Hearthpwn

Curse warlock was already high up there with the most annoying decks to fight, as the entire deck literally only consists of answers - usually control decks have big attacks late game and the rest of their deck is built around surviving until they can play those cards, but curse lock is literally nothing else than answers to any kind of plays the opponent might have, plus an almost constantly full hand no matter what, and only kill you from passive logarithmically scaling damage COMING FROM THEIR ANSWERS -, but now renathal makes it so they don't even have to choose between different types of answers they want to focus on, they can literally just have it ALL.
So now not only do they have absolutely busted decks literally designed to counter *everything*, they can counter EVEN MORE things even more consistently AND heal up to even higher.

I am all for a more controlly meta, but by god PLEASE don't make curse lock the dominant deck, it's literally in the top 3 most tedious decks to fight against!

Quote from Fyrfytr998 >>

Half rant. Half observation.

When I need to win, I play decks that are generally considered “cancerous” by the general population and Blizzard rewards me handsomely with the wins I need.

When I want to have fun and try out other deck styles within the supposed meta, Blizzard MMR decides it’s time to match me up with direct counters to that deck, and feeds me losses. And I’m not talking meme decks or home brews. I’m talking other legit tier 1 and 2 decks.

It sucks that before you even face your opponent, you have to win the battle against the MMR first, then RNG second. Games where actual strategy come into play are few and far between.

Yeah it’s tin foil hat shit, but I’ve been playing long enough to see a pattern with Blizzard that doesn’t seem that far fetched.

 I've had very similar observations and in fact was reflecting on exactly this this morning.
There are two sides to this:

1. Since the first time i started playing again (after years of absence), mid-last season, my experience day to days has almost exclusively consisted of sessions of very solid and consistent winrate, good draws and good rng, then followed-up with the next session (either later that day or the next) being the exact opposite: pretty much impossible to get any synergy going in anything i play, incredibly terrible draws and rng, and opponents getting very consistent top-decks and insane randomness (to the point where it often feels like literally every single turn is the absolute most perfect turn the opponent could get, including every single hits from mecha sharks and stuff like that).

2. Every single time i get fed up with getting crushed by the majority of that one deck that is way too good against my deck, and that i try a new one that should be much better against it, i suddenly see almost exclusively new kinds of decks i've never seen before.
This also comes in the form of "new deck -> great 60%+ winrate -> then slowly descending into utter uselessness and literally not being able to to win more than 1 game out of 6 or so.

I have a very high suspicion that indeed, the MMR also affects deck matchups (pairing you with classes that tend to have a better winrate against yours), as well as rng, honestly, which feels to consistently sling back and forth between consistently good and then consistently terrible.
And it's absolutely infuriatingly frustrating in most situations... Even wins feel lame, half of the times, because they're basically caused by the opponent having that same case of the worst draws ever, while you're just getting everything perfect, and there's no actual thoughts or strategy needing to be put into it.

Quote from Fhionnuisce >>

My all time favourite deck will be my "Trio" deck featuring the Ascendant Scroll Quest, Deck of Lunacy and TAR (Evo and C'thun/Yogg didn't drop, you see). Wr was like 45% and I really only won consistently against Priests and Druid, Lock or Warrior depended on how I played around my randomly but mostly useless cards (Barrens wasn't out yet.) and surviving long enough to play Yogg Box and hero card then proceed to pray it didn't overdraw me with fatigue with skull, hand, overflow, nourish, ai....

The friend requests I got when I did win where worth being D, Hunter, and Rogues punching box.

Tl;dr — I love rng mage, never change it. I have fun playing it and chuckling when I lose to it, for I know that all in all? That was probably the first win the player had with their deck in like 5 games. 

 That's a perfectly valid point and example; the issue is that here OP isn't talking about a gimmicky fun deck that just farts funny things all over, they're talking about a deck that's literally currently tier 1 and played by, in my recent tracked experience, about literally 32% of players in D10. That's still a random mage deck, but that also happens to be incredibly hard to beat even when their big random spells get mediocre rng.

I just got a game a couple minutes ago where they played a 5 mana "20 mana worth of spells" card that did almost nothing but secrets and minion spells on an empty board, then a discounted "summon 2 dragons" for a 4/5 and 5/5 and then another 20 mana for pretty much no effect again, and they still won because in between those, they kept me entirely locked frozen, taunted, hero powered for 4 damage and they slowly killed me with just general chip damage. *That* isn't a "fun gimmicky deck", and is unfortunately by far not the only deck to feel like that when played against in standard rn.

