So to be clear, your argument is a deck needs to be 33% different from a meta deck?
It is a well-known fact that by the relatively small deck-size and card pool and the way HS “packages” are designed the deckbuilding is pretty limited. Most of the decks will be like 22-25 cards pre-constructed and then you will have 5-8 cards that do not matter that much and can be swapped for whatever. Depending on class and deck this might be even more limited. Many classes struggle to find 30 decent cards period let alone 20 with multiple choice of another 10 to round your deck.
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Demon Hunter, though granted there’s a weird new deck this month: a Pirate variant. Though granted it felt a bit clunky to me; it seems to require a strict sequence of specific cards; but I may miss something.
YOU can’t. i can. And do.
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How dare people learn from others who are better than they are!
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meh i like each card game in existence to use their own names
Haven’t read the entire thread, sorry if any of this was covered.
I don’t know what this means. How does your original deck turn into an already existing net deck?
Assuming successfully just means winning, plenty of streamers have been doing just that for years. They probably also have more game hours in a month than I do in a year, so it makes sense that their brews would work out better (especially when piloted by them).
I mean no offense, but any home brew you have made in the past may have been more successful in another players hand. I know for me, whenever I try out something I’ll tinker with it for maybe 20 games or so before giving up if it seems bad. However, even in just 20 games the odds can easily be stacked against me. I could draw badly, have poor matchups, get unlucky (dozens of different ways) or just play poorly because it’s a new deck. Now maybe you play 100 games, but it still wouldn’t be enough to say what place your brew would have in the meta.
As someone who hates Mirror Matches with a passion and therefor hates playing Meta decks, I strongly encourage you not to give up. Hitting Legend rank doesn’t mean anything so just try to have fun.
The core of the issue
im fine with you netdecking
but if you do it in casual, youre a monster
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I’m sure they also object to all those dirty cheating netdecking doctors who went to medical school instead of inventing surgical procedures themselves…
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Players have been “Net Decking” since the creation of MTG. I used to play in the NY Neutral Ground MTG group with some of the best players to ever play the game. Wherever we went players would ask us during or after tournaments for our deck lists. It became such a frequently asked question to us that the lists started getting posted at local tourneys on a bulletin board beside the pairings list each round.
Nobody cared one bit if they knew what we were playing or wanted to copy it. It’s the pilot not the deck that makes it as good as it is.
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I wonder if you pay attention to those people who you admire; they are not just streamers by the way; a lot of smart people aren’t doing it for money.
If you paid attention you’d see they usually do it within a few days of a new important patch (often even hours).
A lot of you here are eager to call me stupid but you don’t pay attention it’s important that I said after 2 weeks.
I think I am reading between the lines, but you do mean high tier netdecking right? Because if you build a Marckmkz deck and play it in casual you would still be netdecking in casual and some of those decks are less then tier 4 and would be atrocious to try and play in rank
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I’m curious on how you can ascertain with absolute certitude someone has “netdecked” his deck, or just constructed on his own, refined it and somehow arrived close to a version of the deck that is published on various website.
For one, most of the time, you don’t even see all the cards in your opponent deck, the game ends before.
Second, it’s not like there is a million way to build a dragon druid list. Yet, hearthstone has millions of players.
Third, how is it different to learning opening in chess; or build order in starcraft? Or are you against that too?
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The issue here for the “netdeck” opposed players is ego.
To accept that there are correct ways to build decks in that there are optimum and less optimum cards to include, that this can be tested, and that expert deck builders arrive at those answers faster than the persons making complaints implies the complainers are doing it wrong.
The “netdeck” complainers simply don’t want to accept that they actually suck at deck building regardless of their piloting skills.
I actually suck at deck building. I don’t spend much time on it, but when I do it’s at a rank floor or in casual because I don’t expect to win with my homebrews.
At all.
Ever.
Because I freely admit I suck at building decks. I’ve gotten better with practice and time, but I’m still not going to find the unicorns.
The great news is you don’t need to know anything about building decks to enjoy the game because great players actually share their knowledge with us to improve everyone’s experience.
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Which is what is so bizarre to me. There’s literally nothing that I think I’m the best in the world at doing, and building Hearthstone decks is merely one thing on the pile of things other people do better.
But the audacity of playing a deck made by someone who is a better deckbuilder than I am…so horrifying.
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Right? Do these people make their own cars, too? Unique homemade toasters, maybe?
We use shared knowledge all the time because that’s what civilizations do.
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This is a great post.
But I think that this is a symptom of a much larger problem. For most video gamers — not just Hearthstone here — the reason that they game is in order to feel a sense of accomplishment that is considerably more difficult to achieve in their real life. They expect to be told by the game that they have won, fantastic, great job! In order to deliver upon this expectation, game developers load their games with participation trophies and easy to accomplish quests with ethereal rewards that are technically worthless but designed to feel good. There is a social contract here between gamers and game developers: the developers will deliver saccharine facsimiles of accomplishment, easily achieved, to feed the starving egos of the gamers, and in return the gamers will give money.
The issue with deck building is that it breaks the immersion. In order to author a netdeck, you need to compete against the best of the best at deck building, across an entire society — just like in real life. It’s exactly the genuine situation that gamers are paying money to escape from. They have an expectation of being told that they are successful because they can easily defeat strawman after strawman; if they’re paying, that’s what they’re paying for.
This is why I started by saying that testing your piloting skill is the better choice. It’s easier to outskill a random on the Internet, especially when that random is likely to have typical gamer mentality. It’s the far easier quest.
I half sympathize with the “netdecks are bad” types. Not because I don’t think they’re pathetic, because they’re definitely pathetic. But because I feel like there is an entire industry dedicated to capitalizing upon their mental illness for profit, harnessing what remains of their ambition for a few extra bucks while that person’s dreams in real life go unfulfilled. It is truly sad.
And this is a recent phenomenon. In the 80s, games were designed to be as punishing as possible. People talk about Elden Ring difficulty as being this novel feature to games unique to its developer, but virtually every NES game had that as a mentality. Failure was expected. Actually beating a game was a challenge, and nobody cried about making them easier. You just tried and tried again until you learned and got better, or just didn’t.
And that doesn’t even touch the arcade side, where the games were designed to make you fail, so you had to put another quarter in.
Yeah, I’m a crusty old millenial who missed the full heyday of the arcade, but man, modern gamers, who have only known 2015ish design and later, are so coddled.
Hell, they even took the ability to see accurate win rate data away from us in Hearthstone so we don’t have the chance of feeling bad by looking at it.
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I hadn’t really thought about the concept historically, but you are correct. It has gotten worse with time.