Hearthpwn

Eh, decks fall in relative power level over time. Libram Paladin in Darkmoon Faire was basically the exact same list as during Scholomance, but it completely dominated Scholomance and wasn't a problem in Darkmoon. As more cards get added the power level of your average deck'll increase, and unless Spell Mage gets more support it'll be phased out in favor of new decks with new tools.

There are exceptions to this rule, but it comes in the form of decks that can execute very specific gameplans - I think Warlock's going to be around in every meta that isn't hyper-aggro because Jaraxxus and to a lesser extent Tickatus give it a super-defined gameplan to win against Control. A "toolkit" deck like Spell Mage which wins because it just sort of has a strong card for every occasion goes away when a different deck's average card becomes better. 

You lose nothing from your collection. The old Classic set has rotated to just be playable in Classic mode. Some cards from that Classic set are in the new Core set, which you get for free. Since your gold Tirion was Classic, he's only playable in Classic mode, but you have a free copy of Tirion playable in Standard (a gold copy is also available through levelling the correct class up). Think of it as having a card called Tirion (Classic) which you got from packs and can play in Classic mode, and a card called Tirion (Core) playable in Wild and Standard. 

The cards that are in Core set change each year, so next year you might not have that Tirion (Core) anymore, but you'll always have Tirion (Classic) until you disenchant it. It's just not playable outside of Classic mode. 

Not sure what's happened with Clockwork Giant, but I'm betting you got something confused looking at the collection. Clockwork Giant is now part of the core set, so you should have an extra two copies of it, but your old copy should still exist. The difference is the old version is only Wild-playable, whereas the two free copies are also Standard-playable. Since it's a card from Goblins vs Gnomes it's not Classic-playable in eithet version. If you're sure that your old copy disappeared contact Blizzard, because it's a bug and shouldn't happen, but do double-check. 

I was playing around with Dudeadin earlier today, actually. I've only played 9 games with it so far, so it's far too early to say whether it's any good, but I am 6 and 3, one of the losses being to an absolutely godly Celestial Druid draw that any deck would've lost to. It's a bit of a janky hybrid build which runs all of the Dude synergy available in Standard (2 Pursuit of Justice, 2 Balloon Merchants, 2 Carnival Barker, one Warhorse Trainer, Lothraxxion). I thought it'd do badly against aggro so I included a copy each of Barov and Equality, 2 Consecrations, a Snack Run for heal, and 2 Hammer of the Naru for big taunts and some damage to point at their face late game. Then I noticed I was running a Demon in Lothraxxion and Elementals from the hammers, so I jammed Murgur Murgurgle and the new Alexstrasza so I could include N'Zoth (a card I have an unhealthy obsession with) to hopefully win longer games against control - I have beaten a Tickatus Warlock this way, but they sort of wasted their AoE on unthreatening dude boards since I guess they didn't expect I had the tools to make big boards. Alestraxsza has also won me several games - the deck seems to start falling behind hard when the enemy gets to about 10 HP, so having that bit of burst is invaluable, and people don't expect Paladin to be able to do 8 from hand through taunts. The rest is just generically good Paladin stuff (Righteous Protector, Knight of Annointment, Hand of A'dal, that sort of stuff). Oh, and one copy of Acidic Swamp Ooze, which turned one of my losses against a Secret Paladin from a stomp into a close match - not sure if it's worth.

As I said, I've not exactly played a lot with the deck, so I don't know how good it is, but so far it's performed pretty well and felt pretty powerful. It seems hard to stop early game Paladin buffing shenanigans if you're running enough Divine Shields, and late game your Hero Power often summons 2/1 or 3/1 dudes with Divine Shield, which can be pretty overwhelming on top of your Carnival Barker + Stand Against Darkness/Day at the Faire power turns.

Quote from Bengalaas >>

It probably stems from the fact that people lost faith to Blizzard as a whole.

Hearthstone came out in an age where we still believed in the company, when they showed that they care about the product first. Now Activision Blizzard is a company that is very clearly out of touch with the players, developers come and go, so we don't really know them or how much they love the game and there is a general sense of scepticism about anything and everything.

