Because its the only card making control decks viable without it the game would be nothing but face decks and thats boring
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How would you define control? I think the argument can be made that it existed prior to Kazakusan. For example, there was and still is Freeze Shaman.
A deck that aims to control the board early then win with late game bombs.
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You mean like Quest Mage?
Well…
This scenario is more complicated than that.
The extreme polarization caused by kazakusan actually enabled decks that can’t exist without it.
Why?
They take advantage of decks that actually beat kazakusan.
This meta is basically coinflip simulator due to it.
You can literally build any half baked deck that as long as you beat ramp druid or aggro decks consistently you gonna climb.
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Quest Mage just a like Freeze Mage are Combo decks not control.
That can be discussed a ton actually.
If buffing the Minions in your hand isn’t a combo deck why buffing my spells is?
That to not even touch the subject of the deck rarely even OTK anything.
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Kinda but the deck should also be viable
No it cant…
" Freeze Mage is a mage combo deck which uses Freeze effects and board-wide removal to delay the game until it can deal lethal burst damage through specific combinations of spells."
Ultimately that’s a semantics debate. I would define control in such a way that Quest Mage would be a control deck, because the deck runs control tools like cheap targeted and mass removal. But I know that’s not conventional, and was more interested in getting a better definition from mada.
lol nevermind he agrees with me
Try again.
Quest mage isn’t freeze mage.
Actually the amount of freeze on it pale when compared to both freeze mage or even any shaman deck nowadays.
Minions get mostly removed.
People got annoyed by it and overreact.
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quest mage is aggro deck not a control deck
Quest Mage is a combo deck that feeds of Control decks…
We had months of nerf Combo non stop until they destroyed the deck you cant clown your way out of this.
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As far as I’m concerned, the only practical use for the concept of “control” is in the sense of the famous and brilliant Mike Flores article “Who’s the Beatdown?” Because it was written long before Hearthstone was a thing, the article pulls examples from tournament-level Magic the Gathering, but even if you’re unfamiliar I recommend you give it a read if you haven’t yet.
In that article:
- Control is a relativistic concept. This means that unless it’s an exact mirror match, when any two decks face off against each other, one is the “beatdown” (today we’d say aggro) and one is the control.
- The control deck is the deck that has an increasing likelihood to win the longer the game goes. So aggro tools speed a game up ending it sooner while control tools delay the game until the control deck can assemble an active win condition.
So the way I see it, when Big Priest and (pre-Deadmines) Quest Mage sat down against each other, Big Priest was the aggro and Quest Mage was the control. This is, of course, very frustrating for Big Priest, as they are quite bad at being the aggro, but that’s why the matchup was bad for the Priest. Quest Mage has inevitability unless Big Priest can somehow find a way to win first.
Combo as I think of it is Magic the Gathering combo, which doesn’t exist in Hearthstone. Magic the Gathering has removal for cards in hand, so control tools counter combo; simultaneously, uncontrolled combo is generally much faster in MtG, so combo counters aggro. That’s not how Hearthstone “combo” works at all. To me, “combo” can usually be translated roughly as “more control than control” for Hearthstone purposes.
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Balderdash.
twenty characters
Thanks for taking the time to explain that. I grasp what you’re saying, although I’m not sure today’s Hearthstone players would agree with you. I mean, most players probably wouldn’t consider QM control.
Do you believe it’s a dichotomy, and that a deck can’t be, for instance, combo-control? Stepping away from the explanation you wrote and further into the Hearthstone mentality.
Edit: Thinking about it, your designations being relative to specific matches, they’re not mutually exclusive to introducing absolute definitions. No?
In Magic the Gathering terms this works, because there’s more of a clear rock-paper-scissors involved, and you can sometimes hybridize scissors and rock (to make something that is bad against rock, good against scissors, and relatively even against paper).
In Hearthstone, traditional “combo” decks that have good minion removal tools (like pre-Deadmines Quest Mage) and are just, like I said, more control than control.
The exception here would be Alignment Druid. It doesn’t have good minion removal, and it doesn’t technically OTK. Casting Alignment isn’t an instant win so much as one of the few legitimate ways to control what the opponent can play from hand. The difference in minion removal definitely effected matchups, particularly against conventional aggro, but overall I don’t think the way “combo” is usually used as it applies to Hearthstone is relevant. I do recognize Alignment Druid is a kind of archetypal anomaly, neither properly aggro nor properly control in the traditional sense, but that’s because Alignment Druid is the only archetype in Hearthstone with reliable and competitively viable mana disruption, followed by threats that mostly ignore the symmetrical effect. I don’t know what term I’d use for that, if I was the person in charge of Hearthstone linguistics. But people generally refer to it as “combo” and I guess that’s as good a term as any.
Is Alignment Druid combo-control? Not in the usual sense of having strong minion removal. Was Quest Mage combo-control? Yes, in the sense of having strong minion removal. But when Alignment Druid and Quest Mage sat down against each other, Alignment felt like MtG control and Quest Mage felt like MtG combo.
I might be alone in this, but I’d like to see more tools in Hearthstone that disrupt the ability to play cards from hand. It would better differentiate control and combo as separate archetypes. Some people like winning by fatigue and some people like winning with OTKs, and the way to accommodate both simultaneously is to give the former a way to remove the threats of the latter (without them always removing them successfully).
Moar Dirty Rats plox Blizz
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Actually it would be fun to have a year themed around disruption.
Sure people would whine a lot but they already whine about everything.
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You missed an opportunity to creatively beat the character limit - “Absolute Balderdash” would have done the trick. 
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Um, no, relativistic definitions are the opposite of absolute ones. I understand “control” in a similar manner to how we understand the term “old.” Is 70 old? Most people would say yes, but perhaps not if you’re asking someone who’s 90, and when you compare someone who’s 40 to someone who’s 20, 40 is old. Adding an absolute qualifier to the definition of “old” such as “you have to be 70 years of age or more” would ruin the word.
That said, given a particular meta, you can pick a point on the spectrum to draw a border and declare “the decks on this side are aggro and the decks on the other side are control.” But that’s still ultimately relativistic, not absolute.
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