Lurker > metroid composite

Since I crafted the quest for wild anyway, I gave the pirate quest a spin in standard.

Wow it's...not very good there, or at least copying the vicious syndicate build didn't work out very well.

It struggles against stuff like face hunter just rushing it down--no real board clears in the VS list. But it also has an almost 0% winrate against mage quest and the self-mill warlock quest. (Handlock warlock is also running the quest, but doesn't go into fatigue super early, and that matchup is doable, but not free; if they get a big turn where they play three giants, well the VS list doesn't have boardclears so...).

And...my assumption was that the questline endgame would be a ton of value for standard, but it's not--standard deck endgames are pretty high value right now for anything at least midrange--lots of decks can build huge boards.

Maybe the deck would work better with some brawls or something, but that would just make it lose harder to quest mage and quest warlock. Maybe those matchups were already just losses anyway, though.

Man, I kind of hate ignite in both standard and wild now though.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Well, I had to try the extra silly one with Zola and Barista Lynchen. So far my record is 3 Juggernauts.



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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

azuarc posted...

Could you bounce Rokara for the same effect? (Assuming you could find an odd-cost panda.)

You definitely can--and the odd cost panda would be Zola, and I guess also Barista Lynchen if you really wanted to be greedy as fuck. That is pretty greedy, although worth noting most of the pirates are battlecries, and armor vendor is also a battlecry.

UltimaterializerX posted...

I straight up didnt know you could do that. Nice.

List?

I'm still experimenting, but I'll give you a few lists.

Here's the list of Memnarch, the top 10 legend player I saw doing this--it's a lot more removal focused than the list I'm running:

AAEBAePjAwaFF53wAp74At6tA5PQA5j2Awz/B4Kw
AsrnAt2tA6S2A4rQA/7nA9XxA5b2A5f2A4igBImgBAA=

Here's the list I used to get double juggernaut, which is adapted from a GetMeowth list (except I'm missing a reckless flurry--add in the second reckless flurry if you have it):

### Brann Odd Pirate
# Class: Warrior
# Format: Wild
#
# 2x (1) Armor Vendor
# 2x (1) Bloodsail Corsair
# 2x (1) Bloodsail Deckhand
# 2x (1) N'Zoth's First Mate
# 1x (1) Patches the Pirate
# 1x (1) Raid the Docks
# 2x (1) Risky Skipper
# 2x (1) Shield Slam
# 1x (1) Shiver Their Timbers!
# 2x (1) Sky Raider
# 1x (3) Ancharrr
# 1x (3) Brann Bronzebeard
# 2x (3) Cargo Guard
# 1x (3) Lord Barov
# 1x (3) Reckless Flurry
# 2x (3) Stormwind Freebooter
# 2x (5) Brawl
# 2x (5) Stonemaul Anchorman
# 1x (9) Baku the Mooneater
#
AAEBAZ+rBAiFF5G8AsrnAp74At6tA5PQA5f2A5j2
AwvlB4KwAt2tA6S2A5LkA/7nA9XxA5b2A8/7A4igBImgBAA=
#
# To use this deck, copy it to your clipboard and create a new deck in Hearthstone

But I also have another list that runs more aggro cards (Southsea Captain, Rokarra, Loatheb)--the idea being that combo druid with celestial alignment and combo mage with sorcerer's apprentice are terrible matchups for odd warrior, and most of the tech cards against them are even, not odd, but if you "tech" in SMORC cards maybe you can just kill them before they combo.

Here's the more aggro list (although it doesn't have Brann, and once again you should probably add in the second reckless flurry).

AAEBAZ+rBAr6DpG8AsrnAp74At6tA7i5A5PQA5XtA9XxA5j
2AwqCsALdrQOktgOS5AP+5wOW9gPP+wOIoASJoASvoAQA

Most likely the good anti-combo tech available to odd here is actually Robes of Protection, though--so even as an anti-combo list, this list can be improved on pretty sure.

(Still very much in the experimental stage with odd pirate, which is why I'm presenting multiple lists).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Hmm...so I was messing around with Odd Control Quest Warrior in wild. Seemed ok, but there were definitely some control decks out there with stronger endgames. So...I watched a few streams, and saw someone who ran Brann Bronzebeard in their Odd Quest Warrior to summon double Juggernaut.

Took a few games before I pulled it off. But I pulled it off against a reno priest and it felt amazing. I don't know if it's good, but wow it's satisfying.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Wow, that's a lot of balance changes at the same time. Interesting when Visious Syndicate was basically calling for no nerfs.

Incanters flow: yeah, about damn time. It's wild growth, it should cost the same as wild growth.

Ill'gynoth: Dunno how much this changes TBH, I've taken 72 damage plenty of times, and sure, the added mana probably drops that to 36. Guess the deck dies to control warrior gaining 8 armour though?

Darkglare: *happy wild noises*

Battlegrounds Battlemaster: A little surprising; paging through all the decks that use it, it's pretty much just paladin decks. Guess it is good enough in paladin to deserve a nerf?

