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Mana cheating, except under very limited circumstances. A special card here, a special card there, such as Discover a Deathrattle card and reduce its cost by 2. Not “reduce the cost of EVERYTHING” cards.
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Cheating out huge minions early. High rolls are cool, and an inevitable part of any game, but when it happens frequently and there’s no counter… it’s not really a game.
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Endless use of the same minions over and over and over. I played a Hunter today who managed to keep on summoning the same 4/3 beasts, and killing them just summoned more 4/3 beasts. Then he copied THOSE beasts, assuring that his whole deck was basically just summoning the same beasts. In general, the ability to spam the same thing over and over is bad design in any game. Good games encourage variety.
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Infinite turns. Hearthstone devs do actually jump on that nonsense when they hear about it, so not really a complaint against Hearthstone so much as players who do that nonsense.
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“I win” single cards. A combo is cool, if sometimes frustrating if it’s uncounterable. The player still had to draw it and survive while waiting for it, and hopefully, set it up. But the Shard the Priest uses is terrible(even though they usually can’t play it), and the Sword of a Thousand Truths is even worse, creating a situation in which you can’t possibly win, but you might have to wait a few turns for your death. The fact that both of these cards can be defeated by good aggro is not a redeeming factor. It’s why we have too much aggro. Certain playstyles provoke it.
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Infinite cards. You’ve fought well. Your opponent has fought well. It looks like it’ll come down to fatigue or perhaps the last few cards in hand will be game enders. But nope, instead your opponent has devised a way to simply create endless copies, including copies that create other copies. While I don’t mind some card copying, cards that themselves copy cards should not be copyable. There should always be a limit to resources.
this is what should be looked into (it’s also due to point 1).
When I play beast hunter, my main plan is “let’s try to play the colossal on turn 5 and if my opponent can’t answer it I just win”; I would prefer a more consistent and fair way to win that doesn’t involve me getting lucky and my opponent being unlucky.
Beast hunter theme revolves around copying beasts to summon multiple copies of them: there are at least 2 core cards that copy beasts, it’s just how beasts work.
Since they aren’t as annoying as infinite karthut defender, they don’t look problematic to me
but these are not single cards, you need to jump throw hoops to get them; they are combo decks adn you know in advance when they will be played (or at least, you know when they won’t be played).
if you both go to fatigue, but the opponent has a back up plan to avoid fatigue, it means they sacrificed deck space to have an advantage in such a situation.
For me, the opponent played well (by making a better deck), so they deserve to win.
You may not like it, but no one stops you to put Elysiana or Kazakusan or Renathal or Ticketus (or all of them) in your deck to be the fatigue king.
You’ll probably never use them, but when you will finally use all of them you will think “I deserve to win because my deck had these cards that I decided to put, even if they are usually bad”
Is it mana cheating when a shaman summons 2 5/4s with rush for 5 mana?(I really hate that card).
Classic Hearthstone is that way ----------------------->
The opening post can be summarized as “aggro and combo shouldn’t be allowed to have fun things.” Because OP is a control player and any fun his opponents have makes him jealous and salty. If OP had his wish every minion would be Chillwind Yeti boring and there’d be no viable way to punish greed.
I disagree. I think every archetype, including control, should have fun things to do. Nice big swingy plays, for everyone.
And anyone who disses Sword of a Thousand Truths is no friend of mine. Funnest card ever.
Oh, I don’t mind normal Beast Hunter. I’ll face a few polar bears and that’s cool. But the key there is that he still must draw those additional polar bears. What happened in today’s game was a deathrattle that caused the next beast to be summoned straight from the deck onto the battlefield with another deathrattle that repeated the same effect. Think Endless Dreadsteed but a 4/3 minion with rush. Ouch. I haven’t seen it but once, but it seems like something the dev team might want to put the kibosh on.
My issue is the automatic win condition. I’d hate the Shard less if priests couldn’t draw it any other way but random. And it IS counterable with the various disruptions now available. Still, it’s literally an “I win” card and it just shouldn’t be.
