Hearthpwn

So I started making a series of expansions and these cards are the neutral "set" of legendary's, kind of like the princes. Basically they let you change the size of your deck when creating it. What are your thoughts on this mechanic and these cards? 

Edit: New versions added; what do you think of these changes? These are an attempt to balance and make the cards more interesting. The ones with shorter names are the new ones. I also shortened the wording of the deck size change and while it's less clear, it is also more succinct, which is something Hearthstone actually does often.    

Edit: I deleted the old ones now, any thoughts on which version of Gong is better?

Way too broken to ever be a real thing, you basically get a super deck (either smaller or bigger, both are busted) for absolutely nothing at all. The only price you'd have to pay to get this insane effects is literally the dust cost of the cards or just straight up open them which is too broken. Even an insane card like Keleseth had a backdraw on it, granted it was almost irrelevant and that made it the unholy card it was but imagine it having no backdraw at all? Yeah sounds disgusting even by Keleseth standards.

Now leaving aside the fact that this cards are not balanced at all, I think the 35 cards one is useless, you would either go 25 to run only the good shit and cut all the extras or go full 40 to either run ALL the shit and/or play some sort of fatigue deck. Also I'm 100% sure that all the 25 card decks would either be extremely aggro, trying to assemble a very specific combo and most of them would just be Nomi decks trying to abuse this card. 

40 card decks would just be heavy control and even slap an elysiana on top of it to push it further. So if you honestly think about it, these cards would change anything, it would still be a rock, paper, scissors meta. You would have hyper aggro 25, which gets countered by heavy control 40, which get smacked by combo decks (of any quantity) and also by the 25 Nomi decks that are able to exploit Nomi (By playing multiples) and this decks get obliterated by hyper aggro.    

Great conceptual idea, I'd love to see what people could do with it. or something similar. let's hope someone at Blizz is thinking along the same lines.

What if the punishment was having to leave the cards in your deck, and understatting them like the even and odd cards? That would help solve the problem of the agrro one because one dead draw, and the control decks already more balanced because of higher variance in my mind. 

Edit: oops didn't mean to post without quote

ignore

Quote from Uberninja >>

Quote from Uberninja >>

What if the punishment was having to leave the cards in your deck, and understatting them like the even and odd cards? That would help solve the problem of the agrro one because one dead draw, and the control decks already more balanced because of higher variance in my mind. 

 What if the punishment was having to leave the cards in your deck, and understatting them like the even and odd cards? That would help solve the problem of the agrro one because one dead draw, and the control decks already more balanced because of higher variance in my mind.

Quote from Mackie264 >>

Way too broken to ever be a real thing, you basically get a super deck (either smaller or bigger, both are busted) for absolutely nothing at all. The only price you'd have to pay to get this insane effects is literally the dust cost of the cards or just straight up open them which is too broken. Even an insane card like Keleseth had a backdraw on it, granted it was almost irrelevant and that made it the unholy card it was but imagine it having no backdraw at all? Yeah sounds disgusting even by Keleseth standards.

Now leaving aside the fact that this cards are not balanced at all, I think the 35 cards one is useless, you would either go 25 to run only the good shit and cut all the extras or go full 40 to either run ALL the shit and/or play some sort of fatigue deck. Also I'm 100% sure that all the 25 card decks would either be extremely aggro, trying to assemble a very specific combo and most of them would just be Nomi decks trying to abuse this card. 

40 card decks would just be heavy control and even slap an elysiana on top of it to push it further. So if you honestly think about it, these cards would change anything, it would still be a rock, paper, scissors meta. You would have hyper aggro 25, which gets countered by heavy control 40, which get smacked by combo decks (of any quantity) and also by the 25 Nomi decks that are able to exploit Nomi (By playing multiples) and this decks get obliterated by hyper aggro.    

Edit: I quit trying to get this reply correct.

 What if the punishment was having to leave the cards in your deck, and understatting them like the even and odd cards? That would help solve the problem of the agrro one because one dead draw, and the control decks already more balanced because of higher variance in my mind. 

I think with the 25 card one it should say: burn 6 random cards of your deck including this one. With the 40 cards one it should probably say something as AFK: can't play cards for first 2 turns and on your 10th turn.

