I’ve given some thought about Hearthstone these past few days, about where it’s been and where is going. And after thinking for a while, I think the best way I’d describe Hearthstones trajectory is
“Hearthstone has gone from being a deeply strategic game at it’s core to one that is largely a superficial bean counter simulator.”
First let me define what I mean by bean counting. I use the term in the same way that accountants may derisively be described, as bean counters, as in professionals that spend their waking hours calculating important things (money) in very rote and basic ways (arithmetic).
So what I mean is that nearly every game in Hearthstone now devolves into bean counting (simply counting damage from hand typically, or memorizing a sequence of plays that set up a blow out board) with zero strategic planning, every turn can be played in complete isolation, and so strategic multi turn planning is precluded.
I think the best way to give support for this conclusion is to contrast any existing top decks, in any of the past year versus previous top decks.
A great example of one of the decks in the past with the largest amount of strategic planning was cube lock. This is probably the hardest deck to play correctly that ever existed in Hearthstone, and nearly all it’s difficulty to navigate arose from strategic decisions.
Take any of the top decks in recent times, you still notice there are basically no strategic decisions to navigate any of them. Let’s take hand buff Paladin, it’s a deck that has resurfaced tier 1 multiple times over the past year maybe longer. What’s hard to play about it? Well, unsurprisingly the part that takes any skill at all is knowing when your hand lethal by counting damage from hand. That’s it, bean counting. It’s a heavy board based deck, but it involves zero strategy.
The way I see it, Hearthstone before involved bean counting on another level → calculating who is going to be forced into milling first in a warrior vs warrior mirror, or who’s going to be proccing whose ice block first in a freeze mage mirror
It’s just counting of different things, and I hated that part of the game. I wanted a win out of the straight up battle of tempo or value. Your strategy on the ladder should be about maximizing your ranking up, anyway, so what you do in-game should depend on what your deck was built to do, anyway.
And you can find lots of different ways to plan in different decks. For example, on Weapon Rogue I have to exactly calculate fastest road to lethal while accounting for what they will be doing in the meantime. It’s thinking 3-4 moves ahead with different possible scenarios
WIth Painlock, you had tough decisions very early, knowing you’re putting yourself in lethal danger against some classes, and calculating how probable you are to survive. If that probability exceeds the one of you dying, you’re making a good play.
I just don’t see any substantial difference between now and before, except that games hardly ever go to fatique, and if they do, it’s quite fast, and someone dies fast. And I love it.
You’re right in calling out pain lock as strategic, it’s one of the few decks in the last two years before it was nerfed multiple times to be considered strategic. Unfortunately it was promptly nerfed multiple times. It also confirms strategic decks need not be control but can be really aggressive aggro.
You seem to conflate fatigue decks with strategic decks. They rarely were, but occasionally they happened to be. Control warriors tended to be extreme simple to navigate and were far from strategic.
It sounds like you never played cube lock. Although it would go into fatigue and that was optimal play in certain games, it was far from the rule and more the exception. I actually don’t believe anyone, myself included, played the og cube lock optimally, I spent hours playing and reviewing plays from it and found subtle mistakes constantly. I’m not lying when I think it’s the highest skill deck that ever like likely existed in Hearthstone. Your right in that fatigue was a significant consideration in every game.
I don’t think your understanding what a strategic decision is. What you describe is much closer to a tactical decision (a kin to bean counting) counting how much damage will come from hand or what your opponent’s likely plays will be. Strategic decisions are one level higher in abstraction. You can think of a strategic decision as being one where you use tactics to understand a certain line of play (ie you know your best moves and your opponent’s best moves.) then you apply tactical thinking multiple times each from a significantly different decision that is irreversible and evaluate. You then make a choice about which line of play to commit to, otherwise know as which strategy.
What you describe, weapon rogue et al, it’s very one dimensional from a strategic point of view, there’s only one line of play that makes sense, you being the aggressor. It may be tactically rich, you might have to consider many different scenarios, but you don’t have to switch between lines of play in your evaluation of the position.
In cube lock, you could effectively play mid-range (nonexistent in today’s Hearthstone), otk, control or fatigue. All of these strategies where viable and you had to constantly evaluate which strategy to commit to and which options or strategies it precluded if you did. This is strategy. You might be completely unaware something like this even existed in the game if you only played in the last few years.
Put simply tactics dictate strategy, but without strategy tactical thinking is just an exercise in bean counting (calculation).