Kolkar Pack Runner: Uh? That's a weird choice. Like...drawn winrate in hunter decks tends to be right around the middle of those decks. Definitely not on the weak side, not close to cutting it, but not on the strong side either.

Granite Forgeborn: Hm. Well looking at HSReplay, it is #1 on all three of drawn winrate and mulligan winrate and played winrate in the deck that runs it, so I totally see why they targeted this card. I guess this is a little like when they nerfed ancharr when pirate warrior wasn't even good. The weird thing is how few shaman decks are actually running it. It's in 30% of Shaman decks right now.

Conviction: Deserved. I mean, possibly RIP Odd Paladin in wild, and I'm a little sad about that. But then again maybe not cause darkglare got two cards nerfed, and I felt like darkglare preys on odd paladin, so that's nice.

Flesh Giant: Big ol middle finger to specifically Even Warlock in wild. For all the other warlock decks, changes the cost from 0 to 0, but...maybe slows down their big turn by one turn.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

DeepsPraw posted...

that graph is whack. pretty sure to be considered left you need to be some sort of socialist, which literally none of those presidents were

I mean, as far as I understand, the entire political compass was created by American right-leaning Liberatarians to try to make themselves seem more important than they actually are.

Notice how there's four political categories, and American right-leaning Libertarian is one of the four. Now compare that to the real world--do you really think American right-leaning libertarians represent 25% of the political views worldwide? It certainly doesn't represent very many governments worldwide, I'll say that much.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

UltimaterializerX posted...

Elemental Shaman: AAECAZyrBAaTwgOczgOu3gPi7AOwigT5nwQM27gDp94D qt4Dq94Dh+QD4OwD4ewDre4Dr+4D4+4DlPAD46AEAA==

Welp, guess it's time for me to stop being cheap and craft two lillypad lurkers, cause I've been playing a gimped elemental shaman in casual for a while, and I like Lillypad Lurkers conceptually. Can't be worse than the Jewels of N'Zoth I crafted for funsies right? Maybe Elemental Shaman will actually be good.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Mini-set is out. I've seen a few people (and botmathematician) speculate on whether the userbase should not buy it, so just so we're clear: yes, buying the mini-set with gold is almost certainly better than buying 20 packs with gold (unless you don't want any legendaries or epics from the mini-set, and also highroll with the 20 packs). The dust value is 2520, which is more than 2054 that you get from dusting the average contents of 20 packs.

ALSO in the realm of things you should probably think about buying:

Standard packs and wild packs. They seem to have starting pity timers at 10, like every other type of pack, meaning you're guaranteed a legendary in the first 10 packs (averaging a legendary in 5.5 packs). They are buyable with gold (so I just bought them one at a time until I hit a legendary from each).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

LiquidOshawott posted...

Midrange decks could definitely feel something if it messes up their curve. Eating a Troublemaker for a rush Warrior or a Inquisitor for Demon Hunter or a NZoth in Paladin is huge.

Oh sure, they'll feel something. It's not a dead card in those matchups (which is good design). But it's also not crazy high variance--if the card it discards against a midrange deck decides the match, then you had a pretty close match for the first 7 turns.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

LiquidOshawott posted...

The first card of the miniset is a 7 mana 4/4 Murlocvthat eats a minion in the opponents hand and gets their stats

So a Alex/Tickatus tech

I love this card, cause it's so good at fixing the problems with dirty rat.

Dirty rat was fine as a tech card against combo. But when it was played against aggro and it pulled out a fire fly or the like, it was basically an instant win (2 mana 2/5 taunt that makes your opponent discard a card--aggro couldn't beat that). And when it was played against aggro and it pulled out an 8/8 it was an instant loss. It wasn't "correct" to play it on 2 vs aggro, but people at my MMR did all the time, and it was the biggest coinflip nonsense.

This card has a job--it takes out combo pieces; Alex, Tickatus, Y'sharrj, Lady Liadrin. And it does those really well (when it lands it's also a 7 mana 12/12 or 14/14 in addition to disrupting their wincon). But it comes too late to be a crazy tempo swing. By turn 7, decks can kill or freeze or stall with taunts a 12/12. The RNG will come from whether you hit their win condition, but midrange decks with no one singular win condition won't feel huge RNG swings from this card.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

skullbone posted...

Guys I can't get out of Diamond 9 and I'm going absolutely insane. If ANYONE has managed this month can you please tell me the decks you used.

Odd Paladin in Wild. Wasn't doing too good until I switched to the newest VS list which required crafting Conviction (not because it's super strong, but because there aren't that many other odd-costed Holy spells to draw with Knight of Anointment. In odd-cost decks you can't run Hand of A'Dal, which is the really good holy spell. The deck actually runs Blessing of Authority just to get the holy spell count up).

Experimented with swapping out cards for Divine Favour (the deck doesn't run it) but Divine Favour gets drawn by Knight of Anointment, and Knight of Anointment gets drawn by Crystology, so often when I did Crystology into Knight of Anointment I had trouble emptying my hand for Divine Favour.

