Causing Tsunamis to Legend

Multiplayer Discussion
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A few things I want to preface here. Until today I have barely touched Hearthstone this month. I barely touched it towards the end of last month. The cycle of creating incredibly polarizing cards and then nerfing them is getting tiring. Something desperately needs to change about the design philosophy of the game. The vast majority of my games on this climb were decided on turn 4-6 and many of the my opponents had zero chance because turn 4 Tsunami into turn 5 Tsunami into Turn 6 draw Volley and create a 9 drop is just insurmountable for many decks.

My win rate was about 75% from D5-L. What was truly telling about how absurdly powerful BSM is the fact I saw multiple people horribly misplaying it in ranks D3-1. I had multiple other BSM play a turn 2 Cult Neophyte instead of waiting to use it to stop the combo turn. I saw people shuffling in their Snake Oils and then drawing them with Surfalopod and Under the Sea. It was absurd. I truly believe that the power level of cards have allowed people to get away with more misplays since late game cards can completely wipe out all early game decisions. People are not really thinking out their turns or planning for later turns. It is just all about doing your big OP combo.

I will not be doing a write up on how the deck plays. It is patently brainless and steals wins. If you can’t pilot this deck to legend then you won’t be able to pilot any deck to legend. Instead I will talk about the serious problem plaguing Hearthstone for what seems to be at least the past 6 months. Mana Cheating.

The balance of a card is often heavily defined by how much it costs to play. Whether that be mana, life, or having to run highlander, the higher the costs the better the card tends to be. We are currently in a state where the devs are constantly creating ways to break that balancing for very little cost. When Hearthstone was launched Water Elemental was considered a great staple card. A turn 4 Water Elemental was a good play. Now, it is very possible to have 4 of them AND a 4/5. That is truly insane power creep, Or, worst case they come down on turn 5. Oh no.

But, what really pushes this over the edge is the fact that if the opponent DOES deal with 16/29 in stats on turn 4, you can then follow it up with 16/28 in stats the very next turn. And remember, 12 damage also got to swing, essentially being worth a Pyroblast on top of the minions sometimes. The most degenerate Thing I have had happen was a Surfalopod trigger when I cast Under the Sea, Drawing and Casting Tsunami, and then summoning a Factory Assemblybot This was a turn 5 24/38 in stats with 18 damage swinging in immediately. What is my opponent supposed to do?!

I honestly do not know how to fix this. So much of the game is just mana ramping, lowering costs, or just auto-casting things. I just hope future sets move away from this philosophy.

I am going to go walk my dog now. This meta is a mess.

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I know how to fix this: bring back Classic.

Removing Classic was one decision I never fully understood. By doing so, they’ve created the situation we’re in now, where every mode feels like it’s doing way too much. I’ll speak for what I assume is a minority of players who actually enjoy the repetition of a card game and don’t want every game to feel wildly different.

The dev team, on the other hand, seems to think the huge swing gameplay is what defines HS, but I never believed that.

The only way to truly fix the game is to create a new mode. Standard can’t be scaled back now; if it were, sales would drop, so they won’t go that route. But they can still cater to different styles of players.

The ongoing complaints show that not everyone enjoys this massive swing-style gameplay. Some do, but plenty don’t, and the lack of accommodation for those players is causing them to leave.

That’s my take on the situation.

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Nothing out of the ordinary happened there. The deck is just fast aggro. Pain lock is even faster (albeit slightly).

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Right now, I hit a wall in Gold 8/9. I haven’t seen many mages. Nor have I been tracking the number of my games because I have seen “small sample size” argument when literally anyone does.

What I can tell you is I’ve been fluctuating between Gold 8/9 and I have seen mostly

  • DK (handbuffing a lot)
  • Paladin (Handbuffing a lot)
  • Some kind of Taunt Warrior
  • Barrels of Sludge Warlock
  • Spectral Cutlass Rogue
  • Occasional Shaman
  • Occasional Hunter
  • Exactly One Priest

Priest and Warrior are just auto concedes. The first because I hate mirror matches. They drop a card that steals from my deck, I am out. It is not a fun match up for me.

The last Warrior I just played mana ramped so hard that there was just no way even with all my buffs and eggs popped. They had too big of minions, too much armor and a weapon equipped.

Rogue matches are usually a toss up. If I draw well, I can usually get them down before their cutlass is online. If not
I’m kind of screwed.

Paladin is similar to rogue.

What Does This Mean?

With Mage dominating legend, there aren’t any in the lower brackets so a lot of my matches are feeling very decided within the first few turns. Hunters, Shamans and Warlocks feel a bit more board centric while everything else is just
buff>vomit on board>go face.

And with everything having lifesteal


BEAR IN MIND

This is my personal experience from the few matches I played last night and this morning on NA server. Nothing is written in stone, this isn’t a claim as to what the meta is or isn’t - it just my personal experience and my small sample size.

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Yeah it’s driving me crazy seeing tons of people doing this, thus my forum topic on it lol

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Whats driving me crazy is you trying to advise people to play the matchup better.
Leave those good samaritans alone, they are doing Gods work on the mirror match up for me.

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In order for it to change, the bait-and-nerf cycle would have to stop being profitable. In order for it to stop being profitable, we’d need to change customer psychology on a biological level. In order to change psychology on a biological level, we’d need to replace it.

So I’m unironically telling you that until cyberbrains become mainstream technology, nope, it will not change. No matter how desperate you are.

From a business perspective, the goal isn’t to fix it, the goal is to ruin it. Blizzard wants as many players as possible to chase after Legendaries in the new miniset, with Skyla being the obvious golden child. They get maximum pressure to chase by destabilizing the previous meta. Things were very good before the miniset; fixing would be pretty much as easy as deleting Skyla completely. But that’s the polar opposite of what Blizzard wants.

