Champs are supposed to win games guys its literally the reason they are in the game.
Quote From Nifty192
you guys seem to forget but it used to be if a champion leveled you would just auto win.
I agree in general about the importance of Champions to the game, and I definitely think the following two things should always be true about LoR:
Leveling up champions should matter. There have been lots of decks where the Level 1 version of a Champ was more than good enough to act as a win condition, and I think that spoils a key aspect of the game. Often that means the L1 version is too good.
It should be extremely hard to build a deck that isn't made better by including some Champion(s)
All that said, the idea that Champs should be auto-wins is clearly a bad design goal, for two major reasons.
First, it emphasizes linear gameplay. You need look no further than Quests and Questlines in Hearthstone to see exactly how building your deck around a hyper-specific win condition makes the game overly linear. Admittedly, the Hearthstone examples are more egregious because you always start with your Quest in hand, but the basic premise is the same - a deck built around drawing and leveling a Champion for the sake of some auto-win is going to ultimately lead to linear games where each player is just trying to outdraw the opponent. It might have been okay in the earlier days of LoR, but as more and more card draw is introduced to the game, this becomes more and more streamlined and miserable to play against.
Second, it fails to really suit the diverse roles of a given Champion. LoL has a wide array of Champion classes which describe how that champion functions at a high level. Braum is a great example of doing this right - he's a Tank/Warden champion, so he should be highly defensive and more useful as a support tool than a win condition. That's manifested through his high health/low attack statline and his challenger and regeneration keywords. He can win you the game over time by generating a ton of Mighty Poros, but he's more likely to just help you push damage to face by challenging your opponent's biggest blocker and forcing them to make bad trades.
There are probably classes of Champions (e.g. Slayer/Assassin types) that should auto-win the game, but I don't really think that should be broadly true about Champions.
This was exactly my question when I read that! I do expect the Dragon Aspects will stay in the game - can't very well have a Nozdormu day without Nozdormu, and those Dragons have been a central part of Hearthstone for a long time.
Of the other new cards, there aren't a ton you couldn't live without. Illidari Inquisitor is the one most relevant to any deck's win condition, while some like Nordrassil Druid and Crimson Clergy never really took off. Most of the ones that do see some play (e.g. Thrive in the Shadows, Bloodsail Deckhand, Taelan Fordring) could probably still see play in Wild after rotation, but aren't strictly necessary for the decks they'd support.
The advice of playing faster decks is certainly good advice. I've been playing since Whispers of the old Gods, and I've only ever hit legend twice because I rarely find time to play enough games to get there (it doesn't much help that I often prefer slower decks). Here's a simulator for how many games you'll have to play in any given season: https://www.primedope.com/number-of-games-to-reach-legend-in-hearthstone/. Even when you're starting with a 10-star bonus from legend in the previous season and playing a top tier deck, you're probably looking at an aggregate of 10 to 15 (maybe even 20) hours of gameplay to get back there in a given season. Drop down just one level to starting from Diamond 5's 9-star bonus and you could easily be adding several hours onto that.
At some level, though, it's all mental. If you win with your deck more than you lose, you'll get there eventually. And the fact is you need to play a lot of games to get to legend, so if the stress of losses makes you play less than you might otherwise without that stress you won't get there. Ultimately I decided to reorient my goals in the game away from ladder rank (which often leaves me stressed out about losses once I get to a high enough rank) and more toward overall wins and those associated rewards. Setting goals like "get all the golden heroes" has helped me to care less about ladder losses, which led to higher end-of-season rankings on average because I enjoyed playing more.
I struggle to believe that this new zone and bounties will be any different from what already exists - a long tree of boring (and relatively easy) battles followed by one boss fight that (at least in Heroic) requires a specific comp to win.
I think the biggest problem with the PvE is that most of your game plan is locked in at the start of a run when you pick your comp. There are some bosses where maybe you add in someone that can get Hunting Party (e.g. King Krush), adding a tiny bit of variety to your game plan for the last battle, but mostly you just do the same moves over and over again until you win. Playing a fire comp? Do a bunch of fire AoE. Playing a holy comp? Do a bunch of holy AoE. Your gear and comp are locked in at the start, so there's very little wiggle room to change what you're going to do throughout the run.
