Returning HS player with some thoughts – December 29, 2022 at 11:16PM

Hi! I was a former HS player all the way from beta where priest used to give taunt and freeze mage cost 1-2 less mana on every spell. I stopped playing after my first game against DH where I died turn 5 after getting repeatedly hammered in the face, and returned about 10 days ago to play the new DK class. Randomly had a Trump video pop up in recommended so I came back and gave it a go. Some stuff about me so you all know what kind of background my opinions are coming from:

• Former legend player. First time legend was reaching rank 2 with my homebrew miracle warrior and then said fuck it and metaslaved to legend.
• Currently D10 after 10 days, 4-5 hours per day (in reality, about 4 days of actual ranked time because i was doing jank stuff like testing DK, using the mage loaner deck to get school teacher, book of heroes, trying to go for the alterac valley cards using achievements, christmas parties etc).
• Haven’t played since Day 1 of DH release (3 years?)
• Watched some Trump videos and Rarran videos. Otherwise, never kept up with cards or meta.

After 1 week, I’m here to jot down some thoughts.

The good:

• Game is better designed. Like, MUCH better designed. Far less output RNG, buffs are more interactive, druid is balanced and no more “bullshit” (eg boom bot for 4 in the face, lightning storm low rolling on tunnel trogg, crackle high/low rolling etc.)
• No control autowin card forcing other control decks to be built suboptimally (looking at you elisyana)
• New player experience looks much more playable (looking from Trump FTP)
• Rewards track >>> gold from quests. I never experienced the old rewards track where Blizz was scamming everyone by claiming it gave more, but in reality gave 70% of what it used to and that was being generous.
• Returning player experience was really cool with loaner decks.
• Patch cadence is up by a lot. I remember when stuff like Patches would be broken for an entire year because balance patches were every year, and usually only targeted classic cards. Unfun meta.

The bad:

• Power creep. Not much to say here other than the best 1 drop was possessed villager, now its lingering zombie. That’s 50% more power and 100% more tribal tag with 0% drawback in a class with buffs… 🙂
• Damage from hand. Every 2nd game, I lose around 20 HP from hand. Around every 5th game, I lose all 30 from hand.
• Discovering damage. Cards are balanced because you can only run 2 copies. Too much targeted discover cheats this rule too consistently.
• Lack of soft counters. It was much better when you could warp your deck to soft counter the meta. Old control warrior used to gain enough armour to outlast freeze mage burn. Old controllock used to play 30 card v 30 card against other control decks, and outlast with gnomeferatu. Now, that’s impossible because A) damage is split 50/50 from hand and board, B) removal has not kept up with powercreep and C) you cannot run 1 win con because of excessive disruption.
• Card “packages”. I think card packages are actually a really good idea, but they are implemented poorly. Currently, it’s “one OP card carrying card package archetype” or “one huge payoff card” instead of soft synergies within a package. Synergies don’t have to be symmetric or transitive (eg A -> B -> C !== A-> C !== C -> A) which is responsible for power creep.

The consequence:

• 30 hp is no longer enough. When reach is around 15 hp with 8 mana from hand, thats 50% of your HP. Even the most broken combos back in the day was 14 for 8 (and then 14 for 9), and you could kind of play around that with taunt (ifkyk lmfao).
• No more “control”. You used to be able to build decks where you calculate turns ahead, allocate removal etc. Aggro decks would calculate board presence, play around clear turns, play to a certain win condition vs certain control decks (DK Rexxar etc.)
• If your deck cannot win by turn 6, it is not T1. This is the primary reason why control is dead. If a deck cannot highroll a win on turn 6, you are autolosing a certain amount of % winrate. Briefly looking at HSReplays shows evidence that supports this observation.
• When rating cards from now, we should consider that we are going to play it around 4 times.

Anyways, some jumbled thoughts spewed across a screen. It’s likely that some stuff is not clear, I’ll probably be around to clarify for a bit.

EDIT to bold some stuff. TLDR – read the bold