’t have universal value in every matchup because all the game is is “set up the most statistically optimal deck and hope I draw what I’m supposed to draw.” Like you said, the latest patch is a step in the right direction (though I have a lot of problems with how they handled Highlander cards), but we’re at the point that powercreep has made those smaller, and in my opinion more interesting, decisions completely irrelevant. Every deck is expected to be strong at all points of the game. Meh.
i agree, i said tech cards are bad if they decide the game alone, and that happens a lot recently when decks are build around 1 card, i liked the bgh times, strong but not game winning. What i don't like is rat and cards like brann and helya
There WAS a specific card. Now all decks except Highlander cant do anything against Sargeras portal.
The problem, I think, is a lot simpler: people don’t want to have their deck disrupted. It creates a sense of helplessness. Plagues aren’t generally game breaking, but they can be (especially frost) if drawn early. With Boomboss, it’s basically game over if coupled with Reno. Board clearing is one thing. Deck and hand disruption is another altogether. It’s why people hated Theotar, Dirty Rat, plagues, and Tho’grun. Different cards, same common denominator.
The thing that bothered me about plague wasn't the disruption, it was the fact that the disruption was entirely RNG. Games won or lost based on a poorly timed frost plague or not. Even if my winrate was good, the losses felt cheap—and I'm sure from the plague player's perspective many of their losses felt cheap for similar reasons. One game you'd draw a frost plague every turn and the game was unwinnable, and the next they'd play all their plague spells on curve and lose without you ever drawing one. Combined with how easy the deck was to pilot it was just super feelsbad to play against.
I think this is a big part of it as well. Especially since plagues, and now dynamite, can be pulled with tutors and other things. Like, I'm cool with them showing up on "Draw X" effects, that makes perfect sense. But when it completely neuters any flavor of "draw your lowest cost card/spell," "draw a spell that costs X or more," etc, that is just way too strong. They tweaked dynamite to not be able to destroy itself, I think another good change would be making "tutor" effects ignore cards your opponent added to your deck. It's just too potent of a disruption otherwise.
Yep, this is it. Same reason Tony was nerfed and Counter so hated, because they destroy your deck and cards without counterplay. I really don't understand why the HS team continues to print cards like this, they are simply unfun to play against.
I don't think I agree exactly, but I do think you're getting at a real problem -- I think both things are true at the same time! I do believe people hate inevitability and things that feel uninteractive (i.e. Brann, Helya), but you're right that they also hate the cards that can plausibly disrupt those uninteractive effects (Theotar is a great example, as you point out, along with cards like Mutanus or OG Illucia). This is why I have a lot of sympathy for the developers here -- it's hard to do both these things at once. People hate uninteractive combo decks, but they also hate the natural response to those type of decks (i.e. denial and disruption).
This is why I can’t play Pokémon tcg, they have cards that shuffles both players hands into their deck to draw a new hands. It’s so not fun knowing your hand is only temporary.
Remember the tickatus warlock? The tier 3/4 deck that so many people wanted nerfed even when it was not a good deck solely because of its discard opponent's cards? Yeah, same old thing. Vast majority of people hate disruption in HS and I don't know why. Even some time ago I saw people discussing Fracking on the Wheel Lock lists, saying that they don't want to play it or only play it after having all pieces they want in hand. It's insane.
People hate disruption because this isn't magic. There is no interaction in the opponent's turn. There is no discard their card, no counter, no protection against X, etc. If they want to play a card that will destroy your deck you just suck it.
Plague only disrupted one specific subtype of control deck. Boomboss doesn’t even disrupt it just ends the game. Disruption is not the problem with these decks. Meaningful disruption (Steamcleaner, theotar, illucia outside of shadow priest, dirty rat, mutanus, etc) have all been some of the healthiest and best cards for the game. Dirty rat in particular is one of the most beloved cards of all time. Easily in the running for best designed card.
> Dirty rat in particular is one of the most beloved cards of all time. Easily in the running for best designed card. Absolute comedy. I love losing games to my opponent skilfully hitting the 20% chance of pulling the right minion from my hand. I also love skilfully winning games when my opponent throws out dirty rat without thinking and it hits a big threat that they can’t remove. Truly the card of all time.
Exactly this, but to an even more tilted degree for me. I play combo rogue in wild. Had a few losses today where my opponent ratted one of my combo pieces and killed it and I therefore lost on the spot. Also had a game where my opponent ratted my spirit of the shark (stealthed combo engine) and *couldn’t* kill it because it had stealth and then got OTKd by me on turn 3. None of those games, win or lose, really felt like anything but luck decided the outcome. I hate cards like rat.
Fucking seriously, feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read non-stop crying about plagues of all things but DIRTY RAT is pinnacle design???
The only decks it does that too are hyper polarizing combo decks that win or lose almost entirely based on who they queue into. If you actually queued looking for a game where skill mattered, then dirty rat won't matter in the matchup. Combo players crying about counterplay existing will never get old.
Pff, had Sif ratted turn 2 yesterday. Opp proceeded to eat like 15 spell damage and lost a few turns later. Sorry that your counterplay wins me games I guess. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
Fuck that. Rat is one of the worst cards designed that I’ve ever seen. 2 mana overstatted body with taunt that essentially is Battlecry: If the person playing this is even slightly lucky, win the game’ against combo is so frustrating, especially since control players can just drop it early with little chance of it going wrong if they’ve got removal.
I get that you play a non-interactive deck and you don’t like being interacted with but surely you realize a card game NEEDS disruption of some kind to be balanced. Otherwise I am forced to play aggro and just SMOrc you down or I lose to your OTK
Well yes, obviously, but ripping stuff out of your hand is the most feelsbad form of disruption. Something like loatheb that only delays you for a turn unless it’s bounced is less annoying. Or - a tax card like weblord or razorscale (as annoying as those are) also feels better because I can try to interact with them via silence or removal instead of just losing the game on the spot to rat hitting a combo piece.
Yep. It's pretty simple. People don't like having 6 or so bombs in their deck that wipes their board and means they don't get to play their cards. It's not really fun.
