Which one was the most degenerate, overpowered, and completely broken expansion Hearthstone has ever had?
I figure a lot of people will say K&C cause it’s easiest to rememeber but don’t forget MSG gave us Patches, Small Time Buccaneer, Jades, & Kazakus, Kun, Raza, Dragonfire Potion, Drak OP, Devolve, & Dirty rat
Jade was rly nasty to. And everyone except aggro hated patches to their core…
KnC got Kingsbane ![:smiley:](https://dacy5cilkxabf.cloudfront.net/en/hearthstone/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=6" ":smiley:")
level up ![:oden:](https://dacy5cilkxabf.cloudfront.net/en/hearthstone/images/emoji/twitter/oden.png?v=6" ":oden:")
Call to arms priest spellstone… duskbreaker… pshycic scream all the ingredients to make a cubelock…
I think KNC wins
Eh, I’m sure if you added Frozen Throne, you’d’ve gotten some people going that way too.
Still, some things didn’t get OP until another expac made an old card broken. Raza was decent, but it was together with DK Anduin that it became silly strong. Jade Druid were a t2 deck that relied on Aunctioneer + Idol at the end of the deck to cycle, but Ultimate Infestation made it so much easier, and pre-nerf Spreading Plague gave them great anti-aggro. Even the dreaded Aviana+Kun was not too common, primarily used for Malygoose once in a blue moon, but Psychmelon and Star Aligner went and ruined everything.
Patches is hard to beat
But
Dusk Breaker by itself is one of the most Bonkers cards ever made
That card is the epitome of power creep
Also Cubes
Nuff said IMO
KnC had more balance changes to cards since its release, but they’ve gotten more active with balance patches over the past year so that might not be a fair comparison.
Mean Streets of Gadgetzan had the meta constantly warped around its cards for a full year. Dring which only Quest Rogue challenged it.
This includes 2 months of K&C. K&C’s first op deck relied on MSoG cards.
Most overpowered expansion was clearly Knights of the frozen throne.
As for msog i dont think it was overpowered. The only overpowered card was patches.
‘‘Small Time Buccaneer, Jades, & Kazakus, Kun, Raza, Dragonfire Potion, Drak OP, Devolve, & Dirty rat’’
All these cards are one fine imo especially after small time buccaneers nerf
Knights of the Frozen Throne is disgustingly overpowered. That’s for sure, every DK is a good Legendy…
Picking the second one is more difficult.
It’s practically Jades + Kazakus + Drakonid OP… vs … Spell Stones + Cubes
frozen throne
mean streets
kobolds
I don’t actually think kobolds was that bad. MSoG was without a doubt the worst expansion to ever hit the game. Jade was unchecked for about 8 months or so before they released geist which still didn’t do a whole lot. Patches was awful to deal with. pirate warrior flooded the ladder, WEe got the abomination known as kun which ruined wild for the longest time, and with all this crap all but like 5 legendary cards were even playable.
Mean Streets of Gadgetzan, beyond any doubt. Current power level, unhealthy meta warping mechanics, design mistakes, and other apprehensions are consequent of this expansion; quite literally everything one might consider to detract from or be bad about the current game can be tied back to MSoG.
Warning: Wall of Text ahead! ![:yum:](https://dacy5cilkxabf.cloudfront.net/en/hearthstone/images/emoji/twitter/yum.png?v=6" ":yum:")
The Year of the Mammoth had to be created with MSoG in mind, and many of the cards were intentionally made under extreme power creep just to be able to compete with that expansion and not be entirely irrelevant. This is particularly true since MSoG was so broken it power crept and synergy crept itself; for the first time in the game’s history, many powerful or potentially powerful effects were introduced, often on vanilla bodies, but none of them saw play because they lacked sufficient raw power or synergy. Something had to be done; and the decision Blizzard ultimately made was not to nerf an entire expansion.
The Year of the Mammoth, and Kobolds & Catacombs especially, exacerbated this problem; but afterwards, power creep was abruptly ceased with insufficient balance changes to the YotM, so that aside from Baku the Mooneater and Genn Greyamen – themselves unhealthily meta-warping – the Year of the Raven has just been the K&C meta minus the MSoG elements.
Exploring design space is good. What is not as good is when doing so falls flat and diminishes the quality of game, yet steps to mitigate this phenomenon or preclude it from occurring are not taken.