Quote from Rise_Before_Dawn >>

I think with the 25 card one it should say: burn 6 random cards of your deck including this one. With the 40 cards one it should probably say something as AFK: can't play cards for first 2 turns and on your 10th turn.

 I like these more drastic punishments, but they may need re-flavoring then. I think I'll try some more punish heavy versions of the cards

Quote from Uberninja >>

Quote from Uberninja >>

Quote from Uberninja >>

What if the punishment was having to leave the cards in your deck, and understatting them like the even and odd cards? That would help solve the problem of the agrro one because one dead draw, and the control decks already more balanced because of higher variance in my mind. 

 What if the punishment was having to leave the cards in your deck, and understatting them like the even and odd cards? That would help solve the problem of the agrro one because one dead draw, and the control decks already more balanced because of higher variance in my mind.

 

Quote from Mackie264 >>

Way too broken to ever be a real thing, you basically get a super deck (either smaller or bigger, both are busted) for absolutely nothing at all. The only price you'd have to pay to get this insane effects is literally the dust cost of the cards or just straight up open them which is too broken. Even an insane card like Keleseth had a backdraw on it, granted it was almost irrelevant and that made it the unholy card it was but imagine it having no backdraw at all? Yeah sounds disgusting even by Keleseth standards.

Now leaving aside the fact that this cards are not balanced at all, I think the 35 cards one is useless, you would either go 25 to run only the good shit and cut all the extras or go full 40 to either run ALL the shit and/or play some sort of fatigue deck. Also I'm 100% sure that all the 25 card decks would either be extremely aggro, trying to assemble a very specific combo and most of them would just be Nomi decks trying to abuse this card. 

40 card decks would just be heavy control and even slap an elysiana on top of it to push it further. So if you honestly think about it, these cards would change anything, it would still be a rock, paper, scissors meta. You would have hyper aggro 25, which gets countered by heavy control 40, which get smacked by combo decks (of any quantity) and also by the 25 Nomi decks that are able to exploit Nomi (By playing multiples) and this decks get obliterated by hyper aggro.    

Edit: I quit trying to get this reply correct.

 What if the punishment was having to leave the cards in your deck, and understatting them like the even and odd cards? That would help solve the problem of the agrro one because one dead draw, and the control decks already more balanced because of higher variance in my mind. 

 Nah you would need an insane backdraw to have effects as powerful as these. Even if you made them 10 mana 0/1 that had to stay in your deck the effect is too powerful. 

Just look at Genn and Baku, cards that were somewhat under stated and stayed on your deck but pretty much turbo charged it to the point where having 1 bad draw was absolutely irrelevant. The 1 bad card on the deck is sooo irrelevant that even 2 aggro decks like Odd Paladin and Odd Rogue did not care at all and were willing to take the risk of drawing that 9 mana dead card cause the effect was bonkers.

The thing about such powerful build around cards is that they for sure need some sort of strong back draw in order to justify the insane effect. Reno and the general highlander archetype force you to not have duplicates in your deck which affects your consistency. The princes forced you to completely avoid cards from a certain cost. Odd and Even decks broke your curve. Galakrond now makes you have to run some subpar cards in order to invoke him so he gets powerful. The problem with this cards is that even if you make them have a strong backdraw, they're still incredibly powerful, all the cards I mentioned have spawned powerful, busted or broken decks at some point in their life, cause making this sort of cards from a game design perspective is too difficult; you want to make cards that are obviously impactul, cause these type of cards are special, so you need to give them powerful effects but more often than not they end up being broken. These type of cards feel like you either make them way too strong (Like literally almost every card I mentioned) or you make them straight up bad, irrelevant and not at all worth the slot (cards like prince 4 or Solia).

I don't know what would be a healthy downside to this type of effect honestly, it just seems too strong and I have no idea about game design so don't feel bad about my commentary on your cards, but I do know HS and these effect seem too powerful for the tyoe of game HS is, which is a tempo game, no matter what cards blizzard prints, HS will forever remain a tempo game cause good tempo beats any deck and having a smaller deck means it is more consistent and you have less bad draws (at least in theory). Take a game like MTG as an example, there's only a deck minimum for most formats, which is 60, but there is not max deck size stablished, you could run a deck of 1k if you wanted, the only rule they have for paper MTG is that you have to be able to shuffle the deck unassited with your own hand without having to drop any of the cards to do this. but yet it's very rare to see decks with more than 60 cards cause the key on cards games is consistency so if you have more cards your deck would be less consistent. That's what brakes the 25 deck effect. 

