You mean like Yogg, because that's exactly how the card works; poorly when ahead and better the worse you are.
And last I heard, that card isn't exactly loved by large batches of the population for all of those "I should've won then they played this then I lost." cards.
Nah I don't mean like Yogg, I mean like Healbot. Avian Watcher is a step in the right direction although only fits into a few niche decks.
You mean like Yogg, because that's exactly how the card works; poorly when ahead and better the worse you are.
And last I heard, that card isn't exactly loved by large batches of the population for all of those "I should've won then they played this then I lost." cards.
Nah I don't mean like Yogg, I mean like Healbot. Avian Watcher is a step in the right direction although only fits into a few niche decks.
People really overemphasize healbot's effect against aggro. using healbot and a few taunts does nothing for a control deck against aggro decks. That's why Shield block and shieldmaiden wasn't enough to protect control warrior (which suffered greatly under GvG vs aggro).
Healbot worked best with TEMPO decks and not even all o fthem, just the slower anti-aggro focused types. Decks that had enough early game to fight over the board then used taunts and heals to stop aggro's final attempt to kill them. Otherwise, Healbot was mostly used in freeze mage decks and it was NOT used against aggro: more for anti-midrange/control which actually threatened them.
Control is meant to delay until late game, not just spit out taunts all day like a slow Tempo deck. Thus what they need are board recovery tools to gain value. Control Warrior didn't work because of some taunt minion. They worked because of Brawl. And weapons that let them 2-on-1. And mostly because of Alex/Grom that killed you in two turns. Control Paladin, when it used to work, did so off of Tirion: adivine shielded 6/6 that let you do 15 damage over three turns after it died followed by a hero power that translates to alwayshaving damage on the board that can never be stopped in the late game. And a card that removes EVERY SINGLE CARD ON THE BOARD for two cards and 4 mana. And even then it stopped working when their win condition, tirion, failed.
Control needs a win condition. They don't win by just dropping taunts and heals. They NEVER have and decks that do are NOT control in archetype but Tempo. Control wins by value plays that result in one card killing 3+ of yours, the ability to reverse the board in one turn, and destroy you once they have enough mana and are no longer in instant danger.
Healbot isn't worthless, but bringing back Healbot and Sludge will do no better to bringing back Control than it did to bring in Control when it existed (and that's when we had a 7 mana beats of a card that rocked minion-based aggro decks..that everyone hated)
It's because aggro is cheap and simply to play. HS is a game for complete noobs who couldn't pilot a control deck even if they wanted to.
All Blizzard games are the same, they are balanced around the lowest common denominator. Just look at WoW and D3.
RIP old Blizzard, Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3 were amazing competitive games, and Diablo 2 was the best.
Sadly ladder will be full of mindless aggro until maybe the next expansion does something, which I seriously doubt, and it's only going to become more aggressive from here.
Those were just examples, I'm not saying to introduce just healbots or taunts, but cards that give advantages to a player in a losing spot, rather than win more cards. I don't think introducing more powerful win conditions for Control decks is a wise idea though.
Those were just examples, I'm not saying to introduce just healbots or taunts, but cards that give advantages to a player in a losing spot, rather than win more cards. I don't think introducing more powerful win conditions for Control decks is a wise idea though.
But what archtype would use it if not control? This is meant to be against aggro and tempo. Combo doesn't use these cards or needs it. Midrange would be too powerful if they could somehow stop aggro while being strong against control.
As far as control, a recovery tool card (which we do need more of) HAS to be powerful as it has to generate a ton of value/tempo. Yogg is only incredibly powerful because it's a 10 drop. But a similarly scaled power would have to be placed at a cheaper level. Thus it'll need to disrupt the board heavily and provide a card advantage of some type, unless you want to create a powerful Tempo card, thus giving Tempo even more power.