Fixing that probably certainly requires more varied battles that reward you for choosing more mixed or interesting comps at the start, but they also need to add more interesting power-ups along the way so that your choices feel more like they matter. Most of the buffs are just "here's a few extra stats or some bonus spell damage," and they don't push you to think differently about your comp or each run individually. What about a power-up that turns all fire damage into holy damage? Or a power-up that grants abilities some kind of combo effect (e.g. adding Arcane Combo: Summon a 0/1 copy of this merc to an ability or something wild like that)? Or something that lets you change the role or your merc for the duration of a run? Those are things that might actually make you think about changing which mercs get deployed and how you order your abilities to capture the value of those power-ups.
I used to spend time doing the daily tasks in Mercenaries, and tried to get into the grind for various comps, but just got super bored of it. For the PvP to be fun, you need to have tons of fully buffed Mercs, but getting there requires way too much boring PvE. How many times can you battle the same line-up of Furbolgs or Dragons or what have you over and over before you die of boredom? There's just not enough variety in each run, and I think that stems largely from the fact that the perks you get along the way are just not all that impactful. "Here's a stat buff for your Horde characters." "Here's a little more Arcane damage." Okay, great, but that doesn't really meaningfully impact the choices I make in game.
MarkMcKz has a video out of a Rokara OTK that uses Linecracker. I got the What Happens When...? achievement on the second game I played with it. (I would have gotten it on the first, but for Ice Block spoiling it.)
If you're just going on aggregate streaming numbers, I'd say the game was never really all that popular but has seen a sustained dip over the last several months compared to the last year: https://twitchtracker.com/games/514790
Just looked it up, and clearly I've been wrong for a while lol - no pity timer. Original source is on this Hearthstone blog post from 2017: "These packs use the new pack opening rules regarding duplication protection, but will otherwise have an independent chance of containing Common, Rare, Epic, and Legendary cards unrelated to any special rules (such as a guaranteed Legendary within 10 packs)." This is further clarified in 2020 to be broadly applicable to all Golden Packs (via a tweet by Celstalon: https://twitter.com/Celestalon/status/1263560197143801857
Yeah, bringing up Diana and Nocturne seems to have obfuscated my point - I meant to point to them as Champions whose design is anchored in one-off mechanics (outside of their original support packages there is exactly one other Nightfall card, so playing them means very limited deck building options if you want to level your champ).
It's true that Nightfall is used in ways which are thematically relevant to the regions in question, so it's far less egregious than other examples like the Tahm Kench self-harm package, but I think it still qualifies as an example of putting Champion mechanics and identity above regional identity in a way that hinders deck-building.
The one case for getting a 10 golden pack bundle would be if you had no cards from that expansion. The first legendary pity timer for any expansion is 10 packs (rather than 40), so you'd be guaranteed a golden legendary with a 10 pack bundle. That might be relevant since you could dust it to craft any legendary you want, but after you've picked up your first legendary from an expansion the 45 packs is way more value.
For what it's worth, I think you're right about how the Riot design philosophy works here - Champions are about fulfilling a particular fantasy regardless of their region. I guess it's a big part of why I got frustrated with the game, but for folks that have no issue with that, the game is probably totally reasonable.
As far as I'm concerned, if it were just Champions in isolation that broke the regional identites, it might be fine. But Champions often need Followers that directly support their unique game plan in order to work (e.g. the Diana and Nocturne need a lot of Nightfall units to work, and Rek'Sai's payoff is worthless if your deck isn't full of Lurkers). The result is that huge chunks of expansions are dedicated not to the core regional identities of regions, but to the Champions' identities.
Region identity is not based around a single mechanic but rather strength and weakness :
...
Finally it's not a realistic expectation to think that every champion is going to fit withing the confine of region identity, Demacia for example is supposed to be a anti magical, combat oriented region but many of their remaining champions are mages ( Sona, Sylas, Morgana )
This is exactly what I thought Riot believed, and is fundamentally the problem I tried to highlight in my original post. Regional identity takes a backseat to champion identity, which in turn leads to regional pair identities to ensure each Champion has enough support for their gameplan. It dilutes the unique feeling of any given region and weakens deck-building.
