My take is extremely simple: please remove the line “destroy a minion” from every card and replace it with a damage value.
The reasons are many:
“destroy a minion” is not amplified by spell damage, meaning a cool concept of hearthstone is wasted on these cards. While on the flip side, if they deal damage it could add more fun, creativity and complexity to the game through cool cards that provide spell damage.
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“destroy a minion” specifically counters big minions, often played by control decks, meaning infinite removal control decks counter big minion decks at an incredible efficiency while poorly countering aggro decks, resulting in a horrid balance philosophy as aggro decks become powerful, these “destroy a minion” cards get buffed specifically to handle aggro decks but indirectly completely stomp on big minion control decks.
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“destroy a minion” cards can often be generated by a wide range of other cards, meaning big minion decks simply run out of cards without any player interaction, you play a big minion, they remove it. You play a minion, they remove it, nobody ends the game. The game turns into an endless stalemate session until someone runs out of cards.
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All future big minions must now be designed to have a direct effect like a battlecry or death rattle, as “destroy a minion” cards simply wipe it off the board extremely efficiently, therefore playing tall or big in effect provides a negative board presence.
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“destroy a minion” cards don’t accelerate the user to a win condition, meaning if you have a deck completely revolved around infinite “destroy a minion” cards or card generation, you’re just playing a waiting game endlessly, which is incredibly unfun for the victim, and a single player experience for the caster. It ruins hearthstone’s fun factor, which is pretty essential to video games.
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To combat this I’m not just going to complain, I’m going to suggest card changes to turn “destroy a minion” into damage values:
Obliterate: deal 8 damage to a minion
Asphyxiate: deal 8 damage to the highest attack enemy minion
Frost queen sindragosa: After freezing an enemy minion, deal 6 damage to them.
Soul stealer: Deal 7 damage to all other minions, gain a corpse for each that die.
Whirlpool: Deal 7 damage to all minions, destroy all copies of those that died.
Cannibalize: Deal 7 damage to a minion, if the minion died, heal all friendly characters for that amount.
Sure, we can remove destroy a minion effects from hearthstone… right after we remove divine shield from the game as well. This is just a low-key triple blood complaint thread disguised as something else.
Removal scales pretty miserably against the aggro decks that buff their minions to the stars as is right now. And there is an inherent cost to running removal. It costs a card and can be situational, and it also doesn’t develop your board. Playing cannibilize against a 8/1 that just rushed into your board may delete the minion, but you only heal 1 HP and it costs 4 mana to do so. When there are 4 or 5 other smaller minions still on the board waiting to hit you the next turn that really doesn’t do much to save your rear.
Right now we have aggro boards that go wide and tall very fast. Warrior’s imbued axe and anima extractor comboed with wild pyromancer can throw 50/50 in stats on board by turn 5, warlock’s slime into thaddius ressurects checkmate anything board based with a monster mana cheat turn, big demon hunter dropping Xhialang’s and inquisitors on 5 for an immediate 8-10 damage to face flat out kills you. Then you have wide sticky strategies like unholy DK and undead priest with their deathrattle buffs, or paladin with its divine shield buffs. There’s also the rogue deck that builds a 12/3 weapon by turn 6 and hits you in the face with it from offboard. Quite frankly, removal really doesn’t scale well into any of this stuff. They play too many stats way too fast.
And whirlpool…really? You’re gonna complain about the 8 mana card that doesn’t even cleanly deal with deathrattles? By 8 mana most aggressive decks will have already killed you dead.
I get good belly laughs when you get instant concedes from people who went off and you just silence them and yawn.
You are correct that there are parallels, but you’ve identified the wrong common factors. The common factors are the arguments have little merit in either form and are typically brought by low skill players salty that their solitaire game play was up ended by quality counter play. In both bg and in standard, the arguments against poison and hard removal are wrong.
You could limit “Destroy a minion” to one per deck by making them legendaries, which would limit their proliferation among decks at large, along with being removed from discovery pools to mitigate the opportunity to find more. (Im thinking how they treat Ice Block secret for BGs). Or add a big penalty to them going forward such as you skip your entire next turn in exchange to play this cheap removal tool that eliminates that big threat. Or reduce your available mana in half next turn, etc. You can get creative with the tradeoff at this point.
I think the guy wants other types of decks to have more of a chance, but removals deny those kind of decks.
But his suggestion doesn’t cover all the hard removals leading to more questions (problems) to address. Like… how’s the rogue concoction (aka deadly shot) gonna be affected? What about old card like execute? Silences don’t destroy but can neuter buffed minions all the same so how would that work? Are people gonna complain about pure paladins since class action lawyer doesn’t strictly destroy but it might as well be (ok last one the answer is yes they will, with or without the suggestion)
I think you misunderstand. I’m saying most removals are overcosted for their effects in the current meta. Most removal cards are not that good despite people hating on them. It’s the scaling minion stat piles and mana cheating that’s the problem, not the removals meant to deal with them.
This is absolutely false and would be horrific design.
Think about it. If I play a 5 drop on turn 5 onto an empty board and it costs you 5 mana to remove it, you’ve got no mana left to develop anything with. I keep initiative and now have 6 mana to play into your empty board and put you back where you were a turn ago, except now you need a 6 mana removal to clear my threat. If it costs you 2 mana to remove my guy, you can develop 3 mana worth of cards behind it, giving you initiative going into my turn and something I’ve either got to deal with or that can make trades against my board on the following turn.
Removing threats is always more cost-efficient than developing them in CCGs and it has to be that way. Minions can kill your opponent, Asphyxiate can’t. The minion is more valuable than the card that destroys it and the cards are costed appropriately.
I’d replace “always” with “usually.” But flexibility is a key point. Removal that can’t go face has to essentially punish what it’s designed to remove to be good, not merely maintain some form of equilibrium. Flexible removal (e.g. it can go face or Rush minions) is a bit different.
That said, I definitely think control should have to run a variety of answers to address a variety of threats. It doesn’t have to be that a 3 mana card nullifies a 7 mana threat; that might be more advantage than is necessary.
Destroying a minion needs to have a set value, otherwise any board state rapidly escalates out of control.
I miss a single turn of removal in your proposal and now i NEVER get to deal with the minion played on said turn because the next minions take my full mana count to deal with, and i inevitably lose.
Under your idea, any deck going turn 2 would have to deploy a near infinite removal stack and hope the attacker trips up somewhere so that maybe they can play some minions.
That’s only true if taken isolated.
Let’s not pretend AOE board clears aren’t a thing.
Sure 4 mana remove a minion sounds terrible against a wide board but considering the whole deck is made to clear those wide boards which get perma silenced, removed etc.
You finally get to play put a big minion for which you wasted many cards and as the OP said it gets killed by sometimes as low as 1 mana.
And the thing is, as long as these disgusting removals don’t get nerfed and as we see get better and better, the aggro decks have to be buffed to crazy levels as well
Like imagine playing hunter and slowly building your beasts only for some1 to remove it with one mana while having a degenerate win condition
Wow. So now basic removal, something every CCG I have ever played has, is too hardcore for the HS crowd. Ya’ll really need to read what you post. Deleting “destroy” from the game is batcrap insane. I can’t believe anyone in this thread is even entertaining this idea.
