Control Warlock at this point has a lot of bad matchups and very few good ones, but he still exists in the meta somehow. Yet you say, that other control decks currently cannot exist in the meta, because they have one bad matchup (which is Control Warlock as you claim)? Sounds legit...
Control Priest 45% WR & Control Warrior 41% WR are the only other control decks you’ll find on HSReplay. At top 1000 Legend Control Priest is the best control deck with a 50% WR (Warrior and Warlock are about 45% WR).
Control decks should, in theory, have a good winrate at higher ranks given their difficulty to master in comparison to tempo decks, but even at the highest level players are only just squeezing out a neutral winrate.
In short, all control decks are bad, but Warlock is by far the best performing outside of the high Legend pocket meta.
I think Tickatus is not op, but is an unfun card. It's one of the better disruption cards in the game to provide counterplay to uninteractive OTK decks.
I personally would like the game to just not have otk decks and not have disruption (this was once the philosophy of blizz too when they hall of famed Power Overwhelming because taking 20 damage to the face from Leroy Jenkins power overwhelming+faceless was 'unfun and uninteractive')
But since OTK decks are likely not going to get removed, we need disruption cards like Tickatus
Disruption is fine. Giving one class, and one class only, the ability to burn a third of the opponent's deck is not fine. Bringing Dirty Rat back could help a bit (Vol'jin does not help due to the legendary status -> one copy only, and due to the fact that even if you manage to pull Tickatus from the hand, there is suddenly an 8/8 on the board and you have just spent five mana to pull it out and don't have a taunt in the way...).
I love playing control decks, and have been having the worst time ever with them in current HS. There is simply no chance for "honest" control decks from classes such as Priest, Warrior, and Shaman to exist as long as Tickatus is around. And I for one think that it is not only sad, but also bad for the state of the game.
[edit] I was reading some other comments, and had to add this: To those who view Tickatus as an unproblematic card in current Standard, have you tried playing other control decks against it? I mean really? Seeing all of your win conditions being burned away, not only once, but twice? I have, for example, created a home-brew control Shaman deck with Yshaarji returning four corrupted cards to deal 16 damage from hand that actually has a positive win rate against Paladin and Mage. This means I have been able to climb with it this season almost as nicely as I normally do (for me, the most fun in the this game is in creating my own decks). But against Warlock... I have like 10% win rate, and the only reason for this is Tickatus. A single card. If that is not bad design in a card game aiming for diversity of strategies and a resemblance of balance across its many classes, I don't know what is.
IMO Tick is not balanced due to Hearthstone's own nature.
In games like MtG you have two tools to face a "Mill" situation, graveyard recursion and tutoring, here we have neither.
Here in Hearthstone "mill" is final, so if Tick hits a key card of your deck (even more if you play combo) you are in a situation you can't turn around with skill or good plays, you just lost to Tick's rng
IMO, burning cards to the enemy is a mechanic that should dissapear and never come back.
Tickatus is fine, we had a bunch of Control played Control Buster cards in the past and there was at least one absolute dominant control deck at least once a year every year, Tickatus just does it instantly instead of dragging you for countless dead turns, Justicar Warrior would simple press HP every turn and fatigue you to death and there was absolutely nothing you could do as a control deck if you were playing passive, KotFT Warlock would crush any control deck if you took your time, you can't keep up with constant full boards of sticky minions and Drain Hero Power.
Tickatus at least does not win on the spot or flip the game on it's head, if you were winning before Tickatus, you are still winning after Tickatus.
Would love to see a fun control meta with variety. Instead you get a rock-paper-scissors game with Aggro vs. Control Warlock (which is both Control and Combo). It baffles me how people only look at win% or how they do not see this card is single-handedly ruining other control decks from simply existing.
Would love to see a fun control meta with variety. Instead you get a rock-paper-scissors game with Aggro vs. Control Warlock (which is both Control and Combo). It baffles me how people only look at win% or how they do not see this card is single-handedly ruining other control decks from simply existing.
So, control decks cannot exist, because they have LITERALLY one bad matchup?
Would love to see a fun control meta with variety. Instead you get a rock-paper-scissors game with Aggro vs. Control Warlock (which is both Control and Combo). It baffles me how people only look at win% or how they do not see this card is single-handedly ruining other control decks from simply existing.
So, control decks cannot exits, because they have LITERALLY one bad matchup?
Yup, one bad matchup means control has a 40% overall winrate. Priest is a dead class because it almost always loses to control warlock. Tickatus is likely to be nerfed in the next two weeks, Blizz put him on their watchlist.
Honestly, my biggest issue with Tickatus isn't the card destruction per-se (though not playing Combo no doubt biases me there), it's the fatigue push.
