I feel like a big part of the problematic decks in the history of Hearthstone were based around 1 or more battlecries. They are pretty hard to interrupt, your only tools that help you with it are Dirty Rat, Mutanus (cards that are random and gives only a chance). This tools aren’t even that good today because the problematic battlecries come out of a quest that can’t be stopped.
We had in the past again with jades, raza, different types of dragons, darkglare(loatheb?), secret mage cards.
What if we get a “Battlecry: Cancel the last battlecry your opponent played last turn” legendary minion(so you can’t use 2 and abuse it)? It wouldn’t help only against new quests, but it would also be a nice tech against other insane decks and it would force to play more minions-board-based. And it wouldn’t be good only in control, it would also be nice in aggro decks if you want to stop a Zephrys, Reno, minions-AoE-based(Xyrella, Duskbreaker), etc.
And it’s also a card that you would need to play around so skilled players would be able to do their stuff, like you know you have to use another, smaller battlecry after the strong one in order for the combo piece to not be interrupted —> which means that it wouldn’t really kill decks, just make them harder. So it is a bit skill testing.
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I’m not sure how that would work and it seems incredibly complicated/unintuitive. Imagine this scenario:
I play a battlecry that buffs one of my minions. I use this minion to trade into your minion removing it (but my minion could not have killed this without the buff). How do you cancel that battlecry? Do you need to resurrect your minion too?
In another example, let’s say my battlecry healed me by 8 which gave me enough HP to clear your board with my weapon. Would this retroactive cancelled battlecry mean I just die since removing the heal would put me lower than 0 health?
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I feel like you’re proposing something that feels too much like a ‘get out of jail free’ card. It also punishes expensive cards, and we need more reasons to play expensive cards, not less.
Instead, we need something that rewards anticipating your opponent’s plays.
Put Boompistol Bully in Core, or print a Cult Neophyte version.
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It would work the same way when you debuff minions now. Let’s say a minion is buffed from 4/2 to 6/5, it trades and gets to 6/1. If the opponent silences this minion, it gets to 4/1 it doesn’t die.
No, it would act like silence and my minion would still be dead. The specific battlecry only buffed, it didn’t directly kill my minion.
Now this is true that we didn’t see any “Silence your face” yet so we don’t know what the interaction would really be in that particular case. But I don’t see that as something too complicated or that it would break Hearthstone’s rules, just another situation that Blizzard should have to decide(like at Silence).
I think a logical situation would be to bring you at 1 health.
Yes and no. I think we can all agree that polarizing decks are bad for the game. Nobody wants to have 80-20% matchups. There should be a tool that balance such matchups and this would help alot without having to ask Blizzard for nerfing all quests or any strong battlecry they print. The same way we can counter secrets and weapons (or control in general with Loatheb), I think it would be as good to be able to counter battlecries.
I agree with this but let’s be honest, considering how to game worked for the past years we shouldn’t even expect to be able to properly play Dr. Boom again or whatever. With Hearthstone’s current design we wouldn’t be able to play such cards no matter if the legendary I proposed would exist or not.
I don’t disagree, I just feel like your idea doesn’t really ‘fit’ the way Hearthstone works. ‘Undoing’ things that have already happened? Too gimmicky.
Just imagine the nonsense cancelling a Yogg or Shudderwock turn in Wild, and also what happens if your opponent uses their anti-battlecry card to cancel yours? Do the servers implode?
Perhaps a Rogue secret that reads ‘When your opponent plays a Battlecry minion, the battlecry does not trigger’.
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I think Yogg and Shudderwock battlecries are set under a “folder” in the code, so it would just eventually close or “delete” the folder, coming back to how the board was before in just a second(without showing all the battlecries/spells in reverse or anything like this).
It would just re-reset what it was. It does the canceled battlecry again.
Yes it’s true it would be a complicated card. But they did print Zephrys. They did print Serena. Both made the community to brainstorm and theorize around them. Even Shudderwock was a bit complicated and people thought it would break the game’s codes. But here we are now and the game is just fine, this particular cases would be easily solved. And IMO such a card would do great for the health of the game so why not?
No, undoing previous Battlecry is a logical nightmare. NO ONE going to code it (I am telling you this as a coder) and no one going to want to play that game anymore.
What you do want is more cards like Nerubian Weblord that prevent or punish Battlecry play.
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the game is already yu gi oh they should just introduce hand traps in the next mini set.
