Oh my god why? We only just got rid of Flamewaker + Sorc in Wild and now we get the next best thing. This + Mechwarper + Galvanizer = a whole lot of free mechs to spam with Mecha-Shark for essentially a new Flamewaker deck that also develops a board. Mecha-Shark or this, or both, are SO getting nerfed before the expansion is a month old.
Perfectly fine in Standard only. In Wild Scabbs is the backbone of one of the fastest OTKs in the game (Pillager Rogue tends to kill around turn 5-6 with a good hand).
This seems soooo broken in theory, but in practice I'm not sure it's even that good. When will you have a big board and a large hand of stuff in an aggressive deck? Most of the time your board is full and your hand is empty. It's essentially only good for reload if you expect your board to get wiped, and then you'll have to have spent quite some mana drawing up cards first. If you have a sizeable board of murlocs, where this is at it's best you'd rather just play additional, synergistic murlocs or board buffs to end the game, rather than buff future Murlocs, if you even have any in hand. Unless there's some sort of combo where you flood the board with murlocs with just one or two cards, then use this to buff up a bunch of quick stuff with rush/charge, I'm not sure this ends up being worth it, as insane as that sounds.
Well argued. However, I would respond that the conditions aren't as different as you say. Sunken City, while part of a new year, also comes on the back of a string of powerful expansions just like RR did. The entire Alliance vs Horde cycle has yielded some fairly unhealthy designs, particularly on the Questline end. While my perspective is admittedly skewed on the topic as I'm a Wild player, I'd imagine these Questlines will continue to have a presence in Standard as well, and the designers will have to tiptoe pretty exensively not to give any of these Questlines any tools. We already know Hunter is getting some fuel for their Questline, and who knows what the Core set will bring to the others. In that environment, a new set has to be doing something fairly spectacular to present an appealing alternative to doing the same old from United in Stormwind and I just don't feel VtSS is doing that so far. It's self-contained mechanics mean that if the set cards underperform as they stands, they're pretty much dead in the water (lol puns) for the future as well cause they don't interact particularly well with upcoming sets. Perhaps when the 2021 sets rotate and the meta gets truly powered down, Sunken City may float back up in relevance (I crack myself up sometimes) but currently it feels dead on arrival barring a few exceptions.
Quote From dapperdog
If I get to play dredge throughout the next meta because the power level is weaker, and then subsequently in the next expansion dredge gets completely forgotten, is that really so much of a big issue?
It's not necessarily a problem for the expansion itself but it is a problem for the future. If design is this self-contained too often, the end result is a bigger part of your collection becomes redundant as new expansions release (moreso than usual), which in turn means higher costs for remaining competitive and a general feeling from the playerbase that they've wasted their money. That's the type of dissatisfaction you can't keep on accumulating for long.
As for Colossal, what I mean is...it feels somewhat like Jungle Giants. In practice the Quest is pretty meh in terms of power level even with the variety of tools Wild offers. It's bombastic in concept (stuff my deck full of giant monsters and draw and play 38 mana of stuff on turn 6-7) but in practice not that interesting, as your deck is often choking on big, clunky cards that rot in your hand if drawn before Quest completion, and you mostly rely on a handful of crucial, low-cost, high-attack minions to get your Quest moving. If those end up buried midway through your deck, your deck does very little. It's exciting, just impractical. A lot of these Colossal minions feel the same way. Xhilag of the Abyss is exciting in theory but the tentacles are never gonna last a turn and the EoT effect isn't impactful enough past the raw on-board stats. Colaque is just a giant idiot. Can be fun if you find ways to copy the shell etc. In fact all of the Colossal minions get pretty fun when you try some copying, mana cheating or bouncing shenanigans on them. It's really a Timmy mechanic through and through. And maybe they will make a splash as a top-end option, even with the Alterac Valley heroes being around. But they're more exciting by their size and by the Dane/Mark McKz/Roffle bombastic shenanigans they invite rather than sheer practicality in ending the game.
Probably an unpopular opinion (what am I saying probably, I'm going against the hype culture after all), but I think this expansion is going to have a Rastakhan's Rumble level of lasting impact. It may change things some for Standard (and do almost nothing in Wild) by virtue of there being very few sets in Standard on release, but its impact is not going to last past the second expansion. At least not from what I've seen so far.
Outside of the Colossal mechanic, which appeals to the Timmy players with its high costs and bombastic effects (bombastic, not necessarily that good or interesting), this expansion feels like it forces you to take a whole bunch of extra steps to get something kiiiinda ok.
