Doesnt Tickatus design philosophy contradict with coldlight oracle ban?

I mean wasnt the oracle ban to prevent Fatique builds?

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Actually, it was the whole “mill/fatigue” strategy that they were trying to ban/prevent.

Not just oracle (since it’s in Wild, not banned), but how it interacts with mill-builds. I still use it in my rogue mill deck in Wild.

I like playing it to remind people, mill is a way to lose when you think you’re going to win by any other means.

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i also liked to play it in my mill rogue, was just wondering why they came up with such a card after striking them in the past

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For anyone wondering, the reason for Coldlight Oracle’s HoF was stated in the Year of the Raven announcement:

Coldlight Oracle – Coldlight Oracle is becoming exclusive to Wild for several reasons. It offers unusually strong neutral card draw which can be detrimental to class identity. Its “downside” can destroy opponent’s cards and prevent opponents from playing the deck they built—which in turn limits some designs related to Battlecry and effects that return a minion to hand.

Taken individually, any one of these reasons might have been enough to prompt a promotion to the Hall of Fame, but when viewed as a whole, we feel that it’s time for Coldlight Oracle to leave Standard play.

Based on my reading of that, it seems the mill effect by itself wasn’t the issue, but rather the combination of milling plus its impact on the design of cards that affect Battlecries and return to hand effects. Tickatus, being a Legendary card that costs 3 times as much as Coldlight Oracle and needs to be corrupted is a lot less impactful than Coldlight Oracle would be under the same circumstances.

EDIT: and of course, Coldlight Oracle is a neutral card. That seems to be a pretty big consideration as well.

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Only because they didn’t play test to see that you can get 6 Ticks and essentially mill 30 cards. That’s just crazy, even if it takes 10 turns to pull off (corrupt Tick, dupe tick twice for 1 mana, then the 10 mana get your corrupted cards back corrupted and they cost 0 this turn - if you were able to get the other 3 off at 20 mana cost, that’s a T10 of 15 milled cards for 10 mana + 3 8/8s + 1 /10/10).
In case you were trying to defend tick and justify it’s mill-ability as an ok thing again.

Here’s a generally accepted standard for definitions and evolution of the game for HS that’s 3rd party owned https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Mill and the HoF action was meant as a means to break what Mill had evolved into thanks to cards from the previous several expansions adding cards that made mill a competitive standard deck.

Also, the definition you showed describes the mill effect “Its “downside” can destroy opponent’s cards and prevent opponents from playing the deck they built”.

I remember playing both rogue and druid mills across several expansions. Mill was how I got my golden rogue :stuck_out_tongue:

EDIT: it was one of the best way to counter control decks. For the OP, fatigue wasn’t the mechanic, it was milling; however, to that point, IDK why they brought it back. Hopefully so we can build more mill decks :slight_smile:

And Mecha’thun Priest could end the game by turn 10 back when aggro had much more limited tools to close the game. It was still a mediocre deck. I don’t find perfect highroll scenarios particularly compelling to evaluate card balance.

I also don’t play Tickatus Warlock, so it’s not like I have a dog in this fight.

Yeah I think a lot of people who look at control deck win conditions as being op are kind of looking at a red herring. When control decks feel oppressive (which they don’t right now but that’s besides the point), it’s because of the enablers that get them to their win con.

The same is going to be true for tickatus, if he ever becomes an issue it won’t be because of Tickatus himself, it’ll be whatever gets the warlock to the point that they can afford to play him.

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That’s about as likely to happen in a competent game as a high keeper ra lethal from mogu cultists imo.

why do people keep forgeting oracle is card draw and tickatus isnt

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This. Based on the dev quote earlier, Coldlight was primarily HoFed because it was a very efficient neutral card draw, and would give classes that were supposed to have weak draw capability an effective draw option, while the downside of the card, drawing your opponent cards, punished slower control decks with large hand size by burning cards, essentially being an additional benefit.

They couldn’t just nerf away the milling potential because then the card would basically be a straight up better Arcane Intellect for all classes, and it’s the fact that it’s an Arcane Intellect for all classee that they had a problem with in the first place anyway. They could have nerfed the amount of cards drawn but no one would play a 3 mana 2/2 that cycles a card, except maybe pure murloc decks.

I also suspect that Blizz didn’t want to straight up destroy Mill decks, either, so limiting it to Wild was pretty much the best option for the health of the game.

Tickatus, however, is just burn 5 cards. It has no card draw attached, therefore it isn’t reloading your hand. You can say it can burn up to 30 cards but that is EXTREMELY highroll and won’t happen in your average game.

On top of that, Tickatus is very weak against high aggression decks, which is almost always very prevalent in the meta, and spending the time corrupting and playing him will generally be suicidal against said hyper aggressive decks. Meanwhile those hyper aggressive decks could run Coldlight for additional draw and body without caring about their opponent drawing cards. Could you imagine, say, Libram Paladin with Coldlight? One of their greatest weaknesses is not drawing their librams or libram cost reducing cards. Coldlight would give them additional card draw to accomplish their goals while also supplying them with an additional body to cast librams on. And if Coldlight also happens to cause their opponent to burn a Hex or something? That’s a huge bonus!

THAT is why Coldlight was HoFed