First post I’ve ever made here, after a few thousand games played. I love Hearthstone, so I’m not here to be a constant complainer, but starting with United in Stormwind I’ve been seeing some card designs that I just can’t get behind.
Selfish Shellfish is a 4-cost minion that is 7/7, which is ridiculous, with the tradeoff being that your opponent gets two cards when it dies, which is great because card draw is a powerful mechanic. But when used properly, the card has no tradeoff. You get the cheap 7/7, and the card draw becomes a problem for the opponent, not for you. Which turns a 4 cost card into an incredible value, probably akin to an 8 cost card.
Another mechanic that annoys me in that way is how cards like Ignite and the Demon Seed turn burning through your deck too fast into a problem for your opponent, rather than a problem for you. The point of having 30 cards is that you have to balance between drawing them too fast and suffering fatigue while your opponent is not only still standing, but has plenty of cards left to play. But with Ignite and Demon Seed, that tradeoff is gone. You can merrily draw as much as you want and the only one who suffers is your opponent.
Now I recognize that none of these cards are unbalancing the game, so don’t really justify a nerf. But they do mess with basic game mechanics in negative ways, I believe, and should never have been designed.
While I’m at it, I’d also put any situation where you attack or silence your own minions in that category. While those are legit tactics, it should be a sacrifice. I need this minion, but I need hit points back more, for example. Or when you use area effect cards that destroy your valuable minions along with your opponent’s. With Selfish Shellfish, there is no downside to silencing the minion at all! You even still get the deathrattle when you use the Priest hero card!
Old concepts of limited resources, value etc. don’t exist anymore. Every class can draw. Classes generally get one of mana ramping/mana cheating/ramping effects.
The destruction of a lot of long time class identities upset a lot of people.
Turning a disadvantage into an advantage has always been a tactic in CCG’s. One of my earliest decks in MtG was a sacrifice deck. Oh, I need to discard a card to cast this? Let me discard a big creature. Oh, I need to sacrifice a creature to bring back a creature from my graveyard? Let me sacrifice this free 0/1 I have to bring back that big creature.
Yeah but in a well designed game there should be no easy outs. Almost no one uses the Shellfish as supposedly designed, as a cheap big minion that is hard to counter early, but when countered, gives your opponent a nice little reward. Instead, it’s a turn 4 challenge that requires serious effort to counter AND not get milled in the process. Which turns the game on its head. The Shellfish player gets a big advantage with no tradeoff, while the opponent is in a lose-lose situation. Leave the minion on the board, bad. Kill it, bad. Silence it, still bad.
A good game rewards players who show ingenuity and skill. It doesn’t allow super easy plays that force your opponent to demonstrate ingenuity and skill just to get out of trouble. Plus since it can be plunked down on turn 4 and duplicated on turn 5, it’s often just a matter of “do I have a counter or don’t I?” The reason to have big threats late game is because if you’ve used your resources wisely, you probably have a counter. If big threats can be put down early, then it all comes down to how lucky you were in the mulligan stage.
that’s false.
if you face someone with the gold cele card back, barring some friend family using their acct, that player factually is good.
ive seen it once, and actually won, and got a polite friend req out of it.
i think he made it to blizzcon years ago.
basically i killed his flame totem and that ruined his tempo and game.
its pathetic that hs is that simple of a game for some decks.
it really is like the game has like 2 comeback cards ice block and like i dont even know the other one.
devs just want this game to be allllllll about tempo and never about coming back.
which is bogus and sad.
Hey, just observing that it messes with basic game mechanics in a bad way. Hearthstone does that a lot, I know. Mana cheating complaints are frequent here for that reason.
But in general, a powerful early card should have a tradeoff for its use, not a DOUBLE benefit making it even better. They could have just printed 7/7 4-cost cards with no effects. As a matter of fact, why not just do that? But if THAT card existed, most of you would say “WTF?! That’s power creep!”
Yeah yeah whatever you say. Everything Hearthstone is Polarizing, Toxic, Bad Design, Rigged Brain Dead, Cancer, and a few dozen other buzz words and phrases I forgot.
When to face Aggro players: “Hah, you dare to spam minions to me? Ma’ VIPER of da Deep will wreck your board!!!”
When to face Midrange players: “Hah, pathetic mortals, behold the army of Ma’ Shellfishhhh (a lot of fishes) with Azharan Ritual and Amulet of Undying!!!”
When to face Control players: “Hah, a lot of cards on ya hand are dead by now. I, the chosen child of Hearthstone, active Xyrella, the Sucker”. All ya legendaries, epics, atm cards will be sucked into my Xyrella’s … (do not further your imagination over these words).
Without looking Shellfish players’ enemy crumble into pieces, they turned their backs, raised their heads up, watching their radiating staff while saying
I think Shellfish is fine were it not for Xyrella. I find it utterly obnoxious they changed her explicitly to be a mill bomb with silenced Shellfish. My most hated decks are ones where they run a bunch of fat but limited threats, but then if you slugged it out with them they get to just disintegrate you for free instead of resources actually matteringl. It’s why Demon Seed was so obnoxious too, so I can’t understand why they tried to give Priest that same dynamic.
Oh my God, people complain about Shellfish and priest deck in meta full of DH and Mr. Smite. I have played over 200 games with this deck, so there are my observations:
VS aggro it’s decent with [Whispers of the Deep]. It’s 5 mana and most of times it doesn’t help to clear because at 5 mana there are a lot more than 7 hp on ther board. Without [Whispers of the Deep] it’s a shot in the foot because of card draw for aggro.
VS control is kinda good. At the same time control has plenty of options to deal with it.