The cards that put shit on the bottom of your deck are weak without Dredge. Dredge cards on their own are mostly weak without the bottom deck placement cards, cause they just adjust your draw. They don't draw you cards. They don't revolutionise your draws either, because you only put good cards in your deck in the first place. Being able to adjust which good card you draw is neat but neat doesn't cut it in constructed. There's a distinct difference between Dredge in Hearthstone and Scry in MtG, to address that comparison. We don't run lands in our decks, the outcomes of the filtration mechanics are not nearly as spiky. So only if there's something really strong at the bottom do you actually get a decent pay off with dredge. But then you're investing two cards into actually making your deck do something somewhat interesting. And things go very bad when you get one half of the pair and not the other.
The naga cards are mostly duds. They're absolutely horrifying as topdecks. Imagine you're running a spells+Nagas deck. You're one or two spells from activating a bunch of naga in your hand but you're out of spells. You proceed to topdeck useless, inactive naga for the next 2 turns. So now the shit you're drawing is useless until you activate it like 2-3 spells later (which you still haven't drawn) and the shit you're holding isn't getting activated either. Sure you can use dredge effects to put spells on top of your deck to save yourself. But then you're really just spending cards and mana to fix a mechanic. Remember the Spirit cards from Rastakhan Rumble? The cards that gave you a payoff or boost on something you didn't want to do in the first place? Naga + Dredge is kinda like that. With the spirits there were at least two outliers that did eventually start breaking stuff (in Wild) like a year or so later. I don't see that happening with Dredge (which essentially lives and dies with this expansion, bottom of deck shenanigans are not an evergreen thing cause they do nothing without Dredging) or with Naga (who really are just a minions+spells gimmick entering the world of Questlines).
Overall about the only thing coming out of this that's kiiinda interesting to me personally has been the Murloc Warlock stuff, cause that's something I've wanted to make happen ever since Seadevil Stinger came out.
I can already tell this is gonna be my free legendary, cause I can't imagine a world where I'm happy opening this.
If this wasn't legendary there could have been some potential for a weapon-focused strat, where you just remove everything your opponents play with spells and smash face with weapon. As legendary it's way too inconsistent to be a main strat and thus is pretty much useless. Now if this was in Rogue, there'd be way more potential with all sorts of weapons (Spectral Cutlass, Kingsbane, Self-Sharpening Sword, Swinetusk Shiv) since Rogue does a much better job capitalising on having a weapon up through all the poisons.
And I was so hopeful they were actually gonna come to their senses and mass-nerf the stuff they messed up in the last two years. Which is a lot. The game needs powering down. Recently Hearthstone has had what Magic experienced in the Urza's Saga (ok, not quite as bad, but the gist of it is there) and the only way out of this shithole for the eternal format is to nerf that stuff. Reducing the power level or increasing interactivity in the new sets fixes Standard (the Mercadian Masques solution) but won't fix what the old sets broke in a format where the old sets remain. It will just lead to new sets being continuously irrelevant in Wild.
This is something they've been doing pretty consistently lately: creating effects that should not exist. It doesn't matter what mana cost you slap on top of it. If it's sufficiently broken, it will find a way to be relevant. To list a few:
Hunter Questline - recreating the Raza Anduin effect, which also should not exist, but making it even faster...facepalm Warlock Questline - turning a class' downside into its win condition Warrior Questline - giving infinite value and infinite damage to an aggro deck...facedesk Shaman Questline - doubling from-hand burn damage in a from-hand burn deck...all in favour of interactivity! Darkglare - cause mana cheating was never an issue...facewall Incanter's Flow - cause mana cheating was never...sigh Runed Mithril Rod - cause mana chea....really? You nerfed it twice and it still sees play, devs, doesn't that tell you something? Stealer of Souls - cause mana... Celestial Alignment - cause...HOW MANY TIMES DO YOU NEED TO LEARN THIS LESSON? Parachute Brigand - apparently having Pirates start the game with +1/+1 on their first minion in Neutral wasn't stupid enough, so they doubled down on the stupid (literally, you can run twice the number of Parachute Brigands than you do Patches and they're twice as large)
Then there are the smaller offenders like: Polkelt - tutoring, except it also tutors for the rest of the game if you build your deck right Samuro - one-sided board-clear that generates board presence= so fun Flurgl+Tox - one-sided board-clear that...forget it Snowfall Guardian - board-stall that generates one-sided board presence...what an interesting twist on the formula!
I could go on. Pretty much the only way these effects become balanced is if the meta becomes such that those strategies are either too slow to remain competitive (the problem is not fixed, it's just hidden behind a fast meta...you can expect Questline Shaman to resurface the moment the meta slows down by about 1.5 turns) or there are even more broken ways to achieve the same effect (Darkglare vs Stealer of Souls vs Runed Mithril Rod).
And that's not even talking about the other broken shit that can be fine in theory but not with the mana cost they gave it (e.g. Raise Dead, Animated Broomstick etc.).