Even then, though, there's not much point unless they can win games afterwards, otherwise tempo will just recover and keep pushing forward. And before Old Gods Control have crap for win conditions. N'Zoth is proving to be rather greedy given how you have to design your deck and C'thun is more of a tempo deck outside of Warrior. Y'Saarj was never meant to be highly competitive as he's a turn 10 unreliable tempo card, not a win condition. Yogg is the closest thing and really only for Druid which mostly just use him as a Brawl with extra juice. But even then, we're finally getting to the kind of power levels 10 mana SHOULD be.
Now I can understand not liking such power to exist. However, if so then you basically don't lik ea Control mindset in your games. Which mostly means we're stuck at having an aggro/tempo meta as control needs powerful win conditions to exist properly, not just recovery tools, and combo can't be allowed to exist without a strong control meta. And why would you polay midrange without a control meta?
Look at the player base folks. When HS was at its peak, it would roar through towns) it did with mine at least). Everyone would download it, and it was a really social game. People would spend obscene amounts of money to get ahead, forcing others to do so. However, once people started to get bored (fairly easy) it would die. Blizz makes more money from a wide player base than a deep one (as shown by the discontent in this forum). As such, they made medium expensive decks with a low skill threshold powerful, as shown by the tempo dominance. "No" many of you are thinking, "it's the 500 dust aggro decks that take no skill." Wrong, it takes less skill to be OK at Tempo, where you only have to play on curve, than to be OK at aggro where you have to go face and not die. Please note, I am not saying either takes more skill than the other to play well. To play mediocrely, tempo/midrange is going to tend to be stronger. Had Blizz actually desired to own your souls beyond you "throwing good money after bad" they would have already placed certain classes to be far more llacement based (more adjacent buffs) With discover style mechanics. You would simply gear those classes to be more expensive, skill reliant, and powerful, while having some weaker, easy to play classes to introduce players to the game. But they didn't, so you have a midrange with some aggro ladder with a few control archetypes to delude you into believing there's no low skill ceiling and eat your money.
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GENERATION 40: The first time you see this, copy it into your signature on any forum and add 1 to the generation. This is a social experiment.
You have no idea how much this game would suck if it didn't revolve around proactive, low barrier to entry archetypes, control players who complain about aggro are like heads who complain about tails - they are both sides of the same coin and neither can exist in the metagame without the other. Otherwise the meta devolves into which control decks can out control the other, see Wild Priest, or which combo decks can gold fish control decks, see Wild Freeze Mage.
Aggro decks are more skill intensive than control decks as well, if you disregard the games where aggro wins because control fails to mulligan, the player who has to win on a time restriction or with limited resources has to be much more careful about if he trades, how he trades, when he trades and how he commits to the board or holds back. Control Warrior is arguably one of the easiest decks to play in the game vs aggro, and Face Hunter was one of the easiest decks to play in the game vs control because they were both too binary in their function. The trick is giving both players meaningful decisions in the game regarding board control and not just "go face" or "clear board," decks like Zoo or mid-range Paladin.
I don't think the logic with which the game is designed is bad, it's just horribly implemented by idiotic designers who should be fired (Team 5), Standard format is a failure because the base set wasn't designed to, or has been nerfed so it can't support a format by itself and the expansions haven't addressed the issue at all - people just overlooked that fact when the game was released because it was still new. Basically, you have Warrior and whatever aggressive decks exist to challenge it as long as you do things like nerf Molten Giant and rotate out Sludge Belcher, Antique Healbot, Lightbomb, Dark Bomb etc. and don't replace them with functional equivalents. Look at how terrible Warlock is now compared to release, it's one (really shitty) control archetype hinges on one card that will rotate out compared to having Handlock out of the box.
All I can say is just do yourself a favour and quit playing standard, for a "refresh" that was supposed to reinvent the meta all it did was hamper it to the point of having no diversity.
