Every strategy in this game devolves into draw your win condition, ignore everything your opponent did since you can either just race their face, assemble an otk or infinitely clear, and win or lose based on draw.
The same for your opponent. I ve been playing this game for a long time and it’s gone through various cycles of draw RNG having different amounts of impact, I’d say on average it’s been about 50 percent of the contribution to determining who wins, the other 50 being decisions.
While I think that’s pretty high, RNG should play a smaller role in my opinion, but 50 percent is maybe okay.
We are now breaking 80 to 90 percent of each game being decided by draw and nothing else. And it’s not just certain decks, it’s Every. Single. Deck. And. Matchup.
I dont think its particularly different now than its ever been. I mean an aggro deck could ‘hand check’ your opponent for years now and win if the opponent didnt have a good anti aggro draw. Token druid did just that for years to name one of many.
There do seem to be more cards in the game now that want to be played early and often… By that I mean something like infestor that wants to be played early and manipulated over and over or a better example is sentry in priest protoss.
But we’ve had cards like that in the past with something like Prince Kelseth… It wasn’t normally played over and over but win% exploded when you had it early… same with pre-nerf drek’thar.
I think you could go back throughout hearthstone history and groan at various early game combos where you knew it was going to be an uphill battle… or if you were playing that deck knowing that since you didn’t draw your early game snowball combo it was going to be a harder fight.
The whole discover a win nonsense has been almost curtailed entirely from the game which is probably why draw RNG seems more pronounced now than it was back when you could discover a way out 16 times per game.
Because the definition of toxic lately is too vague.
Is just the fact that sometime the game gonna end with you losing If you don’t try to Win really toxic?
And even if we talk about disruption. Disruption incentivizes non polarized deckbuilding.
If you punish those players with disruption they either gonna have to deal with it or in fact play something less polarized.
This is why people mad at disruption should be ignored most of the time instead of the entire show on “feelings” people pull here.
That’s just wild conjecture because that’s an extremely complex calculation because it depends on both opponents’ decks but I agree randomness is generally high.
But even if it’s high it’s still a zero sum game given a lot of games in the month (say at least 60) since your bad luck today turns to good luck tomorrow and so on.
It’s still a problem though because you have no way of knowing if in the current game you were actually better or worse unless obvious mistakes were done.
It’s a more brutal problem for people who play very few games every month, and it also ruins Tournaments because they play very few games to even it out.