Why is Rastakhan Rumble so bad?

Multiplayer Discussion
1

I mean, of all the 135 cards in the set, the only ones I regularly see are Springpaw, Master’s Call, Zuljin and Firetree Witchdoctor. I’ve seen Spirit of the Shark and a bunch of shaman stuff occasionally but those are often the experimental decks I beat at rank floors. (Anecdotal evidence FYI.)
According to Hsreplay, only 35/135 have a => 1% deck inclusion rate. That is terrible.

So, fellow forumers, I ask you. Why are RR’s cards so weak?

I propose the following: All the Loa’s, along with their spirits, are actually balanced.

Kragwa is good value but is very clunky to play.

Graal the Shark requires strict deckbuilding and high-stat minions to be worth it, and sacrificing that early game tempo for a high roll possibility is just not viable in Rogue’s archetype.

Jainalai requires too much effort. Sure, you get ragnaros, but the fact that she only say play because of Baku shows how she can’t stand on her own.

Akali the Rhino is balanced - theoretically at least 10/10 of stats and a card draw if you play it right. But most often Akali dies in the trade and - it’s too slow and too low impact. If it was 7 mana or a 6/6, maaaybe.

Bwonsambi is just terrible. (Or is it??? Zoo/Mech priest has been on a rise lately)

The Hunter One (he’s that bad I dont remember the name, despite owning him). Decent value that synergizes well with Hunter’s arsenal but its just too low impact on board (3/2 lol)
Shirvalah is the only one that sees play, but that’s because of her interaction with Holy Wrath - its her interaction with another card that makes her good, not her own merits.

The fact i cant name the other two shows how bad they are.

So I ask you this as well: what would you do to buff them?

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2

I think it’s too soon to call the cards from Rastakhan’s Rumble bad. Some cards, like Da Undahtakah have the potential to be strong, but lack the support to be viable.

When the cards from Rastakhan’s Rumble were first introduced, they had to compete with the high power level cards from the year of the Mammoth. When the Boomsday Project first came out, it had little effect on the meta and many of it’s cards were considered to be unplayable. Now, cards like Microtech Controller and Boomaster Flark have been able to enter the meta.

Since the power level has lowered, more cards from Rastakhan’s Rumble will see play as support is printed for them in the upcoming expansions.

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It was the worst set power creep wise and that should raise the flag why they included that set in the masters bundle versus the boomsday or withwood sets that have more cards in play.

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4

I think the set’s a potential candidate for the next set of buffs. That said, I LOVE Rastakhan’s Rumble as a set, it contains many of my favorite cards.

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5

Rastakhan’s Rumble was probably the strongest of the Year of the Raven sets in a vacuum. The problem is that it was designed entirely in opposition to the metagame.

Year of the Mammoth rotating out was certainly a significant change, and one that has made a difference; but even so, many of the meta decks then were just common class meta decks taken up to eleven. This often entailed cards from the expansion pushing terrible archetypes. As such, further support will be needed to see more of these cards in the meta – there are still two expansions to go!

6

Sorry but that Mammoth to stronk answer was already old at Raven year.

Can we admit just for a second that you can resume the Raven year into BAKU VS GENN without lose to much?

Serious…

The rest of witchwood is forgettable because there just aren’t a good amount of strong cards.

Boomsday had giga amount of cards that devs not had courage to put at a proper strenght like:

Project cards should be more disrupting like :
Research project
2 Mana
Every player draws 3 cards

Mech were obvious underpowered to the point the did buff they.

And they nerfed the hell out of ramp to destroy the combo shell they created for druid.

And rastakhan born archtypes in general are just bad with a feel exceptions.

Ping mage has dependant on baku.
Standard Pirate rogue was dependant on genn.
Heal paladin is just bad.

Sorry but last year was a show of bad design in the sense that they did a ton of underpowered stuff that will still bad for eternity.

It is obvious that we gonna some cards get some play until the end of the year but RoS is proof enough that Raven year sets in general we’re just a bunch of weak cards made only for use space while they prepared the changes in the game for this year.

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7

One big problem is they never continued some of the themes that RR started.

Druid has no more Beast or Hero attack support. Mage got no Elemental or Hero Power support. Healadin support? Nope. Pirate rogue got hit by the nerfbat instead of supported. Discard lock? Gone. Warrior doesn’t have any more Dragon or Rush support.

Priest and Shaman didn’t really get themes and Hunter is lucky enough that they’ll always have beasts to work with. But overall, RR just couldn’t compete with last format and very little in this format has been designed with RR in mind.

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Sorry but this isn’t true.

Most of “attack druid” support exist even if not obvious.

You could build a miracle deck from it for example.
That to not speak about it being directly connected with healing druid since you need to take damage to actually heal yourself.
We would be probably playing it if baku did not get rotated.

Ping mage support was baku and people stated clear that they not want hero power oriented stuff for a long time.

Rush warrior basically has a literal year of support. If it didn’t work at this point we should just admit it isn’t good enough without some really overpowered cards and forget.

Healing paladin can give freeze shaman a run for its money.

Warlock had a last try of support discard instead of something new due to how powerfull it was at said time.

In the end of the day we can resume rastakhan rumble to hunter and raiding party.

