So recently I created a goofy mage deck centered around Barnes and Y'Shaarj and molten reflection. Now obviously I don't have any illusions about this deck being even remotely successful, it was mostly just for fun, but I can't even get the fun to happen. Every match I've played I draw Y'Shaarj on turn 3/4/5/6, but never ever barnes. Now 1 or 2 games I'd chalk it up to bad luck...but we're going on 12 games now the same thing every game. Makes me wonder how almost every big priest I've played gets barnes by turn 5/6 on average. I know Renounce Warlocks use kind of the same setup, anyone else have this kind of experience?
It requires some luck, but priest also has shadow visions and eternal servitude to get a minion if they don't draw Barnes. They also have lots of removal to usually survive the first couple of turns IF, usually a big if when I'm playing against them.
Gone to fatigue against them a few times as mid hunter which was actually kind of fun. Crafted like 15 beasts those games and ran them out if removal and revives
Well That was anti-climactic. After 15 games I FINALLY get the combo to happen, and in the most optimal way possible. I pulled Barnes on turn 4, had spell bender up and frozen clone (courtesy of primordial Glyph) and molten reflection in my hand. Jade Druid top decks Keeper of the grove, gives me 2, and concedes...Didn't even get to show him how bad it was going to get for him LOL.
The amount of times I get Y'Shaarj in my opening hand, or the amount of time I draw all my bombs in the first 3-4 turns, is greater than the number of times I get Barnes by turn 4, easily.
Once i played 20 games with bigpriest and got barnes only one time, another time i got him 4 games in a row in my opening hand.
random is random
Coincidentally i named my bigpriestdeck fuck mr.barnes
I Named my "Big Mage" deck "A Tale of Terror," because it's gonna be scary for one of the players whether I get the combo or not. I'm actually thinking of adding Ysera and Antonidas To make things more interesting lol. I wish I had the dust to make a big priest deck tbh. Even though it's cheesy in the right hands it's quite good.
LOL no problem. It's interesting to say the least. Compared to big priest it has the pros of being able to protect your minion in the form of Spellbender and Counterspell and the ability to copy it with Molten reflection but this comes at the downside of having no res capability.
I play Zoo Warlock and Big Priest too. I have way more games as a Big Priest and I can tell you that I've easily drawn Keleseth way more often than Barnes. I'm not only talking about my opening hand but also during the game.
I've also lost count of the number of times Shadow Essence makes a 5/5 Barnes.
Chances to draw Y'Shaarj, Rage Unbound in your opening hand: 6/27 going first or; 8/26 going second and this is assuming that you are mulliganing for the card.
Now let's look at Barnes: Chances to draw Barnes in your opening hand: 6/27 going first or; 8/26 going second and assuming that you are wanting it in your opening hand.
Now why is this? Because if you are going first, you get 3 cards to choose which to keep and which ones to lose. You decide to lose all of the cards, you have removed 3 (going first, 4 going second) from the cardpool of cards that you are allowed to draw. The thing is that since you are looking for an unique card specifically, they have the same percentage chance to be drawn at that point. If you get rid of either Barnes or Y'Shaarj, Rage Unbound from your initial 3 (or 4) cards you drew, then that one goes down to 0 percentage in your mulligan and just increases naturally over the course of a game much like every other card in your deck having the chance to be drawn.
Welcome to cardgames. Chalk it up to statistical probabilities. The reason why Big-Priest works however is that they have more than just a single big thing in their deck that they want to draw, play, ressurrect, copy or otherwise get an additional natural-sized version of.
That is not correct.
The chance to get a card when hard-mulliganning for it is not 6/27 or 8/26. (There's another thread about this, "need good mathematicians" is the title.
You don't need to mulligan anything if it is in your opening hand (probability 3/30 going first, 4/30 going second).
You only mulligan everything if you don't have it, chance of getting it is 3/27 going first or 4/26 going second
Read the other thread for discussion about how the mulligan affects this probability.
EDIT: This is only true when there is a single copy of a card in your deck (both are legendary though so we are good). It's slightly more complicated if you are hard mulliganning for a card you have 2 of.
Well it turns out if you hard mulligan everything it's even easier to calculate, because you will notice the final value is just the chance of having it in the opening hand before the mulligan doubled (so 6/30 going first and 8/30 going second).
