In trying to be more productive with my time lately, I’ve been finding so many new things I want to try and keep up with. However, when I get excited about a new project, I tend to focus on it and forget about other ones I had already started…
I decided to go back to what I’ve done before and have a weekday schedule of project types for each day. I actually found my old post from 2012 that had my old schedule listed:
Monday: Video games! and reading
Tuesday: Crafts project
Wednesday: Technical project
Thursday: Do something with Jack (play games or do a project or something)
Friday: Free choice
When I decided to make my current one, I had remembered that I used to have one, but I couldn’t remember what it was and hadn’t looked it up. It turns out it was pretty much the same as the previous one! Including the day for hanging out with Jack – I guess I’m pretty consistent in trying to have a dedicated “You have to spend time with me” day 😂 The difference now is that Tuesdays and Thursdays also include going to the gym after work, so the days are moved around based on what I am okay with having less time for:
Monday: Technical project
Tuesday: Gym, hang out with Jack
Wednesday: Crafts/journaling
Thursday: Gym, games, read
Friday: Whatever
An interesting thing is that in the blog post about my old schedule, I wrote that I had decided to come up with it “so I don’t get lazy and do nothing when I can’t decide what to do”. The one I have now is almost the opposite – I have too many things I want to do and it gets to be a big mess with nothing getting finished if I don’t have focused days!
I haven’t quite decided if writing this blog post today is on schedule or off schedule – I usually put it in my planner for a weekend. I guess writing a blog post would kind of fall under journaling.
The Journey to Un’Goro Hearthstone expansion released yesterday. While it is probably one of the most unique and interesting sets in terms of card design, Blizzard somehow managed to make a fundamentally stupid blunder that will likely further alienate the player base.
Un’Goro introduced a new set of Quest cards, spells for each of the 9 classes that require you to complete some goal in order to get an extremely strong reward. While some of the quests are quite dull, such as “Play 7 minions with Deathrattle” others are much more varied, such as “Cast 6 spells that didn’t start in your deck”. Regardless of how good these cards are, they at least create unique and interesting deck types to play around with. One could say the entire Un’goro expansion revolves around these Quest cards.
The general idea behind Quest cards seems commendable. However, that’s before you realize that Blizzard made every Quest spell legendary. In order for a player to open or craft all 9 legendary Quest cards they would need to spend hundreds of dollars. Now I’m all for micro transactions and price obfuscation through randomness, but the way this is implemented is just a disaster. In order to play a Quest themed deck, you MUST have the Quest card. This means the average Hearthstone player can only experiment with one or two, and it’s very likely they will never obtain a single one. This is utterly stupid and a waste of potential.
Here’s how you’re supposed to design a rarity system. Make all the Quest cards easy or free to obtain for 100% of players. This allows every player to try the decks and have fun playing them. Then release complementary legendary and epic cards for each quest that must be included for the deck to be competitive, but are not strictly necessary to play. For example, let’s take the Mage Quest. Un’goro introduced three new Mage cards that help you get access to spells that were not originally in your deck. It would have been trivial to make the quest free to obtain and instead make all three of these cards epic or buff them slightly and make them legendary. None of these cards prevent you from making the Mage Quest deck, but without them you may struggle to complete the quest. Players having fun with the Mage Quest will eventually feel obligated to pay up in order to make their deck stronger.
We see this sort of system happen in every single competitive Free2Play game, ranging from League of Legends to Clash of Clans. Give the player a taste of the fun but force them to pay in order to be competitive and keep up with their friends. Even Blizzard did this exact same thing when they released Whisper of the Old Gods. In that expansion there was a new deck type involving a legendary card C’thun. However, instead of forcing every player to spend $100 trying to randomly open it, they gave everyone a copy for free. Then alongside C’thun they released Twin Emperor Vek’lor. What happened? 100% of competitive C’thun decks included Twin Emperor and it was stupid to play the deck without it. However, your average Hearthstone player was still able to mess around with a highly unoptimized version of C’thun Warrior or C’thun Priest.
With the Un’Goro expansion, players will eagerly pay some money to be able to try the new decks and be sorely disappointed when their $50 of packs results in 0 or 1 Quest cards. Again, the problem isn’t that the expansion is too expensive or it’s impossible to get all the cards. The core problems lies in how rarities are assigned. Blizzard could have very easily distributed the rarities in a way that quests are more accessible to all players while still creating a paywall to competitive versions of the decks. Instead, they are left with an expansion that the majority of players are unable to experience. That is not the way to do Free2Play.
And this is coming from someone who has been primarily playing Arena since the expansion came out.
I’m a huge fan of the Souls series. Having finished all three Dark Souls, Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne, I am constantly amazed by the high quality bar set by these games. Whether it be with the tight controls, the precisely tuned encounters or the immersive atmosphere, these games never disappoint. I’d go so far as to call Dark Souls 1 my favorite single player game ever.
No conversation about the game can be had without some mention of it’s excruciatingly high difficulty. I can fully understand why. My first ever experience was with Demon’s Souls, where I died 24 times before reaching the first boss. Unfortunately, the brutal difficulty tends to dominate the discussion and create a very polarized reaction. People sometimes dismiss the game because they feel the high difficult curve is not for them. The issue isn’t helped by the veteran community that can treat the game as a sort of trial by fire, looking down on those who aren’t “hardcore” enough to undergo the challenge. Difficulty is so much a part of the stigma of Dark Souls that “Prepare to die” is an official marketing slogan for the game.
However, it’s important to note that Dark Souls isn’t a good game because it is difficult. It is a good game that happens to be difficult, and it utilizes that difficulty to help weave the player experience and create unique scenarios. If there was an “easy” setting to the game, it would still be impressive both mechanically and visually. However, there are certain feelings and emotions that would not be possible without the adversity the game puts you through. Just as a team forced to overcome obstacles together becomes united through hardship, Dark Souls uses difficulty to create different emotional responses.
