I'm a player who hasn't played in a very long time but really enjoy your content. This video was a bit tough to watch for me. You do a great job in explaining how certain cards had an influence on the metagame, but you don't always explain what the card does. I understand you put them on screen but it very often will jump cut to just your facecam or it simples moves on too fast. Making it harder to read the card for someone who has never seen it before. We don't have that instant familiarity yet that you get when you see these cards so often. This makes it hard to tell who the video is for. Because on one end, it could be made as a recap for current players, but then there would be no reason to explain it because they experienced it themselves. On the other hand it could be for people like me who didn't play, but then I think it might be a good idea to talk more about what it does, or at least put it on screen long enough to read it. Just my two cents, you're content is great and I love how often you try to do something new. Hope you keep doing what you're doing.
Omg Rarran PLEASE do reviews for every hearthstone year, this one was extremely interesting to watch =) I love how you're always finding new ways to bring us cool content!
I'd also like to see him maybe bring in other streamers for expansions from previous years and get their views on what the game was like at the end of those metas.
The printing of Mr Smite is my most “What are you doing?” Hearthstone moment. They spent, YEARS running charge minions into the ground to a point where I really thought they’d nerf Stonetusk Boar and then suddenly they decided “I’m in Charge now”
Realistically, they should have made Mr. Smite not be a pirate himself (not sure how that would work flavor-wise but) so that Pirates from the Juggernaut and such could still have Charge, conditionally, but not just a beater that goes in every mid-range deck (it was run in Buff Paladin only because they could buff it and Charge 14 damage face)
Really like this new style of video! Only slight thing is that there are a lot of moments where you reference "this card" instead of a name. I think saying the names a bit more often would help mainly people who want to audio-only the video as well as people watching it a longer time from now where they may not remember effects as quickly.
The one thing that really, really bugged me about Mr Smite, was that a few years ago Blizzard starting to phase out Charge minions because they felt that A. Rush was a better mechanic, and B. Charge a keyword that they felt push a style of play that they weren't comfortable with. And then they make this card, which is probably the most broken and toxic Charge card ever produced 🥴
A couple notes: 1. Deck of Lunacy was a trap after the nerfs. It was not worth the deckslot, yet saw tons of play anyway because it was chaotic fun. See: Tickatus Warlock 2. Control Priest is a unique deck in Hearthstone history as a statistically significant portion of the deck's winrate came from people conceding on turn 1. 3. Alterac Valley, especially early on, felt a lot like later Stormwind because the entire expansion was a lot of big, dumb, slow cards. Most of the Heroes were good enough to see play anyway during this time and OwlTK joined the fight, but it took direct intervention in the form of nerfs for new decks to start seeing significant play.
You joke, but that actually illustrates how this happened to begin with. Rogue used to be the class known for mana cheat and they were balanced around the idea that they could reduce the cost of their cards, but it was their niche, they had their thing. Then we had Year of the Gryphon where there was a point where the mana cheating was so rampant that Rogue wasn't a class for a long time because their one thing they did well was now being done in all the other classes who all still had their other unique strengths. Year of the Gryphon seemed to follow the philosophy of "People love playing Rogue and playing a bunch of cards in one turn by reducing their cost, let's have ALL the classes do that!"
I don't play much anymore, power creep is getting a little obnoxious and every game feels like a race to pull off some sweaty unavoidable death combo and it's just whoever gets all their puzzle pieces first
@@christianclark9494 Card games usually have interactions with (almost) all your opponent can do. Cards you can play on your opponents turn, cards that affect their hand, cards with static effects that limit the number of cards playable or increases cost. Hearthstone has extremely limited versions each, because of the absolute control players have over their turn. For interacting with cards not on the field HS standard has two mage secrets countering creatures and spells respectively, two playable hand disruption cards (three in Warrior lol), the better of which got nerfed multiple times, and one playable peace of opponent targeting mana increase (Far watch post, which got nerfed). Hearthstone is a game with multiple decks that can try to win from the hand, and less than ten cards total that even try to slow that down.
It brought me back to Hearthstone momentarily. As fun as I'm the sure the prior couple years were, I sorely missed with Hearthstone felt more like an adaptation of Warcraft rather than Warcraft fanfiction. Forged was exactly what I was looking for thematically and the expansions that followed also didn't disappoint.
it'd be nice if sometimes they continued with a new keyword for more than 1 expansion. there wouldn't be so many dead cards if they did, that would see play but don't because of lack of synergy
As someone who hasn't played since Boomsday, this is pretty cool. I don't play a lot of card games but I'm super interested in card designs and how people synergized cards. Also love hearing about deck types during certain expansions. Only issue is that sometimes you don't really explain the card or quickly cut away from it. Otherwise, super cool recap and I'd love more from other years/metas/expansions
My main takeaway is that most decks should not just be able to end a game without the opponent having any say about it, be that on turn 4 or on turn 10. At no point should games stop being a back and forth for small incremental advantages, and playing a late game deck shouldn't automatically mean that you're playing an OTK deck.