Menagerie Warden is not an aggro card. It's a midrange card and midrange Druid isn't that scary I think. It has been in the meta previously and it was completely fine. Aggro beast Druid doesn't need this card, it's perfectly fine with Enchanted Raven as an amazing 1-drop, yet I haven't really seen one.
The Priest card are actually not that bad (except for Purify, which is just useless so far), they just aren't enough. I do agree on the lack of control tools being annoying though - the only class that gets good ones is Warrior. No decent taunts, very little good healing, board clears not as effective as they used to be.
We can't really expect them to fix it with an adventure, which is quite a small amount of cards. Hopefully the next expansion will adress the issues.
It's not aggro card? You mean like Mysterious Challenger? It will be new cancer "play on curve" deck that people will hate.
Secret Paladin (Mysterious Challenger) isn't a aggro deck, it's a high tempo midrange deck. It was still annoying fak though :P
Common, I bet there were so many people much like yourself, OP, who complained back at the time that shaman was the weakest class. This is a game of metas. Please, hearthpwnians, let's not all degrade out honour by complaining about the fixes Blizzard gave to our own complaints.
They're doing a good job, period. Else this game wouldn't be as successful and popular as it is today!
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"As housecarl I am sworn to your service. I will protect you and all you own, with my life." - Lydia of Whiterun
I don't think the commercial success of the game has any thing to do with the competitive balance, casuals are the bouyant force and the IP is the hook.
There are not millions of players rank 5 and up. Not even close. Also these kind of arguments strive away from the point OP tried to make, which wasnt to be at legend rank 100+ to be taken seriously.It didnt even had anything to do with that at all.
I think there are but since we both don't have the numbers to support our statements, I'll let it go. Also, the points isn't to be taken seriously (most people are taken seriously based on what they say, rather than where they are placed), but one needs to be realistic on how his/her skill is counted in a game. If you think that achieving rank 10 because 30% of the player base is there according to Blizzard's stats, is a noteable achievement, then all I need to say is that you are just lying to yourself.
Good players THAT ALSO put time in the game, never fail to achieve rank 5 or up, the rest of the talk is just discussion for people that think that they are special snowflakes trapped in the body of an unlucky player that can't get past a certain rank because RNG doesn't help.
The meta favors black swans and relatively unforeseen advantages so significant that people's winrate can ride on it - assuming average skill here.
No Blizzard cannot make that meta as it is like a living organism that develops out of the best deck-building we have rather than the best card-building.
However, suggesting that they don't really control it is not correct either: you can certainly stop feeding into known advantages and compensate by rewarding what turned out the poorest synergizing archetypes, even if you didn't predict this lack of synergy before it manifested / happened.
That you can still grind aggro / straight-forward and relatively simple decks involving mostly micro but not macro decisions, sure granted... I don't see why that is fun but you could do it.
People focusing on the reason being bad or good skills is a weak cop-out. Obviously the meta determines a lot and favors some styles of playing regardless of skill.
I think people saying others are probably bad are a bit self-content if they are able to play a wider variety of decks very effectively. But that is not the concern! The concern is that there shouldn't be such a disadvantage to some of the archetypes.
It's a fact of certain statistics that it's not exactly getting more balanced, especially not in arena but thats another story even.
I know that I personally do relatively well with novelty and less with grinding the straightforward stuff. But if that were the only thing it would be fair and I'd concede my point, rather I'm a bit fed up that some of the - mostly aggro - styles get rewarded in such a way that it destroys balance and makes the game in general boring. I don't really have incredible respect for people who can perfectly play a strong deck grinding it til legend... I want to see enough balance so that we see diverse play - because that keeps it exciting knowing that you could face just about any class - since they are all good to play.
I dont want to quit HS and I guess many don't want to because it is a good game that does many things better than the competiton.
I really whished that the devs pushed Shaman back then, but not in this way.
And I can see that a Solitarystone is boring, I totaly agree with intercative plays beeing the most fun and OTK beeing more than unhealthy for the game.
