I really appreciate that Blizzard has been more frequent with the nerfs lately to keep the meta from being stale for too long, but in the game of balancing you need buffs and nerfs to avoid things like power creep. There are plenty of cards that never see the light of day regardless of future expansions releasing, Blizzard could look at these cards play/win rate and buff accordingly (slightly of course). Some examples are: Cheaty Anklebiter, Serpent Ward, Half-Time Scavenger, Arena Patron, Star Aligner, Holomancer, Harbinger Celestia, ect… I think you get the point if you agree with me or not.
And I swear to god if Where’s Waldo McGee comes out of his 10 year vow of silence to say he plays “x” card and wins “all the time” so it doesn’t need buffs SO HELP ME.
IIRC, Blizzards official stance on buffs is “Blah, blah, blah, we dislike the idea of card buffs blah, blah, can always print different, new, exciting cards to fill those roles!!!”
While I like buffs, I really don’t like any of your examples. I can imagine though LONG time cards in the classic set that are underperforming to get a SLIGHT buff.
IIRC the reason they aren’t giving us more deck slots was “Something, something, would confuse new players, something, someting, mass uninstall the game, something, something, bad press, resentment, blood, large bowls of porridge…”
Yes there should be some buffs, but I think the reason for buffing something should not be just that the card is not being played, but rather that the card is not performing the way it should have. This is what makes things tricky because in order to properly asses the performance of the card you would need tons and tons of data, which might be hard to get if the card is not being played in the first place. Also the balance of standard I think is a very valid argument that could complicate things more for the design teams working on future sets with unknown variables like that.
Still I think it can be done, and you can start in wild. You could fix old cards like knight of the wild, or Bolvar to work like thing from below or arcane giant, having their effects count actions in the duration of the game not only when they are in your hand. you could remove unnecessary jumping hoops to cards like gorillabot (control another mech), specially since the amount of mechs to discover is so big now that it diludes the results so much. Or update cards that were nerfed with the solutions found later (giving patches and force of nature rush instead of charge).
I think there is a lot of space to work with and wild is a perfect place to experiment in, since making a few cards stronger will not affect the balance of the competitive meta too much anyway.
Yeah I see where you’re coming from and thought about that too but that’s why I said cards “play/win” rate as well the fact that there are cards that are literally so bad they don’t get played in wild or standard at all. I personally don’t play wild so of course I am biased to see standard get more attention anyways, but you’re right they do need to get rid of charge and replace it with rush (I’m looking at you Leeroy Jenkins) Blizzard definitely has the data that they need, at the end of the day they probly only will do what can make them money (aka current card packs sell more than older card packs)