It’s forced meta on a whole other level. How much variation have you seen in quest decks? They’re each played in exactly one way, and you face a quest deck in basically every matchup. There’s no creativity. No surprise. The game is boring as hell.
Back in the Un’Goro days, you at least had to sacrifice some early game tempo to play your quest, and quest decks fell out of favour before rotation. With Questing Explorer in the mix now, these trashy cookie cutter decks are probably just going to get better with future expansions.
I just don’t see what Blizzard could do to make the standard format feel fresh again. I’m uninstalling, and so should you.
You just described how meta decks work. There are always optimal builds for high-tier decks, and those are the builds that see the most play. While there are some core cards that are required for some Quest decks to operate (e.g. Quest Paladin basically has to run the same Reborn minions), they’re otherwise identical to any other meta deck in the sense of creative deviance.
Playing a card T1 still sacrifices Tempo, you aren’t always guaranteed to have Questing Adventurer in your opening hand, and Adventurer is a terrible lategame card. There’s a give and take aspect here.
It honestly sounds like you just hit the “late season blues” a couple months early. We’ve all been there. Take a break, play something else, and come back when you feel like it.
I’ve always thought Blizzard could have done more with the quest concept. I would like to see multiple quests released for each class at the start of the season so there might be a little mystery/variance instead of knowing exactly what your opponent is doing as soon as the quest hits the board.
Also, would like to see cards that interact with your opponents quest. Cards like “If your opponent has a quest in play, do x”, “If your opponent has fulfilled a quest this game, do x”, “Increase the requirement of your opponents quest by x”.
Right, I forgot. I should have remembered that one person gets to decide what’s fun, and everyone else has to accept that no other ways of doing things can be fun.
Comparing them to Ungoro quests is a joke. None of them ever saw play other than warrior for a short time, mage with OTK decks for a short time and the rogue scourge that had to be nerfed half a dozen times before it finally died.