If You Lose To a Discovered Card, Here Are Some Questions to Ask Yourself – May 1, 2023 at 09:48PM

Since the release of Voyage to the Sunken City and the advent of Mech Mage and Paladin, Discover has constantly been in the crosshairs of the average sort of player likely to make a post to the Hearthstone Subreddit when they lose. This fervor, whether it really is legitimate, has played a part in the recent Death Knight change.

Still though, people continue to complain. In the aftermath of the Death Knight changes, people were asking for the Scourge to have another Unholy Rune added to it to remove it from any potential Discover pool.

This isn’t about how or even if Discover should be changed or the cards with it toned down.

Instead, this is a series of questions to ask yourself after losing to a Discovered card that will hopefully calm you down and get you to step back from making a post you’ll delete after an hour.

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• Were you even in a position where you could have reasonably won?

Sometimes stuff played by your opponent acts as the final nail in a coffin rather than as the actual turning point. This is especially the case against Blood Death Knight. If you haven’t won by turn eight against that deck as the beatdown player, you almost certainly were not going to win anyway. The Blood Boil they discovered off their Ghost Writer or whatever on turn nine wasn’t the actual reason you lost.

• Was it unrealistic for your opponent to have already had a similar card in their hand?

Redundancy in deckbuilding is important, especially with more control oriented decks. You have a certain amount of removal, and even if the Spell Demon Hunter you played against found an Eye Beam off Illidari Studies or whatever, they probably already had a card in hand that could have accomplished something similar.

• How many other cards could your opponent have found that would have accomplished the same thing?

Just as decks will usually contain redundant tools, classes in general usually have several cards that will accomplish the same sort of thing.

Did your Mage opponent find that little bit of extra burn they needed to put you down? Well, the chances of them finding such a thing off a Babbling Book with so many damage spells in their spell pool is rather high. They didn’t really get lucky. They just played the odds correctly.

• What was the floor on the card they could have found?

This applies mostly to Concoctions and other, highly restrictive Discover pools. The Potion Belt your opponent played right before they, of course, killed a minion of yours and drew two cards wasn’t really random.

Other cards like Amalgam of the Deep tend to pick from rather small Discover pools as well. Amalgam targeting a Totem only picks from a pool of nine other minions. The realist floor of the card in such a case is extremely low, and the Totem Shaman player will probably pick whichever Shaman Class totem they found.

• Was it more that your opponent was generating card advantage than what your opponent found exactly?

Adding cards to hand in any card game is the most powerful thing you can do in a card game. Whether the cards are drawn or Discovered, it usually doesn’t matter. So long as the card can be worth playing, it is a valuable resource.

And as a game goes on, the player with a greater card advantage becomes more and more the favorite to win. In such a case, you lost because your opponent kept their hand more full than yours. They could have probably accomplished the same sort of thing if their Discover cards drew cards instead.

• If you lost to the Countess, did you lose to the exact cards they play or just the massive influx of stats on turn eight?

The Countess represents a massive tempo swing more so than a casino. Unless your opponent found a couple specific Legendary minions, the loss your suffered soon after was more about them dropping three massive minions for six mana total.