Is it true though that skill is in Aggro mirror crucial? In non mirrormatches you just playing your cards and hope the enemy doesn't draw boardclears. I for my self feel like the game is is becoming: Who is the winner is who draws better, sometimes you win sometimes you lose. You just don't have the tools to punish misplays, desicion making is very linear and only few cards really need a consideration that takes the hole game into account.
Here is the reason for the rant before ONiK is even complete : Do you see card in the set of ONiK that truly rewards good desicion making? I only can think of Ivory Knight. Lately it seems like the game is just getting kind of an idle game, with cards that have a strait forward effect, most cards even need only one decision makeing: play it or not.
Sorry for not beeing a Legendplayer, but many ain't. If all you "snowflakes" belive this game is alright, fine, but this game is not only for the Top 0,1%. Furthermore: Shouldn't such a bad player, with such a dumb thought process as I even get higher than Rank 15?
Here is the reason for the rant before ONiK is even complete : Do you see card in the set of ONiK that truly rewards good desicion making? I only can think of Ivory Knight. Lately it seems like the game is just getting kind of an idle game, with cards that have a strait forward effect, most cards even need only one decision makeing: play it or not.
You know what's a straightforward effect? Frost nova, Fireball. I think a big reason they kept the classic set is so they never have to release straight forward effects really and they can just remain in standard.
A lot of the auto pilot comes from the way resources generate since they are guarenteed and require no investment on your part you know for a fact you can curve from 3 to 4 to 5, you never have that moment where you stumble but with the way combat works stumbling would be devastating so adding it clearly isn't the answer. And blizzards ONLY solution to this is RNG cards since they force you to play around getting things you didn't get to plan around until they went off, with the current iteration of these being the portals.
Is it true though that skill is in Aggro mirror crucial? In non mirrormatches you just playing your cards and hope the enemy doesn't draw boardclears. I for my self feel like the game is is becoming: Who is the winner is who draws better, sometimes you win sometimes you lose. You just don't have the tools to punish misplays, desicion making is very linear and only few cards really need a consideration that takes the hole game into account.
Aggro mirror is actually Control VS control level difficult, except instead of a slow Chess game, it's more like a Fighting game where you have to constantly count how much damage you can do, how much they can do, who is aggressor this turn, who is defender, how can you stop their attack without ruining your attack, and so on. It involves a lot of unusual plays an odd trades due to planning ahead. It's pretty insane.
It's just non-mirror when things get easy. Aggro vomits, Control looks for their removal. Whoever gets what they want wins. Note that naturally aggro has an advantage over Control (Aggro>Control>Combo as the old trilogy goes) so it's harder for control, but both aren't really thinking much. But yes, Aggro has a lot of hard thinking matchups.
The "get my good hand or lose" is the feeling that comes from Tempo, which is an archetype that does NOT have a lot of touch decisions, even in mirror matches. The entire point of the deck is to curve well, defend against fast decks and rush down slow decks. It's complex to make them deck design wise but they run on autopilot since you just follow your curve when you can. You DO have to think when things don't go right but that's when things go WRONG. That's different from AggrovsAggro or ControlvsControl when difficult decisions come from a natural part of the battle. Tempo thinks when their deck is failing them.
Here is the reason for the rant before ONiK is even complete : Do you see card in the set of ONiK that truly rewards good desicion making? I only can think of Ivory Knight. Lately it seems like the game is just getting kind of an idle game, with cards that have a strait forward effect, most cards even need only one decision makeing: play it or not.
The community made it clear that they hate 'brainless aggro decks' and 'boring slow control decks' and 'uninteractive combo decks'. that mostly leaves Tempo. So long as Blizzard hears that messgae from us, that's what they'll make.
Sorry for not beeing a Legendplayer, but many ain't. If all you "snowflakes" belive this game is alright, fine, but this game is not only for the Top 0,1%. Furthermore: Shouldn't such a bad player, with such a dumb thought process as I even get higher than Rank 15?
