The other major issue with Genn and Baku is that they made nerfing other cards problematic too. The go to nerf is to increase a card by 1 mana, which is often enough to weaken a card without killing it entirely, but you can't do that easily when you need to consider what happens when something switches from an odd to an even deck and vice versa. Any balance change needs to either be 2 mana, be a change other than mana, or needs to be thoroughly tested with either genn or baku. I'm sure the logistical problems there also contributed to them being hall of famed early
I had an idea at the time to nerve Glenn and Baku (although it would indeed mean a considerable change in their text): They start in your opening hand like quests. If you keep them in your hand, they work just like they do now - but your opening hand is considerably weakened. If you mulligan them away, their 'start of game' effect is changed into a battlecry on the card.
You also could have like put "When you have 5 Mana Crystals, upgrade your heropower" on its effect. That'd probably be too slow for anyone other than druid, but its just an example.
@@Epzilon12 Genn not working on turn 1 is pretty brutal since you literally can't run 1 cost cards in your deck. Upgrading the hero power on turn 5 doesn't make to much of a diference as at worst you miss 3 empowered hero powers at thats only if you skips your turn 2,3 and 4 plays. Can't remeber who ran baku outside of warrior and maybe druid but those 2 probably don't particuarly care about not using empowered hero power early since they got along fine using justicar trueheart previously.
Now this is my tinfoil hat theory so take it with a pinch of salt but I feel like Blizzard did not increased power levels because of Genn and Baku, they did it because of Demon hunter. After demon hunters release they realized how strong the class is so in order to make other classes catch up to illidan they printed 10 out of 10 cards for every other class in Scholomance. Hence naturally increasing the powerlevel of the game and the future expansions so that they can sell packs and not flop like Rastakhans.
They went too far and now Demon Hunter is poo tier. On rotation, if they revert pretty much all the DH cards from Ashes it'll have a chance to even exist in Wild.
The game was balanced around 9 classes. They introduced a class that effectively did what warlock hunter and Rouge did. It was what caused me to drop the game. Not even because it was inherently overpowered, but because they jumped the shark I game design.
People say that power creep is inevitable in CCgs. I say _bollocks_ it is. As a classic Magic player from back in the day, I remember when the game underwent power SEEP. The base set's Lightning Bolt was so over-efficient (1 mana, deal 3 damage, no questions asked) that WotC kept remaking it in inferior forms, like Incinerate (2 mana, deal 3 damage and target creatures can't regenerate this turn) or even Shock (1 mana, deal 2 damage). All the most powerful cards in Magic history were released in the first few years of its existence. As long as your game uses set rotations, you have NO excuse for infinite power creep other than being an inept game designer. It's all about designing INTERESTING new cards with new uses to power new archetypes, not just making cards that are like old cards but better (unless said old cards ended up being unplayably weak and you want to have another crack at them).
The reason why they increase the power level is really a no brainer which had been addressed already. Simply put, the sales sucked. Rastakhans Rumble was an attempt to curb the power creep and unfortunately because of that it was one of the worst expansions in terms of monetary sales. Basically the market responded, make more powerful cards or were not buying.
By releasing a powerful set Blizzard is making new cards relevant and thus necessary for competetive play, which means people will spend more money to acquire them. Having each expansion power creep the last one is more economically viable than paying close attention to balancing, especially when you can just wait and see what will turn up to be op and then nerf it, when it is clear the card is problematic, rather then try to predict what cards may be too strong. It may be cinical of me, but I think it's impossible that those aren't at least in part reasons for cosntant power creep.
I do agree in terms of short term profit however that way you lose a large part of your player base. (You need only look at the amount of streamer that have quit the game.)
Sadly it doesn't work like that because the hype that people will have for powerful cards won't stand for too long before people get tired of the powercreep, that can be obviously be seen by how there's always more people playing when a new expansion comes out, it's not because people want to play the game for fun, they just need to see something new and that will cause people to get tired of it in a couple of weeks, that constant power level increasing is only causing people to have less interest in the game and there's always less hype for new expansions and there's always more complaining about the power level, it's just a marketing sistem that will slowly but surely kill hearthstone, the only opportunity for a new chance for this game is the rotation, with a lot of powerful cards going to wild there will be an opportunity to add weaker expansions to the game and still having people interested in playing them because weaker cards will be actually viable
I actually enjoyed the most in the Year of the Raven. Yeah Genn and Baku was too good but the rest of the meta was very solid. I like when you don't cheat huge mana. I like it when you get a 10 mana effect when you play a 10 mana card. I think they screwed up with the Rise of Shadows, they did the same mistake they did with the release of Witchwood. Panicking and making extreme changes when moderate changes would suffice.
Unfortunately, I believe the wrong lesson was learned from this "mistake". Genn and Baku were much stronger than other cards from the sets around them, but the real issue with the cards is in the design itself. Brian Kibler even talks about this in his videos back then. Baku was really the more problematic card, and that is because of the effect it had on each match. While there was a deck restriction, the upgrade was focused on the hero power, and it causes games to play out extremely similar. Odd Paladin was at the forefront of these kinds of decks, and every single game you knew it was going to be just a ton of dudes from a ton of hero powers and thats all it was going to be. It made gameplay very stale, but that is because you can't interact with it. Hearthstone always has had an issue with interactivity between opponents, but it wasn't always a dominant issue. Baku specifically made this issue extremely apparent, and paired with the lower power level of those expansions led to a very oppressive set of decks that werent even enjoyable to play. Now the lesson should have been focused on the design elements, not the power level. Fast forward to today and we have some of the most oppressive and awfully designed cards the game has ever seen. You even highlight the extreme amount of nerfs that have been required to get things to an even playing field, but yet the cards still remain problematic because the issues are related to the design of the cards not the power of cards. Power is relative after all, there will always be "powerful" decks relative to what is currently around. But cards these days are not just powerful, but designed to be oppressively. Control decks have literally been pushed out of the game, not the meta, the GAME. Despite tons of nerfs, it doesn't matter because the design of cards like Demon Seed, Raid the Docks, Ignite, ect, will continuously be oppressively because they are designed poorly. Unfortunately, I feel the trend will continue.
you're right, the card design isn't very good for the biggest offenders this year of course it's baked into the "power level", part of the power is the poor design my point is the "if everything is overpowered then nothing is overpowered" is absolutely not true imagine if they power creeped chess let every piece move like the queen let you place any piece anywhere fk it, no rules, i win, that was fun i'm exaggerating, but the point is parts of the game stay the same while the cards bloat in power and that affects the gameplay just as chess has a specific number of squares on the board so hs has things that don't change, and power creep is in relation to those in hs it also affects the ability to have control over the meta mathematically a system who's governing parameters are too close to 0 or infinity are unstable systems and can't be controlled, they spin out of control it's a statistical principle and we're seeing that in hs, we are going to get hyper aggro or hyper control because it's an unstable system, and power creep is primarily the reason gradually eroding the strategic gameplay of hs toward.... in the direction of "no rules i win, yey fun"... or a coin flip in short you are right. ignite shouldn't be able to be cast an infinite number of times and avoid fatigue indefinitely, and demon seed making fatigue irrelevant is violating principle game fundamentals... you run out of cards you die other principles: playing cards cost mana, drawing cards cost mana and other solitaire game mechanics just ruin the fun
@@andrewgrow5711 I both agree and disagree with you here. Everything you described is correct, I just don't think it is accurate to our current situation. In terms of "if everything is overpowered, then nothing is overpowered" is an accurate statement, because what it is referring to is the overall level of power, not the individual mechanics. If all cards are of a specific level of strength, then that simply becomes the new baseline for which we draw from comparison, therefore making nothing really out of the ordinary or powerful. In your example of chess, what you are describing is fundamentally changing the way the current pieces work. You are adding functionality to what is already there. By doing so you are more or less creating something new. It would no longer be chess, but a new game. However, thats not what is happening in hearthstone, we arent changing what is there but adding more. So in terms of chess, it would be like taking the existing game of chess but adding in a new piece that could do these things. Thats what is happening to hearthstone, the fundamental rule of fatigue exists and that hasnt changed, but a new piece has been introduced altogether and it ignores that rule. Now the cards power does not change the way it works. Many cards have been nerfed, but the problem continues because of the design of the card, not the power level. The Demon Seed could be an incredibly weak card, but would still be problematic because of its design. So while we mostly agree, I still feel power is separate from design. It is a interesting conversation though, thank you for your constructive response!
