I don't know why everyone keeps thinking this is a control card. This is very much an aggro card. For example, in an aggro deck with maybe 60% creatures 40% spells this card is essentially:
3/2 Put a Chicken into your hand.
With a 40% chance to be:
3/2 Put a random spell card from your deck into your hand.
The former mode is basically a slightly superior razorfen hunter (assuming the wisp-style chicken) as it lets you control timing. In addition it gives you a 0-mana combo enabler for Rogue decks.
Essentially, if your aggro deck might be interested in a Razorfen Hunter with upside this might be the card to look at.
I don't know why everyone keeps thinking this is a control card. This is very much an aggro card. For example, in an aggro deck with maybe 60% creatures 40% spells this card is essentially:
3/2 Put a Chicken into your hand.
With a 40% chance to be:
3/2 Put a random spell card from your deck into your hand.
The former mode is basically a slightly superior razorfen hunter (assuming the wisp-style chicken) as it lets you control timing. In addition it gives you a 0-mana combo enabler for Rogue decks.
Essentially, if your aggro deck might be interested in a Razorfen Hunter with upside this might be the card to look at.
I said I didn't like it in aggro, but I was thinking of mostly decks like zoo. I would like to say that I was wrong there, and that I agree that it could be used in an aggro deck.
We now know it's not the Gelbin Chicken because he said it was a different one. It just went down considerably in value. I think that they really wanted him to be used in spell heavy decks just because he is so under-budgeted if you draw a minon since it's either 3 for a 3/2 that does nothing if you don't want to play the chicken or 4 for a 3/2 and a 1/1, and that isn't worth it at all.
Maybe he is wrong (he wasn't sure). Doesn't make sense to create a new token...
True, but he seemed certain to me when he said it was a different one, and it wouldn't make sense to create a new token if it was an exact copy of another token, so something had to have been changed.
Maybe he is wrong (he wasn't sure). Doesn't make sense to create a new token...
True, but he seemed certain to me when he said it was a different one, and it wouldn't make sense to create a new token if it was an exact copy of another token, so something had to have been changed.
If the chicken costs 0 then it is definitely an upgrade on Razorfen Hunter, in so far as you have a chance of drawing a spell or weapon and you also get to choose the timing of the chicken entering play.
It is good to see that most forum users understand that milling a card to replace with a chicken has no effect (unless fatigue occurs). For those who just don't get it, I offer a consolation prize :
If you have 20 cards left and Ragnaros gets chickenized you have a right to be heartbroken. However, there is only a 5% chance of this happening, so it isn't a major worry.
However, if Ragnaros DOESN'T get poultrificated then you are IN LUCK! Your chances of drawing Ragnaros next turn have just increased from 1 in 20 to 1 in 19. Even if it doesn't happen, your chances of drawing Ragnaros every turn thereafter have also increased! This will occur a whopping 95% of the times which you play Gnomish Experimenter!
If the chicken costs 1 then it is definitely an upgrade on Razorfen Hunter, in so far as you have a chance of drawing a spell or weapon and you also get to choose the timing of the chicken entering play.
Can you please elaborate on this? To me it sounds like you are ok with the 1 mana cost chicken.
I actually think this might be ok in druid - lots of midrange minions, so the loss of one specific minion isn't too harmful to your strategy, druids can end up top decking quite a bit so card draw is nice, and your combo that you want to topdeck later is two spells, so you don't risk burning it (unlike miracle, where you could burn malygos, leeroy, gadgetzan, etc).
Imagine if we changed the wording to the following:
"have a look at the last card in your deck.... if its a spell keep it, if it is a minion put a chicken in your hand".
Notice that thinking about the card in this way means that, unless you are going to fatigue, the downside is really marginal. Since you were never going to draw Ragnaros anyway who cares if you discard it!
Now I know this wording is different but just like tracking the difference is more psychological than logical. The difference between burning your next card and the last card in the deck is basically the same, logically speaking.
To prove that:
"have a look at the last card in your deck.... if its a spell keep it, if it is a minion put a chicken in your hand".
is basically the same as:
"have a look at the Second to Last card in your deck.... if its a spell keep it, if it is a minion put a chicken in your hand".
,,,and via backward induction it seems that these statements are equivalent to:
"have a look at the First card in your deck.... if its a spell keep it, if it is a minion put a chicken in your hand".
