Plagues are, without doubt, the worst mechanic that the HS team has ever developed. No way to interact with them, no way to avoid them (don’t tell me to burn my own deck), no way to remove them, absolutely inevitable. Then you add a card (Helya) that ensures that they last forever so any form of late game is completely nullified by them.
Swallow your pride and remove them from the game. It’s in everyone’s best interests.
its a good mechanic punishes "do nothing " attrition decks
Not even close.
I rarely agree with Boreas, but plagues are only really effective against you if you’re not trying to win. They punish slow, grindy decks and are good for the game.
And what’s wrong with slow grindy control decks?
Nah. Plagues ain’t that scary.
Clearly this person never played when Garrote Rogue was in standard. Probably not even during the Boom era with all the bombs either.
as much as I dislike the bomb/plague mechanic, they are balanced (if not weak).
they should stay
here is how to beat plagues in standard
Kill them faster. Solved.
They do exist, that’s the problem.
Winner, reply of the month
For me, the problem with plagues is that almost every DK I face, is plague DK. It’s old and boring. Its not good anymore. There are better options. There is a new expansion. Be more creative.
But yes, if there are mechanics that put cards in your deck, there should also be that removes it. I don’t mind grindy control decks.
But because every 2 or 3 games are against plague DK, I am forced to play fast aggressive decks.
I think plagues should be removed just to add to the creativity of the community. Same with any deck that sees too many plays.
Do you have any hard data whatsoever to back this up? Genuine question.
My guess is you only “feel” this way and have never actually attempted to keep a record of your match history. But I could be wrong, hence the question.
I generally prefer cards like Neru to punish grindy control decks personally.
It basically makes sure they have to try to win the game because it’s something that at the end of the game they can’t remove. It doesn’t kill the archetype of grindy control decks, but it does give an option to keep say, badlands control priest from being good enough.
Plagues are just a different form of grindy control deck that beats other grindy control decks. It just doesn’t have good enough control tools to survive in this meta. The deck would be insufferable if it did.
I wish grindy control decks were more playable. I like the archetype, but I do recognize that they can not be allowed to drag every game into fatigue, or do stuff that makes you feel like you are in jail the entire extended game.
To give an idea of where I think the control target design should be, it’s about where the old 1st iteration Nzoth decks were. They had to play minions the whole game to set up a big board to threaten lethal. It wasn’t just fill the deck with removal and win in fatigue, and there wasn’t a few cards in there to 30-0 your opponent instantly once drawn. They played more like a tempo deck that liked expensive minions and used removals to get past the early turns.
Nowadays, that kind of play style just doesn’t really exist. Tempo druid is close-ish, but being on 10 Mana while locking your opponent at 5 isn’t exactly an ideal game design.
Name one deck of this type that actually exists today.
Rogue Sonya might not intentionally be a “do nothing attrition deck” but it certainly feels like it qualifies as such.
5 turns and approximately 9,001 cards played later, they either time out or get me to concede out of sheer boredom.
I hate to say this but pretty much anything priest does outside of a few niche decks. The basic design ATM is to survive and play the titan and then proceed to bring the titan back into play a dozen times more.
Outside of that any grind control deck today has a definitive win condition they are playing for. Unlike years ago when the win condition was to bore your opponent to death for 40 minutes.
I’ll admit, no I don’t. But its not just a feeling. I use the Firestone deck tracker. It only shows me the classes I faced, not the actual deck.
But as I climbed the ranks it got less. I was pleasantly surprised today to face a few other DK decks.
So it does seem to be more in the lower ranks.
plague is easy to fit into most dk decks