@@zeleros4027 every analogy has a flaw and focusing on the flaw and not the point of the analogy doesn't further the discussion but fair enough there's spells that deal damage to enemy hero how about a 1 mana spell that deals 40 damage to the enemy hero if you draw it on the first turn you'll probably win functionally it's in line with hs, but the scale is extreme it's not interactive, it's not fun and reduces the game to a coin-flip paradigm clearly that's overpowered and is bad for hs why? because you get one mana on your first turn and you have 30 health and it's parameters like these that define the game, and power level is in relation to these parameters in chess you can pick whatever you like to be the analogue for power, and the point is that if whatever that is, if it's scaled enough the gameplay of chess devolves so there is obviously a "too powerful" and the boundary is debatable, but it really feels like hs has crossed that boundary... imho in the last year or two and the symptoms are the instability of nerfs failing to balance the meta, the swing of games based on things you don't have much control of etc. leads to games feeling solitaire standard doesn't feel like standard hearthstone, standard feels like wild much in the way chess with all queens wouldn't really feel like chess anymore
Power creep, on the other hand, does not necessarily make design bad. The two are not mutually exclusive. You can have power creep on interesting cards. Take year of the dragons. One of the highest power creep years in the game, but SO MANY CARDS WERE FUN
All this new design philosophy says to me is "we don't know what we're doing with this game, but it doesn't matter, we'll fix it in post". I don't really play HS anymore, I hate the way the game is now, I hate that control is just not allowed to exist by design. It's like they saw the hype moments of Yogg getting a lucky roll and said, "why don't we just make the entire game like that all the time". It's boring and every new set made my in-game decisions matter less and less.
I certainly agree BB's personal charisma is quite welcoming, but if it came to the level of interaction between devs and player community, the new devs are miles ahead compared to BB's.
As a player who went away during cobolds (and never returned), looking at these videos gives me the same feeling. After bb was gone, the new devs needed some time to adjust. When they finally did, the game was already if not declining, at least out of the spotlight. Or maybe the tcg genre was just short lived and people moved on.
first of all, he left the team on his own. Secondly, he and his team barely communicated with their customers, us :D Thirdly, he was not really good with the streamers etc.
I think that the team screwed up with Rise of Shadows. If they kept the powerlevel in check after the rotation, we could actually get to experience the cards from the year of the raven in a more stable meta. Missed opportunity imo
Low power level does not mean bad cards. Rastakhan's Rumble was by far one of the best expansions, the cards it introduced being so gimmicky and fun in how they made you play and what they pushed for. Good cards are not cards which are competitively viable, but cards which are fun to use. By no means do I think Mogu Cultist is some top tier card, it's pretty low power, but to make a deck around them and use them is still fun, so it's a great card. Same with lorewalker cho, gonk the raptor, zerek's cloning gallery, blackhowl gunspire, chameleos, the list goes on and on. I do not like this competitive-only lens that cards and sets are viewed through, especially since most players aren't competitive.
On the contrary, low power level cards don't do their designed idea effectively. If cards don't follow some baseline, they'll be too weak to do what they were designed to do and won't be fun at all. Meme cards are kind of in this area. Meme cards can be utterly unplayable like Millhouse and Moorabi. Guess which one is seen as a fun meme idea. It's Moorabi because the potential for something crazy is there (aka high power). High power and fun are definitely related but that doesn't necessarily mean competitive. Consistency also matters for competition, and is arguably more important.
@@GaussianEntity Casting seance in shaman is really not that "powerful". Things are not memes because of a promise of power, they are memes because to achieve them requires a lot of strategy, it's actively hard to, there's something impressive about it. Even demon hunter is a meme deck, you can't deny that people have played it and built strategies around it, but it's not explained by your idea of "power" why people would ever care. The simple fact that at the very start of the game your opponent has to watch you reduce your hero power to what it already is, with you emoting some threat, that is the good shit man, that's the fun. Crazy does not have to be "high power", crazy can just be fun and gimmicky. Also, millhouse + cho IS a meme strat, tf do you mean about him not being considered a meme card? People craft him in golden for the meme. When mechathun was first released at the start of boomsday, he was the pinnacle of a meme card as he was stupidly hard to complete and it felt like you were some mad scientist at the end, your opponent thinking you were an idiot in how you wasted all your resources, with the big reveal of some dumbass combo when you're left with nothing. It's not the fact that you're doing something powerful as much as it is the process of getting there, the strategies that had to be employed, y'know, the gameplay.
@@smallangrycrab Really? Okay so point out a meme deck with Millhouse Manastorm? What about a deck with some other low power legendary? What's a meme deck without a ridiculously difficult payoff card(s)? (Keyword: payoff aka powerful). You mentioned DH but those decks include some payoff cards in some form or another (Even DH has the Reno cards and value cards, Tax DH stops meta decks from playing the game, other DH stuff does some ridiculous things as a payoff). Fun is definitely tied to power. Otherwise, why play the game? Another way I can drive the point home is to see deck creation through the eyes of a deckbuilder. Every deck has a goal in mind. Meta decks are built to win. Flashy decks are built to win with style. Meme decks are built to do something incredibly funny that has some influence in the game. Every deck has a goal. And that goal usually is some payoff card or synergy. Don't believe me? Find a deck that doesn't have a goal that is played more than once. Okay here you mention a synergy. Millhouse AND Cho together. Why is this important? Because now your goal here is a tempting risk. Give your opponent basically unlimited power but at the potential cost of going down an unknown road. That's the goal of this synergy. But that synergy doesn't require Millhouse lol. Cho does this entirely on his own to the point where there's a UA-cam player who builds Cho decks for almost every class lol. Cho is a powerful legendary (contrary to some opinions) because he forces a change in the game state. Spells are no longer without additional consequences. He's in the same vein with cards like Irondeep Trogg and Crossroads Watchpost. Mecha'thun has the exact same principle except we call these cards sleeper cards. They're cards that have no support when first released but could be powerful one day. And lo and behold, there's been a strong Mecha'thun deck every so often in Wild. Also, Mecha'thun also follows the principles I've outlined above. Strategy is the path you take to get to your payoff. But if your payoff is weak, there's not much of a point to getting to it. Like I mentioned above, give me examples of decks that do not follow this kind of thing and I will concede this point. That said, having played different card games, the only ones that don't really follow this structure is RP decks, decks that follow some nonstandard rules or mechanics, or just friends doing fun stuff. That's not really playing the actual game in my eyes so I exclude these.