Part of this is just comfort level with the deck, though--I tried handbuff paladin which is theoretically a much stronger deck, and lost several games with it. Odd Paladin...I like to outvalue people, value trade and rarely going face, and in Odd Paladin frequently that is the optimal play. I'm not sure what the right line is with the new wild handbuff paladin, I've played paladin decks with handbuff strategies before, but I feel like this one must play different from those.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

LiquidOshawott posted...

I really did think Paladin was strong enough to need two nerfs

Well, based on the data we're getting in so far, seems like part of the problem is that the first day of school nerf might not have made the card weaker?

Still included in 95% of paladin decks.

Hard to get drawn winrates isolated from the old FDoS on HSReplay, but we can get played winrates post patch. Now, yes, played winrates are a dangerous metric, cause they overvalue finisher cards like Alextraza and sometimes rarely played cards get overvalued cause they were played in one variant of a deck that had higher winrates than other decks. For example, Shadow Hunter Vol'jin is in the top 5 played winrate Paladin cards, but...that's from playing it in a goofy combo deck when things go right, and it's only in 7% of Paladin decks. But none of these caveats apply to First Day; it's not a finisher and it's played in every paladin deck. And despite all that it's still top 10 post-nerf for played winrates among paladin.

So...yeah, First Day might not actually be weaker. (Which means it's probably actually stronger in more midrange decks like Libram Paladin). Combine that with Crabrider not being in every Paladin deck pre-nerf (and not actually getting nerfed that hard so a lot of people still run it) and yeah...Paladin's sayed pretty constant.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

KokoroAkechi posted...

i learned that in wild HAND BUFF PALADIN is apparently a top tier deck and its like really weird considering its not a deck that saw a lot of play when it existed in standard.

Oh yeah, variations of handbuff have been good for a while.

Going back a few years, people played mech paladin and put in handbuff cards (because magnetic meant the handbuffs could be applied directly to face).

Meanwhile, people started experimenting with a no-mech handbuff but it wasn't very popular yet.

Around the time when Crabrider came out, handbuff without mechs was just consensus the stronger variation. And then the newest set turbocharged it, thanks to adding Blademaster Samuro.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Nerfs are basically as expected.

Mankirk and Crabrider as soon as we knew it was two neutrals and one of them was a murloc.

First day of School from Paladin--admitedly I wasn't expecting the way in which it was nerfed (making 3 1-drops now). Nerf is still gigantic, though, cause you can't FDoS on 1 into Hand of A'dal on 2. Gets cut from aggro decks now; maybe still run in Librams.

Something from mage (could have been incanter's flow, but Refreshing Spring Water works too).

Hysteria was kind-of expected too. Often a full board clear for 3, which...is pretty nutty. Sometimes cleared boards that mass hysteria could not clear, and that's a wild-viable 5 mana clear.

Buffs...the way they teased these they sounded really spicy, and these...mostly aren't actually that spicy.

Xanesh: should have been printed that way, but happy to see the fix.
Razorboar: a bit surprising--deathrattle DH is a solid deck that only really struggles with paladin. Supposedly this is one of its worse performing cards, though.
Unbound Elemental: Yawn. Like...sure, maybe Elemental Shaman runs it now, but it's pretty vanilla.
Tidal Surge: OK, this is pretty spicy, cause the card as an individual card is fine, like one of the highest drawn winrates in control shaman. Maybe this pushes other shaman archetypes to run it, though?
Lilypad Lurker: I expected them to buff it to 4 mana. This...is not quite as big of a buff, but still a decent buff. Medium amounts of spice here.
Fiendish Circle: Yawn
Deck of Chaos: I don't want this card to be playable, cause like...it'll turn into one of those "you win when you draw deck of chaos" decks. Luckily, I don't think much has changed.
Whirling Combatant: Didn't see this one coming. Like...Ravaging Ghoul still makes it into wild Odd Warrior lists. Whirling Combatant is now 1 more mana for 3 more health and a frenzy to whirlwind again? Wow. Yeah, ok I'll give this a little bit of spice level.
Shieldmaiden: Well, shield block went to wild and got replaced by shieldmaiden. Turns out Shieldmaiden is a lot weaker than shield block, so control warrior ceased to exist. Maybe it'll exist now, though. Obviously this makes shieldmaiden very good.
NZoth, God of the Deep: So...a lot of the cards you would want to bring back with N'Zoth cost 10, like darkmoon rabbit and scrapyard colossus. This is a weird choice, not sure what the buff actually changes, other than the fact that you can N'Zoth + Broomstick on the same turn I guess.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Seginustemple posted...

Probably Warcraft depending on what you consider "beating" Hearthstone

Probably just clearing the single player stuff. (Naxxramus, League of Explorers, Dungeon Run etc).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Lord Ephraim posted...

Do MMOs count? I played all Final Fantasies except 11 and 14 because they're specifically MMOs. Even titles that have Final Fantasy in the title that aren't even FF like the GBA Legend games. I even played the rhythm and fighting spinoffs.

