Back in Hearthstone...and I suck

[rcs619]

If you were competitive in G&G, I am sure you can still win plenty of games now (even without getting new cards).

Expansions since G&G did not add that many great cards and the meta has not change all that much (beside patron warrior). Aggressive decks still trump controls (unfortunately). Face hunter is still a plague.

Since most aggressive cards came from G&G anyway (and previously from Naxx), you should not be too much out of depth. You just need to adapt a bit.

I am morally against it, but anyone can make a face hunter deck to win its share of games. Mech mage and Zoolock are also still easy to build and works rather consistently.

I completely agree. And a lot of the really good GvG cards are commons and rares. The legendaries (besides, like, Mal'ganis) weren't particularly stellar. Blackrock mountain as an expansion also wasn't that great for the most part. Thaurissan is amazing, and the dragon cards are nice for people who want to try a dragon-themed deck, but it's not that essential. I would recommend that if people are going to drop any money, they buy Naxxaramus. Sludge Belcher, Haunted Creeper, Voidcaller and Mad Scientist are so good, and Loatheb and Kel'Thuzaad are legitimately cool legends.

For the most part though, yeah, you can still make a fairly mean deck purely out of cards from Classic and GvG. Mostly the commons, and then maybe you craft a rare or two to fill in. Mech mage is pretty dang scary, and zoolock can be good (although, the warlock legends are a lot more essential to the class, since most of the actual class cards tend to be so bad).

I'm going to disagree with you about hunters though. In the age of Secretdin, all hunters get a free pass. Face-Hunters, I'm talking to you guys right now. You are no longer the scummiest deck in the meta. Go face all day and live in shame no longer O:

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I'm going to disagree with you about hunters though. In the age of Secretdin, all hunters get a free pass. Face-Hunters, I'm talking to you guys right now. You are no longer the scummiest deck in the meta. Go face all day and live in shame no longer O:

Face Hunters are fine. So are secretdins.

The only really scummy decks are OTK combo decks. They're completely non-interactive. Did he get his combo? Yes? You lost. Did he not get his combo? You win! So excite.

About the only interaction you have through 6-7 turns is "how much card draw can I deny him", and even that isn't a guarantee of anything. It's why the old incarnation of Unleash the Hounds got nerfed, and it's why Miracle Rogue/Leeroy got nerfed. Now we have Patron Warrior.

It's boring as fuck. At least with secrets you can try and work out what's there, and there is interaction between the two decks.

If you wanna complain about Paladins, complain about them in Arena. It's just a non-stop spray of Uthers from beginning to end.

 

[SlumlordThanatos]

I completely agree. And a lot of the really good GvG cards are commons and rares. The legendaries (besides, like, Mal'ganis) weren't particularly stellar.

GvG brought us Dr. Boom, AKA the one non-adventure legendary that EVERYONE HAS.

It's the only really good 7-drop in the game.

 

[rcs619]

I completely agree. And a lot of the really good GvG cards are commons and rares. The legendaries (besides, like, Mal'ganis) weren't particularly stellar.

GvG brought us Dr. Boom, AKA the one non-adventure legendary that EVERYONE HAS.

It's the only really good 7-drop in the game.

Oh yeah. I forgot about Dr. Boom. Probably because he's such a given, lol.

 

[Unspoken_Request]

I'm going to disagree with you about hunters though. In the age of Secretdin, all hunters get a free pass.

Agree that Secretdin is worse, but this does not excuse Face Hunter.

The only really scummy decks are OTK combo decks. They're completely non-interactive. /quote]

I also agree that OTK decks are actually worse. but, again it does not excuse ultra-aggro decks. These are all shitty deck that suck the fun out of the game and players using them deserve the shame.

 

[rcs619]

I'm going to disagree with you about hunters though. In the age of Secretdin, all hunters get a free pass.

Agree that Secretdin is worse, but this does not excuse Face Hunter.

The only really scummy decks are OTK combo decks. They're completely non-interactive. /quote]

I also agree that OTK decks are actually worse. but, again it does not excuse ultra-aggro decks. These are all shitty deck that suck the fun out of the game and players using them deserve the shame.

