Razorscale might be a decent anti-aggro card, as it prevents your opponent from playing a one-drop plus a two-drop on turn 3. Unless it gets killed, but then it likely took two minions down with it and prevented 4+ face damage.
A lot of the draw is conditional: you don't need to use the last charge of Tuskpiercer or it might not draw anything, Consume Magic can be played from a non-outcast position, Double Jump won't draw anything if your deck is empty, one copy of Sigil of Alacrity can be played on the final turn (especially if its cost has been reduced to zero).
The worst card to be stuck with is Need for Greed, but having Acrobatics as your last card isn't great either. Maybe Topple the Idol would be useful to make sure you don't have expensive draw at the bottom of the deck, as well as being useful as a board clear. Another option would be to use Sphere of Sapience to push non-draw cards to the bottom of the deck.
If you're running so few minions, you could consider using Souleater's Scythe as protection against Dirty Rat and Patchwerk. It would also allow you to always get Bloodmage Thalnos as your first minion and it makes it easier to move outcast cards to the leftmost position in your hand.
I think mana cheating is a problem in particular if it can reduce powerful cards to zero mana and if it is available early in the game. For example Patches the Pirate was summoned so early for 0 mana that it warped the meta despite having only 1/1 in stats. Corridor Creeper and Wildpaw Gnoll are other examples.
For these titans, the mana cheating happens only after playing a 6 or 7 mana minion, so it won't happen early in the game.
The Shaman spell discount is very nice, but it is limited to one spell per turn; it would probably have been broken otherwise. And it only lasts for as long as the titan lives, which in modern Hearthstone with its efficient removal and plenty of rush minions is often just a single turn.
Discovering a deathrattle with a 3 mana discount doesn't sound like a problem: if you discover a 1-3 mana minion, the deathrattle is likely not that impactful and if you discover a more expensive minion, you might not be able to play it immediately. Also discover isn't consistent unless the card pool is really small.
Discounting all minions in your hand by two mana sounds strong, but the fact that it is only minions and requires a 7 mana summon keeps it in check, I think. You could use it to play two six-mana minions on turn 8 or flood the board with cheap minions, neither of which is game breaking. Maybe there could be some kind of combo where you use the minions only for their battlecries, but by turn 8 there is plenty of opportunity for the opponent to use disruption or pressure to derail your plans.
So while I agree that mana cheating can be a problem, I think in these particular cards they balanced it pretty well.
With this range of sets and no neutrals allowed, Pure Paladin might be very dominant, as it was already good several times in the respective metas and other classes will not have an upside to playing no neutral cards.
Maybe Thief Rogue also gets a boost from not discovering neutral cards, but I don't expect that to be nearly as significant as the Pure Paladin advantages.
For me, the interesting macro is decisions like army composition, when to expand, when to get upgrades etc. "Decisions" being the key word here. The things I described that I don't enjoy aren't decisions: there is an optimal way to do them and you either execute that well or you suffer.
Reportedly the most popular mode in SC2 is the co-op missions, which is relatively relaxed compared to PvP. That suggests to me that players are still into base building and controlling armies, but just don't want to deal with the stress and multitasking requirements of competitive play.
While I enjoy SC2, I rarely play it anymore, mostly because of the skill floor: to be even slightly competitive, you need to do all the economy actions at the right time or you'll get supply blocked or forget your mule/larvae inject/chrono boost and are behind significantly. The fact that I can't just pick up the game but have to practice to get back to the level at which it is enjoyable to play makes me play something else instead.
In the demonstration match, I see that they still have supply in the game. I think that's a missed opportunity: supply doesn't add much to the game play experience (you rarely win by attacking your opponent's supply), but it does raise the skill floor considerably, because it is very punishing if you get supply blocked.
Another thing that made SC2 a chore to play is that you couldn't queue production effectively, because you had to pay the cost in advance. It would make things a lot easier on the player if you would pay resources only for the item at the front of the production queue.
In my opinion, the skill should be put in the cool things, like micro and multi-pronged attacks, not in keeping your economy from breaking down. I think you can have a high skill ceiling game without requiring those administrative actions.
There are a lot more people gaming now than 25 years ago, so even a niche genre could be successful enough to sustain itself. But I worry that if they stick too closely to the old formula, they won't pull in young gamers because the game play is too clunky and they won't pull in older gamers because they don't have the time and reflexes anymore to get good at the games they used to enjoy.
