Hearthpwn

Classic troll thread.  Other trolls take note.  Look how the title begs the question as to which decks are the ones 'requiring skill'.  No debate allowed buddy, you either agree with the OP position, or you define yourself as one of the haters (thus invalidating any points you may have as biased by your hate).  I might as well make a thread about Donald Trump and call it "Why people so brainless to not like the Greatest President Ever".  

Quote from DiamondDM13 >>

Quote from PsyyKik >>

 You just completely glossed over the main point about the gameplay for the opponent being unacceptable. I know why. I have played a lot of Freeze mage, I don't care if you believe me or not, I just am not in love with the deck so am capable of being honest about it from both players point of view, which you clearly are not.

 I didn't gloss over that. I just have no idea why you think it's unacceptable. If you played a lot of Freeze Mage, I assume one thing you enjoyed about it was the control you had over the game, over what your opponent was allowed to do, and what the outcome of the game was. This is not something exclusive to Freeze Mage, it's exactly how most control decks feel to me. It is the reason I love playing Control decks. You are telling me it is unacceptable that the player that plays a control deck has control over what the opponent can and can't do? Because that is the main appeal of Control decks, having control over the game. So it is more than acceptable.

It is all about how you choose to play the game. It might feel bad to be restricted of actions by a Freeze Mage, but it feels just as bad when it is a Control Warrior or a Control Priest that is controlling you and preventing you from playing how you want. It's not exclusive to Freeze Mage. The reason it feels worse is because Freeze Mage is actually better against board centric decks than the other 2, so obviously board centric decks will have a really hard time against Freeze Mage.

Please, I would love it if you could explain to me what is unacceptable about Freeze Mage or any other Control deck having full control of the game after the point in the game where they stabilized. I'm really curious honestly. I can see the game from both players point of view, trust me I do, however, I understand that it is normal to work as it does. Whenever I play an Aggro deck or a Midrange deck, which is really really rare nowadays, I am deciding to give up control of the game. I guess most players don't understand that, but I do. I am accepting that if I run into a control deck, they will try to stabilize, and the moment they do, the game is completely under their control and that I can't really do much about it. They decided to play the control game so they will decide what they allow me to do in the game. It's all about having control of the game. I myself HATE not being in control, I like dictating what happens, what my opponent can and can't do. It's a risk I take, since a great ammount of the time it doesn't work out for me and I can't stabilize, but when I do, I love that feeling of controlling the outcome of the game.

I think the problem is not everyone is familiar with these concepts, not everyone understands this choice they make, they do it without thinking about it, and then get surprised when they are confronted with the reality. I know it's not realistic to expect everyone to try and play all kinds of decks, but it would be great if everyone did. It would allow them to understand this.

Quote from DiamondDM13 >>

Quote from PsyyKik >>

 ...what tops it all off is iceblock. You can't play around the possibility of board clears as you would do against, say priest and their dragonfires or deaths because you need to do incremental damage against a freeze mage to beat them. Trying to play around a freeze mage's multitude of control options isn't possible as you know eventually they will draw Alex or Antonidas. Inevitably you end up just kinda playing into everything, which creates a really joyless experience, unlike what you have in other control matchups. The whole design of the deck seems to be to give the pilot a great time, and the opponent a terrible one. When you think about it, it's got more in common with pirate warrior than the thread creator here realised.

 Ice Block is an extremely important tool for Control style Mage decks, and is also based on the Mage's ability in Warcraft. Mage doesn't really have Armour Up or Lesser Heal, it doesn't have health gain basically, Ice Barrier is all. Both are important tool for Control style.