For example, while this game isn’t a horror game in the traditional sense (e.g. Silent Hill), there have been multiple points where I have felt pure, unadulterated fear. This wasn’t from some cheap, jump scare or gruesome imagery, but simply because of the game mechanics. In Dark Souls, you gain experience (souls) from killing enemies, but if you die before you return to a checkpoint, you can potentially lose them all. As you make your way through a difficult area accumulating more and more souls, the thought of dying becomes increasingly traumatic. The fear of dying and losing all my progress built up so much tension that a random noise in the game would make me scream out loud in terror.
However, I’m not here to talk about horror, I’m here to talk about beauty. While I could show you screenshots of some awe inspiring scenery and landscapes, the beauty of Dark Souls extends beyond graphics. Just like the difficult game mechanics manifest as terror in the player, they also instill a sense of appreciation and reflection that would not be possible without them. Two events in particular have stuck with me to this very day.
The Real Dark Souls Begins
Let me paint you a picture. Dark Souls begins in a grim, desolate dungeon. You spend the majority of your time killing pitiful, miserable zombies on a quest to ring two bells. The atmosphere is drab and depressing, ranging from an undead parish, a corrupted forest and a diseased, makeshift town. You struggle through these dreary, bleak environments in an attempt to achieve your goal, and when you finally do, the gates to Sen’s Fortress open. This was a victorious moment for me. The ringing of the bell is accompanied with a triumphant cutscene, an appropriate reward for my toils. At this point I had spent many hours playing and felt like I had mastered the game.
As I approached the newly opened gates, I was immediately skewered by a giant, armored lizard wielding a butcher knife. It’s hard to explain in words just how ruthless Sen’s Fortress is. The enemies are relentless and unforgiving, punishing your every mistake. Traps lay in wait around every corner, with treacherous ledges that threaten to claim your life at the first misstep. Sen’s Fortress acts as a hard wall, forcing you to call upon every skill you’ve acquired since the beginning of the game. Traversing this nightmare was easily an order of magnitude more difficult than everything the game had presented beforehand.
Upon reflection, Sen’s Fortress was the hardest point in the entire game for me. Yet, I persevered through it. Little by little I learned to defeat the enemies and navigate through the numerous pitfalls. It took tremendous focus and determination, but eventually I made my way to the summit and defeated the towering Iron Giant who stood in my way. The glory I felt when ringing the bells was a drop in the ocean compared to jubilation from watching this final boss crumple before me.
As I prepared to rest on my laurels, I was presented with this cutscene:
When I first watched this, it blew my fucking mind. I had just overcome an enormous challenge and instead of letting me bask in the glory, the game reveals that this was only the beginning. The entire time I was playing Dark Souls, this looming mountain range has towered over the world. In most games, you would assume this wall of rock is simply background art, a boundary to the world that exists to keep the player on the right path. In reality, it’s been an ominous backdrop, hiding a entirely new civilization, ready to be explored.
The gorgeous horizon and awe inspiring architecture are a visual treat to behold, but the true impact comes from the emotional state of the player when they watch it. The fact that this comes immediately after the hardest point in the game so far is what gives it such a lasting impression. It’s as if the game is saying to you “You thought you were done? That was just the beginning. The real Dark Souls begins now.” This point, when you are first introduced to Anor Londo, is the most memorable moment I have ever had in any game, bar none.
Defying Expectations
Dark Souls is a game that utilizes vertical height very well. As you progress in the game, each subsequent goal has you climb higher and higher, culminating in a climax at the peak. Humans tend to equate ascension with progress, and simply placing the goal above the player creates incentive for them to continue forward. A great example is what you just saw with Anor Londo, a sprawling kingdom high in the mountains that you gain access to after defeating the strongest enemies in the valley below.
However, Dark Souls also has moments where you instead descend deep into the bowels of the world. These tend to be some of the most dark and depressing moments in the game, where you find nothing but more and more despair. Nothing exemplifies this more than Blighttown, a rickety village built on top of a toxic lake. The entire area is comprised of dilapidated wooden shacks, hastily lashed together with whatever makeshift tools the inhabitants could find. As you pass through, the miserable residents who have made this diseased world their home attempt to fend you off.
At the very bottom of Blighttown, after wading through the noxious swamp, you encounter a hidden wall. Behind this secret lies an enormous, dying tree and a treacherous path down through it’s hollowed trunk. Inside you encounter demonic basilisks that can curse you and bizarre, giant mushroom men that literally crush you with their bodies.
It took me forever to descend through this misery known as the Great Hollow. The aforementioned Basilisks can apply a curse to you, probably the most frustrating mechanic in the entire game. This curse reduces your maximum HP, stacks multiple times and can only be removed by a limited item. Once you run out of that item, you cannot remove the curse, even by dying. As you can imagine, this creates a slippery slope where the more cursed you are, the less HP you have, the harder it is to continue. In addition, the mushroom men are unusually strong for this point in the game, harboring enormous health pools that took multiple minutes to take down.
The most depressing part of all of this is the decent. There is no known goal at the top of the mountain that you can use as motivation. Instead, you are descending forever, moving further and further from the safety of the surface. The layout makes it impossible to see the bottom, so you never know when the struggle will end. The entire atmosphere is a suffocating web of rotting roots and winding branches. Sen’s Fortress was punishingly hard, but this was a completely different type of despair.
After what seemed like an eternity, I finally made my way to the bottom. By this point, I was super depressed, confronted with the drab, dark atmosphere you would expect from being miles underground. Then I exited the base of the tree and saw Ash Lake.
Everything about Ash Lake defies expectations. Vertically, this is the lowest point in Dark Souls, so you would expect something appropriately dark and gloomy. Instead, you are greeted by a vast, open beach with an ocean as far as the eye can see. The non-existent music of the Great Hollow is replaced by a haunting choral arrangement. In the horizon you can glimpse the silhouettes of hundreds of other trees similar to the one you just descended. How is there even light? It’s an incredible juxtaposition from the claustrophobic environment you just exited. When I first saw Ash Lake, all the frustration that had been building up within me melted away into awe.