The Wagtoggle and Lich changes needed to happen. These heroes just automatically sailed through the game with minimal effort running Tavern Tier 1 builds till the engame. The tavern levelling system is there for a reason, you shouldn't be able to just ignore it and win. Both heroes were essentially on an entierly separate power level because they were guaranteed a top 2-4 spot every game. Now they're forced to play the game the same way everyone else does, with specific incentives to run Menagerie as Wagtoggle and pretty much anything with a gold advantage as Lich. It might effectively kill the two heroes in terms of power rankings but that had to happen. The only question is how far they'll drop.
On the buddy's tavern tier. The meter fills up slower the higher tavern tier your buddy is. Tavern 2 buddies come out lightning fast, Tavern 4 buddies are glacially slow.
Been thinking long and hard of the nostalgic feeling this miniset evokes. Felt so familiar. Then I realised: oh yeah, this smells exactly like TGT and Rastakhan. And gonna have about as much impact. This card would have been killer maybe two years ago. Not in the game we have today.
I'm really sad about Hamuul. He was one of the few things making Hogger Pirates a decent lategame option and overall allowed smoothing out the process of filling your board with the tribe you want once you were decided on a strategy.
As for the buddy changes, some of these are really great (e.g. Tickatus, Illidan, Curator, Elise, Guff, Aranna) but a lot of these don't feel impactful enough or won't achieve the intended result.
AFKay: You won't be anywhere close to having your buddy by the time your hero power activates so the process of catching up to the rest of the lobby won't really start until way too late. In addition, AFKay no longer has her dream opening of Deflect-o-bot + Iron Sensei and a lot of power has been moved to tier 4 and 5, so you can't really even make a tier 3 build with this buddy in mind. It's a throwaway and getting an extra +0/+1 won't change a thing, especially if the buddy itself isn't tier 3 to scale itself. IMO, the buddy should scale all minions that are higher tavern tier than it, and AFKay's hero power activation should partially fill the buddy meter. Otherwise, she essentially has nothing to offer, and will frequently chain-lose games until death after about two turns of her hero power activating.
Tavish: Tavish is still nuts and gets free wins off of a free hero power regardless of the buddy being a tavern tier higher. Tarecgosa + Crabby is still a major problem. By the time Tarecgosa becomes available, Tavish will already have the buddy even on tier 4 given the free wins and extra combat damage he gets off of his free (!) hero power.
George: Still toxic AF. Having to face down a board of 45/2s with divine shield is exactly zero fun and the only counterplay is tokens (Unstable Ghoul still doesn't win you the game because you're down a minion, you need tokens or to have health over the top of George's attack). IMO the buddy should simply be a body for permanent scaling off of broken divine shields, kinda like the tier 3 dragon except it would keep its stats. That way George has to actually work towards making a threatening, scalable board, instead of just sitting on what he has and spamming hero powers on garbage in the tavern.
Flurgl: Who cares about the buddy's stats??
Deryl: -1/-1! My day is ruined. What was this supposed to achieve? I'd be surprised if Deryl's winrate moves by more than 0.05 % after that change.
Tess: Way too inconsistent. Some buddies do absolutely nothing for you, others are outright broken to get for free repeatedly. I guess putting this in the middle of the buddy tavern tiers makes sense, so there is some upside of being able to nab tier 4 buddies (like Rag's) before your opponents even have them (similar to Finley) but the outcomes will still be kinda meh on average and, more importantly, you can't really afford to make a build out of buddies, so at most you are keeping one opposing buddy and then just cycling the ones with battlecry. Not awful, but given the number of useless buddies that essentially just equal 1 gold for you (like Illidan's or Maiev's), they could have given the dude a bit more stats as well so he's at least useful in combat while you sit and wait to get what you want. But Tess by nature is a lot about the luck of the lobby so I guess this guy is on theme, if not on par on power level.
Galewing: This buddy is still awkward as hell. The numbers on the flightpath turns and the progress given by the buddy just don't gel well at all. +1/+1 hardly changes a thing. This buddy is getting sold as soon as you are able to fill the board with synergies because it does so little. Even tripled it's questionable in effectiveness. If this allowed you to have multiple flight paths active at a time (1 extra base, 2 extra golden), it would be more useful. Constantly scale your stats while you wait for the other two paths to tick down.
Deathwing: About the only good thing about this buddy is that it will help you fill the buddy meter so that you can triple it, level, discover a tier 6 and sell it. Of course, your hero power already helps your opponents fill their buddy meters too, and almost all the buddies are better than yours, so you're still periodically assisting your opponents in beating you lategame while your reward is a tier 6 discover. What a bargain!