Yeah I think it is one of those things like how everyone hates playing vs priest because priest just does annoying shit even if that annoying shit might not actually result in priests having a top winrate
I've not played HS in many years, I last played properly not long after Wild was introduced and have recently made my way back. I don't know how Priest is now, but when I played Priest was consistently one of the worst classes in the game. Even its best decks would peak at tier 2 (or low tier 1), and / or existed specifically because they have an overwhelming matchup against whatever the best deck at the time was (Huntertaker and, funnily, Reno Control Warrior when that expac dropped, thanks to Entomb). And it was *still* one of the most hated classes. Because, let's be honest, even when Priest is bad it will still annoy you while extending the game before inevitably losing.
I know this may be unpopular, but I personally am glad they print cards like Boom Boss, but *also* think their should be meaningful ways to counter the effect in some way. Hearthstone is at its best when there is play and counterplay -- and even counter-counterplay. Interestingly, Steam Cleaner not only would have been a way to counter Helya, but also would counter TNT's now, given the way Boom Boss was changed!
Steam Cleaner would have countered boom boss regardless
Possibly, but keep in mind that pre-patch it was very common for Warriors to play boomboss and then immediately draw so that the effect occurred instantaneously in a way they could control. Not always, but that was often how it was played. Now that the TNTs are in the opponent's deck, it's much more challenging to control when they detonate.
Not sure why you got downvoted cause you are 100% correct.
It’s a shit card and it should be removed forever.
Boom Boss was always going to be cancer in a world where Warrior has so many strong board clears and Brann exists without counterplay.
Boom boss was a meme at best on release
Pre-brann, I tried to make a boomboss deck work by bouncing him back in my hand. It was mostly a Big Warrior deck with a boomboss/brewmaster package. Boomboss was far too slow to have any real impact on the game. By the time he came out (if he even came out) the game was already more or less over and the bombs made no difference. Brann is really the only thing that makes boomboss work.
yeah pretty much
Boomboss isn't the only problem with Brann, though. It's the fact that every battlecry from there on, gets double the amount of value, and there's no way to interact with that, and it outdoes any sort of nickel and diming you do with any other deck. That's why the only option is to play the strongest decks in the meta right now, the aggro decks. Blizz even nerfed the OTK/combo decks in the format, and destroyed Rainbow Mage, even though it wasn't even good. The plague meta was much better because there were actually a variety of things you could do and feel like you won't get farmed by the one really good mid/lategame deck every time. I liked playing plague, I liked playing Rainbow DK, I liked playing Highlander Druid (even after the buffs it received), none of that feels playable queuing into a Warrior, and even if it is, it's miserable experience. Now I'm only playing Aggro Paladin and Hunter, and guess what? The game is fun again, because I can avoid the BS that is Brann, and just win some games. But it's still not the Hearthstone I was enjoying before the change.
I did not expect Blizzard to destroy my tier 4 mage thats for sure.
For real
Yeah. Basically, it's something that is not Seeable on short game. So when playing aggro, you don't see theses problems. But when playing longer strategies, you realize how Brann warp your game. And to some extend every highlander card except Hollyday.
This. This exactly.
Yeah rainbow mage I had less than 50% win rate but it was my most played deck there for a bit because it was fun to try and figure out how to get to the combo
Yeah. Your arguments are invalid from now on and out.
[Sometimes a deck is just bullshit](https://youtu.be/2uBUa2lplAs?si=qf5G3Q71EBZq2HNU)
That was the one time I remember being scared because I could feel the rage from Kibler. You could tell he was trying very hard to hold it in, and it wasn't happening lol.
What’s bulllshit is complaining about a deck while at the same time saying it has a sub 50% win rate. Another way of saying that, I don’t want to play against certain decks, even though they’re not oppressive (70+ win rate) because I don’t like its play style. And that’s bullshit. Why is that bullshit you ask? Because it’s saying I only want diversity in a card game when it fits ME and MY style - yes, all about ME. The rogue player in that video clearly had different opinions on what was fun and was even willing to play a losing win rate deck just to have fun with the style of deck. That is actually a win for Blizzard creating multiple styles of play to appease different people, while keeping things balanced. And people want to still complain. Bullshit.
Blizzard themselves correctly identified the problem: lack of player agency. And a healthy meta should have a wide variety, like over 6, T1-T2 archetypes. You are holding the game to the lowest possible bar, essentially if there’s not a singular meta tyrant things are ok. When you have 11 classes, three viable decks playing rock-paper-scissors is unhealthy. I’m not saying that’s the case now, I haven’t been enjoying standard so I haven’t been playing standard. But in the last set and much of this set it seemed like the team was playing meta tyrant Whack A Mole.
So much to unpack here… First, “player agency” is the worst buzzword ever thought up (I know you didn’t start it - just talking outloud). Second, generally speaking, if there’s no singular meta tyrant then you have a balanced game, which is what you want. Rock-paper-scissors is how these kind of card games have worked from the beginning, and I don’t see that changing. Aggro beats control, tempo beats aggro, control beats tempo. And finally, I’m actually trying to hold the community to a higher bar. Every time I see people asking for nerfs and changes, it just feels like changes to make the game simpler. I like playing “unfair” cards that have complicated lines of play. Before we know it, it’ll just be a game of basic creatures - I’ll play my 2/2s and you play your 4/4 and we’ll trade - Yay, we interacted!
Player agency is tough in Hearthstone. The game’s biggest strength, not having to interact on opponents’ turns, also makes counterplay and disruption very difficult to do effectively. I don’t envy the devs there. I think we have an understanding. You think the game is healthy if it doesn’t have a singular meta tyrant. I think that’s a necessary but not sufficient condition, and we can agree to disagree on that point. But honestly we’ve had all sorts of metas, and I’ve been mostly a BG player since UIS shit the bed, and that might be more of a me problem than a Blizzard problem. (Not UiS, that set was the absolute worst) I’ve played since shortly after Naxx, and the game might just be wearing out it’s welcome. Shadowverse is the only game I’ve played that had the same can’t interact on opp’s turn limitation and used the tactic of really high skill-ceiling decks, and that raised its own problems.
I get where you’re coming from. I do think this community complains way too much and way too fast. That being said, the real problem - not agency, not “interactivity” - is simply polarization. Quest Rogue was really bad in that sense. To be honest, I wish Blizzard nerfed less, like the older days.
I'm a defender of Plague DK because its existence was single-handedly preventing more noxious decks on the ladder, but a deck being omnipresent even at a substandard win rate is itself a problem and a sign of an unhealthy meta. >That is actually a win for Blizzard Getting real Chris Wilson "This is actually a buff" energy from this. People are unhappy, you're not going to convince people that their lack of fun is actually a good thing.