In a vacuum, the graphics don’t stand out as particularly visually impressive. What really makes it memorable is the path you take to reach it. The tremendous struggle immediately preceding Ash Lake is what amplifies the beauty beyond plain, good looking art. The ironic part of all of this is that Ash Lake is a completely optional part of the game and provides almost no in-game benefits. There’s a few minor crafting items and a huge dragon NPC to talk to, but otherwise there is nothing of significance. No amazing weapon or item to justify the brutal journey. Only a beautiful stretch of beach to sit and reflect upon.
Conclusion
Simply put, the beauty of Dark Souls goes far beyond the actual game. It resonates with you on a deep, emotional level, creating an immersive experience that sticks with you long after you’ve finished playing. It’s a truly fantastic game that anyone who loves games should definitely play.
tldr; If you haven’t played Dark Souls yet you are a noob and need to go play it.
Hearthstone’s online community is in a bit of a rut. There is a lot of discontent among players due to the strength of certain cards warping the meta so severely, and Blizzard’s unwillingness to change these cards. This is a recurring trend that has happened multiple times in the past, including Miracle Rogue, Undertaker Hunter and Patron Warrior. Each of these instances have resulted in massive nerfs, but often after the problem has been allowed to fester for months at a time.
While I 100% agree that Blizzard needs to make changes to cards more frequently, I want to discuss another issue in Hearthstone that is unrelated to the power level of the Pirates package or the oppressively strong nature of Shaman. Overpowered combinations of cards is an inevitability as it’s impossible to internally play test everything. However, something that can be better controlled is the actual mechanics of cards and what they actually mean. Enter Reno Jackson.
Why do people play Reno Jackson? The reason is that the card, when the effect triggers, is insane. A full heal is backbreaking against many aggro decks, while still having minimal value against control decks. They balance this extremely powerful effect by requiring you to only play one copy of every other card in your deck. Taken another way, this card actually reads:
What is the end result of this mechanic? Control decks are forced to build a less consistent, less powerful deck in order to enable a single card that is drastically more powerful than the other 29 cards. This means that games are often decided on whether or not you draw Reno. Aggro decks have no real way to “play around” Reno because if he hits the board, they typically cannot win. So the plan for Aggro becomes to ignore the fact that Reno exists, go all in and hope he’s on the bottom of the deck.
Card draw is not that random
Something I hear people say a lot is “This is a card game dependent on drawing random cards. It’s all luck anyway.” There is some truth there, but what’s important is to consider how luck manifests itself in the game. The best decks are very balanced in terms of early, mid and late game cards. Regardless of which cards you draw, you will generally end up with a very moderate set of results. There are times when you curve out perfectly and win turn five or times when you have no plays until turn five. However, these are more often exceptions to the norm. This is the reason that decks that rely on inconsistent combos or the perfect state generally are not competitive.
The best way to think about this is to consider a past examples: Face Hunter vs Control Warrior. In this matchup, the objective of Hunter is to play many low cost, aggressive minions and overwhelm the Warrior. The Warrior’s goal is to kill everything the Hunter plays until they can stabilize the board. In order to facilitate this, the Warrior plays 10-12+ good, low cost removal spells and weapons. As long as the Warrior draws a few of these cards in the first few turns, they stand a chance of surviving. If one or two of these cards are at the bottom of your deck, you still have 10 other options to potentially draw and utilize.
On the other hand, consider a common matchup from today: Aggro Shaman vs Reno anything. The Shaman plays the best aggressive minions and spells available and tries to kill the Reno player quickly. Like the Control Warrior, the Reno player includes as many low cost removal cards as possible. However, due to Reno’s restriction, they cannot run the same number or must substitute mediocre alternatives. As a result, it’s less likely that the Reno player will be able to draw the cards necessary to survive early and even if they do, they still might be dead because the quality of these cards are not comparable.
The one saving grace is that if you do manage to draw and play Reno, you often immediately win. Whereas if you don’t draw him, the rest of your deck is likely not strong enough to compete. With Control Warrior, depending on their draw, they might have between a 30-60% chance of winning a game, averaging out to 50%. On the other hand, you have a 10% chance of winning if you don’t draw Reno and a 90% chance of winning if you do draw him, averaging out to 50%.
When the results of a game are dictated by a single card, this create extremely polarized situations that are frustrating for both sides. Nobody wants to play a game where they feel they had no chance of winning. When your opponent draws Reno, you curse how lucky they were and feel cheated. When you don’t draw Reno, you rant about how face decks are a cancer ruining Hearthstone and how you’re never lucky.
The ideal Aggro vs Control matchup should be both players drawing some of the cards they need to play the early game. The Control player may eventually stabilize with little health left, while the Aggro player is hoping to topdeck that last point of lethal. It should not be waiting until turn 6 to see if Reno has been drawn and one of the two players conceding. People complain about how much unnecessary randomness Hearthstone has and I would argue Reno is one of the worst offenders.
Reno did not create new deck archetypes
First of all, what is an archetype? I consider a deck archetype as a style of play that feels different from another deck archetype. At the most basic level, you have Aggro, Midrange, Combo and Control. At a finer grain level you have Aggro Shaman, Midrange Druid, Freeze Mage and Control Warrior. If you go even deeper you might have a Control Warrior that wins with Grommash and Alexstrasza and a Control Warrior that wins exclusively from fatigue. All of these decks have different strengths, weaknesses, strategies, priorities and win conditions. They FEEL different to play.
