The Mage Problem

So, is there a reason Blizzard decided it’d be a good idea to make the elementals you summon from Tsunami attack as soon as they come out? 10 mana for 12 power of attack to freeze any and everything they hit. It may as well say 10 mana, make it so weapons are an obsolete card type in the game. And it wouldn’t be bad cause oh its limited to two copies in a deck. Except Blizzard has made it super easy to make it more like 4-5 copies with cards that just let you recast things. And let’s not even include the elemental mage deck that runs lamplighter and just hits you for 25 in one turn. Here I was, thinking I was safe, there’s no way my opponent can kill me. With 13 life and 12 armor with an empty board. And he’s just like 4 mana lamplighter, 12 damage. 4 mana lamplighter, 13 more damage. Blizzard needs to reset Hearthstone’s power creep because the game isn’t even fun anymore. That or don’t update Standard and make sets and focus on Battlegrounds cause that’s the only appealing game mode in Hearthstone anymore.

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That’s a pretty reasonable timeframe to die to lamplighter. What is that, turn 11 or 12? You had plenty of time to pressure them and if they are playing an elemental every turn you knew exactly what they were trying to do.

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This is not a safe health total against most of the meta decks right now.

Insanity lock, Pipsi paladin, Odyn warrior, BSM, and overheal Priest can all kill you from there. The rest of them can immediately drop a board that will have you dead if you can’t clear it.

This isn’t really a “mage” problem. It’s just how hearthstone is now.

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Over half of those decks can do it at least 2 or 3 turns faster too

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The reason mage isn’t dominating everything is because even with the good ole cheat n repeat, all of the other decks are doing equally crazy things.

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As someone who plays elemental mage, i think the deck has a few key weakness you can exploit

  1. Lamplighter combo takes time and the deck also lacks good card draw
  2. Once you lose the board it’s very hard to recover
  3. You get overrun by aggro fairly easily
  4. control decks can heal/armor out of lamplighter range while maintaining board pressure
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Health is no longer a resource to utilize in most matches now. It used to be something you could leverage but with so many decks being able to burst 30+ in a turn you need to always be wary.

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So, everyone who responded to this just confirmed my thoughts that Hearthstone’s power creep is ridiculous. They’ve made control decks unplayable with Lamplighter. Plain and simple. You can’t interact with it and so long as you don’t miss a drop, which you won’t, Blizzard has guaranteed you won’t, you’ll kill your opponent with double Lamplighter. There’s a simple way you reset power creep. Every xpac has low power cards until rotations hit and there’s no overpowered cards anymore. It’s not a hard concept.

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Sounds like you played bad. Im going to guess you were playing warrior… You should have ramped into turn 5 marin then turn 6 you should have wanded into odyn/sleep under the stars/heavy plate. Drop a razorfen rockstar and it should be an otk.

Alternatively if you were playing reno you should have wanded into brann/bombboss/reno and then dropped a dirty rat before the reno. That play is slightly more RNG heavy which is why reno probably isnt as good as straight up OTK warrior but it should have been good enough.

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Power creep may exist but you don’t get the deck at all if you think it’s a target of traditional control. It does not have a board that can be easily controlled because it relies on a sudden spam of the elementals played FROM HAND.

I.e. it’s a combo deck that happens to be fast; it is NOT countered by slow control; it’s countered by just being fast (not even faster necessarily (that’s because it’s clunky and sometimes it wastes at least 2 rounds to find cards)).

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Why don’t you pick up the deck and test your theories before embarassing yourself?

That deck is tier 4, it’s a disaster.

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It’s not that great, control will clear your board a couple of times and overrun you way before you can lamplighter, i mean if you are losing to lamplighter at turn 15 that’s another issue

Expansions will always have power creep because if there’s no power creep then there’s no reason to collect the cards.

Imagine saying that I played poorly because I didn’t RNG into proper draws. Or I’m embarrassing myself for complaining about a “tier 4 deck”. If Hearthstone wasn’t a bad game, Blizzard wouldn’t have needed to implement bots into their games to help fix long queue times. They reset the power creep in the game, they bring back a large influx of players. So large that the morons who rely on the power creep who would leave because it’s gone wouldn’t even matter. Power creep is all relative to what the strongest card in Standard is. It will eventually rotate out and when it does and the power creep is at an all time low, people will be forced to rely more on their skill in playing the card game rather than the power level of their cards. Everyone who is arguing that the mage decks aren’t that bad compared to other decks are missing the point. If the “lower tier decks” are winning that carelessly, that shows how brainless the Hearthstone meta has become. And it shows. It’s crazy that Battlegrounds is a better game mode than any traditional Hearthstone format because of how bad the creep has gotten.

Not really, lowrolls happen. I mean, the deck being tier 4 means it still wins 40, 42% of the time, maybe even more for Elemental Mage

But compared to most of the others in the meta, it’s just bad. You’re not supposed to give him 11-12 turns to ramp lamplighter.

But yeah, lowrolls happen, so I guess you lowrolled.

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/agree

I would love to see a massive overhaul of Hearthstone, which involved balancing cards and reducing powercreep from all sets.

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The only thing I’m gonna say. Today’s patch notes of reducing Tsunami’s cost and making it so you only get 3 water elementals instead of 4 shows me those who were saying the deck it was in was tier 4 and not as good as other decks are full of sh*t and you have no idea what you’re talking about.

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The deck had it’s time at the top. I’m glad team5 gave mage something, even if it wasn’t my cup of tea, but it really is time to move on.
Maybe next time mage can have a deck that actually involves playing spells for damage and not imitating pally.

Nah.
It really isn’t over.

The nerfs are just to see if the draenei they planned to be played with big spells work.

And sincerely…
I still seeing no reason to use they.

Orb mage is a more well rounded deck than most people believe and drop skyla/rogue cards for draenei would be such a retrocess that i see no reason for doing so.

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BSM was a Tier 2 deck when they nerfed Skyla as the data indicated, and it remained a Tier 2 (with 12 other deck archetypes that had a higher winrate).

The addition of Prince Renethal was added into Standard, which helped to take BSM to Tier 1 for a week, before Tsunami was nerfed today.

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