Keeping it simple here.
Powercreep in games is like people aging. You can’t stop time and things needs to continue to move.
See the actual meta we have with everyone bored?
It is the exact result of trying to reset things and everyone who argue in good faith knows it.
They reseted part of the powercreep because most of the new cards suck enough to need it.
So any “super power reset” you imagine is basically this meta but on a larger scale.
The reason for this meta is the old cards that are still busted are still around. You can’t reset the power level with the last set of the year. Pair that with confusing choices like ethereal oracle,which favors older combo/otk decks instead of the new stuff, and BoB and you see the mess we currently have.
Resetting the power isnt a problem. They just need more focus on what they are trying to do and less decisions that seem to contradict that.
Sure sure.
For sure it is super incredible fun to play starship putting gigantic minions on the board that die to a single removal or asteroid decks that should be called card flipping decks at this point.
This expansion sucks and it sucks because the new cards suck on average.
Be it literally or just not being fun to use.
And what blizzard done when they perceived it?
Double down on it by trying to force the cards into play via nerfing other stuff.
You can’t defend nerfs at this point. Because it is something that was tried and already failed.
I would even say that a new nerf patch is doubling down on top of doubling down.
It is pretty crappy they can just destroy already designed cards just for the sake of new toys being pushed out, but we had this discussion years ago, like when Rise of Shadows or w/e was a thing? Maybe even sooner.
I like good cards, and balance wise should be saved for when things are mostly like X class is 60% of a meta all by itself or so. If they would just make GOOD cards, and bigger sets, with SMART Devs who could plan for X strategy’s to be good, and other decks having options to counter certain decks we’d be golden but hey, it’s to tough to make more than what? 10 cards per class? lmao.
We not even need that big sets.
In fact i would say we need less cards and have those slighty better.
We gonna see they more with less cards for sure but one thing is seeing stuff like ziliax deluxe.
The other would be if we did see something like reverberations that has multiple uses.
The problem with resetting power is that they need to commit with the first expansion of the year and continue through the whole year worth of expansions which means we would basically have 2 years of the same meta waiting for the 2nd half of power to rotate out. They won’t do that because it would cut into profits.
We already had that and believe in me.
You don’t want to see it. In fact the result was so bad that the amount of powercreep did “double” after that year.
It is that bad to come with “power reset plans”.
Want a power reset?
Make a new game from the 0. The gaming equivalent of only if you born again.
Well, I have been complaining about powercreep since year one, because the design philosophy of Ben Brode was “we want turns to feel powerful” and so many Classic cards were unnecessarily designed to feel powerful, which why some Classic cards had to be HoF’d.
Early sets that attempted to reign in powercreep were clumsily and lazily designed, which resulted in huge failures.
Now, we are at point where trying reduce powercreep while there are so many powerful, broken, and badly designed cards is problematic for a team that has never been very good at balancing anything.
I think reducing powercreep is the right decision, because it’s always been the right decision throughout Hearthstone’s history, but the bigger problem is that the design team continues to lack vision in terms of balance and design.
In the meantime, while we wait for the devs to sort this out, I am fairly unimpressed with the only starship decks that seem to work are reliant on generating lots of armor and copies.
Constructed is a joke. It’s certainly not an experience worth paying for, so I won’t. I played three Arena matches earlier, and I found myself cursing at the RNG cascades that I experienced. One can draft and play good cards, but wins these days often require getting some good RNG outcomes from those good cards.
I really expect more from a strategy-based CCG than feeling like my strategy is often limited to pulling a slot machine handle each turn.
What’s dumb is current state of the game. Kibler and I, have often had overlapping opinions about Hearthstone and he has made a couple of videos explaining what’s wrong with hearthstone as he cuts back on playing the game while he waits to see if the devs improve the gaming experience. Kibler and I are both slow to quit a games we like, but when the fun is completely gone due to bad design, then even diehard players need to recognize when it’s time to move on—and that’s what a players will be deciding in 2025.
You’re so used to talk about powercreep that you can literally point problems caused by trying to reduce it and say “hur dur powercreep fault”.
The problem with the last kibler video is that he did exactly that.