Quote from Dakhrok >>

How much more fun is playing 1/1 turn 1, 2/3 turn 2, 3/3 turn 3, 4/5 turn 4, right?

Playing 6 mana spell turn 6, 10 mana spell with 10 mana.

That was Vanilla, you have to make so changes if you want ppl to keep playing the game..

 It is fun, because it means that the game is more reliable, and therefore can be understood better by both players, who therefore have to try and outplay/outsmart each other, which feels more engaging, interesting and rewarding.
Saying things have to be super widely swung around in random ways to be fun is like saying that chess is the most boring game in the world because there's no randomness in it.

Randomness can be fun and create funny and memorable situations, but when next to every deck relies on randomness to win, it makes for games like the ones you have against thief rogue:
- Mulligan is skewed because you didn't have any way of guessing what kind of deck you'd be fighting (so now everyone has to account for potential rogue in every mulligan, which is kind of a ridiculous effect for one class to have on all the others).
- You can literally never play around anything at all because that would mean playing around every possible available card in the entire game every turn.
- You could be playing very well, having interesting trades with the opponent and a decently well paced game, and then all of a sudden they pull out Colaque from a random card generator and replay it every turn, completely shutting down any answer you could even hope to have, and nothing at all could have prevented or signaled this from happening.

But beyond all of this, because granted, this can still be fun if that's the kind of games you like to play, the worst part of this, on which i absolutely agree with OP, is the fact that most current decks, and this kind of general philosophy in general, makes it so games are usually only fun for one of the two players.
One player will have lots of fun, pulling out huge Snowfall Guardian every single turn, constantly bringing back something similar every time the opponent manages to remove it, but the opponent in that time is just left with never being able to do anything at all. Summon minions -> can never use them, they just stay stuck on the board and might as well be dormant. Spells -> inadequate for big minions, or just simply not enough unless you're a warlock.
You just end up unable to play.
That's the exact same for big spell mages, who not only can pull out ridiculous amounts of mana for ridiculously cheap at random, but in the process can also freeze you completely, make your cards and spells unplayably expensive, and shut you down with gigantic minions on top of it all.

The problem isn't so much how random things are (though it is, too), it's how most of the decks, most of the meta and in general most of the current design philosophy, relies around making the game fun for only one player, while extremely frustrating and unsatisfying for the opponent. Even wins can be extremely unpleasant because of how tedious it was to get through that game.
Old HS was, more often than not (looking at you, face hunter), enjoyable for both parties during the game, precisely because of the reliable nature of it.

I'm not sure it really is an actual bug though; the hunter one is definitely an outlier, but otherwise, it kinda has to account for targetability, since it could potentially be used on any hero power. Again, on hunter one it feels weirder, as it's also direct damage, but in terms of consistency, it does make sense and could be a design choice

They swapped to hunter hero power to kinda abuse a "bug"/weird way the Reckless Apprentice works. Basically, it doesn't do quite exactly what it says; it actually only triggers the hero power for each enemy, and only if able to target, uses it on them.
So it basically fired the hero power twice (brann) per enemy, without the ability to aim it at them.

Thank you for the reply!
Yes i've been trying the irondeep trogg for a little bit and definitely thought of the peasant as well; i had also considered Vicious Slitherspear or possibly Wickerclaw, but trogg feels much stronger early game in every situation, while still being decent later, with the other two being mostly only good on early game and not that much later on. And the trogg already won me a couple of really cool victories; i especially liked the turn 1 trogg -> 2 Mark of the Wild -> 3 Spikeshell + trogg game i had lmao

Guff seems really cool indeed, i'd be really interested to try it out, and i hope i'll be able soon!

One of the most solid "kinda off-meta" decks i've tried!
I don't have Kazakus, Golem Shaper nor Guff Runetotem so i replaced them with Wildheart Guff and Park Panther, and swapped a Mark of the Spikeshell for a Mark of the Wild and still seeing 61% winrate.


(This is keeping in mind that the 27% mages were mostly big spell mages which are extremely hard to win against with this deck, and warlocks too)

I like the spikeshell, but i think the mark of the wild is fairly stronger, especially in early game, where having any 1 drop followed by mark of the wild is almost guaranteed to carry the game all the way to mid-game at least, whereas spikeshell is pretty weak on 1/1s, and as cool as the frostsaber combo is, i found it very rare to actually have a situation where pulling it off (would have) made a solid difference.
I have no idea how strong guff is, since i couldn't try him, but the park panther definitely pulled its weight every single time i drew it; it's an absolutely amazing card and i think it has a surprisingly very strong place in this deck!