If you decide to keep some cards and not mulligan everything the chance goes down a bit.
EDIT: I give exact formulas for this in this post taking into account number of cards mulliganned here (formula also gives probability to have the card after drawing a certain number of cards from the deck):
The amount of times I get Y'Shaarj in my opening hand, or the amount of time I draw all my bombs in the first 3-4 turns, is greater than the number of times I get Barnes by turn 4, easily.
THIS! As a Big Priest player in Wild, I can say from experience that Barnes is a fucking asshole who never comes out on time. 1 out of 10 games he's there, but 9 games he's inside, and you know the worst part? Shadow Essence almost always pulls Barnes while he's hiding inside the deck. It really pisses me off.
I can give you the exact odds of having Barnes on turn 4 if you hard mulligan for it if you want (turn 3 with coin going second, or the case where you aren't bothered about coining him out on 3).
The post I linked to above has a formula which considers how many cards you mulligan as well.
Playing Barnes on 4 is the highroll for Big Priest, not the win condition. The win condition is to play big stuff, preferably but not mandatorily cheated out via barnes or shadow essense, and res them with servitude
Playing Barnes on 4 is an alternate win condition for Renouncelock. Their main win condition is renouncing into something good. Barnes is just a way to randomly win that happens to not interfere with their main win condition
Playing Barnes on 4 appears to be the only win condition for your mage, which is why it's not doing well. It has no game when it doesn't win however many coinflips required for Barnes but not the 10/10 to be in your hand by turn 4. Meanwhile, when the other two decks mentioned fail these coinflips, they don't get a free win, but they're still doing fine in the grand scheme of things
You also have cards in there that synergize with highrolling but are dead in every other case; this is not what you want in a deck like this. If you have a highroll case that almost always wins the game, you want the rest of your deck to plan for when this doesn't happen. Big Priest and Renouncelock are full of removal, clears and rerolls (shadow essence) to "recover" from not highrolling and survive to their other win conditions
I like how this got moved to priest class discussion and it's more a discussion on barnes
And despite the title OP is about a Mage deck.
There's a bored moderator who randomly moves posts around I think, has happened before (build a zombeast odds post got moved to card discussion even though it was more about a hero power and/or discover mechanics (so general discussion).
Not much to be said here. If you are playing a Barnes deck, you have to mulligan every single card in your hand that is not Barnes. Maybe you were keeping Frostbolt or Primordial Glyph in your opening hand. Everything else is RNG and complaining about that is a worthless effort.
It requires some luck, but priest also has shadow visions and eternal servitude to get a minion if they don't draw Barnes. They also have lots of removal to usually survive the first couple of turns IF, usually a big if when I'm playing against them.
This. If you are really unlucky with draws, first minion you will put on board on Turns 8+, but it rarely happens. Worse case scenario is that you get all 5 minions in your hand during the first 2 turns, but probability for that is quite low something like fact(5)/nchoosek(34, 5)
I only did the going first case and the numbers were for a set number of minions in the deck (I also considered what happened by turn 5, but the numbers should be tweaked easily for turn 2 instead). You have to adjust the numbers at the start depending on how many minions you have in the deck.
I go into a lot of detail about how to do the calculations (I started off making a mistake though but corrected myself).
So recently I created a goofy mage deck centered around Barnes and Y'Shaarj and molten reflection. Now obviously I don't have any illusions about this deck being even remotely successful, it was mostly just for fun, but I can't even get the fun to happen. Every match I've played I draw Y'Shaarj on turn 3/4/5/6, but never ever barnes. Now 1 or 2 games I'd chalk it up to bad luck...but we're going on 12 games now the same thing every game. Makes me wonder how almost every big priest I've played gets barnes by turn 5/6 on average. I know Renounce Warlocks use kind of the same setup, anyone else have this kind of experience?
EDIT:::
13 games now
It requires some luck, but priest also has shadow visions and eternal servitude to get a minion if they don't draw Barnes. They also have lots of removal to usually survive the first couple of turns IF, usually a big if when I'm playing against them.
