Two questions...
1. How would they rig it? Pair you up with an available player with a tendency to play a deck that counters yours, who is themselves not on the final match before Legend?
2. Why would they do it? Your path to Legend is no different to his, hers or mine and yet other people do get to Legend. So why is your progress being singled out?
Also, take some time to toss a coin a few thousand times. See if there are any sequences of heads / tails that look suspicious...
2
Buddies were a fun addition for a while but definitely glad it's not permanent. They made the game a lot messier, with a bunch of broken interactions
3
Just remember to tempo out the cookies vs. aggro
8
If mr. Smite is nerfed you'll get 1600 dust. Isn't that alone almost worth the 2000 gold? Seems to me buying the set is worth it whether it's nerfed or not
1
Right now the tempo of the 7/7's plays a fairly relevant part in the games ending a turn or two after quest completion.
If you went all out and made them 5 mana 1/1's instead it would definitely scale back the explosive finishes of those games.
But keeping the stats and increasing the mana cost instead is probably a better way of doing it.
4
Great! Hunter definitely needs more damage that can go face
12
I like the approach of buffing more cards than they're nerfing. Should lead to a lot more experimentation and shaking up the meta. Often nerfs just tend to change the powerlevel of the various deck rather than lead to new ones.
5
So Crabrider must be the neutral Murloc getting nerfed. My guess would be 1 less health. 4 health is just too hard to deal with that early
1
Having less polarized matchups should definitely be a goal. Playing a matchup where you have 30-40% chance to win is a lot more fun than one at 10-15%. But it can be a tricky thing to balance in a game where players deliberately develop counter strategies.
Personally I don't think a deck like face Hunter should ever be tier 1. It should be tier 2-3 and something that can be brought out to punish slower, greedier strategies.
A card like Tickatus is mainly problematic because it feels terrible to play against. It's winrate isn't that high. But another aspect of it is that it potentially locks out other control strategies, forcing the meta into a corner.
10
I think the powerlevel of the card is really high compared to something like Polymorph or Hex. It could easily be nerfed by increasing it to 2 mana or decreasing it to 2 missiles and it would probably still be a playable card.