We should call Constructed the "Netdeck" game

literally no one thinks this. if we thought it was easy, we wouldn’t want to copy others’ decks.

My main problem is that I get bored of most decks very quickly, so I always want to try out new decks and don’t spend a ton of time ever learning a single deck. This also means I don’t want to refine a list myself because that sounds exceedingly boring to me. I’d rather just jump into a game with a deck list I haven’t even looked at before the game starts

You need to get out more.

I agree.

Agreed here also.

It is. I click a link, it makes a deck. That’s very easy.

Not only is this ridiculous and easily proven false (try building an elemental mage without elementals), but you’re missing the entire point: I don’t want to play “cards similar to” the ones that actually win. I want to play the ones that actually win.

But even that is merely a symptom of the root problem: not everyone plays games for the same reasons. This includes games that are predominately or even strictly “supposed” to be competitive. HS is no exception.

You’ll never convince the people who think throws or cornering in fighting games isn’t cheap, and you’ll never convince the people who mainly play to win to stop doing those things. And you shouldn’t do either of those in the first place.

It’s okay to have diversity of goals and myriad perspectives. Without variety we’d all be stuck in some sort of sci-fi distopia. Take your pick, there’s plenty from which to choose. My personal favorite is The Giver, though I also found Equilibrium to be fun.

1 Like

You don’t know many people then, and the ones you do know are apparently bad at the game.

2 Likes

Aah! Nice book

Nice example, as well

1 Like

The best players of the game, the people who win the major tournaments and win prize money, are not the best deck builders. They are the best pilots. No one ever became World Champion because deck building skill.

I don’t agree that piloting is harder than deck building at the highest levels. I don’t really know for sure, because they’re both very challenging in their own ways, both far above my level (and I think my level is pretty darn high tbh). But the one thing that I do know for sure, is that deck building skill simply doesn’t pay. There is no occupation there, at all, which is less than can be said for professional piloting.

2 Likes

I created a Murloc Shaman deck for Standard Arena Battles.
It helped me go from Bronze rank to Silver rank.

  • Wouldn’t my deck be considered an Original deck?
  • Wouldn’t my ranking increases be considered Successful?

Does a Murloc Shaman “Net Deck” exist in Standard?
If anyone has the list, I would love for them to share it to compare notes.

Murloc Archetype is old school hearthstone Archetype.
Murloc decks have on and off been tier 1 at least few times throughout years.

I haven’t seen anyone talk or even mention Murloc’s in Standard.
As an Old School player who like Nostalgic decks, I didn’t mind creating one.

How exactly would the OP classify my Murloc Shaman Deck?

I would consider my Murloc Shaman deck a very original deck with some Old School Traditions. Several of the Core Murloc monsters may be similar to older decks.

However, A lot of the support cards and boss cards are completely different.

The game use to have crazy Support Murloc card - I think it was named Finey Awesome or something. It would buff every Murloc based on number you had or played. LOL

The game use to have crazy Boss Murlocs - The Devour - Do players remember him?
The good old days for sure!

You know what else is funny?
Something just occurred to me.

If I was to post my Murloc Shaman deck somewhere, Than other players came to copy it.
They would be considered “Netdecking”, but not me!
I would be considered the Original Deck maker, right?

Doesn’t the above statements mean the OP own logic is collapsing in on itself?
If we follow the line of logic all the way through to its natural conclusion, The logic collapses.

How can you copy from another person if the other person doesn’t create/do anything?
Their has to be an original deck maker for people to copy from.

I suppose the OP is trying to dance around the above logical problem by saying the time line “ 2 weeks”, but that doesn’t necessarily help the OP.

It seems to me the OP is acknowledging the players in 1st - 2 weeks are original deck builders, but is trying to say people afterward are not original deck builds just copy players.

The problem with the above logic arises due to financial & management issues combined with deck building skill.

Best way to demonstrate what I mean is following:
A streamer creates a deck with in first 2 weeks right?

BUT how did the Streamer acquire the new cards to create the new decks?
Most of the Streamers will spend money or will save resources prior to the release of the new cards so that when the new cards drop they have full access to use them.

Now think about how a Non-Spending/Non-Resource Saving player gets access to new cards?
They will not have full access at the start of the new cards release because they are not spending and they might not have enough coins or dust to actually get new cards.

This means they more than likely will use the first 2 weeks to try and collect the resources they need so that they can eventually buy the new cards to design their deck idea.

This is how it happens right?
Doesn’t matter if your pay 2 win or free 2 play.
True talent will always shine thru, right?

The above logic also explains how a Rogue deck which might not have been seen with in the first 2 weeks of Ranked can suddenly appear out of no where and force it’s way to the top.