Sneed: First off, you don't want to play this thing early. You want to copy high tier deathrattles and you want to copy minions that already have a bunch of your hero powers on them. You won't be doing that on tier 2-3. More like tier 5-6 because by then you will have had the time to use your hero power a bunch on higher tier minions. So this buddy coming out earlier doesn't really do anything for you unless you are desperate for an option to stay in the game and have to copy a bomb or something. In addition, this being lower tier makes the effects of your hero power it copies worse. This is almost a nerf because of that.
Galakrond: Evolving the tavern has never been good. It wasn't good with Vashj, it wasn't good with Darkmoon Prizes, it's not good with Tickatus. And you get it as your buddy. As if Galakrond didn't have enough struggles. Secondly, this buddy makes no sense for the hero. Galakrond sits on low tavern tier for a long time. Evolving a board of tier 2s into random tier 3s won't get you anywhere so you'll have to either sit on this for a longass time (until you're tavern tier 5 which will take ages with your levelling curve) or you have to use it essentially as a free hero power use. Drop this on a board of tier 3s, make some tier 4s, hero power one of the tier 4s, next turn you're making it a 6. That's on par with the power level of...no buddy in the game. Even Galewing can probably get more out of their buddy than you.
Reno: This buddy is still only good when combined with like 10-11 minions in the whole game (8 of the Avenge minions, Gentle Djinni, Tarecgosa and Rivendare).
Honestly expected a bit of a bigger hit to Pirate Warrior but even this might be enough to give decks some breathing space. The hit to Odd Hunter is nice, not only do they lose a spell from their arsenal, which is already kinda having to make do with some suboptimal cards, but they just so happen to lose the best spell they had. That said, there are plenty of games where Odd Hunter doesn't get Rapid Fire and they still do quite fine. I'm hoping this might make the non-Odd version of the deck a lot more competitive, as that one feels a lot more midrangy and fair.
Also happy with the Incanter's Flow nerf, even though that only sees fringe play in Wild. It's almost as if effects like Incanter's Flow, Stealer of Souls, Darkglare or Runed Mithril Rod shouldn't be printed, given the thorough nerfing all of these cards received (and Runed Mithril Rod is still insane at 5).
The nerf to Sorcerer's Apprentice I'm torn on. On one hand, I'm happy that they didn't just nerf it by 1, which would have done almost nothing, on the other I wish they just changed the general discounting mechanics the same way they did with Echo. Just no reducing to 0 by static effects. That would nix Anacondra too which I'd be perfectly happy with. This is a pretty clear signal to me that they're just fine with Mechwarper, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Anacondra, Radiant Elemental etc. all enabling busted shit, they'll just slow down the outliers (after 2+ years of complaints). But these types of cards will continue creating problems in the future because the nerf simply doesn't future-proof the game. I am a little sad about losing Apprentice in Parrot Waygate Mage though. That deck was fun.
The nerfs to Rogue are sad for Wild though. It's not like Burgle Rogue or Tempo Rogue really have much going for them in the format, but chances are these will get unnerfed once they rotate and we can have them back. That said, what all this says to me is, with the top decks slowing down and Mage OTKs becoming a lot worse, we're about to see a lot of Pillager Rogues blowing people up by turn 5-6. Maybe they should have touched the other Scabbs as well. Curious what sort of innovation Mage will be forced to push now that they have to play a bit more fair.
It's not even great for PC players. If a platform owner is at the same time the driving force behind game development, it's pretty much always bad for the consumer because it's in the interest of the platform owner to push their platform every chance they get. The Age of Empires remasters have been a perfect example. They could have pushed those out on so many available Windows platforms. Nope, Win 10 only. You can expect the same treatment for everything that will come out of Blizzard moving forward. It won't be long until they say fuck Windows 10, time to push for people to migrate to Windows 11. As soon as they can get away with cutting off support for older platforms, they will. And nobody can say shit to them because people aren't suddenly start abandoning Windows altogether en masse for other OS. Microsoft has monopoly and that allows them the luxury of impunity.
Not sure how I feel about this. On one hand this gives you a lot of intricate things to do on your end even if your taverns have been shit and you've had zero triples to work with. On the other, if done poorly this might lead to a rich get richer problem where the heroes that are already strong and winning will be doing better on their objectives than the weaker ones, which will then earn them rewards that push them forward in power even more. And if the buddies wind up too powerful, you might also end up in a situation where everyone is just playing in their own little corner trying to tick off objectives while what plays you're making in the tavern plays second fiddle.
Oh my god why? We only just got rid of Flamewaker + Sorc in Wild and now we get the next best thing. This + Mechwarper + Galvanizer = a whole lot of free mechs to spam with Mecha-Shark for essentially a new Flamewaker deck that also develops a board. Mecha-Shark or this, or both, are SO getting nerfed before the expansion is a month old.