Honestly, the people I hate more than anyone else in Hearthstone are those occasional one or two players who run a mill-rogue or mill-druid deck on the ladder. But then again, I play handlock, so they hit me extra hard XD

 

[Lightspeaker]

and it's why Miracle Rogue/Leeroy got nerfed.

To be fair I used to get really mad at Miracle Rogue back in the day. But then I decided "SCREW IT, I'LL MAKE ONE MYSELF!" and...actually I didn't hate facing it anymore. It wasn't as straightforward as it appeared. I learned to play it reasonably well (although I've never forsaken my Priest; I've mained Priest since beta, only ever ladder as a Priest) and it required quite a lot of judgement calling I found. Because the simple fact was you could only have so much removal and you needed to play in precisely the right way and a poor judgement could cost the entire game. It was quite an educational experience. I didn't stay mad at Miracle Rogue players anymore after that. There was a certain amount of finesse in piloting that deck.

Patron Warrior is just horrendous though. I've tried playing it and there are just so many ways to get value out of every single card that it made me feel dirty. There's no real elegance to the deck; throw stuff down and win. Same reason I've never liked playing Hunter. And the same reason after trying Zoolock for a week or two as a quest-clearing deck I gave up and decided to go with Demonlock which at the time was way less viable but way more fun.

 

[LetalisK]

Patron Warrior is just horrendous though. I've tried playing it and there are just so many ways to get value out of every single card that it made me feel dirty. There's no real elegance to the deck; throw stuff down and win.

Huh. Sounds like a reason for my scrubby ass to get back into the game.

 

[Lightspeaker]

Patron Warrior is just horrendous though. I've tried playing it and there are just so many ways to get value out of every single card that it made me feel dirty. There's no real elegance to the deck; throw stuff down and win.

Huh. Sounds like a reason for my scrubby ass to get back into the game.

I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not by much. You can pull off ridiculous numbers of win conditions with Patron Warrior. The "classic combo" is Warsong/Patron/Commanding Shout which is a 10 mana combo that lets you clear a ton of board and fills your side with a pile of 3/2s and 3/1s; though not a lot of Patron decks use Commanding Shout anymore, its not really needed and other cards work better.

The issue is because it just spirals out of control so easily with so many combinations of cards. Either by filling your entire side of the board with Grim Patrons or by charging up an absolutely gigantic Frothing Berserker. Even just a couple of Grim Patrons rapidly get out of control. If your opponent has had a lot of luck and can't shut his plays down you can be looking at something like:
T3: Warsong.
T4: Death's Bite and swing for 4 damage. Attack with Warsong for 2.
T5: Grim Patron. Inner Rage for two Grim Patrons (one 5/2, one 3/3) and swing with axe to give another 4 damage and two more Grim Patrons, all with charge. Leaving you on 4 HP on turn 5.

That's an extreme example, but unfortunately this kind of thing isn't as uncommon as it should be. Its so very easy to propagate Grim Patrons that unless your opponent is a Mage with double Flamestrike its really easy to just fill the entire board with them and that becomes impossible to deal with. Everything works SO well together in these decks that you don't need a specific "winning combination"; tons of the cards in them work well together. I'm kinda lucky I main Priest because at least I have the cheap and cheerful Shadow Word cards to help prevent my opponent getting a free Warsong down or something.

I probably shouldn't post this but...example:
http://www.hearthpwn.com/decks/224656-senfglas-1-legend-grim-patron-warrior

 

[RedDeadFred]

Ranked play got A LOT tougher ever since they introduced the rewards chest for the end of the season. Also, aggro decks didn't really get much of anything with the latest set, so the meta is slower in general. This means farming people with Face Hunter is no longer as easy as it was. Getting Blackrock Mountain is definitely mandatory since it added numerous cards that have become essential for a variety of strong decks. Also, don't play Shaman. They're quite underpowered you'll end up feeling like you're at a distinct disadvantage since there's just way too much RNG involved (crackle, lightning storm, totems) and overload screws up your curve.

