It’s not the stats. Cards like Silverback Patriarch and Booty Bay Bodyguard saw zero play, and the cards that supposedly “powercrept” them were actually reasonable and balanced. Cards like Frazzled Freshman are not really powercreep either, as class cards always had some situational upside or slightly better stats than average.
Damage effects are not really the biggest issue, either. The game had many charge minions since day 1, and you always had to calculate big burst damage from cards like Grommash, Bloodlust or Savage Roar. Sure, they are slightly stronger now and might need some nerfs, but they are not the biggest offender.
But the real issue many don’t realize is resource generation. Now days card draw effects are worth less and less mana, which inflates the power of the game a lot. A minion with vanilla stats (such as 2 mana 2/3 or 3 mana 3/4) that draw or generate a card is no longer considered overpowered if it had a very light restriction on it, say if you control a quest or control a minion in your board heavy tribal deck, which occurs 90% of the time. Mana cheating and ramp is also a big part of this. Refreshing mana and discounting cards are now cards that cost low mana, sometimes even being a 0 mana 1/1 with a strict upside of mana cheating.
Nowadays when you are about to lose, you just refill your hand with a ridiculous amount of cards. You can also generate multiple copies of things you didn’t put into the deck. This reduces predictability, which reduces skill in the game due to the fact that you can no longer count on the opponent not having a card, since they can always add a bunch more to their hand out of thin air, or draw a ton of cards, or cheating out late game threats early through insane ramp. Discover seemed like a great compromise between random generation and tutor, but really it is the worst effect to be ever invented, being overused by lazy designers as a filler effect while still not adding scrying and searching decks after so many years. Dredge is a good start for more interactive mechanics, but they still need to do better.
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By that logic, the most skill deck in Hearthstone is Pirate Warrior because you just predictably play Pirates and predictably get Juggernaut and just do the same thing every time.
What you mean by “skill” here is the illusion that you’re skilled. Because what you’re running into here is skill beyond your capability.
Let’s take another skill game as an example: Texas Holdem Poker. Your opponent could, theoretically, have any two hole cards. But you do get to see their bets and your body language, and the best players in the world can perform uncanny reads of these “unpredictable” any two cards based off that information.
Similarly, I could take the total number of spells in Standard, give each an equal weight for appearing as one of my opponent’s Discover options, consider the game state at the time and give probabilities of my opponent having a particular generated card. It IS predictable, or at least no less predictable than your opponent having a card in their hand that began in their deck.
Just because YOU can’t calculate in your head on the spot probability like the on-screen percentages during televised coverage of a poker tournament doesn’t mean it isn’t a skill. It is. Reducing the ease of predictability increases skill in the game.
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I believe op meant the oppositw with predictability. You cant predict you opponents plays because he can generate so much stuff that didnt start in deck
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You can’t. Heck, I’ll be real, a lot of the time I can’t either. But someone can. It’s humanly possible.
Git gud.
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Kind of disagree. Tons of meta decks generate barely anything. If Kazakusan disappears from Druid then Ramp Druid becomes pretty threat light even with Moonlit Guidance (and wow is that card disgusting). Naga DH is a top tier deck and generates nothing. Quest Hunter is very powerful in tournaments… generates nothing. Holy Paladin is quite strong; generates maybe some extra holy spells.
The decks that really generate a lot of stuff right now are tribal decks and Thief Rogue and sort of Naga Mage. None of the meta tyrants and mostly decks that fall off at higher ranks or just perform poorly in general. And regardless of generation or not, you can get a pretty good idea of what is available to every opponent you face right now.
Predictable doesn’t mean skilled, but the less reliable information you can acquire in the game, the more it depends on luck and random guesses than actual thinking.
Have fun guessing that Pirate Warrior gets a 4th copy and Smite and lose the game. “Git Gud!” Lol
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it is powercreep on every level by purposely overpowered cards for sell purposes.
New cards have to compete with old cards over deck slots.
And because Hearthstone has a 2 years rotation it can’t power down (fastly), still have to compete with the 1 year old set which power creeped the 2 year old one.
Drastic power down will result into less sells, as they tested in some expansions.
That stacked up into continues powercreep which resulted into nonsense cards as hearthstone has now.