9

Rush Warrior, Healadin, and Attack Druid never took off as a viable deck. Last I remember, people we’re meming on how they were “Gronked”, AKA they got the garbage dump of the 9 class legendaries. I myself was one of them, and I can attest to how garbage this card is.

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You are wrong about Shirvallah not being good on her own. She definitely is. She is just even better with Holy Wrath.

The situation is that the support kits for non-holy wrath paladin is not there to make a spell based paladin. And you can’t make a strong non-holy wrath paladin balance wise without making an over the top strong holy wrath paladin as I see it

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I think it’s because when it was released, Genn and Baku were still in rotation, and all of the really powerful cards from the year of the mammoth were still around. People today say that rogue is OP or Warrior is OP or whatever, but honestly none of the decks could stand against the best decks from last year.

Like do you remember cubelock before their nerfs, or Druid before all the Druid nerfs, or Quest Rogue. They would all still be insane.

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That’s no longer valid because all of those things rotated out, and the Rastakhan set continues to have limited relevance.

They made way too many bad memes like Surrender to Madness, Hireek, Gonk, and Griftah.

The Spirits are almost all pretty bad build around cards for one reason or another.

There’s some good stuff sprinkled in, but nowhere near enough.

13

I like how you talk about 7/9

So lets talk about the problem with the 2 you didn’t mention cause you didn’t talk about them.

Let’s start with my comfortable pick, Druids.
Gonk need set up , or wide board, and you need to do allot of trade to do the “OTK” combo, which is nearly death sentence in this type of Meta, not to mention the hero power/attack has little to no support in Druid.
The totem isn’t bad as it help you draw, but need to draw it early generally to make it worth while, but with minions like Acorn you either have 4/3 stats or a 0/3 and gotta hero power trade the 1st part of the game to gainthe most value of it to draw cards, and as stated, with little to no HP/ATK support.

Now Hir’eek needs some major hand buff support , while the totem does support the LoA you’re not going have a good Hir’eek turn in this meta Unless the totem is slap down and never touched, and you have Taunts, so you’re force feeding the upgrade till all the minions your opponent would had, died and Hir’eek does the final push.

Honestly Gonk should have a inspire like affect with him, he’s a 7 mana over price stat minion cause druid was to Ramp ahead the curve and use the weak stat over price to read up something.
Like the health of the minion you kill turn into armor, so this would make druid more willing to trade with minions with higher health, and boost their attack to bearound 4 Attack, then every kill they do, they get armor from the minion health they just killed. this would be more putting less stress on a Lethal setup on yourself and bounce back to stable game most likely.

Hir’eekshould maybe get it’s cost reduction affect for every time it’s buffed by a Beast minion death, since Hir’eek is a beast itself, it should have a bonus feastin’ affect on beast. And it’ll make a “beast” like Warlock to be play outside the normal demons, and make most the Rumble being Beast like more in theme.

this might sound abit over powering, but this is just the top of my head for the real LoA’s that aren’t balanced and need real support unlike the rest you stated.

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14

Rumble is full of many conflicting synergies and not enough support to make full decks. I suspect many of the cards were made with Genn and Baku not prematurely leaving Standard. I am sure someone with a lot of time could theory craft and maybe even test some decks that would have been Standard if Genn and Baku never left and find some tier 1 decks that would beat the current Standard meta that includes a number of Rumble Cards.

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Because the entirety of Year of the Raven was designed to be a power reset compared to Year of the Mammoth.

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The cards from the Year of the Raven were made at a lower power level, so the power creep from the year of the Mammoth wouldn’t continue after it rotated out.

Mechs from the Boomsday Project weren’t underpowered. Many of them saw play after rotation. The only exceptions to this are the Security Rover and Beryllium Nullifier in Warrior, which are good discover options from Doctor Boom and Omega Assembly.

With the exception of Research Project, all of the Project cards have seen play. I would say that they’re balanced.

Pirate Rogue never required Genn Greymane. Even before rotation both the Captain Hooktusk package and Raiding Party saw a significant amount of play. One of these strategies became so strong after rotation that it received a nerf.

Many strategies are bad when they are first released. Powerful decks like Taunt Druid, Odd Mage, and OTK Paladin required cards from later sets to become viable.

17

Sorry but the amount of strategies that not work from those sets still totally anormal and there are a decent amount of ways to design around powercreep without do THIS.

People were complacent about Raven year cards for a long time already just because they found that they not like Mammoth cards but it is a fact that Raven cards are even Bellow the classic set in terms of power in majority.

What they did was make players pay for what they did and thanks to people like you we really did.

So we can thank your opnion for the worse year of hearthstone history far more than blizzard itself.

18

My problem with both RR and RoS is not the whole power level but rather the mechanics introduced.
You can remember WW for odd/even decks and echo, you can remember Bd project for magnetic but what do you get in RR and RoS?
RR gave us overkill, a mechanic that sounded nice but never saw actual competitive play and RoS gave us lackeys, twinspells and schemes which are basically nothing memorable or game changing. Add the fact that these mechanics have low synergy and you get 2 generally bad expansions (despite their metas).

19

I wonder if the Totem would be overpowered if it additionally gave the Druid +1 Attack.

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20

+1 attack on your turn you mean. That would be balanced
+1 attack in general would mean your face does damage when the sMORC. That is probably too strong, and therefore would see play.