Do this for every year please. I love this. Also quick correction. The barrens is a starting horde zone and stormwind is the capital of the alliance, the other faction. Wailling caverns and deadmines are respectively horde and alliance dungeons. Alteract valley is a pvp zone where both factions have to capture stuff and kill the opposing faction’s leader (aka drek’thar and vanndar) Onyxia’s lair was the second raid people did after molten core.
I think the biggest problem with questlines was the ability to progress your quest incrementally and being rewarded for it. a lot of the quests in ungoro (especially the slower ones), you'd regularly have to decide whether you wanted to answer your opponent's plays OR progress your quest. with united in stormwind, you could easily just lean into progressing your quest and not be punished for it because each quest step would add a layer of survivability. of course, it didn't help that the rewards were absolutely busted and so fundamentally game-changing
6:10 one thing I think you should added to Deck of Lunacy is its combination with rotation - as you said, cards pool was much better for highrolling having only four sets and with DoL you could easily predict what you get from each card you put in your deck
I love the reviews of the year, please do more. It's fun to hear your commentary and definitely nostalgic to hear you talk about a lot of these decks that I remember playing like two years ago.
rarran you should do reviews of the older years e.g. mammoth, kraken, etc. i really enjoyed this as someone who missed the year of the gryphon so i think it'd be nice to reminisce on all the old cards from 10 years ago :)
I think the least fun I’ve had playing hearthstone was when I played against quest hunter, because I couldn’t play any minions as they would just die to 1 mana damage spells, and every turn I was taking at least 2 damage, and once they finish the quest and play tavish I just lost. The most frustrating thing was how uninteractive and repetitive it was, because they would have the quest every game, and the other 29 cards were cheap damage spells. I decided to just play wild games where I could maybe do something to stop my opponents plans but people played odd quest hunter so the hero power would just deal more damage
Tbf the Questlines u said werent busted were also busted in Wild . If i remember right after warlock Questline got removed you were either dying to Hunter in 5 turns cuz of the quest or were playing druid and smorcing your enemy with claws and bites . That meta was so toxic it made me quit again .
For me, the worst designed questlines are Warrior and Hunter. Since both are so consistent, and essentially you just do what you would do without the questline. You just get more value for it. Priest and Mage is of course huge, and does reward you for doing what you want to be doing, but it is nowhere near as consistent. And then stuff like Druid, DH, Paladin and Shaman make you go out of your way for a reward. But Warrior and Hunter? Well, the Warrior deck is called Pirate warrior, and there is like what, 20 pirates in it? Not exactly hard to play them. And Hunter dealing damage with spells isnt exactly out of its way either. Another thing why I do hate Warrior quest is that it gives Pirate Warrior, an quintessential aggro deck a lot of late game presence. A minion, 4 damage and a weapon every single turn to grind you down. A few good hail mary turns with gorehowls and Mr. Smite can mean that even if you are a control deck which managed to survive against pirate warrior, you may still lose. And neither you, nor the Warrior have much agency over it.
a thing that I notice throughout this video: you would say words like 'Finally' and 'it took them until x expansion to change it' so not only these toxic cards plagued the meta, it took them a long time to address and properly balance cards.
I started playing Hearthstone again because of your content a few weeks ago. My previous experience of the game was like 2 months at the start of the game. I'm basically only playing mercenaries. The problem with the main gamemodes is that I don't really have enough cards to make fun decks. Mercenaries is a gamemode where I can get all mercenaries in a few days, where I can build combo teams because I have synergies and where I can access PVE gamemodes without paying.
You should do another one of these on the Year of the Kraken. As someone who started playing during Un’Goro it’d be interesting to see a break down of how Pirate Warrior, Jade Druid, and C’Thun decks actually worked
I remember during UiS everyone was saying games were over by turns 5-6 and then ask the stats people were like "mmmm ackshually games are over by turn 7 on average, which is only .5 turns faster than other expansions" but I SWEAR the amount of games that were over by turns 4-6 were far more frequent than at any other time. Fastest meta ever and it sucked ass.
@@squid4462 No, this year was much worse in how powercreeped it is. Espcially Stormwind and the AV hero's Frozen throne and kobolds have logn since bene surpassed as storngest sets
Mid to late Stormwind (just before Deadmines) had objectively the most diverse meta Hearthstone had seen in years, with literally no deck able to be actually strong enough to be tier 1, and nearly every archetype had strong decks that could succeed on the ladder - including, yes, control, because Handlock is a control deck, and claiming otherwise is simply silly. Players liked to tell themselves that everything they were losing to was an "OTK" because it was an easy deflection, but it simply wasn't true and the data repeatedly proved that it wasn't true. Go back and look at the data from the time period I'm referencing before jumping to conclusions: you'll find that Hearthstone has legitimately not had a richer meta since. Said data also showed quite clearly that the actual average speed of games was *barely* faster than Barrens - the period with one of the slowest, most miserable decks ever released in the form of Attrition Priest, for reference. The outrage towards Stormwind, after the initial wave of nerfs, which was, of course, necessary, is almost entirely based upon completely false impressions from players who were not actually paying attention. Deadmines was pretty awful, though, and undid almost all of the progress that was made, so the great times did not last as long as they should have.