I will say, i've been having some doubts about the Vibrant Squirrel, because as much as it's generally a strong card for token generation, it did, in many many occasions for me, caused me more harm than good, by either flooding the bottom of the deck (annoying with Aquatic Form), or being a very frustrating pull on turns where i would have wanted to Romp of Otters into Herald of Nature/Clawfury Adept, or getting in the way of a good Oracle of Elune (plus, with the amount of mages i've been encountering recently, they make a very very poor turn 1 minion). Additionally, i found that flipper friends already covers most of our needs to get the matriarch down to 2- mana.
So yeah idk what would be a good replacement, but i've been feeling like the deck could benefit from trying something else instead.

Anyway, thank you so much for the deck, it's really fun to play and much more solid than other versions i've tried recently!

Quote from 3nnu1 >>

Quote from Shadowrisen >>

Quick Correction, he is anything but "well meaning".  Very difficult to attribute positive intentions to a man who redefines "person of color" to include or exclude Asians as his personal soapbox demands.

 Since you are so good at making judgements about others. What would you say about an individual that continues to defend a corporation which has engaged in horrific behavior toward both their employees and their customers?

 I think you misunderstood shadowrisen's comment; they're saying the guy is a bad person, not defending him

While we're talking about "nerfs based on feelings", please someone nerf Serpent Wig already!
+1/+2 at least twice per turn every single turn, almost half of which costing 0 mana, is just incredibly absurd!

By default, that already makes any of their curved minions already out of reach in terms of hp, but priests already have so many cards to add hps! This card makes literally almost every single one of their minions permanently out of reach to kill if you don't happen to have perfect board clears for them every two or three turns, and the fact that you literally cannot do anything about this card being played every single turn is just infuriatingly frustrating!
Even +1/+1 would seem exactly as annoying for the exact same reason, and i feel like it should be changed to be only damage buff, and no health, so that it at least makes the minions killable sometimes just PLEASE

Quote from xskarma >>

Quote from Thex_ >>

Hi!
I was having a conversation in this post here and when i replied again, it marked my reply as spam, despite being barely a third reply in a conversation, and not having any sort of strong language. Could you take a look at it please? (I have tried reposting it a second time after it so it might be duplicated on your end - if it's there; i don't know how the system works)

 Fixed. :)

 Thank you!

Hi!
I was having a conversation in this post here and when i replied again, it marked my reply as spam, despite being barely a third reply in a conversation, and not having any sort of strong language. Could you take a look at it please? (I have tried reposting it a second time after it so it might be duplicated on your end - if it's there; i don't know how the system works)

Quote from Shipmen >>

Quote from Thex_ >>

So first of: exactly, you're a construction engineer. If a game dev came at you and told you you really need to throw weights at the wall as hard as you can to try and break it until you're sure it doesn't break, that'd probably sound stupid to you and obviously they don't know the reality of your job, right? So yes, that, but in reverse too.

But also, no, our job as game dev isn't to play our game. Our job is to make it. As i mentioned with the 8 hour work days part of my message, our job is to construct it. Again, yes every dev wishes they could know the game by heart as much as the most avid players do, but that's just not doable when you have deadlines to meet and producers trying to fit objectives into budget and time constraints...
Once again: a game dev's job is not playing games. Even game designers. They play games to get inspiration/comparison point, they play their own game to make sure to get the best feel they can, but at the end of the day, they have deadlines to deliver on.

You don't spend your time just chilling and walking around in your building to make sure it feels nice, you work on actually making it while making sure it stands up.

Sure that I have also to "spend my time walking around in my building to make sure it feels nice" if I don't have direct time to do it, I have to pay someone to do it (these are indeed technically called "punch lists" or "snagging lists"). You have to list all the defects, also only aesthetical and the construction company has to adjust them, otherwise, penalties. This was indeed the metaphor. Sorry because otherwise who have to do the tests? The consumer (the user)? Like Blizzard is doing? Because the dev already worked 8 hours? Ahahaha too funny. 

 I mean yeah, when you talk about paying someone else to do it, that's literally the job of QA (quality assurance), aka testers, and that's also similar to deferring to content creators. (And unfortunately we all know how activision treats QA, which honestly has an impact on almost all their games at this point...). The biggest difference i could think of right now between construction work and video games (especially live ops), apart from the obvious fact that you literally have the livelyhood of people in your hands and need to make entirely sure it's perfectly safe and up to code and all, is that in video games you are driven almost entirely by tight release schedules.