They accidentally made the 3-wins skin a 3-games skin instead. Maybe that will actually increase the number of tickets they'll sell; I guess we'll see whether they keep the change or not in the next Heroic Brawl. I briefly considered participating just to push them in that direction, but the skin didn't appeal to me enough to pay 1000 gold for it plus a few packs from the regular rewards.
I do appreciate that we got a Standard pack even when skipping the brawl.
And we now know the mini set is launching soon... ;)
After playing some more, I noticed that Amorphous Slime wasn't really useful, as typically you'd rather want your undead in play immediately. Also many games are over before turn 5, so the mana cheating aspect of this card is not very relevant in this brawl.
I can't reproduce it in Standard on EU ladder. I lost several games in a row trying to play Questline Mage (it's too slow), but no suspicious play patterns from my opponents and all of them were visible in the "recent opponents" list.
Not showing up in the "recent opponents" list is interesting; I don't think player bots would be able to do that unless the name would be hidden during the match as well.
Dane had some videos recently of playing versus bots in Wild. Those bots would hang if they got an unexpected discover effect; he used Suspicious Alchemist, but the Peddler is similar. Of course there could be multiple bot implementations with different bugs.
Are you sure it's Blizzard's bots and not bots farming XP? The most likely theory I've heard is that with the shutdown of Hearthstone in China, a lot of players moved to other servers and either took their bots with them or maybe even started botting to build a new collection.
Note that all of the decks you mention are aggro decks, except Big Priest, which is terrible to play against unless you are playing aggro yourself or a very quick combo deck. If you want to play something else, you're in for a hard time.
You can't really play a deck without mana cheats anymore if you want to win games. For the weekly ladder quest, I turn to Evenlock: while not a meta deck, it does do a lot of mana cheating, which is necessary to keep up with people summoning a board for hardly any mana (play one pirate, get two for free!).
Tech cards are a solution for tournaments and ladders with a really low variety of decks, but not a solution in general. Say that 20% of opponents runs Ice Block, then teching against it will make your deck slightly worse in 80% of games.
Wild was always meant to be a "wild" format where anything was possible with all the old cards
To be honest I think the real purpose of Wild was to make players feel less bad about their cards rotating out of Standard. I don't think there was a 5-year plan for Wild, and even if there was, such a plan could use some re-evaluation after all that time.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the impression that the players who are not concerned with Wild balance are mostly people who don't play a lot of Wild. They might play a few games every once in a while, marvel at how broken some of the decks are and then return to Standard. But if that is the intended way of playing, Team 5 should turn Wild into a tavern brawl instead of having it as a permanent mode.
Another argument I sometimes read is that Wild is a place to play old decks. That sounds nice in theory, but in practice it's pretty rare to encounter an old deck as-is on the Wild ladder and I imagine that has a lot to do with the fact that those decks are not nearly as powerful as decks that gather synergies from all sets. If they want to give players a bit of nostalgia, a tavern brawl where everyone plays decks from a certain era would be a better format for that: players want to relive the good plays of their old favorite deck, not sit there and be slaughtered by cards and combinations that didn't exist back then.
I don't think it's possible to perfectly balance Wild, but that's not really necessary either: it's pretty rare for Standard to be perfectly balanced as well. As long as the decks that are worst to play against don't have too much of a population for too long of a time, players can deal with a bit of chaos.
The alternative to balance changes would be to replace Wild as a mode, for example by a mode with rotating sets. Personally, while I'd like to see such a mode, I'd prefer for it to exist in addition to Wild.
Playing 22 cards in one turn sounds doable. Drawing the combo is probably the bottleneck, but it doesn't sound super hard, as it's 4 cards that are all in the deck twice and some of which have tutors or can be found via discovering cards from your deck.
I'm not sure Cleric is going to work as a draw engine if you only have one minion-healing spell in the deck. Maybe replace Desperate Prayer by Regenerate? Or you could use a different draw engine altogether, like Switcheroo and more minions that draw.
Razorscale might be a decent anti-aggro card, as it prevents your opponent from playing a one-drop plus a two-drop on turn 3. Unless it gets killed, but then it likely took two minions down with it and prevented 4+ face damage.