Like, Fatigue decks are boring and oppressive to play against, so Tickatus to me is less "Ah crap, I could have used that card" and more "Oh yay, my deck is ten cards shorter than my opponents. Yay fatigue death, my favourite!"
Personally I think Tickatus would be far more fun if it was "Replace the top five cards of your opponent's deck with random cards", maybe with a price penalty on them (like the opposite of Deck of Lunacy).
Honestly, my biggest issue with Tickatus isn't the card destruction per-se (though not playing Combo no doubt biases me there), it's the fatigue push.
Like, Fatigue decks are boring and oppressive to play against, so Tickatus to me is less "Ah crap, I could have used that card" and more "Oh yay, my deck is ten cards shorter than my opponents. Yay fatigue death, my favourite!"
Personally I think Tickatus would be far more fun if it was "Replace the top five cards of your opponent's deck with random cards", maybe with a price penalty on them (like the opposite of Deck of Lunacy).
That's a cool idea, it will be still used for combo breaker but at the same time it will give more rooom to other control decks
Would love to see a fun control meta with variety. Instead you get a rock-paper-scissors game with Aggro vs. Control Warlock (which is both Control and Combo). It baffles me how people only look at win% or how they do not see this card is single-handedly ruining other control decks from simply existing.
So, control decks cannot exits, because they have LITERALLY one bad matchup?
Yup, one bad matchup means control has a 40% overall winrate. Priest is a dead class because it almost always loses to control warlock. Tickatus is likely to be nerfed in the next two weeks, Blizz put him on their watchlist.
It's only relevant if you face warlocks in almost every games, which is not the case...
When I play against Warlock with my Priest Tickatus is basically the only card destroying me.
And when i play against shaman, DH, hunter as a warlock, basically every card is destroying me :) And the meta is all aggro(ish) now...so Tick is not a big problem IMO.
But it is exactly the problem! In an aggro meta, control decks should be able to come in and control the speed of the game. Normally, priest, warrior, shaman and warlock (at least) would have the tools to fight off the likes of face hunter etc. But now, if you build a deck that does exactly that, and has a respectable 55-60% win rate against aggro, the fact that every now and then you absolutely lose to Warlock's Tickatus means that the overall win rate drops below 50%. And this is the fundamental problem that no amount of statistics on HSreplay will show.
But it is exactly the problem! In an aggro meta, control decks should be able to come in and control the speed of the game. Normally, priest, warrior, shaman and warlock (at least) would have the tools to fight off the likes of face hunter etc. But now, if you build a deck that does exactly that, and has a respectable 55-60% win rate against aggro, the fact that every now and then you absolutely lose to Warlock's Tickatus means that the overall win rate drops below 50%. And this is the fundamental problem that no amount of statistics on HSreplay will show.
Good point :) unfortunately, we have to play against face hunters (again)
People are crying about control being unplayable because of tickatus. Just explain why please?? Maybe it’s a very bad matchup for your control deck SO WHAT? Every deck has very bad matchups! If you lose to lock with your control deck, and win against the rest of the meta, where is the problem?
And „It’s unfun for me“ is no argument. Guess what: it’s fun to play Tick for many people. That’s the only reason a deck as bad as standard control lock does even see play. And it is terrible everywhere except bronze and maybe in wild with bran (where Tick Reno lock is still horrible, and nearly non existing)
and another question: how is it fun for your opponents to play against your greedy control priest with tons of random generation or your control warrior? It isn’t fun for me. I hate facing priests. Most annoying class in the game. But I am not running around telling everyone to nerf illucia, hysteria or stupid setthek just because I don’t like the cards.
it’s like: my Aggro deck loses every game to odd warrior. Nerf this deck it’s broken and unfun. Nope it isn’t. It’s horrible into everything but Aggro. Tick lock is the same for control. And thus, winrate is horrible unless nearly everyone plays Aggro (odd warrior) / control (ticklock)
and yes, if a Card is only Good at certain ranks, then it’s the players fault. They play the wrong decks in the meta, or play the Game wrong.
I’m sick of control lock in general. The deck is like 70% hard removal. You can’t play any sort of board centric game against them, it’s a total waste of time. there’s no thought involved with the deck. They don’t have to be smart with removal like most control decks do. The healing is stupid. I’ve dealt like 60 damage to a warlocks face and still lost because their stupid soul fragments kept stacking on top of each other. And just when you think you’ve got them they just drop 4 6/6 taunts for 0 mana. I’m irritated this deck didn’t get slapped down in some way. It’s so toxic.
Problem is that there is no longer deck building. There is only Tickatus and what can you play to beat Tickatus. Same with Mage and Secret Paladin.
People like to be able to at least have a low win percentage when building decks and playing them. Here, it's 0% win percentage.
You should not have cards that in turn create a 0% win percentage against a deck.
