I mean so many of you appear to hate Reno so much because you keep seeing it; or you hate this and that card that is so amazing at round 7 and 8; I mean think about it though: do you have to be consistently at round 7 and 8?
I believe the Devs made broken cards at high-Rounds because they believe those high-Rounds are just “anything goes”; and it’s “anything goes” because they want you to END YOUR GAME; you must soon reset and start over.
So relax and enjoy the game in a more aggro way so change your frame of mind towards that; make decks that never take you to round 8 “EVERY TIME”; make decks that if you see round 8 you say “oh dear… it will be chaos”.
You don’t need crazy power creeped late game for games to end.
Fatigue is designed in the system since the beginning. Eventually one side or the other will run out of cards and start dying.
If anything, it’s because late game became more powerful that it became possible for games to not end, as people got more heals/armor/generation, maybe shuffling stuff or extending their decks to not fatigue, getting upgraded hero powers so they can fight even with few/no cards, etc.
Power creeping late game also led to power creeping aggro. This made decks in the “middle” hard to find a place to exist. Not everybody wants to do either one extreme or the other.
You are right that people should relax, but the ones who aren’t relaxing are the hyper aggro and the ultra greed.
Low quality bait in my opinion. Opening post feels like only intent is to troll with the title “hot take:” followed by word salad with no key insight to speak of. Frankly it’s not a hot take because it’s not even a take to begin with.
There seems to be two break points in the game now… If you’re a minion deck and you cant kill your opponent on turn 5 your chance to win plummets as the efficient AOE removal starts kicking in at turn 5
THe other breakpoint is turn 8 or 9 where all the OTK decks pretty much can do their thing.
If you’re creating a hearthstone deck, depending on what type of deck you want to play those are the two turns you have to be aware of in my opinion.
You know what: maybe something like Fatigue is the key to striking a better balance in general in the game, because it’s both consistent but also very gradual and predictable so while it does define the game it does not just ruin in a round or 2 only (like some broken-OP cards I mean).
But of course that would need a vital change probably: move “fatigue” from “you run out of cards” to “you are after round 5!” etc.
It’s a very specific concept. People appear to consistently hate broken-OP cards like Reno and practically anything above mana-7 that works well but they don’t sit and think that there’s a chance the Devs have at their back of their mind “yeah: we don’t want you to not have broken-OP things after round 8: we want the game to have an end very soon”.
Also the above poster I just replied to made me think of a good solution on this (a potential one) (“solution”… more like an improvement probably).
Good observations I believe. You seem to define well some breakpoints. There’s a chance the Devs have actually a “guidelines” that follows breakpoints of at that specific “mana/round spots”.
They made a very conscious decision to put a lot more draw and discovery into the game about 2-3 years ago. That’s what’s enabled decks to go on longer. It’s also what’s basically killed midrange. Aggro doesn’t stall out anymore and control can just keep drawing (and generating answers).
It’s true aggro has been the preferred deck by Blizz since the beginning. They always wanted games to end asap (so more games are played and people are more likely to play no matter how much time they have). It’s also the most beneficial for players to play aggro. The games are fast. You can rank up 5x as fast using an aggro deck that wins by turn 8 (or if not, then concedes), than if you play those decks which can take 20 minutes for an average game. While they have printed countless cards which shut down aggro, even buffing Removals and Taunts, lifesteal abundant, healing abundant. But then they also continue to make broken 1 drops and 0 cost spells and etc. It’s truly rock(aggro)/paper(control)/scissors(combo).
Not really. C’mon now, Reno doesn’t end the game right away it’s removal. There’s a bigger issue here.
That’s the thing though. Excluding mana ramp (Druid), that’s a card that’s not coming down until turn 7 earliest. Against aggro, a high cost card is dead weight as far as the job of getting to turn 7 is concerned, so in order for it to be worth inclusion it needs to have a large effect.
What’s really going on is that the high cost cards that are actually viable are viable because they are balanced assuming an aggro opponent. Aggro will always be a thing in this game so design needs to take the existence of aggro into account.
Then a bunch of people get upset because they don’t play aggro, and the card just happens to be very good against them. They can’t try to counter it by winning the game first so they say it’s uncounterable (only because of their self imposed limitations) and rage all over the place.