Hearthpwn

Yeah play more aggressive and push more face damage rather than just trying to grind them out like you would in other matchups. However as mentioned Tog's Scheme is in the deck to tech against control warrior. If you can't get a decent start and apply pressure then you're probably going to lose so it's worth making some higher risk plays in the hope they swing things your way. The alternative, if you are facing this deck a lot, is probably just to switch to something else.

Really it sounds like the main thing you need to do is accept that some decks are just going to be favoured against you. If a single 1 mana card which spends most the game dead and has no immediate tempo effect is infuriating you perhaps you're coming at it with the wrong mindset. I imagine if, for example, a murloc deck made a thread asking "how do I beat control warrior" the suggestions would be pretty similar - to either play more all in or to switch deck entirely - because sometimes there's not much more to do.

As mentioned I think small amounts of mana cheating are ok when they come with some kind of requirement or drawback. For example there's a plethora of 5 mana 8/8s in HS's history with a drawback and cards like mountain giant only get particularly cheap when you meet a, typically inconvenient, requirement of some kind.

That's fine imo, the problem lies in cards that give too big a benefit at too low a cost (cost referring more to something other than mana). For example Possessed Lackey and Skull of the Man'ari's only requirements were that you had demons in your deck/ hand and it was pretty easy to both strengthen their effect and mitigate how much you weakened your deck by only playing a few VERY powerful demons in the deck. The pre-nerf conjurer's calling could get 16/16 in stats out for as little as 6 mana depending on how many cards they played/ how much of their draw they found. Pre-nerf Luna's had the drawback of losing your turn 5 but unless you were against a fast aggro deck that's easily survivable for such a massive upside. Wild Growth could put you 1 mana ahead of your opponent for multiple turns for just 2 mana and a card from your hand. Mysterious Challenger could simultaneously get a 6/6 and 5 extra mana of secret value out for 6 mana as well as somewhat negating the negative requirement of having a lot of secrets your deck by thinning the 'bad' cards out for you.

You might notice all of these examples have been nerfed with the exception of 2 because Blizzard also felt they were too strong. The other 2 either had counterplay available already (weapon removal for Skull) or they introduced a hard counter of sorts (Secret Eater for MC which even directly references it in its voice line). In fact the presence and power of Mysterious Challenger, at least imo, contributed significantly to the introduction of standard format in order to make maintaining game balance easier.

That's all well and good but what about "mana cheat" cards that never saw any changes? Well off the top of my head I can think of a few that are in the game that people don't typically feel are an issue currently. I put the requirement/ cost in brackets after each one, I'm sure you can tell what's what.

-0 mana 7/5 divine shield lifesteal rush (play 25 mana's worth of spells first)
-7 mana 42/42 in stats (your deck and board must both be empty)
-10 mana deathrattle: win (your deck, board, and hand must be empty)
-0 mana 7/8 taunt (play 12 mana's worth of spells first)
-1 mana draw 2, 2 mana 3/4 rush minion (have a card from a different class in your hand)
-10 mana 5/5 battlecry: summon 60 mana's worth of stats (have 6 x 10 mana spells in hand)
-2 mana 4/5 (this minion can't attack)
-0 mana 3/3 taunt (have a weapon with 3+ attack equipped)
-1 mana draw 3 cards (discard those cards at the end of your turn)
-3 mana 2/6 taunt (discard your cheapest card or have no other cards in hand)
-9 mana 8/8 deal 15 damage (your opponent must have taken no hp damage before playing this)
-2 mana draw up to 8 cards (have 8 damaged friendly characters)
-2 mana a minion deathrattle: summon a random 8, 9, or 10 drop (have a 7, 8, or 9 drop alive on board)
-7 mana 4/4 battlecry: summon any 2 minions in the game (have those 2 minions in play and adjacent on your side of the board already)

These are all effects that exist in the game at that mana cost but the important thing is that the drawbacks and/ or requirements are proportional to the impact they have. A 0 mana 3/3 taunt that typically comes out turn 3 or 4 isn't game breaking so it has a fairly mild requirement of just having a powerful enough weapon equipped (and if you don't do this it's just an extremely sub-par 4 drop). At the opposite end of the spectrum a minion with deathrattle: win needs serious costs and requirements so that's what it has.

My point being that just because a card does more than it should for the mana you pay does not necessarily make it overpowered or gamebreaking. Arguably the deckbuilding side of Hearthstone is all about finding ways to have your cards work together to be more impactful than they normally would be. To broadly say mana cheating cards are bad and shouldn't exist is daft. Perhaps pick a more specific area of mana cheating or, better yet, highlight which cards you believe are an issue and maybe examine the similarities they have.