I'd also like to challenge you a bit on this idea that these remaining champions can't fit their regions simply because there's some surface-level clashing of themes. Demacia is all about nullifying magic, the righteous pursuit and striking down of their enemies, and winning on board with challenge and smart trades. With that in mind, consider this design that I just threw together for Morgana:
To be very clear, I didn't make much of an effort to think about balance here, I just wanted to flesh out how you might translate her LoL abilities to a Demacia card that's still honest to the region's identity.
Her Black Shield power becomes a Support SpellShield. There's not much SpellShielding in Demacia, but it's thematically relevant and clearly splashes in a bit (Captain Arrika, and sort of Towering Stonehorn). It fits the anit-magic themes and pushes the player to enter combat. Her Soul Shackles ability becomes a Grant Vulnerable for champions at Level 2. Vulnerable is another keyword that doesn't show up in Demacia, but since it's the inverse of Challenge and focused exclusively on champions it's still suitable to fit what Demacia does (i.e. targeted trades), and it fits better with the behavior of the LoL ability. Finally, her Dark Binding causes an enemy to strike itself, fitting with the fantasy of the ability and Demacia's common keywords (on the LoL website, it's described as "forcing them to feel the pain they've caused").
So, this is a mage/support card in Demacia that still highlights an anti-magic theme and pushes the player to engage in board-based combat, but is different enough to feel special/different from the more hardcore combat champions of Demacia without being so rooted in its own arbitrary abilities that it can't function without tons of specific card packages. It's not a perfect 1-to-1 translation of Morgana from LoL to LoR, but it does a good job without muddying Demacia's strengths and weaknesses, and it's a card that has broad enough application (by virtue of being a Champ killer) that it could see play in a variety of decks/archetypes.
Yeah, it's probably not worth trying. But I did want to confirm it, and now I believe I have. I got a Deathlord up to 34/34, and now my progress is 32. So anyone trying to do this today has to do it all in one go on a single minion.
I just tried a game or two with a deck that also tries to cheese extra copies out of Test Subject, but it's honestly very hard to get all the pieces you need to do much of anything before you get wrecked in Wild.
Okay, so the implication here is that the Gesundheit! achievement is currently only tracking the max value you've ever granted (in my case, 25 attack). Certainly seems like a bug (since the achievement text clearly reads "Give 200 Attack to minions with Bless."), but it's something that we can test further. Of course, it would be incredibly hard to get a minion up to 200+ health for this.
I agree with you that the two biggest issues Hearthstone has is card draw and mana cheating. Time and again those are the things that end up warping metagames. But I also think that's kind of tangential to desire expressed by the OP to see new archetypes buffed to have a chance. Central to that is the question of whether or not all archetypes should be equally viable in competitive environments, and the Mark Rosewater articles are still hugely relevant to that.
Quick aside - you equate Timmy with Control and Spike with Aggro/OTK, but that's not really correct. Quoting from the Timmy article: "I should stress that Timmies don't like cards because they're expensive. They like cards that are impressive, and many of the most impressive cards are big (in size or effect) and thus are expensive. In addition, let me point out that a card doesn't have to be expensive to appeal to Timmy. If a card has a fun effect or creates interesting gameplay, Timmy can get quite excited even for cards that cost one or two mana."
Timmies care about big, impressive plays (which often requires a slower metagame), but they don't need to be playing a strict control deck to get that. Burgle Rogue is a great example of this - Contraband Stash is absolutely a Timmy card, but the deck is really more of a midrange/tempo deck than a control deck. Many versions happen to run disruption cards because that's the only way to stay alive in a warped OTK metagame. Similarly, Spike cares about efficient plays that rack up wins, so while Spikes tends to gravitate toward aggro decks for their efficiency they're not strictly aggro players. (Hearthstone has had some degenerate Control metas - e.g. Bomb Warrior meta - and you can bet Spike was playing optimized control decks in those metas.)