Perfectly fine in Standard only. In Wild Scabbs is the backbone of one of the fastest OTKs in the game (Pillager Rogue tends to kill around turn 5-6 with a good hand).
This seems soooo broken in theory, but in practice I'm not sure it's even that good. When will you have a big board and a large hand of stuff in an aggressive deck? Most of the time your board is full and your hand is empty. It's essentially only good for reload if you expect your board to get wiped, and then you'll have to have spent quite some mana drawing up cards first. If you have a sizeable board of murlocs, where this is at it's best you'd rather just play additional, synergistic murlocs or board buffs to end the game, rather than buff future Murlocs, if you even have any in hand. Unless there's some sort of combo where you flood the board with murlocs with just one or two cards, then use this to buff up a bunch of quick stuff with rush/charge, I'm not sure this ends up being worth it, as insane as that sounds.
Well argued. However, I would respond that the conditions aren't as different as you say. Sunken City, while part of a new year, also comes on the back of a string of powerful expansions just like RR did. The entire Alliance vs Horde cycle has yielded some fairly unhealthy designs, particularly on the Questline end. While my perspective is admittedly skewed on the topic as I'm a Wild player, I'd imagine these Questlines will continue to have a presence in Standard as well, and the designers will have to tiptoe pretty exensively not to give any of these Questlines any tools. We already know Hunter is getting some fuel for their Questline, and who knows what the Core set will bring to the others. In that environment, a new set has to be doing something fairly spectacular to present an appealing alternative to doing the same old from United in Stormwind and I just don't feel VtSS is doing that so far. It's self-contained mechanics mean that if the set cards underperform as they stands, they're pretty much dead in the water (lol puns) for the future as well cause they don't interact particularly well with upcoming sets. Perhaps when the 2021 sets rotate and the meta gets truly powered down, Sunken City may float back up in relevance (I crack myself up sometimes) but currently it feels dead on arrival barring a few exceptions.
It's not necessarily a problem for the expansion itself but it is a problem for the future. If design is this self-contained too often, the end result is a bigger part of your collection becomes redundant as new expansions release (moreso than usual), which in turn means higher costs for remaining competitive and a general feeling from the playerbase that they've wasted their money. That's the type of dissatisfaction you can't keep on accumulating for long.
As for Colossal, what I mean is...it feels somewhat like Jungle Giants. In practice the Quest is pretty meh in terms of power level even with the variety of tools Wild offers. It's bombastic in concept (stuff my deck full of giant monsters and draw and play 38 mana of stuff on turn 6-7) but in practice not that interesting, as your deck is often choking on big, clunky cards that rot in your hand if drawn before Quest completion, and you mostly rely on a handful of crucial, low-cost, high-attack minions to get your Quest moving. If those end up buried midway through your deck, your deck does very little. It's exciting, just impractical. A lot of these Colossal minions feel the same way. Xhilag of the Abyss is exciting in theory but the tentacles are never gonna last a turn and the EoT effect isn't impactful enough past the raw on-board stats. Colaque is just a giant idiot. Can be fun if you find ways to copy the shell etc. In fact all of the Colossal minions get pretty fun when you try some copying, mana cheating or bouncing shenanigans on them. It's really a Timmy mechanic through and through. And maybe they will make a splash as a top-end option, even with the Alterac Valley heroes being around. But they're more exciting by their size and by the Dane/Mark McKz/Roffle bombastic shenanigans they invite rather than sheer practicality in ending the game.
Probably an unpopular opinion (what am I saying probably, I'm going against the hype culture after all), but I think this expansion is going to have a Rastakhan's Rumble level of lasting impact. It may change things some for Standard (and do almost nothing in Wild) by virtue of there being very few sets in Standard on release, but its impact is not going to last past the second expansion. At least not from what I've seen so far.
Outside of the Colossal mechanic, which appeals to the Timmy players with its high costs and bombastic effects (bombastic, not necessarily that good or interesting), this expansion feels like it forces you to take a whole bunch of extra steps to get something kiiiinda ok.
The cards that put shit on the bottom of your deck are weak without Dredge. Dredge cards on their own are mostly weak without the bottom deck placement cards, cause they just adjust your draw. They don't draw you cards. They don't revolutionise your draws either, because you only put good cards in your deck in the first place. Being able to adjust which good card you draw is neat but neat doesn't cut it in constructed. There's a distinct difference between Dredge in Hearthstone and Scry in MtG, to address that comparison. We don't run lands in our decks, the outcomes of the filtration mechanics are not nearly as spiky. So only if there's something really strong at the bottom do you actually get a decent pay off with dredge. But then you're investing two cards into actually making your deck do something somewhat interesting. And things go very bad when you get one half of the pair and not the other.
