Cards I’m glad are leaving in HS 2018

It is a bit early, but the Year of the Mammoth Rotation format in Hearthstone is about to end in two months and I was thinking about what cards we were losing. In the upcoming Year of the Raven, all the sets that came out in 2016(Old Gods, Karazhan, Gadgetzan) are leaving. 2016 is in my opinion, the worst year that Hearthstone has ever had. It started off decently with Old Gods, but the next two sets introduced some terrible RNG cards that the game is constantly getting criticized for. As well as some other horrendously designed cards. Most of my friends who played Hearthstone dropped the game around this time. In fact the Karazhan meta being so bad is one of the reasons I even considered looking to other card games, and is how I discovered Shadowverse. So I cannot complain too much I guess.

But anyway, I wanted to talk about which cards I am glad to see rotating out in the Year of the Raven.

Whispers of the Old Gods
A great expansion with a ton of flavor, this is a fan favorite. The main issue with Old Gods is in how much filler there was, but the cards that were impactful had a very long lasting effect on the game. I don’t think anyone expected all 4 Old Gods to eventually see competitive play.

• Cabalist’s Tome – This card is actually not a problem anymore, but it started a nasty trend of Mage getting random spell generation. I remember when the Year of the Kraken was first announced, I was really happy to see that Unstable Portal would be leaving. But Mage would just shift from getting random minions to random spells.
• Evolve – A key card in one of my least favorite HS decks of all time, Token Evolve Shaman. Shaman in general is one of the worst designed classes because almost everything they do is RNG based. Even its hero power, one of the most fundamental parts of Hearthstone, is random. The Evolve Shaman deck’s playstyle is to go wide on board with small garbage minions and then try to highroll evolves. Gross.
• N’Zoth’s First Mate and Bloodsail Cultist – Put these two together because they are key parts of another one of my most hated HS decks of all time, Pirate Warrior. This has more to do with the class they were given to rather than their power level, though. The reason is that for most of Hearthstone’s history, pirates have never been a Warrior thing. Every pirate released before Old Gods was either Neutral, or Rogue class cards. And all of the Rogue pirates were complete garbage. Then Old Gods comes out, and Warrior gets pirates out of nowhere. And the pirates it receives are far better than anything Rogue has ever gotten. So yes, I am salty. It also got released in the same timeframe that Blade Flurry got nerfed, which still upsets me to this day. Bloodsail Cultist would have been so amazing for weapon based Rogue decks, which basically disappeared after the BF nerf and have only recently started to come back because of Kingsbane.

One Night in Karazhan
Quite possibly the worst adventure of all time. The first wing was good, but the others had a bunch of uninspired boss battles with very few new mechanics. Not to mention the difficulty of this adventure was way too low: I remember purposefully handicapping myself in deckbuilding just to make the battles interesting.

In terms of power level, most of the cards in Karazhan were awful. And the ones that were good were playable for all the wrong reasons. Way too much game swinging RNG.

• Barnes – garbage RNG card, everyone knew it was a problem when it was first spoiled. It did take a while, but he is definitely a problem now since there are competitive decks that just auto-win the game if he gets played on 4, like Big Priest and Spell Hunter. Just the worst type of game swinging RNG that the game needs less of.
• Malchezaar’s Imp and Silverware Golem – Put these together because they basically killed the original Zoo. The original Zoo Warlock(with Nerubian Eggs) was pretty much the shining definition of a good budget deck in card games: was very cheap to build, no legendaries, perfectly taught the basics and fundamentals of the game, and had a high skillcap. Imp and Silverware Golem turned Zoo into a retarded highroll deck where you play around nothing and just try to get lucky with discards. Gross.
• All the portals – Another example of bad game swinging RNG. Firelands Portal is probably the biggest offender here, since it was also completely broken in Arena due to it being common rarity. Admittedly I kind of like Moonglade Portal, but the entire summon random minions mechanic is dumb and needs to go. Unfortunately, this would not be the last we would see of it…

Mean Streets of Gadgetzan
A big crash and burn expansion for me. I remember being hyped for the card designs during spoiler seasons, and even some of the Shadowverse streamers were excited and talking about the new cards. I also remember one of the bigtime HS professional players even claiming that this expansion was going to be the next League of Explorers.

Gadgetzan ended up creating one of the most unfun metas in HS history. The power level of the cards was off the charts, and the meta became warped around two types of decks: hyper aggro(pirates) and Reno decks. Nothing else could compete anymore. It is very clear from the recent nerfs that this expansion was a disaster, because the cards continued to cause problems years after their release.