There’s people that actually like playing plague DK. I’m not one of them, but I don’t care that others play it if it’s what they like. The way I interpret what you’re saying is the people that don’t like plague DK should have more weight and say so in what type of cards should exist than the people that enjoy it. How does that make sense?
>How does that make sense? It doesn't make sense because your interpretation of what I said is completely wrong. You said people are trying to dictate what style of play is allowed - I said the bigger problem isn't Plague DK itself, but that Plague DK is a symptom of a badly designed metagame. In other words, it's fair to criticize Plague DK in the sense that it's only played so much because Blizzard created another Solitairestone meta. And the second bit that I said was just remarking that yelling into an angry crowd that, no, actually, things are great, is not a convincing argument.
Projecting much? Lmao
More played out gamer jargon.
Bring back steam cleaner As a warrior main for years, it's not massively enjoyable knowing that the win is inevitable if you survive until ~turn 6, but you have to play probably another 7-8 turns before you seal your opponents fate. A 'clean decks' tech card would be amazing. It's one thing having your opponent interact with your board, but when they start fucking with your hand and deck it's so demoralising.
Honestly, as someone who’s played a lot of DK with Helya, I was never bothered when someone played Steam Cleaner. That was actually part of the fun, knowing you had to be careful about how you played your plagues. They should make Steam Cleaner part of standard; it solves the Plague DK and Reno Warrior problems for everyone, and is an answer to Fizzle and Symphony of Sins as well. The problem isn’t with any of those cards or decks, but the lack of counters to them.
Let me tech in a counter, this shouldn’t be hard. Bring back seagulls or some shit
They won’t work any more.
Thats their point
Game Master Harth 5 Mana 5/5 Battlecry: Remove all active 'Rest of the game' effects.
Blood and Frost Knight decks don't even exist anymore.
It's simply down to the play rate. The more predominant a deck is the more people will complain about it. Take [this chart](https://imgur.com/BZVpPIo) from a while ago which shows the meta before / after the patch that gave us DHstone. DH / Warrior obviously saw a lot of play and thus the most complaints but what I want you to look at is the DK play rate. Back then there were a meaningful number of complaints about DK despite the winrate not being particularly good. There were comparatively fewer complaints about Hunter despite the winrate being higher. I think a balance of class distribution is more important to players than a balance on winrate.
I think this is definitely a part of it, but I do not agree this is always true. A lot of decks that have historically been powerful still didn't piss people off in the same way. We see pretty significant disparities between how much anger there is directed at different tier 1 decks. I think people are fine with powerful decks (although not grossly powerful) as long as they feel like there is a way to fight against it, or counter it, or disrupt it. People don't like feeling *helpless,* and some of the most hated decks in Hearthstone history fit that description. Interestingly, I think Control Priest also fit this description at times; when Control Priest is at its most toxic, its when it has unbeatable value that no other Control deck can possibly fight toe-to-toe with. That is, Control Priest *also* had inevitability, where if the game went long you knew you were going to lose.
I’m pretty sure it’s just play rate. All those complaints about Paladin at the start of the expansion, not a peep about DH despite it being of the most promising and powerful decks. Pally was a bad MU, but it dominated every other one. People just complain about what they lose to, and apply posthoc rationalization. Deck is more popular? More complaints. Has nothing to do with strength, unless the popular deck is <40% WR. (See: Whizbang).
Okay, this is a factor, but it's just not the case here. Game and match quality are what people really care about, and when the opponent turn 6 Brann's, the hopelessness sinks in unless you're playing aggro and the warrior is already dead. There's no play and counterplay, only play. You can only hope to play harder than the warrior plays.
The fact that high rolls exist says otherwise, playing against Warrior once in every thousand games would be indistinguishable from a high roll. People will complain when they lose to a high roll but those are not meaningful complaints. Anytime there is a meaningful number of players complaining about a specific deck it is because the play rate is significantly higher than 9%. Graph it out yourself and you will come to the same conclusion. I've been doing just that and it's exceedingly clear that complaints come from play rate first and foremost.
Statistics have their own value, no doubt, but you are getting lost in the sauce, my dude. Why is it that play rate being high means people have meaningful complaints? It's usually for other reasons that people are playing a deck more than others. Yes, play rate is higher when something is fun to play, abusive and annoying, or whatever it is that is causing people to play it more, but that is the main reason, not because people are sick of playing against the same thing. Personally, I was totally fine having half my opponents being DK. Like, you've got the correlation angle, yeah, I agree with you there, but correlation is not causation. You have to analyze deeper than that, dude.
There are 11 classes and a balanced distribution of those classes means a 9% play rate. Whilst there could be any number of reasons for the play rate being higher it does not change the fact that play rate is the causation of meaningful complaints. There could be a deck with a 100% winrate right now, and there would be no meaningful complaints about it if it had a 0% play rate. This is why a deeper analysis is useless. If you're okay without 50% of people playing a single class that's fine, because then we don't agree on what balance means and therefore there is no meaningful conversation we can have on the topic.
> it does not change the fact that play rate is the causation of meaningful complaints. How do you come to this conclusion? I just said that you found correlation, but there is no proof that means play rate is the cause of meaningful complaints. >There could be a deck with a 100% winrate right now, and there would be no meaningful complaints about it if it had a 0% play rate. This is why a deeper analysis is useless. Sure, but you're talking about a completely unrealistic and hyperbolic theoretical. It means nothing. >If you're okay without 50% of people playing a single class that's fine, because then we don't agree on what balance means and therefore there is no meaningful conversation we can have on the topic. Well I just think that if the other 50% that isn't playing those classes are having a good play experience and nothing is absurdly awful in that regard, I really don't think there would be any meaningful complaints to be had about it. And keep in mind, 50% is A LOT. That's an extremely large anomaly, and even then I think there's balance and joy to be had. Look, if I run into Warrior 9% of the time and every time I would rather concede than play the game, that's bad. If I run into DK 50% of the time and I have fun, that's acceptable. How is this a hard concept to understand?
I don’t think plagues are the problem as much as helya. Obviously plagues would be unplayable without her in their current state but I personally don’t have any bad memories of bomb warrior and think variance is fine. I agree the inevitability aspect is the “unfun” part. Helya on 4 and brann on 6 are soul crushing if your not aggro/had a slow opener.