I would say you should need to complete the main story quest of FF14, yes. The main story quest is a bunch of solo fights, long FF style cutscenes, with the occasional 4 player dungeon and 8 player boss fight.

You can ignore basically all of the MMO aspects (you don't need to ever enter a single raid, you don't need to socialize, you don't need a single person on your friends list, you don't need to buy or decorate a house, you can unsub after 30 days).

But if you don't know who Emet-Selch is, no you haven't beaten every FF game.

(I don't know if FF11 has something equivalent, though).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

5 nerfs...can probably guess a few.

Spring Water, First Day of School feel likely. Maybe Sword of the Fallen. Maybe Incanter's Flow. Some people seem to expect a Hysteria nerf, and I could see it. Possibly some stuff from wild (maybe sorc apprentice will finally get hit).

Buffs...really hard to call. I'll just list out some low power cards

DH: IDK, Kutrus Ashfallen maybe?

Druid: Guff Runetotem and Plaguemaw the Rotting and Living Seed?

Hunter: Caravan?

Mage: plenty of garbage cards like Rimetongue and Arcane Luminary. People on twitter are calling for ping mage buffs, but I don't see an obvious way to buff that deck. Maybe wildfire could cost 1? Wild Even Mage players would be sad about that change, though.

Paladin: Caravan could use a buff. Nobody is playing Veteran Warmedic. Cannonmaster Smythe has been abandoned. Almost nobody is playing Invigorating Sermon. Paladin probably only gets nerfs, though--maybe Veteran Warmedic?

Priest: I have no read on this at all. Even the Caravan is being played a little bit. They were probably expecting more from Void Flayer and Serena Bloodfeather, so maybe those two?

Rogue: There's a few cards that aren't played much like Oil Rig Ambusher and Scabbs Cutterbutter, but I don't really want to see those cards buffed. Maybe I wouldn't mind a Yoink buff, but IDK what buffing that card would accomplish.

Shaman: IDK just buff a bunch of stuff lol. Caravan sucks obviously. Probably something from the elemental package--thinking Lillypad Lurker (maybe becomes 4 mana). Probably something from the murloc package--honestly the class murlocs are fine, maybe some neutral murlocs. Maybe Coldlight Seer becomes a 3/3 or something--now that warleader is wild only, can probably beef up neutral support a bit.

Warlock: Caravan sucks. Self-mill warlock sucks (Altar of Fire and Soul Rend could probably be buffed by a full mana or something).

Warrior: Hmm...I mean the class is probably a little on the strong side now, but I'm not seeing really obvious candidates for buffs or nerfs (nerf bumper car? nerf stage dive? IDK). Least played cards are Warsong Envoy and Whirling Combatant, so maybe those two?

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Starcraft?

Starcraft counts as like...four or five singleplayer campaigns I think? (Starcraft 2 definitely has three full single player campaigns released literally years apart launching as their own full priced games basically. Brood War's campaign probably doesn't count as a separate game from SC1, but that's still 4 games ish). I assume I can get away with not playing Starcraft 64 or all the Nova mission packs and still get away with saying that I've beaten every Starcraft game.

I struggle to think of any other remotely long series where I've played every entry.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

I honestly don't remember. Long before I played the game, I know that much.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

As a fairly big Metroid fan....

Metroid is just a smaller series than I'd like it to be (specifically Metroid 1 was not that big--a lot of people start caring about the Metroid series only after Metroid II cause there wasn't much else on the gameboy in 1991 when Metroid II came out, or more often start caring about Metroid after Super Metroid because Super Metroid is when the series got really good). And while sure, the Metroid 1 manual refers to Samus as a he, starting from Metroid II onwards all instruction manuals refer to Samus as a she.

Maybe you could play through Metroid II without reading the instruction manual and be surprised at the end, but Metroid II's instruction manual was really cool--spent almost as much time reading that as I did actually playing the game. One of the best instruction manuals when I was growing up, can't imagine skipping it. And then by the time Super Metroid rolled around it was pretty in your face--Samus' gender comes up in the opening cinematic of Super Metroid (and also literally every time you die).

From my memory, in the late 80s and early 90s, there was more buzz around Rumplestiltskin's name in King's Quest 1 (literally had to spell it with a backwards alphabet), and the minus world in SMB1 than there was around Samus' gender. The buzz that existed around Metroid had more to do with codes that people found (JUSTIN BAILEY). Possibly I'm too young, but I don't remember much buzz around Samus' gender in Metroid I. (My introduction to the series was Metroid II, and while it was certainly important to me that Samus was a girl, I didn't associate it with being a spoiler cause the instruction manual refers to her as a she).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Meh, seems like a fandom thing, doesn't even seem that weird.

LUE's obsession with its "unholy trinity" back in 2004 or so certainly felt weirder to me.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

As someone who has a vagina: no I am not surprised.

