I figured it’s clear it’s “minutes”. Why? Because it literally says “min” right on the table with a clock next to it.
I mean lets be fair BSM is not all that materially different from hydration station warrior. A little faster and a little more consistent but the same mana cheating principle which means warranted or not it’ll probably catch a bunch of nerfs and everyone can go back to playing warlock and druid with a smattering of shaman.
This isn’t proof of nothing. Your statement is that a deck that kills fast can’t be strong in the mid to late game because it would be too strong to exist, thus it needs to be aggro. Which is wrong. A deck can kill fast and be strong in the mid to late game. Its the point of midrange.
You’re so close to getting it that it’s surprising you don’t. A deck can kill fast and be strong in the late game because decks aren’t exclusively balanced nor exclusively slotted into strict archetypes.
Several examples of this existed through the ages. I’ve just given you one. BS mage is another.
It’s not a matter of arythmetics. Looking at a deck average game time to determine it’s gameplay plan is like looking at feet size to determine someone’s height. Frequently related but in no way a rule.
Look at the deck list and think: BSM plays a blowout turn at 5. Then repeats it, ideally, at 6. Then it can repeat it again, if it has the cards, at 7. Then it can play it’s cards for their full cost between 8-10. What is it? What kind of deck has a average to below average starting curve, then starts with strong plays on the mid turns, capping of just before or at max mana?
By your logic, aggro decks.
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You think that you describe anything out of the ordinary for fast decks. Yes even flood paladin sometimes wins by round 8. But the more it goes on the worse their chances; especially if a control deck is the opponent; the fast decks have a probability of losing against control that approaches ~100% after round 10 so those late rounds you see are usually either between two fast decks (because both are bad at late rounds) or against a mid-range(“combo”) that escaped the aggression of the first rounds.
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God, having to explain basic stuff is too much work.
What i’m describing is a midrange game plan. Aggro is not planning to go to turn 8. It runs no turn 8 cards, let alone turn 10. Your concept of “fast decks” is utterly meaningless.
This whole spiel of yours also applies to midrange vs midrange matchups, which usually go to late game, and get worse chances of beating control the longer the game goes.
The difference between Midrange and Aggro is how far the gameplan goes, not the time the deck takes to win.
If you think your “Aggro decks” are planning to go to turn 8 and beyond, you’re delusional. Aggro is playing it’s blow out turn and running out of juice around turn 6. Decks that plan to go to turn 8-10 are midrange decks (usually).
If you think BSM isn’t planning to go to turns 8-10, you’re also missing on how the deck works.
Do yourself a favor and go see the lists of Face Hunter throught the metas. That’s an aggro deck. Then go see the list of the original Khadgar Mage, which frequently won on turn 4 but planned to go far longer. That’s a midrange deck.
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Deck trackers keep track of your average game time as well as the other stats they record
I really dont know if average game time is shared publicly or for personal use only
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It’s really not very good, it’s a dice roll to hope for double 6’s
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The common version is generally aiming to win before then. The longer the game goes on, the tougher it is for that one to win. Bigger minions soak most of its damage potential, and better clears exist to wipe a board of elementals.
You can absolutely build big spell mage with the longer games in mind, but they are not wrong that the common version has a lot of the hallmarks of an aggro deck.
It’s big push for the win is very similar to flood paladin, but unlike flood paladin that you stop from hurting you by board clearing, you stop BSM’s damage by flooding the board with higher HP minions. You can also just out aggro it if they don’t have the most insane of the high rolls. A bunch of them are even teched against the mirror, which is making them even more vulnerable to other strategies.
That’s why you are seeing BSM in a new refinement phase. They are trying to stop the meta from making them irrelevant by just using the old good decks.
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In the best, most perfect of the worlds, BSM will generate 2 coins, find a Skyla, Find tsunami, play Skyla on 4 and win. Yaaaaaay (Still not aggro, would be closer to a absurdly fast combo).
I’m reality, the deck has no tutors for any of these before turn 6, so the turn 4 win is a high roll.
The deck starts it’s power turns at 5 - King Tide into Tsunami, Skylla into Tsunami, or 6 with Surfalopoda into Into the Sea into Tsunami, and then plans to repeat it with even more power plays at 6-7 with the Rogue 4 mana, and if it all aligns even more power plays at 7-8, topping off, if all else fails, with a King Tide on 9 for one spell at 9 and two at 10, but this is basically a failure situation already.
The deck starts with a god forsakenly bad early curve (for however bad a 2/2 into 2/3 into 3/2 is) and hopes to last to 5 to start out valuing actual aggro decks (like the really fast pirates) and out tempoing actual control decks (Like Druid).
It’s almost textbook midrange, it only has a powerful blowout on 4 that frequently win games outright. It’s gameplan goes up to turn 7-8.
And as built, the win rate drops off precipitously the longer it waits to do the combo.