He made that video exactly after blizzard nerfed the entire past expansion meta.
If anything it should be better if it has “less powercreep” don’t you think?
With all respect.
Did live enough to see that discourse on practice many times and it never worked. You should move on.
And all times it don’t work those same people do find a bogeyman so they don’t have to admit that it does not work.
Be it old cards, the public and many others.
The real problem is they went the way of power creep instead of fun. You can make normal cards with fun effects without being super powerful. They just went full steam ahead on the power.
There are plenty of average decks filled with average cards that are currently just average… because you can build a deck to drop dungar on turn 5 and blow it out of the water.
Having powerful cards isnt bad… but when you’re trying to play powerful cards “summon 2 cards from your deck” and then they introduce “summon your entire deck” well… they completely invalidate all the other cards that dont summon the entire deck.
Same with 1 mana 2/2s which are literally everywhere when they’re in standard unless you have some tribal or other considerations with your 1 drop. Instead of playing ‘bigger and better’ every expansion mabye try to create subtle synergies with the existing card pool rather than invalidating 99% of it.
Until a certain point.
Then things start pile one on another and that is when powercreep starts.
Rotation taking half the cards Just does not work. Really.
Either rotate the entire thing or not even try.
Nah, you can keep designing fun cards without ever power creeping the game if you know what you’re doing. It’s been done in many tcgs (some of which have a longstanding 5+ or even 10+ years keeping the power level fairly consistent without any rotation). If hearthstone’s designers can’t even keep a power level consistent for 1 year (with rotation), that’s on them.
That’s exactly what they did, a lot of small, subtle synergies
It started (for me) with Nature Shaman, over Excavate Pallies, and then with new swarm and spell Shamans, and now DH and Shaman pirates…
There’s many small, hidden combos which can mean the difference between a win or loss, but you wouldn’t recognize it as such on the first appearance
Lots of mechanics and order to take care of, as well
I don’t care about power creep, but I do care about player agency.
If every card only has upsides, it’s terrible design. Then power creep will ultimately result in the demise of this game.
If they start designing powerful cards with upsides and significant downsides, then we get an interesting game where player agency is a thing.
Consider any Titan printed. Those are terribly designed cards, all of them only have an upside, and a lot of them are massive power swings.
On the other hand, consider Kil’jaeden, delete your deck that’s a significant commit, for a strong upside. It’s not a guaranteed win condition though. That’s a much better design for a card, even though KJ might sill be overtuned or OP it will always take some amount of good judgment/skill to play well.
That’s such a dumb take, because it can be demolished with the next sentence ALONE.
Explain how it’s not a problem to print an 1-drop of 999/999 stats.
Please, give me an example or three. I mean it sincerely. I keep seeing claims like this, yet I can´t find any playable altrenative to Hearthstone. Tell me about those mythical CCG´s thriving for 5 or even 10 years with helthy player base, new content and support and without powercreep.
For the newer ones, last time I have seen some streamers to play Parallel - I didn´t try it, but it seems so uninteresting to me I don´t have an urge to do it.
I also have seen Cards of Eternity. This one seemed more interesting, so I tried. And I uninstalled, it is clear Hearthstone rip off, but worse in all aspects…
Battle spirits, duel masters/kaijudo, undercards, and digimon all have healthy player bases, new content, and little to no power creep (while having all been around a while). Naruto tcg used to as well, but the player base died after implementing set rotation nearly 2 decades into the game’s existence.
Hmmm, so all obscure asian anime stuff… zero interest in any of that, but thanks anyway
BTW, are those even online or physical? I mostly can´t find online games outside of some board game arena implementations. Those are some really weird choices
So I just checked Undercards. I mean, really? Whats that? I don´t know if I found what you had in mind, but webpage seems to be made by 14 year old kid and it shows like 70 online players. This is healthy player base?
Most of those are physical, only undercards is digital. Personally my favorite ccgs I’d recommend are exodus, birthright, d-spirits, and monster crown tcg, but admittedly they don’t have particularly large player bases if you care about that. There’s also elestrals (which you probably have heard of), that one’s pretty fun too.