I wouldn't put something like that in there out of concern for hygiene (yeast infections are a real concern) but vaginas can fit a lot. Like...entire human babies are supposed to squeeze through them (obviously it's pretty labour-intensive to get a bay through a vagina, but something smaller and thinner than a baby like a wiimote, yeah, might fit without excessive discomfort).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Huh, I don't remember HMC 100 being a problem. There's 139 coins in the level.

Granted, yes, it's legit the most obnoxious level for doing an all-coins runs, cause you need to do stuff like run around eyeballs on the tops of pillars, and then hope the blue coin they drop doesn't stick on top of the platform but comes down to the ground. But 100 I don't remember being too bad.

The obnoxious 100 coin stars to me are the ones where the level barely has 100 coins total (so...JRB and DDD).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Paratroopa1 posted...

Snowman's Land isn't great either but it's saved by the fact that you can ride a shell around

Eh, I'm not that enamored by the shell.

It's okay I guess, but the real strength of SM64 is in Mario's baseline jumping controls. In terms of alternate control schemes...Flying > Slides > Shells > Swimming I guess, something like that? I still prefer the core jumping mechanics over all four. And...overall I don't find myself liking a level more if it has a slide or if it has a wing cap or if it has a shell. It adds some variety, but doesn't make me like the level more.

(Not like you can use the shell to do most of the stars in Snowman's Land anyway; you can do like...8 red coins, which is the star the shell was built for, and I guess you can do the bully with the shell if you want to. That's pretty much it. Maybe you can use the shell to reach the igloo, but that sounds harder than the normal route. It's not like Lethal Lava Land or Shifting Sand Land where the shell takes you literally everywhere).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Water levels in general just strike me as the worst, and specifically JRB and DDD (DDD being the worse of the two).

By contrast, wet-dry world I actually like cause of the water height setting mechanic; you can do pretty much the entire level without swimming if you want to.

In terms of levels that aren't JRB or DDD...probably Snowman's Land? Doesn't have a unique motif, and doesn't have like...any stars that stand out to me as particularly good, and several stars that are really quite badly designed.

For example...the star that you're supposed to go through an internal ice maze to get to, but which literally everyone just jumps on top of the maze and drops to the finish line; reasonable star for an early level, but for an upstairs level it's just too easy to ignore the maze they made and grab the star. Also, the intended way of getting to the star on top of the snowman, you're supposed to stand next to the penguin to not get blown off, but this always felt really buggy, and I usually end up not relying on the penguin at all.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

LiquidOshawott posted...

Hey remember Rin

41 mana for a bunch of smallish minions and one big one

Crazy that saw play but the meta was slower back then

The meta is only as slow as the slowest viable win condition currently available to control decks.

(Aggro decks will get out-valued at some point--you generally don't even need a win condition to beat aggro).

Right now running any win condition slower than Warlock's win conditions is just dubious. Like...what are you hoping to beat by running that win condition? The priest mirror? And C'Thun the Shattered falls under that category.

In the past? Yeah, no problem, two years ago when control warriors were running Archivist Elysiana, of COURSE you would slam C'Thun the Shattered into those decks. It has the upside of shuffling five reasonably playable cards into your deck, with the guarantee of not drawing any of those cards in your opening hand, A+ amazing card!

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Should also work on Hunter's hero power right? (And presumably a bunch of death knight hero powers).

But yeah, it's +1 damage, so it's limited to hero powers that use the word "damage" specifically, and not ones that heal or give your hero +attack.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Emeraldegg posted...

So what's the worst class in the game right now?

Judging purely by the decks people are taking to grandmasters...might be Shaman?

(None of the GMs brought Shaman this week unless I missed one. There are some GMs running warrior right now, when there weren't any last week. And definitely all the nerfed classes are still around--paladin, mage, rogue. As well as all the other classes that showed up last week, which means Priest, Demon Hunter, Hunter, Warlock, Druid are still around too. So 8 classes. With Warrior making 9).

HSReplay has Shaman only in 7th, but Shaman decks are mostly pretty aggro and straightforward to play, and that always inflates HSReplay numbers.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

I'm doing my normal f2p thing after a nerf--tabbing between high lengend players and seeing what they are playing against so I don't have to craft stuff myself to test.

Lots of Warlock, Priest, DH, some rogue, aggro paladin, a little bit of no minion mage (including with lunacy), some druid, some warrior.

No librams seen at high legend so far.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

I'm not sure you put Lunacy in your deck anymore.

But will you pick lunacy off of a discover? Oh you bet. Plenty of discover effects in that deck. Runed Orb can discover DoL, but you can also just randomly generate multiple different mage minions which can also discover.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

LiquidOshawott posted...

Think the Librams could bring back Broom and/or Braggart and lower the secret curve

I tried a version with brooms and Lord Barov close to set launch.

It...didn't feel great; like it was going about 50-50, but this was against un-refined day one decks, and the problem was it just didn't have enough card draw, and topdecking either broom or barov with an empty hand was absolutely terrible.