So, why can't fun and competitive be the same thing? For some people they are the same thing, and some archetypes exist to support them. For some people they're not, and other archetypes exist to support them (e.g. Burgle Rogue). They can't all be buffed to equal competitive levels just because some part of the player base likes them. Now, should those "fun" decks like Burgle Rogue be more competitive than they are? Probably, but that reflects problems like excess draw and mana cheating, and buffing weaker decks will only serve to power creep the whole game rather than reign in the actual problems.
I opened Shadowcrafter Scabbs and Cera'thine Fleetrunner on the first day of the expansion, and was really excited to try out Burgle Rogue too. And it's certainly a cool deck that does some powerful stuff. The early tempo you can get from Double Agent and Wildpaw Gnoll thanks to how they interact with Maestra of the Masquerade is awesome, and Contraband Stash is a great payoff card that benefits from smart playing (e.g. by picking spells from Wand Thief that will always target enemies, picking high-value deathrattles from Reconnaissance, or maybe holding back a bit when playing Shadowjeweler Hanar to avoid losing out on the tempo value you might otherwise get from the Contraband Stash).
It's a sweet deck, and when it goes off it's incredibly fun. I played a game where, between Reconnaissance and Contraband Stash, I generated a full board of Greyboughs and become untouchable. A part of me feels the same way you do about wanting to see it be more competitive so that I can win more and enjoy these sweet moments.
The reality, though, is that cards and archetypes are intentionally not created equal. Thesearticlesby Mark Rosewater back in 2009 speak to how MTG goes about designing for different players. Together I think they paint a good picture of how cards and archetypes will naturally vary in strength because they're basically serving different constituencies. As I see it, Burgle Rogue is likely always going to occupy some Timmy/Johnny design space, and probably won't be terribly competitive. That's not to say that every individual player can't find success with it (e.g. Rogue has some nice disruption tools that can really mess with OwlTK Warlock), but it's naturally going to be weaker because it's built to serve a set of players who care more than the average player about the "how" of winning.
To the broader point about issues with the metagame, I think you're right that it's in an unhealthy place right now. You need only tune in to one of Kibler's streams to see a player who is famous for winning with "Timmy decks" frustrated at every turn by the efficiency of the top tier decks.
This works brilliantly. I think the deathrattle proc'ed about 60 times times in a single game - seemed like it would go on forever, but it did eventually resolve rather than break the game with an infinite battlecry.
EDIT: I should mention that I tried this twos ways - killing the Kobold Illusionist before dropping Spammy Arcanist (to spawn 1/1s that Spammy would kill for sure), and setting up the board to have the battlecry kill the original Kobold Illusionist (by ensuring there was a 1-Health and 2-Health minion on board to chain into the Illusionist). The former didn't work (which surprised me, since the chaining works fine otherwise), but the latter did twice. So, there's some amount of setup required to get Spammy to kill a played version of the Illusionist, but it worked like a charm otherwise.
In fairness, that's a reasonable way to assess fun for a lot of individuals. Frankly, I think it's a pretty concise description of the Johnny/Jenny player archetype (and dips a bit into the Timmy/Tammy archetype as well). It's also understandably frustrating to feel like a lone Johnny/Jenny in a sea of Spikes.
The Chillwind Yeti bug makes it pretty clear that little to no manual testing goes into these achievements. I can imagine some poorly written unit tests that might exist and make it look like the code works as intended, but clearly no one ever bothered to try and do this achievement in Standard because you literally can't get the right version of Yeti in Standard.
Regarding Bless, I've got a new wrinkle to add here. After reading all of this I thought I might test a hypothesis, so I played my first Bless Priest game (which happened to be in Wild). I thought maybe there was some bug resulting in bad integer division (e.g. if it were dividing by 5, let's say, then any buff lower than 5 Attack would count as 0, anything between 5 and 9 would count as 1, etc.). That sort of thing might account for why a huge buff was only counted as 6 points.
However, my achievement worked exactly as it should have with the following plays: Kabal Talonpriest buff applied to a Northshire Cleric (both played in the same turn), then 2x Divine Spirit into Bless on the subsequent turn for a 26/26 Cleric. My achievement is now at 25/200.