And for the haters, even if it's close to 0% win against a deck it's still bad.
Explained - You cannot play any other control or combo type deck against this deck. Tickatus right now is the only card in the deck that creates a situation where second time it's played (possibly even 3rd time) the game is over. There is no coming back.
Why did this not get included in the nerfs? Because nobody brought it to Masters. Only the Masters 3 decks got nerfed.
In turn Blizzard skipped this card. No idea why. It's the worst offender out of the set.
Why have a card that makes it so the whole set besides a few decks is now not worth playing? Doesn't make sense.
You want to build decks and play all the cards. Create a card like Tickatus and all of the sudden no cards are good. Only a certain few decks are now good. And it will stay this way for a long time. There is no hard counter. There are a few soft counters but good luck with those.
Play Aggro. Great. A whole set of cards and I either play the select few decks or aggro. Yay for Hearthstone.
TL DR - Nerf 1 card and all of the sudden you have more control decks present, combo decks, and intuitive deck building.
Control Warlock at this point has a lot of bad matchups and very few good ones, but he still exists in the meta somehow. Yet you say, that other control decks currently cannot exist in the meta, because they have one bad matchup (which is Control Warlock as you claim)? Sounds legit...
Control Priest 45% WR & Control Warrior 41% WR are the only other control decks you’ll find on HSReplay. At top 1000 Legend Control Priest is the best control deck with a 50% WR (Warrior and Warlock are about 45% WR).
Control decks should, in theory, have a good winrate at higher ranks given their difficulty to master in comparison to tempo decks, but even at the highest level players are only just squeezing out a neutral winrate.
In short, all control decks are bad, but Warlock is by far the best performing outside of the high Legend pocket meta.
I think Tickatus is not op, but is an unfun card. It's one of the better disruption cards in the game to provide counterplay to uninteractive OTK decks.
I personally would like the game to just not have otk decks and not have disruption (this was once the philosophy of blizz too when they hall of famed Power Overwhelming because taking 20 damage to the face from Leroy Jenkins power overwhelming+faceless was 'unfun and uninteractive')
But since OTK decks are likely not going to get removed, we need disruption cards like Tickatus
Disruption is fine. Giving one class, and one class only, the ability to burn a third of the opponent's deck is not fine. Bringing Dirty Rat back could help a bit (Vol'jin does not help due to the legendary status -> one copy only, and due to the fact that even if you manage to pull Tickatus from the hand, there is suddenly an 8/8 on the board and you have just spent five mana to pull it out and don't have a taunt in the way...).
I love playing control decks, and have been having the worst time ever with them in current HS. There is simply no chance for "honest" control decks from classes such as Priest, Warrior, and Shaman to exist as long as Tickatus is around. And I for one think that it is not only sad, but also bad for the state of the game.
[edit] I was reading some other comments, and had to add this: To those who view Tickatus as an unproblematic card in current Standard, have you tried playing other control decks against it? I mean really? Seeing all of your win conditions being burned away, not only once, but twice? I have, for example, created a home-brew control Shaman deck with Yshaarji returning four corrupted cards to deal 16 damage from hand that actually has a positive win rate against Paladin and Mage. This means I have been able to climb with it this season almost as nicely as I normally do (for me, the most fun in the this game is in creating my own decks). But against Warlock... I have like 10% win rate, and the only reason for this is Tickatus. A single card. If that is not bad design in a card game aiming for diversity of strategies and a resemblance of balance across its many classes, I don't know what is.
IMO Tick is not balanced due to Hearthstone's own nature.
In games like MtG you have two tools to face a "Mill" situation, graveyard recursion and tutoring, here we have neither.
Here in Hearthstone "mill" is final, so if Tick hits a key card of your deck (even more if you play combo) you are in a situation you can't turn around with skill or good plays, you just lost to Tick's rng
IMO, burning cards to the enemy is a mechanic that should dissapear and never come back.
Tickatus is fine, we had a bunch of Control played Control Buster cards in the past and there was at least one absolute dominant control deck at least once a year every year, Tickatus just does it instantly instead of dragging you for countless dead turns, Justicar Warrior would simple press HP every turn and fatigue you to death and there was absolutely nothing you could do as a control deck if you were playing passive, KotFT Warlock would crush any control deck if you took your time, you can't keep up with constant full boards of sticky minions and Drain Hero Power.
Tickatus at least does not win on the spot or flip the game on it's head, if you were winning before Tickatus, you are still winning after Tickatus.
Would love to see a fun control meta with variety. Instead you get a rock-paper-scissors game with Aggro vs. Control Warlock (which is both Control and Combo). It baffles me how people only look at win% or how they do not see this card is single-handedly ruining other control decks from simply existing.
So, control decks cannot exist, because they have LITERALLY one bad matchup?