The issue is that we have to balance for both and both sides tend to forget the other exists. Top players tend to forget that most people don't see the meta that they see. Lower players tend to not see how much of their issues are only because of their skill level. It does seem odd for some to see complaints about the game being F2P while they see pros taking F2P month-old accounts to legend regularly and more common folks reaching rank 15 with day old accounts.OTOH that also means it's hard for them to see how different it feels when you don't have the ability to do either.
A lot of the auto pilot comes from the way resources generate since they are guarenteed and require no investment on your part you know for a fact you can curve from 3 to 4 to 5, you never have that moment where you stumble but with the way combat works stumbling would be devastating so adding it clearly isn't the answer. And blizzards ONLY solution to this is RNG cards since they force you to play around getting things you didn't get to plan around until they went off, with the current iteration of these being the portals.
There's actually an alternative to this: Cards that work on curve but work in a different way off curve.
Wild Pyro is a great example of this. You CAN play it on curve s a 3/2. However, the card can be used as a mass removal with cheap spells or for other tricks like card draw. This not only means deciding whether to drop a 3/2 on curve or wait til llater, but it also means deciding whether to hold spells you can use elsewhere or for the pyro play. Those kind of choices work well in hearthstone. The choice between playing on curve or playing off curve for an alternative move.
Priest of the Fiest, I found, is similar. It's a good turn 4 for priest if you just need a minion that's hard to remove. But if what you need is a way to heal up and turn around from a burst attempt, you're better off holding back, even at turn 4, and playing it a few turns later to work off of your spells. That also means not using PW;S, something you always use when on curve.
Honestly there's not much else like that. Everything else has a'Best time' to use either right away on curve or when the conditions are met (secret in hand, turn 5, why NOT a 4/6 taunt?). Though I think this adventureis more about deck design rather than in-game choices. The DeCK you have to make will have lots of odd choices, how many secrets, do you carry an extra beast to evoke Curator, do you put a few more deathrattles for Barnes, that sort of thing.
Not sure what game you're playing. My experience is that aggro is almost completely dead. By far the most common archetype I encounter when climbing the ladder is C'Thun.
Not sure what game you're playing. My experience is that aggro is almost completely dead. By far the most common archetype I encounter when climbing the ladder is C'Thun.
When wotog came in it was like that, but a month passed and only cthun warrior left and some druid very rarely.
Not sure what game you're playing. My experience is that aggro is almost completely dead. By far the most common archetype I encounter when climbing the ladder is C'Thun.
Wherever you are, I wish I was in your meta from 3 months ago.
It's because aggro is cheap and simply to play. HS is a game for complete noobs who couldn't pilot a control deck even if they wanted to.
All Blizzard games are the same, they are balanced around the lowest common denominator. Just look at WoW and D3.
One does not simply walk into Mordor,
unless they want to be the best they can be.
Those were just examples, I'm not saying to introduce just healbots or taunts, but cards that give advantages to a player in a losing spot, rather than win more cards. I don't think introducing more powerful win conditions for Control decks is a wise idea though.
One does not simply walk into Mordor,
unless they want to be the best they can be.
Look at the player base folks. When HS was at its peak, it would roar through towns) it did with mine at least). Everyone would download it, and it was a really social game. People would spend obscene amounts of money to get ahead, forcing others to do so. However, once people started to get bored (fairly easy) it would die. Blizz makes more money from a wide player base than a deep one (as shown by the discontent in this forum). As such, they made medium expensive decks with a low skill threshold powerful, as shown by the tempo dominance. "No" many of you are thinking, "it's the 500 dust aggro decks that take no skill." Wrong, it takes less skill to be OK at Tempo, where you only have to play on curve, than to be OK at aggro where you have to go face and not die. Please note, I am not saying either takes more skill than the other to play well. To play mediocrely, tempo/midrange is going to tend to be stronger. Had Blizz actually desired to own your souls beyond you "throwing good money after bad" they would have already placed certain classes to be far more llacement based (more adjacent buffs) With discover style mechanics. You would simply gear those classes to be more expensive, skill reliant, and powerful, while having some weaker, easy to play classes to introduce players to the game. But they didn't, so you have a midrange with some aggro ladder with a few control archetypes to delude you into believing there's no low skill ceiling and eat your money.