The fact that their communication skills are abysmal doesn't hurt either. Just look at the rewards track fiasco. A new reward system that was definitely better than the previous one caused such uproar simply because it was vague, unclear. People would go on and on about comparisons of the lvl50 rewards vs the total rewards of 4 months of grinding like that mattered because noone made it clear that it didn't.

The playerbase hasn't changed that much. Blizzard has.

 I strongly disagree. Blizzard as a developer may have lost a lot of its old respect (the Warcraft 3 fiasco, that mobile Diablo game, heck even stuff as far back as the launch of Diablo 3 has really tarnished the company's reputation as putting out highly polished top tier games), but the Hearthstone team has improved dramatically. People like to point to Ben Brode leaving as this big turning point where Team 5 fell apart, but the truth is since then there's been massive changes for the better. We get regular and fast nerfs, constant AMAs with the team, blog posts detailing their insights and card design philosophy, and even straight-up admissions that they struggle with certain parts of game design. I was shocked last week when in an AMA they admitted they had trouble printing high-cost cards that don't instantly win the game because they'd pushed the power level of lower cost cards too high. They were straight up pointing out the problems with their own design philosophy, which was unthinkable before Year of the Dragon. There is some stuff that could be communicated better, like just how much better the reward track system is (though frankly, people were just upset to be upset, plenty of people did math early on proving the reward track was better for most players), but overall Team 5 has moved in a massively positive direction. Used to be you'd get an announcement of an expansion every 4 months, one set of nerfs halfway through an expansion cycle, and complete radio silence for the rest of the time.

"Golden age" Team 5 let Naxx Undertaker Hunter, statistically the most powerful deck of all time, go unnerfed until after the next expansion came out. Can you imagine the shitstorm that would've been stirred up if we'd had to wait for Lunacy Mage nerfs for two whole months, let alone until the next expansion came out? This community threw more of a fit over a deck being broken for two weeks than the Naxx-era HS community threw over a deck being more broken for four months. I'm not even mad at this - Lunacy Mage deserved the outcry, and Undertaker should've had more pushback - but it definitely goes to show that the HS community has become quicker to anger.

This is a good thing to some extent, like getting the Kargal refund, and even making the reward track even more generous (which wasn't necessary at all, but it was definitely nice), but it also means there's people causing a lot of noise over a lot of dumb shit. The outrage over the reward track was misguided, the outrage over Tickatus risks causing a nerf to a card that doesn't deserve it, and the early outrage about Watchpost Rogue caused one of the dumbest nerfs the game's ever seen. The community's constant outrage can get changes for the better, but when it's over dumb things it risks making changes for the worse. If Blizzard had caved in and removed the reward track entirely, as a not small contingent of the community wanted, I'd have gone into Barrens with 3k less gold than I did. 

This is a genuine question. I'm not trying to be a smartass here, I would honestly like to know why some people don't just stop playing the game. It's clear that a decent amount of people on this forum have very serious problems with Hearthstone. I understand sticking with it for a bit. Barrens has been a disaster so far - this is the least fun I've had in the first month of an expansion since Gadgetzan - and I'm unhappy with it too, but there's been bad expansions in the past, and the game's recovered, and even had good metas since. It's more about people who have been consistently and vocally unhappy about the game for years on end, but who keep coming back to it. I am legitimately curious as to what your motivation for this is - it seems like Hearthstone consistently makes you mad, but you're still playing it. Why not just quit? There's plenty of great games out there that'd probably cause you way less grief. I don't know, I just don't think I could spend years playing a game that causes me as much anger as I see on this forum. 

Vanilla (now Classic) was the best meta - all classes were relevant, and the game was generally pretty fun and interactive (tm). Will probably play Classic next season, I didn't want to miss expansion launch meta and may as well go to Legend now. I played the most in GvG though, so that's the meta I had the most fun in. Un'goro and Scholomance (in that order) were the best since. 

