Let’s say for the same of argument, the hearthstone devs wake up one morning and are like “you know what, mana ramping has gotten completely out of control” so they remove the mechanism from the game entirely. For the sake of balance, if that hypothetical were ever to happen, how would you rebalance the game? Or a better question is, what new mechanic would you have take the place of mana ramping? (Again this is a hypothetical, so please don’t be arguing about how unrealistic the scenario is. I’m just interested in what you all can think of (mechanic wise)
There is nothing to replace it that would be good on druid or make people equally annoyed.
Like…
We can try temporary ramp but people would just do the same thing with less tempo loss because that temporary ramp would have to cost less.
Mana deramping!
You start with 10 mana and approach 0!
The ultimate aggro deck!
That must be the day when the CEO of Lockheed Martin announces that they’re no longer selling weapons, McDonald’s that they’ve decided to go full vegan with their entire menu, and the IRS says no income taxes this year.
There’s really no point debating the impossible.
I think the larger issue is people’s expectations.
Card cost vs “power” (which I’ll loosely define as “how much it contributes to win condition(s)”) vs “budget” are all things that require tons of effort to reach equilibrium. For instance, in MTG, a 4/4 creature for 4 CMC would be considered “average” in colors like red, or white, maybe even black… but for blue, it would be OVER-budget (because blue is “supposed” to have weak minions) and for green it would be UNDER-budget (because green is supposed to have strong minions).
Here in HS, it would be like Druids getting a dragon that’s literally just a 2/2 for 2 mana. And that’s it. That’s all it did. Like, what self respecting druid is playing that? That Snake oil guy blows it out of the water. I’m paying more just because it has dragon tribe? Hard pass.
But, instead we go completely into the deep end the OTHER way, and we get a 4/5 with taunt, AND a “conditional” refund that’s very easy to meet, for 4 mana that we can EASILY come by at least a full turn earlier than expected. So like, if a 2/2 for 2 was famine, this is feast.
And it all boils down to customer expectations. People that play Hearthstone - and I mean ACTUALLY play it, not just come here to gripe about it occasionally - they’re conditioned to expect crazy-go-nuts shenanigans. That’s what they’ve been given for years. If we were going to do a hard reset, it would come at the cost of resetting the player base.
So honestly, to make a short story long, I wouldn’t bother replacing the mechanic because we’d still have the same players expecting something equally busted as compensation. The real decision is to stay the course and attract the players who like OP RNG, or to reset and hope enough “old timers” come back again.
The LEAD dev just tweeted, “well I wanted those cards to be 7/7/7 so I just decided they are 7/7/7”.
If you think those people put balance substance over superficial looks you’re sorely mistaken.
Well…
Design always start on the artistic side.
Anyone thinking otherwise have to remember that you can’t balance something that does not exist. So it first has to have someone think some BS like that and make it born.
After that is when you balance things.
I’m not convinced they do balancing well after the art. E.g. they’re just about to release a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy-inspired card on how its numbers work in-game so there is a lot of gameplay interference with their “taste”.
After a point the balancing may not be able to help it; “in order to balance this we may have to reduce 7/7”; “no: it must be 7/7” etc.
They probably do but not the super hard way.
It’s like witchwood when the process for doing Baku and genn was and it was like:
Dev 1- We should try that odd/even gimmick we discussed once you know?
Dev 2 - Sure but what would be the pay off?
Dev 1- Just do something silly that can help those decks curve like altered hero Power and we can present It next meeting.
Some hours later in the Meeting after that absurdly simple explanation:
Ben Brode - Someone give those guys a raise . We’re implementing that.
Except for the Ben Brode part devs already confessed that the whole Odd/Even gimmick was born like this and everything around it was just some tuning.
It is why dustwood is know as dustwood.
It took months for most odd/even stuff take off and when it did people got bored so fast that they decided to rotate the cards early.
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It sounds like it was a very clunky mechanic. It takes the ENTIRE game’s cards to work with it. They could at least deploy simulation for development but I doubt they do; I keep hearing “we decided we like 7/7” and “we decided we like the number 42” and “we decided this card no longer has a tribe at all because we changed the art”; good luck having those people have robust balancing techniques.
Uhhh, I’d replace it with magic the gathering mana dorks/Mana sprites
Minions who double as mana crystals as long as they’re alive, or you literally yo yo your mana into minions.
Thats usually how I think of it when I think of something jank like tsunami spam/my entire mindset after discovering the secrets of Hagatha the Fabled. If what this spell did was a minion who did the same thing as a battlecry or as their gimmick, would it still be just as annoying?
So far the results are conclusive: yes. Yes it is. 
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A minion that when alive gives a mana crystal is not a bad idea at all.
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