Without a draw engine, it's probably playable but like tier 3 or low tier 2.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Actually, it occurs to me that poison/weapon rogue was barely nerfed either. I mean, they lose pen flingers, those are 100% getting cut from the list cause they were only included for the face damage, but they weren't running watch posts or Jandice.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

The sword nerf hurts the aggro secret paladin deck a lot more than the libram/mixed deck (libram decks run a lot of weapons anyway, so ended up overwriting the sword decently often. Secret deck basically always ended up using every charge of the sword).

But...yeah, aggro secret paladin looking like a deck that got hurt relatively little. I expected a sword nerf to 3 mana cause it would mess up their curve. Now they can still go sword on 2 into one of their many power 3 drops on 3.

The deck didn't run watchposts, didn't run pen flingers, so the impact of the other nerfs is mostly just to make other decks weaker against it.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

skullbone posted...

Gut reaction is that Paladin is still going to be too strong but after some thought I think that the penflinger nerf really hurts a lot of their libram control style decks.

Yeah, I think the thing to do now if you want to keep playing paladin is to switch to aggro secret paladin.

Libram Paladin with pen flingers probably still exists as an anti-aggro deck that gets bopped by any deck running a win condition. But I expect that will put it into a similar category as most Priest decks right now (good if you expect a lot of aggro, bad against everything else).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Camden posted...

I don't know, I just kind of life nerfs that aren't +1 mana or -1 stat.

Fair but...Blizzard doesn't like making nerfs like that, so I assume we're getting something really simple.

Drawing the secrets is the only other change I could see them doing, maaaaaybe. But I would still be surprised if they went for a functional change like that.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

KokoroAkechi posted...

Which one of these far watch post nerfs do you think is better (not more likely to happen)?

Mana cost increased by 1
HP reduced by 1
Takes 1 damage at the end of your opponents turn.

HP reduced by 1 looks like the most reasonable of the 3. Most removal deals 3 and not 4.

KokoroAkechi posted...

in my games with libram paladin getting sword early sees a big spike in my win rate more so than like any other card. I do think Sword is 100% being nerfed (probably to 3 mana)

Sword is like...the best card in standard and wild by the data, and is basically confirmed for a nerf.

Libram Secret Paladin isn't even the deck where sword looks strongest (because it ends up competing with some of the libram weapons), but yeah, it's so strong that you basically don't build paladin decks without it right now.

It's so strong that I wonder if 3 mana is a big enough nerf, but...yeah, it's probably enough. Weapons are very very sensitive to mana changes (harder to find 2/1s and 1/1s to attack on turn 3), and it makes it so that you can't curve smoothly from weapon on 2 to 3/4+draw on 3.

The other nerf I've seen suggested is to cut a durability (2 mana 1/2 weapon) but that nerf seems too small for how good the weapon is. Plenty of times especially when combining with librams that you are thinking about overwriting your weapon before the final swing in order to play something like Libram of Justice.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

skullbone posted...

I think wand thief could use a nerf but I doubt many people agree. Rogue generating 5 mage cards a game always feels weird

Actually...wand thief probably also benefits from the discover pool being better. As does Apexis Blast.

I don't think they hit Apexis Blast, just because it's the reason to build spell mage, but they might hit wand thief....

Hmm...no, looking at the data, Wand Thief looks like a fairly unlikely nerf target. It's a middle-of-the-road card in Watch Post Rogue. Weapon Rogue doesn't even run the card. Stealth Rogue ALSO doesn't even run the card. It's a middle-of-the-road card in miracle rogue. It's a middle-of-the-road card in Hero Power Mage (which sometimes cuts it anyway).

Nope, probably no change to wand thief.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Camden posted...

alongside making librams not being able to cost 0 and increasing the cost of Pen Flinger to 11 mana.

I don't think they are going to touch Pen Flinger in this balance patch based on their tweets this week.

I mean...I guess it's possible, much like Tickatus it's a card that a bunch of people hate playing against. And it fills a similar role (it's a finisher that makes the game end).

But given everything they've written about this balance patch, this is going to be a very data driven balance patch, and not a "we're nerfing this card because people don't find it fun to play against" patch. And the data on pen flinger is...nowhere near nerf territory.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

In less speculative stuff...I just got Instructor Fireheart from a year of the phoenix pack. Nice! Kept thinking I was going to need to craft that card cause like...every shaman list runs it (including in wild).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

We still don't know the nerfs, but we have some obvious hints.

Obviously Sword of the Fallen, it's busted.

But then random generation effects effectively got a lot stronger because of replacing classic with core, and in interviews they basically said, yeah, they knew this was happening, but decided not to pre-emptively nerf stuff, wait and collect a bit of data. Which makes all the following cards extremely likely nerfs:

• Deck of Lunacy (obviously)
• Jandice Barov (less obvious, but if you check rogue stats it's by far the best rogue card, better than Kazakus).
• First Day of School (I haven't seen anyone talking about this one, but like...card was borderline too good before, and the pool got better. Very frequently makes augmerchants or 1/3s).