It’s basically only competitive in win rate because of the high roll.
Absolute nonsense. The most simplistic fast(“aggro”) deck in the game is the flood paladin. It has a gigantically expensive Amitus in the deck by default; those decks are not always “Treant Druid” with mainly 2-cost cards; it’s just that they HOPE to be very powerful by round ~5 and then they hope to be lethal by ~7 and then have a final chance at ~8-9(but mainly against other decks that are mediocre that late).
Compare Flood Paladins curve, which largely tops out at 4, with a single Amitus in the upper end largely to facilitate a last ditch try on turn 7 (which is, by the way, one of the lowest played winrate cards in the deck, because by the time you’re getting to Amitus your plan has gone out of the window), to BSM, which by default STARTS at 5, and plans to go all the way up to 8, and you will understand the deck differences.
Heck, look at Flood Paladin and count how many turn 8 cards it runs?
What you’re describing is a midrange deck. Aggro doesn’t HOPE to be powerful at the early game. It IS powerful at the early game, because it overloads the early game with their most powerful cards to actually win in it; and they want to be ending the game at around turn 6. Not making a power play: ending the game. Decks that hope to maybe have lethal at 7 are Midrange decks.
By the time Aggro gets to turn 5, it wants to have absolute board dominance to actually kill you.
The terminology I used at the round 5 bit not agreeing with what words you would use is not important; when I said it hopes to be powerful at 5 I didn’t mean it’s very rare: I meant it’s the main thing it does very well at 5; I described it that way because I was writing next that if that doesn’t go as planned it may go later (which was the sub-topic there).
By the way calling Amitus mediocre because the stats sites show it bad is very sketchy; I don’t trust the stats sites on individual card stats always; sometimes those stats should be VERY obviously ignored.
For example they were showing Shopper in Shopper DH being very bad; it was obviously the best card in the deck but the way it is interacting was fooling the stats methodology; Amitus may be similar.
It should never be the case that one deck determinates whole meta. Like… either u play BSM or a deck that can counter it. That is like taking 80% away from the game.
I can’t believe some people are actually defending this deck. At the moment the game ain’t fun, which it is supposed to be?
It makes sense to support it a bit, because we had way too many mid-range(“combo”) decks. This is practically a mid-range killer because its true nature is very fast (“aggro”) because its average speed of a match is almost the same with a pain lock (the fastest deck in the game).
Yeah, you guys found a hole and you dropped inside it, as expected.
Average game duration doesn’t tell you anything in a vacuum about deck archetypes involved, so if you want those data to mean something, you have to compare them with other average durations.
For example, average game duration of 5 minutes can very well be any deck archetype’s average game duration, so we need to collect and categorize other archetypes and average game durations.
With that said, we can’t even all agree about how to categorize deck archetypes anymore. I think in those terms a lot, and lately I’ve been having troubles doing that.
How do you classify Insanity warlock? How do you classify Reno Druid?
What even are the archetypes?
Aggro, midrange, control?
What do you even find out about a deck with archetypes being so vague and general?
A combo is not an archetype, it’s a way of finishing the game. You can play Insanity warlock as a full combo deck, but your winrate will suffer a lot, because it has this entire aggro package which can reliably finish the game by turn 5 with a perfect curve and not a single combo involved.
Same about Rainbow Shaman. It’s clearly not aggro, it’s clearly not full combo. I guess you could say it’s midrange, but again, many finesse go out the window.
Today’s Hearthstone is NOT a good spot to practice basic analysis. It’s a complex, dynamic system with many intertwining variables which change your interpretation based on the context, and we don’t even have the variables NOR the context defined yet.
EDIT: In my research from other sciences, I’ve found that major divisions/categorization MUST be 3-s or 4-s to be relevant for a complex system.
For example, a categorization which includes 5 archetypes, will not be nearly as useful as the one which includes 4 archetypes, or 3, because there will be redundancy and overlapping between them.
I’m yet to find a satisfying categorization of archetypes with 3 or 4 categories, and even if I did, a lot of decks would be hybrids nowadays.
EDIT 2: I’m working on a categorization which includes:
a) Win cons - aggro, midrange, attrition
b) Playstyles - Combo, Control, Tempo, Value
but one of those two groups is missing one additional member.
I clearly differentiate between playstyles and win-cons, because you can play a deck suboptimally if you always play your preferred playstyle, and because without doing so, every deck in the game is a hybrid of some kind. With this categorization, aggro control and even aggo combo are like height and width, 2 dimensions which all need to be specified to explain the deck archetype.
According to that categorization, Insanity warlock is aggro combo deck, while for example, Reno Druid is Attrition tempo deck.
Sure, you can play ANY deck with your preferred playstyle, but your winrates will suffer. For example, you can’t make attrition player out of me if my life depended on it. I’ll just use control tools to gain tempo and lose because of it later on.
