Hearthpwn

there are a marginal number of boards where lich king is strictly better than ragnaros. however there are things ragnaros can do that lich king simply can't. consider a wide board of smallish minions: at best ragnaros will kill a small minion or deal eight damage to face. maybe your opponent will trade off for ragnaros or maybe they'll just play another guy and go face and race. lich king in the same situation at least forces your opponent to trade off minions and replaces itself with a card that might just deal with the board but will likely do nothing.  now consider a game state where you've played aggresively and proactively. your opponent is at a lowish life and you play lich king. now an 8/8 is a threat and it nets you a card, but ragnaros can just drop eight damage and either win on the spot or put enough pressure on your opponent that leaves them drawing dead to the board or creates so many outs for you that there's just not enough time for them to draw out of the situation. so it just comes down to how you want to play.  I'd put lich king in slower decks that aim to win a long drawn out game. for players who want to play starting on  turn one, ragnaros might be the better fit. of course you could just play big priest and play with both lich king and raganaros; i imagine that being equally valid as well.

The metagame for a competitive event is usually very different from the ladder metagame. At tournaments all the players are familiar with the format and have a general idea of what the best decks are. One obvious strategy would be to just take all the best decks available and just use them. Unfortunately that could just end up being a mistake because everyone can see that coming and plan accordingly. They'll bring decks that have good matchups against those best decks. This creates a tension between the best decks and the decks that beat them but may not beat any given deck one can find on the ladder because the ladder has a greater variety of decks. Then each player tests and decides what their optimal decks should be and in testing powerful decks though not popular decks like Quest Rogue can occasionally find their way into lineups because they may have favorable match-ups against the best decks and the decks that beat the best decks. Thus the ladder metagame and the competitive tournament metagame diverge and become two different metagames falling into two different equilibriums.

Alternatively you can also consider the competitive tournament metagame to be a subset of the ladder metagame that ignores all the random homebrews and rogue builds. It starts from a different initial condition thus it's equalibrium is likely very different from the ladder metagame allowing niche decks like Quest Rogue a better chance of being played; meanwhile in the ladder metagame Quest Rogue can usually be beaten by any relatively aggressive deck that can mount enough pressure to end the game before it can complete the quest or long game control/OTK decks that just ignore Quest Rogue altogether and win despite Quest Rogue completing it's quest.  So no one plays it on ladder.

And finally people could just be sick of playing Quest Rogue on the ladder, but because of incentives found in the competitive scene they'll be willing to play Quest Rogue if it will earn them money.

I would prefer properly developed cards or at least some caution when designing cards.  The same mistake they made with Reno they made with Baku and Genn. Making them neutral cards was an invitation to chaos. They set them loose on us basically demanding us to break them in every class possible. If they had started with a few class specific versions of Reno or Baku and Genn, they would have easily have seen how disrupting they would be to the metagame.  And it would have been so much much easier to nerf a class version of them.  Paladin is a problem change the text to a new hero power.  You can't do that so easily and specifically with Baku. Even Shaman ruining the format, change the text to battlecry plus draw the card start of game and mess around with its cost. It's basically impossible to nerf a neutral design like that for a specific class without making the card irrelevant. And this is something they know how to do. That's the method they used with quests and deathknights.  And people complained about them, so they just had to push their luck again with Genn and Baku. Go back to class legendary build arounds and push those to their limit because they're a lot easier to manage with a nerf.

LIch King. When you're behind Godfrey might be better, but on curve there are boards where you're just not going to play him; Lich King isn't too bad if you're behind either it always nets you a card and that card might be good enough to get you to parity.  When you're at parity Godfrey might put the board in your favor, but Lich King demands an immediate answer and nets you a card that might put you way ahead. And if you're ahead then Lich King always seals the deal, get two cards out of it and that's usually enough to win the game, all while Godfrey sits in your hand doing nothing. You might feel more secure knowing Godfrey might bail you out of a bad spot, but Lich KIng doesn't need you to be in trouble to hit the board and put in work.

betrayal is a dead card against one minion and against a wider board an experienced player can place their minions to minimize betrayal's effectiveness thus all other alternatives that are either always live against one minion and immune to minion placement are strictly better.

 Battletag: rargran#1674
Region: NA
Trade Only?: Yes you first

 all done...thanks k

Battletag: rargran#1674
Region: NA
Trade Only?: Yes you first

all done thanks h

these are interesting cards...all are well thought out, but it seems you've fallen into a complexity trap. it's relatively easy to conceive of an idea for a card and then add a bunch of text to it. i'd like you to try to simplify things. try a simple common that won't break the meta but will likely be appreciated by a relatively niche part of the hearthstone community. or try a vanilla minion that plays well in arena but will likely not find a deck on the ladder. or just new ideas in hate cards like golakka crawler or emp operative. if you want your designs to really stand out be ready with ideas that are more than just complex and interesting...have designs that look to the various segments of hearthstone players, be ready with designs that might be "bad" yet still have a place in the game, or just simple clean cards that don't require complexity. game design is more than just shiny new toys it's also those dull every game objects that players rely on. being able to design any and every kind of card required should make you stand out from a crowd of who only wants to offer some new thing. it may not be flashy but it is a necessary skill.

Battletag: rargran#1674
Region: NA
Trade Only?: Yes you first

all done thanks dshrpanel

Battletag: rargran#1674
Region: NA
Trade Only?: Yes you first

thanks complexity

I haven't been stuck. I just haven't had any motivation to play. Usually I just do my quests everyday and that's been enough to make a run to rank 5 but these time quests are too easy to pop and sometimes you can pop more than one of them and there goes any reason for me to play the next day. But then again even if there were regular quests this metagame just feels stale to me. The nerfs did shake the metagame up, but the metagame is still slow boring control decks vs other slow boring control decks. Yawn...I chalk it up to that then...the metagame is slow boring control decks and ranking up just feels like it takes forever. It may only be slightly more difficult than in previous months, but because of this slow boring control metagame it makes the grind feel particularly painful.

3 things

1
The play isn't horrible per se. It's possible penguin into hallucination was just the best opening available with a sub-optimal hand. A worse play might have been turn one pass turn two pass turn three pass. And the case can be made that your opponent misclicked. Soul fire on the your minion is defensible to protect the penguin.

2
Failing to consider playing the dragon on turn 4 is overly ambitious. Dragon plays around a possible hellfire one of the few ways you might lose this game. And your opponent is almost certain to trade anyway. It doesn't qualify as a bad play but it is less optimal when it is not an available option.

3
And finally your opening hand curved out to turn five. And that's just tough to beat when you're not on the play to begin with much less when you're behind from the start.

 Battletag: rargran#1674

Region: NA

Trade Only?: Yes you first

all done thanks c

It depends on what sort of plan you want to play...
Turn One: Deckhand + Patches Turn Two: Weapon Turn Three: Captain deals more damage and is likely best against control decks where you need to be as active as possible forcing your opponent to have the right answers for your threats within a narrow amount of time.

Turn One: Pass Turn Two: Weapon Turn Three Captain + Patches + Coin + Deckhand  is a line you might choose if you think you can win a longer game a more reactive game. I choose this line against some aggro decks and occasionally in the mirror.

Battletag: rargran
Region: NA
Trade Only?: Yes

you first

all done thanks de