Hearthpwn

Funny thing, I think that a lot of players MMR's at Rank 1-5 are now higher than about half the legend players. I have been going on a tear to the tune of 80% and faced no Legend players, now today I saw my first one at Rank ~2500 with me in Rank 2. Signs of the times.

Quote from FairyThea »

Quote from _Justice_ »

Quote from FairyThea »

Anyone, explain please, why it is considered SO bad to somtimes play FH to regain 2-3 stars you just lost? 

I enjoy playing Combo decks, expecially Druid. But when I lose simply because my opponent topdecked I might switch to FH. Although I don't enjoy it because this type of deck is a non ineractive one.

So much salt.

If you think you are better with Face Hunter, why not play it all the time?

 

This is what I don't understand. Oh I've been losing for a while with another established, meta-ready deck, but because I dropped 2 games in a row, time to switch to Face Hunter! Why do you think you won't drop 2 games in a row as Face Hunter? Sick of your opponent topdecking what they need? Why is it you think that never happens playing Face Hunter?  This line of thinking just indicates that people think Face Hunter is a much stronger deck than it actually is.

And even if it were so strong of a deck that it eliminated any opponent's suckout, what's the reason you wouldn't play it all the time?  Wouldn't you just play what you thought was the strongest deck? Ok, even supposing you wanted to play some "casual" deck for funsies, and then play a "competitive" deck to regain stars, yeah, wouldn't you just play what you thought was the strongest competitive deck in your collection? Unless your meta is a bunch of Zoo, Handlock and Midrange Hunter, chances are that Face Hunter isn't some unbeatable deck you can just use to collect free stars. Either play the deck you want or play the deck you think is the best, either one, it doesn't sound like it's Face Hunter.

First of all, like I said before, I don't really enjoy playing Face Hunter. 

Secondly, you' re right, a player can actually drop 2 games in a row with this type of deck. But the thing is, they'd need to topdeck less than their opponent because their deck consists of, let's say, four 1 drops, two 2 drops, four 3 drops etc. If a Druid player might have a bad hand in the beginning, FH almost always has a good curve.

That's why. It's not unbeatable, noone said that.

Yeah, you are still talking as if the deck draws better than any other deck. I'm not sure why you think this, because it isn't true. But if you actually do think this, then what you should be doing is playing Face Hunter.

Spoiler alert, top legend play doesn't have a very high Face Hunter representation at all. It's just not the auto-win deck you're saying it is.

I hit Rank 3 last night to finish out the weekend. I saw a ton of Aggro - mostly Mage and Hunter. I got a few sick win streaks with a Midrange Zoo deck teching 2x Dragon Egg. The card is insane in the meta right now. Midrange Zoo has to be north of 85% against Tempo Mage with that card in, and it's also terrific against the Knife Jugglers played by Pally, Mid Hunter and Zoo. I had a nice positive split against Pally and Hunter, which is really good for Zoo. 

Quote from FairyThea »

Anyone, explain please, why it is considered SO bad to somtimes play FH to regain 2-3 stars you just lost? 

I enjoy playing Combo decks, expecially Druid. But when I lose simply because my opponent topdecked I might switch to FH. Although I don't enjoy it because this type of deck is a non ineractive one.

So much salt.

If you think you are better with Face Hunter, why not play it all the time?

This is what I don't understand. Oh I've been losing for a while with another established, meta-ready deck, but because I dropped 2 games in a row, time to switch to Face Hunter! Why do you think you won't drop 2 games in a row as Face Hunter? Sick of your opponent topdecking what they need? Why is it you think that never happens playing Face Hunter?  This line of thinking just indicates that people think Face Hunter is a much stronger deck than it actually is.

And even if it were so strong of a deck that it eliminated any opponent's suckout, what's the reason you wouldn't play it all the time?  Wouldn't you just play what you thought was the strongest deck? Ok, even supposing you wanted to play some "casual" deck for funsies, and then play a "competitive" deck to regain stars, yeah, wouldn't you just play what you thought was the strongest competitive deck in your collection? Unless your meta is a bunch of Zoo, Handlock and Midrange Hunter, chances are that Face Hunter isn't some unbeatable deck you can just use to collect free stars. Either play the deck you want or play the deck you think is the best, either one, it doesn't sound like it's Face Hunter.

Yeah, I'm offended by this. Let's not forget that before the Civil Rights movement in the US, Goblins had to sit in the back of the bus. And even today , there is ethnic cleansing of Panderan and Dranei by a few Worgen dominated countries in the middle east. It's just unacceptable for a company in this day and age to be so insensitive.

We need to rewrite WoW lore so that our children have a more ethnically diverse set of heroes to look up to.