On the other hand, deciding to run one or two copies of Holy Nova does not change the archetype of a Control Priest. Swapping a Slam for a greedy Ysera does not change the archetype of Control Warrior. People look at Reno Jackson and say “It created new decks like Renolock or Renomage!” This is absolutely false. Renolock is not a new deck archetype. It is simply a sub-optimal Control Warlock with a super powerful neutral heal. Instead of running 2x Hellfire, you run 1x Hellfire and 1x Demonwrath (e.g. worse version of Hellfire).
In other words, imagine if instead of releasing Reno Jackson, Blizzard said that all decks require 60 cards instead of 30, but the two card limit remained. Obviously the meta would drastically change, but not because any new archetypes were created. It would change because many decks simply don’t have enough options to fill out a 60 card deck, so they would become terrible. This doesn’t create new deck archetypes, it just makes certain ones better or worse.
Deck building should be about discovering synergies between cards and trying to make them work. Deciding which mediocre removal spell to use instead of the second copy of Frostbolt isn’t interesting deck building. It’s boring and at the highest levels comes down to playing a ton of games, recording your win rate and picking the option that gave you that extra 1% edge. What’s exciting is discovering unique decks like Evolve Shaman, Confuse Priest and Egg Druid. Even decks that have traditionally been looked down upon like Patron Warrior and Freeze Mage offer players a drastically different experience from the norm. Blizzard should be releasing cards with mechanics that allow new types of play, rather than simply restricting the cards you can choose and calling that good game design.
What’s next?
The worst part about this is that Blizzard looked at Reno Jackson and how many decks included him and probably thought “You know what we need? More Reno mechanics.” Now we have three more of these terrible “if you deck has no duplicate” cards that create new decks by essentially restricting the card pool. I can’t wait until we get a card that says “If you deck does not have odd mana cards, win the game”.
If you’ve never heard of Timmy, Johnny and Spike, I highly recommend reading this article. It wouldn’t surprise me if Reno Jackson was meant as a Johnny/Timmy card like Yogg-Saron or Majordomo Executus. It has a flashy, big effect but will never be strong enough to be played competitively. However, similar to Yogg-Saron, this backfired when Spike did the math and realized the card is actually extremely powerful. Fortunately, Yogg was so blatantly overpowered and terrible for the game that it couldn’t escape the nerf hammer that erased it from competitive play. The Reno mechanic on the other hand, will remain with us forever, always ruining Hearthstone from the shadows.
I played a little bit of Malygos Druid back when it still included Yogg-Saron, however I never got a lot of games in. After the Yogg nerf, I didn’t go back to the deck until I saw this list being streamed by LiquidSjow at 10 top legend. It felt super strong, so I decided to play all my games between 5 and legend using this exact deck list and the stats above are from that same period.
First of all, this deck is a lot harder to play than I thought. I can think of at least four instances where I lost because I missed lethal or a guaranteed 2 turn lethal. Recognizing when you have the ability to burst down with Malygos is much more difficult than I thought, because you are so often concerned with clearing the board and staying alive. It’s particularly tricky to identify when to use your Moonfires or Living Roots to clear board vs saving them for a Malygos combo. I know at least two games where I likely lost because I was greedy and saved a Moonfire and died before playing it. Finally, one of the other important decisions is knowing when to play Malygos without lethal and hope your opponent can’t deal with it. It’s scary to drop your main win condition naked onto the board, but sometimes it’s your best chance of winning because it sets up insane followup turns. Piloting this deck is way harder than when I played Midrange Druid to legend, where you basically just curve out into Force+Roar.
Mulligans
My opinion is that you toss everything that is not Wild Growth or Innervate. If I already have Wild Growth, I will keep Raven Idol if I know what type of spell I want, Living Roots if there is a 2 health target to kill and a 4-drop to curve into. I will also keep Mire Keeper+Innervate without Wild Growth. If I get Wild Growth+Innervate, I will mulligan aggressively for card draw like Azure Drake of Nourish. If I get 2x Wild Growth then I will toss one unless I also already have card draw. You have to be careful that you don’t end up with too much ramp and nothing to play.
General Stuff
It is often correct to ramp with Nourish, especially if your hand is already strong (Azure Drake, Curator, Ragnaros) or you missed a Wild Growth. This deck is heavily based on being ahead of the curve and it has a ton of card draw to refill your hand.
Jungle Moonkin is a surprising all-star for this deck. Moonkin+Swipe is an insane board clear and Moonkin+Spells can be a backup when Malygos is nowhere to be found.
Know what to save Mulch for. It can be correct to Mulch early for tempo or to prevent face damage, but remember that it is your only hard removal. Against certain decks, you absolutely have to save it.
The one card I was on the fence about was Savage Combatant. I wanted to replace it with a second Feral Rage because of how much aggro is on ladder. I often felt like I managed to stabilize the board but would get burned out shortly afterwards. In addition, sometimes I desperately needed Jungle Moonkin for the Moonkin+Swipe combo and my Curator would draw the wrong beast. On the other hand, it gives Curator more value, is another threat for control match ups and gives you an active turn 4 play which requires immediate removal. This deck will often Wild Growth into no 4-drop, which is a big tempo hit.
Vs Shaman (14-9, 60.9% winrate)
I think this deck is slightly favored vs Midrange Shaman. The overwhelming number of Shamans were Midrange, with a few Totem variants. The plan is the same for both. Ramp and clear as much of the board as possible until one of three things happen:
You play a big guy ahead of the curve (Ragnaros, Arcane Giant, Curator) and hope they don’t have Hex. If they do, you play a second one and pray they don’t have the second Hex. If they do, you probably lose. Otherwise your big guy can often stabalize the board.
You survive until you can Moonkin+Swipe+Moonfire with 8 mana. You can outright win the game if you can pull this off, as it almost always clears their entire board, including six health Thunder Bluff Valient and all totems. I think it is often correct to Nourish and just take a bunch of face damage in order to dig for this combo. It’s really important to save your Swipes for this combo. Using one early to clear a single target will likely cause you to struggle later on when Shaman floods board with 0 mana 5/5 taunts.