...and so on.
Long story short, this is the sort of thing that allows you to play a 28 card deck. Yes thats right folks, for a mere 1 stat point (most 3's are 3/3's) on a minion you get a 28 card deck that has some non-negligible chance to cycle even deeper (i.e. you might draw a spell) and in other cases you get a chicken which is in some cases exploitable.
So yeah Experimenter = misunderstood genius, imo.
This is wrong:
Whether it's random or not makes no difference. Regardless, lets say you have 4 late game minions, which are important in your deck. You have 20 cards left in deck. Odds of burning an important late game card: 20% chance. That means, 1/5 times, you're fucked your late game by getting rid of 1 late game card. This is significant, because next turn, with 19 cards in deck, odds of drawing a late game threat are 3/19, or 16% chance of drawing (instead of 4/19, or 21%).
This gets more significant with less cards left in deck. Say you have 12 cards left in deck, and 3 late game minions you can draw. Odds of turning one into a chicken are 3/12, or 25%, as are the odds of drawing it, 25%. That means, next turn, if you burn a late game threat (which happens 25% of the time), your chance of getting that late game minion go from 25% to 2/11, or 18%.
basically, this card's upside, which is a card draw, has pretty serious downsides, and a very bad body for it's cost.
You're much better playing just playing a class specific draw like arcane intellect, with no body, better draw, and no downsides. This is a horrible topdeck card late game, if you have some serious threats left in deck. And if you don't, and are behind, you're probably losing anyway.
You're correct in saying that in a late-game deck, or as the game progresses into the late game, this card sucks and increasingly gets worse. But Dr_Smash did acknowledge that the effect is ONLY marginal (arguably) if you are NOT going into fatigue, or at least not drawing most if not all of your cards. So basically, he already admitted this card sucks in a late-game deck, and your argument doesn't really knock his down. The problem is that you extrapolate this card's inefficiency in the late game to say that it sucks in all decks or all situations. It COULD actually be bad in all decks, but I don't think it would be for the reason that you're stating: that it's a horrible late-game card (you can say that about a lot of cards that are still seen in play).
Thus, the discussion should be whether it's worth it to play this card in decks that capitalize on the early/mid game. I personally don't think so, but again, for a different reason than the argument you've laid out. Mainly because even if you give weight to what Dr_Smash said (and I do somewhat; I think it's a legitimate argument), all that his argument accomplishes is that this card is either a 3 mana 3/2 draw a spell or a 3 mana 3/2 summon a 1/1 beast, both of which are not really that good anyway. The latter option is obviously just a slightly better Razorfen Hunter, but it probably wouldn't be that viable even if the effect was literally 3 mana 3/2 summon a 1/1 beast, because the 1/1 is easily wiped out before you can take advantage of it. The former option sounds really good, but spells are only heavily seen in late game decks, and you've already established that the drawback of potentially losing a game-winning minion is just too much. Basically, I don't think that your points are incorrect, but I don't agree with your calling Dr_Smash utterly wrong; his argument is certainly not the most intuitive or obvious, but it's an interesting way to look at the card in a way to justify that it's not THAT bad. The drawback just seems worse than it might actually be because you are made aware of the card that you will no longer be able to play for the rest of the match, creating a psychological aversion toward the card.
TLDR: DR_Smash is not flat-out wrong as you suggest, and this card can indeed be OK some of the time and in some decks, unlike your stance that the card sucks period. I agree that the card does indeed suck in late game decks, but you can't use that to say that it sucks in all decks. I still don't like the card though, but I just wanted to take the time to defend Dr_Smash, because he provides an insight that I believe deserves more weight than you are giving him credit for.
The card description does not say that the card that is transformed into a chicken will be played. If it stays in your hand it means that this card is worse than an earthen ring farseer which has better stats, does a beneficial extra effect and does not reduce your card quality.
Chicken is a different card than angry chicken. Chicken costs zero, so even though you have to play it from your hand, the outcome is essentially the same as an actual summon.
The card description does not say that the card that is transformed into a chicken will be played. If it stays in your hand it means that this card is worse than an earthen ring farseer which has better stats, does a beneficial extra effect and does not reduce your card quality.
Chicken is a different card than angry chicken. Chicken costs zero, so even though you have to play it from your hand, the outcome is essentially the same as an actual summon.