Quote from XanderCrews1 »

There are blurry lines between tempo, midrange, and aggro, so I don't see much point in arguing over which is the most appropriate label for each deck. I think labeling a deck a "face" deck is more specific, though. Face decks almost always go face instead of trading, except in extremely favorable trades. If you charted the frequency at which each deck traded or used a burn spell on a minion vs attacking face (given the option), I think face hunter would be an outlier, with all the other aggressive decks clustered further towards the trading end. In that sense, flamewaker mage is much different than face hunter.

I like this better, except...

I oppose on principle any misconstruction of Face Hunter as a deck where it's always, or nearly always, correct to go face. As I posted a few pages back, this just isn't true. You can't abandon your brain. Last night, I was playing against a Face Hunter as a Midrange pally where I had out exactly Loatheb, Aldor, Minibot and Dude out (11 attack) against a Face Hunter on 11 Health. His play is UTH, Wolfrider, Arcane (11 attack against me on 13 Health. He goes all Face and passes, making a play that literally has 0% chance of winning. He could have at least traded 1/1's and put me 1 damage short on board. Better, he could have traded Wolfrider for Aldor to keep himself out of Consecration range. I can't imagine that without this pernicious idea that all Face Hunter does is go Face would that play have ever been made. That's one game, but similar things happen basically every game against Face Hunter during the beginning of the season sub Rank 10. He fails to clear an Acolyte of Pain with Bow. He passes on clearing a Knife Juggler. He goes face with Scientist when he clearly needs a trap down. He uses an Abusive trigger against face. Every game, a scrub Face Hunter makes a boneheaded play couched in this idea that he's always supposed to go Face, and I just think to myself another internet lurker that's read too much Face Hunter whining.

Another thing, I'd wager that Tempo Mage wants to trade even less than Face Hunter does. When I count up all the Face Hunter minions that never, ever want to trade, all I come up with is Knife Juggler, debatably Golem/Huffer. And Face Hunter is nearly always trading a weapon charge for a minion 1 to 1 in the early game whenever it can. But with Tempo Mage, they never ever want to trade Flamewaker, Apprentice or Mana Wyrm. Once in a while if a Flamewaker or Mana Wyrm can pick off a minion for free, that play gets made. But never trade. And it trades the other minions, such as Scientist/Clockwork/etc, just as rarely as any Aggro deck, because its minion count in the deck is very low in the first place.

The anti-aggro whining is backed almost entirely by ideas that are 100% wrong.

Quote from Disasterrific »

Quote from _Justice_ »

But because what's at issue is the appropriateness of answer cards, the distinction is entirely pointless. Here's the only one that makes sense - "Aggro". Aggro is short for aggressive. Take the set of all your wins and record the turn they happen on. If that distribution is around an earlier turn than another deck, then your deck is the more aggressive deck. It doesn't matter whether you win by minion swings, or by Fireball, or by Steady Shotting face. The earlier your deck wins, the more aggressive your deck is. That's what aggro means. Putting a deck on a pedastal because, hey, at least it's not Face Hunter, that's just inane and meaningless.

The distinction means everything. Hearthstone is muddier because it's so minion centric, but take a look at these two MTG decks and tell me they're the same...

http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/deck.asp?deck_id=1240621

http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/deck.asp?deck_id=1240080

The old "Blue Aggro == Tempo" canard.

If you define it like that, sure, you will always play differently against Tempo than you will against Aggro, simply because one is Blue and one is not and there are specific things about playing around Blue. But the real difference is that one deck is Blue and the other is not.

In Hearthstone, it doesn't matter because there is no Blue. Playing against Aggro, you kill the minion that's killing you, whether Face Mage, Tempo Hunter, or Face Tempo Mech Midrange Control Hybrid Combo deck. You've got a face to worry about and you've got tempo to worry about, both.

As mentioned above, if aggro is a chimp, tempo is a chimp in a suit. Forgive me if I don't notice the suit and just see a chimp.

The whole game is luck. At least 75% of results are determined purely by RNG. When good players play against each other, they make relatively few misplays and skill ends up being almost negligible. Matchup, draw and card RNG effects completely overshadow the importance of skill. Some will claim that there's plenty of skill in Hearthstone, but it's only really the case when there's a large experience gap between two players. Face decks are not any more luck-based than other decks -- in fact, probably less so, since they don't really depend on good draws. A deck that can play anything it draws and go face and win by turn six is not a deck that requires luck. Or skill.

Ok, so the rationale is that because the skill of equal opponents can be presumed as equal, then that means that skill isn't a factor? Ok, so if the Cavs beat the Warriors in the NBA finals, it was obviously because of luck. After all, they're both good basketball teams and make relatively few mistakes, and so the factor of their skill is negligible.