The naga cards are mostly duds. They're absolutely horrifying as topdecks. Imagine you're running a spells+Nagas deck. You're one or two spells from activating a bunch of naga in your hand but you're out of spells. You proceed to topdeck useless, inactive naga for the next 2 turns. So now the shit you're drawing is useless until you activate it like 2-3 spells later (which you still haven't drawn) and the shit you're holding isn't getting activated either. Sure you can use dredge effects to put spells on top of your deck to save yourself. But then you're really just spending cards and mana to fix a mechanic. Remember the Spirit cards from Rastakhan Rumble? The cards that gave you a payoff or boost on something you didn't want to do in the first place? Naga + Dredge is kinda like that. With the spirits there were at least two outliers that did eventually start breaking stuff (in Wild) like a year or so later. I don't see that happening with Dredge (which essentially lives and dies with this expansion, bottom of deck shenanigans are not an evergreen thing cause they do nothing without Dredging) or with Naga (who really are just a minions+spells gimmick entering the world of Questlines).
Overall about the only thing coming out of this that's kiiinda interesting to me personally has been the Murloc Warlock stuff, cause that's something I've wanted to make happen ever since Seadevil Stinger came out.
I can already tell this is gonna be my free legendary, cause I can't imagine a world where I'm happy opening this.
If this wasn't legendary there could have been some potential for a weapon-focused strat, where you just remove everything your opponents play with spells and smash face with weapon. As legendary it's way too inconsistent to be a main strat and thus is pretty much useless. Now if this was in Rogue, there'd be way more potential with all sorts of weapons (Spectral Cutlass, Kingsbane, Self-Sharpening Sword, Swinetusk Shiv) since Rogue does a much better job capitalising on having a weapon up through all the poisons.
And I was so hopeful they were actually gonna come to their senses and mass-nerf the stuff they messed up in the last two years. Which is a lot. The game needs powering down. Recently Hearthstone has had what Magic experienced in the Urza's Saga (ok, not quite as bad, but the gist of it is there) and the only way out of this shithole for the eternal format is to nerf that stuff. Reducing the power level or increasing interactivity in the new sets fixes Standard (the Mercadian Masques solution) but won't fix what the old sets broke in a format where the old sets remain. It will just lead to new sets being continuously irrelevant in Wild.
This is something they've been doing pretty consistently lately: creating effects that should not exist. It doesn't matter what mana cost you slap on top of it. If it's sufficiently broken, it will find a way to be relevant. To list a few:
Hunter Questline - recreating the Raza Anduin effect, which also should not exist, but making it even faster...facepalm
Warlock Questline - turning a class' downside into its win condition
Warrior Questline - giving infinite value and infinite damage to an aggro deck...facedesk
Shaman Questline - doubling from-hand burn damage in a from-hand burn deck...all in favour of interactivity!
Darkglare - cause mana cheating was never an issue...facewall
Incanter's Flow - cause mana cheating was never...sigh
Runed Mithril Rod - cause mana chea....really? You nerfed it twice and it still sees play, devs, doesn't that tell you something?
Stealer of Souls - cause mana...
Celestial Alignment - cause...HOW MANY TIMES DO YOU NEED TO LEARN THIS LESSON?
Parachute Brigand - apparently having Pirates start the game with +1/+1 on their first minion in Neutral wasn't stupid enough, so they doubled down on the stupid (literally, you can run twice the number of Parachute Brigands than you do Patches and they're twice as large)
Then there are the smaller offenders like:
Polkelt - tutoring, except it also tutors for the rest of the game if you build your deck right
Samuro - one-sided board-clear that generates board presence= so fun
Flurgl+Tox - one-sided board-clear that...forget it
Snowfall Guardian - board-stall that generates one-sided board presence...what an interesting twist on the formula!
I could go on. Pretty much the only way these effects become balanced is if the meta becomes such that those strategies are either too slow to remain competitive (the problem is not fixed, it's just hidden behind a fast meta...you can expect Questline Shaman to resurface the moment the meta slows down by about 1.5 turns) or there are even more broken ways to achieve the same effect (Darkglare vs Stealer of Souls vs Runed Mithril Rod).
And that's not even talking about the other broken shit that can be fine in theory but not with the mana cost they gave it (e.g. Raise Dead, Animated Broomstick etc.).
The Wagtoggle and Lich changes needed to happen. These heroes just automatically sailed through the game with minimal effort running Tavern Tier 1 builds till the engame. The tavern levelling system is there for a reason, you shouldn't be able to just ignore it and win. Both heroes were essentially on an entierly separate power level because they were guaranteed a top 2-4 spot every game. Now they're forced to play the game the same way everyone else does, with specific incentives to run Menagerie as Wagtoggle and pretty much anything with a gold advantage as Lich. It might effectively kill the two heroes in terms of power rankings but that had to happen. The only question is how far they'll drop.