The card description does not say that the card that is transformed into a chicken will be played. If it stays in your hand it means that this card is worse than an earthen ring farseer which has better stats, does a beneficial extra effect and does not reduce your card quality.
Chicken is a different card than angry chicken. Chicken costs zero, so even though you have to play it from your hand, the outcome is essentially the same as an actual summon.
Given that Ben Brode says that the chicken from this card is "new" compared to this Chicken suggests that even the art is new, which I'm not a fan of if that's the case. All cards with the same name should have the same art IMO. It's bad enough that I can't specify a Treant out of the 3+ that already exist in the game in this forum. Just saying.
So I conclude you basically didn't get to see an additional card without the Gnomish Experimenter. It was never there, so you never gained/lost it. So you burned a card you would have never seen in the first place.It literally never existed! As you never know which card you will draw next, you might draw your favored card any time. It might be Card No. 11, 23 or 30. So you never actually lost a card. Only in hindsight it appears like this, when you feel you lost a good card. But since in beforehand that burnt card is equal to the next draw and all the other draws you can swap them out, so you have to accept that the card you burn/transform - be it good or bad - is equal to the next card draw (and the ones afterwards). This always holds, because we assume we never draw our entire deck!
This is the tricky and pychological part, which you and I'm sure many others didn't get. It's not that you have a different perspective on the matter. We could all accept that, that's totally fine. But it's worse. You're fooled by psychology and your reaction to it is purely illogical and therefore invalid.
That's why we can proudly state as a simplification: It doesn't matter if you burn Alexstrasza. For all we know, we never would have seen, as it was in the later part of the deck, far beyond reach."
This does not work because of the fact that you must also look at the probability that, in this case, the Alexstrasza will be a card you would already draw. For example, using a pure theoritical because Hearthstone's incomplete information means you can never be sure of how long you will live, then Alexstrasza has a chance to be drawn in each of the next 10 draws without the Experimenter and the Experimenter can draw it any of those times if played that turn.
The big thing is that this analysis seems to miss is the assumption of risk: Goblin Experimenter adds to the chance that Alexstrasza, in this example, "would never be seen" by adding transforming it on the draw to the chance of the Alexstrasza already being on a part of the deck that you will never see. This risk increases with each minion in your Deck and changes based on how many of your minions and how many of your non-minions in your Deck have been drawn. For example, using the Hunter, the downside is that using just 50% here for simplicity, Goblin Expermenter adds a 50% chance of one card in your Deck never being seen ON TOP of the already existant chance that the card is never seen. In essence what it does is that it increases the risk of never seeing one of your cards, in exchange for putting a draw on a 3 mana 3/2 body, with a consolation of getting a 1/1 if that card is never drawn. Note that while Goblin Experimenter does increase your odds of drawing a card past the first one, so does every single draw in the game (IE Gnomish Inventor), which is why the card has additional risk on top of the normal draw.
And note that I am saying this as someone who has said that I think it will see play in spell heavy decks. But the idea that Goblin Experimenter's downside is not much of a downside is rather bizarre and involves the logic that the card it burned will always have never been seen, which is a faulty assumption: It is just that the Experimenter increases the odds that the card will not be seen (by transforming it).
Reading that amazing post, I conclude the card is bad unless you play a spell/weapon heavy deck. Think it was confirmed chicken is 1 mana right? The card is still a tempo loss in a deck like huntard because 3/2 for 3 isnt really doing any good, unless you're topdecking already. Hunters play better cards than razorfen so they wouldnt be happy getting the chicken even if it's 0 mana. If they dont get the chicken it's great.
And that's still not a card for control decks since any control decks has a chance to go to fatigue in my opinion (happens more often with paladin and priest ofc).
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I don't know why everyone keeps thinking this is a control card. This is very much an aggro card. For example, in an aggro deck with maybe 60% creatures 40% spells this card is essentially:
3/2 Put a Chicken into your hand.
With a 40% chance to be:
3/2 Put a random spell card from your deck into your hand.
The former mode is basically a slightly superior razorfen hunter (assuming the wisp-style chicken) as it lets you control timing. In addition it gives you a 0-mana combo enabler for Rogue decks.
Essentially, if your aggro deck might be interested in a Razorfen Hunter with upside this might be the card to look at.
