I think the fine lines comes in the form of knowing what your opponent’s hand holds, and how to control that hand space in ways that optimally slow them down.
But there’s quite a bit of RNG and discover effects afloat right now, so that task can be rather monumental, even obsolete.
I do agree, though, that the game would be much more one-dimensional if all action relied on the board.
You did a good job describing what is going on in hs right now. I do agree, but I understand there are plenty of people that enjoy being overpowered and stomp their enemy so for them this age of hs is good.
I don’t like how this game has gone from skillbased to luckbased. I used to be able to play smart and win, now I can play smart all I want but if my opponent catches a lucky break my perfect play doesn’t matter at all.
You could say my opponent was more skilled because I played right into their trap or whatever, but that’s basically saying that certain match-ups you’re better off not even trying.
It takes no more skill for mage to pick when they freeze because they simply get more with cyclone and magic trick, in wild there are even more options.
It takes no more skill for warrior when to use removal because when they drop new dr 7 all their mechs become removal.
As shaman I can plop down battlecries that do nothing because I’ll simply repeat them with shudderwock and they might do something then (tempo mct or ooze for instance) I can hex and silence all the early drops because chances are my Hagatha will give me what I need after I play her.
Yes I do it too. And yes I too admit I like seeing good spells added to my hand or refill my hand with angler. I added them for the fun factor, not to overpower my opponent. And as a homebrew I seldom do heh.
Yes arena has more board battle and that’s exactly the reason why lately I only watch streamers that play arena. Arena is surely not for everyone but I do suggest trying it if you’re tired of constructed.
If you need some help get better at it, Shadybunny is a really good arena streamer, he also coaches people and does chatdrafts now and then and explains why he would or would not have picked cards that chat picked, and overall interacts with chat a bunch. It’s very informative.
You summed up large percentages of the current problem of hearthstone. Back then you have to choose for tempo or value, most of the time if you are getting greedy with value, you’ll get punished right away. Tempo was the one of the main reason hearthstone was better than any other similar card games, it made the game faster and can be played on almost any circumstances. If hearthstone keeps on printing cards to shift the direction towards more value and makes the game greedier in process i’d better play mtga more.
This comes from a guy who mainly play control decks. Right now control deck mirrors rarely about skill anymore. Card generation RNG is way too powerful atm with the pool of the cards. I missed those days when playing control deck means limited removal and always fighting for the time when to get tempo and when to get greedy
The most exciting aspect of Hearthstone, especially from a spectator’s perspective, is fighting for board control by trading minions
I somewhat disagree with this opinion. When people watch the Championships and the Tournaments they are not cheering when people control the board by trading minions. The stand up and cheer moments when the crowds gasp and burst into applause are the big value moments.
I think you need to reword your argument a bit and change it to “In MY OPINION the most exciting thing is…” Because the facts and reality of how the game is being played today contradict your premise quite definitively. You may indeed have a personal preference or interest … but your opinion is not reflective of the game’s larger audience.
My perspective on this issue?
I think there’s a wistful core of ‘old school’ CCG players who want Hearthstone to be more like Magic the Gathering and as time goes on they become increasingly disgruntled that Hearthstone’s design is not catering more towards their personal preferences. Hearthstone is what it is though, and I think people have some pretty foggy nostalgia goggles when they look backwards at HS: 2014. Because let’s be honest here … HS: 2014 had more than it’s share of massive tempo generation such as Kel-Freaking-Thuzad.
And let it not be overlooked that the current meta has several very successful decks that are pretty much nothing BUT board-based tempo… 
The stories of the death of board tempo appear greatly exaggerated.
I went full Reno in wild 
such a fun deck, and it does work well in this meta…I crafted the darkness…added in mage AND druid deck (trying to create the darkness( few of em on the board) and armor combo at the same time…for fun 
or even jade…
P.S. Respect the Murlocs those earned me legend more than once!
Anyways! go meme or go wild! that’s the best fun
Eh… I don’t miss curve stone or minion spam. Long live control. Warrior is beatable by a lot of things. People are lazy and don’t wanna put in the work. The problem is that the all the nerfs to classic cards/basic cards has done lasting damage to the game.
Classes are pigeonholed into roles that are one-dimensional and boring to some people. The HOF, Standard/Wild, nerfing of cards, have not done much good for the overall quality of the game. If priest was in a better spot as a control deck, warrior wouldn’t be able to steamroll everything. There were classes that had cards that kept other stuff in the game from snowballing off a cliff. Iceblock, Sylvanas, Ragnaros, Pre-nerf big game hunter, Equality, are some examples.
I recommend Blizzard bringing back Charge for the aggro players to keep value oriented greed in check. I dunno… but I for sure remember classes having more flavor/variety. I’ll agree everything feels the same and boring, but nerfing Warrior and/or Mage is just robbing Peter to pay Paul at this point. It won’t fix the inherent problems of the game. IMO some examples include The Coin, going first, cards generating other cards, Discover being vastly better in some classes versus others, some classes having hero cards and not others, trash taunt cards, cards that tutor specific cards, etc.
