Plenty of stall with freezes and secrets, plenty of draw and card generation to complete quest and now the new beast to repeat spells.
Nerf the parrot to repeat only spells of 6 of more. And nerf the new mage mech to only deal 1 or 2 ping damage. Tired of new standard cards screwing wild. Or outright ban these cards
In Wild the quest reward should be “You win the game, take it, you deserved.”
Aggro decks killing in turn 4 is common place there and combo decks like bomb rogue can easily kill in turn 6 without a board.
Play the starting hand with 1 card less, generate spells don’t start in your deck, play the spells, get the reward and finally make things happens are insanely hard in Wild, have way more problematic decks before quest mage.
Plenty of stall with freezes and secrets, plenty of draw and card generation to complete quest and now the new beast to repeat spells
Its one of several “unbeatable” decks in wild.
I dont know what is required for blizz to consider a deck is too broken for wild. The test for standard used to be they should not be able to kill you from a empty board in 1 turn. But that is no longer true ie demon hunter,
It is one of the more anoyying decks In that you have to sit their for turn after turn while they kill you, but on the other hand sometime you can rush them into making a mistake and trying to go infinite turns without the right cards in hand. Its quite satisfying to see then play the quest then concede after 1 turn
Watching for 90 seconds on turn 6 or 7 while a rogue vomits a dozen cards and then kills you is a much faster and less annoying way to die.
There’s so many broken things in wild… mage has 2 broken decks, druid 1, rogue at least 3 in ladder and I could go on and on, but there’s still space in between specially in lower brackets. Wild can’t be fixed, it can be downtone as per last shammy’s nerf that had taken over ladder but nothing else.
Yeah. (Insert Class Here) shouldn’t win any game ever. There is something seriously wrong with the game if (Class) can win a game.
So informative. I know, being able to grasp the concept of brokeness is truly monumental. Do you have somewhere else to make useless comments?
I know it’s frustrating when they pulled out time warp combo, but at least I only see maybe 1 out of 10 matches, that’s just for me.
It’s a fairly complicated deck and hard to pull off, a lot of tech cards also are instant win into this, I’m going to make an assumption and say they won’t nerf it.
Hard disagree with this, they just need a real banlist like every other eternal CCG format. Check out modern in MTG, or the various banlists they have for all of their formats (including standard).
In general…
I think there are a few design principles that make balancing Wild particularly challenging, the big one being that they largely try to balance Wild and standard in tandem but the formats have very different needs. Other more established CCGs work around this problem by maintaining their eternal formats with extensive banlists, allowing people to have fun with things in standard and banning the stuff that is less appropriate for an eternal format. Banlists are pretty necessary if you want to use the same cards in multiple formats basically, because not all cards/mechanics/play patterns are equally suitable for all the different rulesets/game modes.
Being a digital CCG I don’t think Hearthstone necessarily needs to expand it’s banlist because they have other tools, but I do think more temporary bans in Wild might help them more actively maintain the metagame while printing whatever they want in standard. Let people have fun with new stuff in standard, ban the cards that are less appropriate for eternal formats in Wild, then unban and nerf them eventually with rotation so eventually Wild players at least get to use a version of the card when standard is done with it. I am also down for the devs to just expand the banlist though, I’ve been playing CCGs for 20+ years and know there are a lot of tough decisions involved in maintaining healthy metas.
There are also three specific play patterns that I think could use a bit more attention if they want Wild to continue being fun as power creep inevitably happens with the release of more and more sets. Everything that follows is very much IMO:
1.) The first are decks that do not develop interesting boardstates that encourage dynamic interaction or bother competing for the board at all.
In my experience players do not enjoy staring at empty or heavily one-sided boards for entire games while being forced to go face regardless of the deck they are playing, and losing entirely to hidden information that you have zero opportunities to interact with does not feel fair or fun. OTK/APM mage, Switcheroo, Hunter Questline to a certain extent, infinite turn combos etc.
2.) The second is the way infinite reanimator strategies completely warp people’s perception of how a traditional control deck should play by providing infinite/maximized redundancy/reliability/inevitability.
While I realize reanimation strategies are meant to be abused in CCGs in general, it seems to me like 100% of the time they come up in Hearthstone they are effectively used as infinite copy/redundancy effects more than anything else. This combined with a handful of key minions that serve as very effective roadblocks creates a situation where there is a very easy package of cards that you see over and over again built around resurrecting the same small pool of 2 or 3 minions, effectively copying those minions infinite times often starting very early in the game around turn 4 or 5. I’m thinking all the N’Zoth/rebirth shenanigans, big priest, shaman stuff with Scrapyard Colossus etc.
3.) The third is access to fast mana/circumventing the mana system, which honestly seems like the most obvious to me.
I’m not talking mana ramp, I’m talking mana circumvention where you are able to break the mana system of the game entirely. The mana mechanic is the primary power throttling device in the game, so when you enable cost reduction to go below (1), various combos dropping 10 cost cards onto the table turn 5, armageddon/smokestack play patterns like celestial alignment, zero-cost recursive hero powers etc you are really warping the core game loop that’s supposed to make Hearthstone fun. This is different from simply accelerating a gameplan by a turn, and I personally don’t think it is healthy for the game.
All IMO obviously.
If you take out all of those things you are basically just playing classic, I personally think 2 of 3 of the things you mentioned there are fine, see whereas if I was creating an extensive ban list I’d be banning mostly 1 and 2 mana slot cards because that is really where wild is being broken, turn 4 win aggro strategies that can refill their hand have absolutely zero place in the game because absolutely nothing can be faster and you cannot outvalue it because it has so much draw that you’re basically just hoping that they don’t draw optimally which happens like 40% of games, but in the 60% of games where his draws and sequencing are fine he will win.
