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What cards do we *need* to see in the top buckets?
The honeymoon hype for the new announcement has ended. So let's talk about some preventive measures to keep Arena balanced for the new format. Misbucketing of cards have been a staple since the system was introduced. Some cards are still misbucketed (Demonbolt, Omega Agent, Warpath) and takes ages to rebucket because of the math they decided to use. I'm not blaming anyone here. It's the reality and we can prevent these really obvious misbucketed cards via communication.
So what are cards in the old sets they NEED to get it right to avoid an unbalanced meta for the new format? Let's start with the obvious.
- Abyssal Enforcer. This should be unanimous. Hellfire on a stick for just 7 mana. Makes Flamestrike looks tame in certain scenarios. The card should probably be microadjusted before the meta even begins as I certainly don't want to face this over and over again.
- Dragonfire Potion. Another fairly obvious target. Not much to explain. 6 mana deal 5 to non-dragons when dragons is scarce in this set so far.
- 4 mana 7/7. The card is basically better than Earth Elemental in every way possible and that's still in the 1.5 bucket for some reason. Also, there are barely no answers for this as loads of small Poisonous minions are gone (Basilisk, Gastropod). If there is enough counterplay, you can consider the 1.5 bucket.
- Death's Bite. No question. One of the best weapons to ever been released. If Blood Razor and Truesilver is in the top, so should this.
- Potion of Madness. Pls game. Pls. Pls. Pls. Just do it. Don't think about it's winrate, don't think about how specific the scenario has to be. This card has the same hate as MCT if not, worse. It should cost WAY MORE than 1 mana to start with, and makes minions with 2 atk or less nearly unplayable against a Priest. This is the ultimate feels-bad card in Arena. You know, at least Kabal Shadow Priest is 6 mana. At least Shadow Madness is 4 mana. At least Mass Hysteria is 5 mana, and so on. If you want me to feel bad at playing the game, at least get me to play the first 5 turns at least lol
More contentious ones that will go into 1.5 buckets nicely, if not the top:
- Kabal Talon Priest - 3 mana 3/7 with a fairly easy activation is just the nuts. Like, seriously. The amount of games you'd lose because the priest has a 1 or 2 drop into this is very high.
- Blastcrystal Potion. This card they'll get wrong for sure, but how wrong can we accept it to be? I think if they put this in the 2nd bucket I'll be fine with. But if it ends up in the same bucket as the present Demonbolt... YUCK. Like, they have Siphon Soul in the 1.5 and they still put Demonbolt in the 5th?
- Drakonid Operative. 5 mana for 5/6 with a bonus effect is crazy good.
- Shadow strike. Basically a smaller Walk the Plank. Only 3 mana. Card by itself isn't nuts but just comparing cards with similar effects it belongs in 1.5 minimum.
- Master of Evolution. Like Drakonoid Operative, competitive vanilla stat with a bonus effect that's easier to trigger than the Operative. They'd never put this in the top bucket but I can see it in 1.5.
- Ravaging Ghoul. Essentially an autopick mot of the time back in the old days and it just doe way too much. Like, Whirlwind on a 3/3 body for just 3 mana makes the card extremely overstatted. Even at 4 mana it should be playable.
- Keep moving Warpath up a bucket. Bottom of 2nd bucket and with Dragon Roar not in the next set, there is NO competition for it where it is now.
And that kind of wraps up my list. The card I'm also worried about is Mad Scientist. With the bucket system and not a random system, you're MORE likely to get draft secrets because they aren't in the worst buckets. Also, Mad Scientist is only good in 2 classes, Mage and Hunter. You know how Hench-clan Thug is broken in Rogue (why is it only rated 112 on LF...)? Because it's a neutral card that's only premium in specific classes, it will likely be put in a crappy bucket but with Mage/Hunter picking it the most. A scientist dragging out a 3 mana card from your deck and playing it is such an insane effect that I wouldn't even care about how weak the body is. So what's the solution? Don't put it in the 5th bucket. Put it higher. Put it in the 4th.
Any cards you think should belong at the top?
I'll give a shoutout to u/IksarHS as this is a very important topic to the Arena community and buckets will determine a significant aspect to balancing the game mode.
Iksar
Keaton does the initial bucketing for cards we don't have data on, then automation takes care of the rest. We spot check it for any obvious errors, but generally let the system do its thing.
We use the upgrade and downgrade math we do because those are the lines cards generally need to be in order to not be promoted or demoted back to the same bucket they were in.
Keep in mind the buckets change based on pick rate, so anything that seems like an obvious misbucket to you is most like just not obvious to the general population. We do our best to put the cards where they belong, but we'll try and be as quick as possible changing our hand buckets to use player data once enough is collected. Enough player data is probably 2-3 days for bucket changes and another 2-3 days for microadjustments.
Iksar
Most recently, we grabbed 2 weeks of data to do both steps then didn't do either again. Most of the time we don't have to, but I think it's likely we'll do a second microadjustment round before the next expansion releases.
In the new world, instead of taking 2 weeks of data for each step we'll try to take 2-3 days instead. It's much less data but there are so many games it should be similar output. If after the bucket adjustments and microadjustments are made we're seeing larger class disparities than we'd like, we'll do a second round.