• Dirty Rat – Fuck this card, seriously. I get that it is a way to disrupt combo decks or decks that revolve around minions with strong battlecries. But game swinging RNG is not the way to do it.
• Patches the Pirate – People knew he was broken when first spoiled, he was immediately broken on release, and continued to be a huge problem until he finally got nerfed last month. Patches is obviously a bad card now, but he distorted the meta in a way that is impossible to forget. The pre nerf Kobolds & Catacombs meta really showed how dumb he was, where you had multiple classes who had zero pirate synergy run Patches + Southsea Captain just because of how strong it was.
• Doppelgangster – A card that was clearly meant to be used for the Grimy Goons handbuff classes, but ended up much stronger in Token Evolve Shaman. You can probably guess from my earlier writings that I hate decks that cheat out minions for way lower than their intended cost. Especially if it is trivial to set up. Getting three 6 drops for 6 mana with a 2 card combo is gross.
• Devolve – Another key card in Token Evolve Shaman. The entire deck is based around RNG. Not only do they build their board through randomness, their “board clear” is RNG based. Disgusting.
• Drakonid Operative – A ridiculously overtuned card with no drawback whatsoever. Operative is a fully statted 5 drop with huge upside. Blizzard has even gone on record stating that they printed this card to allow Dragon Priest to go out with a bang(since Blackrock Mountain was rotating out soon).
• The Jade mechanic – The biggest offender here is obviously Druid with Jade Idol, but honestly the entire mechanic is just boring. Will not miss it.

I was also considering writing another post on which cards I was sad to see leaving. But honestly outside of N’Zoth and Fandral, there aren’t many. I play Rogue, and it was a terrible year for the class. You could make a serious argument that the best card Rogue got was a coin, which says a lot about the quality of cards printed in 2016.

More card game stuff

Dark Dragoon Forte by Mushimaro

Have not updated in a while. Two of the card games that I play have both gotten expansions, and while both expansions are similar at first glance, they have had wildly different effects on the metas of their respective games.

For Hearthstone, that expansion is Un’Goro. Ungoro was seen as something of a dealbreaker expansion, as the game was in a really poor state for a long time leading up to its release. For reference, Karazhan and Gadgetzan were terribly received. Whispers of the Old Gods was an excellent expansion, but in my opinion its meta was only good for about 1.5 months. Once people figured out how good Dragon Warrior and Aggro Shaman were, that meta went downhill. Un’Goro was also the first expansion to bring in the next Standard rotation, so it had to do well or else the playerbase would shrink even more. Well much to my surprise, Blizzard really knocked it out of the park with this one. The expansion brings in lots of new mechanics and keywords, and card design is on a much higher quality than usual. They also cut down on the amount of filler cards, as almost every card released has some kind of use.

So yeah, game is super fun again after about 8 months of terrible metas. The main thing that is an issue with Hearthstone right now is getting the cards. The rate of card acquisition has always been horrendous in HS, but I feel like this new set has exacerbated this problem since a huge chunk of the fun, high impact cards are of Epic or Legendary rarity. It also doesn’t help that each class got 2 legendaries this expansion, and Quest decks basically cannot function without said quest. I have played a fair number of digital card games at this point in time now, and HS has the worst new player experience by far. The ranking ladder system is still awful as well. The rank floors that were introduced a while back for 15 and 10 were good, but they still don’t fix the issue of the monthly ladder reset. Now I don’t think the idea of a reset is bad. Resets are fine, but when people at Rank 5 to Legend get demoted all the way to 17 and 18 every season the experience is just miserable for everyone. I have no idea who came up with this system. It almost feels like it was a placeholder rank system that was not changed because the devs had other priorities.

One thing that I will say is that Un’Goro did add a solid core of neutral cards that can be used to great effect in almost every deck. I am talking about the core elemental package of Fire Fly/Tar Creeper/Tol’vir Stoneshaper/Servant of Kalimos. It won’t be amazing in every deck, but it’s passable and good enough to do dailies with. So new players can just invest in the elemental package for dailies and build their collection slowly this way. The best thing about this package is that it is actually fair and doesn’t feel oppressive. The splashable neutrals that were run in pre-standard HS like Haunted Creeper/Piloted Shredder/Sludge Belcher/Dr Boom were way too strong and powercrept almost every minion at the same cost.

