Hearthpwn

I think everything w/ joust

Jade Idol or Frost Nova

Spreading Plague and Reno Jackson

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Quote from dgoodm03 >>

Toxic Arrow.

If you need to ask why, then you do not understand what bad DESIGN is.  Everyone else is just complaining about overpowered cards, but those cards function as intended -- All of them fill the purpose that they were explicitly designed to fill.   If it was a mistake to create them because they were too powerful, that's entirely different.

Toxic arrow, in the kind of game Hearthstone is, given to the kind of class Hunter is, literally has no function and does not work as designed. 

 No function? Wrong. It's one of two cards that are behind Control hunter being semi-viable in Wild. Very strong when paired with Unstable Ghoul or similar. I don't think it was designed for AE, instead being designed to trade up, but I'll take it for AE.

 True, but I think it would have been better and still not too overpowered if you were able to kill the minion and it still bestowed poisonous. Like working with bloat bat. They may have tested it that way, but decided it was too powerful... only problem is they then underpowered it (at least for Standard). Balance is hard I guess I just wish they took more time with rebalancing it sucks when a class like hunter which is mostly bottom barrel (except at rank 20-15 I guess) doesn't really get anything viable. I feel like the same thing has happened with Crushing walls. Priest get unconditional board clear at 7 and hunter get's crappy conditional board clear? LIke WTF. so bad design. I can easily see Crushing walls being fine at 6 mana

 

 

 Oh, I completely agree that it giving poisonous before killing would be better - and it's a buff I'd love to see. Bloatbat is another card that's just not been pushed enough, and Crushing walls? That's probably bloatbat level, IMO. Ridiculously bad,

The sad thing is that if bloatbat hit itself it would probably be playable (with PD, like explosive sheep, just worse), same if poisonous was given before death.  CH in STD is probably not viable anytime soon, though, primarily because it needs so many tools that are never in STD together.

Tunnel Trog...

Quote from WhiteWolfe >>

I came to this thread expecting a discussion of card design, and instead got a salty list of cards people hate losing to.

Looking at card design: jade idol.

It's not just some card that turned out to be unexpectedly unfair. It's just horribly designed.

Other contenders include: ice block, shadowreaper anduin (voidform), mad scientist and edwin vancleef

 surprised "pile of stats" bad design hasn't come up. worgen greaser? when would you pick this even in arena?

also, ill-conceived mechanics: most inspire/joust cards are just not well designed. joust is particularly weird - adding a bit of RNG to minions could be interesting, but incentivizing stacking your deck with high cost minions for these nominal effects doesn't lead to interesting deckbuilding nor exciting gameplay.

half-baked class themes: freeze shaman makes no sense. it's not "2 cards from a tier 3 deck", it's a hodge podge of useless stuff. would moorabi be played even if he was a 6/6 and the effect applied to himself as well? im not sure. beast hunter - cards like stampede or dinomancy. these are useless in a class that needs the board early. stampede is really a headscratcher. if hunter had draw then maybe it'd be playable for generating value. but if hunter had draw, you wouldn't want to play this card to begin with....

Looks like a lot of people are picking cards because they don't like them, not because they're poorly designed.

A pick off the top of my head would be The Boogeymonster. It's overpriced for the base stats, the ability isn't very strong, and he doesn't have charge so you must wait to gain value. Nobody can afford to spend 8 mana on this minion unless they are already winning. Horrible design that should have never even been a common.

Another off the top would be Flame Leviathan. A vanilla stats minion (really sub-vanilla stats) with an uncontrollable effect that is likely useful 1 out of 100 times. Also, Dr. Boom was released in the same set as a Neutral, so yeah. Horrible design.

Idk why on earth people think Patches is a bad design. It's actually a very innovative design, especially for HS, it just happens to be really strong and annoying. That doesn't make it a bad design. I don't like seeing the son of a gun either, but to call it a bad design is either stupid or willfully ignorant.

Quote from TailedLoxley >>

Quote from Draco_Cracona >>

Quote from Nicholasjh >>

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Quote from dgoodm03 >>

Toxic Arrow.

If you need to ask why, then you do not understand what bad DESIGN is.  Everyone else is just complaining about overpowered cards, but those cards function as intended -- All of them fill the purpose that they were explicitly designed to fill.   If it was a mistake to create them because they were too powerful, that's entirely different.

Toxic arrow, in the kind of game Hearthstone is, given to the kind of class Hunter is, literally has no function and does not work as designed. 