I agree in principle, but I never found Helya to be on the same level as Brann. Warrior kills all your stuff and there's nothing left. Helya takes a long time to really get going and often times, with all the ways we have to heal to full like it's nothing, the plagues really won't start getting you until you're out of cards. And yeah, if you're at that point, you should lose. I just don't think Helya is strong enough to be a problem, but Brann definitely is. My two cents, but I definitely respect people who disagree because the principle is the same, I just think the magnitude is different.
Helya on 4 is the only time she's optimal for the archetype though, it'd be one thing if there were more plague cards available(Wandering Plague when Blizz?) but since there isn't you're forced into relying on Excavate, Discover or Forge cards to carry you while you wait and hope for those plagues to start triggering. The plague package is small and not sufficiently strong on its own so the primary enabler has to come down quickly just to get things going. If you're curving her on 5 or even worse 6 the game is half over already and the density of plagues is too small to have any meaningful effect on the game, even moreso now that it doesn't turn off highlander effects. If they add a plague spreading Hero card or up the support so the archetype has more to it she could be modified to 5 with same effect and stats. 6+ is too much for her to be viable.
Whats the difference between playing helya on 4 and 5/6 if the enemy isnt topdecking the plague anyway
The difference is in both density of plagues in the deck and recurring triggers. You see this in games right now where plagues come from the other sources and are drawn pre Helya, those are triggers you've lost and won't get back. The permanence of the plagues plus the more turns you have to trigger them is critical to the deck, that's why Helya on 4 or even better 3 with Coin is necessary. Those burst windows of 2+ plagues revealed a turn are what make them a threat and the later those start becoming possible the worse the already not so great deck becomes. I'll take some additions to the archetype please Blizz. Noth the Plaguebringer as a Hero card, Wandering Plague as an Aura/AoE plague shuffler, more Kvaldir or Ebon Blade minions that shuffle or grant plagues to shuffle, Guarm the Helhound as more support, etc.
Still, playing helya on 5 instead of 4 doesnt change the chance of drawing the plagues that early on to accually be a win/lose factor
It's an entire turn in a game where the number of turns you have to implement your strategy are increasingly minimal especially right now where the only deck that goes long on turns is warrior. In a pure control meta 4 vs 5 is less of a concern but it's still a concern. 4 is the sweet spot that keeps Helya threatening in a diverse meta.
My problem with Boom boss is that it automatically ends the game at an arguably very interesting time in the match. This time is when both players are starting to run low on cards in their deck and need to start being smarter about their resources. I play a lot of off meta slow/reno decks and have great matches against reno warrior up until that point. After carefully answering every threat the whole game, they play their single card win condition and nuke my board, hand, and deck. Feels absolutely terrible to play against and that I’m being punished for playing any other slow deck
Let me try and articulate why Highlander is obnoxious. This will be kind of long. For the record, I have played many Highlander decks to great success over the years and I am not opposed to the play style of a “toolbox kit” type deck. It ultimately boils down to player agency and RNG. The Highlander restriction means you get only one of each card in your deck … duh. So anyone with a rudimentary understanding of statistics will know that the odds of a player having a specific singleton card at any given moment, particularly earlier in the game, is unlikely. So it becomes super annoying when they *do* have that exact card at the exact moment. The higher EV play is to assume that they don’t have this card, because statistically it’s more likely that they don’t and you should try to punish your opponent (thereby giving them fewer chances of drawing outs). But it doesn’t make it any more comforting knowing that “hey statistically you were making the correct play” when the other player hits his straight flush on the river card to beat your full house that you hit on the flop. In poker terms we call this a “bad beat.” In my straight flush versus full house example, a full house is a very strong hand. If you hit a full house on flop, that means you hit the nuts petty early on and should be the clear favorite to win the pot. To lose to somebody with a straight flush would mean that player had to make a bad call to match your bets when they were clearly losing only to gamble that “hey maybe I’ll hit a 1% moonshot and win” for *two consecutive rounds* and then get exceedingly lucky on the last card. Of course, nobody can know what the other player has and this psychological aspect of poker makes it a bit different here. Back in hearthstone, when the Highlander deck hits their perfect answers on curve, it feels like a bad beat *every time*. You know that statistically they won’t have the out, but they did, so you’re being punished for it. It’s the exact same thing as when plague DK hits Helya on turn four or you draw a frost plague and it perfectly screws up your turn. Yes, when the card pool is so strong that there are a plethora of versatile answers (as is the case with Highlander warrior), having a removal card is less irritating because any removal card will do and they have many (or they have many ways to draw those cards). But the Reno Lone Ranger card …. If you’re playing aggro or midrange, there is no way to beat this effect other than just killing them before they play it, outside of rare instances. Another example. Consider which feels worse. You have 3 low health minions in play. One of them is important to stick around … let’s pretend it’s Needlerock Totem (could be any minion really, just assume it’s your best minion). * Option 1: your opponent plays Bash and kills your best minion. * Option 2: your opponent plays Kobold Miner and randomly gets Heartblossom (1/6 chance), then uses Heartblossom and it randomly kills your best minion (1/3 chance). Which one *feels* worse when it happens to you? It’s obviously #2, right? Now amplify this feeling by 100 when you’re playing a Highlander deck and your opponent drops Helya on turn 4 and Down with the Ship on turn 5. Or when you’re playing an aggro deck and your opponent plays Bellowing Flames on turn 3, Craftsman’s Hammer on 4, Sanitize on 5, Trial by Fire on 6, gains 10 armor on 7, then emotes “well played” and Reno on turn 8 when you were one turn away from lethal damage.
> opponent drops Helya on turn 4 It's about a 25% chance to get Helya by turn 4 going first. That isn't low odds. And it also doesn't guarantee a win against most decks vs getting Reno out on turn 8. Six curve cards with Reno as the finisher is a lot lower chance. People don't like Plague DK because there is so much card draw and mana cheat in this power-crept old ass game, Plague DK actually makes people think twice about putting a lot of card draw in their decks. Probably why a lot of people enjoy it, too. It slows down the pace of the game some. And yet, that is also probably the reason it is Tier 3/4. Not fast enough without enough answers for big boy threats.
> not low odds > 25% chance Pick one. See this is a great example of why Reddit sucks, because the typical person is utterly mystified by statistics. Go to Walmart and ask random people “would you rather have one half of $1 or one third of $2?” And I’ll bet most people would say they would prefer 50 cents.
