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October 31, 2024

Denathrius and Theotar Discussion/Writeup – August 18, 2022 at 10:11PM

I will preface this with that fact that I am not a professional card designer by any means, this is simply my opinion of a Hearthstone player who has been playing since release. Everything I write here is opinion and some rough mental math statistics, nothing more.

I have a few talking points to address in this write-up:

  1. Theotar feels much worse and is much harder to play around when compared to Mutanus or Dirty Rat.
  2. Theotar feels extremely bad to play against regardless of what deck I am playing.
  3. Theotar is symptom of bad game design.

Firstly, I want to look at some rough scenarios of Dirty Rat and Mutanus’ effect, which while I have been on the receiving end of both, I have never really been too jaded on. The main key factors with both Dirty Rat and Mutanus is that they can only hit minions, their effect is entirely random, AND it does not put the card they “take” into your opponent’s hand (and I guess also Mutanus costs quite a bit more).

  • Mutanus’s disruption effect can only hit minions so the ability to hold minions in hand to play around his effect is much greater. For instance, if I have on minion in my hand Mutanus will hit it 100% percent, then 50%, 33%, 25%, 20%, etc. depending on how many minions are in my hand. The key metric I would look at is 9 cards in hand. On average you might have 4 or 5 (around half?) and so Mutanus, a card that comes down on turn 7 only has about a ~20-25% chance of hitting any one minion. If I chose to hold more minions that this “average” then Mutanus becomes MUCH worse. Not to mention Mutanus and Dirty Rat just remove the card from you hand, Mutanus is obviously much better than Dirty Rat, as Dirty Rat can instantly lose the game if you’re not careful.
  • If we compare this to Theotar, the issue starts to become clearer. For instance, I can no longer play around the card by holding minions, I simply must hold a large number of cards in my hand, yet in doing so I only lower his chance to take a specific card by a little bit. Again, if we look at the metric of 9 cards in hand, Theotar has a 33% chance of hitting a specific card in your hand regardless of what you are holding. That is already higher than the average Mutanus effect will ever be. The real kicker is that this card can be played on turn 4 which is generally a point in the game where players have LESS than 9 cards in their hand, meaning Theotar has a much higher chance of hitting any given card. All Theotar has to do is hit a key board-clear or on-curve minion to completely wreck anyone’s gameplan. I recently had a Samuro taken on turn 4, which promptly lost me the game as I could no longer swing the board back. All I did was play minions of curve, had 6 cards in hand, and lost to my opponent rolling a 50/50. That doesn’t feel good for anyone involved.

Theotar feels bad.

  • o Like I said in the previous section, losing to Theotar’s effect feels bad, but I am also inclined to believe than winning with Theotar’s effect also feels bad as it is rather hollow feeling. If my opponent hits my Denathrius I am having a bad game. If my opponent misses an important card then they know they are most likely screwed and are having a bad time. No one wins. I recently beat a face hunter by taking his Aralon on turn 4 and playing it on turn 5. There wasn’t anything I did, or my opponent could do to change the outcome, I just high rolled and won on turn 4. There isn’t much more to say here in this section, I just find that Theotar takes away player agency and reduces the impact of decision making, which is something you never want to do.

Theotar is a symptom of poor game design.

  • o Like I said earlier, I largely agree with Theotar’s inclusion in decks to combat the popularity of cards like Denathrius. Yet there is something about printing a strong neutral, borderline OTK card that can be ran in any class, and IS ran in (almost) all classes, that screams “this was a bad idea.” Anyone remember Knights of the Frozen Throne when you could make a mostly neutral-card deck with Bonemare and Cobalt Scalebane? Currently on HSreplay (which can be a questionable source of stats) Theotar and Denathrius are at 40% deck inclusion rate (which by the way has increased by 5% form 35% over this past week). Basically, as a game designer, if you are having to print a card as polarizing as Theotar and swingy to combat cards like Denathrius, which are IN THE SAME SET, then maybe you shouldn’t print either one in the first place.

TL;DR: Theotar is hard to play around regardless of the deck you are playing and is a symptom of bad game design.

Also let me know what you think of the Write-up! I am pretty biased when it comes to Theotar so I am probably missing some counter arguments, so let me know your feelings.

submitted by /u/RomneyDesu
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This information was first published at https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/ws0cg2/denathrius_and_theotar_discussionwriteup/

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