People that play around the multitude of options the Freeze Mage has are people that know how to play the matchup. I never really had issues facing Freeze Mages as other decks, I know what it's weaknesses are, it's not really that hard to do. They will draw Alexstrazsa yes, Antonidas is not as relevant. But when they draw Alexstrazsa, are they safe to use it offensively? If you are an Aggro deck or a Midrange deck that applies good pressure, like Hunters, Alexstrazsa most times is nothing more than a heal. Freeze Mages try to put you into check mate as hard as they can, you just need to see a few turns in advance to stop that. Obviously, you can't always do that, and if you are a Midrange board centric style deck, there is very little you can do, but it's because that is what Freeze Mage counters. Your deck has weaknesses, every deck has. If your deck happens to be weak to Freeze Mage, you have to expect games against Freeze Mage to be terrible.

Freeze Mage is not an unicorn deck. It has it's strengths and weaknesses. It happens to be strong against one of the most popular kind of decks, which is midrange board centric style of decks. These have always been popular, and Freeze Mages will always have an easy time dealing with them. But Freeze gets countered hard by other decks. The thing is if your favourite kind of strategy, your favourite kind of deck, is the Midrange Board Centric kind of deck, you will inevitably hate Freeze Mages. I'm a Freeze Mage, I hate full on hyper aggro decks, specially the likes of Pirate Warriors, whose damage comes from multiple sources, like weapons and direct damage, which I can't really stop all that well. Still I accept that I have that weakness, I chose to play the deck so I understand the risks of playing it...

And actually, Freeze Mage and Pirate Warrior are not too terribly different. They have vastly different skill floors, however, in a way they operate similarly. They focus most of the damage to opponent face. The main difference, and the reason why I personally think Freeze is more acceptable, is the timing. The % of games decided against Pirate Warrior and against Freeze Mage by the Mulligan stage are so polarized. Extremely few games get decided on the mulligan against a Freeze Mage. It's basically whenever they have a god draw, where you can't do anything against them. The other games, you always have something to do, you have at least 10 turns to do your own strategy and try to kill the Mage. Pirate Warriors? If you have a slow hand, you are dead by turn 5. That happens way too often, games decided simply by the mulligan. Hyper Aggro decks leave you very little time to react to them, and if you fail to react, you lose. I personally have a big issue with this. It makes games be decided solely on the mulligan rather than decisions you made, I'm not a fan of that. When you face a Freeze Mage and they freeze you some turns others they don't, and they still win, might feel bad, but at least you had a chance to play the game. It's much worse starting the game and being dead on turn 5 before you managed to do anything. Obviously, this part is just my opinion, others may feel differently...

I'm not gonna deny that PW involves skill when taking it to higher levels of play but it's also worth pointing out that in the MSG meta there was very little to do against it because of the lack of good neutral healing and efficient taunts. Yes, PW is definitely a deck that has a time limit (and sometimes a very short one when you went up against Reno decks), but without any reliable ways to counter its strong Patches openings almost any card you drew was going to be relevant in finishing off your opponent. Even more so against the Miracle Rogue match up where you either plopped a big T1-T2 Edwin or you rolled over and died because the game would never go long enough that the Rogues power turns mattered. This doesn't say anything about Miracle Rogue's skill cap, it just highlights one of it's weaknesses.

That's why i don't really agree with the PW vs MR assesment in the OP. I definitely think that these days Pirate decks require more skill to pilot than the one they took in MSG thanks in part to the nerf to STB and the addition of stuff like Tar Creeper or Gluttonous Ooze as a 3rd weapon destruction option.

RE: Freeze Mage IMO a lot of the current hate the deck gets is less about how much skill it takes to play it (i think it does) and more by the addition of Babbling Book and Glyph into the lists. It's never been very fun to be on the recieving end of Freeze Mage pulling off its game plan. It's even less so when they are able to play a 3rd Frost Nova or a 4th Ice Block.

There are too many early op cards in hearthstone. Heartstone limited manas and cards in early game, so if you have many op early cards in game, you should win without skills. if blizzard will not nerf many early op cards, hearthstone will replace by other card games.

Iceblock is fine but you shouldn't be able to tutor it. Blizzard keeps printing cards to support mage secrets but they don't seem to realize how much more powerful Iceblock is than all of the other mage secrets.