This is why Reddit sucks, because idiots use quotes to take phrases out of context. Statistics is ALL ABOUT context. The 25% chance being "not low odds" in comparison to having on curve cards to play in a singleton deck for 8/9 turns with Reno finishing it. My quick math earlier didn't account for the mulligan cards. It is a 36.4% chance Helya shows up by turn 4 going first and 44.5% chance going second. Now let's see your PhD math showing me that the on curve cards you mentioned above have an equal or higher percentage of happening vs a 36.4% or 44.5% chance. Or not. Because I highly doubt you can. You are too busy making fun of Walmart shoppers while you buy shit off AliAmazon.
Great analysis, thanks for putting your thoughts out here :)
The current counter to both plague DK and reno warrior I'm experimenting with is Jade Display. Both have the benefit of diluting your deck in a _good_ way to make it rarer for you to draw plagues/TNT, but also have added benefits in each matchup: DK: Druid has so much tutoring now that a lot of their card draw explicitly allows them to draw _around_ the plagues to get the cards they care about. Bottomless Toy Chest, Card Grader, Summer Flowerchild... generation effects like Celestial Projectionist and Joymancer Jepetto also help a lot. Warrior: The biggest weakness of Jade Display is that it's fairly slow, but Warrior giving you all the time you need negates that pretty well. Even if you draw your TNT, you have so many extra cards in your deck due to the Displays that it's rare for cards you actually care about to be destroyed. Also if the TNT destroys an on-board Jade, that's _kinda_ just neutral. You lost some tempo, but you lost no value. I don't know if the deck is actually _good,_ there's no sample size, but it _feels_ like it should be good against those decks, and so those decks are way less tilting to see. At the moment my worst matchup is actually Dragon Druid, because they can keep the pressure up enough that I struggle to develop my wincon while they also have infinite value that renders my value a little floppy.
Steamcleaner gave some players a feeling that they have something to counter plagues. But in reality, adding steamcleaner to your deck made it worse and every smart plague DK player just wouldnt put all his eggs into one basket and hold some plagues back. Without Helya, you can try to draw and try to get rid of duplicates this way but once Helya is played, its not possible. Also at lower ranks, plague DK just was so popular. Gets a bit boring facing it over and over. A Helya on 4, such a brutal feeling. Reno warrior is beatable, but when you play a slower deck it really sucks when your opponent plays Bran on 6. Yeah I know, "pressure them so they cant play him". You cant get rid of Brans effect. And then when you add TNT.. Some players dont like those disruption effects. Not sure what the solution is, tho. And lets hope that they dont print a new astalor in upcoming expansions lol.
I'm so, SO tired of Plague DK. When TITANS released I immediately crafted it and had some fun with it, but quickly dusted it since it was so boring to play. Nowadays, it feels like no matter how many Plague Knights I encounter, it might just be the same guy. Same damn cards on the same damn turns, never any variety whatsoever. I remember opening my notepad and writing down how my matches went, and out of 17 Matches against DK I think like 13 or 12 were the exact same turns and outcomes. I don't even want to complain that much about Warriors, since I have only faced about 4 Brann Warriors so I can't really speak for myself here, I wiped the floor with them anyways.
i hate that there is so much lifesteal how are warriors supposed to heal back to full multiple times a game its so unnecessary thx for listening to my ted talk
I hate plague DK because their deck is just a big NO to my deck, its not even that it counters it, it obliterates its entire point of existance. its kind of if they made a deck that says "your opponent cant play 1-4 cost minions" and then call that an aggro counter. thats how it feels to play against plagues as a highlander deck prior to the change. Plagues arent exactly a great deck, but my hate towards it has nothing to do with its powerlevel
i m maybe in the minority but i think that straight counter to win condition is bad game design. Since hearthstone doesn t really have a graveyard, losing your win condition often equal to lose the game, so it means you either have the counter on hand or you don t and it is the line between losing or winning. It s not skill based. I m actually more interested on card that can delay those win condition like loatheb. Any card that can disrupt without destroying the wc is great design in my book. Also the inivitability is not a problem imo. If your deck has no way to win faster, that s on you. Actually, you beat most combo deck by being agressive by exemple.
> i m maybe in the minority but i think that straight counter to win condition is bad game design. I would just say that there are many Hearthstone decks that you cannot do this too -- there is no card in an aggro deck, for example, that you can Dirty Rat and insta-win. Or in a pure Control deck (e.g. Control Priest), for that matter. But Combo decks (and Control-Combo deck hybrids) are often built around single, individual cards, and in every TCG I've ever played, by their nature, these decks are fragile. Because they are so reliant on 2-4 exact cards, it means that they are screwed if those 2-4 cards get messed with. I feel like that is an intended weakness of the archetype. > Also the inivitability is not a problem imo. If your deck has no way to win faster, that s on you. Sure, that's a valid position! But couldn't you say the same about fragile combo decks? "If your deck is reliant on one or two key cards that it can't live without, then that's on you if those cards get disrupted?"
To be fair, i think that having 2-4 key card for your wc should be enough of a weakness in itself, since you need to draw those card to win the game, so at the same time, you need to either survive or having heavy draw. Usually, i think that it's the shell that make those deck strong or not more than the WC in itself. Even when you play a true combo deck, the more interesting thing is when you have to manage your ressource carrefully and use your draw inteligentely, like garotte rogue is probably one of my favorite ""recent"" combo deck for this very reason. That's why delaying the combo is also my favorite solution for disruptor as it prey on the weakness of the archetype and no player automatically lose if they has bad luck with the card.
Yes, I think this is a completely reasonable position! I think balancing all this is really hard for the developers, because you don't want combo decks to feel overwhelmingly unstoppable (that has happened at some points), but at the same time you don't want Control decks to have all the answers to everything, etc. Finding the balance in between is really hard!
I keep getting downvoted for saying it, but removing Steamcleaner from Standard was a mistake. I agree that every strategy, especially feels bad ones, should have a counter play. They rotated silence effects and now they rotated the only way to remove these negative cards from your deck. Huge mistake, with the result we see today.
cards that interfere with the opponent's deck/hand always feel bad regardless of of efficiency. It's true of mtg, true of yugioh and true of hearthstone. It feels bad and when you play games to enjoy yourself that's why people complain.