The original Edwin was in every world champion’s deck until it was rotated out - now *that* is crazy! Great vid overall, would love to see other years. This video made me realize how much last years expansion has ruined this years meta 😢
This is the first video if your I have seen, dunno how you haven't showed up on feed before. But yes, I would absolutely love to see more videos going over specific years in HS. Having been gone that year, this was especially illuminating
Please do these for all the seasons, it's fascinating! I say that as someone who has played or at least kept up with HS content since vanilla, I forgot a lot of this stuff and never really looked at the seasons in a whole like this.
Havent Played Standard in so long, but its fun seeing that Pirate warrior just constantly remains the like scourge of the player base. It was the first deck I used to get to legend way back in Whispers of the Old Gods, it is one of those like constant 55% winrate decks that u just can quick game grind up to legend
ah yes, you see when i'm leveling a level 15 Orc Warrior I crave to leave the Barrens and enter Stormwind so I can get pummeled to death by level 60 Elite Guards.
I hated warlock quest a lot more than mage quest, but maybe that's because I was a filthy mage quest player sometimes. At least with mage you could avoid playing minions in some decks to prevent the freeze procs. Warlock just felt so inevitable. Great video btw!
Love your videos. As someone who doesn't play Hearthstone much, but used to, can you please leave any of the cards on the screen for more than a quarter of a second? It's very hard to read them and understand what you're talking about when you jump cut so aggressively.
Mercenaries tbh was absolutely fantastic in concept, it was just competitive Pokemon battling, with cool strategic combat, bench swaps, board synergies, but the monetisation and lack of early concept sucked so hard the mode was DOA. Such a shame
I haven’t played Hearthstone since Witchwood and probably won’t play it again in all honesty, but I genuinely appreciate your videos like this one that not only summarize these sets I’ve never experienced but also give an honest perspective on their successes and failures.
Wow what a great video, was a fun and interesting watch while I ate. Started playing in United in storm wind and started watching you for mercenaries. So glad to see you work so hard on your content after the game mode flopped and stuck around to see your videos evolve. Would love to see reviews of past expansions as never got to experience them b4. Keep doing amazing work bro 👍!!!
This was definitely fun to watch. Would love if you did this for some of the other years. I started in kobold and catacombs or frozen knights, whatever came out second
I had the same feeling for this year. Barrens was the best time for me. For most of Stormwind and Alterac time I was just doing daily or weekly quests, the game crushed you to play for fun.
Great video Rarran! Would love to listen to your thoughts for every year too. Been on and off hearthstone since I learned what it was back in blackrock mountain and would love to know about the evolution and metagame of the old and the new Banging content, hope your week is great
I'm really sad about the card design and play patterns of that year being so problematic to the game, because the flavour was an absolute 11/10 for me and absolutely got me back into Hearthstone. This more muted style that's not about wacky theme-park style expansions but actually going to the roots of Wacraft is a huge selling point of Hearthstone to me (I would argue it's also what made its initial success), and everything about that year's direction, especially at the beginning, seemed tailored to fit that. Most importantly I think it really played into the class identity, and playing in Forged in the Barrens I felt so much more like an actual Mage, Paladin or Warrior than when with some of the crazy League of Explorers-style thematics that turned me off HS in the first place. I really like Sunken City and Nathria overall, but they've gotten back to that wacky style a bit more. As that year rotates I really hope I will keep feeling that same flavour of Warcraft and will want to keep playing.
I came back for Mercenaries and wanted to play it, but without money or playing HS itself I felt pretty quickly gold starved. So when they offered these free to play decks, I played GUff and he was fun, but I am not surprised that he was probably the worst offender. I got killed by that shard in one match and I didn't knew that something like that existed. Basically I played one week at the start of Death Knight and never touched Heartstone again since.
Imo the big problem modern hearthstone has is they don’t really know how to make cards viable unless they discover or cheat mana. I‘m not saying don’t have it in the game, but don’t slap these insanely powerful effects on every other card, especially not very cheap cards. I think what we really need is a new keyword that’s as impactful as discover, that rewards you for playing more slowly. They tried it with Manathirst but it ended up not being strong enough in the meta game. Also I think this year will be the deciding year for hearthstone. They either really pull it back and make hearthstone an exciting, much played game again or they will put the final nail in the coffin by creating another frustrating year that will make the majority of players quit for good. That being said I have high hopes for this year, let’s hope the next expansion, along with the rotation will bring some exciting stuff!
The only thing I disagree is on hero cards, remember kof ones? You lose if you don't draw them, the new ones are way less important to win the game (please ignore guff) and way more easy to find them because of tradable and later on dredge which allows you to look for them and setup your lategame. If your opponent draw Tamsin and you don't you can still win, guff and buffed dawngrasp were the only exceptions, but overall I'd like to see again hero cards with this design
I still think Year of the Raven was the worst. It introduced Genn and Baku, the two most meta-warping cards of all time. Besides those two though, Witch Wood was a really underpowered set, and so was Rastakhan's Rumble, leaving Boomsday as the only set of the year with any significant cards seeing play into the next season, and many of those became notorious as some of the most annoying cards in HS history. So it was basically just a whole year of game breaking OP cards and completely unplayable cards, none of the class themes were very fun or memorable, and besides Rush none of the keywords introduced that year have stuck around.