Last two are a lot harder to guess. But just going by stats Far Watch Post is likely. Maybe a wicked stab or a refreshing spring water--both of those are also super good.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Camden posted...

I love that that report essentially says "Every deck Camden is interested in playing is hot garbage get absolutely wrecked lol"

Well, yeah, this is one of the most unbalanced metas.

There's a few things to get out of this report:

Apparently using Taelan Fordring to draw primes is very very good. Like...the right way to build secret paladin is to not include the 5 mana secret legendary, and instead run Taelan Fordring who can draw either the prime if it's been shuffled into the deck, or Kazakus.

The other thing to do is to ignore the three classes we know are getting nerfed, and look at the matchup chart:



And...I don't see an obvious winner here. The remaining 7 classes all seem to have at least one deck with quite a bit of green...except maybe hunter and warrior. Deathrattle DH, control priest/spell priest, control warlock, doomhammer shaman, gibberling druid--all looking solid.

Obviously Paladin/Mage/Rogue will probably still have decks, but we don't even know what cards are being nerfed yet, so that's really hard to predict.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Camden posted...

I'd rather just make it so that Tickatus doesn't work with Whyshuarrjay then

Yeah, that would fix quite a few problems.

LiquidOshawott posted...

Then I guess Mill Rogue truly was the scourge of the meta

Mill rogue is unironically still a deck in wild that I face from time to time. And yeah, it's got some super polarized matchups, crushing some control decks.

But that's fine cause it's not very popular.

LiquidOshawott posted...

But in all seriousness, the average game is over by turn 8 or so, or basically decided by then. I feel like Blizzard doesnt like long grindy control matchups and has tried their best to steer clear of them.

I think that's a reasonable goal but...

1. If that's their plan they forgot about Priest lol
2. Tick came out in Darkmoon Faire, filled with old gods who have a turn plan sometime between turn 11 to turn 15. Even after reaching 10 mana it's not always correct to drop a N'Zoth right away, for example, cause you might want to get more stuff in the res pool (like Scrapyard Colossus is a great elemental to bring back). And obviously C'Thun has an even slower gameplan. Just...doesn't seem like the right time to shorten control games so that they're over on turn 10?

As an extension of that last point, design-wise I think Tick is much less of a design issue now than it was when DMF launched. The focus has moved away from the old gods and on to forged in the barrens cards, and forged in the barrens is a very low mana cost set in general (only two cards that cost more than 7 mana).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

LiquidOshawott posted...

You dont auto win with burning 5 cards in any deck

You win by burning 10.

Burning 10 cards will put most decks into fatigue. (decks draw a minimum of 14 cards by turn 10, and most decks will play a couple of draw spells/minions that draw/weapons that draw, leaving them with around 10 cards left by turn 10).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

VeryInsane posted...

and my general thought is about the same... it's just a win more card.

Like it's got a really high winrate when played but you won't ever play it when you're behind.

Sure, it's a finisher like Leeroy Jenkins or Shudderwock--much like a lot of finishers sometimes it'll just rot in your hand if you're on the defensive.

And as with all finishers played winrate is a bad statistic. What you want to do is open up an actual deck in HSReplay, and sort by drawn winrate:

https://hsreplay.net/decks/HnoaQMhofMJts9aQD6NSVb/

Like in this list, Tickatus is the 5th highest drawn winrate card in the deck. Which puts it slightly above average. (Obviously it's pretty bad to draw against some classes, but the converse is that it's pretty good to draw against other classes).

This doesn't cross the line into a winmore card, since drawing the card ups your chances of winning on average, even compared to most other cards in the deck. In fact it probably puts it in the realm of a card that's worth crafting if you want to play warlock.

An example of an actual winmore card would be (drumroll......)

https://hsreplay.net/decks/2qyRrcgZA3miOVrblUKyQc/

Coldarra Drake in hero power mage. Nice lowest drawn winrate in the deck, Coldarra Drake. But hey, if you play a Coldarra Drake on 10 mana you get to ping. Twice. AND THEN if the opponent is so low on resources that they can't kill a 6 mana 6/7, you get to ping 5 more times next turn (potentially for 15 damage). Coldarra Drake is a winmore card.

Or, for a winmore example from control warlock, Envoy Rustwix is pretty close to the bottom of the winrate table, and Rustwix actually got cut in the Vicious Syndicate version of the deck probably for that reason. Envoy Rustwix is also arguably a winmore card for control warlock.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Pretty sure I've had that the other way around. Was playing casual, then somehow found the mode switched to constructed.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

VeryInsane posted...

Really? I felt like the Priest/Quest Rogue matchup was just too strong for the Priest (and Jade Druid basically made Control Warrior obsolete but I guess Taunt could beat it with an early Sulfuras) but I guess Scream was a great removal tool back then. Maybe I just haven't been too impressed with what I do with Control Lock.

I mean, you probably just haven't played against very many control priests, because for the most part people don't play them on ladder outside of very specific pocket metas where they can avoid the warlock matchup.