Why? I did very few coding/programming in my life when I was in high-school(Cmath) and I feel like in Hearthstone the battlecries are put under some or { } that I like to call as “folders” and this specific battlecry can just outright delete that specific parenthesis.
Now maybe I’m wrong but I don’t see why is it hard?
The problem with Nerub’ar Weblord is that it is a card that mostly only aggro use it at it’s true potential. Usually aggro already wins against decks like Quest Mage/Quest Warlock so nerub’ar barely helps. We need a card that universally good, so all control/midrange/aggro/combo can use it properly. So it’s pretty hard to think a card that stops battlecries for 1 or 2 turns cause it really doesn’t help slower playstyles.
Oh, what hand traps do? I’m curious.
cards in your hand that can be used during your opponent turn to disrupt his cards effect.
What would your proposed card do against Illucia? Do they get all the cards played back? Or does it do nothing because it only affects the hand swap itself, like your comment re: undoing minion buffs?
There are more elegant solutions than some ham-fisted ‘go back in time’ mechanic. Think outside the box.
Edit: I almost want this idea to actually be a thing to see if you can break the game with double battlecries and such
No, I have to agree with RuralJuror. This would be a logistical nightmare.
I mean, what if a Battlecry kills your seventh minion, making you draw this “undo battlecry” minion? Playing it would mean what? Suddenly you have eight minions on the board?
There are cards that punish Battlecry play. You can’t use the argument that only agro use cards like Nerub’ar Weblord, because there’s nothing restricting control or combo to use them as well. The reason they don’t is because they don’t fit into the deck, so any other card that would replace those would also not fit.
Tech cards have a risk. That risk is that they’re not played because they don’t fit the deck. People asked for Secret counters. They were given Secret counters and nobody played them because they didn’t fit. Any alternative to those weren’t played either. There are alternatives for Battlecy punishment, but if those aren’t played, your card won’t either.
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your not first see this so be ready for fan of broken cards say your wrong without put up a good argument
(like for real I call out problem cards advanced and people say it never happen or it not a big problem even when meta is 70% that one card)
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I think it would just re-swap the hands. No minions coming back or anything, since Illucia’s battlecry says just “Swap your hands with the opponent”.
A “go back in time” seems cool too. Something like “Stop your opponent’s last turn” or anything.
The minion would just not appear. It wouldn’t break the game’s rules, if there is no space on the baord then the minion just doesn’t appear.
The problem with Nerub’ar is that it is temporary so it forces you to kill the opponent ASAP, this is why it is a really good card in aggro and in control/combo not. Because control needs to stale for its win condition, so a “stop battlecries for 2-3 turns” doesn’t help alot.
If they somehow print a card that is usable in slower decks and does this then I’m pretty ok with it.
Oh, that’s cool. I actually thought about this in the past that it would be cool in Hearthstone, but I feel like it is a too far idea from Hearthstone’s gaming process. Until now, you couldn’t do anything in opponent’s turn, secrets were the closest to that thing.
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It’s not likely to be a technical challenge, but cancelling battlecries in the current meta would be a card everyone ran and quests would be pointless. It’s too much.
Because you essentially talking about going back in time to undo 1 specific thing without touching the other. While it possible to keep a record of a persistent state of the game an any given moment in order to roll back to, the memory and CPU requirement for doing that goign to slow down the game flow by like 200%. And somehow the game must also differentiate between what was a Battlecry effect and what wasn’t to. So if you undo A, which some effect B, don’t you think player next action woudl be different if A never happened? How do you re-do those actions under new conditions?
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Yeah, let’s just call it “Rewind Time”:
As pointed out, it’s a coding nightmare - the server had to take a snap shot after each battlecry and reset the board, but not just that, also cards, decks and maybe even turns. Would get even more interesting with counterplaying it and/or card duplication.
No, forget it.
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Actually it’s not that hard, as events are all logged, you can simply reconstruct the game state programmatically. This is commonly done in games for lots of reasons.
But I agree it’s not a great solution for the problem given.
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well yes. A full time roll back in certainly possible and doable. But only FULL roll back. The Op wants a selective rollback without taking into consideration a gazillion of sub-effects that will or will not happen as result.
I think it’s easily designable, but a fair bit of work to update/parametise battlecries so they can be inverted, and you’d need a couple of extra systems to track deck effects that need to be undone.
So not technically hard, just a lot of work.