Would love a video not necessarily about other years but more about the current state, what you like/dislike and what you think needs overall balancing/total removal. As someone thats only started playing about a year ago i'd like to see how my opinions differ to someone who knows the game historically. For example, am i being salty for getting annoyed by extra rng cards like the 'cast 20 mana worth of spells' or the removal of random cards from your deck.
The amount of “gamechanging effects” were in play in Stormwind was nuts. Everyone is hating on Illucia, however I feel like she was reeeeally needed at the meta, and would still be needed now. Having the option to maybe, just maybe (bc probably it is played by then) to yoink the quest reward from a pirate warrior or a questline hunter felt so fecking rewarding. Screw those guys. Give me back my Illucia.
Tbh the only time since I came back to Hearthstone (Alterac Valley) that I enjoyed the state of Hearthstone was halfway into Sunken City. At all other points the game was either horribly unbalanced or power level/frustration was too high.
Super late to the contents section, but United in Stormwind was the set that also made me quit HS. Well, Mercenaries had a lot to do with it as well. Went to LoR which was amazing until it stopped being amazing. Came back to HS last year with the Catch-up packs, and I haven’t hated it yet.
You got me addicted to hearthstone again, adter 5 years. Somehow battlenet detected that i was watching your content so they gave me 150 packs Now that im 200 dollars in, i dont have a single moment of regret, keep it up!
It was ok. But this was the year that made me play Battlegrounds more than any game modes. During summer the whole meta was BS. I really hated so fast paced games. That was when I stopped Standard entirely (but sometimes i do play standard because of quests). Year of the Hydra was better than Gryphon. Also, in Darkmoon first Mini-set was introduced.
Priest discovering random into random into random is what made me quit the game for two years. I had been playing since classic, but became a regular player in Ungoro. Ungoro was the goat.
Tried something different, hope you like it! Let me know if you want another year review by liking the video :)
thanks rare ram
Watched the stream vod. It was pretty fun as a casual player that missed a lot of these changes as they happened.
Loved it! As someone who took time off from hearthstone but has started playing recently again, this type of vid is really nice to see what I missed!
I'm a player who hasn't played in a very long time but really enjoy your content. This video was a bit tough to watch for me. You do a great job in explaining how certain cards had an influence on the metagame, but you don't always explain what the card does. I understand you put them on screen but it very often will jump cut to just your facecam or it simples moves on too fast. Making it harder to read the card for someone who has never seen it before. We don't have that instant familiarity yet that you get when you see these cards so often.
This makes it hard to tell who the video is for. Because on one end, it could be made as a recap for current players, but then there would be no reason to explain it because they experienced it themselves. On the other hand it could be for people like me who didn't play, but then I think it might be a good idea to talk more about what it does, or at least put it on screen long enough to read it.
Just my two cents, you're content is great and I love how often you try to do something new. Hope you keep doing what you're doing.
Definitely make more content like this, I enjoyed it, you seemed to enjoy talking about it
Omg Rarran PLEASE do reviews for every hearthstone year, this one was extremely interesting to watch =) I love how you're always finding new ways to bring us cool content!
I'd also like to see him maybe bring in other streamers for expansions from previous years and get their views on what the game was like at the end of those metas.
The printing of Mr Smite is my most “What are you doing?” Hearthstone moment. They spent, YEARS running charge minions into the ground to a point where I really thought they’d nerf Stonetusk Boar and then suddenly they decided “I’m in Charge now”
Realistically, they should have made Mr. Smite not be a pirate himself (not sure how that would work flavor-wise but) so that Pirates from the Juggernaut and such could still have Charge, conditionally, but not just a beater that goes in every mid-range deck (it was run in Buff Paladin only because they could buff it and Charge 14 damage face)
@@Starwarsgeek12 The major problem wasn't the pirates from Juggernaut, it was Nellie generating 3 mana 15+ damage...
@@Starwarsgeek12 "Your other pirates have charge"?
They actually did nerf boar but replaced it with the 2/1 rush griffin and moved it to wild
@@lettucebob7395 that was with core set stuff though right? Wasn’t like a hall of fame situation
Really like this new style of video! Only slight thing is that there are a lot of moments where you reference "this card" instead of a name. I think saying the names a bit more often would help mainly people who want to audio-only the video as well as people watching it a longer time from now where they may not remember effects as quickly.
The one thing that really, really bugged me about Mr Smite, was that a few years ago Blizzard starting to phase out Charge minions because they felt that A. Rush was a better mechanic, and B. Charge a keyword that they felt push a style of play that they weren't comfortable with. And then they make this card, which is probably the most broken and toxic Charge card ever produced 🥴
A couple notes:
1. Deck of Lunacy was a trap after the nerfs. It was not worth the deckslot, yet saw tons of play anyway because it was chaotic fun. See: Tickatus Warlock
2. Control Priest is a unique deck in Hearthstone history as a statistically significant portion of the deck's winrate came from people conceding on turn 1.