Gone to fatigue against them a few times as mid hunter which was actually kind of fun. Crafted like 15 beasts those games and ran them out if removal and revives
Well That was anti-climactic. After 15 games I FINALLY get the combo to happen, and in the most optimal way possible. I pulled Barnes on turn 4, had spell bender up and frozen clone (courtesy of primordial Glyph) and molten reflection in my hand. Jade Druid top decks Keeper of the grove, gives me 2, and concedes...Didn't even get to show him how bad it was going to get for him LOL.
As a big priest player in Wild I'll say this...
The amount of times I get Y'Shaarj in my opening hand, or the amount of time I draw all my bombs in the first 3-4 turns, is greater than the number of times I get Barnes by turn 4, easily.
Once i played 20 games with bigpriest and got barnes only one time, another time i got him 4 games in a row in my opening hand.
random is random
Coincidentally i named my bigpriestdeck fuck mr.barnes
All Skill, No Luck
Prince decks should never work but they always seem to get it on the first two turns.
I'm actually going to try big mage now, thanks
This space is intentionally blank.
I play Zoo Warlock and Big Priest too. I have way more games as a Big Priest and I can tell you that I've easily drawn Keleseth way more often than Barnes. I'm not only talking about my opening hand but also during the game.
I've also lost count of the number of times Shadow Essence makes a 5/5 Barnes.
Well it turns out if you hard mulligan everything it's even easier to calculate, because you will notice the final value is just the chance of having it in the opening hand before the mulligan doubled (so 6/30 going first and 8/30 going second).
If you decide to keep some cards and not mulligan everything the chance goes down a bit.
EDIT: I give exact formulas for this in this post taking into account number of cards mulliganned here (formula also gives probability to have the card after drawing a certain number of cards from the deck):
http://www.hearthpwn.com/forums/hearthstone-general/general-discussion/205335-need-good-mathematicians?comment=53
I can give you the exact odds of having Barnes on turn 4 if you hard mulligan for it if you want (turn 3 with coin going second, or the case where you aren't bothered about coining him out on 3).
The post I linked to above has a formula which considers how many cards you mulligan as well.
I like how this got moved to priest class discussion and it's more a discussion on barnes
Playing Barnes on 4 is the highroll for Big Priest, not the win condition. The win condition is to play big stuff, preferably but not mandatorily cheated out via barnes or shadow essense, and res them with servitude
Playing Barnes on 4 is an alternate win condition for Renouncelock. Their main win condition is renouncing into something good. Barnes is just a way to randomly win that happens to not interfere with their main win condition
Playing Barnes on 4 appears to be the only win condition for your mage, which is why it's not doing well. It has no game when it doesn't win however many coinflips required for Barnes but not the 10/10 to be in your hand by turn 4. Meanwhile, when the other two decks mentioned fail these coinflips, they don't get a free win, but they're still doing fine in the grand scheme of things
You also have cards in there that synergize with highrolling but are dead in every other case; this is not what you want in a deck like this. If you have a highroll case that almost always wins the game, you want the rest of your deck to plan for when this doesn't happen. Big Priest and Renouncelock are full of removal, clears and rerolls (shadow essence) to "recover" from not highrolling and survive to their other win conditions
Legend with : S65 Freeze Mage, S57 Maly Gonk Druid, S57 "Okay" Shaman, S53 Boom-zooka Hunter, S53 Maly Tog Druid, S52 Wild Tog Druid ft.Blingtron, S50 Quest Rogue, S49 Dead Man's Warrior, S41 Wild Clown Fiesta Druid, S41 Hadronox Jade Druid, S40 Wild OTK Dragon Druid, S35 SMOrc Shaman, S33 Jade Druid, S22 Control Priest, S19 Control Priest
Not much to be said here. If you are playing a Barnes deck, you have to mulligan every single card in your hand that is not Barnes. Maybe you were keeping Frostbolt or Primordial Glyph in your opening hand. Everything else is RNG and complaining about that is a worthless effort.
I did a big calculation about Barnes minions after a certain number of draws, finished off here
http://www.hearthpwn.com/forums/hearthstone-general/general-discussion/203995-mungos-maths-thread?comment=22
I only did the going first case and the numbers were for a set number of minions in the deck (I also considered what happened by turn 5, but the numbers should be tweaked easily for turn 2 instead). You have to adjust the numbers at the start depending on how many minions you have in the deck.
I go into a lot of detail about how to do the calculations (I started off making a mistake though but corrected myself).