On the buddy's tavern tier. The meter fills up slower the higher tavern tier your buddy is. Tavern 2 buddies come out lightning fast, Tavern 4 buddies are glacially slow.
If they want to make things board-based they'd need to make midrange viable. A LOT of shit needs to change to make midrange viable.
From a Wild perspective, only the two Hunter spells are worth anything, otherwise this seems like a safe skip and 2k gold saved.
Been thinking long and hard of the nostalgic feeling this miniset evokes. Felt so familiar. Then I realised: oh yeah, this smells exactly like TGT and Rastakhan. And gonna have about as much impact. This card would have been killer maybe two years ago. Not in the game we have today.
So far this expansion seems pretty out of touch with the meta it's coming into.
Dat Onyxia hero power! Whew! I don't think we've had a hero power this shit since Sylvanas quit in disgust.
I'm really sad about Hamuul. He was one of the few things making Hogger Pirates a decent lategame option and overall allowed smoothing out the process of filling your board with the tribe you want once you were decided on a strategy.
As for the buddy changes, some of these are really great (e.g. Tickatus, Illidan, Curator, Elise, Guff, Aranna) but a lot of these don't feel impactful enough or won't achieve the intended result.
AFKay: You won't be anywhere close to having your buddy by the time your hero power activates so the process of catching up to the rest of the lobby won't really start until way too late. In addition, AFKay no longer has her dream opening of Deflect-o-bot + Iron Sensei and a lot of power has been moved to tier 4 and 5, so you can't really even make a tier 3 build with this buddy in mind. It's a throwaway and getting an extra +0/+1 won't change a thing, especially if the buddy itself isn't tier 3 to scale itself. IMO, the buddy should scale all minions that are higher tavern tier than it, and AFKay's hero power activation should partially fill the buddy meter. Otherwise, she essentially has nothing to offer, and will frequently chain-lose games until death after about two turns of her hero power activating.
Tavish: Tavish is still nuts and gets free wins off of a free hero power regardless of the buddy being a tavern tier higher. Tarecgosa + Crabby is still a major problem. By the time Tarecgosa becomes available, Tavish will already have the buddy even on tier 4 given the free wins and extra combat damage he gets off of his free (!) hero power.
George: Still toxic AF. Having to face down a board of 45/2s with divine shield is exactly zero fun and the only counterplay is tokens (Unstable Ghoul still doesn't win you the game because you're down a minion, you need tokens or to have health over the top of George's attack). IMO the buddy should simply be a body for permanent scaling off of broken divine shields, kinda like the tier 3 dragon except it would keep its stats. That way George has to actually work towards making a threatening, scalable board, instead of just sitting on what he has and spamming hero powers on garbage in the tavern.
Flurgl: Who cares about the buddy's stats??
Deryl: -1/-1! My day is ruined. What was this supposed to achieve? I'd be surprised if Deryl's winrate moves by more than 0.05 % after that change.
Tess: Way too inconsistent. Some buddies do absolutely nothing for you, others are outright broken to get for free repeatedly. I guess putting this in the middle of the buddy tavern tiers makes sense, so there is some upside of being able to nab tier 4 buddies (like Rag's) before your opponents even have them (similar to Finley) but the outcomes will still be kinda meh on average and, more importantly, you can't really afford to make a build out of buddies, so at most you are keeping one opposing buddy and then just cycling the ones with battlecry. Not awful, but given the number of useless buddies that essentially just equal 1 gold for you (like Illidan's or Maiev's), they could have given the dude a bit more stats as well so he's at least useful in combat while you sit and wait to get what you want. But Tess by nature is a lot about the luck of the lobby so I guess this guy is on theme, if not on par on power level.
Galewing: This buddy is still awkward as hell. The numbers on the flightpath turns and the progress given by the buddy just don't gel well at all. +1/+1 hardly changes a thing. This buddy is getting sold as soon as you are able to fill the board with synergies because it does so little. Even tripled it's questionable in effectiveness. If this allowed you to have multiple flight paths active at a time (1 extra base, 2 extra golden), it would be more useful. Constantly scale your stats while you wait for the other two paths to tick down.
Deathwing: About the only good thing about this buddy is that it will help you fill the buddy meter so that you can triple it, level, discover a tier 6 and sell it. Of course, your hero power already helps your opponents fill their buddy meters too, and almost all the buddies are better than yours, so you're still periodically assisting your opponents in beating you lategame while your reward is a tier 6 discover. What a bargain!
