Hearthpwn

My first thoughts is that the expansion is largely fun except for a small couple of HEINOUSLY bad actors

Number one is Sire Denathrius. This card just should not fucking exist. Ever. He is far too easy to power up for too many decks but ESPECIALLY abusable in Druid - and mind you, this comes from me playing PRIMARILY druid so far this expansion in order to win games. It is just way too easy to ramp, play a Capture Coldtooth Mine somewhere along the way to guaranteed grab my win con, start playing my Scales and Flipper Friends, and then just turbocharge the crap out of Sire for no effort, just playing the gameplan I want to play anyway, and from there set up a 60-70 damage instant win via playing him and Brann. Of course, part of the bad actor here is Brann, who I also feel is just a flat mistake in the current game environment, but he at least allows for more fun and explorative deck creation and synergies than Sire.

But even outside of druid, the card is just way too easy to turbo charge through little to no effort and then OTK with. And in the cases where you aren't OTK-ing with him, he for SOME REASON is also a 10/10 with Lifesteal, so in any game where I have to use him reactively, I am probably still winning the game because I wiped my opponent's board, gained 15-30 life back, and I have a 10/10 with further stabilizing potential remaining on the board. The card is a heinous design.

Second thought: Jesus christ, Freeze mage/shaman is still the single most boring deck to play against in the game, and they have too many tools available to keep a board nearly permanently locked down. Whenever they are around, they just incentivize the entire meta to devolve into degenerate face-and-burn or OTK strategies to be the only viable solution. I have said it time and time again, but the game should actively encourage the game and boardstate to be the main focus of ALL matches. Not the Majority. All. Every single meta where the tempo and board are rendered obsolete because it can always be answered in an instant, has devolved into the worst metas the game have ever had, and so far I fear that this expansion is once again rapidly descending down that road. I am not looking forward to it.

Good luck killing it on their turn specifically

Oh boy, just what druid needed, a 0 mana tracking! Sometimes with even greater upside! /s

At what point is blizz going to stop giving druid the most freaking absurd draw in the game to go along with their absurd ramp power?

Quote from SirJohn13 >>

Quote from Squiggly >>

The meta seems to be everyone rushing to complete whatever simple or elaborate kill plan they have, to even the discouragement of using any minions that are not part of said scheme.  

Quest shamans rushing to get double cast so they can burn with attack spells or summon multiple 10-cost minions each turn.  Elemental shamans going for otk with doomhammer or just barrage of face damage battlecries/spells.

Quest mages rushing to complete and get spell damage to burn down in a turn or two with remaining spells.

Quest warlocks mashing their hero power and self-harming quick as they can so they can kill with fatigue or dropping free 8/8s on turn 4 (which still happens even after the nerf).

Rogues rushing to shuffle their cards around ND discount them to then try and burst burn in a turn or two by drawing through their deck and hitting garrotes and other face damage spells (ideally with spell damage).

Demon hunters drawing as fast as they can, either to plop down (auto-summoning) big minions, or lots of fel spells.

Paladins piling all the minions they can into the field with every turn to either megabuff the ones they haven't put down yet, or otk with battlemaster and attack boost for anything that isn't immediately wiped.

Hunters going face with even more spells now and less reliance on minions.

Priests rushing in shadow form to kill with nicks and cuts.  Or quest priests as possibly the only class that tries to stall for as long as possible to complete the quest and then draw out the insta-kill card.  (I think giving an insta-kill to a class that has specialized in dragging out matches is bad too though, and still gives the sense of rushing to complete an ultimate weapon).

Warriors rushing out pirates to get that ship.

Druids sitting until they can double-summon 8-cost minions and armor (optionally resetting your mana before/after so you can't do anything), or spam the field with summoned minions and hope you don't have an aoe spell to respond with so they can otk.

Druids were nerfed before the latest expansion explicitly to reduce the frequency of 'non-games' where it doesn't matter what their opponent does/the opponent can't do anything, but now it seems like most classes are essentially hoping for the same thing.  Prep your killer combo first, with thanks to lucky rng, and pay only the minimal required attention to what the opponent is doing.

Many games have the sense of it being clear who is going to win by around turn 5 now (sometimes earlier), with the crappy part being that it's clear there was nothing you (or they) could have done to prevent it, based on rng.