GENERATION 40: The first time you see this, copy it into your signature on any forum and add 1 to the generation. This is a social experiment.
You have no idea how much this game would suck if it didn't revolve around proactive, low barrier to entry archetypes, control players who complain about aggro are like heads who complain about tails - they are both sides of the same coin and neither can exist in the metagame without the other. Otherwise the meta devolves into which control decks can out control the other, see Wild Priest, or which combo decks can gold fish control decks, see Wild Freeze Mage.
Aggro decks are more skill intensive than control decks as well, if you disregard the games where aggro wins because control fails to mulligan, the player who has to win on a time restriction or with limited resources has to be much more careful about if he trades, how he trades, when he trades and how he commits to the board or holds back. Control Warrior is arguably one of the easiest decks to play in the game vs aggro, and Face Hunter was one of the easiest decks to play in the game vs control because they were both too binary in their function. The trick is giving both players meaningful decisions in the game regarding board control and not just "go face" or "clear board," decks like Zoo or mid-range Paladin.
I don't think the logic with which the game is designed is bad, it's just horribly implemented by idiotic designers who should be fired (Team 5), Standard format is a failure because the base set wasn't designed to, or has been nerfed so it can't support a format by itself and the expansions haven't addressed the issue at all - people just overlooked that fact when the game was released because it was still new. Basically, you have Warrior and whatever aggressive decks exist to challenge it as long as you do things like nerf Molten Giant and rotate out Sludge Belcher, Antique Healbot, Lightbomb, Dark Bomb etc. and don't replace them with functional equivalents. Look at how terrible Warlock is now compared to release, it's one (really shitty) control archetype hinges on one card that will rotate out compared to having Handlock out of the box.
All I can say is just do yourself a favour and quit playing standard, for a "refresh" that was supposed to reinvent the meta all it did was hamper it to the point of having no diversity.
Common, I bet there were so many people much like yourself, OP, who complained back at the time that shaman was the weakest class. This is a game of metas. Please, hearthpwnians, let's not all degrade out honour by complaining about the fixes Blizzard gave to our own complaints.
They're doing a good job, period. Else this game wouldn't be as successful and popular as it is today!
"As housecarl I am sworn to your service. I will protect you and all you own, with my life." - Lydia of Whiterun
I don't think the commercial success of the game has any thing to do with the competitive balance, casuals are the bouyant force and the IP is the hook.
Good players THAT ALSO put time in the game, never fail to achieve rank 5 or up, the rest of the talk is just discussion for people that think that they are special snowflakes trapped in the body of an unlucky player that can't get past a certain rank because RNG doesn't help.
The meta favors black swans and relatively unforeseen advantages so significant that people's winrate can ride on it - assuming average skill here.
No Blizzard cannot make that meta as it is like a living organism that develops out of the best deck-building we have rather than the best card-building.
However, suggesting that they don't really control it is not correct either: you can certainly stop feeding into known advantages and compensate by rewarding what turned out the poorest synergizing archetypes, even if you didn't predict this lack of synergy before it manifested / happened.
That you can still grind aggro / straight-forward and relatively simple decks involving mostly micro but not macro decisions, sure granted... I don't see why that is fun but you could do it.
People focusing on the reason being bad or good skills is a weak cop-out. Obviously the meta determines a lot and favors some styles of playing regardless of skill.
I think people saying others are probably bad are a bit self-content if they are able to play a wider variety of decks very effectively. But that is not the concern! The concern is that there shouldn't be such a disadvantage to some of the archetypes.