I don’t see an issue with APM mage which was the best deck hearthstones ever had or quest mage which so far seems pretty decent too, but I can agree that switcheroo and hunter questline are so linear in the way they play out that there is zero interactivity (but I could name about 30 decks that are too simple for my liking that I’ve faced off in my last 100 or so games, perhaps oversimplicity is killing hearthstones feel as well), if you see issues with quest mage then you’re bound to dislike decks like mecha’thun or well any deck that isn’t trying to win by creating a board state and that doesn’t mean these decks aren’t interactive, because it’s more telling when they don’t play a card that you know they have something else in their hand and if you don’t get that piece of information then I’m sorry it’s lost on you.
I would personally ban all standard cards from wild and that way they can nerf/buff with the two sets separate, but if they think it’s a good idea to continuously keep powercreeping in the newer sets then they need to nerf every card before it becomes wild. Because seriously when you have cards that are like 1 mana draw 4, you know this is going to create opportunities for things to be consistently broken, combo decks without the hyper draw element aren’t even problematic nor are aggro decks because they have no refill and just die to value if you can survive them for a few hits.
Yeah, I mean that would be a pretty extreme response but powercreep is basically necessary to sell packs so I agree with the general spirit, I just think it can be more targeted because most cards in standard simply aren’t good enough to cut it in Wild anyway. Other CCGs with less maintenance tools and much larger card pools/design spaces do just fine with a targeted banlist, and I think it would make sense for Blizzard to at least start there…
Its healthy because it isn’t all that much different from other OTK combo decks. Taking 1000000 turns in a row for a win condition isn’t all that much different than just making someone explode immediately when popping off. The combo deck got to pop off they won it doesn’t matter what form the pop off takes. That decks win condition is on par with the power level of the format. You shouldn’t be looking at it as Waah Mage gets 1000000 turns that’s so unfair. It’s Combo deck got to it’s combo. You wouldn’t be crying this much if any other combo deck like Mecha’thun, DK Paladin or some 100000 damage OTK did their thing that wins on the spot so why you cry about Mage doing their version.
So by contrast, the less fun things. Serious Mode. I think that’s backwards. I mean, both formats should be fun, but out of the two Standard should be the more serious format of the two. Making it the format for tournaments doesn’t exactly makes tournaments accessible to newer players on a budget, but slightly more accessible.
I think Wild should sit somewhere between Standard and Duels. Duels is clearly the pseudo-constructed minimal seriousness mode.
Your three points are basically a manifesto on how you would implement Serious Mode in Wild. I don’t think that’s a good goal in the first place, much less whether those suggestions would get you there. Frankly, I didn’t read past the first point.
That said, I think the key design goal for Wild and Standard shouldn’t involve the seriousness spectrum at all. Instead, I think the goal for Wild should be Deck Diversity, because Wild is full of old players with old cards who’ve seen everything and don’t want to play the same matchups over and over again. I think the design goal for Standard should be Skill Testing Matchups (which doesn’t necessarily have a high diversity requirement), because if it doesn’t have that eSports becomes a joke. And I think the design goal for Duels should be the polar opposite of seriousness.
Your whole post is built around this extremely subjective premise, and we’ve argued about this at length before…
You said it. Not me. When you say “let them have the fun things in Standard, but in Wild yada yada yada” you are directly implying that Wild should be more serious than Standard.
Ah, I see - miscommunication. My point was that it’s easier to control/move metagames in standard because the card pool is smaller and there is a rotation. They may like the impact/interactions of a card in one format but not another basically, and I would rather see a temporary ban than a compromise in standard or undesired interaction/impact in Wild.
I imagine you’d have quite an extensive ban list in order to bring diversity back to wild, I’ve been playing aggro decks almost exclusively due to their low cost and their sheer effectiveness, but the common thing is that every aggro deck I played relied on pirates, if you nerf one pirate there are basically 5 or 6 other candidate cards that are almost as good to replace it with and that’s why the only things that have really shook that up are actually other op aggro tribal synergies like mechs or murlocs which also isn’t really any different, then it’s kind of a miracle when this base power level exists that decks like even warlock find a way to slot into that and mainly because it’s control and sustain is absolutely king, then also druid which has way too much armour gain to be considered healthy.
Then on every expansion you also have a broken interaction which tends to stay for a month and that can be 25% of the time or 50% of the time if the miniset is also flawed and I’m talking about in a way that a game can end by turn 3 because I particularly saw a few of those with coin side, I even achieved this a few times with token decks, can’t remember which ones now. If you can issue enough bans that stop decks winning between turns 3-6 then maybe OTK becomes king, but you’d also have a much more diverse meta as even midrange decks with disruption tools become viable and there are a lot of those kinds of decks that just slightly get edged out.
Yeah, I’ve been saying for a wild that something needs to be done about the infinite turns bs. Since the quest was released, too much twinspell and “add a coin to hand” effects have been added, making the quest easy to finish.
Then you have the pop off turns. This isn’t a combo deck where you disrupt 1 piece and they’re done. You’ve got 2 parrots, brann, and that naga that adds spells back to hand. There’s too much to hit and then you have that spell that adds 1 mana copies to hand, which allows any combo you didnt hit to go off 1-2 more times.
I think if anything the quest reward needs to be changed to have the text “Can only be used once per game”, then set it up so if it does go off again, it doesn’t do anything.
Or if they still want the vargoth crap, then they can just change the cost of the reward to 4.
This is perfect. They should only nerf something if it’s absolutely, completely broken. I do agree that the infinite turn mage is broken, but they should nerf it in such a way that it doesn’t affect standard. If necessary, just ban the bird and address this deck when the bird rotates. I consider myself a wild player, but in some metas I’ve play more standard than wild. Both need to be healthy IMO.