Regarding Hearthstone ESport … have you ever watched a movie so terrible it actually becomes fun to watch because of the sheer disbelief feeling you are getting in return? That’s the feeling I get when I watch Hearthstone competitive matches. I was weirdly amazed to see a good amount of Yogg-Saron Hopes End … we all know how RNG that card can be and yet, almost every player had it somewhere in their deck roster. In other words, Hearthstone can’t be taken seriously. It catters to the mass by giving RNG such an impact on games, a rank 10 player could defeat a legendary player with a little luck on his side. Becoming a legend player becomes a matter of grinding.
I believe Faeria should find its identity and stick to it. Let Hearthstone keep the 5 minutes aggro fest matches decided by RNG and let us Faeria players enjoy good 10-15 minutes matches decided by good thinking. The board and terrain were a very, very good idea setting Faeria appart from all other online card games out there … but it’s a shame rush is so dominant and easy to setup right now, it kindda remove some of Faeria’s identity. Thinking is less and less important and getting your good draws (RNG) becomes the deciding factor when most players just race for face damage.
I believe that if rush’s overall power decreases, then games will become longer, and thus RNG will have less impact. However, it’s a tough call, as if you decrease it too much, then nobody will play it, and the meta will shift to a greedy fest (which devs don’t really want, afaik).
But I disagree on one point of your post, Hagen, which is that rush may not be fun to face in its current form (at least for most people, it’s a subjective PoV), but it’s certainly not boring to play (at least not more than any other deck), otherwise, there would not be that many players playing it continuously, no matter how effective it is.
I, for instance, enjoy trying to pierce my opponent’s defense, as long as it’s not too one-sided. The problem is that it currently is too one-sided, but the problem is not about archetypes, it’s about balancing, once again.
@Foxclear It is possible to be a rush player and require that the player think about what he does… Right now, players could be brain dead and still win by rushing.
Let me give you an exemple. I see you played a lot of Duel of Champions. Surely, you are familiar with the Hero card Myranda from the wizard faction. Her power lets you relocate one of your creature. I saw a lot of games where being aggressive could only get you so far (opponent has 5-10 hp left out of 20) and in order to squeeze those last few points of damage, you reeeeeeally needed to think about how to “pierce your enemy defense” and “relocate your creature with clever thinking” to attack through the hole you just created… all that while also thinking about ressource management properly.
I want those kind of rush deck in Faeria. Rush deck able to deal 10-15 damage in the first 5 turns easily, but quite easy to wall up against by turn 4-6. Then, force the Rush player to think in order to squeeze those last 5-10 damage through. As a result, I would give proper Tools to the rush player to piece through for those last few damage. Actually, yellow already have some of those Tools but unfortunatly, their rush cards are so effective that they dont even need to play them. How often did you relocate an enemy creature with Flash Wind so you could sqeeze through ??
In conclusion : I’m not against Rush, I just want that archetype to require a little more thinking. I wouldn’t feel bad being rushed down by a player outmanoeuvring me … but spawning haste and doing face damage is just sad.
Which is exactly what I said : it’s not about the archetype, it’s about its current power. If the best strategy is going blindly at the orb, then it’s not a good thing (at least according to me), which is exactly what happens in a mirror rush, btw. If the defending player is good, it requires a bit more of thinking where to put lands and what to do. Those games are already more interesting.
To further the comparison with Duel of Champions (which was indeed a game I played much), it’s like comparing Crag Hack, which was a rusher with barely any subtlety at all, with Myranda, llike you said. If the first one is more effective, why play the second except for fun, if you don’t mind losing 70% of your games to the first ?
Well, here that’s the same thing, it’s so effective that I usually don’t care about outsmarting my opponent, I simply blast him away, full stop. Which is why I don’t play Flash Wind in this archetype : it’s a great and interesting card, but not value enough to be squeezed in (it used to, when it costed 1f, no matter the target, but it was too strong at that moment).
The very crucial point was mentioned here, but not empathised enough. The problem is not the rush archetype. The problem is the haste keyword in a GAME WITHOUT INSTANTS AND INTERRUPTS. Seriously, this is just sad how card game developers do not see how fundamentally different this keyword behaves in their digital games without stack-based interrupt phases as compared to offline games with them. Currently in Faeria haste creatures are priced as weaker spells, yet they are actually stronger. For example, there is no 3 faeria spell with “deal 2 damage. If damages a God, draw a card”, because it is too strong, yet there is a 3 faeria spell with “deal 2 damage. If damages a God, draw a card and spawn 2/1 adjusted to the enemy Orb”. Amazing.
// Another point is the lack of defensive creatures. Defender of the Homeland is just laughable compared to the Axe Grinder.
Your example may still not be 100% accurate, but comes very close to it and dismantles the story pretty well.
The Axe Grinder vs Homeland (Security) on the other hand is just not fair. They function completely different, the Grinder being offensive and the Homeland being for defense. Main point however is, that the latter has taunt, which is why it’s not comparable.
Jeez, taunt, what will we do now? If only we could use some sort of conversion of the real value of a card to some sort of unified currency… oh well. Guess we can’t compare cards after all.
You could break it down to find out how the devs did it. Without having spend any time on it, it seems that you can sum the power and health with the amount of needed lands. From there on you would have to find out how they value the different keywords. All I can tell is, that some are clearly above the curve.