Probably the biggest mistake in general was Mana cheating. Patches the Pirate was the main precursor to this; Kobolds & Catacombs took it up to eleven, yet it still did not break the game as much as Mean Streets of Gadgetzan. (For context, let’s briefly discuss decks rather than mechanics abstractly. Jade Druid and Razakus Priest had both achieved Tier 0 during the Year of the Mammoth; Knights of the Frozen Throne was what enabled them, but the ticking time bombs were a gift from MSoG. Indeed, MSoG had to leave Standard before Cube Warlock approached anywhere near that level, and even then, Even Paladin was what would have become the Tier 0 deck had it not been for the nerf in The Witchwood.)
In fairness, this is symptomatic of the developers’ lethargy as a whole; that is a distinct discussion.
This is indubitably the biggest sin of them all. In any card game, a healthy metagame in terms of balance, equitable representation and diversity, and lack of polarity necessitates midrange being prominent because of its inherent malleability and relatively honest play style.
MSoG essentially initially made everything except hyper-aggro (face) and hyper-control (fatigue) decks nonviable; later, this trend continued and developed, staying similar but for the addition of combos and infinite value as well as the targeted destruction of aggro and tempo. The current meta is a consequence of this: excessively powerful control decks that also resulted in the rise of similarly powerful combo decks that abuse the same control tools, aggro that is degenerate in it ability to refill the board, and almost anything resembling midrange primarily being tempo but for Genn (Standard) or virtually nonexistent (Wild).
The next few points are really nothing more than addenda to this one.
Jade Idol was the first of many reliable infinite value generators. Everything from Kingsbane to Death Knights – especially Deathstalker Rexxar’s absurd infinite value machine in the form of his Hero Power – is due to the original. Infinite value had almost always been an option, albeit rare: what Mean Streets of Gadgetzan did was introduce it at unprecedented levels and with direct support, such that the game proceeded to release more and more immensely powerful options of this kind.
Granted, people commonly think face decks do not have the right to exist; if this is so, neither do fatigue decks. Yet this approach was not the right way to resolve that: introducing attractive but finite win conditions for control decks would have been.
Because Hearthstone is such a simple game, combos were completely marginalized in the start: they tended to be difficult and costly, and were quickly nerfed when they were consistent to any extent, even when they were fair (e.g., Worgen OTK Warrior). MSoG changed this approach. Nothing in the expansion itself did this, to be fair; Aviana-Kun was not even relevant until a year later in Wild, and never problematic except for Star Aligner Druid during The Boomsday Project. It was the precedent they set that proved so problematic. Combo Druid and Combo Priest in general, Mecha’thun decks, Exodia Paladin, ways to reliably cheat out Malygos and/or Prophet Velen, and the like, is due to this paradigm shift.
I would like to point out here that combo is a perfectly acceptable archetype and is an important part of a balanced meta, but Hearthstone’s excessive simplicity removes much of the interaction that would make them seem fairer, although they are generally among the most skill-testing of decks. We can see that when combo decks are viable, they are utterly despised by a large proportion of players, whether or not they are out of control by any objective metric.
Combo decks are now overly potent against control decks, in the same way control decks are overly potent against aggro decks: All because of the Year of the Mammoth, which can be tied back to Mean Streets of Gadgetzan.
Just got home from work so why not. Ok this took me an hour, and was super-educational along the way, answer at the bottom!
MSOG
Malfurion
Rexxar
Jaina
Uther
Anduin (Fasten ur seatbelt…)
Valeera
Thrall
Gul’Dan
Garrosh
Neutrals
KnC
Malfurion
Rexxar (Fasten ur seatbelt…again)
Jaina
Uther (Oh boy)
Anduin (Fasten ur belt a 3rd time)
Valeera (Omg…hold my baby please!)
Thrall
Gul’Dan (Grab my baby, Valeera has been holding it!)
Garrosh
Neutrals
So…what’s the more-busted set?
Kobolds and Cata
It’s not even close. Thanks for time.
I’m wagering Knights may even beat out KnC…topic for another day maybe.
Honorable mention to both One night in Karazhan and Genn and Baku in witchwood.
Frozen throne was only the DKs and some very few select cards like chaingang and Kelazeth, there are more but not that many.
Kobolds was just to empower both quests from Un’goro and DKs.
But to me the price goes to Mean streets so many busted mechanics (jades and Kazakus decks) plus a neutral pirate package that fitted in like 6 out of the 9 classes, hell even some priest ended running it.
Rhok is unplayable???
Still i dont see how this was msog problem. Jade druid (and we re talking about an era that druid also had innervate) was a T3 deck at msog and a T2 deck at Un 'goro. Raza was a worthless card as well.