@@GaussianEntity " Fun is definitely tied to power. Otherwise, why play the game?" I think you misunderstand in how you view power. Viability is a necessity for things to be able to happen, and you do need a certain level of viability to do things. However, you do not need something to be more powerful for it to be more fun, engaging, or overall enjoyable. To have a card that kills your opponent turn one, that you are guarenteed to draw, is not fun. No animation, no sound, just you play it for 0 mana, the game ends, and your score is increased. It is certainly powerful, but there's obviously no enjoyment to it. You earned nothing, you didn't think about anything for that win, it just came to you, making the card not fun. Even demon hunter is not an interesting deck because it is a reno deck. There is no reason for a reno demon hunter deck to include Genn Greymane, at least trom this purely power based view. Why not just play normal reno demon hunter? That is a deck that exists, and given that it is a RENO DECK, there are certainly more optimal card inclusions which are of an odd cost. Clearly, the draw is not based on power. It's based on fun. There is obviously a difference there. I feel like I should clarify what fun is to me so I can better explain. Having a card which is 10 mana do nothing is not fun. But, if designed right, it can be fun. Add a crazy visual and sound when played, make it tied to an achievement for playing it in ranked, with the rank that they were able to play it in built into the card, make it extrermely hard to reach, like behind a quest with 6 stages to it, and you've got yourself a card people would absolutely see people playing entire decks built around playing that card. It would be stupid in some people's eyes, sure, but it would be fun because it's not just about the reward, but the challenge of the card itself existing. It's a gimmicky, stupid thing, for reasons completely beyond power and viability. With that all being said, again, viability is good. To be able to play the card and not have it backfire every time is fun. That weapon in shaman from Knights of the Frozen Throne, the one that kills frozen minions, doesn't have much fans despite it being hard to pull off and low in power. But I think I've demonstrated that that's not the only reasons why it's bad, there are many ways you could make that card far more fun. You brought up cho, and said that he's an actually good legendary because he changes how you have to play the game. I'd completely agree with that if by good you didn't mean powerful, but we could debate the strength of cards separately. Instead, I'll pick an example which, in terms of power, is pretty sucky: Nozdormu. Either the original in classic or the new one in the core set, Nozdormu has an effect people play him for which, let's be honest, isn't really that powerful. It changes things, sure, and you could argue there's some very niche situation where it's useful in that your opponent went afk or is playing very slowly, but I think we could agree those aren't the sole reasons people play him. People play him for those super fast paced moments, for the thrill of changing something so normally slow paced and thought out into a rapid fire clusterfuck of cards being thrown out. People played decks that filled their side of the board with nozdormus because the visual animation of the sand stacks, and it's silly to not be able to see your own cards or health most of the time due to the animation. By all means, the card sucked in power, as you had to commit 9 mana for an understatted dragon, but it was a thrill the whole way through. Ultimately, this card game has a lot more to it than just grinding for rank 1 legend, and I want to see the devs care about all that other stuff, as I certainly take more enjoyment in it than pure power. It's why I loved rastakhans, as it felt like the right direction towards fun and not strictly competitive, and it didnt seem bothered with making every card on par with every other. You can have weaker cards or strategies, it can be fun to have a challenge, but just make the cards and strategies fun.
@@smallangrycrab That's the thing though. You relate power with viability. I don't. The reason I don't is because consistency is far more important for viability than power is. If your deck is "weak" but does something consistently enough, you will beat decks that have "better" win conditions but with much less consistency. With that in mind, take for example the Watchposts. Their text isn't very impactful on their own or in a vacuum. But they inhibit consistency by denying your opponent from playing the game the way they would like. The Watchposts can be removed by having the right board or hand state. Thus, they're not incredibly powerful. But they do damage consistency with their disruption. By damaging a deck's consistency, you can take out a lot its power. What's a spell deck under the effect of Loatheb? It's junk because they can only play at most one spell. What's a Quest Priest deck under the effect of Celestial Alignment? Now it's infinitely harder to complete the quest and win the game using it. Power doesn't relate to consistency in my mind. Feel free to disagree but at least we can lay out the reason we don't agree. Okay sure, people could play a regular Reno DH deck but part of the fun is that is that Genn doesn't do anything in that deck. However, you still have to win the game for the funny to work. If you lose every game, well of course you lost. You gimped your deck severely so that you could try to win with a useless card in the deck. And that's why you run the Reno cards because you want to give yourself at least some chance of winning. You could argue that the funny part of some decks isn't the winning and you'd be right. Yogg decks sometimes don't care for it. They care more about the crazy RNG clownfiesta that could happen by dropping the Yogg. But that deck still relies on the impact of Yogg. Winning doesn't create the funny here, Yogg does. Again, you have to agree that power isn't necessarily viability to see the draw is based on power. If power is viability to you, then we won't agree on this. Yeah I'm pretty sure a 10 mana do nothing card is extremely boring to most people. But what if you were able to get like 3 of them out on like turn 5 and they were dinosaurs? Enter Big Beast Hunter. I think having cards that do crazy stuff like this would have to be powerful to some degree because you're breaking the normal progression of the game.
The thing that bummed me out the most in Year of the Raven, was that Whizbang was never kept in Standard. As a F2P player, I relied to much on that card. Even craft it in Golden so I could finally use a Golden Coin. I mean, I get why it couldn't remain in Standard because, money...
I don't think Genn and Baku were a power level problem, but man, they were SO boring. Hit the button, play a neutral 1 drop, hit the button... Had they released better cards and not had the infamous all-2017 Odd Paladin deck, we would just have better cards following the same formula
The power level is getting higher, and higher, and higher.... that's the massive oversight that you have missed they need to reduce and normalize the power level of all the cards so they can power creep them without ruining the fucking game because right now power creep has gone beyond "high power level" and the gameplay suffers mana cheating to 0-cost, ridiculous card draw, extreme stats/benefit for mana cost standard plays like wild that's not how it should be that's from the last year or two they want to power creep the last set? fine, then nerf half of the fucking cards first so that the overall power level of hearthstone doesn't go beyond some reasonable boundaries
I know chemeleos didn’t see much played because it was kept in hand to reveal what your opponent has and be able to play around it. It was so good that a lot people put in in a deck and use it as a control priest.
I remember there being a good length of time where a new expansion would be announced, they'd start revealing cards... And people would respond to *legitimately good* stuff with "myeh, it can't go in Odd/Even X, this card sucks!!!"
What about releasing a card with a start of the game power that nullifies every other start of the game power if an specific condition is met? Would that make sense?
Weak expansion does not equal bad expansion. Compared to this year's crap Genn and Baku are much better designed. They actually encouraged deck building since having only even or odd to chose from made it easier. The only real problems were Baku warrior and paladin hero powers. If those had been changed I doubt people would remember them as problematic cards.
I still remember when Witchwood was teased I was super hyped for Genn and Baku as a casual player. It looked like a really strong effect with a big deck building restriction. People who played ranked told me they were too weak and the restrictions outweighed the benefits... Look who's laughing now.
They didn't necessarily screw up in these expansions. I believe it wen't wrong in rise of shadows were they panicked and wanted to power up the game again. If only thay hadn't wild would still be playable, hearthstone would still have games over 6 turns and lot's of people (including me wouldn't have quit). I think it's funny that they decided to power up standard again just when they finally had a window to bring back powercreep. (After the hall of faming of genn and baku that is.)
A posibility to fix genn and baku are to drop then to 2 and 3 mana with 1/1 and 2/2 stat line and change their abilites to battle cries and that they start in your hand like quests. It make then significantly weaker than currently since they burn an intial card draw as well as having terrible stat lines.
I have an Idea how they couldve changed the cards, not sure how good it would be, here it goes: Make Baku 1 Mana, 1/3, the text would be a battle cry to lvl up your hero power If you have only Odd costs. For Genn, make him 2 Mana 2/4, with the battlecry to lower the cost of your hero power If you have only even cost cards. Would this nerf them to a correct Level, what do you think? I know its an old video but maybe someone still sees this.
I hope that when demon hunter rotates they put the cards back to their initial released forms, because it would be nice to have the tenth class in Wild
Imo their biggest mistake was the whole rotation system. That was when I quit, cause I was like nah dude not gonna spend another 200$ each year just because they are taking away my hard earned cards
I really like this Start of Game effects, same with quests (though i think they all should read draw at the start of the game instead of starts in your oppening hand). Kind of a good mix would be duel kind of treasures for 1 mana draw at start of the game with effects that support different deck archtypes.
Genn and Baku made me quit Hearthstone for good. They were dominant and ruining the game whilst MTG Arena launched in open Beta. I started Arena and now am a full enfranchised mtg player (paper and online). But recently YT recommended your channel and I really enjoy your deep dives into hearthstones history. a nice trip down memory lane. even if I won't ever reinstall hearthstone, I'll stay subscribed to your channel :D
I think some of your framing of this is a little strange. Things like saying Blizzard was 'forced' to design things a certain way when the thing 'forcing' them to do that was the team's own design philosophy. Hearthstone to me stinks of the same stank all of Blizzard is tainted with; short sightedness and greed. Power creep is a thing in all TCG's. Managing it is something you have to have in mind while designing the very first set. It's clear this team failed to really plan very long term. The way they describe things it sounds like they made a set, waited to see what happened, then made the next set as a reaction to that. Not a big brain strategy. Being surprised that two powerhouse cards overpowered a meta you had designed to be weak is just plain dumb. Sorry, there's no nice way to put that. You could say they didn't know how strong they were, but what kind of excuse is that? Making everything strong so its easier to fix balancing mistakes is lazy on its face. You're making a design mistake in over ramping power in order to cover for potential future mistakes in design? What? Truth is you keep making flashier and flashier things because you've got the advertisement for the set at the front of your mind. Don't worry if it's not actually balanced. By the time that's common knowledge everyone will have already bought all the cards. Then you just nerf or remove the problem. So punish your players who already had to play through a poorly crafted meta by taking away the cards they had to craft/farm in order to even participate in said bad meta.