EDIT: My second attempt with the same deck resulted in a gain of 0 despite buffing a Kabal Talonpriest to 11/11. I don't recall exactly what buffs I put on him when, but he got at least one Talonpriest buff and the Bless buff (and maybe a Focused Will buff?), and was not at full health when I cast Bless on him. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I agree in general about the importance of Champions to the game, and I definitely think the following two things should always be true about LoR:
All that said, the idea that Champs should be auto-wins is clearly a bad design goal, for two major reasons.
First, it emphasizes linear gameplay. You need look no further than Quests and Questlines in Hearthstone to see exactly how building your deck around a hyper-specific win condition makes the game overly linear. Admittedly, the Hearthstone examples are more egregious because you always start with your Quest in hand, but the basic premise is the same - a deck built around drawing and leveling a Champion for the sake of some auto-win is going to ultimately lead to linear games where each player is just trying to outdraw the opponent. It might have been okay in the earlier days of LoR, but as more and more card draw is introduced to the game, this becomes more and more streamlined and miserable to play against.
Second, it fails to really suit the diverse roles of a given Champion. LoL has a wide array of Champion classes which describe how that champion functions at a high level. Braum is a great example of doing this right - he's a Tank/Warden champion, so he should be highly defensive and more useful as a support tool than a win condition. That's manifested through his high health/low attack statline and his challenger and regeneration keywords. He can win you the game over time by generating a ton of Mighty Poros, but he's more likely to just help you push damage to face by challenging your opponent's biggest blocker and forcing them to make bad trades.
There are probably classes of Champions (e.g. Slayer/Assassin types) that should auto-win the game, but I don't really think that should be broadly true about Champions.
This was exactly my question when I read that! I do expect the Dragon Aspects will stay in the game - can't very well have a Nozdormu day without Nozdormu, and those Dragons have been a central part of Hearthstone for a long time.
Of the other new cards, there aren't a ton you couldn't live without. Illidari Inquisitor is the one most relevant to any deck's win condition, while some like Nordrassil Druid and Crimson Clergy never really took off. Most of the ones that do see some play (e.g. Thrive in the Shadows, Bloodsail Deckhand, Taelan Fordring) could probably still see play in Wild after rotation, but aren't strictly necessary for the decks they'd support.
The advice of playing faster decks is certainly good advice. I've been playing since Whispers of the old Gods, and I've only ever hit legend twice because I rarely find time to play enough games to get there (it doesn't much help that I often prefer slower decks). Here's a simulator for how many games you'll have to play in any given season: https://www.primedope.com/number-of-games-to-reach-legend-in-hearthstone/. Even when you're starting with a 10-star bonus from legend in the previous season and playing a top tier deck, you're probably looking at an aggregate of 10 to 15 (maybe even 20) hours of gameplay to get back there in a given season. Drop down just one level to starting from Diamond 5's 9-star bonus and you could easily be adding several hours onto that.
At some level, though, it's all mental. If you win with your deck more than you lose, you'll get there eventually. And the fact is you need to play a lot of games to get to legend, so if the stress of losses makes you play less than you might otherwise without that stress you won't get there. Ultimately I decided to reorient my goals in the game away from ladder rank (which often leaves me stressed out about losses once I get to a high enough rank) and more toward overall wins and those associated rewards. Setting goals like "get all the golden heroes" has helped me to care less about ladder losses, which led to higher end-of-season rankings on average because I enjoyed playing more.
I struggle to believe that this new zone and bounties will be any different from what already exists - a long tree of boring (and relatively easy) battles followed by one boss fight that (at least in Heroic) requires a specific comp to win.
I think the biggest problem with the PvE is that most of your game plan is locked in at the start of a run when you pick your comp. There are some bosses where maybe you add in someone that can get Hunting Party (e.g. King Krush), adding a tiny bit of variety to your game plan for the last battle, but mostly you just do the same moves over and over again until you win. Playing a fire comp? Do a bunch of fire AoE. Playing a holy comp? Do a bunch of holy AoE. Your gear and comp are locked in at the start, so there's very little wiggle room to change what you're going to do throughout the run.