For the most competitive it's tempo rogue. THIS seems to be best/ most popular list right now.

Tbh though I'd say just play burgle rogue instead, specifically the version with higher lackey generation and Togwaggle. It may not win as much but it gives interesting and varied games that are going to be far more engaging than spending a bunch of turns hoping for a Myra's draw to get you over the line after dumping your hand. One provisor though - it gets dunked on pretty hard by highlander hunter which is everywhere atm. I tech'd around this by adding a couple of Khartut defenders and now my build feels like it has a legitimate chance against any deck which is nice. Nothing worse than feeling like a game's decided before you even mulligan.

Hey can I get a source on it being "easily the most popular deck in the game". The sources I checked have minimum 2 decks above it in popularity (highlander hunter and murloc paladin), typically more. Also a quick look on HS replay at decks with 1000+ played games has the best performing version of quest shaman at just 39th so not much to suggest it's too powerful either.

The funny thing is you hit the nail on the head regarding the worst side of the deck - the direct damage allowing for wins that shouldn't be possible. That has nothing to do with the quest though (and you even describe the more positive and complex side of that quest reward) so idk what this thread even is.

There's actually a factual answer answer to this: it doesn't matter.

It only affects wild and the devs go between paying lip service to that mode and ignoring it entirely for months at a time. Point being that if a 68% win rate for secret mage doesn't prompt them do anything about it no amount of community discussion is going to have any impact.

Ok well putting aside the possibility that you made a mistake (which is honestly probably still the most likely explanation) Blizzard did mess up once a couple years back meaning a small number of players missed out on legendaries from packs. They acknowledged this and compensated those players with dust but it shows it's possible for mistakes on their to happen.

So my next best guess would be that you pre-purchased the upcoming expansion in that bundle which includes an Uldum legendary somewhere in the middle of those 41 packs. I could see that somehow messing with the pity timer (even though it certainly shouldn't) since an Uldum legendary has been added to your card pool even though it wasn't actually from packs. If that's the case it will likely affect others in the coming days/ weeks and it will be worth letting Blizzard know so they can fix it.

https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Card_pack_statistics#Pity_Timer

The most obvious possibility would be that your 41 packs are from more than one set. The pity timer runs separately for each set so if you opened say 10 classic packs and 31 Uldum packs in a row and didn't get a legendary that would make perfect sense.

Quote from Flavio_Pas >>

I played Conjured Mirage to reach rank 5 in a priest deck. Is a nice card.

Conjured Mirage Priest Unknown Deck by Flavio_Pas - Sep 2, 2019 View Deck String Export to BBCode Export to Cockatrice Export to MarkDown Export to Html Clone this deck
Minion (15) 1x Archmage Vargoth 1x Catrina Muerte 1x Zilliax 2x Psychopomp 2x Conjured Mirage 2x Convincing Infiltrator 2x Khartut Defender 2x Damaged Stegotron 2x Sandhoof Waterbearer	Ability (15) 1x Activate the Obelisk 1x Zerek's Cloning Gallery 2x Plague of Death 1x Forbidden Words 1x Mass Dispel 2x Mass Hysteria 2x Mass Resurrection 2x Penance 1x Seance 2x Shadow Word: Death
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 Why on earth would you run that over Bone Wraith? It's bad with Amet and can mess with your res pool for Psychopomp, Mass Res, and Catrina. I absolutely believe you can hit rank 5 with that list but that's off the strength of the other 28 cards in the list, mirage just seems like an absolute liability.

I think another issue worth mentioning is that this huge uptick in secret mages and subsequent increase in anti-secret tech cards means other decks that run secrets are currently utterly forced out of the meta. Hunter, paladin and, to a much lesser extent, rogues have effectively had their card pool shrunk in wild through no fault of their own.

Literally just crafted 2 Town Criers and Boom, Mad Genius yesterday as well after getting bored of quest shaman. I was wondering why I was getting such garbage discovers today but I guess that answers that. Classic Blizzard move to nerf cards/ decks in a way that avoids giving dust refunds.

Quote from ChildOfTheAtom >>

Quote from Battenberg >>

This is the card with a dismal 48.3% played winrate on HS replay right? A worse played winrate than Murloc Raider? Okey doke, sounds like a legit complaint.

