Although I’ve personally liked Twist, one of the common complaints I see is that they are just re-balanced retro formats. Obviously the last Twist wasn’t like this but there were issues of complaints (can’t judge Twist off of one format people didn’t like) and one of the over-arching issues is that the format is inaccessible because it’s focused around a Wild card pool. I don’t think this last aspect is an issue, Standard just doesn’t have the depth to play around with alternative rules that makes it in any way significantly different from the Standard we are playing now and honestly I think it’s more important to (1) allow players with Wild collections to have a space to play outside of Wild, (2) incentivize people to start building Wild collections, (3) sell new Twist product like what we got with Caverns of Time. I think the only axis of discussion left is that initial complaint – Twist being revised versions of retro formats.
From what I’ve heard from other Wild players is that Twist sounded exciting when it was announced because we would get cube-like formats that would distinguish itself from Wild and give Wild players an area to play in that didn’t have the problematic power issues that Wild has. Even though Wild has recently had some balancing changes that make it playable, before it felt like the only people playing Wild were people looking to abuse these obviously busted strategies in a format where everyone else is playing nothing but obviously busted strategies or people looking to carve out some space with homebrews which were, for the most part, competing terribly.
Although I’ve disagreed with the philosophy that Wild should be THE place where anything goes and the meta will sort itself out, I’ve disagreed with that philosophy because Wild was simultaneously the only place where you could play decks that never existed historically in Standard because of the lack of support. It wasn’t until recently when elemental shaman actually became a playable class because the history of released elemental cards were so limited throughout Standard that it simply never became playable until Into the Badlands, and so if you wanted to play an elemental deck before this point your only place was Wild. The issue this creates is that (1) elemental shaman is a singular example of archetypes that had support spread so thin over the years that it took multiple years for any competent decklists to sprout (2) by the time they did solidify into competency it was far too late because these adolescent decks were competing with OTK and aggro strategies built on years of refinement and utilizing increasingly power crept card choices.
To put it most simply, there are too many cards in Wild that do not see play. The crazy thing is that there are a number of other cards that would have also been good in Standard (or pre-Standard) but were so horribly balanced and never rebalanced that they never saw the light of day, either. Brave Archer for example COULD have been a card that just said “inspire: deal 2 damage to the enemy hero,” and yet it has the stipulation of having an empty hand. Other cards, like Light’s Champion, could have simply destroyed a demon (or perhaps not since I’m not sure if the Lord Jaraxxus interaction being a demon was fixed at this point).
Anyway, Twist was hyped up as a thing where people could not only play with new strategies that just never existed due to balancing and “print” issues but also because there was infinite potential to mix and match legal sets throughout Hearthstone’s history. It really became a case of limitations creating innovations and instead players felt like what they got was more of what they’ve already played. Admittedly, Twist did address one of the issues with card usability with the balance changes and I think MOST players responded to Caverns of Time pretty well considering we got a ton of new cards, some of which even see play IN Wild (Runi, Time Explorer for highlander paladin). There were some failings with balance since C’Thun strategies ended up being WAYYYY too good but it’s fine, trial and error. We can allow some mulligans here and there.
Really, I hope Blizzard isn’t thinking about abandoning the format. If there’s anything I’ve learned playing this since release it’s that many of the shortcomings just come from things not being done well enough, not that because they were bad ideas. Like I mentioned earlier with the inspire mechanic, it’s not that the mechanic is inherently bad but if you print nothing but bad cards with that mechanic, of course it’s easy to chalk it up as just being a failure and never print another inspire card again (which is the case).
Just take the risk of giving us a cube-like format that rotates and let the players figure things out. Continue releasing Twist product and for all intents and it could be the next big competitive format for Hearthstone. Because it’s rotating maybe the best way to look at it isn’t an alternative to Wild but a convincing case for Wild players to have their own Standard.