The opponent plays too many things too quickly and you fail to find ramp. You die.
I can’t stress how strong #2 is. I think at the moment, most Shamans do not play around this because Druid historically has no way to clear a full board. There were many times I would Nourish to fish for the combo, my opponent would overextend and I would clear their entire board the following turn. I think if Shamans start playing around this more, it will be closer, but I still think this deck has a slight edge.
Vs Druid (11-5, 68.8% winrate)
Almost all the druids I faced were mirrors running the exact same list with Curator, with maybe two Token Druids. The mirror is very draw dependent and is basically decided by two major factors. First is who draws ramp. If you get a Wild Growth, you gain a huge advantage that is often insurmountable. Second is getting your card draw engines like Azure Drake or Nourish. You ramp so that you can be the one actively playing threats while your opponent has to respond. Sometimes you will ramp hard and either run out of cards or end up with a hand full of spells and nothing to play. Getting ways to replenish your hand usually defines the end game.
It’s important to save Mulch in this matchup, as every Druid list I’m aware of only runs one. You literally have no other answer to Malygos, so once you use it you have to resign yourself to losing if they ever draw it. On the other hand, if your opponent uses their Mulch early, you can slam Malygos early and expect it to live a turn so you can do crazy 9+6 Swipes the following turn. Be careful of them countering your Ragnaros with their own Ragnaros. It’s a 50/50 coin flip that will often decide games.
Vs Mage (9-4, 69.2% winrate)
I think you are very favored against Freeze Mage. Ramp as hard as you can and just start dropping threats. Ragnaros is the all star here, as they have no reliable removal for it and have to waste their direct damage on him. Try to save Nourish for turns when they Frost Nova+Doomsayer if you have no answer. Keep spell damage for when they try to stall out your board with freeze. Search for healing with Raven Idol and use it right after Alexstraza.
The two other variants I ran into were Aggro Mage (the one that tries to burn you out while stalling with Ice Block and Frost Nova) and Tempo Mage. Both of these are harder than Freeze Mage and you want to quickly identify which one it is, as it greatly impacts what you pick from Raven Idol. Obviously if it’s Aggro, healing is what’s most important. You basically just need to always clear board and survive, as their deck has a finite amount of damage.
With Tempo Mage you actually have to Raven Idol for more value cards. The scary part about Tempo Mage is that they generally have aggressive starts against you and you will feel like you need to use spells inefficiently to survive. Then you may get out-valued later on due to Cabalist Tome or Antonidas. I’ve actually gone into Fatigue against tempo mage and completely run out of cards while they still had cards in hand. Of course, if they have a slow start and you can efficiently use your removal, then you will eventually out value them.
Vs Warlock (5-4, 55.6% winrate)
The Zoo matchup feels very bad. It plays very similarly to the Midrange Shaman matchup except way faster. The only time I won was when I managed to ramp and draw into Moonkin+Swipe. Unfortunately, even if you pull it off you can still lose since their board is more sticky than Shaman and they finish you off with charging Doomguards.
Renolock feels very favorable though. Since you run the burst package of Malygos, you are basically just waiting to gather all the pieces and kill them from ~20 life. They will usually be around there from just life taps. You also run a lot of big threats, so they can sometimes struggle to find answers, especially if they don’t have Siphon Soul for your 8/8s. This lets you get in the rest of the chip damage to put them into combo range.
Vs Hunter (5-2, 71.4% winrate)
With the nerf to Call of the Wild, I think Hunter has fallen off the grid a bit. Secret hunter is generally the harder matchup, specifically because Cat Trick triggering off a Wild Growth is too much face damage and Freezing Trap is strong against your big minions. Otherwise, the hope is just to ramp and stabilize the board, which should eventually happen. Secret Hunter usually doesn’t run Deadly Shot or any hard removal, so an early Ragnaros is often game ending. Search for healing from Raven Idols and pay attention to when you can race and burst them with Malygos combo.
Vs Paladin (6-1, 85.7% winrate)
Against aggro, you obviously just want to clear board as fast as possible and try to survive. Empty your hand to avoid Divine Favor value and if you can survive into the later turns, you automatically just win. Watch your life and Raven Idol for healing if needed. This matchup is very dependent on who curves out best.
N’zoth and Murloc paladin play out surprisingly the same and are both favored in my opinion. Your goal is to ramp and play threats, without ever over extending into Equality+Consecrate. Be very aware of how many equalities they’ve used, since it’s their only real way to deal with your big threats like Ragnaros or Malygos. Your goal is to draw your entire deck, continuously playing threats. You can generally do this faster than the Paladin, so occasionally you will get some face damage against him. Then you kill him from near full health with a Malygos+spells combo. Save all your damage spells for this, as the Malygos+2xMoonfire+2xLiving Roots is 26 damage from hand. If you get a Thaurissan tick off with Innervate+Swipe, you can do the full 30 from hand.
Vs Rogue (2-3, 40% winrate)
Miracle Rogue is not a particularly fun matchup. You can’t really stop them from getting a good Gadgetzan turn off and you have no answers for Conceal except for Ragnaros. Occasionally you will ramp well and manage to take board. In that case, you can keep trading and eventually run them out of threats. Sometimes, you can get lucky and draw Malygos+spells to surprise kill them. Otherwise, you generally get overwhelmed by the card advantage of Gadgetzan.
Vs Warrior (3-2, 60% winrate)
Against any aggro Warrior like Pirate, the objective is just to try and survive. Prioritize your health and use your cheap spells as soon as possible to clear board. If you survive to late game you win.