I think it could be fun if everyone expansion was its own thing and you could only use cards from that set. Like create basic class cards for each set for every expansion
7:39 "If a lot of cards are OP, then the strongest one is not as meta-dominant as before" is what you mean there? Because I would agree on paper but after observation of what actually happened over the last year, most of the cards that were nerfed were indeed meta-dominant until their nerf and then another one became meta-defining because it had avoided the last round of nerfs. The meta has never been so favorable to the strongest deck of the time as it has been since they implemented this philosophy. Also, powercreep bad.
It's a good thing Blizzard learned from Genn and Baku that deckbuilding restrictions did not justify OP effects, isn't it? *Looks at Drek'Thar.* Isn't it??!!!
I hit diamond just b4 demon hunter hit the scene w a control Warlock, now THAT was fun.(I even played mechacthun warlock in non ranked) then DH came and I tried it for awhile and it was very easy to win. I also had an odd pally deck that was great. I quit for a long time and just started again. I think the game is at a good point. They made a full meta deck for me which really made it easy and fun to get back into.
5:21 Man I have a lot of hate for that graphic lol. Nourish used to be 5 but got nerfed because of it’s ramp, mage had a 2 mana draw two with a downside, steel ranger was practically just a meme and Warrior had 2 amazing 4 mana rush minions. Kobald Librarian is better than crimson sigil runner because Warlock treads that take 2 damage as an upside a lot of the time. Demon hunter was very powerful and things like Skull were busted but this graphic is just bleh
Personally, i don't mind HS release a weak set, just to shut down those powercreep deck in standard. Its not like other paper TCG when banhammer falls it effect the price of the card (MTG im looking at you). We cannot do anything for wild except for nerf/ban because its wild. But for standard maybe its a good choice...
For me, true bonkers came after Descent of Dragons. Yes it's fun to get crazy value, and the games lasted a lot; But it meant aggro had to become way stronger, and then United in Stormwind ruined the game for me. Games don't need to last 40 minutes, neither 3 minutes.
Genn and baku will never not be meta defining. It doesnt matter what set they were released in. Consitency is soooo valuable in card games that the downside barely matters. If i can make a game go thw same way then i can control my decisions better. Draw rng is really hard to overcome. Its a shame really that witchwood gets such a bad rap because as a set thematically and synergy wise it was amazing. Voodoo doll, rotten applebaum, witching hour, cinderstorm, arcane keysmith, sound the bells, blink fox, warpath, towncrier, and many others allowed for such good synergy. Yes genn and baku were the standouts but there was a lot of utility and sleeper cards from witchwood.
Genn and Baku made me quit hearthstone and never come back. Never ever, even jade idol, i have hated a card more. It is even more grievous because i returned in this expansion after quiting in lich king and expending 100 pounds to absolutely hate every single deck
@@darencolby1916 In lich king i stopped, mainly due to how much the game was consuming. Then i came back expending 100 pounds in that expansion. Since then i only play bg casually
The devs for Hearthstone at the time of Year of the Raven really shit the bed hard. That year is, by far, the worse year of Hearthstone. The entire meta had not changed throughout the entire year, and when it came time for the next year, they just rotated Genn and Baku a year earlier. Creating even more frustration on why they didn't react sooner.
I quit playing HS shortly after Descent of Dragons because of the insane amount of random luck effects like discover, battlecrys that adds cards like lackeys or effects that puts cards in the deck which are way to much of a speed boost when drawn early. I lost so many games in arena and even in ranked ladder to such effects creating impossible game states in which you simply can't win the game anymore if not playing casino bs too. I really was on a good way to play competetive HS tournaments when all of that happened. All of my friends quit around the same time, so there was no reason to keep playing anymore. Should tell everything about Ayala's role in the whole process. He managed to completely destroy a good game in less than 2 years and made it a game for people who enjoy losing all their money on one-armed bandit.
I think they were still fun and atleast they were neutral cards so every class were balanced not like demon Hunter making all other classes unplayable very unfun
There is away to fix this problem . The first part is to split aggro and control in a grouping and for fun in another. Now playing an aggro or control in the for fun would either reduce draw or mana Number 2 : banned gen and baku and 1 copy of hof cards . 3 make sure that mechanics are played with said intentions you played the 6 drop 3/4 restore 3 health comes back with its reborn mechanic. It dies. The creature is removed from the pool . N'zoth can't bring it back . The same can be said for the 3/3 colbold.
I'm pretty sure they're just power creeping now to build hype for the game. The more hype you build the more attention it gets, the more people want to buy cards, etc. It's pretty much a coping mechanism for a declining game. This company is able to attract the best talent in the industry and they've been doing this for a really long time. I'm pretty sure if they wanted to just make the game balanced they could, but I would bet the power creep is calculated & pushed by the upper management & marketing departments. It seems the game industry forgot that you can actually make profits by just letting passionate developers make really good fun games and properly funding a QA department to make sure it works correctly. Another tragic story of a company forgetting its roots. Maybe that will change a bit after Microsoft takes over, but who knows. Too many of the good old devs have left already.
The other major issue with Genn and Baku is that they made nerfing other cards problematic too. The go to nerf is to increase a card by 1 mana, which is often enough to weaken a card without killing it entirely, but you can't do that easily when you need to consider what happens when something switches from an odd to an even deck and vice versa. Any balance change needs to either be 2 mana, be a change other than mana, or needs to be thoroughly tested with either genn or baku. I'm sure the logistical problems there also contributed to them being hall of famed early
I do remember some nerfe cards just made odd even cards stronger which was bonkers
I had an idea at the time to nerve Glenn and Baku (although it would indeed mean a considerable change in their text): They start in your opening hand like quests. If you keep them in your hand, they work just like they do now - but your opening hand is considerably weakened. If you mulligan them away, their 'start of game' effect is changed into a battlecry on the card.
Yeah or you have the effect of the card active for some number of turns, like first 5 turns hero power costs 1
You also could have like put "When you have 5 Mana Crystals, upgrade your heropower" on its effect. That'd probably be too slow for anyone other than druid, but its just an example.
I think this is probably the fairest way to do it, actually.
@@Epzilon12 Genn not working on turn 1 is pretty brutal since you literally can't run 1 cost cards in your deck. Upgrading the hero power on turn 5 doesn't make to much of a diference as at worst you miss 3 empowered hero powers at thats only if you skips your turn 2,3 and 4 plays. Can't remeber who ran baku outside of warrior and maybe druid but those 2 probably don't particuarly care about not using empowered hero power early since they got along fine using justicar trueheart previously.
@@XenithShadow Maybe 5 was too much, but the idea was just to make the effects not immediate. Just spitballing but you're probably right.
Now this is my tinfoil hat theory so take it with a pinch of salt but I feel like Blizzard did not increased power levels because of Genn and Baku, they did it because of Demon hunter. After demon hunters release they realized how strong the class is so in order to make other classes catch up to illidan they printed 10 out of 10 cards for every other class in Scholomance. Hence naturally increasing the powerlevel of the game and the future expansions so that they can sell packs and not flop like Rastakhans.
Agreed, that was a huge change of balance.
I also think that's the reason
They went too far and now Demon Hunter is poo tier.
On rotation, if they revert pretty much all the DH cards from Ashes it'll have a chance to even exist in Wild.
The game was balanced around 9 classes. They introduced a class that effectively did what warlock hunter and Rouge did. It was what caused me to drop the game. Not even because it was inherently overpowered, but because they jumped the shark I game design.
forsen1 ?
4:05 Notorious big brain man, Brain Kibler
People say that power creep is inevitable in CCgs. I say _bollocks_ it is. As a classic Magic player from back in the day, I remember when the game underwent power SEEP. The base set's Lightning Bolt was so over-efficient (1 mana, deal 3 damage, no questions asked) that WotC kept remaking it in inferior forms, like Incinerate (2 mana, deal 3 damage and target creatures can't regenerate this turn) or even Shock (1 mana, deal 2 damage). All the most powerful cards in Magic history were released in the first few years of its existence. As long as your game uses set rotations, you have NO excuse for infinite power creep other than being an inept game designer. It's all about designing INTERESTING new cards with new uses to power new archetypes, not just making cards that are like old cards but better (unless said old cards ended up being unplayably weak and you want to have another crack at them).