To have strategy in a game, a necessary condition is to have two or more irreversible (requiring the commit) lines of play, both of which may look equally promising without deep thought or calculation (tactics). Modern Hearthstone fails at this as there is nearly always only one line of play which is obvious as day and night (the solution to the current turn’s “puzzle”)
Play a good aggro deck they’re incredibly strategic still. There is most certainly multi turn planning with an aggro deck. The first few turns decide whether you win or lose a lot of the time. Sequencing of minions is very important and knowing when to hold burn and when to go in is also another multi turn planning part of aggro decks.
I mean most people see a game thats over in 5-7 turns… but a bad aggro player will crash and burn… the margin for error is actually a lot more slim than it appears on the surface
You’re equating turns with minutes. 4.9 min game can be a 20 turn game if both players play as fast as I do.
And I’ve already told you that nothing and noone tracks minutes per game. What is being tracked are turns per game.
You might be able to see how long your game was in minutes in Firestone, but that’s not what you find on HS Guru when filtering, you get turns per win there.
No you don’t get it man, the reason why aggro is the most efficient archetype in every tcg is due to how the curves are being set, try calculating any odds of permutations like you wanna draw 1 drop on your first turn, the odds are the amount of 1 drops in your deck and the card being drawn in your first turn, this adds up quickly by turn 4 and 5 hence aggro decks are generally consistent.
Board based aggro deck is way more consistent than spell based burn aggro deck due to the redundancy of the minions since some spells are situational / provides extra value/ requires certain type of condition/ lasts only 1 turn generally.
Imagine having 7 1 drops and you get to pick 4 card in your first turn
(23!/4!) / (30!/4!) I am way lazy to do the math right now but I believe it’s above 65% so about 2 out of 3 games you get to play something on the board and most of aggro 1 drops are really good.
Keep on doing this stuff for 2 drops 3 drops 4 drops and you will get the numbers quite surprisingly high
Yeah but you don’t need the cards by turn ~5 only, you also want them in SEQUENCE. E.g. Pirate DH was devastating against ANYTHING if it highrolled but it would just die a horrible death without doing any damage with low rolling.
A similar deck now is Elemental Mage which is devastating on high rolling though there are probably better examples because it’s too one-dimentional too.
It depends a little on the deck composition because e.g. Treant Druid from 2023 could not low roll easily because most of its cards worked in all rounds.
That doesnt mean all won games are only a few turns… a good aggro deck/player will be able to navigate a longer game as well which is where a lot of the strategy/multi turn planning comes in.
I was talking about the average. PS I was a bit off there with the numbers because 5 min decks might take ~7 rounds usually (the minutes align with the rounds more when a deck is much slower), but in general fast/aggro decks don’t have that many chances to draw compared to others.
Thats true… but then that makes the decision every turn more important. Like you have two different one drops… take for example murloc growfin vs. drone deconstructor which do you play?
If your against something like druid… drone decontructor into trusty companion can draw you zilliax which will increase your winrate quite a bit… on the other hand against other classes your drone deconstructor has a high chance of being dead before you can play trusty companion so its better to play growfin because you have a higher probability of getting off trusty companion on turn 2.
Thats just a simple base example of a turn 1 as an aggro deck… you can imagine it gets more complex… on turn 3 play a 3 drop… or 2 one drops… so on and so forth.
Except for when they have draw engines and pull half their deck or more in five turns… because, especially in wild, the aggro is so deadly precisely because it can refill.
Or you coin the cannon on turn one, knowing you have two one drops, a minion that will play from your hand, and patches in your deck and setting up ten damage on turn 2.
There’s lots of strategy in aggro decks, but most people don’t appreciate the finer points of how much reach some of these decks really have.
Card draw is not an issue right now we have cards like trusty companion, cactus cutter, ethereal oracle, birdwatching, trusty fishing rod, attack demon hunter is probably the best aggro deck at utilizing ethereal oracle for both card draw and damage. I do not aggree that you have to high roll playing pirate dh, if you ain’t getting high roll always play what is the best tempo wise ofc considering what the opponent decks are playing for next turn.
It’s true that fast decks are more sensitive to singular mistakes, but I was adding next to that that the draw randomness is more brutal for them since they draw less on average.
But someone could argue that your argument is a zero sum comparison because singular decisions are more important but others have more decisions (the total is same).
To say it mathematically, importance * number_of_decisions may not be higher than lower_importance_in_slower_decks * more_decisions.
The point was the average when comparing decks. The slow decks can draw more too. I guess you might mean “even when others draw more: you still draw enough anyway”.
I’m not sure that’s true or not always. E.g. I hated the draw sensitivity of pirate DH.