As for boars, I’ve seen in wild ways to get the sword by turn 4. I know it’s a high roll, but naw…
A plan to avoid fatigue in a limited way is fine. Kaz can get you an additional ten. Rogue has a way of copying like 20 cards if the game went long enough. They also have a card that adds ten cards to the deck. But that’s still finite. Being able to copy the copy cards is not finite. If they can design a minion that can’t be affected by spells, they can make some cards uncopyable. Frankly, I think legendaries in general should be uncopyable. Most of the cheap plays in the game involve taking a card that you can only have one of in your deck and playing it ten times. Why bothers with any deck limits, then? Just let any card be put in the deck as many times as the player likes.
at some point the 4/3 will end; they only summon a beast from the deck, not a copy, so they aren’t really “infinite value”.
yes, it’s stupid and they could have made a better reward, but you know it’s coming so you have time to plan how to ruin the combo (even if it’s just one card)
even without an highroll, I haven’t seen that deck having the weapon after turn 7 
wild unfortunately is not balanced to avoid fast games that are unwinnable (unless they are turn 1-2 win like big shaman)
don’t watch tennis.
really, don’t.
You are a wannabe Hearthstone inquisition dictator.
Banning every play style you find offensive and inappropriate.
I will not support your dictatorship!
I was thinking the “dictator” part but I’ve been getting heat for being to antagonistic in my posts lately. Probably shoulda said it anyway.
You playing.
List end.
I’m not sure about standard, but some of the stuff you identify is indeed design space that has been historically problematic in eternal CCG formats from other games with much more dynamic rules/mechanics (and therefore more ability to make corner-case strategies actually fun for the majority of players, including opponents). Others can comment on standard in Hearthstone, but I agree some of this stuff has a negative impact on Wild and in general feel that the format could benefit from more active attention/support from Blizzard.
More specifically I think there are a few design principles that make balancing Wild particularly challenging, the big one being that they largely try to balance Wild and standard in tandem but the formats have very different needs. Other more established CCGs work around this problem by maintaining their eternal formats with extensive banlists, allowing the designers/developers to really shake things up in standard then banning the stuff that is less appropriate for an eternal format. Banlists are pretty necessary if you want to use the same cards in multiple formats basically, because not all cards/mechanics/play patterns are equally suitable for all the different rulesets/game modes.
Being a digital CCG I don’t think Hearthstone necessarily needs to expand it’s banlist because they have other tools, but I do think more temporary bans in Wild might help them more actively maintain the metagame while printing whatever they want in standard. Let people have fun with new stuff in standard, ban the cards that are less appropriate for eternal formats in Wild, then unban and nerf them eventually with rotation so eventually Wild players at least get to use a version of the card when standard is done with it. I am also down for the devs to just expand the banlist though, I’ve been playing CCGs for 20+ years and know there are a lot of tough decisions involved in maintaining healthy metas.
There are also three specific play patterns that I think could use a bit more attention if they want Wild to continue being fun as power creep inevitably happens with the release of more and more sets. Everything that follows is very much IMO:
1.) The first are decks that do not develop interesting boardstates that encourage dynamic interaction or bother competing for the board at all.
In my experience players do not enjoy staring at empty or heavily one-sided boards for entire games while being forced to go face regardless of the deck they are playing, and losing entirely to hidden information that you have zero opportunities to interact with does not feel fair or fun. OTK/APM mage, Switcheroo, Hunter Questline to a certain extent, infinite turn combos etc.
2.) The second is the way infinite reanimator strategies completely warp people’s perception of how a traditional control deck should play by providing infinite/maximized redundancy/reliability/inevitability.
While I realize reanimation strategies are meant to be abused in CCGs in general, it seems to me like 100% of the time they come up in Hearthstone they are effectively used as infinite copy/redundancy effects more than anything else. This combined with a handful of key minions that serve as very effective roadblocks creates a situation where there is a very easy package of cards that you see over and over again built around resurrecting the same small pool of 2 or 3 minions, effectively copying those minions infinite times often starting very early in the game around turn 4 or 5. I’m thinking all the N’Zoth/rebirth shenanigans, big priest, shaman stuff with Scrapyard Colossus etc.
3.) The third is access to fast mana/circumventing the mana system, which honestly seems like the most obvious to me.
I’m not talking mana ramp, I’m talking mana circumvention where you are able to break the mana system of the game entirely. The mana mechanic is the primary power throttling device in the game, so when you enable cost reduction to go below (1), various combos dropping 10 cost cards onto the table turn 5, armageddon/smokestack play patterns like celestial alignment, zero-cost recursive hero powers etc you are really warping the core game loop that’s supposed to make Hearthstone fun. This is different from simply accelerating a gameplan by a turn, and I personally don’t think it is healthy for the game.