 No function? Wrong. It's one of two cards that are behind Control hunter being semi-viable in Wild. Very strong when paired with Unstable Ghoul or similar. I don't think it was designed for AE, instead being designed to trade up, but I'll take it for AE.

 True, but I think it would have been better and still not too overpowered if you were able to kill the minion and it still bestowed poisonous. Like working with bloat bat. They may have tested it that way, but decided it was too powerful... only problem is they then underpowered it (at least for Standard). Balance is hard I guess I just wish they took more time with rebalancing it sucks when a class like hunter which is mostly bottom barrel (except at rank 20-15 I guess) doesn't really get anything viable. I feel like the same thing has happened with Crushing walls. Priest get unconditional board clear at 7 and hunter get's crappy conditional board clear? LIke WTF. so bad design. I can easily see Crushing walls being fine at 6 mana

 

 

 Oh, I completely agree that it giving poisonous before killing would be better - and it's a buff I'd love to see. Bloatbat is another card that's just not been pushed enough, and Crushing walls? That's probably bloatbat level, IMO. Ridiculously bad,

The sad thing is that if bloatbat hit itself it would probably be playable (with PD, like explosive sheep, just worse), same if poisonous was given before death.  CH in STD is probably not viable anytime soon, though, primarily because it needs so many tools that are never in STD together.

 The oddest thing with Control Hunter is that with all the pushing of the archetype and the adding of tools to Rexxars kit to try and make it work is the fact that the tools are semi-decent, but the other classes get better ones. You run wide? Hope you don't face a Priest with their collection of boardclears and survival tools or Druids with a Spreading Plague at the ready at 6 to murder yer tempo. You try and run value? Get stampeded by the aggro archetypes or frakked over by that Anduin 8 boardwipe. Get out-ramped by the Big Druids. Get out-valued by Big Priest. When the KotFT reveals wound down I was sorely disappointed at the Hunter Epics. Bowman was 'eh'-ish, but Toxic Arrow was the greatest let-down. I hoped for a weapon, for something much like Rogue's Shadowblade. A tempo-swinger. But no. Toxic Arrow. One of the original weapon classes only get weapons once a Year and only halfway viable. The Hunter Legendary weapon better be good. Or a properly memey [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Wind-seeker], but that's the old Trade Chat reader in me.

I agree that Jade idol is poor design. The other cards I think are pretty well designed. Ice block is really fine what is bad is if the mage can get more than 2. Shadow reaper anduin is really really well designed. The problem is a lot of the other priest cards are badly designed or just Over powered, dragon fire potion I am looking at u. Vancleef is fine given that it is a legendary and fits rouges theme. Mad scientist is pretty bad I will give u that.

Master of Ceremonies. Everyone and their grandma could have figured out that this card would see 0 play. Stats are super weak and nobody is going to play enough spell damage minions to get this to work reliably in a deck that is about minion board control.

I think Shadowreaper Anduin in a world where Raza exists and Prince Keleseth and Jade in general are up there as well. A lot of these too-powerful mechanics seem to be made with the idea of "wouldn't it be fun if", only to find out that the forseeable answer would have been "heck no!" If a card is not fun to play with/ against in the ideal scenario, it shouldn't be made. Because you either get a highroll deck which is always frustrating for one of the two players, or you get an unplayable deck, or you get a deck that just ruins ladder for everyone. Rogue quest is another good example of this.

Jade Idol and jades in general.

Caverns Below, hand/deck buffs. 

Easily Jade Idol.

Moorabi like... I don't get it.. did someone ever thought it was a good card?

They even played freeze shaman? I don't get it seriously I think the guy that thought about the freeze shaman balance should be fired.. even in the tavern brawl that feaured the deck lists the deck was totally garbage..

I know not everything is competitive, but comon never saw something so underpowered.. it was obviously something made when shaman was tier S last year..

Quote from CrovaxTheCursed >>

Looks like a lot of people are picking cards because they don't like them, not because they're poorly designed.

A pick off the top of my head would be The Boogeymonster. It's overpriced for the base stats, the ability isn't very strong, and he doesn't have charge so you must wait to gain value. Nobody can afford to spend 8 mana on this minion unless they are already winning. Horrible design that should have never even been a common.