4:26 Ah yes Brain Kibler. My favorite content creator
The reason why they increase the power level is really a no brainer which had been addressed already. Simply put, the sales sucked. Rastakhans Rumble was an attempt to curb the power creep and unfortunately because of that it was one of the worst expansions in terms of monetary sales. Basically the market responded, make more powerful cards or were not buying.
By releasing a powerful set Blizzard is making new cards relevant and thus necessary for competetive play, which means people will spend more money to acquire them. Having each expansion power creep the last one is more economically viable than paying close attention to balancing, especially when you can just wait and see what will turn up to be op and then nerf it, when it is clear the card is problematic, rather then try to predict what cards may be too strong.
It may be cinical of me, but I think it's impossible that those aren't at least in part reasons for cosntant power creep.
I do agree in terms of short term profit however that way you lose a large part of your player base. (You need only look at the amount of streamer that have quit the game.)
Sadly it doesn't work like that because the hype that people will have for powerful cards won't stand for too long before people get tired of the powercreep, that can be obviously be seen by how there's always more people playing when a new expansion comes out, it's not because people want to play the game for fun, they just need to see something new and that will cause people to get tired of it in a couple of weeks, that constant power level increasing is only causing people to have less interest in the game and there's always less hype for new expansions and there's always more complaining about the power level, it's just a marketing sistem that will slowly but surely kill hearthstone, the only opportunity for a new chance for this game is the rotation, with a lot of powerful cards going to wild there will be an opportunity to add weaker expansions to the game and still having people interested in playing them because weaker cards will be actually viable
I actually enjoyed the most in the Year of the Raven. Yeah Genn and Baku was too good but the rest of the meta was very solid. I like when you don't cheat huge mana. I like it when you get a 10 mana effect when you play a 10 mana card. I think they screwed up with the Rise of Shadows, they did the same mistake they did with the release of Witchwood. Panicking and making extreme changes when moderate changes would suffice.
“Brain” Kibler 😂
Unfortunately, I believe the wrong lesson was learned from this "mistake". Genn and Baku were much stronger than other cards from the sets around them, but the real issue with the cards is in the design itself. Brian Kibler even talks about this in his videos back then. Baku was really the more problematic card, and that is because of the effect it had on each match. While there was a deck restriction, the upgrade was focused on the hero power, and it causes games to play out extremely similar. Odd Paladin was at the forefront of these kinds of decks, and every single game you knew it was going to be just a ton of dudes from a ton of hero powers and thats all it was going to be. It made gameplay very stale, but that is because you can't interact with it. Hearthstone always has had an issue with interactivity between opponents, but it wasn't always a dominant issue. Baku specifically made this issue extremely apparent, and paired with the lower power level of those expansions led to a very oppressive set of decks that werent even enjoyable to play.
Now the lesson should have been focused on the design elements, not the power level. Fast forward to today and we have some of the most oppressive and awfully designed cards the game has ever seen. You even highlight the extreme amount of nerfs that have been required to get things to an even playing field, but yet the cards still remain problematic because the issues are related to the design of the cards not the power of cards. Power is relative after all, there will always be "powerful" decks relative to what is currently around. But cards these days are not just powerful, but designed to be oppressively. Control decks have literally been pushed out of the game, not the meta, the GAME. Despite tons of nerfs, it doesn't matter because the design of cards like Demon Seed, Raid the Docks, Ignite, ect, will continuously be oppressively because they are designed poorly.
Unfortunately, I feel the trend will continue.
you're right, the card design isn't very good for the biggest offenders this year
of course it's baked into the "power level", part of the power is the poor design
my point is the "if everything is overpowered then nothing is overpowered" is absolutely not true
imagine if they power creeped chess
let every piece move like the queen
let you place any piece anywhere
fk it, no rules, i win, that was fun
i'm exaggerating, but the point is parts of the game stay the same while the cards bloat in power and that affects the gameplay
just as chess has a specific number of squares on the board so hs has things that don't change, and power creep is in relation to those
in hs it also affects the ability to have control over the meta
mathematically a system who's governing parameters are too close to 0 or infinity are unstable systems and can't be controlled, they spin out of control
it's a statistical principle
and we're seeing that in hs, we are going to get hyper aggro or hyper control because it's an unstable system, and power creep is primarily the reason
gradually eroding the strategic gameplay of hs toward.... in the direction of "no rules i win, yey fun"... or a coin flip
in short you are right. ignite shouldn't be able to be cast an infinite number of times and avoid fatigue indefinitely, and demon seed making fatigue irrelevant is violating principle game fundamentals... you run out of cards you die
other principles: playing cards cost mana, drawing cards cost mana
and other solitaire game mechanics just ruin the fun
@@andrewgrow5711 I both agree and disagree with you here. Everything you described is correct, I just don't think it is accurate to our current situation. In terms of "if everything is overpowered, then nothing is overpowered" is an accurate statement, because what it is referring to is the overall level of power, not the individual mechanics. If all cards are of a specific level of strength, then that simply becomes the new baseline for which we draw from comparison, therefore making nothing really out of the ordinary or powerful.
In your example of chess, what you are describing is fundamentally changing the way the current pieces work. You are adding functionality to what is already there. By doing so you are more or less creating something new. It would no longer be chess, but a new game. However, thats not what is happening in hearthstone, we arent changing what is there but adding more. So in terms of chess, it would be like taking the existing game of chess but adding in a new piece that could do these things. Thats what is happening to hearthstone, the fundamental rule of fatigue exists and that hasnt changed, but a new piece has been introduced altogether and it ignores that rule. Now the cards power does not change the way it works. Many cards have been nerfed, but the problem continues because of the design of the card, not the power level. The Demon Seed could be an incredibly weak card, but would still be problematic because of its design.
So while we mostly agree, I still feel power is separate from design. It is a interesting conversation though, thank you for your constructive response!
@@zeleros4027 every analogy has a flaw and focusing on the flaw and not the point of the analogy doesn't further the discussion
but fair enough
there's spells that deal damage to enemy hero
how about a 1 mana spell that deals 40 damage to the enemy hero
if you draw it on the first turn you'll probably win
functionally it's in line with hs, but the scale is extreme
it's not interactive, it's not fun and reduces the game to a coin-flip paradigm
clearly that's overpowered and is bad for hs
why? because you get one mana on your first turn and you have 30 health and it's parameters like these that define the game, and power level is in relation to these parameters
in chess you can pick whatever you like to be the analogue for power, and the point is that if whatever that is, if it's scaled enough the gameplay of chess devolves
so there is obviously a "too powerful"
and the boundary is debatable, but it really feels like hs has crossed that boundary... imho in the last year or two
and the symptoms are the instability of nerfs failing to balance the meta, the swing of games based on things you don't have much control of etc.
leads to games feeling solitaire
standard doesn't feel like standard hearthstone, standard feels like wild
much in the way chess with all queens wouldn't really feel like chess anymore
Power creep only means one thing: the designer’s lack of ability to make an expansion fun. They can only make overpowered cards so you pay.
Power creep, on the other hand, does not necessarily make design bad. The two are not mutually exclusive. You can have power creep on interesting cards. Take year of the dragons. One of the highest power creep years in the game, but SO MANY CARDS WERE FUN
All this new design philosophy says to me is "we don't know what we're doing with this game, but it doesn't matter, we'll fix it in post". I don't really play HS anymore, I hate the way the game is now, I hate that control is just not allowed to exist by design. It's like they saw the hype moments of Yogg getting a lucky roll and said, "why don't we just make the entire game like that all the time". It's boring and every new set made my in-game decisions matter less and less.
I'd argue that the biggest mistake in Hearthstone history was getting rid of Ben Brode
I certainly agree BB's personal charisma is quite welcoming, but if it came to the level of interaction between devs and player community, the new devs are miles ahead compared to BB's.
As a player who went away during cobolds (and never returned), looking at these videos gives me the same feeling.