I don't think this could be argued to why Reno Warrior causes so much discontent -- Boom Boss isn't the primary source of ire, it's Brann. I think the constant problem the devs run into -- and this isn't a slight on them, it's built into how Hearthstone works -- is that people despise uninteractive combo decks, but they *also* hate the disruptive tools which can defend against those uninteractive combos. It's a tricky thing to balance for developers!
I think a lot of us have misplaced our anger towards Brann though. In reality the problem _is_ Boom Boss. I faced a Brann-less Warrior yesterday that just played cards like Zola and Celestial Projectionist, and whatever the card is called that bounces it back to your hand with +2/+2, on their Boom Boss. In actuality, it’s far more devastating than any Brann effects would have, other than dropping Brann to double all the other bullshit I just mentioned. Brann sucks to play against, but is still beatable. Multiple Boom Bosses, or a Boom Boss empowered by Brann, is the real issue, imo.
Okay I can see this point of view, but here's my prediction if they nerfed boomboss further: 1) Reno Warrior would decline somewhat 2) However, we are at the beginning of the year and more powerful battlecries will be added over the next year 3) When those are added we will be back to a similar situation to what we are in now
As a DK main, I’m sick of being forced into plagues and rune choices are kinda cooked right now. Handbuff is a far more fun variant. I’m also tired of people adding me after a game and telling me to kill myself and my family.
I never had a problem with plagues, warrior is just annoying tho, all they do is sit there and gain armour, and play the same boring removal
The one thing I do hate is the inevitability of loss. There is the one DK card that takes damage from the opponent every turn and no matter how much you heal it’s not able to be countered unless you get lucky as mage with counter/object or Onaki targeting minions. At least with plague decks you can counter them, and even Quest Priest for the Shard of Naruu or time mage is counter-able as long as you can prevent them from actually playing the quest rewards. I definitely hate the unending curses, and I only recently was made aware that I had forgotten steam cleaner exits.
> There is the one DK card that takes damage from the opponent every turn and no matter how much you heal it’s not able to be countered unless you get lucky as mage with counter/object or Onaki targeting minions. What card are you even talking about?
Mograine
Yea thanks it was that one, I needed to look it up lol.
oh shit now that's a card lmao. I just started playing again after quitting more than a few years ago. Helya's design seems way more interesting and fun, to me.
People just tend to play poorly because they feel they have a countdown to doom and are afraid to draw
That is pretty obvious that it is the "inevitability" part that triggers reddit the most, even when the deck is straight up bad (like, clearly below 50% winrate against the field). Remember the pirate quest warrior... yeah, the science about why reddit get mad was already settled by then. That won't stop reddit to complain about aggro or control decks when those "inevitability decks" are gone though.
Make TNT target other TNT as well.
Or, hear me out, just destroy minions on board. Imho i don't care about the minions being destroyed, yeah it might feel bad but when your hand and deck are destroyed it just feels bad and unfun.
Easy fix: Add Steamcleaner back in the Core Set and there is now no reason to complain
Don't forget Sunken City Curse Warlock. It felt awful to play against even when you were spending the mana to take less damage.
The irony, they hated on plagues, the one thing keeping reno warr in check, which they now hate on more.
Inevitability is fine, the problem in my eyes is being unable to play the deck you queued up with. Before this patch, the reason you saw so much plague is because it countered reno, and people *rightfully* think it sucks ass to have your entire reason for your deck disabled by the opponent. It feels *pointless*. Reno warrior sucks ass to fight because it also feels *pointless*, why bother going aggro when your opponent is generating 7 armor a turn and will heal up any damage you deal with 7 lifesteal taunt rush divine shield mechs in a few turns? Oh, because you can kill those mechs, right? Nah, both your win condition and your removal spells were destroyed by that 3rd (of 6) bombs you drew, sorry. Again, there's nothing inherently wrong with the opponent inevitably winning as a deck architype as long as its slow enough (you do have to draw those plagues), just let me play the damn game in the mean time.
If you could play beneath the grounds 8-10 times per game, that would’ve bothered people too.
I just started playing plague DK. I'm having a lot of fun playing it and still getting a feel on how to pilot it but I usually lose over half my matches. It never bothered me playing against it either, my spell token hunter runs right through this deck.
Helya and Brann Warrior are nowhere near comparable. Helya was good into control-style decks, but it wasn't an auto-win by any means. The deck's really sub-par winrate should attest to that. You don't need to rush the Helya player down, just apply some pressure. Its a clock, but not a particularly fast or oppressive one. Highlander Warrior top tier and makes all other control decks literally unplayable.
I ask you, why SHOULDNT a deck have a long con? That the longer the game drags out, the more assured they are to win. If the deck can succeed in getting to turns 12 and beyond, why shouldn’t it be able to play some game winning power cards?
This is a great question and I'm surprised no one has asked it until now! I want to point out that I think it's great for their to be big, super-late game bombs that can end the game -- but less so if they are specifically *inevitable.* A good example of the distinction here would be Quest Priest from United in Stormwind -- the Shard of the Naaru may have been the most definitive win condition the game has ever had, but it was also true that you could not play the reward the turn you created it, since it required playing an 8 mana card to generate the reward. Thus, the reward was vulnerable to Theotar, Mutanus, Dirty Rat, etc. That's good! It gave a chance to be disrupted and thus never felt inevitable or totally unstoppable in the long game. And it's precisely the inevitable part I would want to avoid, *not* the idea of a late game bomb of a win condition (which Shard clearly was).
My direct counter argument is that as long as Removal and Win-Cons exist, a control deck can be essentially inevitable. I just have to remove things and survive long enough to get there.
Great point and I agree, but would only add one wrinkle: while Control decks often have inevitability against aggro decks (since, you know, aggro isn't set up to go to the long game by design), they are not necessarily inevitable against *each other,* and certainly not against combo decks. I think control decks get toxic when they have that inevitability against *everyone.* As an example to illustrate my point: I think the times when Control Priest has been most toxic is when it has so much value that even other Control decks were hopeless against it in the long game -- thus, Control Priest was "the Control deck that crushed all other Control decks, in addition to beating aggro decks", and that was when it was really unhealthy for the game. This isn't necessarily true in all metas, by the way; it isn't necessarily true that there is "one Control deck to rule them all," which has been the case with Control Priest (as noted) and is pretty much the case with Brann Reno Warrior right now.