3. Alterac Valley, especially early on, felt a lot like later Stormwind because the entire expansion was a lot of big, dumb, slow cards. Most of the Heroes were good enough to see play anyway during this time and OwlTK joined the fight, but it took direct intervention in the form of nerfs for new decks to start seeing significant play.
Through the year I guess they figured the best way to counter the mana cheat was to print more mana cheating for other classes!
You joke, but that actually illustrates how this happened to begin with. Rogue used to be the class known for mana cheat and they were balanced around the idea that they could reduce the cost of their cards, but it was their niche, they had their thing. Then we had Year of the Gryphon where there was a point where the mana cheating was so rampant that Rogue wasn't a class for a long time because their one thing they did well was now being done in all the other classes who all still had their other unique strengths.
Year of the Gryphon seemed to follow the philosophy of "People love playing Rogue and playing a bunch of cards in one turn by reducing their cost, let's have ALL the classes do that!"
@@SpecterVonBaren totally agree. The whole year it was unusual to not play 4-5 cards every turn
I don't play much anymore, power creep is getting a little obnoxious and every game feels like a race to pull off some sweaty unavoidable death combo and it's just whoever gets all their puzzle pieces first
Yeah I am just spamming a warrior deck that does like 62-124 damage to face. It is really dumb but this is the game they chose
@@christianclark9494 Card games usually have interactions with (almost) all your opponent can do. Cards you can play on your opponents turn, cards that affect their hand, cards with static effects that limit the number of cards playable or increases cost. Hearthstone has extremely limited versions each, because of the absolute control players have over their turn. For interacting with cards not on the field HS standard has two mage secrets countering creatures and spells respectively, two playable hand disruption cards (three in Warrior lol), the better of which got nerfed multiple times, and one playable peace of opponent targeting mana increase (Far watch post, which got nerfed). Hearthstone is a game with multiple decks that can try to win from the hand, and less than ten cards total that even try to slow that down.
I love worgen warrior tho xD dunno about 2019+ meta
Yeah it shows you don't play anymore lol
Arena is the only place to go for the oldschool format of Hearthstone, and even there the powercreep is noticeable.
It brought me back to Hearthstone momentarily. As fun as I'm the sure the prior couple years were, I sorely missed with Hearthstone felt more like an adaptation of Warcraft rather than Warcraft fanfiction. Forged was exactly what I was looking for thematically and the expansions that followed also didn't disappoint.
it'd be nice if sometimes they continued with a new keyword for more than 1 expansion. there wouldn't be so many dead cards if they did, that would see play but don't because of lack of synergy
Yeah, but then you aren't forced to pay for every synergy card every expansion.
*cough* quest paladin *cough*
As someone who hasn't played since Boomsday, this is pretty cool. I don't play a lot of card games but I'm super interested in card designs and how people synergized cards. Also love hearing about deck types during certain expansions. Only issue is that sometimes you don't really explain the card or quickly cut away from it. Otherwise, super cool recap and I'd love more from other years/metas/expansions
MFW Rarran doesn't think hearthstone is already a gacha game.
been gacha for over 6 years yea
As bad as Hearthstone is, it is nowhere near as bad as gacha games.
It resembles more like a gambling game
You must not play gacha games. Because it very much isn't a gacha game lol
I wish I could waste my money for fantasy waifus instead.
My main takeaway is that most decks should not just be able to end a game without the opponent having any say about it, be that on turn 4 or on turn 10. At no point should games stop being a back and forth for small incremental advantages, and playing a late game deck shouldn't automatically mean that you're playing an OTK deck.
Fucking preach it’s been progressive aids since jade druid came out. I just want fatigue to matter again 😢
Nothing was worse than Jade Druid. You knew what is happening, and it took 2 hours to kill you.
Do this for every year please. I love this. Also quick correction. The barrens is a starting horde zone and stormwind is the capital of the alliance, the other faction. Wailling caverns and deadmines are respectively horde and alliance dungeons. Alteract valley is a pvp zone where both factions have to capture stuff and kill the opposing faction’s leader (aka drek’thar and vanndar) Onyxia’s lair was the second raid people did after molten core.
I think the biggest problem with questlines was the ability to progress your quest incrementally and being rewarded for it. a lot of the quests in ungoro (especially the slower ones), you'd regularly have to decide whether you wanted to answer your opponent's plays OR progress your quest. with united in stormwind, you could easily just lean into progressing your quest and not be punished for it because each quest step would add a layer of survivability. of course, it didn't help that the rewards were absolutely busted and so fundamentally game-changing
6:10 one thing I think you should added to Deck of Lunacy is its combination with rotation - as you said, cards pool was much better for highrolling having only four sets and with DoL you could easily predict what you get from each card you put in your deck
I love the reviews of the year, please do more. It's fun to hear your commentary and definitely nostalgic to hear you talk about a lot of these decks that I remember playing like two years ago.
rarran you should do reviews of the older years e.g. mammoth, kraken, etc. i really enjoyed this as someone who missed the year of the gryphon so i think it'd be nice to reminisce on all the old cards from 10 years ago :)
I think the least fun I’ve had playing hearthstone was when I played against quest hunter, because I couldn’t play any minions as they would just die to 1 mana damage spells, and every turn I was taking at least 2 damage, and once they finish the quest and play tavish I just lost.