After bb was gone, the new devs needed some time to adjust. When they finally did, the game was already if not declining, at least out of the spotlight.
Or maybe the tcg genre was just short lived and people moved on.
IIRC they didn't actually get rid of Ben Brode, he left on his own accord right?
first of all, he left the team on his own. Secondly, he and his team barely communicated with their customers, us :D Thirdly, he was not really good with the streamers etc.
Oh my god, no.
Ben brode was a meme, and had no idea how to balance the game
I think that the team screwed up with Rise of Shadows. If they kept the powerlevel in check after the rotation, we could actually get to experience the cards from the year of the raven in a more stable meta. Missed opportunity imo
This is exactly my grudge, they killed an entire year for no payoff, while it could have lowered the power level of the game drastically
I agree. Rise of Shadows was the beginning of the end as far as I'm concerned
Low power level does not mean bad cards. Rastakhan's Rumble was by far one of the best expansions, the cards it introduced being so gimmicky and fun in how they made you play and what they pushed for. Good cards are not cards which are competitively viable, but cards which are fun to use. By no means do I think Mogu Cultist is some top tier card, it's pretty low power, but to make a deck around them and use them is still fun, so it's a great card. Same with lorewalker cho, gonk the raptor, zerek's cloning gallery, blackhowl gunspire, chameleos, the list goes on and on.
I do not like this competitive-only lens that cards and sets are viewed through, especially since most players aren't competitive.
On the contrary, low power level cards don't do their designed idea effectively. If cards don't follow some baseline, they'll be too weak to do what they were designed to do and won't be fun at all. Meme cards are kind of in this area. Meme cards can be utterly unplayable like Millhouse and Moorabi. Guess which one is seen as a fun meme idea. It's Moorabi because the potential for something crazy is there (aka high power). High power and fun are definitely related but that doesn't necessarily mean competitive. Consistency also matters for competition, and is arguably more important.
@@GaussianEntity Casting seance in shaman is really not that "powerful". Things are not memes because of a promise of power, they are memes because to achieve them requires a lot of strategy, it's actively hard to, there's something impressive about it. Even demon hunter is a meme deck, you can't deny that people have played it and built strategies around it, but it's not explained by your idea of "power" why people would ever care. The simple fact that at the very start of the game your opponent has to watch you reduce your hero power to what it already is, with you emoting some threat, that is the good shit man, that's the fun. Crazy does not have to be "high power", crazy can just be fun and gimmicky.
Also, millhouse + cho IS a meme strat, tf do you mean about him not being considered a meme card? People craft him in golden for the meme. When mechathun was first released at the start of boomsday, he was the pinnacle of a meme card as he was stupidly hard to complete and it felt like you were some mad scientist at the end, your opponent thinking you were an idiot in how you wasted all your resources, with the big reveal of some dumbass combo when you're left with nothing. It's not the fact that you're doing something powerful as much as it is the process of getting there, the strategies that had to be employed, y'know, the gameplay.
@@smallangrycrab Really? Okay so point out a meme deck with Millhouse Manastorm? What about a deck with some other low power legendary? What's a meme deck without a ridiculously difficult payoff card(s)? (Keyword: payoff aka powerful). You mentioned DH but those decks include some payoff cards in some form or another (Even DH has the Reno cards and value cards, Tax DH stops meta decks from playing the game, other DH stuff does some ridiculous things as a payoff). Fun is definitely tied to power. Otherwise, why play the game?
Another way I can drive the point home is to see deck creation through the eyes of a deckbuilder. Every deck has a goal in mind. Meta decks are built to win. Flashy decks are built to win with style. Meme decks are built to do something incredibly funny that has some influence in the game. Every deck has a goal. And that goal usually is some payoff card or synergy. Don't believe me? Find a deck that doesn't have a goal that is played more than once.
Okay here you mention a synergy. Millhouse AND Cho together. Why is this important? Because now your goal here is a tempting risk. Give your opponent basically unlimited power but at the potential cost of going down an unknown road. That's the goal of this synergy. But that synergy doesn't require Millhouse lol. Cho does this entirely on his own to the point where there's a UA-cam player who builds Cho decks for almost every class lol. Cho is a powerful legendary (contrary to some opinions) because he forces a change in the game state. Spells are no longer without additional consequences. He's in the same vein with cards like Irondeep Trogg and Crossroads Watchpost.
Mecha'thun has the exact same principle except we call these cards sleeper cards. They're cards that have no support when first released but could be powerful one day. And lo and behold, there's been a strong Mecha'thun deck every so often in Wild. Also, Mecha'thun also follows the principles I've outlined above.
Strategy is the path you take to get to your payoff. But if your payoff is weak, there's not much of a point to getting to it. Like I mentioned above, give me examples of decks that do not follow this kind of thing and I will concede this point. That said, having played different card games, the only ones that don't really follow this structure is RP decks, decks that follow some nonstandard rules or mechanics, or just friends doing fun stuff. That's not really playing the actual game in my eyes so I exclude these.
@@GaussianEntity " Fun is definitely tied to power. Otherwise, why play the game?"
I think you misunderstand in how you view power. Viability is a necessity for things to be able to happen, and you do need a certain level of viability to do things. However, you do not need something to be more powerful for it to be more fun, engaging, or overall enjoyable. To have a card that kills your opponent turn one, that you are guarenteed to draw, is not fun. No animation, no sound, just you play it for 0 mana, the game ends, and your score is increased. It is certainly powerful, but there's obviously no enjoyment to it. You earned nothing, you didn't think about anything for that win, it just came to you, making the card not fun.
Even demon hunter is not an interesting deck because it is a reno deck. There is no reason for a reno demon hunter deck to include Genn Greymane, at least trom this purely power based view. Why not just play normal reno demon hunter? That is a deck that exists, and given that it is a RENO DECK, there are certainly more optimal card inclusions which are of an odd cost.
Clearly, the draw is not based on power. It's based on fun. There is obviously a difference there.
I feel like I should clarify what fun is to me so I can better explain. Having a card which is 10 mana do nothing is not fun. But, if designed right, it can be fun.
Add a crazy visual and sound when played, make it tied to an achievement for playing it in ranked, with the rank that they were able to play it in built into the card, make it extrermely hard to reach, like behind a quest with 6 stages to it, and you've got yourself a card people would absolutely see people playing entire decks built around playing that card. It would be stupid in some people's eyes, sure, but it would be fun because it's not just about the reward, but the challenge of the card itself existing. It's a gimmicky, stupid thing, for reasons completely beyond power and viability.
With that all being said, again, viability is good. To be able to play the card and not have it backfire every time is fun. That weapon in shaman from Knights of the Frozen Throne, the one that kills frozen minions, doesn't have much fans despite it being hard to pull off and low in power. But I think I've demonstrated that that's not the only reasons why it's bad, there are many ways you could make that card far more fun.
You brought up cho, and said that he's an actually good legendary because he changes how you have to play the game. I'd completely agree with that if by good you didn't mean powerful, but we could debate the strength of cards separately. Instead, I'll pick an example which, in terms of power, is pretty sucky: Nozdormu.
Either the original in classic or the new one in the core set, Nozdormu has an effect people play him for which, let's be honest, isn't really that powerful. It changes things, sure, and you could argue there's some very niche situation where it's useful in that your opponent went afk or is playing very slowly, but I think we could agree those aren't the sole reasons people play him. People play him for those super fast paced moments, for the thrill of changing something so normally slow paced and thought out into a rapid fire clusterfuck of cards being thrown out. People played decks that filled their side of the board with nozdormus because the visual animation of the sand stacks, and it's silly to not be able to see your own cards or health most of the time due to the animation. By all means, the card sucked in power, as you had to commit 9 mana for an understatted dragon, but it was a thrill the whole way through.
Ultimately, this card game has a lot more to it than just grinding for rank 1 legend, and I want to see the devs care about all that other stuff, as I certainly take more enjoyment in it than pure power. It's why I loved rastakhans, as it felt like the right direction towards fun and not strictly competitive, and it didnt seem bothered with making every card on par with every other. You can have weaker cards or strategies, it can be fun to have a challenge, but just make the cards and strategies fun.
