Ben Brode on Evergreen Cards in Standard, Hall of Fame, Player Accessibility to the Meta
With the earlier announcement of incoming card nerfs, Ben Brode has been on reddit this afternoon responding to community questions. View the source below for the full comments or our quick recap.
- The goal with the nerfs was to reduce the ratio of Basic/Classic cards in Standard decks. It's too high.
- Ben thinks 10-ish cards is about right for what Standard decks should include when it comes to Basic/Classic cards.
- It was never the plan to not make changes to Basic and Classic cards.
- Hall of Fame is there to act kind of like a rotating core set that other games have.
- They are hoping to have something to announce early next year to talk about better player accessibility to meta decks.
Source Posts
Quote from Ben Brodewhen reading the justification for the change to Fiery War Axe (and, by extension, the Murloc Warleader change).
I just want to make it clear that those are meant to cover some of the thinking behind why we went with option A over option B - not why we decided to make a change to begin with.
In a world where we are looking at making a change, we felt like these changes are slightly less disruptive and that is upside, in a vacuum.
It's not a vacuum, obviously, but the goal here was to reduce power level because the ratio of basic/classic cards in Standard decks is still too high (they represent the biggest percentage of played cards, still).
Commonly, when we mention that we think about a wide variety of players, it can come off like we are focusing on new players at the expense of currently engaged players. That isn't the way we think about it. Usually we look for win-win solutions, where a change is good for the ongoing fun of playing Hearthstone and is also not disruptive to loosely engaged players. We've definitely made changes that are quite disruptive because it's very important to keep Hearthstone fun for engaged players. Just because we prefer non-disruptive changes doesn't mean we are trying to do that at the expense of other types of players.
Specifically, we made these changes for engaged players who are most affected by imbalance (deck diversity goes down the higher rank you are), and who are most likely to want to see the meta change when new sets come out or during the yearly set rotation. (Source)
isn't that the whole point why classic set is evergreen? not only that, basic cards solidify class identity. not a big fan of war axe, innervate, and warleader changes mr brode.
What do you think the right percentage of evergreen cards in decks should be?
I tend to think 10-ish cards might be right. We're way above that right now, and I think it would be better if it were closer to 10. (Source)
I mean remember when Kibler and a lot of people said that it's gonna be a mistake that you keep Basic and Classic in Standard forever?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUupMooIJYo&feature=youtu.be&t=4m17s
I really do want to believe that you want the best for this game yet so many times we have this "we said you so" moment. I love this game but honestly the evergreen sets policy is the biggest problem that holding back the whole design of the game. A rotating core set with reprints would make much more sense. But whatever, our opinion doesn't mean anything in the end.
Keeping Basic and Classic around with no changes was never the plan. We launched rotation with twelve nerfs, specifically because we knew we couldn't just have evergreen sets as-is. There is value in having evergreen sets, but there is a balance to it. Our Hall of Fame system is similar in some ways to a rotating core set. (Source)
bbrode how will you make the game accessible for new players if they cant build matadecks for even longer than now?
Hoping to have something to announce that will help with these problems early next year. We have a lot of work to do on the new player experience, but some of these problems can be mitigated by matchmaking, to some extent. (Source)
Read again what I have written there. I don't say that I spend a lot and I am not new player either! I am speaking for new players how they need a lot more than 50euros per year!
So much this.
Its odd how often people think they should be able to compete on ranks 10+ (which is top 20% players or so even if the rank number poorly describes it) without time and/or money investment.
I come from the old school TCG background and to me it is very logical that you start working from crap setup up and someday you can do the meta-defining, strong, decks.
I agree there is much work to be done to make the matchmaking feel better (like a second match against same person twice in row) but people really should work on the entitlement part.
Free to play in this game is dead, kinda sad actually. I mean play from Beta and i got 80+ lege cards, can play tier1 decks each expansion, but i would never ever recommend this game to friends.