 

 This post sums it up well: There are multiple viable archetypes, the meta is very diverse, every deck has a gameplan and tries to play accordingly instead of just preventing the opponent from executing theirs. Sounds great overall. Would it make you feel better about the meta if all decks were running some vanilla 3-mana 3/4s with the goal of trading on the opponents' vanilla 2-mana 2/3s?

The amount of viable decks is the single dumbest argument and metric that exists for evaluating the health of a meta and OCG/TCG as a whole, and should be entirely disregarded. It is absolute nonsense. In fact, in trying to use it as your metric, you have instead just made an attempt to counter an ACTUAL argument and metric for the health of the game: How much variability is there.

Right now, the game has only 2 different decks. I give 0 shits about whether or not the deck is a priest, a hunter, a paladin, mage, warlock or whatever. That's arbitrary, and it doesn't matter at all. In standard right now, there are 2 decks: Extreme aggro, or OTK combo. The reason for this, is ENTIRELY because of the strength of the combo strategies, and NOT of the strength of the aggro strategies. The extreme aggro exists solely as a countermeasure to the combo decks, because they ARE the only thing that can compete, let alone survive, against combo.

Hearthstone, right now, is fundamentally at a point where it has to make a decision - and only one of those decisions is right: Does it want the game to continue along this trajectory, effectively eliminating every single other deck in the game from ever having a remote chance, OR

Is it going to allow players to interact in more key fashions, in order for any sort of slower deck to have options to curtail the strength of combo decks.

They did a round of nerfs, nerfed the wrong cards, and the meta got worse as a result of a balance patch because blizz won't acknowledge that questlines are a cancerous concept, just like any quest that is good is cancerous.

There it is! It's here!

The single dumbest suggestion I have ever read.

Mountain giant would see literally 0 play in any sort of competitive environment in this day and age, the powercreep of the game has all but ensured that. Good luck staying alive for 4 turns against even the worst aggro/midrange deck, and against any control deck it is just a big dumb body that gets easily removed in a 1 for 1 trade because you've done literally nothing to pressure them prior to that point.

But hey, if you want to think the game is perpetually stuck in 2012, then go have fun. Shit card, will see literally 0 competitive play.

Double wrong. They're the same, albeit with balance changes done to them

Laughing sister is now 2 mana, Dream is 1 mana and only enemy minions, ysera awakens only hits minions now and costs 3, nightmare gives +4/+4 instead of +5/+5.

Quote from RepoMan0077 >>

Quote from Omsimilian >>

Quote from dushas >>

I play 1-2 days a week, and currently sitting at 6k gold. With the old system I usually had around ~3k-4k by the next expansion release. Current system is way more generous to people with limited amount of play time.

 

Quote from RomanKnight >>

I dont know why people complain, I have 7000 gold and I bought BG perks. I didnt invest a single dollar this expansion cycle. I feel like amount of gold you get has increased! 

 I have been playing 3+days a week and i have only 4.5 k gold,I call bullshit on 6000+ gold

 I only play 4 days a week and I have 7.5k gold. And I didn’t buy the Premium Rewards track.

I play just a little bit sporadically here and there every day (Like 30 minutes here, 1 hour there, a couple of games some other time kinda sorta deal) and I have over 10k gold banked up*. Level 155 or something, I believe, without buying the premium either. I bought the 80 dollar preorder for madness at the darkmoon faire, and then spent the 4700 gold I had built up - that's all the packs I BOUGHT. At the pace I am getting gold at the moment, I likely will not have to buy the preorder to get enough packs for the upcoming expansion.

*I do most (but not all. Probably around 85-90%) daily quests and all weekly quests. I just kinda-sorta either get them out of the way, or just casually go about them. I also never spend any gold whatsoever on anything after buying the initial 47 packs at the release of madness (I do not like arena/duels that much).

This absolutely beautiful monster of a comp that is borderline unbeatable (The ONLY thing I can think of is praying to RNGesus that your red whelps are actual gods.)

Edit: Added a "results" pic so people can see just how insanely huge stuff got. Mind every one that this is after these things have gotten to attack like 32 times in a row and already annihilated most of my opponent's board.