I really liked the matchup against the different Control Warriors, whether it be traditional/fatigue, C’thun or N’Zoth. The plan is to out value the Warrior in the long game. You ramp and keep playing threat after threat until they run out of removal. Eventually a minion will stick on the board and he solos the warrior. Save Fandral and Raven Idol for later so that you can get both the minion and spell, which will add additional threats to your deck. At a certain point, you will get the warrior low enough that you can burst them with Malygos+spells. Never play more than two minions so you don’t over extend into Brawl. The biggest concern is actually Sylvanas, as she will almost always steal a minion from you since you have no answer. Obviously save Mulch for C’thun if it ever makes an appearance, but usually they don’t have time to play it since they have to answer your threats every turn. Similarly, they usually don’t have time to play N’Zoth since they have to answer your threats on board.
Vs Priest (0-1, 0% winrate)
Priest OP. Honestly, I think this is a bad matchup. You don’t have clean answers to a Resurrected Injured Blademaster and they have tons of answers for your big threats with SW: Death and Entomb. However, nobody plays this shitty class so who knows for sure.
Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of fatigue warrior. I found a list on LiquidHearth from a player called Eversiction that originally piqued my interest. Control Warrior is a deck I’ve always wanted to play but never could, due to my limited collection. The highlight of this deck is that it only requires two legendaries: Elise Starseeker and Justicar Trueheart.
This deck runs two win conditions. The first is playing Elise, turning your entire deck into legendaries, and slamming huge dudes every turn. The second is to remove every threat the opponent plays until they run out of cards and outlast them in fatigue by gaining 4 armor a turn. While the deck is extremely time inefficient, every game is full of very interesting decisions and mechanics. It’s also very computationally intense, as most games against other control decks come down to difficult fatigue math. This naturally results in the deck having a higher win percentage because other players are less likely to be familiar with the matchup.
Of course, I quickly realized that the math is too hard and decided to build a spreadsheet to calculate everything for me. I got a ton of use out of my original Patron Lethals spreadsheet which calculated damage from hand with varying numbers of Frothing Berserkers, Whirlwinds and Inner Rages. I figured I could try and reproduce a similar thing for fatigue.
Introducing the Fatigue Calculator. You can enter game state like health, healing, fatigue and damage on board for both you and your opponent. Then it displays your life totals at each turn until you eventually die. The purpose of this is to quickly calculate the result of the game if nobody does anything except hero power for the rest of the game. Why is this so important? In most games against aggro or midrange, if you survive long enough you automatically win, no math required. This spreadsheet becomes a lifesaver in heavy control matchups, such as Control Priest or the Control Warrior mirror.
Here’s a quick puzzle. You are playing this deck vs a control Priest. Both players have drawn their entire deck. You are holding the Golden Monkey and 5 other useless cards. The priest has 1-2 copies of Entomb and 4 other useless cards in hand. The priest has a 2/8 Deathlord in play. You have 24 armor and 21 health while the priest has 30 health. You just took 1 damage from fatigue and the priest has taken 0. What’s the correct play?
As the warrior, you have two choices: play Golden Monkey or do nothing. Playing Golden Monkey is tempting since transforming your dead hand into potentially powerful legendaries is great. However, you know it will definitely be Entombed, giving the Priest one less fatigue turn and the ability to also play the Golden Monkey. Every time I’ve done this I feel at a disadvantage and only win because I get better random legendaries. The correct play in this scenario is to actually do nothing. If both players do nothing but hero power for the rest of the game, the warrior will win.
Or, imagine this situation that occurred to me the other day.
It’s currently the beginning of my turn. I will take four fatigue damage on my next turn and my opponent is going to take five. During the game, I knew my opponent had Grom and I incorrectly thought his last card was a worthless Shield Block (turned out to be Brawl). I have two choices: play Nozdormu followed by Golden Monkey or play Golden Monkey and hope I get a better or equal legendary from the effect. What’s the right play?
First of all, if neither of us does anything for the rest of the game, I am going to lose to fatigue first. This doesn’t even consider that he has an equipped Death’s Bite that can hit me for another 4-8 damage.
Now if I play Nozdormu, he will kill it with charge Grom + Death’s Bite. Then I play Monkey and he trades enraged 10/1 Grom into Monkey. He’s left with an Acolyte of Pain and a Death’s Bite with 1 charge. He can’t use the last charge of Death’s Bite since the deathrattle would cause him to fatigue more. The new scenario is the same as the last, except my opponent will take an extra 8 damage from face tanking Nozdormu. I still lose two turns early.
So the only way I can win is to play Golden Monkey and pray for a miracle. It just so happens I ripped a Deathwing off the top for the glorious win.
With Blizzard’s recent announcement of a standard format, I figured it would be interesting to bring up a completely unrelated subject that you’ll never see mentioned in pretty much any reddit post or youtube video: limited.
In my eyes, Hearthstone constructed is “good enough”. And by constructed I mean the thing you play on the ladder or in tournaments, where you make a deck from your collection. There is a lot of diversity in the decks you can choose to play at high levels and a lot of depth in the match ups. With the new standard format where you only allow newer cards, it will be even better. However, what I feel is a tremendously wasted opportunity for Blizzard and Hearthstone is how we treat Arena. And I don’t mean buffing Arena warrior.
Anything can happen in the arena.
If you’re not too familiar with Arena, it is Hearthstone’s take on Magic The Gathering’s sealed deck format. You are giving a set of random cards and you must choose a subset of those cards to make a deck. You are then pitted against other players who went through the same process but with a different set of random cards.
A limited format offers a few interesting aspects to the game that constructed formats cannot. First of all there is the deck building aspect. Since the pool of cards you choose from is random, you can’t just look up the most popular, optimized deck from the Tempostorm meta snapshot. You need to make complex decisions based on a limited set of resources. Most choices are based on intuition and practice, rather than playing a deck 100 times to finely tune whether to include one or two Fiery War Axe.
Since the pool of cards is limited, it makes a lot of “bad” cards playable and you will often see things that would never happen in constructed. Strange interactions between cards that have no business being in a deck together will crop up all the time and 7/7 minions are suddenly amazing since you don’t have to worry about Big Game Hunter being played in 100% of all decks.