EDIT 3: I think I finally made it. I added “Value” as opposed to control, tempo and combo as a playstyle as I see that’s one of the biggest unknowns in this game - when to play for value, when to push for tempo, etc, etc.
EDIT 4: Playstyle should probably be renamed to “Toolkit” or “Toolbox”, since a “value trade” or a “tempo play” or “removal” are basically tools in your kit which you can use according to your playstyles or win cons.
EDIT 5: I’m finally satisfied, at least for my own purposes. I can comfortably say I’m an aggro control player and no matter what deck you give me, that’s how I’ll play it out.
First of all combo is the worst way to describe anything at all ever; all decks with no exception whatsoever do combos; yes some of them do way more elaborate or complex combos but that doesn’t mean that even a simple fast aggro deck is not combining more than 3 or even 4 cards more often than not.
Speed has some fuzziness on what KIND of deck it is but it’s EXTREMELY more useful; e.g. if something is obscenely slow (say 20 minutes) it’s almost by ~100% probability a control deck with a late game plan. e.g. if a pain lock is literally 4.5 minutes average game time sorry but it’s just fast aggro end of.
In reality speed is so useful that the remaining question is “what kind of midrange is it?” when it’s something between 6 and 9 minutes duration; if it kills in 3 minutes(in most cases that it kills) sorry but it’s fast aggro; if it puts you to sleep for 30 minutes sorry but it’s a control late game deck.
Painlock is a clear example of aggro tempo deck, as it sacrifices health and value for tempo. While ending the game, it does look like what used to be midrange decks before (winning with overwhelming board turn 8-9-10) but it only ends games like that 20% of the time.
But BSM mage is kinda fuzzy. To begin with, you can eliminate control and combo from the equation, so you’re left with tempo and value. Clearly, you’re not looking to extract max value out of Tsunamis and Sunset Volleys, nor do you use them as control tools; you’re looking to gain tempo, so it’s a tempo deck. As for when the deck ends the game, it’s probably midrange on average.
Sure, if I’m playing painlock (aggro tempo) against BSM (midrange tempo), I will lose very fast to the BSM, but that doesn’t make BSM aggro deck.
The focus on that deck is to sacrifice early game AND late game to overwhelm your opponent in the midgame, hence, BSM is midrange tempo.
It’s just that against aggro decks, the mid-game comes much faster than usual.
I looked a bit at your thought process on the bigger reply and I identified a few issues; combo as an identifier I’ve already covered that it’s not that useful since everything combines effects of diverse cards (which also contradicts you wanting groups of 3 which I agree with (you put it in a group of 4 so it was superfluous)); but in the same group (Playstyles) you put control but that’s not that far off from attrition so we see there’s some overlap with just saying "fast(or “aggro” (in my opinion we shouldn’t differentiate it)) + mid-range + late_game/slow/heavy_control(“attrition”) etc.
HOWEVER where I agree there’s some major room for “research”(so to speak) is that decks often go on tangents regardless of their total average time played; e.g. a fast mage currently appears to be sensitive to bad draws more than other fast decks; that’s because it appears to rely WAY too much on 2 to 4 cards being always drawn and that’s very sketchy (it may be by far the worst attribute of the deck).
But those “tangents”(“side quests” to find micro-combos regardless of total speed of the deck) DIMINISH if the deck is extremely fast on average or at least they make the deck worse if it requires them while it’s also very fast; hence they are better off being simple on the fast decks and vice versa; similar to that might be defensive or/and tech cards (they might be more anti-synergy the faster the deck).
It’s as far as it can possibly be. I don’t need stats here, because logic works just fine.
Start by asking this question:
“Is it possible that a deck is attrition without relying on control tools?”
If the answer is YES, then attrition and control DO NOT BELONG in the same classification - they are two separate modifiers. A deck can be both attrition control (as most of the attrition decks are), but also attrition value (Reno Excavate Paladin before, Big Shaman now), or even attrition tempo (Reno Druid), as they all go to very late game but the latter 3 don’t run much control tools at all.
That’s logic.
As for your definition of combo, you seem to count as combo when things ramp, aka when cards have synergy between them. That’s too wide. Combo decks relies on a combo of at least 2 cards to finish the game. That’s my definition.
Anything else is just good synergy.
It’s not fatique package in Warlock which makes InsanityLock a combo deck. That’s actually what makes sure it’s an aggro deck.
What makes it a combo deck is the combination of cards which together do more than when used separately (Popgar + crescendo + 2x sludges, Insanity + crescendo, crescendo + gemtosser…)
That’s what makes a deck a combo deck.
EDIT: I made one mistake - insanity + crescendo is just a synergy. You get the “combo” part when you compare scenarios where you play crescendo first and second. If I can do more dmg by doing insanity into crescendo first, or vice versa, that’s a combo deck, as I have to utilize the correct order of playing the cards.
It’s akin to playing Sif into spells, rather than spells into Sif.