Yup, one bad matchup means control has a 40% overall winrate. Priest is a dead class because it almost always loses to control warlock. Tickatus is likely to be nerfed in the next two weeks, Blizz put him on their watchlist.
Honestly, my biggest issue with Tickatus isn't the card destruction per-se (though not playing Combo no doubt biases me there), it's the fatigue push.
Like, Fatigue decks are boring and oppressive to play against, so Tickatus to me is less "Ah crap, I could have used that card" and more "Oh yay, my deck is ten cards shorter than my opponents. Yay fatigue death, my favourite!"
Personally I think Tickatus would be far more fun if it was "Replace the top five cards of your opponent's deck with random cards", maybe with a price penalty on them (like the opposite of Deck of Lunacy).
That's a cool idea, it will be still used for combo breaker but at the same time it will give more rooom to other control decks
It's only relevant if you face warlocks in almost every games, which is not the case...
When I play against Warlock with my Priest Tickatus is basically the only card destroying me.
And when i play against shaman, DH, hunter as a warlock, basically every card is destroying me :)
And the meta is all aggro(ish) now...so Tick is not a big problem IMO.
But it is exactly the problem! In an aggro meta, control decks should be able to come in and control the speed of the game. Normally, priest, warrior, shaman and warlock (at least) would have the tools to fight off the likes of face hunter etc. But now, if you build a deck that does exactly that, and has a respectable 55-60% win rate against aggro, the fact that every now and then you absolutely lose to Warlock's Tickatus means that the overall win rate drops below 50%. And this is the fundamental problem that no amount of statistics on HSreplay will show.
Good point :) unfortunately, we have to play against face hunters (again)
Wait... what?! So if the deck has ONE bad matchup, it can't maintain win rate over 50%?
#BronzeLogic
People are crying about control being unplayable because of tickatus. Just explain why please?? Maybe it’s a very bad matchup for your control deck SO WHAT? Every deck has very bad matchups! If you lose to lock with your control deck, and win against the rest of the meta, where is the problem?
And „It’s unfun for me“ is no argument. Guess what: it’s fun to play Tick for many people. That’s the only reason a deck as bad as standard control lock does even see play. And it is terrible everywhere except bronze and maybe in wild with bran (where Tick Reno lock is still horrible, and nearly non existing)
and another question: how is it fun for your opponents to play against your greedy control priest with tons of random generation or your control warrior? It isn’t fun for me. I hate facing priests. Most annoying class in the game. But I am not running around telling everyone to nerf illucia, hysteria or stupid setthek just because I don’t like the cards.
it’s like: my Aggro deck loses every game to odd warrior. Nerf this deck it’s broken and unfun. Nope it isn’t. It’s horrible into everything but Aggro. Tick lock is the same for control. And thus, winrate is horrible unless nearly everyone plays Aggro (odd warrior) / control (ticklock)
and yes, if a Card is only Good at certain ranks, then it’s the players fault. They play the wrong decks in the meta, or play the Game wrong.
I’m sick of control lock in general. The deck is like 70% hard removal. You can’t play any sort of board centric game against them, it’s a total waste of time. there’s no thought involved with the deck. They don’t have to be smart with removal like most control decks do. The healing is stupid. I’ve dealt like 60 damage to a warlocks face and still lost because their stupid soul fragments kept stacking on top of each other. And just when you think you’ve got them they just drop 4 6/6 taunts for 0 mana. I’m irritated this deck didn’t get slapped down in some way. It’s so toxic.
Problem is that there is no longer deck building. There is only Tickatus and what can you play to beat Tickatus. Same with Mage and Secret Paladin.
People like to be able to at least have a low win percentage when building decks and playing them. Here, it's 0% win percentage.
You should not have cards that in turn create a 0% win percentage against a deck.
And for the haters, even if it's close to 0% win against a deck it's still bad.
Explained - You cannot play any other control or combo type deck against this deck. Tickatus right now is the only card in the deck that creates a situation where second time it's played (possibly even 3rd time) the game is over. There is no coming back.
Why did this not get included in the nerfs? Because nobody brought it to Masters. Only the Masters 3 decks got nerfed.
In turn Blizzard skipped this card. No idea why. It's the worst offender out of the set.
Why have a card that makes it so the whole set besides a few decks is now not worth playing? Doesn't make sense.
You want to build decks and play all the cards. Create a card like Tickatus and all of the sudden no cards are good. Only a certain few decks are now good. And it will stay this way for a long time. There is no hard counter. There are a few soft counters but good luck with those.
Play Aggro. Great. A whole set of cards and I either play the select few decks or aggro. Yay for Hearthstone.
TL DR - Nerf 1 card and all of the sudden you have more control decks present, combo decks, and intuitive deck building.