Free 2 play player who didn’t have enough dust at first.
The F2P player spent time collecting.
Eventually got the cards he or she needed and rest is history.
Makes perfectly logical sense!

So the OP argument is flawed on multiple levels.
Yeah, it seems that way.

yes

casual should be for relaxed games, what point is there in winning as fast as you can in casual, the wins are worthless

Tier 4 archetypes are usually where I look to start a deck build. They are usually ideas that are abandoned or less refined and often have the biggest room for improvement.

Sometimes the core just isn’t good enough (earthen paladin comes to mind).

Other times, there’s so thing strong there that people just gave up on before it could shine. Hero power mage was there for a while, and was coincidentally my highest legend push thanks to me swapping out a good chunk of the early game.

That game plan eventually spread to the point where the hero card got nerfed.

Sometimes the bad deck just needs a single highly synergistic card swap. I had been running mysterious stranger in thief rogue for weeks before the stat websites caught onto it and made the deck jump a tier in power alone.

Absolutely not. At the very least it’s apples and oranges; one is about the analysis of card interactions for all possible futures; the other is using the cards for a specific point in time having limited time and possibly an interaction you could never predict during deck design because the combinations you can think when building are very finite.

Then piloting has an EXTREMELY high skill cap; if the opponent is almost as smart as you then you can only beat them on average of many games only if you manage to do that little extra intelligent thing that combines thinking about many possible outcomes; then you have a very limited time to do it unlike deck building.

1 Like

I mostly agree. There is some degree of synergy between them, kinda like how being good at trigonometry can come in handy to a survivalist trying to live on his own in the woods (if he ever gets his hands on a map). But despite some similarities, I would still say that they’re mostly separate.

Apples and oranges both have seeds, after all.

That said, I don’t much argue with people who say that they’re more similar skills than they are different. I have an opinion, but I’m mostly only great at one of the two skills. I don’t know. I merely have a hunch.

This is true.

A lot of people don’t want to believe this, because it’s not the part of the game that they’re interested in. If the only part of the game one finds truly fun and fascinating is the deckbuilder — regardless of one’s skill level at deck building — then the ideology that piloting skill is trivial or non-existent is fundamentally appealing. It means that one can win the game in the deckbuilder. It’s motivated reasoning.

1 Like

Piloting is like a miniset of building but it’s on steroids in terms of dealing optimally only with a specific set of opponent cards and having a limited time to “build”. Building is like a version of piloting that is on steroids in terms of how many opponent cards you have to analyze for the possible futures.

Building has no time limit in Standard; that could be an argument in favor of Piloting being harder; maybe a new format that has Piloting with short breaks of time-limited Building would be cool.

Then again one could argue that since Piloting only deals with a specific set of opponent cards, it’s easier to do it than dealing with more cards so it’s “even” with Building not having a time limit.

It’s generally apples and oranges.

Life experience teaches us, Building & Designing is harder vs. Piloting.
Both require skill, but when push comes to shove most would in my opinion lean towards the Building as harder.

For Example:
Would people say Building & Designing a plane is easier vs. Flying a plane?
Some planes have Auto Pilot not fully human controlled.

Another way to think of it is what if you put the best deck Pilot into a very badly constructed deck build? Even if Pilot is world class, they can only do as much as deck permits them to do.

And if you was to flip the situation and put top of the line deck in the hands of a novice Pilot. There are times when even novice Pilot does very well in high quality deck.

Similarly, The best Pilot in world can’t do anything of the plane he is using has engine trouble due to bad designing or build.

But people have heard of story’s were a Pilot gets replaced by passenger and is expected to try land or fly a high quality plane.

Both skills require understanding of the game on the highest level, which is why you don’t call number 1 players “noobs” and why decks travel from top ranks towards lower ranks, with huge delays, rather than the other way around.

It’s that one skill, understanding of the game, with all its’ complexities and intricacies, that define your skill in both.

What are your win cons? Do they vary between matchups? Do you have enough card draw? Do you have too much card draw? How fast is the meta? What are the strongest standalone x-cost cards? Which cards are parts of a package deal which should go together in a deck (and together in mulligan, for the most part)?

Just some of the questions which both, pilots and deckbuilders, should be able to answer in every meta, about every deck, if they’re highly skilled.

Alternatively, you can just start building a deck based on an idea, and slowly, through time and through thousands of games, optimize it and make it a high-end deck, just like you can start playing a deck and after thousands of games on it, you should know the best play in every situation simply due to experience and intuition, if nothing else.

The difference between the two approaches of deckbuilding/piloting?

First approach guarantees that a high-skilled deckbuilder will also be a high-skilled pilot, and vice versa.