The goal is to reduce the number of basic/classic cards in decks so new and most free to play players are forced to pay up for the expansions and packs.
Good job Benfuckingbrode
I would say that its time to go to wild, but then I realized, oh shit its in wild too...
Finally a change that addresses the Rich Player Experience.
Spreading plague should have gotten a heavy nerf but yet all they do increase its cost by 1 mana which makes almost zero effect, all aggro decks will still get stoped in place after druid drops down this shit, its basicly a IWIN card for druid against aggro, realistic and logical nerf would be to decrease minion health to 1/3 then that would be a nerf, that card is just complete cancer.
I don't know what you're talking about, it got a big nerf: innervate. Now you can't cheat this up that early against aggro, and when you play it, it might not do enough for you.
It doesn't completely break the card and it may still be overpowered, but pushing its possibility of being played back two turns is a pretty significant (one turn from cost increase and one from innervate nerf) nerf. Aggro decks can do a heck of a lot in two turns.
The new player experience is really a hardcore problem and i dont know why they dont fix it. Many people who started HS had a great fun in the tutorial and the wooden ranks and in the beginning you get quite a bit extra gold with those one-time-quests. They make progress and progress and when they start laddering they just get crushed by T1 meta-decks between Rank 20-18. THose poor Yetis and Harvest Golems dont stand a chance against Jades :/
true, I remembered as a new player how I was crushed with guys with T1 or T2 decks. It wasn't fun. To fix it, they should match people in ranked below rank 15 with the guy with the similar rank and card pool. That would make matchmaking more fun to new players as they would have a higher chance to get the opponent with the similar deck quality.
However, if they dared a bit more with card designs, synergies and archetypes...
we wouldn't be stuck with Classic-centric Miracle Rogues and Midrange Hunters.
Said otherwise, they cannot, in any case, HoF anything without solid new designs.
Which leads to the fact that novelty is ultimately rooted into solid new designs, not into holes.
They release an expansion in wich 90% of cards are pure trash with no real sinergy and then get surprised by people only playing 10% of the cards, but hey, according to BBrode we still haven't discovered the power of the almighty Meat Wagon and with KotFT we will see a new weapon Rogue archetype... It really makes me thing that they are totally disconected with the reality of the meta and the game, which leads to the unballance and poor variety in the game (cause the minute you try something new you get crushed).
Most of the cards are good,its just because they are control oriented leads to the fact that jade druid still rape any control deck without any chances and now with UI card draw control decks stands like 0% chance against jade druid.And tons of jade druids leads to one thing that can counter jades-aggro.And aggro isn't a problem here-people forced to play aggro because of jade druids and they should have smash their nerfhammer hard upon jade idol.Why we don't see jade shamans or rogues?Because their jades has limits and control deck played by skilled player have a chance.But then we have druids with infinite jades who don't give a fuck about safe plays around aoe or removals.We got geist someone might say?This is a dumb way to balance a card by creating cards that just destroys it.What if geist is my last card in the deck and because of dumb luck i am forced to lose the game?Jade idol must become: summon a golem or shuffle 3 cards that just summon a golem.
I'm looking to the problem by the other side, saying that the jades wont need a nerf if the power gap was filled with some other powerful cards that will lead to creating new powerful with good sinergies decks, because half or more of the cards from the frozen throne are unplayable on meta (you wont see them in any tier 1 or 2 deck), so instead of nerfing jades and aggro they could have released cards with good sinergies between them, instead of 1 almighty card and trying to balance with a "destroy" card (jades-->skulking or pirates..>golakka),.
NIce nerfs blizzard. Like druids cant cast turn 6 ultimate infestation without innervate. How do you even decide not to nerf the 10 mana spell that is so op so you can just cast it into your own face and still gain huge benefit? Try it with a pyroblast sometime. I guess i just have to leave my dream of playing control decks and stick to a bit less disgusting quest mage.