Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point
Altair, great post, despite my disagreements with you. Grats
Power creep varies by the ccg (or more specifically, by the people designing the ccg). Hearthstone is owned by quite possibly the greediest studio out there and has a lot of power creep. Yugioh (including its offshoots such as duel links) has greedy owners (though less so than hearthstone) so it also has a lot of power creep (but less so than hearthstone).
Battle spirits, digimon tcg, and duelyst on the other hand are owned by bandai (fairly reasonable company), and have relatively little power creep. Even more reasonable companies (often indie ones) are often responsible for ccgs with even less power creep (often none), such as d-spirits or elestrals. So yes the phenomenon exists, and no it isn’t in any meaningful sense universal or inevitable.
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You know that you’re talking about games are basically death or very near it when you talk about the ones with little powercreep don’t you?
Just saying.
Let’s be clear, this is not a mass polymorph. The deathrattles go off. That’s the first important thing. And those deathrattles trigger before the seeds pop up on board. Then you still have a board full of 2/2’s to deal with after you spent 4 mana. It also hits your own minions. That is another downside.
This card has always been strong because it’s one of Druid’s only way to deal with a wide board, but it’s absolutely not broken. Consider this card vs Shadow Word Ruin against an entire huge board. SWR would destroy all the minions and trigger DRs and leave nothing left. Poison Seeds would do the same, but leave minions still on board.
So the times you normally use Poison Seeds in the past was against a board flood…but really only worked against big huge boards, it didn’t really work against aggro board floods because you’re just refilling their board again with more minions.
Imagine a full board. You play 4 mana remove, but now you still have to remove the board again or take 14 damage. It’s not really as great as you make it out to be. And people knew this back in the day. You’d play this, wipe a Shaman’s board and refill it with 2/2’s and now they bloodlust and kill you anyway.
All you need to do is play Druid a few times with this card and it becomes very obvious what the weaknesses are in the card.
I could see this card coming back in rotation to core and seeing some play but not being anywhere near as good as you might think.
But the big takeaway here is that this triggers deathrattles, and that’s a major downside. It’s in no way a literal 4-mana mass polymorph.
A legit strategy with this card in WILD is you play this when the opponent board floods locking their board up full of 2/2s. Then you armor up and never remove another minion. If the opponent doesn’t have a way to kill their own 2/2s off, as Druid you can armor up big enough each turn to negate the 14 damage…so essentially this like an infinite “freeze” in a way until you get your combo and OTK the opponent. That’s really the only plus side of this card in wild and what it’s used for a lot of the time. For example, this is used in Mill Druid because the 2/2s take up board room so the opponent can’t empty their hand and they Mill themselves.
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Natural part of the game that can be kept in check by making counter cards available in the core set instead of “It’s got flavor so we should have it in core”.
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I’ve been saying this for years. Tech cards don’t really work. Everything should have a counter, and the counter shouldn’t be unplayable.
Much like how good cards have combinations of good effects (see Ethereal Oracle which has Spell Damage AND Draw), cards can have multiple effects that also include counter uses.
For example, why isn’t there a minion that has Battlecry: Silence a minion. Draw a card. ? Why can’t tech be included as part of the other good effects? Or why can’t a card have an optional tech instead? Like Battlecry: Destroy all cards in each deck that didn’t start there. If none are destroyed, then do X instead. And X can just be what the original design of the card was.
This game would have so much more counter play if it did this and it’s something this game needs since you cannot counter anything during your opponent’s turn like most card games have.
That’s why Hearthstone feels like “whoever does X first wins” and people are just rushing to do X. That’s what creates solitaire like games.
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The lack of Polymorph effects is a HUGE issue. They wouldn’t have even needed to nerf Zilliax ONCE if there were multiple polymorph effects in the core set. Not to mention other combo pieces that are abused off getting out cheap and early.
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Needs to be a polymorph effect from a minion and not a spell though, or something like devolving missiles.
However, I think those should be limited because morph effects are cheap and they completely screw over many different deck styles. Deathrattles are already a weak keyword with Battlecry being vastly superior, and if morph effects are allowed in neutral cards, everyone would run it, including aggro (much like why Even Shaman runs Devolve) and taunts and Deathrattle become meaningless.
What we really need is just better silence options that double as other things.
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I disagree. DR minions had free rain all year. There are barely any effects beyond stealing the minion that shuts down a DR minion. They did that because they were rained in the previous year and they wanted them to be playable this year. The problem is that DR effects are just as if not more powerful then most BC effects right now.
There needs to be counters to both in the core set. A punish for decks that spam BC effects and a way to handle DR/Resurrection builds. Devolving Missiles is fine but a general use spell or minion with a similar effect would be good.
I doubt they put starfish in standard and really that doesn’t stop Resurrection decks.
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Yeah, I agree the DR stuff is powerful now, but it’s rarely been this way. Anytime silence has been decent as a neutral minion like starfish or when multiple morphs exist through Shaman and Mage, DR builds are basically non-existent or non-meta important. And in most metas, we had those things.
I also wouldn’t doubt if the next expansion has these things as an answer to Starship shenanigans. What we can’t have is multiple stealing options AND morphing options readily available or Starships will just be non-existent. You may as well just delete DR keywords from the game at that point.
Battlecry has always been stronger. Always. It’s immediate effect and use and DR is value later and there are far many more ways to stop a DR going off than a BC going off.
A neutral morph effect that is targeted would really change a lot in this game both in standard and wild so they have to be very careful with it. I’m more on the side of using Silence and having good Silence cards rather than pure morph. You have to be very careful with morph on a minion because if they do that you will shore up one of the biggest weaknesses Rogue has. If they do that, they have to rotate Shadowstep (assuming the morph is attached to a BC)
What I like more is cards like Plaguespreader. That was a very nice tech idea that wasn’t too strong and wasn’t too weak and couldn’t be abused via battlecry and it had potential to affect both players. Anytime a card has the ability to do something strong but also have the side effect of being used against you as well is fine by me. I think that’s great design.
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Blizzard started making dumb decisions like that when they merged with Activision. Their new Executives started pushing them very obviously into short term profit instead of the long term. It’s very self-destructive so it’s effectively very dumb even for their own good.
E.g. WoW dropped to 10% of its peak popularity in an internet of 10X more potential players so they effectively dropped their popularity by (1/10)^-1 X 10 = 100 times.
The only reason Hearthstone can show some numbers of “maintenance” is that the poorest countries still add internet users but mainly on mobile.
Spreader was a really good card when it was released. I played that in a bunch of my decks because of how disruptive it was to decks that aren’t doing the same thing. Prefect card for aggro/tempo/mid decks to get some hand disruption in and really make the sweepers think twice about being played.
My biggest complaint is the resurrection effects. Either limit them really hard or give us some way that isn’t Hero Reno to deal with recurring minions. We have another year of Zilliax and with a reset i can guarantee it’s going to come back in fashion strong at the bginning of the rotation. I don’t want another Zilliax meta.
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I’m kind of hoping for a Plaguespreader that affects the board instead. That would be nice.
But we’re likely just going to end up with some new silence card or morph effect on a stick.
The Reno stuff answers and Reska stealing stuff isn’t a fun answer to that stuff and we should steer clear of that. I’m ok with poofing single minions though, give us that!
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