I don't think you need to be 100% guaranteed to face one of a list of only, say, four classes to be able to improve your win rate by anticipating your matchups. First, you've chosen a deck because you think it's good against enough of what you think the field will be. For example, maybe you pick Handlock because you expect a lot of Control Warrior. There are matchups that your deck is automatically favored against. Second, you take those matchups that are bad for your deck, try to anticipate what the most common among them will be, then evaluate what your options are for tech cards against that matchup. For example, Midrange Hunter is extremely weak to Face Hunter. So, a ton of the top ladder decks for Midrange Hunter include 1x Kezan Mystic to shore up that matchup. It doesn't matter that every X out of 100 games you face some other counter deck. If you correctly anticipated the field, you've helped yourself much more by shoring up common matchups than the uncommon ones. Top ladder players have data mines to analyze what's being played and they do exactly that.

And I mean, you don't even have to go that far. I think if there's one thing that people need to understand it's that a deck a Pro brings to a Conquest or some other style tournament is not the deck that they're bringing to ladder. In a tournament, your deck needs to beat the one deck that you brought your deck to beat. In ladder, your deck needs to be well rounded against everything. A couple seasons ago, you saw a rise in the play of MIdrange Hunter, and there were basically two sources for that deck. One, a deck brought to tournaments, no Explosive, no Hunter's Mark, that was basically intended to counter Warrior. Two, a deck played at #1 legend by ErA that had those trimmings, along with Kezan Mystic, for the unfavorable aggro MU's. No surprise, players brought the tournament deck more to the ladder ranks, reason being that they identified Explosive Trap more with Face Hunter. They just assume that the deck's good and don't pay any mind. That's the result of just copying decks. In this game, the margins of card quality are thin enough that it definitely helps you to tweak your deck.

Yeah, the only requirement to get a Golden hero is to win X number of games. You might lose X + Y number of games getting there, and be a legitimate Rank 20 player. This game has been out for long enough that any real person is able to have made a Golden hero by now.

Funny, I had read on another thread in this very site that the EU server has more off the wall decks.

And on Sjow getting salty that NA players weren't playing the decks they were "supposed" to, it's easy to lol at that. I think it's just going to depend on the player's mentality. I've been following Trump, and he made a similar comment this month that he seems to always lose to "wild" decks. Funny, because during vanilla he was always the one to try new things and challenge the narrow vanilla meta with odd decks like FTP Mage and Shaman. I imagine he was taking a lot of wins off unprepared opponents there too. Incidentally, Trump remarked that it took him longer this season to make legend on NA than any other season.

If it's true that the EU servers are more strict leaning toward established decks, I tend to think that just impacts you depending on what kind of player you are. If you are a player who plays only stock decks and counts on crisper play to carry you over opponents, then you are going to have a harder road ahead against a field of players vying for those same advantages. But if you're a player who anticipates the metagame and is great at teching out established archetypes, then your advantage is going to be multiplied against that same field who absolutely will not anticipate a blowout card unless they've seen it in a decklist three times before.

I think the real issue is the term.  It's why some people used to call zoo a 'control deck' because it constantly traded and fought for the board.

Aggro, the term, refers SPECIFICALLY to this:  a deck that is strongest in the early game and weakest later on.  It puts all its strong eggs and powers in the early stages and, thus, is vulnerable to the late game.  The 'kill you by turn 5' feature is due to the fact that ANY deck.. EVERY SINGLE DECK that has Tempo will start going face. 

I repeat: EVERY SINGLE DECK that has Tempo will start going face. 

Aggro gains tempo right at Turn 1 and the second it loses Tempo will never get it back. Thus it MUST hit your face early and often if it has a chance to win.  Even if it's designed to trade, like zoo, it MUST focus on kill you early or else it never will.

THAT is an aggro deck.

TEMPO decks are aggressive, they aim to kill you early, like an aggro deck.  The main difference is that Tempo does NOT QUIT.  Aggro, at turn 8, means it's going to lose.  Tempo, at turn 8, just means another minion to spit at you, even stronger than turn 7.  Tempo CAN and WIL Lkill you early.  It does not have to.  Stopping the mana wyrms early on means NOTHING to a Tempo mage except that they now have room for Dr. Booms and flamewakers.  That's why it's allowed to trade more.  it doesn't care about card advantage, value, or even your face.  ALL it cares is Tempo.  So long as it has Tempo, it will kill you whenever it once. 

Tempo is aggro, without a time limit. 

 

So why nitpick? Because playing and fighting a Tempo deck like an aggro deck will lose you the game.  Aggro decks must be drained.  Heal and stall, heal and stall until they run out of ammo.  Tempo decks must be robbed of their Tempo.  Take the board and hold it and be able to keep tempo despite stronger threats.  Thus you Starve Aggro and Rob Tempo.

The distinction of a "tempo deck" is meaningless.