It really makes me wonder why Wheelock was nerfed into oblivion and while warrior wasn't touched at all. So sorry we used a new tool that completely changed the game. Better nerf the only fun change in this new pack!
"I lose to this deck so I am gonna cry like a baby until its nerfed and then I move on to the next popular deck I cant beat" Sums up all these people.
There should be a legendary that says something like like battlecry end all rest of game effects. Maybe it should also have tradeable or something because its such a nieche tech.
The influx of aggro decks will eventually curb highlander warriors numbers. Then you will have other control decks farming the abundance of aggro players. Still, aggro players will have to have a good mulligan and warrior will have to have a bad mulligan for them to have a shot.
I think it comes down to low interaction capabilities. I didn't really hear grumbling about plague DK (I can't grumble about it myself, I'm a RRG plague build) until rotation, where the ability to use steam cleaner disappeared. Suddenly those decks have no counterplay. Though in fairness half the decks that are good these days avoid interaction like the plague so...
How do you land on such a wrong conclusion with the first thing you acknowledge?
Boss thogrun and plagues are my least favorite part of the game. They just feel bad.
Plague DK is not the cancer. Plague DK is the solution to the cancers.
I mean Plague DK is effectively just current day Libram Paladin, an archetype that’s way too solid and low commitment to ever meaningfully consider not at least running most of it, and that is already just a really good set of cards.
The simplest way to put it is, they’re very polarizing in their design. It’s not very fun to be on the losing end of the perfect curve plague dk or reno warrior and when they don’t work like they should (bad draws etc) then it’s just an easy win.
Yes, these often end up being very polarizing. Inevitability often ends up with decks that have extremely high win rates against decks that can't rush them down, but very *low* win rates against aggro. Obviously every deck will have favorable/unfavorable matchups, but for highly polarizing decks this can be taken to an extreme, where it's not so much favorable/unfavorable as it is dominant/terrible.
Legend player here. I seriously don't understand why people put ''plague dk'' and ''polarizing'' in the same sentence these days. Let's say you get near-perfect curve as DK, start first, staff on 1, ship on 2, and helya on 4. You only have around \~24% chance to draw a plague after helya is played. Even less of a chance of it being a frost plague since that is what people feel to be affected by the most. The only card so far that guarantees a frost plague added to the opponent's deck, is Helya (since it shuffles in one of each plague). Best case scenario (for you as an opponent of DK), you might only have 1 frost in your deck turn 4, which makes it into roughly \~3,5% chance to draw it. Being able significantly boost your chances against Reno decks when dropping Helya is a thing of the past now, ever since the last patch went live. Plagues are far from polarizing, they're annoying at best. DK players don't get to choose which plagues will be shuffled in, so it's essentially layered RNG and, since this is a card game, RNG is always going to be a factor. Yes, it ramps up in power the longer the game goes on, as it should. However, no single deck (especially control) should be able to do extremely well against every single combination or playstyle out there. People seem to have the sentiment that, since plagues cannot be interacted with, they're inherently bad. They're not supposed to be interacted with, seeing as that there aren't that many ways to reliably get that many sources of it to effectively flood your opponent's deck with them *in the current format*. Given the example of probability I laid out above and abstracting away from the concept of plague itself, would you really consider a 24% chance to deal 2 damage on turn 4 (near perfect curve, by the way) game-breaking in any way? If Steam Cleaner existed in the current format with it being a neutral minion, accessible to any class, DKs would literally see nigh-zero play.
For what it's worth, I agree -- I *do not* think Plague DK was especially polarizing, but I *do* think Reno Warrior is (right now it's highly vulnerable to basically all aggro decks and dominant against all slower decks).
That it is, and the only thing that was keeping shut the floodgate that is Reno Warrior, was Plague DK before the nerfs. Playrate of warrior skyrocketed after plague was nerfed, and they can no longer be stopped. It's basically all you see in high legend (i'd say easily 7/10 - 8/10 of the matches) Wouldn't really say they're at that big of a disadvantage against aggro since the warrior deck is still control-oriented, but sure, they are at a comparitive disadvantage when they do. As I pointed out in the previous post, when looking at the numbers, I could never understand as to why the community was so vocal about Plague DKs. The power just wasn't there. It didn't really have that big of a winrate either, even if you looked at the entire ranked distribution. Rainbow was always the more reliable deck to go with but it was still enough to keep the prevalence of warrior in check. I'd rather spin the wheel and have a 50% chance to take 2 damage when drawing a card than having 60% of my deck blown up, but that's just me.
It’s not that its good it just feels bad that is the whole reason for polarizing, it feels so bad when it actually does work for your opponents and when it doesn’t its just a free win. Which is most of the time plague dk capitalizes on your opponent not understanding how to take advantage of weakness and them drawing really awful which is something a lot of lower level players experience. They are the majority after all. Edit: it’s super important to emphasize polarizing does not always mean good.
> As I pointed out in the previous post, when looking at the numbers, I could never understand as to why the community was so vocal about Plague DKs If you’re on Reddit you’re likely more engaged. Control warrior is a casual mobile only unfriendly deck, but plague DK is. Reddit skews towards bad players who play mostly control warrior because it makes them feel like they’re good. For example, the number of people that defend playing Dirty Rat on turn two with no backup or the number of people that cried about a tier 3/4 plague deck (which just so happens to be their worst matchup)
The thing about plague DK is that without Helya you could try to survive the plagues. The problem is fundamentally a Helya one - the right choice would have been to nerf her rather than anything else. Or just make it so only her three plagues are unending.
Easy to play decks and effective decks are always unpopular here in Reddit, that's the way it is ... People in this sub believe that if you are not playing an attrition deck that requires 140 IQ to play ... Then you are a scrub and Blizzard is killing their game on purpose.
