Starting from the basics in every ccg ever created in the human history there s always a set of cards that gives you the ‘‘groundwork’’ on building decks around them.
In MTG its rotating and is reffered as ‘‘core set’’ and in Hs its pernament and is reffered as the ‘‘classic and basic set’’.
Problem with druid right now is that the class has 0 basic/classic cards to build around on decks. Therefore the class suffers from 0 creativity and unfortunately that problem cannot be solved by overpowered expansion cards.
Druid right now feels like a class that can only play with whatever garbage they serve to him.
-Hey you got token cards in RoS —> Play tokens
-Hey you got a mediocre quest in SoU —> Play with the quest
-Hey you got dragons in DoD —> Play with dragons
But all i see in all these things are decks that basically are pushed archetypes. The players creativity on the class is 100% completely lost and while Hs was a never a game of huge creativity you could always build a few different druid decks (Especially in wild) and try them on ladder or maybe do a few changes in existing archetypes. But that s not the case anymore.
A class that doesnt have a groundwork is meant to lose its identity and its fanbase along with the joy of playing it.
But all Blizzard does is nerf/ HoF basic/classic cards and then release broken expansion cards while refusing a core set or a total remake of the current evergreen set.
So what druid has become? It has simply become a stiff class that has no fanbase or taste but rather has a few people playing whenever they see a cool winning deck on ladder. And while im sure that the whole solo adventure cards will push the dragon druid archetype i still dont wanna play with the class anymore and it used to be the class i liked the most.
Now of course there are more classes out there but seriously the way Blizzard treats the basic core set is basically ruining their game.
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Well - I said something similar about a year ago. The Druid Classic & Basic cards … by themselves … have a fundamental problem after the WB nerf. They are all overpriced and understatted.
Druid Classic/Basic cards were all designed around the assumption that Druids were going to Ramp early in the game and so the cards were all priced based on the idea that Druids would have a faster mana curve. The WG nerf nukes that concept, and Druids are left with a bunch of Classic/Basic cards that by themselves are weaker stats and higher costs than comparable cards from other classes. There are a few exceptions, but holistically speaking the Druid Classic/Basic set is rather lackluster and weak.
The solution - according to Blizzard - is to make the Druid Classic/Basic cards absolutely 100% dependent on good cards in the expansions in order to lift them out of Dumpster Tier status.
Here are a few examples of Team5’s design philosophy in action…
Stalladris. A card that makes otherwise weak Druid C/B cards much better.
Druid Quest: A card that also makes otherwise weak Druid C/B cards better. In the Shadows meta, who would have believed that Cenarius would actually be good?
Quite a few cards in the Year of the Dragon have been basically designed to make the bad Druid C/B cards and make them ‘good enough’ to put into decks again. So that’s the plan as Team5 has set things up. Druid Classic/Basic cards are supposed to suck hardcore. You are supposed to be dependent on getting cards from the new sets in order for Druids to be any good at all.
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Wild Growth got nerfed because the Balance Team was too dumb to see the Ultimate Infestation and Spreading Plague were the problems. Then there was the even stupider Juicy Psychmelon which fueled the retarded Star Aligner combo. Melon also somehow didn’t get nerfed either. For druid, I don’t mind giving them the token archetype, but honestly I’d like to see ramp come back.
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I’m actually enjoying Druid right now. Embiggen decks are just fun to play and I also enjoy highlander.
Not the best meta decks sadly but a nice change from spamming tokens.
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The worst part about the druid cards is the fact that they didnt get nerfed because they were good or druid was good. Those cards got nerfed because druid had a few annoying cards that made him unfun to play against(DK, Ultimate infestation, Spreading Plague, Branching Paths etc.) and now after all these powerful cards rotated out of standard, and the good classic cards got nerfed there is nothing left.
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While you re 100% right the strange thing is that things should work the exact opposite way. In other words the expansion cards must be supplementary and not core and the Basic/Classic cards must be core and not supplementary.
And to make things clearer let me take the example of MTG. It has a rotating core set. But still black will always have in its core set a card that destroys minions, blue will always have in its core set a card that counters spells, green will always have a card that buffs minions etc and these cards will be able to be used in a large variety of decks despite the fact that these cards might be different from year to year. Therefore the identity of the colour remains
Druid, the ramp class, doesnt have normal ramp cards for about a year now. And now what he gets is conditional ramping for just one deck archetype. THATS WRONG. Druid must always have eligible ramping cause that his identity.
TLDR: Core cards (whether they exist as rotated or not) are supposed to put a foundation from where a class can start and build from 0 and not the opposite.
(Btw i dont disagree with anything you said just adding a few more points)
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As a Druid main class player i have to disagree on the “no fan base” as some people might like the original druid where you can build upon different things return. Recently i even talk about how i miss old Decks like Taunt druid, which ppl only refer to Jade/Had Taunt druids, not plague even tho it was T2/T1 at a time when agro and mid range was strong.
I’ll be a die hard druid player , but I do agree it has no joy playing over and over… Really the only Druid Deck to play is Tokens for long term stability and “tokens” might be use as Druid core set, but druid was to have swarm and big things also, and sure we can ‘swarm’ but no real big dudes to do stuff. We’re more of a token mid-range deck at best now with little to no real end game.
But I do miss when a class had it’s ‘core’ it what the class should be know as, but all the token generator and etc make other classes just as good if not better then token druid but with real minions.
Let’s not mention the fact our ‘spread’ in druid is SO strung out, it didn’t make a full circle , Attack Power Druid? I think Warrior “Invoke” was mean for Druid at 1st cause some those cards would seem more like a Druid thing to enable Attack power cards Like like we got in RR, Then the options really narrow down, with Heal druid being push on 1 cool card with no long term support, Heal Druid? cool ideal but hard to have effective , you’re better off with some heal and the Stag.
I can go on mean archetype decks that would be Cool and amazing but it’s like 1 off filler and dropped.
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Meanwhile Priest never had a good classic set to begin with…
The whole evergreen concept is honestly a mess. They’ve nerfled a bunch of the most important cards in half the classes and sent a bunch more to hall of fame, and the replacements they gave us are all crap. They may be better off just revamping their stance on evergreen and rotate the whole darn thing at this point. It’s not like they haven’t changed their stance on other develoment issues before…
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