Sneed: First off, you don't want to play this thing early. You want to copy high tier deathrattles and you want to copy minions that already have a bunch of your hero powers on them. You won't be doing that on tier 2-3. More like tier 5-6 because by then you will have had the time to use your hero power a bunch on higher tier minions. So this buddy coming out earlier doesn't really do anything for you unless you are desperate for an option to stay in the game and have to copy a bomb or something. In addition, this being lower tier makes the effects of your hero power it copies worse. This is almost a nerf because of that.
Galakrond: Evolving the tavern has never been good. It wasn't good with Vashj, it wasn't good with Darkmoon Prizes, it's not good with Tickatus. And you get it as your buddy. As if Galakrond didn't have enough struggles. Secondly, this buddy makes no sense for the hero. Galakrond sits on low tavern tier for a long time. Evolving a board of tier 2s into random tier 3s won't get you anywhere so you'll have to either sit on this for a longass time (until you're tavern tier 5 which will take ages with your levelling curve) or you have to use it essentially as a free hero power use. Drop this on a board of tier 3s, make some tier 4s, hero power one of the tier 4s, next turn you're making it a 6. That's on par with the power level of...no buddy in the game. Even Galewing can probably get more out of their buddy than you.
Reno: This buddy is still only good when combined with like 10-11 minions in the whole game (8 of the Avenge minions, Gentle Djinni, Tarecgosa and Rivendare).
Honestly expected a bit of a bigger hit to Pirate Warrior but even this might be enough to give decks some breathing space. The hit to Odd Hunter is nice, not only do they lose a spell from their arsenal, which is already kinda having to make do with some suboptimal cards, but they just so happen to lose the best spell they had. That said, there are plenty of games where Odd Hunter doesn't get Rapid Fire and they still do quite fine. I'm hoping this might make the non-Odd version of the deck a lot more competitive, as that one feels a lot more midrangy and fair.
Also happy with the Incanter's Flow nerf, even though that only sees fringe play in Wild. It's almost as if effects like Incanter's Flow, Stealer of Souls, Darkglare or Runed Mithril Rod shouldn't be printed, given the thorough nerfing all of these cards received (and Runed Mithril Rod is still insane at 5).
The nerf to Sorcerer's Apprentice I'm torn on. On one hand, I'm happy that they didn't just nerf it by 1, which would have done almost nothing, on the other I wish they just changed the general discounting mechanics the same way they did with Echo. Just no reducing to 0 by static effects. That would nix Anacondra too which I'd be perfectly happy with. This is a pretty clear signal to me that they're just fine with Mechwarper, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Anacondra, Radiant Elemental etc. all enabling busted shit, they'll just slow down the outliers (after 2+ years of complaints). But these types of cards will continue creating problems in the future because the nerf simply doesn't future-proof the game. I am a little sad about losing Apprentice in Parrot Waygate Mage though. That deck was fun.
The nerfs to Rogue are sad for Wild though. It's not like Burgle Rogue or Tempo Rogue really have much going for them in the format, but chances are these will get unnerfed once they rotate and we can have them back. That said, what all this says to me is, with the top decks slowing down and Mage OTKs becoming a lot worse, we're about to see a lot of Pillager Rogues blowing people up by turn 5-6. Maybe they should have touched the other Scabbs as well. Curious what sort of innovation Mage will be forced to push now that they have to play a bit more fair.
It's not even great for PC players. If a platform owner is at the same time the driving force behind game development, it's pretty much always bad for the consumer because it's in the interest of the platform owner to push their platform every chance they get. The Age of Empires remasters have been a perfect example. They could have pushed those out on so many available Windows platforms. Nope, Win 10 only. You can expect the same treatment for everything that will come out of Blizzard moving forward. It won't be long until they say fuck Windows 10, time to push for people to migrate to Windows 11. As soon as they can get away with cutting off support for older platforms, they will. And nobody can say shit to them because people aren't suddenly start abandoning Windows altogether en masse for other OS. Microsoft has monopoly and that allows them the luxury of impunity.
Not sure how I feel about this. On one hand this gives you a lot of intricate things to do on your end even if your taverns have been shit and you've had zero triples to work with. On the other, if done poorly this might lead to a rich get richer problem where the heroes that are already strong and winning will be doing better on their objectives than the weaker ones, which will then earn them rewards that push them forward in power even more. And if the buddies wind up too powerful, you might also end up in a situation where everyone is just playing in their own little corner trying to tick off objectives while what plays you're making in the tavern plays second fiddle.
*Vomit*
Heavy breathing. Ok, now let's actually read through it.
"Together we will build a future where people can play the games they want, virtually anywhere they want."
As long as they are exclusively using the latest Microsoft operating systems and consoles.
*More vomit*