I think this will have an effect on control matchups and warrior. It hits the effectiveness of dirty rat and bomb boss, which are the two biggest blockers for any control deck competing with warrior. Now it’s an open question whether there are any control decks out there that can get their win condition off around turn 8 or 9, the point at which the disrupt will come online.
Ofc dirty rat will still be in play but it’s battlecry won’t be doubled.
I’m just not a fan of leaving stupid effects that determine the winner every time in the game but trying to let other decks get under them a bit.
Binary games of ,“did Brann get played?” Aren’t fun.
Make Brann do something you can respond to
Yup and according to their own write up on player agency they want to avoid such power plays as much as possible in the future, so I’m likewise confused as to why they don’t just address the effect.
Smeet, Brann is not some monolithic card with infinite power where there is no cost at which he’d be okay. There is a cost at which he’d be balanced, and at 10 mana he would be utterly unplayable. You’ve been completely ridiculous about the card throughout this entire thread.
You can balance the win rate. That won’t make the card effect fun to play against. There’s no cost that happens at.
Imagine a world where Brann did this instead
Deepminer Brann
Battlecry: if your deck started with no duplicates, summon an Azerite vein.
Azerite Vein
0/5 minion
Dormant for 5 turns
At the start of your turn, randomly trigger a friendly minion’s battlecry. (Works while dormant)
Now the effect is still strong, but has counterplay. Maximizing the effect now involves protecting your battlecry minions, and successfully doing so could duplicate the effect well more than once. It also doesn’t go for the rest of the game, and after 5 turns, any deck can now remove it rather than only those running Reno.
The design of Brann is just bad. A 50% win rate doesn’t mean a card is well designed.
I might be a wee bit bad, but I just started trying out the warrior deck and I don’t think the problem is people don’t play counter decks. It is more the players don’t adjust their play for facing a warrior. Like facing fatigue warlock, they aren’t holding crescendos for the killing me. Even when my board is not threatening so they seem to be thinking it is providing additional pressure to me. I might even say they waste their immune weapon for small amount of damage like 1, 2 fatigue damage and hero power, but I haven’t played as fatigue warlock to decide to say that is wrong or not.
Also, I faced a druid who I thought was going to use my strategy of defeating warrior with a slow control deck. My strategy is once I have a way to defeat the excavate and Zilliax finishers of a warrior, I will allow my card generation to keep my hand full. They kept their hand at nine cards for the majority of the game, they got past the excavate and Zilliax finishers and than after I played boomboss they emptied their hand before drawing a tnt. That is where they lost. They could have let themselfs overdraw and take me to fatigue and win, but they did not adjust how they played to win.
It defiantly is nice to have close to a 100% wr while playing the deck, but one should adjust their play style when they know the entirety of the opponents deck.
By what objective measurement?
By winrate? Reno Warrior is a Tier 2 deck so it is better than 50%, but it’s not Tier 1 so there are bigger fish to fry.
By polarization? Once again Reno Warrior is a little above average but there are far more polarizing decks like Dragon Druid, Aggro Paladin and Rainbow Mage.
By popularity? This is the only metric where Reno Warrior is on top, but if you ask me popularity is a metric of design success, not design failure. A lot of players are drawn to Brann and think that he’s cool and fun. Nerfing things just because they are popular is Bizarro World logic.
So what is it then? Seem to me to just be some irrational emotion you feel when you look at the card. Subjective and mostly meaningless.
If I was in charge of balance patches Brann wouldn’t be getting nerfed at all. I consider Reno Warrior’s popularity and winrate to both be flukes from the perspective of being concerned purely with winrate, and I consider its popularity to be a general indicator of good and popular design from the perspective of… well, design. And I am certain that even if Brann was deleted from the game, the deck that you think is being held back by Brann would still completely suck.
They can both be problems. I think one issue is that a lot of people playing warrior counters haven’t been playing them for very long, and it takes them a while to learn the deck. Crescendo Warlock seems like a difficult deck to play to me, so there’s going to be a lot of people who pick it up, play a handful of games with it, bomb because quite frankly they’re bad players and can’t handle it, then they quit and go back to whatever they were playing before.
There are situations where you already have the other copy of the weapon or Void Virtuosos in hand, in which case the card is redundant and it’s the right play to throw it away, but those are somewhat rare, especially before playing the first Insanity. It’s the kind of thing that’s the right play maybe 5% of the time and the wrong play 95% of the time. Harps and Virtuosos are very good against Reno Warrior so you want each durability on a Harp to prevent 3 or more damage if possible, maybe two 3+ and a 2.
If you see a turn 4 Insanity for 1+2 against Warrior with a Harp first, that’s basically a guaranteed misplay, it should be Insanity first then Harp. (Neither is really good but sometimes the good cards just don’t show up.)
Probably the most objective measurement to this is the play rate of Reno Warrior counters. The worse the play experience against a deck is, the more players will gravitate toward it.
This effect is why you saw a TON of steam cleaner techs in random decks even when plague DK was not a crazy meta threat, and steamcleaner wasn’t the way to actually beat plague DK.
Warrior is both amplifying the hard counter play rates while murdering the play rates of most things that do lose badly to it (Reno DH existed before, but it is now completely gone due to the bad warrior matchup). This makes the polarity data for the deck look better than it is in reality, as the deck has flatly prevented the existence of anything slower than turn 7 or 8 wins in the meta.
Counterplay to the card itself is another measurable data point.
It’s a game winning effect that must be dealt with prior to him being played. The only option to prevent it is by a blind (if educated) dice roll through Dirty Rat.
If he hits the board and you have not already won the game, you have almost certainly lost.
