Anyone else find this card to be a tad annoying to play against?
4 Likes
Yes. I play Odyn Warrior, and I think that’s also stupid.
Good Sif decks not even rely on the OTK that much anymore. They usually burst you from 15/20.
If you really want something to be mad about in the deck try the New 1 drops.
They kinda put the deck in turbo mode.
Also it is completely capable of winning games where Sif is disrupted to a Lesser extent.
It’s a strong meta contender, but not at all what I would call a problem.
Is it annoying to play against? I guess for some people. Is that a problem? Yes, I guess so.
But I emphatically do not believe that changing Sif would fix that problem for most of the players experiencing it. See, there four different groups of people to consider here. Imagine a 2x2 grid. One axis divides people according to whether they are or are not currently satisfied. The other axis divides people according to whether they will or will not be satisfied if a change is made. Thus the four groups are Yes→Yes, Yes→No, No→Yes, and No→No.
Only a small minority of complainers on these forums are in the No→Yes group. The vast majority are in the No→No group. You can tell because new accounts aren’t that common and it’s the same people, patch after patch, who remain dissatisfied even after they received nerfs. Nerfs did not solve the problem of the people in the No→No group in the past, and they will not be the solution in the future.
What’s the solution to this problem? I don’t know, but I doubt Blizzard has anything to do with it. I will say this though: your opponent is supposed to oppose you. That’s where the word comes from. You’re not supposed to be in love with everything they do. Try to get used to that.
I feel that odyn warrior should be favoured versus mage from my opinion ive always struggled vs odyn warrior if i play sif mage.
Bumping Sif’s cost now is pointless anyway. They have 0 cost burn to play that negates a cost increase on the card. What should change overall is what Reverberation targets. Make it Enemy Minions only and it stops the combo but leaves the card still very useful and functional for decks.
2 Likes
Sincerely i just Hope people quit instead.
It’s kinda ridiculous that every time a card brings a layer of complexity we kinda end needing to dumb it down because people can’t find a way to force the opponent to use in a defensive manner.
Cards like reverberations are what guide the game to being fun ,bring opportunities to show your understanding of the board situations and therefore showcase some skill.
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Hitting Sif with Reverberation and then casting 2-3 burn spells that cost nothing is not “skillful”.
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Yes its a problem reverb is too its far too good.
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First off, that’s a very unfun suggestion. Minami has a point there regarding flexibility, regardless of how much you hate OTKs.
Second, I think the obvious power outlier of Rainbow Mage is Inquisitive Creation. Tops the deck in mulligan winrate despite costing 4, second only to Sif in drawn winrate. If we pick the nerf target based on performance data, Creation is the target. And generally speaking nerf targets should be chosen that way, because when the power level of cards is more consistent draw RNG has a softer impact on games.
Third, people have too strong of a bias against the cards that they see played the turn that they lose, just because that’s the moment they realize they’ve lost. They don’t have enough (negative) appreciation for the cards that allowed the opponent to reach the endpoint of that journey by being too strong along the way.
Lastly, Rainbow Mage doesn’t need a huge nerf. I think +1 cost to Creation might be too much, but -1 Health might be too little so kinda ambivalent. Maybe -1 damage on the Battlecry? Something like that should be enough.
5 Likes
I think it’s more an overarching design problem for me that cards in hand are inherently safer than cards in play.
If you have to play a card on board the turn before it wins the game, it is open to much more direct response and interaction. The game feels a lot less like you had no chance to win, and you can prepare to handle it in a larger number of ways.
When a card will beat you the moment it is played, even if it needs a combo, your options for dealing with that are basically nothing. At best you can try to avoid needing to face it (kill them first or forcing a discard). On rare occasions you can push your armor/health out of kill range.
Since blizz doesn’t want to make hand disruption reliable, I generally don’t think they should be making from hand wins reliable either. You can balance the win rates of from hand wins by making the deck more vulnerable to “kill it first” strategies, but that doesn’t really address the underlying issue for me that the card/combo is inherently less interactive.
We would make fun of people for expecting a deck entirely focused on making a 30/30 minion without charge to be good. For some reason holding a 30+ damage burn combo in hand doesn’t have and isn’t expected to have that same vulnerability for being a one track strategy.
Even the tools we do have to deal with combos tend to just make the game more frustrating. It’s now just the frustration between “ugh, his dirty rat hit my Sif!” Vs “ugh, my dirty rat didn’t hit his Sif!”