I agree that every deck that has Tempo will go Face. Let's say someone plays a Piloted Shredder into an empty board. Opponent plays Nourish, or equivalent. That player just lost tempo to the player who has minions. What is the Shredder player going to do with it? Pass? I just fail to see what the point of that is. The only thing that point supports is the idea that there are no tempo decks in the first place. Because your premise for what makes Mage a Tempo deck and Hunter an Aggro deck isn't related to that at all.

The argument that follows is that's because, let me see, because Mage has a middle and late game that involves minions? Doesn't a deck with a middle game get classified as a Midrange deck? Maybe because it plays 2x 1-drops, it's a "Tempo" deck? Except, Midrange Hunter plays Webspinner, at minimum, and is still midrange.

Because how you defeat Aggro is by stalling and how you defeat "Tempo" is by taking the board? Except, the entire premise of the Mage build is that the opponent playing minions to gain the board is pointless. Say you play a non-Taunted Giant at 4 mana in response to Flamewaker. The Mage will either mirror image, or Frostbolt your Giant, or do some other such thing that attacking for 8 with your Giant has no effect. So, it doesn't matter if you have the board. You either play spells to clear their minions or you might as well not bother. That's how the deck works. And if there were a deck that you just win against by taking control of the board in the middle game, that deck would be midrange, such as Druid, Midrange Hunter, etc. So because you beat Mage by killing off its minions cheaply, and you said that's how you beat Aggro, I guess that makes it Aggro.

See, the only reason "Tempo Mage" got its name is because it opted for a bunch of cards that gave you a mana discount. Even before Flamewaker was released, players noticed that openings involving Mad Scientist, Apprentice, Kirin Tor Mage with Mirror Image, etc, gave you a ton of stuff that you weren't paying very much mana for. Incidentally, a good way to beat Druid and Hunter. Lots of mana discounts amount to what everyone agrees are high tempo plays. And now, the term certainly isn't going anywhere now that Freezing and Mirror Imaging to take away attacks is part of the deck's repertoire.

But because what's at issue is the appropriateness of answer cards, the distinction is entirely pointless. Here's the only one that makes sense - "Aggro". Aggro is short for aggressive. Take the set of all your wins and record the turn they happen on. If that distribution is around an earlier turn than another deck, then your deck is the more aggressive deck. It doesn't matter whether you win by minion swings, or by Fireball, or by Steady Shotting face. The earlier your deck wins, the more aggressive your deck is. That's what aggro means. Putting a deck on a pedastal because, hey, at least it's not Face Hunter, that's just inane and meaningless.

The problem here isn't the conception of Tempo Mage, it's the perception of Face Hunter.

It's nearly always correct to go Face and the game will rarely punish you very severely for making the mistake of going face over trading? Really? I mean, people honestly believe this? Say I play T1 Leper Gnome, Zoo opponent stupidly Coins Knife Juggler because he believes Hunters always go face, then I play T2 Scientist and go Face instead of clearing Juggler, honestly there are that many people out there who believe that play isn't going to get severly punished? Or say I've got Juggler and a Haunted Creeper on board with Abusive in hand, and my opponent has Flamewakeropposite me. There are that many people who believe that Abusive on Creeper and going Face is only marginally worse than clearing Flamewaker?

Honestly, I have no idea how this idea can get spread other than pure saltiness. It's like these people have never seen a VOD of Face Hunter played at the pro level, or even played against a Face Hunter higher than Rank 12. Yeah, Face Hunter's cards are all designed to work as damage dealers when drawn off the top of the deck. Where the idea comes from that you can just abandon your brains and leave high-value targets on board, I have no idea.

Except, Ramp Druid is probably the least decision dependent deck in the game. So, there are other decks with a low "skill floor". I'd argue that Mech Mage and Zoo have even fewer places where a bad decision can punish you than Face Hunter does. Not every deck is Handlock, Patron Warrior, Oil Rogue decision-dependent.

Still, people gripe about Aggro. The only reason, they subjectively feel worse losing to it than they do losing against, say, a Control Warrior, where it's possible that in both mathcups their chance to win was near zero. I agree with you that if people just learned to play better, or at least care about winning more games, they'd be able to see Face Hunter for what it is and move on. But the reason people loathe it has nothing to do with a high skill floor, or its win rate, or anything other than the fact they don't like watching their health go from 6 to 4 to 2 to 0 over 4 turns with nothing they can do about it, and they'd rather watch their minions die turn after turn, or stare at an impassable 5/10 Taunt on Turn 5, with likewise nothing they can do about it. They have an impulsive connection to their Hero's face and don't like to see it beaten up.

If you want the Coin, then you don't know what you want. Every TCG has an extra card for the player going second, and there's still a huge advantage to going first. Hearthstone has the mulligan of an extra card and the Coin on top of that, and there's still a huge advantage to going first. Going first is that big of an advantage.