I’ve got the beast in my sights. PEW!
There are a lot less pre-known choices in limited formats. In constructed, every deck list of every high tier deck is 100% known. In addition, every professional memorizes the “right” decisions to do in every combination of match ups. In Control Warrior vs Freeze Mage, I want to mulligan for these X cards and my plan is to hero power as often as possible and fatigue them. It’s incredibly skill based but also extremely tiresome to learn. It’s very similar to memorizing chess openings. The first 10-15+ moves of chess have been studied so thoroughly that the optimal choices are pretty well documented. Just memorize the thousands of possible outcomes and you can be a Grandmaster too! Limited formats are more like the mid game of chess. While a computer can in theory map out every possible outcome, it’s impossible for humans to do it. So you’re forced to think on your feet , improvise, and rely on intuition.
If you can’t instantly recognize which deck this matchup chart is for, you are not good at Hearthstone.
Finally, the most important reason this format is great is that the random cards are not based on your collection. Everyone who enters into an Arena is given the same number of random cards and is essentially on a “level” playing field. Sure, sometimes one guy will get better random cards than you but we still started from the same point. This even creates a nice “powerball” effect that encourages bad players to keep playing, since you can always hope to get lucky and open the pack with the bomb legendary.
Ultimately, constructed formats have a hefty “competitive” price tag. To expect to get anywhere, you need to pay the money or time to grind all the cards. You also need to spend hours practicing and studying the same match ups. It’s NOT pay to win (don’t get me started on people who wrongly think that), but constructed Heathstone does cost at least a few hundred dollars, which is obfuscated behind buying random card packs. Limited formats let you circumvent a lot of that cost.
A few years ago I was really into Magic Online, but since I didn’t have a collection, I played drafts (a limited format where players take turns picking cards from random packs). I got to play competitively with other people without having to spend thousands of dollars on a constructed deck running 4 copies of Jace The Mind Sculpter. When Hearthstone came out I immediately started playing Arena non stop. It gave me the same type of enjoyment of playing Magic drafts but didn’t cost $15 per run. It was like a dream come true!
I’m not sure if I’m looking at the price history of a Magic card or Bitcoin.
However, as time progressed, arena started to feel more and more repetitive and stale. And it wasn’t just because I played too much. I played a lot of Magic drafts but never felt the same way. Thinking more about it, I realized the problem wasn’t the format. I actually love the way Arena is designed and I could go into a whole rant about the positives of how it’s built. The problem was something outside the game.
In my opinion, the best thing that could happen to Hearthstone is to make limited part of Blizzard’s World Hearthstone Championships. The reason Arena is stale is because Blizzard doesn’t care about it and so players don’t care about it. In Magic, limited formats like draft and sealed are part of all their tournaments, including the World Championships and Pro Tours. As a result, professionals have to practice and care about Arena. It makes us plebeians get excited and drives more people into the format.
Arena should be more prominent in the game’s UI. Give us public Arena rankings, just like how constructed has the ladder. Make Arena wins count towards golden portraits. It’s important that we have goals to work towards while playing and the 12 win key isn’t enough.
Blizzard needs to design their new card sets more for Arena. For months, there was a ton of feedback from players and data showing how terrible Warriors were in arena. When the new card set came out, there were a bunch of great Arena cards for Warrior that were totally unplayable for constructed. For some reason though, Blizzard decided to make all these cards at higher rarities, meaning they almost never appear as choices for Arena. There was literally no reason not to make the high quality Arena cards more common, because nobody crafted a single one for constructed.
Finally, Blizzard needs to rotate card sets for Arena just like what they proposed for constructed. The reason Arena feels so stale is that if you want to win, you have to always pick Flamestrike, always pick Truesilver Champion and always pick Fire Elemental. If these cards were removed from the format and replaced with new, interesting mechanics, Arena would feel vibrant and alive again.
Although you already have 4 Flamestrikes, I still recommend you pick Flamestrike here because it has the most value.
Blizzard’s choice of rotating card sets is a great decision which will help to make constructed Hearthstone a much more interesting landscape. However, it still doesn’t address the high barrier of entry, in terms of both money and time. More emphasis on limited formats provide new players a way to experience a highly competitive form of the game without that upfront cost. In my opinion, Arenas can also act as a gateway drug to constructed, because as you play more Arena your rewards include cards usable only for constructed. It’s a win-win situation for both Blizzard and players.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my little rant. I love constructed Hearthstone and I’ve played more than my fair share of it (three seasons of legend). But if you gave me a choice, I’d still rather play Arena in my spare time. If Blizzard would support Arena in the same way Wizards of the Coast supported draft or sealed, I believe it could be one of biggest and best improvements to the game.
I recently saw a fun little article entitled No one is actually good at Candy Crush. It makes the observations that the majority of successful mobile games are based around the “illusion of skill”. These are games where the progression and pacing is controlled by the developer, rather than by the player’s ability. The author states, “tell me how many hours you’ve played, how much money you have spent, and I should be able to tell you within a good degree of certainty how far you are in Candy Crush, what level your town hall is in Clash of Clans, how many times you’ve ascended in Tap Titans”.
Now the most amusing part of this article is reading the comments, where players accuse the author of being overly simplistic or elitist. According to them, there is in fact a large amount of skill involved in some of these games. They cite examples where a player can plan ahead to make better moves in Candy Crush. Strictly speaking, they are right. There are basic players who make the first move that is suggested to them by the automatic hints and elite players who look one, two or even five moves into the future to assemble enormous combinations. Like Chess or Go, we could go so far as to write programs to analyze the board and spit out the optimal match. In fact, I had a friend back in school who did that with Bejeweled and won a bunch of money in tournaments before his account got banned. This is clearly, a skill based game.