I just don’t think hearthstone is built to really support healthy combo decks that kill from hand. If they are ever good, they just lead to the mass use of the RNG tech cards that always leave someone frustrated.
At least if a card ALWAYS hit Sif before it could work, Sif would be forced to be more of a backup win condition (or one if many) for a deck and have it not feel like your whole deck got invalidated because RNG wasn’t on your side this game.
Anyway, that’s just some design random thought rambling on my part.
1 Like
Not needing it for something else during the match is a showcase of skill.
Either from the player managing to not need to use it during a challenging match or lack of skill from the opponent failing to create a challenging board to force you to use.
It’s literally a card sitting there dead if you wait till the combo.
All fair points. Although i would say that Creations draw rate being so high has more to do with the meta being top heavy in Aggro. Thus the creation is a massively punishing card to those decks. I’m not sure how you would “hurt” that card without making it useless. It’s doing what it does and very well but it is also protecting those Mage decks from the decks meant to counter it.
As for Reverberation i am just providing another perspective on how to change the card if were to be changed. I’m not saying it 100% should but if they feel the combo becomes to much i think that’s where you start. Honestly i hope it remains untouched because i enjoy the hell out of abusing the card in Warlock to accelerate excavate.
Yeah, that’s a fair statement. Because players don’t seem to want it. I’m not going to dispute this.
This is the part I’m disputing. There is a binary design choice here:
- Endgame threats are difficult or impossible to interact with, therefore in control vs control games whoever assembled their win condition first wins.
- Control vs control games routinely go to fatigue.
I consider option #2 completely unacceptable. Therefore endgame threats should be difficult or impossible to interact with. I reject your entire proposition that being unable to interact with a particular win condition is inherently bad.
Now there is a bit of a problem if those endgame threats start popping up too soon. Perhaps cards like Sif should have a higher cost. Where “endgame” is, that’s grounds for fair debate as far as I’m concerned. But inevitability isn’t.
Sincerely…
Can we just revert theotar at this point?
While disrupting the card was already a massive tempo loss before it’s nerfs.
Therefore creating a decent dynamic of losing a ton of tempo to disrupt the opponent.
And no. I not think that everything that makes someone cry out of rage is bad design.
I think that if someone plays a one card deck they deserve a one card counter.
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I’d rather they fix this through weaker removal tools and / or stickier threats that force removal to be used inefficiently rather than ones that can’t be removed.
I liked it more when control decks encouraged running more threats and less removal to kill before fatigue rather than one or two mega/infinite threats that allow for the rest of the deck to be extra passive.
I also think that the amount of removal available to some decks is asinine (priest)
Control also shouldn’t be so good at control as to make from hand combos feel remotely needed.
What we usually end up with are just control decks with an I win combo rather than something making control less good.
4 Likes
Well that’s part of what makes Rainbow Mage a good deck. It’s evolved over time to not be a pure combo deck, but a hybrid of classic control and combo, often winning with a bunch of Elementals against decks that don’t have the control tools to clear them. Like Minami said, Sif is often coming down to do just the last half of the damage because the minions have chipped away the other half. If Rainbow Mage was going pure combo we’d be seeing very different decklists with Lady Nazjar for the discounts.
It only feels like a combo deck if you’re running a deck that can easily handle Inquisitive Creation, some 1-drops and an occasional Elemental board flood. It’s a hybrid deck, it can have different modes for different matchups.
Other than Rainbow Mage, the main power outliers before the most recent patch, and arguably afterwards, are aggro decks. Paladin, Enrage Warrior, Naga DH. It makes more sense to nerf the classic control half of Rainbow Mage than it makes sense to nerf the combo half in order to keep those matchups somewhere near where they previously were. It essentially prevents Rainbow Mage from getting an indirect buff from the aggro nerfs.
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We kinda have a problem here.
You already tried convince people that decks who create some sort of super sticky board that can’t be removed easily are healthy?
I still remember the conjurer’s calling combo that sincerely wasn’t as bad as people paint(2 big minions on turn 4).
And when you said they could stall it they just started calling names rather than argument.
In other words:
The instant you not enable one card board answers for Control(is what you’re saying to a certain extent) Control will go non existent and whatever deck is doing that job will skyrocket completely out of control in popularity.
People just aren’t rational enough and are too easy to get impressed with big plays even if the deck only has one.
There’s a balancing point.
Pressuring removals is fine.
Flatly outpacing then and winning in the spot is much less so. That’s why conjurers got nerfed. It was just too fast.
1 Like