I think if they got rid of all the hero cards, Pocket Galaxy, CC, Boom, other cards people whine about, the game would be even more stagnant than it is now.
if you want you should be able to play a control rogue but you can’t because blizzard said no :< another deck archtype that mostly vanished was mill, something that punishes combo and greedy decks so greedy decks like control warrior flourish.
the game right now is…
being beaten / out drawn / out tempted by highlander hunter.
being otkd by double inner fire priest.
being lolstormed by a mage with 1 mana fireball generater who can setup a board of 3 HUGE minions on turn 5
or having every single minion you play removed by warrior .
and it feels so bad.
I appreciate the reply but I think you’re getting hung up on balance, which is absolutely not the point of this thread. Of course Warrior is beatable. Nobody implied that it wasn’t. The problem with Warrior isn’t its win rate (although some would definitely argue with that sentiment). The problem is that games featuring Warrior all last 30+ minutes and nothing ever stays on the board.
When I look at Hearthstone’s description on the App Store, it describes the game as a “fast-paced whimsical card game of cunning strategy”. For a new player who is watching Hearthstone for the first time, this would seem like false advertisement. Any game with Dr. Boom is pretty much guaranteed to be a very “slow-paced whimsical card game of wacky randomness”. That may be fine for some, but that’s not how the developers advertise the game to prospective players who are thinking about downloading it.
You put it amazingly, well done. I want WotOG back.
I agree. It could switch back, but I feel like HS is severely limited in its mechanics, and it’s gonna be board, hand value, or aggro close to 100% of the time. Either that, or the devs lack creativity, but I don’t want to accuse them of that outright. I mean, here’s the three cards people complain about, as well as the new mechanics:
LPG: “things cost less” has been done may times
BMJ, ZJ: Pretty much new DKs?
Quests: Done before
Better/new hero powers: done before
Reborn: Basically Deathrattle?
There are lots of things HS could do, but refuse to or haven’t thought of it. I’m not advocating for any of these, just things they could do:
(disclosure: I’ve posted a couple of “what features would you add?” threads, and stole a couple very good ideas from the players there)
How to enable 2on2 finally WITHOUT changing the UI. You could play it even on mobile.
Someone comlaint about mor waiting time, but i dont see that as a problem.
You make your turn and then the opponent like regular.
And then when your mate is on turn you can talk with him in the chat or ingame voice about the next steps what to play. This is something new and i dont think you will feel like waiting more, the mate turn will be like your turn.
Control just has too many tools now.
Back in the day there were only a few aoes or power cards to worry about. Pala had Tirion. Warrior had Brawls. Mage might have 2 Flamestrike. It varied, but you could swing a game if you pressured enough to force those cards early, baited them with false threats or knew when to hold or play your answer to them (like you had a Hex and knew Tirion might be in their deck, knowing when to save it or use it was vital).
Nowadays control warrior doesn’t care about wasting a Brawl or Warpath on smaller threats. They still have 1 more of each, 2 Dyna, Zilliax, Booms hero power, Rush on every mech to use as removal, 2 Shield Slam, 2 Omega and so on. It’s basically impossible to bait removal in Hearthstone. You put down one or two small threats to be safe and they’ll walk all over you with minions, armor up and never run out of health or removal. Commit to the board, they wipe it in one card and you lose.
Playing smart and having knowledge of the game just doesn’t help. It used to be “oh control, I’d better save X card for their X card, bait out X removal, aim to build this board to avoid that card”. Now it’s “oh control, 78% chance I lose. I’ll go all out agro and hope they don’t draw board wipe X by turn 5”.
There are actually two things that my opinion is reflective of, both of which motivated me to post this thread in the first place:
I don’t often watch Twitch streams anymore, but the other day I browsed the list of games for the first time in a while and was surprised to see that Hearthstone, which used to always be in the top 3-5 in terms of viewership, is now way down the list.
The most recent VS Data Reaper Report, which was the first one of the new expansion, even admitted that contributions were down and that this was the most “quiet” expansion release they had seen yet. The fact that there were only 70k games recorded in two weeks after a new expansion indicates that the player base is rapidly losing interest in the game.
If this were just my own personal opinion I wouldn’t have bothered posting this long-winded thread in the first place, but because I happened to stumble across two pieces of STATISTICAL evidence that the game is failing to retain its audience in a 24 hour span I decided to share my sentiments on this board in hopes that it might spurn some discussion and ideas.
I think Lifecoach put it best when he quit a couple years ago when he said that the game doesn’t reward practice/skill/strategy like it used to. The difference in win rates between pro players and above average players has never been smaller than it is now, and that’s largely because anybody can hard mulligan for Pocket Galaxy or Dr. Boom.
Twitch streams & VS Data Report numbers…
Verbum Sapienti. Correlation does not equal causation.
Hearthstone is well into “mature” status as a game and there’s tons of things contributing to it’s numerics. Most of it is no more than the fact that Hearthstone has been out for 5+ years and games don’t stay at the top of people’s lists for long as a general rule.