Fixing that probably certainly requires more varied battles that reward you for choosing more mixed or interesting comps at the start, but they also need to add more interesting power-ups along the way so that your choices feel more like they matter. Most of the buffs are just "here's a few extra stats or some bonus spell damage," and they don't push you to think differently about your comp or each run individually. What about a power-up that turns all fire damage into holy damage? Or a power-up that grants abilities some kind of combo effect (e.g. adding Arcane Combo: Summon a 0/1 copy of this merc to an ability or something wild like that)? Or something that lets you change the role or your merc for the duration of a run? Those are things that might actually make you think about changing which mercs get deployed and how you order your abilities to capture the value of those power-ups.
I used to spend time doing the daily tasks in Mercenaries, and tried to get into the grind for various comps, but just got super bored of it. For the PvP to be fun, you need to have tons of fully buffed Mercs, but getting there requires way too much boring PvE. How many times can you battle the same line-up of Furbolgs or Dragons or what have you over and over before you die of boredom? There's just not enough variety in each run, and I think that stems largely from the fact that the perks you get along the way are just not all that impactful. "Here's a stat buff for your Horde characters." "Here's a little more Arcane damage." Okay, great, but that doesn't really meaningfully impact the choices I make in game.
MarkMcKz has a video out of a Rokara OTK that uses Linecracker. I got the What Happens When...? achievement on the second game I played with it. (I would have gotten it on the first, but for Ice Block spoiling it.)
If you're just going on aggregate streaming numbers, I'd say the game was never really all that popular but has seen a sustained dip over the last several months compared to the last year: https://twitchtracker.com/games/514790
Just looked it up, and clearly I've been wrong for a while lol - no pity timer. Original source is on this Hearthstone blog post from 2017: "These packs use the new pack opening rules regarding duplication protection, but will otherwise have an independent chance of containing Common, Rare, Epic, and Legendary cards unrelated to any special rules (such as a guaranteed Legendary within 10 packs)." This is further clarified in 2020 to be broadly applicable to all Golden Packs (via a tweet by Celstalon: https://twitter.com/Celestalon/status/1263560197143801857
Yeah, bringing up Diana and Nocturne seems to have obfuscated my point - I meant to point to them as Champions whose design is anchored in one-off mechanics (outside of their original support packages there is exactly one other Nightfall card, so playing them means very limited deck building options if you want to level your champ).
It's true that Nightfall is used in ways which are thematically relevant to the regions in question, so it's far less egregious than other examples like the Tahm Kench self-harm package, but I think it still qualifies as an example of putting Champion mechanics and identity above regional identity in a way that hinders deck-building.
The one case for getting a 10 golden pack bundle would be if you had no cards from that expansion. The first legendary pity timer for any expansion is 10 packs (rather than 40), so you'd be guaranteed a golden legendary with a 10 pack bundle. That might be relevant since you could dust it to craft any legendary you want, but after you've picked up your first legendary from an expansion the 45 packs is way more value.
For what it's worth, I think you're right about how the Riot design philosophy works here - Champions are about fulfilling a particular fantasy regardless of their region. I guess it's a big part of why I got frustrated with the game, but for folks that have no issue with that, the game is probably totally reasonable.
As far as I'm concerned, if it were just Champions in isolation that broke the regional identites, it might be fine. But Champions often need Followers that directly support their unique game plan in order to work (e.g. the Diana and Nocturne need a lot of Nightfall units to work, and Rek'Sai's payoff is worthless if your deck isn't full of Lurkers). The result is that huge chunks of expansions are dedicated not to the core regional identities of regions, but to the Champions' identities.
This is exactly what I thought Riot believed, and is fundamentally the problem I tried to highlight in my original post. Regional identity takes a backseat to champion identity, which in turn leads to regional pair identities to ensure each Champion has enough support for their gameplan. It dilutes the unique feeling of any given region and weakens deck-building.
I'd also like to challenge you a bit on this idea that these remaining champions can't fit their regions simply because there's some surface-level clashing of themes. Demacia is all about nullifying magic, the righteous pursuit and striking down of their enemies, and winning on board with challenge and smart trades. With that in mind, consider this design that I just threw together for Morgana:
To be very clear, I didn't make much of an effort to think about balance here, I just wanted to flesh out how you might translate her LoL abilities to a Demacia card that's still honest to the region's identity.
