Toxic Play Patterns

Multiplayer Discussion
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Combo/OTKs: This should hopefully be pretty self-explanatory. It wasn’t fun when pre-nerf Leeroy was terrorizing the meta, and it sure isn’t fun now. Decks should not be able to consistently do 30 damage in one turn from an empty board, ever. Nor should a deck be able to kill their opponent without actually playing for board. If one of the main decks in the meta can do this, the meta is significantly worse for it. And there are many in the current meta: Grunt Hunter, Cycle Rogue, Handbuff Paladin, Lynessa Paladin, Zarimi Priest, Asteroid Shaman, Wheel Warlock, and Odyn Warrior.

Charge: This mechanic has proven near-impossible to balance throughout Hearthstone’s entire history, whether used by aggro or combo. When designing a Charge card, the developers should ask three questions: “Is Charge absolutely necessary for this card design to function?”, “Does this card interact with your opponent in any meaningful way?”, “Are we sure this card won’t become a key part of an oppressive aggro or combo deck?”. And if the answer to any of those questions is “No”, then don’t print it.

Charge needs to be handled very carefully, as by design, it ignores one of the most fundamental parts of Hearthstone’s gameplay: Minion combat.

Direct face damage/Spell Damage: See Charge above.

Stat Bombs: Cheating lots of huge minions onto the board early is a bad mechanic. The counterplay is awful; either you have the perfect card to immediately answer your opponent’s board, or you lose. There’s nothing in between. Dungar is the quintessential example: How exactly is your opponent supposed to deal with 28+ mana worth of minions when they might not even have the mana for a full board clear, never mind dealing with any Deathrattles? And Dungar is no outlier; Loken, Forge of Wills, Overflow Surger, Razzle-Dazzler…

Overloaded Value Engines: There’s something to be said for cool cards that give a lot of value, maybe even affect the whole rest of the game, but at some point we crossed a line. Even aggro decks rarely run out of resources until well into the late game, and every card feels like a win condition unto itself. Costumed Singer, Gold Panner, Ethereal Oracle, Corpsicle, Sargeras, Kil’jaeden, Helya, Odyn, Shudderblock, Deepminer Brann, Saruun, Gorgonzormu, Unkilliax, Boomboss, Hydration Station, Odyn… the list goes on and on.

And finally, we get to one of the main reasons all of this stuff became “necessary” in the first place, because it has to keep pace with…

Removal: The main reason you can’t just play for board anymore is because it has become laughably easy and often incredibly cheap to clear minions. The craziest boards imaginable, with Deathrattles that would take ages to get through on a good day, can now be Thanos snapped like it’s nothing. A huge minion completely saturated with bonus effects that should, by rights, make it practically invincible will routinely find itself mind-controlled or literally deleted from the game.

And such board-clearing cards often come with major upsides or are incredibly cheap too: Sargeras, Yogg Unleashed, Aman’thul, Amitus, Bob the Bartender, Reno Lone Ranger, Unkilliax, Horn of the Windlord, Incindius, Bellowing Flames, Domino Effect, Fistful of Corpses, Threads of Despair, Table Flip, Reska, the Primus… you will routinely find the board state completely flipped from one turn to the next.

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There’s plenty I hate about the Meta, but in the last year, Handbuff Paladin has remained the most annoying and problematic deck to deal with.

But knowing how the game likes to pair certain decks against others specifically, I’m sure I could learn what counters it if I start playing it. I just don’t like it. 10 stat minions that cost 1 or 2 mana by turn 5 at minimum is gross.

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“Fun” is quite subjective

For me It used to be fun and continues being fun, otk was always part of hs and will continue being so.

Control decks should not be able to board clear every turn to give us a chance to tresspass defenses but hey, here we are.

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why isnt aggro on the list ?

are you tyrtying to sell that lie again? the idea that" losing to aggro is fun"?because it isnt

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Aggro at least has a pretty easy fix to your deck to lose to it less.

A lot of the stuff listed in the OP can’t really be fixed by a small deck modification.

It’s not typically fun to lose in general, but it is far less fun when there really isn’t an answer to the thing you are losing to other than playing something else entirely.

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is funny how he complains about being able toput stats on the board because people cant remove them

then goes to complain about “too much removal” ( removal counters agggro the one type of deck he isnt complaining…)

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At this point the too much stats issue is more of a tone that stuff back issue more than a make removals better one.

We shouldn’t need to be cheating out several giants worth of stats by turn 5 or 6 to not get instantly removed every time.

And it’s also annoying that those kinds of stats are pretty instantly game winning when not immediately answered.

The game is just too swingy as a whole.

