#1 delete the priest class #2 nerv secrets so you cant disable your oppent by having 10 secrets and the drake that makes your turn only last 15 seconds #3 no more 0 mana cards, each card costs at least 1 mana ALWAYS #4 get rid of minion copy/ressing cards or make them only usable ONCE per game #5 no more buffing all mobs cards, just one mob #6 every players has a max of 50 secs for his round and if you dont play a card for 5 secs your round is over - no more afk players who play the time down just to annoy you… #7 no more then 1 discovery per round… if you wanna discover something go watch discovery channel #8 max health attack of each card is 10…nore more jade golems/hopper crap…
I wouldn’t because HS doesn’t need balance. HS has meta, roughly translated, 2-3 tier 1 decks and classes, and few tier 2 decks at any given time. This is how the game is designed, the only way to balance the game is to make a new one, Hearthstone 2.
One requirement was to be legend rank multiple times.
Which means you would of had to put money into the game.
So essentially you’d be working to get back the money you gave them already.
I would make random cards be banned and a random class be banned every single day, for what better way to define a balanced meta with the unstable power of chaos? No constant dominance, no surge of the same class, urges creativity by finding replacement cards and homebrews. For the best solution to chaos, is chaos itself. Double negatives = positive.
Also I would just delete emotes and add a chat bar where you can talk straightforward with the opponent, all you need is either report button or a mute button. Say your ggs your wp your HAHAs, be toxic get muted, laugh at your opponents rage, whatever. I’ve been emoted so much times that I do it sometimes as well, so time to put an end to this
I would buff all of the oldest cards in the game up to 2020 power’s standard.
Justification: No card should be blatantly inferior in power. There will always be weaker cards but the vast majority of cards should be a ‘sidegrade’ or situational inclusion rather than just totally unusable.
I would invalidate aggro as an archetype by giving control more tools for dealing with them. I would also implement damage caps for the early stage of the game to heavily put the brakes on any aggro deck from being viable.
Justification: I don’t believe aggro has to exist for a healthy metagame. This is a controversial opinion but I believe the only reason why aggro ‘has to exist’ is because Blizzard prints broken combo cards that force everyone on to a timer where aggro is needed to kill people before a combo is executable. Print no combo cards and there is no need for aggro mechanics to counter them. Not only that, but this is marketed as a strategy game and aggro being efficient for climbing the ladder and killing more thoughtful decks, makes a mockery of any attempt to call Hearthstone a strategy game.
I would remove the wild/standard split and remove all of the cards that would be oppressive due to them being reintroduced to the game.
Justification: I campaigned against the wild/standard split on the old forum and strongly disagreed with the decision for various reasons including that I believed that Wild would escalate out of control for broken cards that leave standard. I argued that it would give Blizzard the ‘design freedom’ to create any ol’ brokenly overpowered cards they wanted because anything they would create would inevitably disappear from standard. This is a cycle that can not be allowed to continue. Removing the wild/standard split would force Blizzard to put effort into creating balanced cards and to actually play-test what they’ve made before they force the abhorrent levels of power creep into our faces each expansion as they do now. This safety net of allowing everything broken to eventually rotate to wild or be ‘hall of famed’ is a safety net that should not be there for Blizzard. PUT SOME EFFORT IN TO YOUR GAME.
Dear god, thank the heavens none of you people are actually on the balance team lol.
Well, a few exceptions like Reaver or George + a few others who actually gave reasonable suggestions, but to the people wanting entire overhauls of mechanics and planning to remove archetypes all I can say is: Yikes.
Loooots of people don’t like the powercreep of the recent extansions.
A healthy metagame is aggro-combo-controle. That’s not a hearthstone rule, it’s true for all TCG. Giving more anti-aggro tools would just make combo too strong, as their natural weakness is aggro.
It also give them freedom to create perfectly balanced cards without inadvertently creating broken combo. Just a quick example : in standard, highlander is a pretty high requierement. In wild, the amount of rewards (highlander leg) is much higher, making it much easier.
Another one : Bees ! is a balanced card, earthen scales is balanced, linecracker is bad. Those three together are a combo that was never possible in standard.
Ban list are a necessity not just for hearthstone, but for EVERY TCG. All old tcg have one.
Kinda agree with your first point, but you have to be careful in doing so because you might introduce more problems to the balance.
Aggro exists with reason in card games, so no, bad idea. Just because you like playing control that doesn’t mean everybody else likes it. The Priest is a good example of a control class, and everybody hates them.
Another bad idea that accomplishes nothing just introduces more problems, and it would make more people pi**ed off. There are a lot of powerful sleeper cards in old sets, even if you remove obvious ones you can never know what will people come up with.
Edit: I’m not sure there is anything better I could respond about card design than others here, so I took the premise of the OP’s question about card design philosophy and instead focused on balanced GAME design philosophy.
It wouldn’t “balance” the existing game, but I would add a new, more-balanced game type aimed towards getting new players into the game. In this game mode, players would have access to all cards (from either Standard or Wild), but each week a number of completely random neutral and class cards (the same number for each class) would be banned. Players could “climb” in Standard or Wild of this mode: there’d be Ranks, each with 3 stars, and the first ten, you wouldnt lose stars (similar to current system), but there’d be no Legend level to reach. Rather, each Rank would have a number (starting with 1 and just going up), every 5 ranks you’d earn 100 dust, and at certain rank levels you’d be rewarded a card pack from an expansion of YOUR choice: after your first 10 ranks, you’d get a pack after every twenty ranks, if you worked your way through that, you’d get another after 30 ranks, etc. (this would make it so this game mode did not offer better rewards than the HS main ranking system).
The goal would be an ever-changing weekly meta that attracted new players or players bored with the current meta. Obviously after several days there would be some “best” decks for each class, but it wouldn’t be as intolerable as waiting 4 months for a new meta. Furthermore, it would teach new players about mechanics and playstyles while giving them an equal opportunity to play “good” decks against even long-term players with more cards. Why would Blizzard create this game mode if it didn’t require people buying card packs and giving them money? I would argue that a more satisfied new playerbase having more fun would, in the long run, pay more in the game.