It's a fact of certain statistics that it's not exactly getting more balanced, especially not in arena but thats another story even.
I know that I personally do relatively well with novelty and less with grinding the straightforward stuff. But if that were the only thing it would be fair and I'd concede my point, rather I'm a bit fed up that some of the - mostly aggro - styles get rewarded in such a way that it destroys balance and makes the game in general boring. I don't really have incredible respect for people who can perfectly play a strong deck grinding it til legend... I want to see enough balance so that we see diverse play - because that keeps it exciting knowing that you could face just about any class - since they are all good to play.
Overloaded Mana Addict
I dont want to quit HS and I guess many don't want to because it is a good game that does many things better than the competiton.
I really whished that the devs pushed Shaman back then, but not in this way.
And I can see that a Solitarystone is boring, I totaly agree with intercative plays beeing the most fun and OTK beeing more than unhealthy for the game.
Is it true though that skill is in Aggro mirror crucial? In non mirrormatches you just playing your cards and hope the enemy doesn't draw boardclears. I for my self feel like the game is is becoming: Who is the winner is who draws better, sometimes you win sometimes you lose. You just don't have the tools to punish misplays, desicion making is very linear and only few cards really need a consideration that takes the hole game into account.
Here is the reason for the rant before ONiK is even complete : Do you see card in the set of ONiK that truly rewards good desicion making? I only can think of Ivory Knight. Lately it seems like the game is just getting kind of an idle game, with cards that have a strait forward effect, most cards even need only one decision makeing: play it or not.
Sorry for not beeing a Legendplayer, but many ain't. If all you "snowflakes" belive this game is alright, fine, but this game is not only for the Top 0,1%. Furthermore: Shouldn't such a bad player, with such a dumb thought process as I even get higher than Rank 15?
Frost nova, Fireball.
I think a big reason they kept the classic set is so they never have to release straight forward effects really and they can just remain in standard.
A lot of the auto pilot comes from the way resources generate since they are guarenteed and require no investment on your part you know for a fact you can curve from 3 to 4 to 5, you never have that moment where you stumble but with the way combat works stumbling would be devastating so adding it clearly isn't the answer.
And blizzards ONLY solution to this is RNG cards since they force you to play around getting things you didn't get to plan around until they went off, with the current iteration of these being the portals.
Aggro mirror is actually Control VS control level difficult, except instead of a slow Chess game, it's more like a Fighting game where you have to constantly count how much damage you can do, how much they can do, who is aggressor this turn, who is defender, how can you stop their attack without ruining your attack, and so on. It involves a lot of unusual plays an odd trades due to planning ahead. It's pretty insane.
It's just non-mirror when things get easy. Aggro vomits, Control looks for their removal. Whoever gets what they want wins. Note that naturally aggro has an advantage over Control (Aggro>Control>Combo as the old trilogy goes) so it's harder for control, but both aren't really thinking much. But yes, Aggro has a lot of hard thinking matchups.
The "get my good hand or lose" is the feeling that comes from Tempo, which is an archetype that does NOT have a lot of touch decisions, even in mirror matches. The entire point of the deck is to curve well, defend against fast decks and rush down slow decks. It's complex to make them deck design wise but they run on autopilot since you just follow your curve when you can. You DO have to think when things don't go right but that's when things go WRONG. That's different from AggrovsAggro or ControlvsControl when difficult decisions come from a natural part of the battle. Tempo thinks when their deck is failing them.
The community made it clear that they hate 'brainless aggro decks' and 'boring slow control decks' and 'uninteractive combo decks'. that mostly leaves Tempo. So long as Blizzard hears that messgae from us, that's what they'll make.
One does not simply walk into Mordor,
unless they want to be the best they can be.
Not sure what game you're playing. My experience is that aggro is almost completely dead. By far the most common archetype I encounter when climbing the ladder is C'Thun.