 I would imagine that's because you only play it when your opponent has a lot of minions on the board, which means you're probably already losing. Played winrates can't always be taken at face value.

 So what if you mainly play it when you're "already losing? All that means is it was a dead card up to that point showing just how situational it is (as a tech card should be). It's not a card you typically want in the Mulligan that has significant bearing when played on curve and it's not a finisher which would be the two most common types of card with skewed played win rates.

Yes stats can't always be taken at face value but it's going to take more than this to convince me a card with a worse winrate than a neutral 2/1 vanilla minion is OP. 

This is the card with a dismal 48.3% played winrate on HS replay right? A worse played winrate than Murloc Raider? Okey doke, sounds like a legit complaint.

Interesting take. My personal feeling is that standard is better than it's been in ages. I've primarily played wild for a year, maybe 2, because I found the standard meta consistently had 1-2 utterly dominant decks that simply didn't get addressed but this xpac it's the opposite way round.

Wild has taken some hits this year as far as balance goes (particularly Snip Snap and Vargoth which have both had a severely negative impact there imo) while standard has some decent quests and highlander deck options (both of which I like) as well as a lot of viable options in general and none of wild's balance issues. 

Certainly I don't think it's accurate to there's only 4 viable decks right now. A few decks I've both enjoyed and had some actual success with include quest rogue with lackey generation/ togwaggle, regular quest shaman, quest mage (yes I actually had this working ok), and currently I'm on Zephrys quest shaman which I am really enjoying  (and historically shaman has been my least favourite class by far). But then there's quest priest, tempo priest, plot twist warlock, highlander hunter, combo paladin, quest druid, and Trump's highlander aggro paladin (which he was at top 100 legend with last I heard). Just an absolute wealth of options right now.

First observation - you aren't running enough healing/ taunt to stop yourself dying to anything aggro/ zoo (or even just midrange with a decent start). I run a Khartut Defender in my more typical burgle rogue and the difference it makes vs hunter and zoo is colossal (although with Spellbreaker making its way back into the meta this may fade, Spellbreaker also being a possible inclusion for this deck). I'd also consider Bone Wraith as an option to slow down early aggression from opponents. Thalnos would also be a fair consideration if you're going to run Fan (Evis is probably also a good call in that case too) as Fan alone is very often going to be "3 mana draw a card" rather than board clearing much of what's out there (if you want a better board clear Blade Flurry is fantastic with quest online, practically Swipe with +2 spell damage plus nice synergy with Deadly Poison). I'd honestly just drop Cable Rat and Togwaggle straight up. It's typically going to be way too hard to actually play him and trigger the battlecry and cable rat is a pretty bad card without lackey synergy. As someone already said shark is probably a bit slow and without the lackey stuff it'd be even worse although I could see an argument for keeping it given how useful doubling 'thief' battlecries could be for completing quest, Barista Lynchen may effectively do the same job in some games and could be a good alternative, hard to say for sure though. Also Togwaggle's Scheme is actually a possible option if you want to really go hard after control warriors. Yes it turns Zephrys off but you should have played him well before scheming something (ideally Tess) so it depends if one mostly dead card against aggro/ midrange (mostly dead because it activates combo and get you more Zilliaxes) is worth it to dumpster slow control decks for wherever you are on ladder.

Cards from your list I'd consider dropping; Cable Rat + Togwaggle for the previously mentioned reasons, Walk the Plank or Assassinate because Evis is better than both in most cases but keeping one in the deck to have more answers is sensible, Brightwing because FC is better and it's hard to justify running both, Spectral Cutlass has no business being in a quest deck (or any deck really now quest exists), and maybe Spirit of the Shark because it's one more slow card in an already slow deck but there's no denying how useful it is.

Tl;dr - My suggestions would be:
+ Khartut Defender, Blade Flurry, Bone Wraith, maybe Thalnos (to make Fan more useful), Eviscerate, maybe Spellbreaker and/or Togwaggle's scheme depending on what you're up against
- Cable Rat, King Togwaggle, Brightwing, Spectral Cutlass, either Walk the Plank or Assassinate depending on which performs worse, maybe Spirit of the Shark as it is very slow (could possibly be replaced by Lynchen for similar value).

Yeah Vargoth is pretty egregious in wild, especially in priest with cards like eternal servitude. Personally I'm still annoyed about Snip Snap, that card gives any class a way to otk any hp total with just one mech on board from as early as turn 6 (with the coin) or, almost as bad, put infinite stats on the board and you can potentially do whatever else you want with 26/30 cards in your deck.