We (usually) work in agile workflow, which is basically a workflow where you have "sprints" of around 2 or 3 weeks, and each sprint has a set of objectives for that sprint. The purpose of a sprint is to have a "deliverable" at the end of it, that's a version that can be played and has as much of the features and new things as the sprint was intended to have. Then sprints are all working towards an "epic", which is the big release objective. So the point i'm making is that we're always trying to reach for a specific goal that we then move on from because we have other objectives to achieve. And the funniest part of all of that is that all of it is driven by executives above the whole team that pressure the producers to push for this and that release and get shit out the door to align with their quarter and stuff and usually those are people who literally barely even know what the game even plays like at all and just know what things sell in what circumstances and just want to push numbers up for their next quarter, with barely any (if any) view on future development, because "that's a problem for later". This last part is exactly why you see so much stuff like content releases that sometimes look like they clearly had no regards to what this means for the future of the game or whatever like that -> because they don't. Or at least the execs calling the shots don't.

Anyway, rant over. All of that to say: yes, devs and game designers don't have time to play the game that much because the priority of money-holders isn't in that, it's in innovation and new content. That's also what QA and/or R&D is for (which game designers can do some of, but again, isn't their job, or the priority they are usually given), but the former is unfortunately usually sacrified by idiot execs "because it costs a lot", without a care for the fact that less QA == less quality.
And yes, i derailed heavily, but my point to your message was somewhere in there i think.

Quote from Shipmen >>

Quote from Thex_ >>

As a video game dev myself (not at blizzard), i just wanted to add that devs very rarely actively play their own game because they do not have time to do that. Designers of course do a lot of personal testing of what they make, and how it fits in the general game, but you have to realize that this is a job; you have (~)8h work days in which you have tasks and objectives to fulfill within time constraints, you don't spend that time just playing the game to stay up to date with the meta, it's just not doable or realistic, unless doing it on your own free time, which, let me tell you, when you work on a game, you most likely want to clear your head off of it when you're back home (which is also healthy for designers to do, playing lots of different games).

So yeah, of course they try to get the best possible feel of the meta they can at all times, and of course everyone, including them, want to have the most objective view on the meta as possible, but you'd be surprised how much live-ops devs (have to) rely on content creators to stay up to date rather than personal direct experience.

 Sorry @Thex_ but this is another nonsense. How can you say that "devs very rarely actively play their own game because they do not have time to do that. " "you don't spend that time just playing the game to stay up to date with the meta". 

This is your job, these are stupid excuses. The game has to work, if not it is THEIR fault, there are no excuses. And this is not only related with dev, but in all jobs.

I am a construction engineer, I work more than 8 hours a day. If the building collapses and I tell you: well, you see, I worked more than 8 hours a day, I don't live there, it fell, I'm very sorry, these things can happen, I did my best. Are you pissed? It is more or less the same.

 So first of: exactly, you're a construction engineer. If a game dev came at you and told you you really need to throw weights at the wall as hard as you can to try and break it until you're sure it doesn't break, that'd probably sound stupid to you and obviously they don't know the reality of your job, right? So yes, that, but in reverse too.

But also, no, our job as game dev isn't to play our game. Our job is to make it. As i mentioned with the 8 hour work days part of my message, our job is to construct it. Again, yes every dev wishes they could know the game by heart as much as the most avid players do, but that's just not doable when you have deadlines to meet and producers trying to fit objectives into budget and time constraints...
Once again: a game dev's job is not playing games. Even game designers. They play games to get inspiration/comparison point, they play their own game to make sure to get the best feel they can, but at the end of the day, they have deadlines to deliver on.

You don't spend your time just chilling and walking around in your building to make sure it feels nice, you work on actually making it while making sure it stands up.

As a video game dev myself (not at blizzard), i just wanted to add that devs very rarely actively play their own game because they do not have time to do that. Designers of course do a lot of personal testing of what they make, and how it fits in the general game, but you have to realize that this is a job; you have (~)8h work days in which you have tasks and objectives to fulfill within time constraints, you don't spend that time just playing the game to stay up to date with the meta, it's just not doable or realistic, unless doing it on your own free time, which, let me tell you, when you work on a game, you most likely want to clear your head off of it when you're back home (which is also healthy for designers to do, playing lots of different games).

So yeah, of course they try to get the best possible feel of the meta they can at all times, and of course everyone, including them, want to have the most objective view on the meta as possible, but you'd be surprised how much live-ops devs (have to) rely on content creators to stay up to date rather than personal direct experience.