Long time didn’t post and I was think if a REAL discussion can be achieve in this forum.
With many complains about class designs and struggles to come to term with the class identity, I thought if we can breakdown each class in term of class designs, followed with deck builds considerations, and play style tips.
As my knowledge is limited, it would require others to chip in to contribute and clarify whatever aspects that was missed out to to be added on.
Note: this is not a discussion of what we want each class to be, but rather what it is.
Let’s start off with Mage.
Introduction
Mage is considered a spell caster class with powerful spells as it main design foundation.
Mage usually does not have strong minions that challenges the board but instead have minions that supports spells interactions.
e.g.
minions that creates spells: Babbling Book, Wand Thief
minions that enhances spells: Lab Partner, Imprisoned Phoenix
Due to the nature of strong spell/weak minions, Midrange build are not common unless the specific expansion set supports it. As such, aggressive, control and/or combo build are more widely seen.
If you mean minions that have good stats for trading or have deathrattles good for trading/discourage enemy trades, then no mages don’t have that many, or at least they don’t rely on them too much (anomalus in wild? Lol)
But if you mean minions that can remove enemy minions (in ways that don’t depend on their own stats), mages actually have those. Currently there’s firebrand, imprisoned observer, firework elemental, reckless apprentice, and even glacier racer with frost spells, and in the past they had minions such as arcane flakmage, flamewaker, twilight flamecaller, and reno relicologist. Even if some of them have poor stats, the fact they could remove enemy minions would in the end make them strong at challenging the board.
Or if you mean minions with high damage potential or annoying affects that can act as soft taunts due to how threatening they are, mages have a few of those too, from mana wyrm to flamewaker to fallen hero (and other hero power boosting minions in the past) to ras, etc.
Also note that while many mage minions have quote unquote poor stats, that’s usually in the attack stat, while they have fair health. This makes them good at challenging the board in the sense they are harder to remove, especially if the mage has just used her instant effects to remove some/all of the opponent’s board. If you use instant damage on those things that could have went to the mage’s face, that may be very good for the mage, so even in the case a decent health minion didn’t challenge the board very well, it worked in the mage’s favor as a tank/stall.
There will always be some exceptions but in general Mage’s minions does not challenge the board.
This are design towards more of board clears with a body presence or a combo-ish intent. They are usually played from mid game to late game.
Other class have stronger options that start building board presence from T1.
e.g. Warlock’s Flame Imp, Void Walker, Shaman’s Tunnel Trogg, Hunter’s Beasts, Druid’s Gibberling, etc
As such, other class are already building the board while Mage’s tends to lag behind in most cases.
Tempo mage/Secret Mage is an exception in that dept. But when comparing to some other classes, Mages maybe limited to the stated 2ish decks. Add: another deck that breaks the mold was Mech Mage(GVG).
Not really. I would say mage minions are split pretty evenly between minions that generate value (spells) as you mentioned, and minions that can wrestle for board (via battlecries and effects as opposed to pure stats), as I mentioned.
Sure, but that’s why I said it depends on what you mean by challenging the board. Being able to fight for board from T1 may be important, but is just one aspect of challenging the board. Consider the current meta heavily favors decks that do hit the ground running from turn 1 (see: pallies, hunters), but not every deck that tries to do tempo succeed, even if they on paper have the cards. Example: locks have flame imp as you said, but zoolock or most aggro oriented locks aren’t doing too well atm. On the flip side, one of the most annoying paladin cards enabling them to win early game isn’t a minion, but a weapon that tutors secrets.
And this is why you don’t make these kinds of threads… Because someone like first123 will come along and nitpick everything to death instead of partaking in any of the discussions you were looking for.
Different views are welcome, and thus the intent to drive towards discussions.
Thou maybe tiring to explain to-fro until a common understanding or agree to disagree.
I do get you when you try to state Mage can challenge the board with minions. But in doing so, we can now say all class can challenge the board?
As such, I want to draw a distinction, else it becomes very confusing for people.
In context of the original post, “challenging the board” refers to a consistent minion base presence on board leading to eventual victory. Value trading becomes an important aspect of such games.
We have seen decks that seldom plays any minions but can control the board very well. This however I would not classify as “challenging the board” (or I could refine my statement at a later stage.)
But back to topic, when we look at Mage’s collection, we need to understand how that design impact the deck/archetype build.
Mage minions aren’t spectacular but aren’t bad either.
In general while their bodies are on par at best their effects are just really strong for the cost.
Lab partner is a good example of this.
Mage spells nowadays people liking or not are mediocre at best with a feel exceptions like c’thuns mask , fireball and runic orb.
The mages moves from a design were the spells were actually powerful for a design were their spell heavily rely on minion effects to be actually good.
This gave space to blizzard design decks like spell mage were have support cards that actually make the build work instead of you running minions like:
Incanter’s flow
Rising spring water
Font of power
Apexis blast
Deck of lunacy
If blizzard want mage design to get more diverse the answer is really simple.
Design more damage spell that can go face.
Not necessarily targeted ones but things like cinderblast.
Other alternative is to print fire spells support making both spell damage and ping mage more consistent.
Mech Mage is a mid range deck it was the first deck that got me Legend and the one i used to farm gold/dust to build the archtypes i wanted.
You forgot Big Spell Mage the best control deck in the history of the game(personal opinion of course) ,Secret Mage that needs no introduction, Giant Mage , Exodia Mage ,Cyclone Mage etc.
Writing from ipad and weary of writing long posts atm (for good reason lol) but just a thought…
Would it really be too complicated to start adding activated abilities to minions that can target and cost mana? Maybe even other costs as well? I’ve made my views on challenging the board clear elsewhere on this forum (all decks should challenge the board IMO, plz don’t flame me) and this is one way magic adds a lot of diversity to what you can achieve on the board…
From above we can see a few archetypes available to Mage. In each there is very specific support towards it which revolves around specific win conditions.
Also from above, we see Mage tends to be designed towards a tempo, control, control.
Players that prefers a more minion base build towards aggro/mid-range would often find disappointment when deck building.
side note:
Using an example of Dragon Mage where players wants to build a dragon theme mage deck. (with a mid-range feel)
By itself it is not a bad deck where there can be a few variations to cards selection, but it exists in a meta where the deck’s power level loses to other decks.
Mage as a spell caster class - to be continued…
Looking into the HS collection, we can see that there is no neutral spell pool.
As such, spell caster class can only rely on their own class spell, thus limiting their range of build.
Each expansion, there is only a limit of X number of class cards and shared between spells and minions.
The only leeway, is that some spells/minions enables discovers to compensate the limitation.