I said I didn't like it in aggro, but I was thinking of mostly decks like zoo. I would like to say that I was wrong there, and that I agree that it could be used in an aggro deck.
Maybe he is wrong (he wasn't sure). Doesn't make sense to create a new token...
- senti
We now know it's not the Gelbin Chicken because he said it was a different one. It just went down considerably in value. I think that they really wanted him to be used in spell heavy decks just because he is so under-budgeted if you draw a minon since it's either 3 for a 3/2 that does nothing if you don't want to play the chicken or 4 for a 3/2 and a 1/1, and that isn't worth it at all.
True, but he seemed certain to me when he said it was a different one, and it wouldn't make sense to create a new token if it was an exact copy of another token, so something had to have been changed.
Absolutely. Well, let's see ^^
- senti
If Brode is correct then this is indeed poor.
If the chicken costs 0 then it is definitely an upgrade on Razorfen Hunter, in so far as you have a chance of drawing a spell or weapon and you also get to choose the timing of the chicken entering play.
It is good to see that most forum users understand that milling a card to replace with a chicken has no effect (unless fatigue occurs). For those who just don't get it, I offer a consolation prize :
If you have 20 cards left and Ragnaros gets chickenized you have a right to be heartbroken. However, there is only a 5% chance of this happening, so it isn't a major worry.
However, if Ragnaros DOESN'T get poultrificated then you are IN LUCK! Your chances of drawing Ragnaros next turn have just increased from 1 in 20 to 1 in 19. Even if it doesn't happen, your chances of drawing Ragnaros every turn thereafter have also increased! This will occur a whopping 95% of the times which you play Gnomish Experimenter!
That should help this thread keep going...
Can you please elaborate on this? To me it sounds like you are ok with the 1 mana cost chicken.
My bad - I've corrected the casting cost and my spelling.
Thanks!
I actually think this might be ok in druid - lots of midrange minions, so the loss of one specific minion isn't too harmful to your strategy, druids can end up top decking quite a bit so card draw is nice, and your combo that you want to topdeck later is two spells, so you don't risk burning it (unlike miracle, where you could burn malygos, leeroy, gadgetzan, etc).
good point with druid! This can draw your combo or swipes and the creatures are beefy enough you won't run out of non-chickens to play
You're correct in saying that in a late-game deck, or as the game progresses into the late game, this card sucks and increasingly gets worse. But Dr_Smash did acknowledge that the effect is ONLY marginal (arguably) if you are NOT going into fatigue, or at least not drawing most if not all of your cards. So basically, he already admitted this card sucks in a late-game deck, and your argument doesn't really knock his down. The problem is that you extrapolate this card's inefficiency in the late game to say that it sucks in all decks or all situations. It COULD actually be bad in all decks, but I don't think it would be for the reason that you're stating: that it's a horrible late-game card (you can say that about a lot of cards that are still seen in play).
Thus, the discussion should be whether it's worth it to play this card in decks that capitalize on the early/mid game. I personally don't think so, but again, for a different reason than the argument you've laid out. Mainly because even if you give weight to what Dr_Smash said (and I do somewhat; I think it's a legitimate argument), all that his argument accomplishes is that this card is either a 3 mana 3/2 draw a spell or a 3 mana 3/2 summon a 1/1 beast, both of which are not really that good anyway. The latter option is obviously just a slightly better Razorfen Hunter, but it probably wouldn't be that viable even if the effect was literally 3 mana 3/2 summon a 1/1 beast, because the 1/1 is easily wiped out before you can take advantage of it. The former option sounds really good, but spells are only heavily seen in late game decks, and you've already established that the drawback of potentially losing a game-winning minion is just too much. Basically, I don't think that your points are incorrect, but I don't agree with your calling Dr_Smash utterly wrong; his argument is certainly not the most intuitive or obvious, but it's an interesting way to look at the card in a way to justify that it's not THAT bad. The drawback just seems worse than it might actually be because you are made aware of the card that you will no longer be able to play for the rest of the match, creating a psychological aversion toward the card.
TLDR: DR_Smash is not flat-out wrong as you suggest, and this card can indeed be OK some of the time and in some decks, unlike your stance that the card sucks period. I agree that the card does indeed suck in late game decks, but you can't use that to say that it sucks in all decks. I still don't like the card though, but I just wanted to take the time to defend Dr_Smash, because he provides an insight that I believe deserves more weight than you are giving him credit for.