I also suspect that it's not that easy to spot a random good matchup, especially if it's less than 5% of your opponents on ladder. It's easier to remember the decks you lose to and go "man, that deck that keeps beating me is bullshit." It's much harder to notice "hey, I don't face them that often, but every time I face priest I seem to win; maybe my deck is bullshit against priest specifically?"

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

skullbone posted...

Wasn't Quest Rogue notorious for being around a 50% winrate deck when it got nerfed? I seem to remember the same arguments about "it actually sucks but it's not fun" that Tickatus gets.

It got nerfed more than once, but if memory serves, the first time it was nerfed it's winrate was low, but it was just a huge portion of the ladder.

LiquidOshawott posted...

Those matchups... arent Quest Rogue or Jade Druid level bad

Looking up some old numbers, doesn't look like Quest Rogue or Jade Druid had 80-20 matchups against a lot of control decks. (Plenty of 70-30 matchups). 80-20 matchups are actually extremely rare.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

azuarc posted...

Jaraxxus being the best warlock card is precisely why Tickatus is able to be a problem. Turn 9 Jaraxxus, Strongman, Strongman. Opponent goes nuts clearing. Turn 10 Twisting Nether, Inferno. Turn 11 Tickatus. Turn 12 Y'Shaarj and play another Tickatus.

I mean, you don't need Jaraxxus for that; pre-Jaraxxus the curve was just....

Turn 8 twisting nether and 2x Strongman.

Turn 9 Hysteria + Tickatus (or wait one turn and Cascading Disaster+Tickatus)

Turn 10 Y'Sharrj, 2x Strongman, Tickatus, and possibly a Cascading Disaster.

Three straight turns of playing a board clear, while also developing a board that is large enough it can't be ignored.

Taelan Fordring played earlier can also help by tutoring for Y'Sharrj/Strongman.

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

LiquidOshawott posted...

Really dont think Tickatus is that good, Warlock is gonna be ahead of you in fatigue in most cases anyway as control and you should have a way to pressure them/try to win the game to bully them into not playing a 8/8 do nothing

This video is pretty good on it

https://youtu.be/u5Nox2Zej_o

Yeah, he's kind-of missing the point.

I mean, he's not wrong that top 200 legend has been a pocket meta where Tickatus is not played much, because the deck to beat in the high-legend pocket meta has for the past 4 months has been decks that go face (rogue decks with lots of face damage, mage decks with lots of face damage). Tickatus isn't good against those decks.

And to be clear, it's not like I'm searching for ways to beat Tickatus decks. I'm not above playing aggro decks. I play wild for fuck's sake. But like...one of the appeals of still playing standard instead of only playing wild is that maybe in standard I can pick up a control deck. And as long as Tickatus stays popular in my matchmaking queues, that's...probably not happening.

Like...

https://hsreplay.net/archetypes/63/control-warlock#tab=matchups

Control warlock is like 80-20 against priest decks (pretty much all of them), and 70-30 against warrior decks.

I get that mill doesn't matter unless you hit fatigue. But with Tickatus I generally do hit fatigue. I frequently find myself with an empty library the moment Y'sharrj drops on turn 10.

To be fair, I had similar feelings about Mech'a'thun when Rise of Shadows came out; I wanted it to be hall of famed early. But it turns out there weren't any good Mech'a'thun combos after rotation, so it kinda went away on its own. If Tickatus drops in popularity like Mech'a'thun did, it's not really a problem. (So far it's been rising in popularity after rotation, but we'll see).

Camden posted...

Jaraxxus definitely feels like the strongest card in my Warlock deck.

Fair, Jaraxxus might also be an issue for other control decks. But...worth noting I think Tickatus is probably better than Jaraxxus against specifically control decks which can't run soul fragments. (Jaraxxus is obviously better in the control warlock mirror where soul fragments give warlock defence against being milled. I'm just not sure it's better into other control decks).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision

Forceful_Dragon posted... 3 mana, refund 1 per spell seems more balanced. It means it's "on line" 1 turn earlier, but then you are spending 1 mana to draw 2 cards instead of 0 mana to draw 2 cards. And it would take 2 cost reductions to gain mana by casting it instead of only 1 cost reduction.

I mean, the problem with 3 mana reduce 1 per spell is that now it's literally better than arcane intellect in every deck. And AI is already a super good spell (gets run in wild). If they really decide to hit Refreshing spring Water, I'd rather see them make it be be 6 mana and restore 3 per spell drawn. Still a nifty 0 mana draw 2 under the right conditions, but can't use it till turn 6, not a card you can reasonably keep in your opening hand.

KokoroAkechi posted...

I dont see how they can nerf pen flinger without like making it unplayable in any deck running it.

The common suggestions are "make it not hit face" or alternatively some people have suggested "make it not hit minions". (I would rather see "make it not hit face" personally).

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Cats land on their feet. Toast lands peanut butter side down. A cat with toast strapped to its back will hover above the ground in a state of quantum indecision