Second approach, however, doesn’t. With second approach, as a pilot, you will know which play is better in any given moment, but you still won’t understand why that card you just played is better than some other card which didn’t make it into the deck. As a deckbuilder, you might keep swapping cards until your winrate hits it’s maximum value, but you still won’t be a proper pilot of the deck, as you don’t know why you chose card X over card Y, which means you probably won’t know how to utilize it optimally in game.

That’s literally what happened to my last iteration of sludgelock. I put in 2x Tidepool Pupil instead of 2x Flame Imp, expecting the Pupils to give me much more power due to more crescendos and symphonies played, but in the end, Pupils barely see play once every 10 games, and my winrate went much higher than that. And I couldn’t tell you why, at least not right away.

Now I figured it’s because imps were killing me before time, but if I didn’t get lucky with swapping those two cards, I would never learn the exact reason why Pupil > Flame Imp.

But, if you read through this, now you understand why many good pilots dont even attempt to build a deck. If you’re not among the best players/deckbuilders from the get-go, your decks won’t be good enough to battle the best ones nor to help you learn the best plays, so you might as well netdeck the best ones and start from there.

1 Like

I think you think your 2nd method is better because you described a 1st method that is just bad. The best deck builders don’t abstractly think of “good draw” and other general stuff only; they also think of the OPPONENTS; basically they do what your 2nd does too and it’s just that your 2nd is closer to a 1st that is more intelligent (basically it’s the same method in reality but if you don’t play a lot you can’t do the method well).

E.g. Look at how the handbuff Paladin is still good even if it’s a “dumb” deck that on its basis is just high stats; if it was just high stats then the Renos and other targeted controls would devastate it; it’s because various decks overdo it with generated cards and cards that didn’t start in their decks and some deck builders understood those decks get devastated if you use Razorscale and Customs Enforcer (in an optimal way).

No, I don’t think they do, because opponents can be running any of the 30+ decks on the ladder. When you’re building a deck from scratch, you’re building a well-rounded deck which doesn’t target any deck specifically.

When you’re trying to optimize it by replacing individual cards, you’re experimenting, and now you’re in the 2nd method zone, but that’s not what I had in mind when I was talking about 1st method.

Wrong. I know 1st method is better. Unfortunately, it’s reserved for a select few people.

It’s not. The method I use, 2nd, is bad, because even when you succeed, you can’t be sure WHY you succeeded, so you might not be able to repeat the success in the future.

And they do xD Blood Reno DK beats it, Reno Pally beats it, Reno Warrior used to beat it, but now doesn’t exist anymore - like most of the control decks.

Anyway, I think Handbuff Pally is a masterpiece of deckbuilding skills. I can’t quite explain why I think that, but I do.

Maybe because it doesn’t run a single spell, maybe because it’s so well-rounded, maybe because it’s been tier 1 for too long. Not sure.

Nah. The meta has usually 2 to 4 semi-tyrants so it’s not impossible to target “the meta”; e.g. it was pretty obvious that 2 or 3 good decks generate way too many cards out of thin air that cost 1 or 0 mana; it’s extremely brutal to them to raise their cost to 2 or 3.

That decks might not be hard to build because most cards have similar “Draw impact”; I’m more flabbergasted by decks like Pirate Demon Hunter; that deck can have a high win rate but it’s so weird how it depends on specific draw/play sequences.

It’s very hard and rare to do that, because meta is rock-paper-scissors, so by countering one, you’re weak to the other

Sometimes, but rarely, a new deck is built which beats all the others, and then it’s called “Meta breaker” and usually nerfed very soon, and because it’s so strong, it becomes meta-defining to the point where a new rock-paper-scissor meta emerges

More often, it’s an old, forgotten deck, that can do the same.

But those things usually happen in specific periods of the game’s state, like 1st expansion of a new rotation, or maybe the last one, because usually the meta decks are too well rounded to allow for a meta-breaking deck to penetrate.

It’s easier when some opponents depend extremely on “one thing”. E.g. when the tyrant Demon Hunter depended on “the weapon” it was pretty brutal to them to have a Death Knight that freezes them a lot (similar to how some decks now use way too many generated cards that don’t come from their deck and are low cost).

The Demon Hunter could freeze the Death Knight but it started turning the Demon Hunter slower so it wasn’t good for the deck and kept it worse in either case.

1 Like

True, but that’s just one of the meta tyrants - where’s the other? I forgot which deck was it, excavate rogue, brann warrior or something else - I think Brann warrior.

1 Like

Should every car manufacturer have to individually reinvent every aspect of a car (internal combustion engine, wheels, ignition battery, etc) to sell cars or make new better cars?

Netdecking is fine and always has been, and the best players routinely know how to modify netdecks to best work around the meta

Edit: for a good example, Altair has been routinely climbing with Sludgelock a year old netdecks… By carefully watching the meta and tuning the deck list around it.

welp this aged poorly

1 Like