Her Black Shield power becomes a Support SpellShield. There's not much SpellShielding in Demacia, but it's thematically relevant and clearly splashes in a bit (Captain Arrika, and sort of Towering Stonehorn). It fits the anit-magic themes and pushes the player to enter combat. Her Soul Shackles ability becomes a Grant Vulnerable for champions at Level 2. Vulnerable is another keyword that doesn't show up in Demacia, but since it's the inverse of Challenge and focused exclusively on champions it's still suitable to fit what Demacia does (i.e. targeted trades), and it fits better with the behavior of the LoL ability. Finally, her Dark Binding causes an enemy to strike itself, fitting with the fantasy of the ability and Demacia's common keywords (on the LoL website, it's described as "forcing them to feel the pain they've caused").
So, this is a mage/support card in Demacia that still highlights an anti-magic theme and pushes the player to engage in board-based combat, but is different enough to feel special/different from the more hardcore combat champions of Demacia without being so rooted in its own arbitrary abilities that it can't function without tons of specific card packages. It's not a perfect 1-to-1 translation of Morgana from LoL to LoR, but it does a good job without muddying Demacia's strengths and weaknesses, and it's a card that has broad enough application (by virtue of being a Champ killer) that it could see play in a variety of decks/archetypes.
Yeah, it's probably not worth trying. But I did want to confirm it, and now I believe I have. I got a Deathlord up to 34/34, and now my progress is 32. So anyone trying to do this today has to do it all in one go on a single minion.
I just tried a game or two with a deck that also tries to cheese extra copies out of Test Subject, but it's honestly very hard to get all the pieces you need to do much of anything before you get wrecked in Wild.
Okay, so the implication here is that the Gesundheit! achievement is currently only tracking the max value you've ever granted (in my case, 25 attack). Certainly seems like a bug (since the achievement text clearly reads "Give 200 Attack to minions with Bless."), but it's something that we can test further. Of course, it would be incredibly hard to get a minion up to 200+ health for this.
I agree with you that the two biggest issues Hearthstone has is card draw and mana cheating. Time and again those are the things that end up warping metagames. But I also think that's kind of tangential to desire expressed by the OP to see new archetypes buffed to have a chance. Central to that is the question of whether or not all archetypes should be equally viable in competitive environments, and the Mark Rosewater articles are still hugely relevant to that.
Quick aside - you equate Timmy with Control and Spike with Aggro/OTK, but that's not really correct. Quoting from the Timmy article: "I should stress that Timmies don't like cards because they're expensive. They like cards that are impressive, and many of the most impressive cards are big (in size or effect) and thus are expensive. In addition, let me point out that a card doesn't have to be expensive to appeal to Timmy. If a card has a fun effect or creates interesting gameplay, Timmy can get quite excited even for cards that cost one or two mana."
Timmies care about big, impressive plays (which often requires a slower metagame), but they don't need to be playing a strict control deck to get that. Burgle Rogue is a great example of this - Contraband Stash is absolutely a Timmy card, but the deck is really more of a midrange/tempo deck than a control deck. Many versions happen to run disruption cards because that's the only way to stay alive in a warped OTK metagame. Similarly, Spike cares about efficient plays that rack up wins, so while Spikes tends to gravitate toward aggro decks for their efficiency they're not strictly aggro players. (Hearthstone has had some degenerate Control metas - e.g. Bomb Warrior meta - and you can bet Spike was playing optimized control decks in those metas.)
So, why can't fun and competitive be the same thing? For some people they are the same thing, and some archetypes exist to support them. For some people they're not, and other archetypes exist to support them (e.g. Burgle Rogue). They can't all be buffed to equal competitive levels just because some part of the player base likes them. Now, should those "fun" decks like Burgle Rogue be more competitive than they are? Probably, but that reflects problems like excess draw and mana cheating, and buffing weaker decks will only serve to power creep the whole game rather than reign in the actual problems.