The most frustrating thing was how uninteractive and repetitive it was, because they would have the quest every game, and the other 29 cards were cheap damage spells. I decided to just play wild games where I could maybe do something to stop my opponents plans but people played odd quest hunter so the hero power would just deal more damage
Tbf the Questlines u said werent busted were also busted in Wild . If i remember right after warlock Questline got removed you were either dying to Hunter in 5 turns cuz of the quest or were playing druid and smorcing your enemy with claws and bites . That meta was so toxic it made me quit again .
Oh yeah. Odd Quest Hunter. That was super fun!
For me, the worst designed questlines are Warrior and Hunter. Since both are so consistent, and essentially you just do what you would do without the questline. You just get more value for it. Priest and Mage is of course huge, and does reward you for doing what you want to be doing, but it is nowhere near as consistent. And then stuff like Druid, DH, Paladin and Shaman make you go out of your way for a reward. But Warrior and Hunter? Well, the Warrior deck is called Pirate warrior, and there is like what, 20 pirates in it? Not exactly hard to play them. And Hunter dealing damage with spells isnt exactly out of its way either.
Another thing why I do hate Warrior quest is that it gives Pirate Warrior, an quintessential aggro deck a lot of late game presence. A minion, 4 damage and a weapon every single turn to grind you down. A few good hail mary turns with gorehowls and Mr. Smite can mean that even if you are a control deck which managed to survive against pirate warrior, you may still lose. And neither you, nor the Warrior have much agency over it.
a thing that I notice throughout this video: you would say words like 'Finally' and 'it took them until x expansion to change it' so not only these toxic cards plagued the meta, it took them a long time to address and properly balance cards.
I started playing Hearthstone again because of your content a few weeks ago. My previous experience of the game was like 2 months at the start of the game.
I'm basically only playing mercenaries. The problem with the main gamemodes is that I don't really have enough cards to make fun decks. Mercenaries is a gamemode where I can get all mercenaries in a few days, where I can build combo teams because I have synergies and where I can access PVE gamemodes without paying.
Really like the "review by year". Would love to see more vids like this
You should do another one of these on the Year of the Kraken. As someone who started playing during Un’Goro it’d be interesting to see a break down of how Pirate Warrior, Jade Druid, and C’Thun decks actually worked
I remember during UiS everyone was saying games were over by turns 5-6 and then ask the stats people were like "mmmm ackshually games are over by turn 7 on average, which is only .5 turns faster than other expansions" but I SWEAR the amount of games that were over by turns 4-6 were far more frequent than at any other time. Fastest meta ever and it sucked ass.
They’ve turned the powercreep switch to max to make people buy cards
not as much as year of the mammoth at least
@@squid4462 No, this year was much worse in how powercreeped it is. Espcially Stormwind and the AV hero's
Frozen throne and kobolds have logn since bene surpassed as storngest sets
@@zyella277 well theyre obviously better thats how card games work, I mean for the time knights and kobolds were more creeping
Mid to late Stormwind (just before Deadmines) had objectively the most diverse meta Hearthstone had seen in years, with literally no deck able to be actually strong enough to be tier 1, and nearly every archetype had strong decks that could succeed on the ladder - including, yes, control, because Handlock is a control deck, and claiming otherwise is simply silly. Players liked to tell themselves that everything they were losing to was an "OTK" because it was an easy deflection, but it simply wasn't true and the data repeatedly proved that it wasn't true. Go back and look at the data from the time period I'm referencing before jumping to conclusions: you'll find that Hearthstone has legitimately not had a richer meta since. Said data also showed quite clearly that the actual average speed of games was *barely* faster than Barrens - the period with one of the slowest, most miserable decks ever released in the form of Attrition Priest, for reference. The outrage towards Stormwind, after the initial wave of nerfs, which was, of course, necessary, is almost entirely based upon completely false impressions from players who were not actually paying attention.
Deadmines was pretty awful, though, and undid almost all of the progress that was made, so the great times did not last as long as they should have.
Very well said
you should totally do these for every year. v poggers
The original Edwin was in every world champion’s deck until it was rotated out - now *that* is crazy!
Great vid overall, would love to see other years. This video made me realize how much last years expansion has ruined this years meta 😢
This is the first video if your I have seen, dunno how you haven't showed up on feed before. But yes, I would absolutely love to see more videos going over specific years in HS. Having been gone that year, this was especially illuminating
If you could put any 3 sets from past and current sets, which 3 would you pick? To make for a fun, powerful, exciting year.
Un goro, scholomance academy, uldum.
Who was your favorite mercenary as a whole? Mine was brukan because his hero power greeting was "come now give ol' brukan a hug"
Haha good reason, I actually really like tamsin, really well done
Deck of Lunecy meta was what I came back to when checking out Hearthstone Esports for the first time since firebat left GM
Please do these for all the seasons, it's fascinating! I say that as someone who has played or at least kept up with HS content since vanilla, I forgot a lot of this stuff and never really looked at the seasons in a whole like this.