Lunacy nerf is nowhere near enough. The deck doesn't need Lunacy to win, at all, and the card probably still makes it in at 4 mana anyway. Spring Water, Incanter's Flow, or Apexis Blast (or several of the above) needed to be hit, and pretty hard. I don't know why they wouldn't drop the orbital nuke on Deck of Lunacy - it's clearly meant as a meme card, why even make it possibly viable? Aren't they aware playing against its effect is zero fun for most players?  How about 2 mana: For the rest of the game, your Charge minions have +1 attacK?

Also unhappy with the Watchpost nerfs. They were only as effective because people don't know how to play around them. Mor'shan at 3/4 may as well have no text, since board centric decks just have enough damage on board to kill it on turn 3 anyway. Far Watchpost at 2/3 is probably a tad less bad, but it's still a damn load weaker. Also, guessing Kargal Battlescar doesn't get a dust refund for these nerfs, even though he's a lot weaker now because I don't think you're interested in running Mor'shan anymore.

Pretty happy with the rest of the nerfs, though. Pen Flinger's still arguably playable but nowhere near as annoying, Jandice feels about right at 6, and Sword of the Fallen is still super powerful but no longer as back breaking. Plus, I unpacked 6 total Swords of the Fallen on day one, one of them golden, so even if I choose to keep 2 I'm getting a real nice chunk of dust out of that.

I really wonder how many people who endlessly complain about Tickatus being the Control killer have actually played Control against Tickatus. Control vs Control doesn't mean automatic fatigue matchup. It's relatively common to end the match with more than 5 cards in your deck, at which point Tickatus may as well do nothing. Most of the time it's only the second Tickatus with the Y'Shaarj that has an effect.

Is Tickatus a powerful card in Control matchups? Sure. So is Rattlegore and Outrider's Axe and War Cache and having an Armor Up button. You can win against Tickatus decks as a pure Control deck with no combo win condition, it's a thing you can do, just play around the fact that they've got Tickatus - mulligan for Rattlegore in your opening hand, realize you're the aggressor in the matchup, don't just sit there being a Control deck and trying to react to their stuff, play minions proactively out to hit their face with. If the draw lines up in such a way that you can't kill them then have the backup plan of gaining five million armor to outlive them in fatigue.

Heck, even assuming Tickatus reads "Corrupt: If your opponent is playing a Control deck, destroy the enemy hero", all the card does is position Tickatuslock in the usual spot that Combo decks have taken: It's a matchup that's very tough for Control decks because it forces them to play the aggressor rather than sit there removing things all day. We've had Control and Combo decks in the same meta before. As long as this theoretical Control Warrior does well against the rest of the field it can still thrive even if it has a massively unfavoured matchup against Tickatus Warlock. 

Joy oh joy, this thread again. Not seen it a million times, nope. Well, let me just do the thing:

Low sample size
Confirmation bias (Edit: Ninja'd by an edit by OP - once again, no, a 15 match streak isn't enough data)
No the patent document doesn't confirm your conspiracy theory
How would Blizzard even implement this game rigging AI if they can't have Zephrys work half the time?
So what, is Blizzard skyrocketing the winrate of decks that counter yours just to screw you? Is every Control Demon Hunter matching into anti-Spell Mage decks?
You've put yourself into a pocket meta by tanking your MMR and are now facing people who all lost to Spell Mage a lot and are trying to counter it.

I'm probably forgetting a few, but I've yet to see convincing counter arguments to any of these points, in any of these threads.

I don't have much free time, and even if I did I still have something like 200 games in my Steam library I've not even touched, a lot of which I really want to play. Playing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice right now, it's preeeeetty good.

Hearthstone is a game people play for fun. Many people have different ways of having fun. I have fun playing homebrew meme decks for the first month of an expansion, and then grinding some form of midrange Paladin as high up the ladder as it'll take me, - whether we're in Scholomance and Midrange Paladin is the best deck and easy Legend, or we're in Descent of Dragons and Paladin is nigh unplayable, it's just the form of gameplay I enjoy most in this game. Some people have fun trying to maximize their winrate at all costs. None of these are less valid or "honourable", especially not in a game which provides the tools to minmax and focuses on a mode that's all about getting your winrate as high as possible as fast as possible each month. You may not like it (and I certainly don't), but not queueing Mage or Paladin right now is unironically a misplay, it's something you do that lowers your winrate. If you're trying to win as many games as possible, which is what Ranked is all about, not playing Mage or Paladin is the wrong move. Most importantly: None of this actually matters. Hearthstone is a game, it's not important. Let people come back from their shitty day at work and play a videogame the way they want for the few hours of day where they're allowed to do what they want. Them wanting to win isn't a moral failing. Get over yourself.