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I agree with Flagkiller and OnlineRitter the op on this one. It’s one thing if say, in a tradeable card game you can build a deck around rng and that is part of what most of its card slots are therein used for is continuous generation of cards whereas there is at least a tradeoff then with the viability of survivability against aggro or direct damage, for example. It is quite another when every third card of any significant rarity is either something along the lines of like “fully heal your hero” or “generate x amount of cards from a pool outside your deck” or "generate a card from this outside pool and cast them or something like Kazakusan which makes you a new deck out of thin air. It makes the game relatively stateless comparative to the deck, since none of the actual existing conditions stay from even one turn to the next but instead are rolled out like a vegas slot machine on a dime, to whomever gets the better algorithm if both are overusing rng and such or to whoever is if the other plays to what other tcgs utilize, which is mostly a card pool from the deck with limited outside generation of cards. Really , even the extraneous win conditions like the Priest Quest aren’t so bad considering the requirements, although it is dumb in a certain way with the amount of heals and so forth for stall Priest has. It still takes plenty of time to overcome it any number of ways including silence of minions defending them. Vs rng always becomes the overriding factor especially with the broken combos out there for either relatively endless rng per turn or making the only highly viable cards those for churning out rng. At this point, it ceases to be a trading card game or collectible card game in the same sense of the word and becomes something more akin to a vegas slot machine or farmville, instead.
Don’t you have phones? Mobile players do not want to play past turn 5. I guess.
It’s not only stats, not only damage, and not only resource generation, everything in HS have suffered powercreeping. We cannot say “X is the biggest offender” because the problem is that all combined are the problem.
Interesting enough people also like seeing more cards of their decks.
I can agree that there is too much draw but we not need to dial draw all the way back to classic.
The stats would not be so over tuned if you couldn’t draw and generate 4 or 5 board clears and heals in a row. If you couldn’t flood the board with 8/8s every turn control just wipes your board every turn and you will have the most polarizing game ever. And if you don’t have 20 damage from hand they can just gain 20+ armor in a turn and draw 6 more armor gain cards by destroying their weapon.
Extremely cheap card draw and infinite resource generation is the root cause of the problem. There is no predictability. You can’t safely put minion on board early because as soon as turn 2 the opponent can deal 5 damage on the entire board, and if you play more they can draw through their deck for even more stall.
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Which is inherently less skilled.
I should have known the warlock was going to play gigafin on consecutive turns, for sure.
If only I had better thinking I would have known that a legendary minion that is only supposed to be in the deck once by rule is in there twice. I didn’t wait to find out if there was a third one, but I am sure someone knows the answer.
Half the fun in a good match used to be baiting their removal and figuring out their hand. Not anymore. It could literally be anything in standard. Who knows.
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At least with something like dredge you know they are drawing a powerful generated card instead of randomly adding extra copies of things they already have in their deck to their hand.
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In this I agree with Scrotie here. Working with and against RNG is a skill. My most played decks, by far, were Cyclone Mage and Khadgar Mage. I loved generating stuff. Heck, I generated tona of it in my time. So let me put you in on a secret here:
Generating stuff is bad. Is inherently a bad way to play a deck. The most successful decks are reliabe 30 cards workhorses. But ya know why it’s bad?
That’s because you will frequently run into cards that don’t have any use whatsoever right now, and a few that do. Your job, as the player, is to see which cards is closer to what you need. Your job, as a opponent, is to try and understand which cards would be the best for your opponent, and play around that.
Oh, but he generated another 20 additional cards through the game!, You say.
Does not matter, they are not picking at random.
Is the worst kind of card right now a X? Cool. Can his generation generate that? Yes. Are the odds reasonable? Is that purely random or several discovers? Should I make the effort to play around that? All that is a skill.
Sometimes, you will make the wrong call. But as anything in card games, it’s not a play by play case, it’s a over time evaluation.
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So much this. But again, like people have been saying all day…
It sucks when you’re the victim of it but it’s GREAT when it enables your victory…
So, how do you propose we fix this “issue”? Smaller discover pool? Can’t discover legendaries? (my vote), then what?
I feel that one reason for power creep is so that if they nerf a new card it doesn’t kill the card.
Sorcerer’s Apprentice being 4 mana killed the card.
While the new cards they recently changed are still playable.
Enforce deck limits in the discover pool.
Brought a smite in your starting deck? You can’t get another one from any random generation pool. (put a copy of a minion spells/mininos would still work, but your opponent would know you have it.)
Discovered a legendary? Can’t find another one in the pool.
Two of any other rarity is the max you will see in a game.
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