Havent Played Standard in so long, but its fun seeing that Pirate warrior just constantly remains the like scourge of the player base. It was the first deck I used to get to legend way back in Whispers of the Old Gods, it is one of those like constant 55% winrate decks that u just can quick game grind up to legend
"Demonhunter absolutely bent every class over and made it its b'tch!" most accurate description of release dh there is. thanks rarran.
Not Rarran forgetting they introduced spell schools
you should make an expansion tier list video, they pop off on the algorithm
ah yes, you see when i'm leveling a level 15 Orc Warrior I crave to leave the Barrens and enter Stormwind so I can get pummeled to death by level 60 Elite Guards.
i would like to watch a review of each year, for sure
I hated warlock quest a lot more than mage quest, but maybe that's because I was a filthy mage quest player sometimes. At least with mage you could avoid playing minions in some decks to prevent the freeze procs. Warlock just felt so inevitable.
Great video btw!
Love your videos. As someone who doesn't play Hearthstone much, but used to, can you please leave any of the cards on the screen for more than a quarter of a second? It's very hard to read them and understand what you're talking about when you jump cut so aggressively.
Tradable (and manathirst) would probably make for good evergreen keywords.
Mercenaries tbh was absolutely fantastic in concept, it was just competitive Pokemon battling, with cool strategic combat, bench swaps, board synergies, but the monetisation and lack of early concept sucked so hard the mode was DOA. Such a shame
I haven’t played Hearthstone since Witchwood and probably won’t play it again in all honesty, but I genuinely appreciate your videos like this one that not only summarize these sets I’ve never experienced but also give an honest perspective on their successes and failures.
Please do more of these! As a returning player, who hasn't played since Koboldts & Catacombs (2017), this kind of video really helps!
any chance you do a review for last year's expansions?
Questlines change how the game is played. Rarran: Cringe
Kazakusan changes how the game is played. Rarran: Based
The duality of man.
Make more of these, this is great
I would love a review of each year starting with the first year! Great video thank you
Wow what a great video, was a fun and interesting watch while I ate. Started playing in United in storm wind and started watching you for mercenaries. So glad to see you work so hard on your content after the game mode flopped and stuck around to see your videos evolve. Would love to see reviews of past expansions as never got to experience them b4. Keep doing amazing work bro 👍!!!
This vid and editing is sick! would love to see more years in hearthstone history recapped.
As a returning player who hasn't played since frozen throne, I'd love to see this type of video for every year rotation
Glad you're not a small creator anymore rarran, now you're one of my absolute favorite creators on the platform!
Amazing format of video! Maybe you could do review for the past year, i'm going back to play HS in few days, stoped since late stormwind expansion
pirate warrior questline and hunter questline filled the ladder and casual modes for stupidly long and got nerfed multiple times.
This is surprisingly entertaining. I'd love to see these reviews for each year.
Please do more of these! This was a really fun, interesting watch. :)
Blizzard never learned a lesson from Mechwarper: if you're gonna make a discount, never drop it below 1
In my opinion tradable was a lot better than frenzy
Since the dungeon game mode, I've been asking for something like that in the main game, It's sad that they aren't doing it
Absolutely wanna see more of this, I took a break from Hearthstone up until Alterac, and hearing how the meta game was back then is super interesting.
A review of the meta game through every year would be such a cool idea. Would love it!
"Cause of that freakin bird that came in deadmines" had me dead
I'd be interested in a retrospective on previous sets. I forgot about Nerfs and buffs! Very interesting
Yes! More content reviewing each year‘s expansion + rotation. Easy pickings for you
Reviews for all the years sound interesting
This was definitely fun to watch. Would love if you did this for some of the other years. I started in kobold and catacombs or frozen knights, whatever came out second
6:56 Leo when he gets a a new haircut
As someone who pops in and out of Hearthstone for the last decade, I would love a review of each year!
I had the same feeling for this year. Barrens was the best time for me. For most of Stormwind and Alterac time I was just doing daily or weekly quests, the game crushed you to play for fun.
Great video Rarran! Would love to listen to your thoughts for every year too. Been on and off hearthstone since I learned what it was back in blackrock mountain and would love to know about the evolution and metagame of the old and the new
Banging content, hope your week is great
I'm really sad about the card design and play patterns of that year being so problematic to the game, because the flavour was an absolute 11/10 for me and absolutely got me back into Hearthstone. This more muted style that's not about wacky theme-park style expansions but actually going to the roots of Wacraft is a huge selling point of Hearthstone to me (I would argue it's also what made its initial success), and everything about that year's direction, especially at the beginning, seemed tailored to fit that. Most importantly I think it really played into the class identity, and playing in Forged in the Barrens I felt so much more like an actual Mage, Paladin or Warrior than when with some of the crazy League of Explorers-style thematics that turned me off HS in the first place. I really like Sunken City and Nathria overall, but they've gotten back to that wacky style a bit more. As that year rotates I really hope I will keep feeling that same flavour of Warcraft and will want to keep playing.