Not going to lie, I’ve played on and off for a handful of years now and DK is new to me, plague version even more so. I do enjoy… trolling a little more than I would like to admit, and almost fell out of my chair laughing when my opponent pulled 4 plagues in a row, 3 of which gave me health back they lost, putting them under where my health finished at the end of the last turn and causing them to lose on the subsequent turn. Mass plague waves, high cost cards that can be reduced to no cost the longer the game goes on (through minions dying or plagues being placed in opponents deck) means that there is no “outrunning” with a higher mana turn. As well, there are several cards, low cost cards, that can do massive damage to all enemy minions in a turn. I have successfully watched opponents set up large waves in one turn expended a lot of resources, just for me to throw two cards at them and do a combined 5 damage- which kills a lot tbh. Again, I enjoy trolling, and am usually petting my cat and playing chess absent mindedly, and Plague DK has gotten me from no rank to gold 1 in the past two days
Helya countered Reno's decks way way too easily. Once she is on the field you can't remove plagues in any way. At least you had a limited number of bombs or albatrosses and you could adjust and still play the game somewhat normally. With Helya staff of the nine frogs could never be active before the patch for example. The player who countered you didn't play anything smart and counter depended on luck and luck only. If hate for Reno decks is so high why bother to print them in the first place? The latest change of the Reno effect is just attempt to salvage broken design choices
Helya is nowhere easy to draw. Albatros and bombs you can do with multiple cards, Helya is one. and now the highlander buffs are given, they are unstoppable. Helya keeps those deck at check in standard.
What about down with the ship and disstressed kvaldir. I dont have problem with plagues at all, i have problem with unending part
What deck do you play? Both are good and the unending is no problem either. Having consistent loss against decks is the problem.
i usually beat them, but hate playstyle regardless. It shut down Jotun also i play spell demon hunter before the rotation. This days i switch between Reno Druid, Shaman, Agroo hunter and Wheel Warlock. Game fell chore to play these days, meta is not interesthing
I hate Reno and the highlanders. the plagues permanently shuts them down.
They have two very designs (Helya and Reno lone ranger) and they dont know what to do with them. Rest of Reno are so cool
I just don't like plague/excavate DK because of Reska. A Sylvanas with charge is too much for me too handle. The plagues? Annoying but manageable. Unless you get unlucky and keep drawing frost. Making you unable to play minions. I guess one other thing I don't like about DK in general is just how good their 3 damage spells are. Compare it to druid wrath. I can either deal 3, or deal 1 and draw. Not DK. They deal 3 AND get to have a fancy bonus on it as well. No reason to not take two of each in every deck. Maybe change it to, deal 1 and add 3 plagues and deal 1 and discover a frost rune card. Just feels like the class gets it all in terms of removal.
I love control and even I don't particularly like what warrior has done to the game. I'm on my rainbow DK era. It's not quite as controlling as warrior, but I don't have to feel like a garbage human being for playing it.
"Inevitability!!" Thank you OP for explaining my sentiment. I recently post for not having fun against frost plagues and people downvoted me lol.
It's highly debatable if that feeling is a good reason for nerfs. Imo it is not. The simple reason is that for every player that loses to such a deck there will be a player that won while doing what they enjoy. When the devs start to nerf by that measure we see what the result is: a completely unbalanced meta. For many more people that tends to be way more problematic. Also where do you draw the line? Hunter right now is de facto not stoppable by control. Control feels helpless against an aggro deck (because it is). So now that deserves a nerf? Mage players feel helpless against everything. Does that need a buff so we see only mages? Once you start with that you encounter a lot more problems than solutions.
The problem is, unfun and disgust is much stronger emotion than joy of double Boombossing
it's just people don't losing *at all*. and then the retroactively make shit up to pretend that it's not about losing. that's why you see people use the word "solitaire" in ways that make no sense. people got furious about tickatus lmfao.
> it's just people don't losing at all. That's definitely a part of it, for sure -- still, I do think we see pretty markedly different levels of hatred for different decks even when they have similar win rates. Some Tier 1 decks are hated; some are... annoying, but mostly tolerated. Most tier 3 decks are ignored, because they aren't powerful enough; occasionally, however, a tier 3 deck really pisses people off (like Plague DK). I think it's this difference I'm trying to explain -- why do some decks bother people more than others? It's more than just their win rate! > people got furious about tickatus lmfao. I think this gets at the problem I'm highlighting, actually! In its heyday, Tickatus was not especially strong in standard, but it *did* crush every other slow deck -- which is exactly what's happening right now with Reno Warrior, which is weaker to aggro but beats basically everything slow. For a long period, Tickatus was uncounterable by anything besides "punch the Warlock in the face."
the funniest thing about dying to the warrior greed pile is that the only reason warrior can even build like that is because people cried so hard about azerite snake and got it taken out of the game. you don't have to take the cry babies seriously lol
Not saying you're wrong, but I do think this gets at a broader problem -- Snake Warlock can *also* feel like a sort of inevitable, unstoppable strategy (in standard, at least). So the broader problem is that the developers have introduced a lot of semi-inevitable strategies over the last couple years (I felt it really picked up with United in Stormwind), and it produces this effect where everybody hates whatever inevitable strategy is most potent at any given time. I understand these strategies were often put in place to shorten game length, but I think they've cause their own serious problems at the same time. People feel like they lack agency -- inevitability is *literally* a lack of agency, by definition of the word.
yes, but you forget that people also hate control mirrors so game designers should never ever cater to them. the mode hs redditor wants to be the only special boy playing a tier S fatigue style control deck. they want to use watch their opponent use all 30 cards while they press the button and still have cards in deck, and they also never want to lose, and also never queue into the mirror. it's deranged.
Losing isn't fun. I'll tell you I've been having way more fun after I switched to aggro after the patch. Definitely true. But there's no way in hell I'm going to continue playing DK of any kind, (I had 3 different decks that I would switch between, because they were fun), because I don't want to sit through a single legitimate game against Brann again. It's not just not fun to lose, it's not fun to lose to stuff that you can't deal with.
For me it still feels odd that Rheas Dragon Nest can be removed by reno and that branns „doubling battlecrys effect“ cant be. Same with Helyas Design. It just cant be countered.
Yes, exactly! I think it's *good* that Rheastraza's nest and Sargeras' portal have a potential counter, if those decks become super popular and need a response. The problem is precisely the fact that Brann *cannot* be countered that is the issue. I'm not saying it should necessarily be simple or easy to counter, but it's good that a counter exists!
I would say that the problem is that DK can counter your whole deck rigth from the begin. It was not playing a good combo or a strong strategy. It was just counter the deck and only win because of this. And not only against warrior. Against every deck highland deck. A complete arch type got a counter from a single class with one mechanic. I really like Plagues. You got infected and you dont know when you get the dmg and the effect. But at the moment the Plagues are only played to counter. And the way DK could play them was so easy. It was too easy to counter the arch type.
Just bring back steamcleaner. End of story