@@smallangrycrab That's the thing though. You relate power with viability. I don't. The reason I don't is because consistency is far more important for viability than power is. If your deck is "weak" but does something consistently enough, you will beat decks that have "better" win conditions but with much less consistency. With that in mind, take for example the Watchposts. Their text isn't very impactful on their own or in a vacuum. But they inhibit consistency by denying your opponent from playing the game the way they would like. The Watchposts can be removed by having the right board or hand state. Thus, they're not incredibly powerful. But they do damage consistency with their disruption. By damaging a deck's consistency, you can take out a lot its power. What's a spell deck under the effect of Loatheb? It's junk because they can only play at most one spell. What's a Quest Priest deck under the effect of Celestial Alignment? Now it's infinitely harder to complete the quest and win the game using it. Power doesn't relate to consistency in my mind. Feel free to disagree but at least we can lay out the reason we don't agree.
Okay sure, people could play a regular Reno DH deck but part of the fun is that is that Genn doesn't do anything in that deck. However, you still have to win the game for the funny to work. If you lose every game, well of course you lost. You gimped your deck severely so that you could try to win with a useless card in the deck. And that's why you run the Reno cards because you want to give yourself at least some chance of winning. You could argue that the funny part of some decks isn't the winning and you'd be right. Yogg decks sometimes don't care for it. They care more about the crazy RNG clownfiesta that could happen by dropping the Yogg. But that deck still relies on the impact of Yogg. Winning doesn't create the funny here, Yogg does.
Again, you have to agree that power isn't necessarily viability to see the draw is based on power. If power is viability to you, then we won't agree on this.
Yeah I'm pretty sure a 10 mana do nothing card is extremely boring to most people. But what if you were able to get like 3 of them out on like turn 5 and they were dinosaurs? Enter Big Beast Hunter. I think having cards that do crazy stuff like this would have to be powerful to some degree because you're breaking the normal progression of the game.
His name is Brian Kibler, not Brain Kibler
Pretty sure it was just a typo
The thing that bummed me out the most in Year of the Raven, was that Whizbang was never kept in Standard. As a F2P player, I relied to much on that card. Even craft it in Golden so I could finally use a Golden Coin.
I mean, I get why it couldn't remain in Standard because, money...
Wizzbang absolutly deserved to be brought in as a standard staple.
I don't think Genn and Baku were a power level problem, but man, they were SO boring. Hit the button, play a neutral 1 drop, hit the button...
Had they released better cards and not had the infamous all-2017 Odd Paladin deck, we would just have better cards following the same formula
6:44
I loved the Witchwood expansion. Monster Hunt was amazing. They showed us new mechanics (like Baku, Echo, Toki's Hero Power)
The only thing I hate about Witchwood is that they decided to keep reusing Echo while refusing to reuse the keyword itself...
@@FireSiku Yeah, I don't get why they add such long texts instead of using old keywords like Echo and Enrage or creating new ones like Cleave
Source: Brain Kibler
lol
Bro, this content does not get old! You are fantastic!
Kibler plays so 5Head they changed his name to brain. 4:06
That's so funny. I stopped playing Hearthstone for the entire year of the raven because each set was so incredibly disappointing to me.
The power level is getting higher, and higher, and higher....
that's the massive oversight that you have missed
they need to reduce and normalize the power level of all the cards so they can power creep them without ruining the fucking game
because right now power creep has gone beyond "high power level" and the gameplay suffers
mana cheating to 0-cost, ridiculous card draw, extreme stats/benefit for mana cost
standard plays like wild
that's not how it should be
that's from the last year or two
they want to power creep the last set? fine, then nerf half of the fucking cards first so that the overall power level of hearthstone doesn't go beyond some reasonable boundaries
Source: *Brain* Kibler
6:40
I know chemeleos didn’t see much played because it was kept in hand to reveal what your opponent has and be able to play around it. It was so good that a lot people put in in a deck and use it as a control priest.
I would’ve just made it say “when you draw”.
That would make it way to weak and unfun to play and against
@@PORIO171 weak yes And more fun I think you mean cause playing against them sucked.
I remember there being a good length of time where a new expansion would be announced, they'd start revealing cards...
And people would respond to *legitimately good* stuff with "myeh, it can't go in Odd/Even X, this card sucks!!!"
What about releasing a card with a start of the game power that nullifies every other start of the game power if an specific condition is met? Would that make sense?
Yeah it makes sense, generally though, in game design, you do not want to have have hard counters to decks, makes the always awful for one player.
Weak expansion does not equal bad expansion. Compared to this year's crap Genn and Baku are much better designed. They actually encouraged deck building since having only even or odd to chose from made it easier. The only real problems were Baku warrior and paladin hero powers. If those had been changed I doubt people would remember them as problematic cards.
I still remember when Witchwood was teased I was super hyped for Genn and Baku as a casual player. It looked like a really strong effect with a big deck building restriction.
People who played ranked told me they were too weak and the restrictions outweighed the benefits... Look who's laughing now.
Baku: NONE will survive
Opponent: "I concede"
They didn't necessarily screw up in these expansions. I believe it wen't wrong in rise of shadows were they panicked and wanted to power up the game again. If only thay hadn't wild would still be playable, hearthstone would still have games over 6 turns and lot's of people (including me wouldn't have quit). I think it's funny that they decided to power up standard again just when they finally had a window to bring back powercreep. (After the hall of faming of genn and baku that is.)
I loved Hakkar, just not in Druid, where it was the strongest. But the card itself was sooo well designed.
A posibility to fix genn and baku are to drop then to 2 and 3 mana with 1/1 and 2/2 stat line and change their abilites to battle cries and that they start in your hand like quests. It make then significantly weaker than currently since they burn an intial card draw as well as having terrible stat lines.
I have an Idea how they couldve changed the cards, not sure how good it would be, here it goes:
Make Baku 1 Mana, 1/3, the text would be a battle cry to lvl up your hero power If you have only Odd costs.
For Genn, make him 2 Mana 2/4, with the battlecry to lower the cost of your hero power If you have only even cost cards.
Would this nerf them to a correct Level, what do you think? I know its an old video but maybe someone still sees this.
I hope that when demon hunter rotates they put the cards back to their initial released forms, because it would be nice to have the tenth class in Wild
"source: Brain Kibler"
im sure Brian Kibler sees this as a Freudian slip.
Easy to nerf those, change "Start of Game", to "When played".
Imo their biggest mistake was the whole rotation system. That was when I quit, cause I was like nah dude not gonna spend another 200$ each year just because they are taking away my hard earned cards
I really like this Start of Game effects, same with quests (though i think they all should read draw at the start of the game instead of starts in your oppening hand). Kind of a good mix would be duel kind of treasures for 1 mana draw at start of the game with effects that support different deck archtypes.
I dont think cards should force you to build a deck around it... for start of game effects
Genn and Baku made me quit Hearthstone for good. They were dominant and ruining the game whilst MTG Arena launched in open Beta. I started Arena and now am a full enfranchised mtg player (paper and online). But recently YT recommended your channel and I really enjoy your deep dives into hearthstones history. a nice trip down memory lane. even if I won't ever reinstall hearthstone, I'll stay subscribed to your channel :D
I think some of your framing of this is a little strange. Things like saying Blizzard was 'forced' to design things a certain way when the thing 'forcing' them to do that was the team's own design philosophy. Hearthstone to me stinks of the same stank all of Blizzard is tainted with; short sightedness and greed. Power creep is a thing in all TCG's. Managing it is something you have to have in mind while designing the very first set. It's clear this team failed to really plan very long term. The way they describe things it sounds like they made a set, waited to see what happened, then made the next set as a reaction to that. Not a big brain strategy.
Being surprised that two powerhouse cards overpowered a meta you had designed to be weak is just plain dumb. Sorry, there's no nice way to put that. You could say they didn't know how strong they were, but what kind of excuse is that?
Making everything strong so its easier to fix balancing mistakes is lazy on its face. You're making a design mistake in over ramping power in order to cover for potential future mistakes in design? What?
Truth is you keep making flashier and flashier things because you've got the advertisement for the set at the front of your mind. Don't worry if it's not actually balanced. By the time that's common knowledge everyone will have already bought all the cards. Then you just nerf or remove the problem. So punish your players who already had to play through a poorly crafted meta by taking away the cards they had to craft/farm in order to even participate in said bad meta.