Shadowverse’s newest expansion is Tempest of the Gods, and like Un’Goro it also gave two legendaries for each class. No new keywords were introduced though. This expansion also has some really solid card design, but it has had a terrible effect on the meta. In short, the meta in Shadowverse now is very similar to that of the previous Mean Streets of Gadgetzan meta in Hearthstone. The meta is dominated by two decks who are complete polar opposites of each other: Ramp Dragon which is basically hyper control, and Midrange Shadow which is basically hyper aggro with enough overtuned cards that let it play the value game against slower decks. There is also a 3rd deck, Aegis Haven, which is not actually that strong, but its mere existence shuts out a lot of other control decks. Sounds a lot like the old Pirate/Reno/Jade trifecta, doesn’t it?

One of the most frustrating parts about the current SV meta is the extinction of several previously viable control decks. Right now, the only playable control decks are Aegis Haven and Nephthys Shadow, who both have (almost unstoppable) endgame win conditions. Any kind of classic control deck that aims to outvalue its opponent and/or grind them out of resources is dead in the meta, because you can never beat Dragon(the ultimate lategame faction) and you cannot outgrind Aegis, because Aegis is actually invincible.

Cygames has stated in interviews that because SV is a primarily mobile game, they want to keep the game length short by printing extremely powerful late game cards. And honestly, this is not something that I really disagree with. One thing that has always bothered me about Hearthstone is how awful expensive cards are, and how overly strong early game cards are. They are so bad that the only ones that see play are cards that have an immediate impact, like Dr Boom and Ragnaros. And there was even a period of time where Ragnaros disappeared from the meta because of token decks being everywhere. So I do like that Shadowverse is willing to push the boundaries and print super strong endgame cards. However, I feel that they crossed the line with Tempest because control matchups are no longer about carefully managing your resources, and are all about who can drop their endgame bomb card first. So I would like to see Aegis get changed or at least have some real counters printed for it. A neutral Aldor Peacekeeper-like card would be great.

The good news is that Cygames has a great track record of stepping in to fix things when the meta is bad. The previous meta in Rise of Bahamut was also quite bad at first, but after they nerfed Piercing Rune and Goblin Mage it became amazing. The post nerf RoB meta is probably my most favorite meta in SV so far, actually. Every faction was playable and had multiple viable decks. So I have faith that Cygames will make the correct changes soon. I still think that Albert was a huge mistake, though. I absolutely detest that card(and the Swordcraft faction in general), because the class just plays overstatted followers on curve, many of which bypass summoning sickness with Rush or Storm. Even though Albert is no longer a problem card in the current meta, he is way overtuned and he is in the class that has the largest amount of Storm followers. I would really like to see him changed so that he normally has Rush, and only gains Storm as an Enhance effect. This way, he is a lot worse as an aggressive card but can still be used as a big endgame threat for Control Sword, in keeping true to Cygames’ mobile design philosophy.

One thing that I have learned playing Shadowverse for this long is that Cygames is a monkey’s paw developer. Unlike Blizzard with Hearthstone, they actually listen to their playerbase and respond quickly. They always answer the wishes of the playerbase, but it comes with unintended consequences:

Haven was one of the worst crafts in standard SV, and people really wanted them to be viable.
Darkness Evolved comes out, where almost every Haven card contained is amazing. It also gives birth to 3 new archetypes: Storm, Elana, and Seraph Haven.

People hated on DShift Rune in standard and DE, and wanted a follower based Spellboost Runecraft deck that was more interactive to play against.
Rise of Bahamut releases, and gives us Daria Runecraft.

People hated on Path to Purgatory for being too oppressive, and not hating any efficient answers to it.
We get Bahamut, one of the most obscene cards ever printed.

People wanted Dragon and Shadow to be good, after these two factions were both relatively lackluster in DE and RoB.
We get Tempest of the Gods, where Dragon and Shadow get some of the most overtuned cards ever printed.

Take Two Arena heavily favored the player going 2nd.
The recent Arena changes fix the going 1st vs 2nd imbalance, but introduce a whole slew of other problems that are too long to talk about here.

Pirate N’Zoth Rogue

Another Hearthstone post! After a bunch of testing, I have finally settled upon a fun deck that works decently in this meta. It’s nothing particularly groundbreaking, though.

2 Backstab
2 Preparation
2 Journey Below
1 Patches the Pirate
2 Small-Time Buccaneer
2 Swashburglar
1 Bloodmage Thalnos
2 Eviscerate
2 Sap
2 Undercity Huckster
1 Edwin VanCleef
2 Fan of Knives
2 SI:7 Agent
2 Tomb Pillager
2 Azure Drake
2 Gadgetzan Auctioneer
1 N’Zoth, the Corruptor

As you can see it’s the N’Zoth Miracle Rogue deck that I played in the past two metas updated for Gadgetzan. The key changes are in adding the 5 card Pirate core with Patches that so many decks are running nowadays. It gives the deck an amazing early game which is something that Rogue has never had in the past. It also makes cards like Shiv and Shadow Strike unnecessary since you can just use your pirates to keep your opponent’s board clear early on.