Chicken is a different card than angry chicken. Chicken costs zero, so even though you have to play it from your hand, the outcome is essentially the same as an actual summon.
Ben Brode said that he believes the chicken is 1 mana. https://twitter.com/bdbrode/status/531672648112431104. And after all this time he still tweeted as if it was 1 mana.
I mean, the chicken is just a regular chicken. It's not even angry, apparently. How good could it be?
Oh, I thought it was this Chicken. Summoned from one of the things that Gelbin summons.
Just to repost it: https://twitter.com/bdbrode/status/531697921579028480
Given that Ben Brode says that the chicken from this card is "new" compared to this Chicken suggests that even the art is new, which I'm not a fan of if that's the case. All cards with the same name should have the same art IMO. It's bad enough that I can't specify a Treant out of the 3+ that already exist in the game in this forum. Just saying.
The Treants: http://www.hearthpwn.com/cards?filter-name=Treant
Is this life?
"
So I conclude you basically didn't get to see an additional card without the Gnomish Experimenter. It was never there, so you never gained/lost it. So you burned a card you would have never seen in the first place. It literally never existed! As you never know which card you will draw next, you might draw your favored card any time. It might be Card No. 11, 23 or 30. So you never actually lost a card. Only in hindsight it appears like this, when you feel you lost a good card. But since in beforehand that burnt card is equal to the next draw and all the other draws you can swap them out, so you have to accept that the card you burn/transform - be it good or bad - is equal to the next card draw (and the ones afterwards). This always holds, because we assume we never draw our entire deck!
This is the tricky and pychological part, which you and I'm sure many others didn't get. It's not that you have a different perspective on the matter. We could all accept that, that's totally fine. But it's worse. You're fooled by psychology and your reaction to it is purely illogical and therefore invalid.
That's why we can proudly state as a simplification: It doesn't matter if you burn Alexstrasza. For all we know, we never would have seen, as it was in the later part of the deck, far beyond reach."
This does not work because of the fact that you must also look at the probability that, in this case, the Alexstrasza will be a card you would already draw. For example, using a pure theoritical because Hearthstone's incomplete information means you can never be sure of how long you will live, then Alexstrasza has a chance to be drawn in each of the next 10 draws without the Experimenter and the Experimenter can draw it any of those times if played that turn.
The big thing is that this analysis seems to miss is the assumption of risk: Goblin Experimenter adds to the chance that Alexstrasza, in this example, "would never be seen" by adding transforming it on the draw to the chance of the Alexstrasza already being on a part of the deck that you will never see. This risk increases with each minion in your Deck and changes based on how many of your minions and how many of your non-minions in your Deck have been drawn. For example, using the Hunter, the downside is that using just 50% here for simplicity, Goblin Expermenter adds a 50% chance of one card in your Deck never being seen ON TOP of the already existant chance that the card is never seen. In essence what it does is that it increases the risk of never seeing one of your cards, in exchange for putting a draw on a 3 mana 3/2 body, with a consolation of getting a 1/1 if that card is never drawn. Note that while Goblin Experimenter does increase your odds of drawing a card past the first one, so does every single draw in the game (IE Gnomish Inventor), which is why the card has additional risk on top of the normal draw.
And note that I am saying this as someone who has said that I think it will see play in spell heavy decks. But the idea that Goblin Experimenter's downside is not much of a downside is rather bizarre and involves the logic that the card it burned will always have never been seen, which is a faulty assumption: It is just that the Experimenter increases the odds that the card will not be seen (by transforming it).
I could see this card in a hunter deck to proc Kill Command if the Chicken is 0 mana... Wait, it is confirmed beast right?
Reading that amazing post, I conclude the card is bad unless you play a spell/weapon heavy deck. Think it was confirmed chicken is 1 mana right? The card is still a tempo loss in a deck like huntard because 3/2 for 3 isnt really doing any good, unless you're topdecking already. Hunters play better cards than razorfen so they wouldnt be happy getting the chicken even if it's 0 mana. If they dont get the chicken it's great.
And that's still not a card for control decks since any control decks has a chance to go to fatigue in my opinion (happens more often with paladin and priest ofc).