All IMO obviously.
I would reply, but my doctor has advised me to avoid large concentrations of salt due to my high blood pressure.
why ? most card games i know have a way for players to use the same minions many times a game by summoning after destroyed or returning them to hand or deck
i dont understand why HS should be different
Not even classic Hearthstone fits your standards in fact no card game ever released to this day does.
Theres only 1 possible choice you must make your very own that checks all your boxes , i realy hope you have a good and solid single player mode because chances are you will never have any company in said miracle game.
The main difference between Hearthstone and something like Magic in this respect is that Magic has a graveyard/discard pile, and that is a game zone either player can interact with that does fundamentally change the feel of how these mechanics work… whereas Hearthstone’s version of the mechanic has very few limits other than the fact that it is entirely based on RNG, which really only punishes decks for running a variety of minions/potential play patterns.
And I think the big problem with how these mechanics are expressed has always been the fact that resurrection in Hearthstone really functions as reproduction more than anything else, and control decks very quickly figured out a way to eliminate dynamic play patterns from their decks entirely by doing exactly what I describe above years ago, and those decks still remain largely unchanged to this day. This kind of stuff is not as prominent in magic because a.) it is a much more mechanically involved game that can inject interactivity/dynamics via complexity pretty much no matter what the play pattern and b.) WotC maintenance efforts have done a lot of work to regulate these tutor/resurrection play patterns in their most popular formats.
In other words resurrection effects as they exist in Hearthstone enable extremely risk-averse strategies, and that kind of stuff doesn’t always lead to the best gameplay. A lot of this just comes down to structural limitations of Hearthstone as a game made for mass consumption via mobile devices…
I would say that mana cheating is ok when it’s intended for specific circumstances. Singular cards that are designed to be cheated out on their own are ok because if they become too strong then they can be nerfed enough to make them weaker.
Cards that discount other cards are the bigger issue because then it makes nerfs more complicated because of having to analyze whether the cost reduction is the problem or specific cards that are being reduced.
It was also ok for the cost of cards to be reduced when Rogue was the only class that was known for doing it much because then they could balance the class around the fact that their cards would likely be discounted. It’s much harder to do that when mana cheat has been handed out to everyone because now either everyone needs to be balanced around it, which will cause homogenization, or they need to remove a lot of it.
I’m honesty surprised you didn’'t include Guff. 
I am very much tired of Big Priest.
But it’s a weak deck. So the question is about nerfing a deck that is really stupid because it’s really enjoyed by a lot of people.
Actually you are taking an even more extreme view. Make it unplayable.
And you don’t want to stop there. You want to choose which mechanics are acceptable like a little Napoleon.
I am not a Napoleon fan.
Do I want more nerfs? Yes. But I want actually problematic cards nerfed, like Twig now that it’s so easy to break immediately creating a ridiculous highroll.
Hahaha that’s an interesting way to describe the process of game design/development, but all I am doing is providing my perspective on the current design vision of the Wild format and encouraging Blizzard to make bold decisions:
Then later more specifically:
So, again, if you disagree and think that [any given mechanic/play pattern] is a good example of fun, dynamic CCG gameplay then we can agree to disagree on that no problem, and I would love to hear exactly why you love it because that would be a positive contribution to this discussion. But remember we are strictly talking about design here, not development - the OP was all about the inherent quality of general play patterns, and that is very much design’s department.
And I understand your desire to shut this stuff down, I really do, it can feel threatening to see people try to armchair develop a game you love by suggesting changes etc you disagree with, and the discussions get even murkier with questions of pure design like this one… I just try not to waste my time getting involved in other people’s bad ideas because I know Blizzard is going to make their own decisions in the end with community feedback being only one part of the equation… and I personally have faith in Blizzard’s ability to decide for themselves how they choose to implement it into their design choices. I just find these discussions interesting, honestly.
Speaking of which, I actually remember the last time we had this convo you had a lot of meaningful things to say about the history of these mechanics in Modern MTG, specifically Hogaak. As a reminder:
And I realize this was a long post and you are probably busy so didn’t have the chance to reply, but I am genuinely interested in your actual thoughts on the design of these play patterns. Like I said, I find these discussions interesting.
Thanks for the response!