So this is a value based deck that runs some of the Miracle Rogue cards as a draw engine. We can play the value game against control decks and since we’re Rogue, we easily out tempo them as well. So we have a good matchup against every control deck in the game. Unfortunately even with the amazing Pirate early game, the deck still has the usual Rogue problem of being weak to aggro. Even standard Miracle Rogue fares better against aggro since it can race them with Leeroy and Cold Bloods. This N’Zoth Rogue deck has much less reach so it can’t really deal with decks that run lots of charge minions. I vividly remember a recent game I played against a Pirate Warrior where I went first and had a Turn 1 Pirate opener. I was winning the entire game and at one point even had two unanswered Tomb Pillagers on board. In the end I still lost because there was no way of stopping all the direct face damage. I also did end up getting bursted for 16 damage on the final turn from an empty board.

The main strength of this deck over standard Miracle is in the matchup against Reno decks, especially Reno Mage. While standard Miracle is supposed to be favored against them all, Reno Mage can cause problems. The Mage spell removal suite lines up quite well against Rogue minions, and Flamestrike is extra strong since there are no minions in the standard Miracle deck that are above 4 health(other than Edwin). Additionally, Reno Mage has access to the Ice Block + Reno combo. If both of those cards are drawn early, they essentially provide ~60 points of healing for the Mage, so Miracle Rogue literally does not have enough damage in the deck to finish the game. So N’Zoth Rogue is better here since the deck aims to win through value instead of burst damage. We can generate a steady stream of threats and then reload with N’Zoth if they are all dealt with.

From a competitive standpoint, this deck is overall weaker than the standard version of Miracle Rogue. But it is a lot of fun to play and is worth a shot if you want to try something different. One of the things that I like the most about N’Zoth Rogue is that every game is a different experience. Between the burgles and the Discovers off Journey Below, you are literally playing with a different set of cards in every match. The deck has 4 burgle effects, and potentially more if the game lasts long enough for a N’Zoth turn.

I really wanted to make Jade Rogue work but I am convinced that it will never be good in this meta. Even after the doom and gloom in my previous post, I still kept testing it. I had some mild success with Jade Pirates, but it was still too slow and less consistent than what I found here. But this deck ends up being a nice compromise because there is a high chance of discovering an Aya Blackpaw off of Journey Below! So we can play the Jade Rogue game anyways if we feel like it.

Recent card game stuff

The Mean Streets of Gadgetzan expansion has been out for a few weeks now, and I have been having a lot of fun with it. Karazhan was super disappointing but this expansion introduced a lot of cool cards and even a new mechanic. The support for the Reno decks, especially Priest and Mage, is by far my favorite addition from Gadgetzan. The power level of the cards in Gadgetzan is quite high, which is great because of how much the meta has changed for it. But it has made it a lot harder to get into for new players or people with limited collections. A lot of old decks cannot compete anymore and you need a decent amount of the high rarity Gadgetzan cards to have a chance.

So I played Jade Rogue exclusively for the first 2 weeks of the expansion and was totally disappointed by it. The deck is a lot of fun but it is depressingly inconsistent. I experimented a ton with its construction, going with pure Jade and Deathrattles along with hybrid Jade Miracle. At this point I am still not sure which one is better but Jade Miracle is more true to the spirit of the class(imo) so I favor it. The issue with the deck is that it is even slower than standard N’Zoth Rogue. It plays similarly, in that it is a value based deck that can get great tempo swings with the Miracle Rogue package. But it takes a while for the Jade Golem train to get started. The meta has also gotten faster and so many decks run burst damage now. So even non-aggro decks can sometimes just ignore your growing Jade army and smash your face. I pretty much had a sub 50% winrate against everything. You know that a Rogue deck is bad when it can’t even beat Priest and Druid consistently. The Jade packages in Shaman and Druid are just so much better. Not only that, but they got 3 Jade cards while for some reason Rogue only gets 2. Where is the justice?

