With control you have slow games and even delaying the game doesnt mean you will win, as you will most likely lose to kazakus etc in slow games anyways and just delaying the lose and wasting 10 minutes to not gain any ranks, and control decks lose to most decks anyway.
Playing aggro you win fast and a skilled player can tell very early at turn 5-7 if the game is lost as aggro decks dont have the tools to deal with certain situations, so you can just concede and not waste time so you can rank up faster, in the same time where aggro deck plays 3-4 games a control deck plays max 1 game which is almost always lose.
Control deck is nearly always dependant on having the right spell early game to have any chance vs aggro and if you dont its a lost game, with aggro decks you dont need to care about this you just play boards and hope the enemy didnt draw the card for guaranteened win.
So there is literally no point to play " Control " decks
The problem is that they’ve put this massive grind in place that requires a ton of wins, yet aggro does the job much quicker so it’s incentivized. Without that incentive, if I had just 30 minutes to play a game, I’d rather launch into one game rather than launching myself into 5x 5 minute games, but I really just play aggro (also because control affects are usually printed onto epic/legendary cards so control is somewhat p2p). I would prefer they did away with the ranked rewards and just increased rewards from playtime, maybe even make the win modifier reward increased more so because it doesn’t much matter if you lose in hearthstone, with star bonuses you could win something like 30% of your games and you’ll still climb for the most part, the best time to be experimental is actually at the beginning of your climb, not when you hit a ranked floor as per popular opinion.
sometimes it’s easier to concede a 30 minute game you know you’ll win and then play like 4 more games after. Playing against something like odd warrior or linecracker druid that could only win by armouring up was a good example of this even if your deck usually somewhat won eventually.
Its hyperbolized a bit but, Its the sentiment control players get. Playing brainless aggro decks feels like something people do for quick wins. The hostility many aggro players have expressed if their winrates are at all threatened also makes it more believable. I feel like this is why aggro will never be in a balanced place, aggro in general is faster, more powerful, easier to play. There has always been an OP aggro deck. Part of what I personally find enjoyable about control is the games last longer, and you can actually make decisions. Meaningful decisions in aggro games are minimal, generally you just play very inefficiently but high tempo and dont take damage. Its not as fun, but you can play big impctful cards that are actually fun instead of 2 mana minion hit face.
If its not obvious already, i dont like aggro. I can play it, any somewhat decent player can, but the high impact swing cards are the cool and fun ones to play.
I would take the opposite point of view, playing control vs aggro if you lose it happens pretty quickly, you concede and move on, it’s the longer games that tend to be wins, I’d rather spend longer winning games.
Also, playing as aggro you miss out on those epic long games where two control decks are trying to play as greedily as possible!
This is a stereotype, and like a lot of stereotypes it’s not wrong in terms of the average but has an unfortunate tendency to make people forget about variance. A real minority of aggro decks have a moderate or higher skill cap.
Just curious, which decks would you consider to be those decks atm? I see pirate warrior, beast druid and occasionally shadow priest and Ill even add shaman into the mix. None of those decks seem remotely difficult to play. The decks build themselves and the cards play themselves.
Difficult to play is not the same as difficult to maximize every decision in ever case.
If you really think all of Shadow Priest and Burn Shamam (lets forget just how many people screw up the mulligans for these decks) top out in complexity at “Aim stuff at face, hope face doesn’t answer quickly enough*” then you have at best, a surface-level understanding of the game.
Ive been playing since beta, I understand the game just fine. Its not a hard decision if there is one glaringly obvious line of play, which in most aggro decks that is the case. Thats my point, dont be rude.
Back between the releases of Deadmines and Alterac, I did an empirical analysis of skill cap within the metagame. I measured the effect of skill upon deck performance by contrasting winrates at the highest rank (top 1000 Legend) and lowest ranks. This is based on the reasonable assumption that top Legend players have more piloting skill than Bronze-Gold players, on average. Some of the results were predictable (Pirate Warrior had by far the lowest score) but some were surprising (Face Hunter’s score was close to the middle of the pack).
I might go and calculate again, but it’s pretty time consuming to do it right. I think I got a decent estimate the first time, but I’d calculate it with a more refined method now. When done properly, skill cap is metagame dependent — what kind of opponents you play against determines how many opportunities you have to show your skill.