All of this would be great if it weren’t for a tiny detail that the author left out of his article. Every single major mobile puzzle game, whether it be Candy Crush or Juice Jam, dynamically controls how the game plays out while you are blissfully matching three. Behind the scenes, an algorithm more complex than you can possibly imagine is secretly adjusting the difficulty of every level, even going so far as to create lucky cascades to fall on to your board. The win percentages for every level is carefully monitored, as well as how many moves you have left when you win and how much of your goal is unfinished when you lose. Candy Crush knows everything about you and if you’re significantly above or below the tuning curve they have designed, then you can bet a $0.99 bundle pack that they are going to change the game to make you fall in line.
These games are essentially super powered slot machines. Everything about the experience is tuned to keep you playing for as long as possible and make you feel good about yourself. When new mechanics are introduced, players will frequently encounter a more “difficult” level with a very low win percentage. After days of perseverance, you finally conquer this challenge and it’s an amazing feeling! You’ve mastered this new obstacle, and the next few levels you fall before your new found skill. Of course, the levels after that “difficult” level are tuned to have very high win percentages, but let’s not mention that to our players.
Now there isn’t anything wrong with slot machines. I’ve dropped $100+ into the Willy Wonka slot machine in Vegas trying to get the Grandpa Joe bonus game (I’ve got a golden ticket!). However, when you play a game you should recognize it for what it is. If you play Candy Crush because it’s a fun way to pass the time on the train, you want a way to decompress and relax after work, or you just love that creepy guy with the mustache, more power to you. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’ve mastered a game that is programmed to be impossible to master.
And for the rest of the people who still think Candy Crush is skill based, King would like to give you a $5.9 billion thank you hug.
I first heard of Brothers (they have a nice parallax site by the way) when I was searching for games for my new iPad Pro. With such a huuuuuge iPad I figured it would be a waste not to spend a bit on the nice graphically-impressive games. There was even a sale on it in the App Store recently, but Jack convinced me to buy it for the PS4 instead because the controls probably wouldn’t be as good on iPad – in the screenshots you can even see that they are on-screen “virtual joysticks” that end up blocking the game. The game’s been out a few years, but only came to PS4 and iOS this year.
The game is about two brothers going to get something that will somehow heal their sick dad, and each brother is controlled separately with L2/R2 and the two analog sticks. There are certain things only one brother can do – the older one is stronger, the younger one can fit through smaller spaces, etc.
I kind of had trouble getting the two brothers to walk together, but it may just be because I suck at controlling them. I kept forgetting which stick controlled which brother. In cases where they would fall off a cliff if I forgot which one was L2, I had to stop and think very carefully before I did anything. I ended up getting really tense and gripping the controller really tightly, trying to make sure I didn’t kill anyone.
They don’t speak a real language, just a gibberish language. To be honest, I had no idea what we were looking for throughout the majority of the game (actually until we got to it) – the older brother would show people a scroll of what he was looking for, but I never got to see the scroll. Maybe there was some visual clue near the beginning that I just totally missed.
It was pretty interesting, and I finished it in two plays – it was very short. The first play was relatively normal, just two boys on an adventure and a troll or two, but in the second play things started getting weird and sort of creepy – I don’t like creepy things!
I’ll use spoiler tags for this part just in case.
Spoilers here!
The second play, I started off where the wolves come after you and started seeing the dead bodies hanging from the trees. I was actually surprised that nothing jumped out at me in the graveyard. I really didn’t like the giant battlefield though – giant bloody dead… well… giants, everywhere with arrows sticking out of them. I hated pushing on the arrows stuck in their bodies to move them out of the way, especially when one of them dropped an arm holding an axe that just chopped the leg off the dead body. Why was that necessary? What does that add to the game??? Nothing even wakes up and attacks you like I kept expecting. Freaky spider lady grossed me out too.
There were parts that just made no sense to me – what was that where the younger brother was hallucinating about the giant woman? What exactly was going on there? It didn’t seem to matter to any of the storyline later.
I actually enjoyed the end, not enjoying that the older brother died but enjoying that a game allowed an ending that wasn’t an ideal happy ending. It was kind of intense and unexpected that they actually have you control the younger brother dragging the older brother into the grave he dug, and you actually go through the motions of pushing the dirt over him to bury him.
Unfortunately our experience was slightly ruined because there seemed to be some sort of bug – laying on the floor near the dead brother was the black shape of what looked like a dead bird. In fact it was right next to the grave, so it was strange to drag the brother through this random black shadow you can’t interact with.
When the younger brother reaches back home and needs to cross the water, I actually thought it was a bug that he wasn’t doing anything when I used his usual R2 button. It was a nice touch that you actually have to use the older brother’s button, like he’s there helping you in spirit – I thought there would be a ghost version of him like the ghost mother.
Overall it was a pretty good game, apart from the random creepy stuff that didn’t seem to add anything to the game.
Your 80% win rate vs Secret Paladin will be missed.
Patron Warrior is such an amazing deck. Not because of it’s strength, but due to the incredible challenge required to pilot it correctly. This deck is a delicate balancing act between playing your minions, saving resources for the combo, and knowing when to pull the trigger. I spent a ton of time watching pros play Patron to learn the fundamentals. I made the best spreadsheet ever of damage from hand for all combinations of Frothings, Patrons, Whirlwinds, and Inner Rage. Despite all this I constantly misplayed, miscounted lethal, and utterly threw away won games. The first time I was at rank one, five stars I executed my combo wrong, wasted 1 point of damage and lost the game with my opponent at 1 health. After 250 games of Patron I’m still not 100% confidant of the best cards to mulligan for in all match ups.
It’s very depressing that Blizzard is removing such an intricate, complex deck from the game. It’s one of the first decks that truly felt heavily skill based and not just an RNG fest. There are so many other ways to lower the power level of the deck while keeping the core game play the same. Unfortunately, they took the lazy approach and just killed it in the name of “future design space”. It’s really too bad.