I opened Shadowcrafter Scabbs and Cera'thine Fleetrunner on the first day of the expansion, and was really excited to try out Burgle Rogue too. And it's certainly a cool deck that does some powerful stuff. The early tempo you can get from Double Agent and Wildpaw Gnoll thanks to how they interact with Maestra of the Masquerade is awesome, and Contraband Stash is a great payoff card that benefits from smart playing (e.g. by picking spells from Wand Thief that will always target enemies, picking high-value deathrattles from Reconnaissance, or maybe holding back a bit when playing Shadowjeweler Hanar to avoid losing out on the tempo value you might otherwise get from the Contraband Stash).
It's a sweet deck, and when it goes off it's incredibly fun. I played a game where, between Reconnaissance and Contraband Stash, I generated a full board of Greyboughs and become untouchable. A part of me feels the same way you do about wanting to see it be more competitive so that I can win more and enjoy these sweet moments.
The reality, though, is that cards and archetypes are intentionally not created equal. These articles by Mark Rosewater back in 2009 speak to how MTG goes about designing for different players. Together I think they paint a good picture of how cards and archetypes will naturally vary in strength because they're basically serving different constituencies. As I see it, Burgle Rogue is likely always going to occupy some Timmy/Johnny design space, and probably won't be terribly competitive. That's not to say that every individual player can't find success with it (e.g. Rogue has some nice disruption tools that can really mess with OwlTK Warlock), but it's naturally going to be weaker because it's built to serve a set of players who care more than the average player about the "how" of winning.
To the broader point about issues with the metagame, I think you're right that it's in an unhealthy place right now. You need only tune in to one of Kibler's streams to see a player who is famous for winning with "Timmy decks" frustrated at every turn by the efficiency of the top tier decks.
This works brilliantly. I think the deathrattle proc'ed about 60 times times in a single game - seemed like it would go on forever, but it did eventually resolve rather than break the game with an infinite battlecry.
EDIT: I should mention that I tried this twos ways - killing the Kobold Illusionist before dropping Spammy Arcanist (to spawn 1/1s that Spammy would kill for sure), and setting up the board to have the battlecry kill the original Kobold Illusionist (by ensuring there was a 1-Health and 2-Health minion on board to chain into the Illusionist). The former didn't work (which surprised me, since the chaining works fine otherwise), but the latter did twice. So, there's some amount of setup required to get Spammy to kill a played version of the Illusionist, but it worked like a charm otherwise.
In fairness, that's a reasonable way to assess fun for a lot of individuals. Frankly, I think it's a pretty concise description of the Johnny/Jenny player archetype (and dips a bit into the Timmy/Tammy archetype as well). It's also understandably frustrating to feel like a lone Johnny/Jenny in a sea of Spikes.
The Chillwind Yeti bug makes it pretty clear that little to no manual testing goes into these achievements. I can imagine some poorly written unit tests that might exist and make it look like the code works as intended, but clearly no one ever bothered to try and do this achievement in Standard because you literally can't get the right version of Yeti in Standard.
Regarding Bless, I've got a new wrinkle to add here. After reading all of this I thought I might test a hypothesis, so I played my first Bless Priest game (which happened to be in Wild). I thought maybe there was some bug resulting in bad integer division (e.g. if it were dividing by 5, let's say, then any buff lower than 5 Attack would count as 0, anything between 5 and 9 would count as 1, etc.). That sort of thing might account for why a huge buff was only counted as 6 points.
However, my achievement worked exactly as it should have with the following plays: Kabal Talonpriest buff applied to a Northshire Cleric (both played in the same turn), then 2x Divine Spirit into Bless on the subsequent turn for a 26/26 Cleric. My achievement is now at 25/200.
EDIT: My second attempt with the same deck resulted in a gain of 0 despite buffing a Kabal Talonpriest to 11/11. I don't recall exactly what buffs I put on him when, but he got at least one Talonpriest buff and the Bless buff (and maybe a Focused Will buff?), and was not at full health when I cast Bless on him. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
EDIT: Third attempt, buffed Reliquary of Souls (at full HP) with Divine Spirit and Bless, made no progress...