The funny part is that Rogue is actually in a very good spot right now. Miracle Rogue is quite strong in the current meta. It’s just that the other Rogue decks can’t compete anymore. And Miracle Rogue is basically the same deck as before, just with some of the spells swapped out for the pirates package to improve its early game. This mostly has to do with the fact that the majority of the Gadgetzan class cards for Rogue are total garbage. You know it’s bad when the best card they got from the expansion was a coin. Going through them one by one:

• Jade Shuriken – A decent card, but I feel like the combo requirement could have been omitted. 2 damage for 2 mana is already below the power curve, so even if it unconditionally summoned a Jade Golem it wouldn’t be broken.
• Jade Swarmer – Definitely the weakest Jade Card in the entire set. Very slow, the only reason it is somewhat passable in Rogue is because you can follow it up with Unearthed Raptor.
• Shadow Rager – A total joke of a card. There’s not much I can say that hasn’t already been said, but what irritates me the most about this card is that it could have been good if it had Ice Rager stats. There is absolutely no reason for it to be a 5/1. You might argue that it would be wrong to powercreep an existing card, but Ice Rager was already a powercrept version of Magma Rager. And class cards in general should be stronger than neutral cards. Just look at Cult Sorcerer and Unearthed Raptor. If Shadow Rager was a 5/2, I would actually play it in a stealth themed deck. But the way it is now, it dies for free to all the AoE that is run in the meta.
• Counterfeit Coin – Obviously a great card, just doesn’t add anything new to the Rogue arsenal
• Gadgetzan Ferryman – Basically a weaker version of Brewmaster, which is a card that already sees 0 play in the constructed meta. The combo requirement seems super arbitrary. I feel like this card would have been a lot more reasonable if you were allowed to bounce anything on combo, not just friendly minions.
• Shadow Sensei – Stats are below the curve for a 4 drop, but it is a good card for a stealth themed deck. The problem is that Stealth Rogue sucks right now, but this card might be good in the future if the archetype gets more support.
• Lotus Assassin – Pretty much a better version of Stranglethorn Tiger, this card is actually quite good. The issues are that it pushes Stealth Rogue which is total garbage at the moment, and that it promotes a playstyle that is far too slow for the current meta. Might be good in the future
• Luckydo Buccaneer – This card could have been amazing if Rogue had good weapon support, but with Blade Flurry dead, running Deadly Poison ends up being a liability in the current meta.
• Shaku, the Collector – A total joke of a legendary. It does push the Burgle and Stealth themes of Rogue, and does curve nicely into Shadow Sensei. But the stats are so poor for a 3 drop. It is almost a worse version of Undercity Huckster. I feel like this could have been playable as a 3/3.

But yeah, new expansion is great, just disappointed with the Rogue class cards. The power level has been raised so much in this expansion that Rogue has to be Pirate Miracle to compete. I kind of miss the times when I could do decently with N’Zoth and Burgle Rogue.

Shadowverse has been great as usual. There is a new expansion coming at the end of this month. Been playing this game a lot more than Hearthstone for the past few months. It has really made me appreciate just how generous Cygames is. I started in July(so about 6 months now) and have spent absolutely no money, and at this moment have pretty much everything. I don’t really have all the cards, but I have enough stuff unpacked and enough crafting material to make everything. The difference to Hearthstone is like night and day, where I have been playing that game for a little over a year and still do not have anything close to a complete collection. It’s not too bad since I only care about 4 classes(Rogue, Druid, Mage, Priest). But it’s not like SV where I can literally play everything.

Thief N’Zoth Rogue

Have not written about Hearthstone in a while, so I wanted to post the deck that I have been using since Karazhan launched.  The meta is in a terrible state at the moment, and I have found that I no longer enjoy the game anywhere near as much as I used to.  There was once a time where I liked playing all classes, but I am really not a fan of the direction they are going with them.  Especially Mage, who has become an RNG aggro class with all the burn spells in the world.  Like people jokingly used to call the old Tempo Mage deck “Casino Mage”, but that can never be more true when describing the entire class in its current state.  I only enjoy playing Rogue now, although I still miss the old Blade Flurry.  Luckily Shadowverse is here and that game is doing so many things right where Hearthstone is failing.

Anyway, the deck that I am playing is a modified version of the N’Zoth Miracle Rogue deck that I wrote about before.  It has some of the burglary themed cards that were added in Karazhan.  However, I did not go full thief and run Burgle because that spell is so awful for tempo when it is not paired with a Prep.  Personally, I do not think this deck is as strong as the original N’Zoth Miracle deck that I made.  Ethereal Peddler probably has no place in any competitive deck.  But it is a lot of fun, and all sorts of crazy things become possible when you get the 2 mana discount on stolen class cards.

2 Backstab
2 Preparation
2 Journey Below
2 Swashburglar
1 Bloodmage Thalnos
2 Eviscerate
2 Sap
2 Undercity Huckster
1 Edwin Vancleef
2 Fan of Knives
2 Shadow Strike
2 SI:7 Agent
2 Tomb Pillager
2 Azure Drake
1 Ethereal Peddler
2 Gadgetzan Auctioneer
1 N’Zoth, the Corruptor