Decreasing Twitch views has way more to do with [A] generalized ennui and [B] the fickleness of the Streaming Public’s desire for the Next Hot Thing than with how much relative focus Hearthstone does or doesn’t put on minion trading. 
Such middling details are - at best - tertiary contributors to a larger trend rather than any sort of primary or even secondary variable.
Personal bias may cause some people to mistakenly THINK that their pet peeves are more influential considerations than they actually are. But that’s just a mental illusion.
While there are still viewers to make Hearthstone a top 10 game on Twitch still, they are concentrated among less streamers. Kripp and Thijs being the main ones well above 10k viewers, since Toast and Dog are gone now.
On the other hand, I am glad that Amaz is back streaming Hearthstone! Will pop in and watch him because I don’t know how long he will stay there, and switch back to something else. (he played Auto Chess stuff and even got invited to some MTG:A Mythic Invitational stuff).
And yes, Vicious Syndicate mentioning the decreased amount of contributors. Also there seems to be much less people at Legend compared to even a couple of months ago. Dumpster Legend doesn’t seem to be more than 2k Rank, when it has been 5k+ in the past.
Among my online friends, a couple of us played the original Auto Chess Mod back in January, but only because I really told them about it. Then months later, when you hear about TFT and Dota Underlords being released, well, just the overall volume of people that switched to TFT is mind boggling.
While I did personally enjoy the original Auto Chess and Dota Underlords, I found TFT really meh and could not see myself enjoying the game. But it has taken at least a couple of my friends with them, some who have stopped playing HS. All of us had played lots of League of Legends in the past, so, naturally it was already in the client.
This does have merit, HS being like a casual competitive sort of game with its RNG swings but
Is true for any card game.
The thing with Hearthstone, is that much of the non-competitiveness is very much visible on the surface. Some top competitive people switch away because it’s not really a challenge and have said games feel the same, even with all the different decks (eg Dog). I personally don’t feel that but I could see how that might be the case for others.
Warrior is getting targeted because all the powerful stuff that could contest warriors style of play rotated/HoF’d out of standard. Now all we have is sub-par cards to play around with a dazzle of broken crap that makes the experience unfun for some people. The game went downhill when they started nerfing everything. Frost Lich Jaina, Jade Druid, etc would put a spanking on Warrior. This may be an unpopular opinion, but classes glaring flaws started to appear when the Standard format was introduced. These flaws grew exponentially with the nerfing of staple cards and when Year of the Dragon began as well. Less cards to play around with, less variety in deck building. Wild is bad right now with barns, secret mage shennigans, murlock jank, quest mage annoyance, etc, but there’s a hell of a lot more variety in wild than Standard by a mile.
Its not that hard to safe HS. But Devs this days melk the game until its near death and THEN start doing all the stuff they should have done 1-2 years befor this state.
It doesnt even matter how big your company is. This kind of stuff happens to a game also then big names like Nokia or Kodak.
But some people still think everything is fine with the game.
Devs logic has changed a little bit. They are fine with certain archetypes having MVP cards, especially if an archetype isn’t that strong on its own.
I dislike this philosophy, since games boil down to “who draws their mvp first/at all”, but it is what it is.
The board-based part of the game is now much more swingy and potentially snowballs out of control more often if you make a single crucial error.
But if you don’t make any big mistakes, you can keep parity with the opponent, but not all the time.
Right now, if you’re aggressive or midrange, you need to play cards for tempo, ignoring the value for battlecries, but if the opponent is playing a deck with board clears, then you have to know when to hold back. The skill floor for good board-based trading seems much higher because there are many cards that now require a lower skill floor to get benefit out of, eg: Reborn minions. Rush, as well.
The Paladin quest is an example where playing a Reborn minion, Egg or Whelp and then just creating a 2/2 copy doesn’t require much thinking, while your opponent has to do all the work, deciding whether they need to trade or not.
I had to think hard playing Zoolock on how to keep killing his Reborn minions each turn, to the point where he was at 2HP with a 9/12 Taunt, a 2/2 copy of it and a Bone Wraith, and how do I find lethal that turn. All the while the opponent BMing me that turn, but I found the lethal.
1 mistake leaving up a certain minion and I certainly lose. Thank god I do not see them often.
Man you really give everthing to make sound the loosing playerbase like something positive.
Yeah its normal that a game looses interest over time. This goes for the most products out also.
But you have always influence on those effects. If you have a great phone out like the motorola razer v3 and keep selling this model with minor updates because it sells great. Then you go danger too miss new markets even you have the chance with your pdocut and some bigger changes instead of the regular ones.
Big names like Motorola, kodak died exactly because of this. They missed the changes needed to make to go to the next level. Same goes for HEarthstone or other products. At your zenith, your best phase of the game you assume it is, you have to make bigger changes, because from that on the downfall will begin.
But this is maybe one of the hardest deccisions to make, because everything looks fine. And this is also the danger.
HS still stays with the 3 Month Expansion model and misses alot of bigger changes.
You will see them coming when the ame looses more and more playerbase as a last attempt to safe players and attract new ones.
But most times this changes come too late.