Koft gave them UI and shadowreaper Anduin which eventually made them monsters. So why blame msog about that? Every card in every expansion has danger potential if given the right tools in the next ones…
Edit: Also let me add that kazakus was a good card in msog but a worthless card after reno left simply cause it wasnt enough to create a highlander deck with him. It was razakus that brought him back
MSoG broke the game. I don’t think the same can be said about any other “powerful” expansion. KOFT comes close due to Anduin though.
Let me remind you what the meta in MSoG was: Pirates, Jades and Highlanders. For half a year, without much change.
Plus, those pirates were often finishing the game by turn 4-5, and that is with you making counterplays. It wasn’t uncommon to die to them despite oozing their weapon and playing big taunts… by turn 6. It felt absolutely horrible and to me personally nothing before or after comes close to that feeling of utter helplessness. There was literally nothing that could have been done, you were at the mercy of RNG to hope that they get worse-than-average draws.
And on the other side of that spectrum were jades, with Aya being their MVP, basically a highmane on steroids, effectivelly killing all control decks for a long time.
MSoG meta was also the only one in which pretty much all streamers were speaking out against it, calling for changes, stressing how absolutely horrible it is.
I agree that the pirates were trully unfun but not with everything else.
If you didnt like jades than no problem at all cause they were T3 at the time, absolutely out of the meta. And then there were some really interesting decks like renolock, dragon control/midrange priest, midrange shaman, miracle rogue. And lets not forget that C’ thun decks still had place in the meta by the time.
Also we saw some fun aspects for ex handbuff and tri-class cards.
So in general i dont think MSoG was as bad as described by many…
My argument against Frozen Throne is while strong… most of the power level was off the Death Knights… where as i think K&C and MSG were stronger from top to bottom
I think it is K&C > MSoG in terms of power but I preferred the ‘style’ of K&C’s brokenness over MSoG’s
I quoted this because Jade wasn’t T3. Jade Druid was tier 3 but Jade Shaman, until Shaman was nerfed, was a high tier 2 deck if memory serves and is, imho, the best of the three Jade classes once again in Wild.
MSoG was less fun in what was OP because it turned into, for a time, a very three deck game and is still, since Naxx, the closest I have come to leaving HS.
I am well aware. Jade Druid was generally at the bottom of Tier 3 and often Tier 4 during MSoG; it was definitely nowhere near a broken deck at the time, especially since Reno Warlock was one of two meta tyrants despite the erroneous claims that the deck “killed control.”
But the problem was Jade Druid was twofold: [1] it was a ticking time bomb that would eventually have become utterly degenerate if not broken, and [2] the mechanic was inherently extremely polarizing.
For the former, we saw what happened due to 5-Mana Spreading Plague and Ultimate Infestation in Knights of the Frozen Throne.
For the latter, this was true even when it changed. Jade Druid’s match-ups only flipped after the KotFT balance patch: with Spreading Plague and other defensive tools, it started to become good against aggro; but because of Skulking Geist, it started to become bad against control.
Raza the Chained was entirely similar: a ticking time bomb. People did not seem to understand how far above the power curve he was – he is still quite a good Legendary in Reno Priest – because Reno Priest originally often floated Mana anyway. More saliently, people do not seem to recognize that his previous mechanic was inherently broken; 0-Cost cards and abilities are extremely dangerous. Raza would have been the reason something became broken later down the road, even if Shadowreaper Anduin had not come along in his current form. This was one of the few nerfs in which exactly the card that should have been targeted was.
I am blaming Mean Streets of Gadgetzan because it developed and pushed these inherently questionable cards and mechanics: its bad design and balance is what initiated and exacerbated all the problems in the Year of the Mammoth. All expansions have cards that could potentially become broken, but usually they are due to more problematic cards (e.g., Juicy Psychmelon vs. Aviana); in this case, the cards that completed the puzzle were only almost as problematic at worst.
Reno Jackson was necessary because he was Warlock’s only reliable way to heal at the time, so that control was pigeonholed into Reno decks both out of necessity and relative power, as well as Mage’s best way to heal, especially with how well it worked with Ice Block.
Kazakus alone was sufficient for Priest, which did not truly require a full heal in most cases, after rotation. This was initially the weakest Reno deck anyway because, while it had by far the best Reno class Legendary, it did not have much to gain from losing consistency, particularly with the overpowered cards the class gained from the same expansion.
That is besides the point, in any case. Reno Jackson made Reno decks a thing; Kazakus was so powerful that he made them better than traditional control decks in spite of the inconsistency. There is a reason the Reno classes are only the Kabal these days; prior to MSoG, they might have been the most natural choices, but they weren’t far better at it than the other classes.