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OTKs are and always have been a blight on this game and every meta where it wasn’t viable was a blessing.

You cannot interact with your opponent on their turn. The only way to meaningfully interact with your opponent by default is minion combat. And because they ignore the board, OTK decks, by design, interact with their opponent as little as possible.

You didn’t read my post? The word “aggro” appears in it 3 times.

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Can we just agree that the meta is toxic in general? The last expansion tried to add draenei and starship decks, but they got pushed aside for old strategies with new cards added for extra boost. Some decks just remained strong because they didn’t get nerfed, while others did. The best examples are Handbuff Paladin, Shaman decks, and aggro demon hunter.

Rogue is still an overlooked off meta class, and starships are just an exploit in mega endgame decks with tons of mana. The counter is aggro of course, but once these greedy decks get their engine running, they are nearly invincible. The problem is that the power level has become inflated over the years. A thing they thought they needed to do to keep the game exciting. Adding new mechanics and play patterns would have been enough.

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Generally a terrible suggestion, because it misses the point entirely. None of that is toxic if it’s not overpowered.

It’s pretty obvious the OP loses a lot to those patterns, and they refuse to play more than a “main class”.

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No he’s right. Everything feels off. I’m fine with losing but losing to some of the strategies that have been cancerous.
I’m fine with aggro and combo.
Combo feels way to fast right now and aggro feels unkillable unless ya play the super armor decks which I’d be fine with if they dident get an endless portal to take away all the risk.
TLDR every meta deck feels bad to play and to play versus.

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But your complaints are more relevant to power creep and generally overpowered cards or overpowered decks.

The OP wants to remove completely entire mechanics.

That practically deletes TCG gaming itself in part.

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I agree with ya I’m fine with combo and aggro but everything needs to be tuned back a bit let the game breath.

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Balance is overrated. The game could be immaculately balanced, every class having multiple viable decks with no clear dominant deck or class, and still be awful to play because everyone’s just playing Solitaire until the enemy hero explodes.

The game has reached the point where fighting for board control and minion combat are almost irrelevant. You either vomit so many stats onto the board that your opponent needs a perfect answer or they just die, or you ignore the board entirely with Charge minions and OTKs.

So yeah, if a mechanic is rendering the single core way you interact with your opponent in Hearthstone irrelevant, it has to go.

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You’re not listening to what you’re saying. “Many stats” and “OTKs” (from spells or charges) are not broken mechanics, they are OVERPOWERED implementations of mechanics.

You could have a 9999 attack / 9999 health one-drop minion in 2014 Hearthstone and you would win immediately with approximately 0 interaction,

hence by your logic we should remove basic minions too.

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I can help you here - you just don’t like the game anymore so just stop playing.

You’ve asked them to nerf everything you lose to, which is apparently most of the game.

The subtext of your rant is that you want to play really long, boring control matches with zero powerful cards and lots of hero power and pass turns.

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OP: It seems you want to play something like the very first version of the Arena and even in there with “fair” randomness and having a favored class pick you would stll complain.
Perhaps this is not the game for you mate.

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Horrible meta, I just stopped playing. It’s getting worse and worse. There’s no interaction. Many decks are simply not controllable. Well, great, they’re going to kill me now. Very interesting. Who cares what’s going on the table and what the enemy is doing, I’ll just kill him now. Wow. And randomness is also killing the game. It’s often clear. It’s good that randomness is on the enemy’s side, there are triggers, and you know when you’ll be incredibly lucky. Well, this is a game of skill or randomness, and often it’s just a game of randomness. The game designer needs to be fired. Everything is fine in this game. Only it’s become completely impossible to play and not interesting. And now the ships… Hello. Is there any humanity in this game, only QC, maybe the game designer is a schizoid. The arena is terrible. The BG is boring. Fire the game designer who came up with the idea for the paladin’s wind fury. The game only degrades from the barren lands. People just leave. They stopped streaming. It’s sickening to see the same people in championships and lists. It’s not normal.

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Well, it is true that the game might not be for me anymore. Which is a sad thing to say as someone who’s been playing since the beta.

However, I don’t take issue with the fact that I lose to things- I do what it takes to win same as anybody, I run a Sargeras-Kil’jaeden-Starship control deck with what I have currently.

But no, as a matter of fact, I do not want long, boring control matches. Hence the part of my post addressing removal and overloaded value cards. I just want the board to matter, for midrange to be viable; at some point, the focus of the game largely shifted away from minion combat and towards game-ending combos and one-card win conditions.

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This is exactly the kind of deck I expected.

Because that’s what the mobile market wants.

Again, it’s not an insult, it’s just a fact that they don’t want your business.