Current card pool - What direction?

General
#1

Hello,

First of all, congrats on the release and everything, I hope you will succeed in your goals and even more.

I have been playing this game for a year, I am what you call a ‘high-end player’ and went through different ‘meta’.
Any input from any other player regarding this subject is very much welcome and I am curious to hear your opinions on this.

I understand you want fast-paced and enjoyable games to watch. I understand watching control mirrors is very annoying for casters and viewers.
And I guess you succeeded in that: from my experience, most of the games are over within the first 6-10 turns of the game.

Though I am bit concerned about the direction you are heading to, regarding combo cards you give us. In the past, you told us you did not want combo/otk decks to be top tier ( caping windstorm chargers, shamanic dance, apex, …)

Yet, you have been adding more and more combo tools the pool every now and then which leads us to have access to the following cards:

  • neutral: wisdom, plague bearer, radiance
  • green: earthcraft, feed the forest
  • blue: failed experiment, shifting tides, lore thief, library, stormspawn, windfall, dream
  • yellow: soul pact, doomsday
  • 3wishes

I may have forgot some, of course.

Anyway, there you go, use these tools to build whatever combo/otk deck you like and you are very likely to have a consistant deck thanks to all these tools and synergies working together.

Here are the lists that come to my mind:

  • blue/red: Lord of Terror burn, control with 7 drops synergy and red AOE (hellfire … :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:)
  • blue/green: Toad OTK, ursus OTK, apex.
  • blue/yellow: disciple cycle events
  • green/yellow: haste units with buffs

All these decks have almost zero interaction with the opponent deck. Of course they end games by turn 6-10 ish, but it is so frustating to play against them.
They do their own shenanigans and you cant really prevent them from doing it. If they draw the nuts, they rekt you, whatever you do, whatever deck you play.
You keep releasing tools for these decks to make them consistant but you do not give any tool to prevent these greedy ‘abuses’.
I might as well play against bots then, it is kinda the same.

And I can’t even imagine what is coming next, since every new card is likely to fit in those deck ( oh, time of legends …)

So here is my question:
May we have an official feedback on these evolutions and the direction you want to go ?

4 Likes
#2

You make a very convincing point. I don’t aim to debate the core of your argument, which I consider sound, but merely to give a different perspective on the issue, given my experience with the game.

I’ve been playing for rather as long as you have, and although I don’t consider myself as good a player as yourself, I have a lot of experience playing Yellow and Blue in all their incarnations and reached top 30 multiple seasons. I’ve gone through all the meta changes even before (I believe it was) Ramora pioneered Toad OTK and talked about its virtues on reddit.

I tried to make Toad OTK work for myself back in the day, but quickly turned away from it. There are multiple reasons why.

  • I never really found the interactions in the deck very fun.
  • I never really liked simply not being able to win a game because of bad draws.
  • Overall my win percentage dropped from over 75% with YControl to little over 50%.

This brings to mind whether these decks are actually as consistent as you describe and if not, whether they offer any other contingency plan when the draws are poor. I don’t think we’ve reached the point where this is true of all combo decks, but I agree, more tools have been introduced to this extent.

While I’ve been making most of my arguments so far in regards to SuperToad, I agree that other combo decks seem better equipped at the moment particularly Disciple Events and Terror Burn. These decks have way more resources than they need to close out a game so that they can afford to squander some in the early game to stove off pressure from faster decks.

I think we’re not yet at the point of complaining though. These archetypes are very welcome in the matchup foodchain. It’s only a problem when their natural predators (aggro decks) cannot fulfill their duty. If combo decks didn’t exist, all matches would be drawn out value slug-fests.

1 Like
#3

I’m happy for combo to exist as tier 3 decks. I don’t really care if I run into toad OTK on ladder one every 30 games. Having said that, I do find disciple OTK pretty much like playing solitaire. Either I draw my removal or I don’t. It’s not fun at all to play against. There is very little thinking, just draw every turn and pray.

The smaller combos which make for broken engines are what really infuriate me. Failed + Lore Thief, Failed + Stormspawn etc. Like you say, it contradicts the idea of collecting and trying to maintain board control and that’s why this has become the engine that is driving many of the top tier decks right now.

Not much more to add, agree in general but it’s the broken engines that piss me off rather than the gimmicky stuff.

1 Like
#4

agreed, combo decks should have a room in the meta, but not tier1

this would be my favourite order for the archtypes power

  1. midrange
  2. control
  3. rush
  4. combo
#5

out of the cards that you mentioned i hate doomsday and the blue faeria ramp package the most

#6

I’m gonna fix that list for you

  1. control
  2. combo (not OTK but TTK, one turn you dent opponents life pool, then you have to find an opening to finish, basically pewpew/yellow events/meme magic style combo)
  3. midrange
  4. nothing
  5. nothing
    6-1000. nothing
  6. rush and otk’s

I blame windfall.
prayer too