A card that just spun a wheel for 10 Mana and won the game 3/4 of the time can look balanced by win rate and polarization when the average game length is shorter than 10. That doesn’t mean the card is well designed or healthy for the game. It would simply shift the meta to accommodate it happening like Brann did.
But yes, Reno warrior has counters. It just forces you to play them at the cost of a lot of other possible decks in the late game because most can’t possibly compete with what it does. If you don’t have an 8 drop that says “you win now” you still lose to an 8 Mana Brann because he does say that.
I’d say this.
If a deck is type X and beats all other decks of type X, it’s probably too good and polarizing.
So Brann Warrior is a slow deck and it beats all other slow decks, which doesn’t allow for the development of other slow decks.
If there was an aggro deck that annihilated every other aggro deck out there, it would be polarizing.
If you allow that to occur, then you end up having a warped meta where other deck types flourish and the other deck type doesn’t.
So you have these for example
Aggro
Mid Range
Control
Combo
With Brann Warrior the meta might look something like this instead
Aggro
Mid Range
Brann Warrior
Of course, this isn’t black and white how it is, but it shows you a single judgement tool (not all) if something is designed poorly. Combine this with its popularity and you get the junk meta we have now.
Brann deserves to get nerfed. It is warping the meta entirely too much.
So you’re saying that either you are insane or that people generally are insane.
The “people generally are insane” version is: they embody “the less fun my opponent is having, the more fun I am having.” In other words, the community at large are griefers, and it’s not a niche playstyle, it’s the rule not the exception. I don’t believe that this is the case at all, but I think that you believe it because projection.
I think that you embody “the more fun my opponent is having, the less fun I am having.” Because jealousy and immaturity. Stop being a sore loser, finally grow up, and learn how to take turns (figuratively, I don’t mean Hearthstone turns I mean turns having fun feeling powerful) in a multiplayer game gracefully.
I have no idea what ranks you were playing at, but no, I didn’t see this at all. Perhaps it was because I still haven’t played a single game as Death Knight though.
Deepminer Brann is a badly balanced and designed card, and nerfing the card to an 8 mana cost will not fix the card. If that’s all they do to nerf Brann, then I expect the card to get nerfed again down the road.
I was hovering at around 1-2k legend while working on DK wins. There was a TON of steamcleaner in ETCs
Ah, here’s that molehill I was talking about.
Reno Warrior is a slow deck that has a strong tendency to be favored against slow decks, but it’s not very polarizing because the advantage gained isn’t extreme. There isn’t a single deck in the meta where Brann Warrior has a better than 64% winrate against in D4-1 (and that drops 1% in T1KL), and the tendency is more towards 60-40. This isn’t like some previous metas where 75-25 matchups are a thing.
Seriously, go take a moment, stop imagining Reno Warrior’s matchup spread and actually look at Reno Warrior’s matchup spread. Not just the colors, the numbers too. Because you’re in a fantasy land regarding the realities of the deck.
Not a junk meta at all, at least not to me. I probably wouldn’t get top 400 Legend in a meta I considered junk.
Just a meta that is slow about evolving past Reno Warrior, which it could do on its own, no nerfs needed. I reckon the main reason it doesn’t is that people just like Reno Warrior.
Not at all.
Technically true. It’s more popular than is rational. But what players find fun is rarely rational.
Yeah, that’s probably true. I thought you meant maindeck. What else would you put in the third ETC slot lol
Because you’re playing a deck that farms brann warrior.
Go attempt to make a control shaman or play highlander shaman. Highlander paladin. Anything slower. You’ll quickly realize the problem. If you’re not beating brann warrior, you’re almost certainly not a relevant deck.
It is fairly extreme. The data just doesn’t show it well because the decks that it beats have been largely eliminated from the data set at this point due to its popularity. Per the last VS report things like rainbow DK and highlander shaman have like 35% win rates against it. In order to justify those decks existing they have to have absurd matchup spreads against everything else.
Brann going to 8 isn’t going to fix it for those decks. I don’t know if it even moves the needle more than a few percents.
It should be a hard hit; imo.
The counterplay for other slower decks is dirty rat or getting their combos out before boomboss hits.
This gives a better chance at hitting brann and slows down the boomboss hit by a lot. It’s pretty significant if true.
Look, there’s only going to be one best Highlander deck. That’s not because Reno Warrior is good versus slow decks, that’s because you’re trying to do the equivalent of beating pocket rockets with Ace-X suited in Texas holdem.
Handbuff Pally, btw, is another example of good Tier 1-2 deck that loses to Reno Warrior.
Or: they’ve been eliminated because their winrate sucks against the other 75+% of the meta. Look at the matchup spreads of Reno Priest and Reno Shaman, those decks are NOT tier 4 because of Reno Warrior. Their problems go far deeper than that, and deleting Reno Warrior would NOT be enough to save them.
There’s a big difference between having a slow deck that’s the best, and one where you concede if Brann/Odyn hits the board because you can no longer compete.
That’s the bad design part, not the fact it wins.
Sometimes I feel like priest could do better with winning fast matchups, if some of their cards work similar to others. Like how Fly off the shelves does not damage any minions summoned by deathrattles like aftershock. Sorry about my complaining.
Exactly this. Once brann hits, unless you have lethal in the next turn or 2, you’re dead. The comeback mechanic and pressure is too strong to deal with for almost any deck that starts gaining traction around then.
You can rat boomboss and you’re still likely going to lose. You can rat etc, zilliax, excavate reward or the mech summon and you’re likely still dead because the others are too good with the double battlecry.
It needs to be slowed down to allow more time to hit brann.
It’s like a combo deck but in reverse making brann incredibly hard to hit since you play it the second you draw it. You never just hold on to it unless you got unlucky and draw it before