More Hearthstone Rants

 I don't particularly love complaining about video games. But, boy has Blizzard managed to screw up over and over again on this one.

Firstly, the positives. I don't know if it is sheer dumb luck or a re-tweaking of the legendary formula. But, I've gotten considerably more legendaries from packs this expansion in considerably less time. Enough so that it seems to be something more than luck. And that certainly does help. But, it also exacerbates things.

I'll also say that the stockpile of options for certain strategies is increasing. And, as a result I've seen more new decks played against me than usual. Which is surprising given the next point.

Which is; they went and made a bad situation worse and now there I pretty much face the same 3 decks over and over again with only the briefest of respite. In the last expansion I could count on a Deck of Lunacy or a Warlock maybe 50% of the time (replace with a Fire Mage after the nerfs). Now, it is more like 75% of time. And, it is the same 2 classes just to make matters worse.

But, even if you ignore specific classes, I would say 90% of the time you're up against a quest line deck of some sort. And why? Because I've tried the alternative and it is soul crushing. I have maybe a 10% win rate outside the decks I've built around quests. There are no counters to them. The only strategy is kill the opponent first. And most of these decks kill you fast in their own right. So, not many people are foolhardy enough to invest much time in anything else. Especially since Casual mode is gone. 

I would say that a good number of my mage runs have the opponent dead by turn 7-8. And, in most of those cases, the opponent had 20+ health at the start of the turn I killed them on. I've seen Warlocks nuke me from full health plus shield in a single turn. And, even the less common classes are much the same. 

The problem however is not new. I felt the same way about Dormant cards. Some of them have pretty large and out sized skills and there are literally no cards to cancel them out. Quests are like that, but on steroids. The games need some cards which can outright counter a quest line. Right now, your best bet is to have Mutanus on hand and hope the opponent is dumb enough to complete their quest line without enough mana left to play the hero AND THEN hope Mutanus eats that card.

And this is actually a huge part of the reason that Mage and Warlock are dominating. The Mage decks are stacked with so many low cost cards that you can ignore strategy and still not run the risk of losing that card often. And the Warlock decks are so stacked with minions that you're just unlikely to eat that card even if they haven't managed to play it. 

Also, I would say 9/10 times if you do manage to somehow counter their quest reward, they will almost immediately rage quit. The one time someone thought they were being smart by holding back on playing their quest in the first two turns only to lose it to Counter spell was my favorite. They played two more rounds, I had a garbage hand and aside from screwing them over on that one card they still decided that rage quitting was best.

This should illustrate how valuable it is to have counters. If there were reliable counters, even if only a few classes had access to them, it would instantly reduce the number of players using these decks. 

Mutanus is NOT a reliable counter. His cost is too high, the fact that you can only carry one and most times doesn't get a chance to be played until after the quest is complete means he only really catches some players who aren't strategizing well. Every mechanic in the game should have either 1 or more absolute counters (just completely removes it) or a decent number of cheaper costs which have a chance of eliminating or interfering with the mechanism. Examples; for secrets, there are a number of cards which destroy enemy secrets, or copy them, or AoE's which can hit stealth units. There was also a hunter card which eliminated stealth from all units on the board or AoE silence spells.

But, a 1-cost card guaranteed to start in your hand? There aren't really mechanisms which can safely block those. Just as there is no way to remove a dormant minion or stop its proc (except in a few rare cases where the proc isn't turn based).

As suggested above, it doesn't even need to be neutral cards. If one or two classes which aren't dominating have access to those, they will start popping up more and more in response to this. And that will drive down the adoption of quest line decks. And as long as every mechanism has a reasonable counter, the ecosystem will trend toward diversity.