Now with the 40 one, it may sound weird with what I just said, but you have to factor that FATIGUE is a thing in HS and it is an actual strategy so you always have to consider it and having 10 more cards from the start means that you are already winning that fatigue game and if you can slap and Elysiana on top of that it means that your deck is effectively 50 cards which is 20 more than an average opponent and that is also insane in the particular HS case. You could basically build a deck with all the removal in the world, a couple defensively efficient minions and then just win via pure attrition which would only be extremely solid for a lot of classes. As an example we have pre boom nerf Control Warrior, it was a deck that had removal on top of removal, then had ways to shuffle up to 20 cards into the deck (10 after Elysiana got nerfed) and also had a infinite value engine on it (Boom itself); the deck was so stable that you could consistely remove everything your opponent played and then just let them fatigue to death, in a lot of game the cards the cards you got off elysiana were not even relevant, you just needed to not take fatigue for 10 extra turns while your opponent was. So this also brakes the 40 card one.

Not gonna talk about the 35 one cause it feel irrelevant, you rather have 25 or just go all the way to 40 at that point.

Sorry if this post is too long but I just wanted to address every point I thought off lol.

Quote from Rise_Before_Dawn >>

I think with the 25 card one it should say: burn 6 random cards of your deck including this one. With the 40 cards one it should probably say something as AFK: can't play cards for first 2 turns and on your 10th turn.

 I actually really like the effect suggested for the 25 one, it gives you a super powerful effect but there's a high risk of losing a bunch of good cards you need, not sure if 6 is the correct number but it's probably a solid way to keep this mechanic somewhat balanced.

The 40 one feels dull tho, if you build your deck the right way being AFK a couple turns is irrelevant, Quest Druid was a deck we had last expansion and was very solid and pretty much had this effect, you had to float a lot of mana and even be pretty much AFK for up to 4 turns but then it had absurd comeback cards to the point it wasn't relevant at all. 

You're make a lot of good points, the drawback would have to actually make it risky to play these cards to balance out the crazy effect. So what if in the 25 card deck you instantly die when you draw your last card, meaning having a combo at the end would kill you. Or maybe like Rise Before Dawn said, at the beginning of the game 5 random cards are burned from the deck. 

I also like the idea of shuffling in more useless cards into the big deck so it has a lot of stuff but chances for trash draws, or maybe like Rise said he can't play for 2 or 3 turns, or maybe that deck only draws every other turn, which would make their fatigue game stronger but give the other player more chances to take advantage of them. 

As for the 35 one, yeah it definitely is the least powerful, but I was imaging it as if you were just trying to fit a few more pieces into a package in your deck. Example: You're making a menagerie deck and you need 4 more murloc slots. 

Also I really do appreciate the constructive criticism.

Quote from Mackie264 >>

Quote from Rise_Before_Dawn >>

I think with the 25 card one it should say: burn 6 random cards of your deck including this one. With the 40 cards one it should probably say something as AFK: can't play cards for first 2 turns and on your 10th turn.

 I actually really like the effect suggested for the 25 one, it gives you a super powerful effect but there's a high risk of losing a bunch of good cards you need, not sure if 6 is the correct number but it's probably a solid way to keep this mechanic somewhat balanced.

The 40 one feels dull tho, if you build your deck the right way being AFK a couple turns is irrelevant, Quest Druid was a deck we had last expansion and was very solid and pretty much had this effect, you had to float a lot of mana and even be pretty much AFK for up to 4 turns but then it had absurd comeback cards to the point it wasn't relevant at all. 

Quote from Rise_Before_Dawn >>

I think with the 25 card one it should say: burn 6 random cards of your deck including this one. With the 40 cards one it should probably say something as AFK: can't play cards for first 2 turns and on your 10th turn.

 I made some new versions. Thoughts?

I like the 1 card one, very good punish