 

I feel like the same thing has happened with Crushing walls. Priest get unconditional board clear at 7 and hunter get's crappy conditional board clear? LIke WTF. so bad design. I can easily see Crushing walls being fine at 6 mana

It's not really conditional. It requires your opponent have 2+ minions on the board and that they are decently big enough for you to get value out of destroying them. To use it for it's full value at least. But it's useful even if one of those minions is a weak one, or if you're just destroying their one big minion.

I dunno if it would have been too strong at 6 but it's not as weak as all that, and has plenty of advantages over Psychic Scream (which is a full board reset). The only reason Psychic Scream is even considered a good card is because of Raza/Anduin/Velen/Mind Blast combos. Resetting the whole board and giving your opponent a lot of resources as a slow, grind-y class like priest wouldn't be as good as it is if priest didn't have a 20 damage combo right now.

I think that's why they've never given Hunter good removal. Hunter just blasts the opponent to death whilst having the ability to play big, aggressive game-ending minions. Removal is highly valuable in hunter, much more valuable than it is in priest or whatever. And in this case, Crushing Walls serves a different purpose. Crushing Walls, much like Deadly Shot is much more for destroying a big threat to keep pushing damage and winning the game there rather than Priest/Warlock/Mage removal, which is more for 'let's blow up the board so this game can go on another 5 turns and I can win'.

So as it is, Crushing Walls is really not that bad. Especially for Hunter. And especially not in this Bonemare meta, which Hunter has a ton of trouble with beating. It's a good tech against Bonemare unless you're way, way behind and you've let them build up a decent board. It's also good against Big Druid and Big Priest, which are sort of relevant-ish decks right now.

On the actual subject:

I think most of the really overpowered stuff is due to card interactions and synergies, which I think makes those things well designed -- if the synergies are interesting. While I may hate Jade Druid and while Jade Idol might be irritating, it's really the combination of Jade Idol with all their really strong mid-range Jade cards (Behemoth and Blossom in particular) that makes Jade Idol obnoxious. If Druids were forced to ramp up their jade counter with JUST Jade Idol and the neutrals, it'd be much more tolerable (Jade Idol would probably be at about 5/5 by 8 mana, rather than 7/7 or 8/8 and you wouldn't have been putting up decent taunts and ramping up extra hard at the same time).

So I just think it's hard to evaluate a card on an individual basis. Obviously cards like Bestial Wrath just don't serve too much purpose, I think a lot of the time their nerfs to cards have just rendered them completely unplayable rather than just toning them down to a degree; like the obvious nerf to Warsong Commander was to change 'summoned' to 'played'. Still would have been decent, still would have had some synergy with patron, but wouldn't have been a win condition in of itself. Now the deck just doesn't exist.

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The core behind keleseth and renojackson is both really really good card design.

High cost (no 2 drops/1 of each card) but high reward.

I think the reason they are frustrated is that perhaps they are slightly overtuned (okay maybe keleseth is a bit more than "slightly overtuned") and also playing them and knowing when to play them takes 0 skill. I think what makes a great designed card is that the deck should be built around it (or with the card in mind as a key element) and it takes skill knowing when to play/use it in game. In addition to make a card well designed, the opponent should be able to counter it when making a deck, and also play around it to some extent in game.

A prime example of this woud be Kazakus or the curator. Both require prior thought and deck adjustment to make the card playable. And in game it takes some thought to know when to play them as both lose tempo when played. For curator you also want to play it before you draw its "activators", but in some cases you can't play it because then you will overdraw so it takes a few turns of preparing by trying to dump your hand.

With this in mind I think the worst designed cards are those you can just throw into any deck, that have basic text, and you can play whenever/in one normal situation that lack counterplay. A prime example of this was fierywar axe (prenerf).

 I get your point, but neither Reno or Keleseth follow these principles of game design a whole lot.

You're saying "in addition to make a card well designed, the opponent should be able to counter it when making a deck, and also play around it to some extent in game". I remember when Reno was still in standard; it simply shut down certain archetypes, because the payoff was completely unfair against certain decks. Hell, I like Raza / Kazakus / Krul / Solia more, because the payoff seems more fair and fun to me with these cards, and they're not "insta-concede" when they play one of those on you. Reno makes the opponent feel like all he did up until that point was worthless, because it always heals you fully, not by a given amount.

Same goes with Keleseth, it's not like you can really play around it, and in certain scenarios it's completely broken.

Quote from agikarus >>

Patches is actually pretty well designed, the payoff is you can get an extra 1/1 in the early game, and the risk is that you draw it. If you draw it, more than likely you've lost the game.

 

ULTIMATE INFESTATION.