The archery example isn't even applicable here. I've seen the clip you're on about, and they're both clearly using expensive bows. What you're doing is showing up with a rubber band that you've wrapped around the edge of a bent toothpick and throwing a tantrum when the other guy hasn't done the same thing. Having a good bow is as much a part of their preparation as learning to aim. Sportsmanship and integrity isn't kneecapping yourself in order to be on the same level as an opponent who's clearly done worse prepwork than you (by bringing a meme deck to ladder when you're playing a top-tier optimized deck). In the case of the archery clip, it's avoiding punishing your opponent for something that was out of their control. Someone else in this thread brought up a much better comparison - skipping your turn after your opponent AFKs or DCs for theirs. 

For me it's one of the most frustrating expansions ever, because I think there's tonnes of interesting cards that pull you towards building a bunch of interesting decks - I don't think I've spent this long testing everything out since trying to play every Quest in Un'goro - but it's resulted in one of the least enjoyable metas of all time (I've been around since closed beta). It's not the worst meta in terms of balance (though it's pretty bad), it's the fact that a lot of the more powerful decks are no fun to play against. I'm not even convinced a Mage nerf would do that much, since Paladin and Rogue are also very clearly overtuned and irritating to play against to boot. Those balance changes really can't come fast enough, and I'm hoping they really hammer Spell Mage into dust - that deck is the antithesis of what I personally enjoy about Hearthstone, highly calculated minion-oriented matches.

I don't think the power level of the decks is as much the problem as how bad they feel to play against. Lunacy Mage has no counterplay not necessarily because it's that strong, but because you literally can't play around their cards - neither they nor you know what they hell they have in their deck. Secret Paladin runs into the usual secret deck problem where you can't play around their secrets because it's not like a Sword of the Fallen is picking the best one to cast, and even if they play it from hand sometimes it's just to fill mana - Oh My Yogg is a particular problem, since every time a secret comes in play you have to re-check whether it's Oh My Yogg and that often doesn't leave you with mana to clear their board, or if it does you've now cast one card check, are committed to playing a clear, and then your third card summons a 3/4 Galloping Savior for them, so it's not like you can get the board back. Special shoutout to having to watch the Pen Flinger animation for minutes on end in every match against a Paladin or Rogue - they really need to speed it up.

I'm still playing around with dumb and bad homebrew decks and climbing relatively alright (I'm hovering at about 50% winrate overall - usually a couple percent lower, but I have gone over 50% at times -, having played a decent chunk of Taunt Druid, Leoroxx OTK Hunter, and Lock and Load Malygos Hunter, all really awful decks), so I really don't think Lunacy Mage in particular is as insanely powerful as people say, but it is a very unfun meta to play in, which is really sad because this is the most fun I've had actually building decks in forever. 

Another possible explanation: Have you disenchanted the rares you don't have a full set of? Cards that you unpack and disenchant still count as "owned" in terms of duplicate protection, so if you have all the rares in a set, then disenchant two copies of one you're not guaranteed to open the card you just disenchanted, you're still getting random rares. I guess the way to think about it is duplicate protection is for unpacking cards, not for actually having them in your collection. I found this out the hard way trying to abuse dupe protection to get extra copies of recently nerfed cards for dust refunds, and I'm pretty sure it's been openly confirmed to work that way by the devs.

I got Warrior, Hunter, Mage and Shaman, and my other win counters went up by about a hundred each - Paladin, my most played, went up by like 400 wins. It's weird, because I barely ever play Mage, so I was very far away. I wonder if it's some kind of bug, or if it's something like Arena wins now count? I probably have a lot of those for Mage banked up since it used to always be the best class back when I mainly played that mode.