I came back for Mercenaries and wanted to play it, but without money or playing HS itself I felt pretty quickly gold starved. So when they offered these free to play decks, I played GUff and he was fun, but I am not surprised that he was probably the worst offender. I got killed by that shard in one match and I didn't knew that something like that existed.
Basically I played one week at the start of Death Knight and never touched Heartstone again since.
Imo the big problem modern hearthstone has is they don’t really know how to make cards viable unless they discover or cheat mana. I‘m not saying don’t have it in the game, but don’t slap these insanely powerful effects on every other card, especially not very cheap cards. I think what we really need is a new keyword that’s as impactful as discover, that rewards you for playing more slowly. They tried it with Manathirst but it ended up not being strong enough in the meta game. Also I think this year will be the deciding year for hearthstone. They either really pull it back and make hearthstone an exciting, much played game again or they will put the final nail in the coffin by creating another frustrating year that will make the majority of players quit for good. That being said I have high hopes for this year, let’s hope the next expansion, along with the rotation will bring some exciting stuff!
I think the storylines around the mercs were a decent idea, but I really didn't like them as characters - way too goofy and lighthearted imo
HEarthstone is entirely goofy and lighthearted. That's the entire point of the game and it always was, even back in 2014
The only thing I disagree is on hero cards, remember kof ones? You lose if you don't draw them, the new ones are way less important to win the game (please ignore guff) and way more easy to find them because of tradable and later on dredge which allows you to look for them and setup your lategame. If your opponent draw Tamsin and you don't you can still win, guff and buffed dawngrasp were the only exceptions, but overall I'd like to see again hero cards with this design
"If you don't know gruff, why are you here?"
I dunno I haven't played this game in 5 years lol I want to know
I quit HS during this year... The warlock quest meta was very annoying as a control warrior player
I remember trying Hearthstone again that year, faced the Far Watch Post in the first game and just noped out
rarran casually using unnerfed jaina in the thumbnail
I still think Year of the Raven was the worst. It introduced Genn and Baku, the two most meta-warping cards of all time. Besides those two though, Witch Wood was a really underpowered set, and so was Rastakhan's Rumble, leaving Boomsday as the only set of the year with any significant cards seeing play into the next season, and many of those became notorious as some of the most annoying cards in HS history.
So it was basically just a whole year of game breaking OP cards and completely unplayable cards, none of the class themes were very fun or memorable, and besides Rush none of the keywords introduced that year have stuck around.
you're my new favorite hearthstone youtuber. please keep pumping these out!
Would love a video not necessarily about other years but more about the current state, what you like/dislike and what you think needs overall balancing/total removal. As someone thats only started playing about a year ago i'd like to see how my opinions differ to someone who knows the game historically. For example, am i being salty for getting annoyed by extra rng cards like the 'cast 20 mana worth of spells' or the removal of random cards from your deck.
More year reviews please :)
The amount of “gamechanging effects” were in play in Stormwind was nuts.
Everyone is hating on Illucia, however I feel like she was reeeeally needed at the meta, and would still be needed now. Having the option to maybe, just maybe (bc probably it is played by then) to yoink the quest reward from a pirate warrior or a questline hunter felt so fecking rewarding. Screw those guys. Give me back my Illucia.
Next video, analyze the current year of hs, voyage to the sunken city, murder at castle and march of the lich king 😬😬
Great video! And a review for every year would be very informative! 🔥
Would love to see reviews of other years!
Tbh the only time since I came back to Hearthstone (Alterac Valley) that I enjoyed the state of Hearthstone was halfway into Sunken City. At all other points the game was either horribly unbalanced or power level/frustration was too high.
Super late to the contents section, but United in Stormwind was the set that also made me quit HS. Well, Mercenaries had a lot to do with it as well. Went to LoR which was amazing until it stopped being amazing. Came back to HS last year with the Catch-up packs, and I haven’t hated it yet.
Love this video style. I would watch every single video for every single year if you do it. Keep up the great work brother.
You got me addicted to hearthstone again, adter 5 years. Somehow battlenet detected that i was watching your content so they gave me 150 packs
Now that im 200 dollars in, i dont have a single moment of regret, keep it up!
I'd be very interested in a review of every year of hearthstone, game is old enough for some serious nostalgia hits
I like these reviews a lot. I came in in alterac, so reviewing the meta of past years is something I am interested in. Keep up the good work, Rarran!
It was ok. But this was the year that made me play Battlegrounds more than any game modes. During summer the whole meta was BS. I really hated so fast paced games. That was when I stopped Standard entirely (but sometimes i do play standard because of quests). Year of the Hydra was better than Gryphon.
Also, in Darkmoon first Mini-set was introduced.
Gryphon was not a year when mini-sets where introduced, it was the first when every single expansion got a mini-set.
Priest discovering random into random into random is what made me quit the game for two years. I had been playing since classic, but became a regular player in Ungoro. Ungoro was the goat.
UoS was such a rough time. Flavor wise I love the questlines, except demon seed. All my homies hate demon seed
I was scratching my head thinking "Wasn't frenzy already in the game?" And then i realized before it was called Enrage