You can read the previous paragraph to understand how it was a good business decision for Blizzard to kill Classic, and how they’ll never bring it back.

Was Classic good for players, even if it was bad for business? Idk. I didn’t play it, but it wasn’t hurting me none either. I got the impression it was not popular.

Chill out. Less than 1% of the playerbase even visits the forums, 50%† of those who visit aren’t smart enough to actually read the words, and 50%† of those who read the words will have too much ego to change.

Me and Altair could coauthor a megathread on how to play a deck perfectly and it wouldn’t do anything.

†±50% due to lack of survey data

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You and Schyla are right to point out how bad it is to trade Snake Oil while playing BSM, but there are times where taking a risk by trading a Snake Oil is the best play for a chance to win when one has no other good options.

Ya, well this ^ describes a lot of decks in HS these days, so BSM is just another one of those.

Again, this ^ will hold true for many different decks.

While this can happen, it’s much more common for it not to happen, since it usually takes coin + Skyla + Tsunami to be in hand on turn 4. A turn 4 King Tide into Tsunami on 5 is a very rare occurrence by player 1, which can be countered by Neophyte.

People used to say similar things about Zoo Warlock in the early days of HS, yet my win rate in the mirror matches back then was insane, because of how poorly others piloted the deck.

I do not find BSM to be a “no-brainer” deck to play. Aside from the obvious combos, there are important choices or lines of play when the deck is not providing the key cards or setups in the early game.

Ya, the abundance of mana cheating out expensive cards and combos is really eroding the fun from playing HS. The idea that since everyone has access to broken stuff to play, it somehow balances out the game is a really poor design strategy.

That kind of win rate may have been easy to obtain for a good player in the first 48 hours of the release, but a lot has changed on day 3.

BSM is defining the meta because of its popularity, which means that a lot of players have shifted to decks that can easily deal with BSM, like Pirate DH, Big Shaman, Pain Warlock, Reno Druid, etc
 Some BSM players are adding tech to help in the mirror matches.

Frankly, I am already bored with BSM
and the meta, but I have quickly felt this way about the last 3 or 4 metas. Is this meta really that much worse than the recent metas that existed right after an expansion or mini-set was released?

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I just built a BSM without Surfalopod and Under the sea so it wasn’t an issue and focused a bit more on staving off some of the earlier aggression instead.

I can trade oils freely!

Just got into the top 1k with it on a veeeery smooth climb from the 8kish I was at last month with the deck.

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Seeing more Mage decks moving away from the one trick pony and playing more aggressively to control the board early on now. It was bound to be a natural evolution to the deck as the Aggro and Control decks started dunking on them.

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Not really, the cards/stat names change etc but as a card game, it’s always going to be 'play with the net-deck of that class, or lose" There may be two or even three variations per faction, but that’s it. So you have 10 factions and twenty decks all playing against each other, very little inbetween, if you want to feel like a ‘winner’

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Yep, I just preempted it.

It’s going to take people a while to realize that surf and under both limit your deck building options too much to effectively do that.

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Well, they need to do something, though.

There are numerous complaints about the pace of the game.
It makes sense to create a space that is both competitive and enjoyable for those who prefer a different pace.

The solution shouldn’t be: just go play Casual.

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You imply it is; I was thinking about this subject for many years in my WoW days; I’m not convinced it’s that profitable to them.

And I mean it probably IS profitable in the short term otherwise they would not be doing it; I reiterate though; in the SHORT term.

But their games lose players in a world of more internet users which is very sus; people aren’t totally dumb; they eventually get it.

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That’s not even a realistic option. The same decks you see on the ladder you will see in casual play.

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It depends what you mean by “people.” And no I don’t mean that in some bigoted way.

Like, consider the Gen X and older Millennials. These are boys who grew up playing Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3, the first StarCraft. Their nostalgia for Blizzard at the zenith of their quality is a permanent fixture. These people will be forever customers no matter how much Blizzard abuses them. They will never learn because their confirmation bias shields them from new evidence.

Now it by “people” you don’t mean a particular generation, but instead the sum of all generations, then yes. The Gen Xers will eventually die. And at that point Blizzard is up a creek without a paddle. But that should give you a pretty good idea what the “short term” here is: a couple more decades.

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That’s ageist. It depends on the person; some are conservative for example and some are more revolutionary minds; the latter may be old and they may be more critical of Blizzard whatever the age. You are not very young yourself: are you fixated to praising Blizzard?

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The mini-set just came out, so BSM has been evolving quickly over the last three days, and it’s probably not done doing so.

I do not know what anti-aggro tech you run in your deck, but I have seen the following cards in BSM: Mixologist, Bumbling Bellhop and Gorgonzomu:

https://imgur.com/a/a8pRImK

Some other interesting cards that appear in some BSM deck lists include:

Glacial Shard
Doomsayer
Sleepy Resident
Yogg in the Box
Speaker Stomper
Audio Splitter + DJ Manastorm
Magatha (?)

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Mostly heat waves and tidepool pupils to repeat heat waves. Star power for the mid game boards that tsunami sucks at clearing, and the 7 Mana Zilliax because it’s fast enough to be relevant, unlike the 9 cost one.

It’s way better than the silly attempts im seeing of people using stuff like doomsayer.

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If you try to run anti-aggro tech in that deck you will probably make it worse. It’s already too fast so it will be prey to other fast decks by becoming 
slower.

Also “tech cards” in general are a trap for most people; they usually make sense in small metas at the very top; the rest usually waste their deck space.