Here are some cheap decks to play that should be able to carry you to rank 15 at least:
https://tempostorm.com/hearthstone/decks/tgt-face-hunter-sept
I know I just said that this is less effective but honestly, if you curve out and your enemy doesn't have decent answers right away, you'll still win quite regularly. Blackrock mandatory due to Quickshot.
http://www.liquidhearth.com/staff/monk/PowerRank/Sept1/Standard_Patron_Warrior.png
It's definitely not one of the easier decks to play, but it is absolutely the strongest. Blackrock is mandatory due to Emperor.
I'd recommend taking out the Shield Slam and putting in a second Fire Win Axe. Upper ranks of ladder always have lots of aggro so this is usually better. Plus, it's cheaper.
http://www.liquidhearth.com/staff/monk/PowerRank/Sept1/Orange_Hybrid_Hunter.png
A bit more expensive than Face, but it's quite a bit more consistent.
http://www.liquidhearth.com/staff/monk/PowerRank/June2015_4/Dog_Rogue.png
Thalnos is not mandatory, but the preps are. For this, you want to want to control the board and then kill your opponent with a big weapon hit to the face followed up with a Blade Flurry.

The only really scummy decks are OTK combo decks. They're completely non-interactive. Did he get his combo? Yes? You lost. Did he not get his combo? You win! So excite.

While this isn't ALWAYS the case (in that he'll still win sometimes even if he didn't get the exact combo), I agree that the deck is just absurd. It's funny because not only did they nerf Leeroy because of the OTK, but they also nerfed Starving Buzzard because when combined with unleash, it punished you for having board control. Now, Patron does both of these things, only much better and yet it's going on 6 months without a nerf. It's not even the Patrons themselves, it's how they enable Frothing to hit for 20 damage each on a regular basis. They should make Frothing a 2/3 so that you can't damage it 3 times. Even that might not be enough.

Edit: took out the easy part since Patron DOES actually require a good amount of skill to play to its fullest potential.

 

[rcs619]

I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not by much. You can pull off ridiculous numbers of win conditions with Patron Warrior. The "classic combo" is Warsong/Patron/Commanding Shout which is a 10 mana combo that lets you clear a ton of board and fills your side with a pile of 3/2s and 3/1s; though not a lot of Patron decks use Commanding Shout anymore, its not really needed and other cards work better.

The issue is because it just spirals out of control so easily with so many combinations of cards. Either by filling your entire side of the board with Grim Patrons or by charging up an absolutely gigantic Frothing Berserker. Even just a couple of Grim Patrons rapidly get out of control. If your opponent has had a lot of luck and can't shut his plays down you can be looking at something like:
T3: Warsong.
T4: Death's Bite and swing for 4 damage. Attack with Warsong for 2.
T5: Grim Patron. Inner Rage for two Grim Patrons (one 5/2, one 3/3) and swing with axe to give another 4 damage and two more Grim Patrons, all with charge. Leaving you on 4 HP on turn 5.

That's an extreme example, but unfortunately this kind of thing isn't as uncommon as it should be. Its so very easy to propagate Grim Patrons that unless your opponent is a Mage with double Flamestrike its really easy to just fill the entire board with them and that becomes impossible to deal with. Everything works SO well together in these decks that you don't need a specific "winning combination"; tons of the cards in them work well together. I'm kinda lucky I main Priest because at least I have the cheap and cheerful Shadow Word cards to help prevent my opponent getting a free Warsong down or something.

I probably shouldn't post this but...example:
http://www.hearthpwn.com/decks/224656-senfglas-1-legend-grim-patron-warrior

See, I actually tried playing Grim Patron to get a better understanding of how it works, and I absolutely hated the thing.

The thing about Grim Patron is that besides its big combo pieces (the warsongs, frothings and patrons themselves) a lot of the cards really are trash. The rest of the deck is just acolytes of pain, armorsmiths, gnomish inventors, dread corsairs and the like. Some very aggressive variations may throw in a Grommash.

Now, even with the acolytes and shield blocks (which not all of them even run), there actually isn't a ton of card draw. They've got the acolytes, two gnomish inventors and two copies of battle rage. If they don't get any value off of them, then they basically have no other substantive card draw. Patron also lacks any real AOE (very few of them even run brawl nowadays). The only thing the deck can really do is stall for time and try to draw into one of the two combo-waves it can use to kill you.