A lot of the draw is conditional: you don't need to use the last charge of Tuskpiercer or it might not draw anything, Consume Magic can be played from a non-outcast position, Double Jump won't draw anything if your deck is empty, one copy of Sigil of Alacrity can be played on the final turn (especially if its cost has been reduced to zero).
The worst card to be stuck with is Need for Greed, but having Acrobatics as your last card isn't great either. Maybe Topple the Idol would be useful to make sure you don't have expensive draw at the bottom of the deck, as well as being useful as a board clear. Another option would be to use Sphere of Sapience to push non-draw cards to the bottom of the deck.
If you're running so few minions, you could consider using Souleater's Scythe as protection against Dirty Rat and Patchwerk. It would also allow you to always get Bloodmage Thalnos as your first minion and it makes it easier to move outcast cards to the leftmost position in your hand.
I think mana cheating is a problem in particular if it can reduce powerful cards to zero mana and if it is available early in the game. For example Patches the Pirate was summoned so early for 0 mana that it warped the meta despite having only 1/1 in stats. Corridor Creeper and Wildpaw Gnoll are other examples.
For these titans, the mana cheating happens only after playing a 6 or 7 mana minion, so it won't happen early in the game.
The Shaman spell discount is very nice, but it is limited to one spell per turn; it would probably have been broken otherwise. And it only lasts for as long as the titan lives, which in modern Hearthstone with its efficient removal and plenty of rush minions is often just a single turn.
Discovering a deathrattle with a 3 mana discount doesn't sound like a problem: if you discover a 1-3 mana minion, the deathrattle is likely not that impactful and if you discover a more expensive minion, you might not be able to play it immediately. Also discover isn't consistent unless the card pool is really small.
Discounting all minions in your hand by two mana sounds strong, but the fact that it is only minions and requires a 7 mana summon keeps it in check, I think. You could use it to play two six-mana minions on turn 8 or flood the board with cheap minions, neither of which is game breaking. Maybe there could be some kind of combo where you use the minions only for their battlecries, but by turn 8 there is plenty of opportunity for the opponent to use disruption or pressure to derail your plans.
So while I agree that mana cheating can be a problem, I think in these particular cards they balanced it pretty well.
With this range of sets and no neutrals allowed, Pure Paladin might be very dominant, as it was already good several times in the respective metas and other classes will not have an upside to playing no neutral cards.
Maybe Thief Rogue also gets a boost from not discovering neutral cards, but I don't expect that to be nearly as significant as the Pure Paladin advantages.
For me, the interesting macro is decisions like army composition, when to expand, when to get upgrades etc. "Decisions" being the key word here. The things I described that I don't enjoy aren't decisions: there is an optimal way to do them and you either execute that well or you suffer.
Reportedly the most popular mode in SC2 is the co-op missions, which is relatively relaxed compared to PvP. That suggests to me that players are still into base building and controlling armies, but just don't want to deal with the stress and multitasking requirements of competitive play.
While I enjoy SC2, I rarely play it anymore, mostly because of the skill floor: to be even slightly competitive, you need to do all the economy actions at the right time or you'll get supply blocked or forget your mule/larvae inject/chrono boost and are behind significantly. The fact that I can't just pick up the game but have to practice to get back to the level at which it is enjoyable to play makes me play something else instead.
In the demonstration match, I see that they still have supply in the game. I think that's a missed opportunity: supply doesn't add much to the game play experience (you rarely win by attacking your opponent's supply), but it does raise the skill floor considerably, because it is very punishing if you get supply blocked.
Another thing that made SC2 a chore to play is that you couldn't queue production effectively, because you had to pay the cost in advance. It would make things a lot easier on the player if you would pay resources only for the item at the front of the production queue.
In my opinion, the skill should be put in the cool things, like micro and multi-pronged attacks, not in keeping your economy from breaking down. I think you can have a high skill ceiling game without requiring those administrative actions.
There are a lot more people gaming now than 25 years ago, so even a niche genre could be successful enough to sustain itself. But I worry that if they stick too closely to the old formula, they won't pull in young gamers because the game play is too clunky and they won't pull in older gamers because they don't have the time and reflexes anymore to get good at the games they used to enjoy.