What if you could have a legendary that includes even cost cards on your opponents deck before their activation?
Good old Brain Kibler, Brian Kiblers evil twin
Great vid! One suggestion decrease the bass a tad in your voice post production
I think it could be fun if everyone expansion was its own thing and you could only use cards from that set.
Like create basic class cards for each set for every expansion
Still i would take Rastakhan meta over UiS meta...
Baku is literally my favorite card of all time, i understand it was broken but who cares, game was fun and the concept was interesting
I have it in my pirate deck. The increased armor the upgraded hero power gives helps with all the weapons you get after completing the quest. :)
Keep up the good work with this new kind of videos. Love the content
I just hope they released more OP cards that let you play a control deck, not more OP cards for aggro
7:39 "If a lot of cards are OP, then the strongest one is not as meta-dominant as before" is what you mean there? Because I would agree on paper but after observation of what actually happened over the last year, most of the cards that were nerfed were indeed meta-dominant until their nerf and then another one became meta-defining because it had avoided the last round of nerfs. The meta has never been so favorable to the strongest deck of the time as it has been since they implemented this philosophy.
Also, powercreep bad.
You could make grenn and Baku have another effect like your deck can only have 25 cards, now.
My issue with HS is -CARD GENERATION and/with -RNG; That killed my joy after 5-6 years of gaming.
on the other spectrum the grand tournament had 0 meta impact because the cards were to weak
great editing really phenomenal mate
It's a good thing Blizzard learned from Genn and Baku that deckbuilding restrictions did not justify OP effects, isn't it? *Looks at Drek'Thar.* Isn't it??!!!
Man i remember the preview of these two, ppl were doubting the cards because hero power wasn't considered good, like in the tourney set
what if the Hero Power ability works only for 5 turns/uses or something? then it returns to normal
I hit diamond just b4 demon hunter hit the scene w a control Warlock, now THAT was fun.(I even played mechacthun warlock in non ranked) then DH came and I tried it for awhile and it was very easy to win. I also had an odd pally deck that was great. I quit for a long time and just started again. I think the game is at a good point. They made a full meta deck for me which really made it easy and fun to get back into.
I like this new format of videos you're doing
Battlegrounds were the biggest mistake imo. They should reimagine it as a minion only mode.
5:21
Man I have a lot of hate for that graphic lol. Nourish used to be 5 but got nerfed because of it’s ramp, mage had a 2 mana draw two with a downside, steel ranger was practically just a meme and Warrior had 2 amazing 4 mana rush minions. Kobald Librarian is better than crimson sigil runner because Warlock treads that take 2 damage as an upside a lot of the time. Demon hunter was very powerful and things like Skull were busted but this graphic is just bleh
Odd Rogue is still my favorite deck of all time, I miss Baku so much...
Personally, i don't mind HS release a weak set, just to shut down those powercreep deck in standard. Its not like other paper TCG when banhammer falls it effect the price of the card (MTG im looking at you).
We cannot do anything for wild except for nerf/ban because its wild. But for standard maybe its a good choice...
Does size of increased power level truly matter ladies?
For me, true bonkers came after Descent of Dragons. Yes it's fun to get crazy value, and the games lasted a lot; But it meant aggro had to become way stronger, and then United in Stormwind ruined the game for me. Games don't need to last 40 minutes, neither 3 minutes.
I did like rastakhan rumble expansion, but not the rest of the year of the raven expansions. But they eclipsed it to the dust :/
Did I hear you say that Boomsday WASN’T powerful…….? Ain’t no way.
4:05 Kibler without grey hair. So unusual now.
This was the meta I 1st played this game so this is hella nostalgic
Genn and baku will never not be meta defining. It doesnt matter what set they were released in. Consitency is soooo valuable in card games that the downside barely matters. If i can make a game go thw same way then i can control my decisions better. Draw rng is really hard to overcome.
Its a shame really that witchwood gets such a bad rap because as a set thematically and synergy wise it was amazing.
Voodoo doll, rotten applebaum, witching hour, cinderstorm, arcane keysmith, sound the bells, blink fox, warpath, towncrier, and many others allowed for such good synergy. Yes genn and baku were the standouts but there was a lot of utility and sleeper cards from witchwood.
Op content.
Still need a history of HS
I think I'm the only one who liked baku and genn 😂 I preferred them over the generic stall cards Hearthstone loved to release
Soooo, what was the biggest mistake exactly?
the best way to nerf Genn and Baku would have been to put them along others deck building drawbacks like singleton or more recently 40 cards decks
BRAIN KIBLER
I play hearthstone in mobile phone since late April 2020 for some decks I don't like I'll go recycled it
Genn and Baku made me quit hearthstone and never come back. Never ever, even jade idol, i have hated a card more. It is even more grievous because i returned in this expansion after quiting in lich king and expending 100 pounds to absolutely hate every single deck
Wait your first sentence said you never came back, but your last sentence said you came back this expansion
@@darencolby1916 In lich king i stopped, mainly due to how much the game was consuming. Then i came back expending 100 pounds in that expansion. Since then i only play bg casually
Those 2 cards destroyed hearthstone for me, it was UNPLAYABLE against those 2 bozos and everything around them
But if Baku costs 10 mana her effect wont trigger lol
I liked this video
10/10, A+ analysis, would watch again
Feels like a rushed video, just take your time bro, we prefer quality over quantity :)
Can you explain more? Since I disagree because I spent a lot of time on this.
pretty sure hearthstone's biggest mistake was day 1 demonhunter
The devs for Hearthstone at the time of Year of the Raven really shit the bed hard. That year is, by far, the worse year of Hearthstone. The entire meta had not changed throughout the entire year, and when it came time for the next year, they just rotated Genn and Baku a year earlier. Creating even more frustration on why they didn't react sooner.
I quit playing HS shortly after Descent of Dragons because of the insane amount of random luck effects like discover, battlecrys that adds cards like lackeys or effects that puts cards in the deck which are way to much of a speed boost when drawn early. I lost so many games in arena and even in ranked ladder to such effects creating impossible game states in which you simply can't win the game anymore if not playing casino bs too.
I really was on a good way to play competetive HS tournaments when all of that happened. All of my friends quit around the same time, so there was no reason to keep playing anymore.
Should tell everything about Ayala's role in the whole process. He managed to completely destroy a good game in less than 2 years and made it a game for people who enjoy losing all their money on one-armed bandit.
ALSO another mistake was made by the pure paladin by only giving 1 expancion to live then to never go again ;c my yerel is in my colection waiting
I truly loved hearthstone at this time
I think they were still fun and atleast they were neutral cards so every class were balanced not like demon Hunter making all other classes unplayable very unfun
There is away to fix this problem . The first part is to split aggro and control in a grouping and for fun in another. Now playing an aggro or control in the for fun would either reduce draw or mana
Number 2 : banned gen and baku and 1 copy of hof cards .
3 make sure that mechanics are played with said intentions you played the 6 drop 3/4 restore 3 health comes back with its reborn mechanic. It dies. The creature is removed from the pool . N'zoth can't bring it back .
The same can be said for the 3/3 colbold.
Semi-daily YT algorithm boost + ratio.
Disappointed this video isn't about quests 😂
1:10 lol no, are you insane?
You don't know that baku questline has been at the top of the wild food cahin for a while now?
I am not talking about wild
@@Rarran well its the cooler format :)
Hearthstone’s biggest DESIGN mistake that is :^)
I'm pretty sure they're just power creeping now to build hype for the game. The more hype you build the more attention it gets, the more people want to buy cards, etc. It's pretty much a coping mechanism for a declining game. This company is able to attract the best talent in the industry and they've been doing this for a really long time. I'm pretty sure if they wanted to just make the game balanced they could, but I would bet the power creep is calculated & pushed by the upper management & marketing departments. It seems the game industry forgot that you can actually make profits by just letting passionate developers make really good fun games and properly funding a QA department to make sure it works correctly. Another tragic story of a company forgetting its roots. Maybe that will change a bit after Microsoft takes over, but who knows. Too many of the good old devs have left already.
Glenn was ok... it could return... but Baku, nop, not, get out.
Source: Brain Kibler, haha
Brain Kibler