Patron is a very strong deck, and probably deserves some sort of nerf, but its eggs are also very much in two baskets as well, and if you know it's patron, there are some things you can do to mitigate. That's why handlock is very slightly favored, because it can create a board-state that makes it super difficult to propagate the patrons. There are always exceptions of course. I once saw a patron in a tournament blow through two heavy taunts (a 9/9 and a 5/10) and still do 24 damage to face all in the same turn to win. But it took very specific cards also reduced by one turn of thaurissan's ability prior.

The one good thing about patron is that it's actually a very difficult deck to play, especially if you don't have an ideal draw and have to figure out how to survive long enough to assemble your win-condition. So, a lot of patrons at the lower ranks tend to kind of flail and make a lot of errors.

Honestly my bigger pet-peeve is mid-range druid. They have *much* more versatile and easy to use tools than patron does, with heavy taunts, lots of silence, much more solid overall minions, and decent card draw via wrath and ancient of lore... and they just kind of sit there until they draw into force of nature + savage roar (a combo that requires only two cards, as opposed to the 4-6 patrons usually need), then kill you from half health or greater in a single turn.

 

[Lightspeaker]

The one good thing about patron is that it's actually a very difficult deck to play, especially if you don't have an ideal draw and have to figure out how to survive long enough to assemble your win-condition. So, a lot of patrons at the lower ranks tend to kind of flail and make a lot of errors.

Yeah its kinda difficult to play but that's more a case of knowing the deck.

In my experience with it you get punished a LOT less than in previous massive-combo decks. Because although the cards aren't great individually they're still substantially better than those in the past. And none of them are totally dead on their own. Even if you can only pull off partial combos you generally still get good value.

 

[DoPo]

Could someone tell me if Hearthsone became pay to win or not?

I don't precisely think so, so sort of no. Nowadays there are more cards you might want to include in your deck and that comes with having a larger global pool of cards. Some of the new cards do synergise slightly better with some older deck themes, so chances are if you had a deck that has been going since, say, official release, you'd want to swap some cards. However, that's not strictly necessary a lot of the time.

The adventure expansions, in particular, add some relatively solid card for relatively low cost. Well, "low cost" since they can be deterministically obtained, a opposed to the RNG factor that the card packs are. The gold isn't really that much - I've got both of them through just playing the game. So, more or less, I'd say that you could start playing the game and save up for the adventures to get some cards - Naxxramas, in my opinion, had some better cards, or at least they appeal more to my playstyle. Blackrock Mountain was more dragon themed which I tried but found meh.

Overall, I'd say that you can win without paying. Yeah, you'd need to put some playtime instead but as a F2P game, and furthermore, a Blizzard game, I guess that's normally to be expected.

However, I do want something to be noted - I don't think Heathstone is entirely veering away from being the so called "pay to win". With the expansion of the card pool, you generally have a harder time gathering the cards you need/want for a deck. That's concerning new players, here - when I started up, it was right at the start of the open beta[footnote]actually, slightly amusing story here - I got an invite for the closed beta. And that was on a Friday, the open beta came the following Monday.[/footnote] and I've been playing on and off since then on a relatively steady pace - I'd occasionally skip a month or something but would otherwise log and clear most quests. So, overall steady but not overwhelming play for which I got cards. When each of the expansions came, it the cards weren't mandatory but nice addition and my old decks still worked, so steady play slowly started to get me new cards. That's with each expansion. However, a new player would have a hard time starting up and the gulf between somebody like me, who has build up some cards, and a newcomer with none is going to be very large. The situation is going to get even worse with each expansion that comes out. So, sure, technically paying for card packs is not mandatory but it does leave people at a disadvantage - they could put some playtime in instead but as the list of available cards grows, they'd need more and more just to get on some stable footing. And yes, cheap decks and relatively effective decks exist but they are still just means to grind in order to get the cards you need for something else.

In summary, again - Hearthstone is not exactly "pay to win" but not exactly a game you just pick up and play on a whim and for absolutely free.