They accidentally made the 3-wins skin a 3-games skin instead. Maybe that will actually increase the number of tickets they'll sell; I guess we'll see whether they keep the change or not in the next Heroic Brawl. I briefly considered participating just to push them in that direction, but the skin didn't appeal to me enough to pay 1000 gold for it plus a few packs from the regular rewards.
I do appreciate that we got a Standard pack even when skipping the brawl.
And we now know the mini set is launching soon... ;)
The art style of Ultros looks amazing, in my opinion. And it seems to be coming to Steam too.
GOG has 24 Star Wars titles with 60%+ discounts, DRM free.
If you prefer Steam keys instead, Fanatical has a big Star Wars bundle.
After playing some more, I noticed that Amorphous Slime wasn't really useful, as typically you'd rather want your undead in play immediately. Also many games are over before turn 5, so the mana cheating aspect of this card is not very relevant in this brawl.
Glad to hear that it holds up over multiple games. I got the same quest this week, so I'll probably be playing some more of this deck tonight.
I can't reproduce it in Standard on EU ladder. I lost several games in a row trying to play Questline Mage (it's too slow), but no suspicious play patterns from my opponents and all of them were visible in the "recent opponents" list.
Not showing up in the "recent opponents" list is interesting; I don't think player bots would be able to do that unless the name would be hidden during the match as well.
Dane had some videos recently of playing versus bots in Wild. Those bots would hang if they got an unexpected discover effect; he used Suspicious Alchemist, but the Peddler is similar. Of course there could be multiple bot implementations with different bugs.
Are you sure it's Blizzard's bots and not bots farming XP? The most likely theory I've heard is that with the shutdown of Hearthstone in China, a lot of players moved to other servers and either took their bots with them or maybe even started botting to build a new collection.
Note that all of the decks you mention are aggro decks, except Big Priest, which is terrible to play against unless you are playing aggro yourself or a very quick combo deck. If you want to play something else, you're in for a hard time.
You can't really play a deck without mana cheats anymore if you want to win games. For the weekly ladder quest, I turn to Evenlock: while not a meta deck, it does do a lot of mana cheating, which is necessary to keep up with people summoning a board for hardly any mana (play one pirate, get two for free!).
Tech cards are a solution for tournaments and ladders with a really low variety of decks, but not a solution in general. Say that 20% of opponents runs Ice Block, then teching against it will make your deck slightly worse in 80% of games.
To be honest I think the real purpose of Wild was to make players feel less bad about their cards rotating out of Standard. I don't think there was a 5-year plan for Wild, and even if there was, such a plan could use some re-evaluation after all that time.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the impression that the players who are not concerned with Wild balance are mostly people who don't play a lot of Wild. They might play a few games every once in a while, marvel at how broken some of the decks are and then return to Standard. But if that is the intended way of playing, Team 5 should turn Wild into a tavern brawl instead of having it as a permanent mode.
Another argument I sometimes read is that Wild is a place to play old decks. That sounds nice in theory, but in practice it's pretty rare to encounter an old deck as-is on the Wild ladder and I imagine that has a lot to do with the fact that those decks are not nearly as powerful as decks that gather synergies from all sets. If they want to give players a bit of nostalgia, a tavern brawl where everyone plays decks from a certain era would be a better format for that: players want to relive the good plays of their old favorite deck, not sit there and be slaughtered by cards and combinations that didn't exist back then.
I don't think it's possible to perfectly balance Wild, but that's not really necessary either: it's pretty rare for Standard to be perfectly balanced as well. As long as the decks that are worst to play against don't have too much of a population for too long of a time, players can deal with a bit of chaos.
The alternative to balance changes would be to replace Wild as a mode, for example by a mode with rotating sets. Personally, while I'd like to see such a mode, I'd prefer for it to exist in addition to Wild.
Ah yes, while you could drop some of the high health minions, that does not apply to Radiant Elemental as it is part of the combo.
Playing 22 cards in one turn sounds doable. Drawing the combo is probably the bottleneck, but it doesn't sound super hard, as it's 4 cards that are all in the deck twice and some of which have tutors or can be found via discovering cards from your deck.
I'm not sure Cleric is going to work as a draw engine if you only have one minion-healing spell in the deck. Maybe replace Desperate Prayer by Regenerate? Or you could use a different draw engine altogether, like Switcheroo and more minions that draw.