Monday, July 11, 2016

Greed

Recently I have been watching a few videos where prominent Hearthstone players try to fix random players' decks.  There are a lot of common threads in these videos, and by far the thing that I have seen come out of them is this:  Stop being so greedy.

Seriously, everyone just seems to load up their decks with enormously expensive stuff and then be puzzled as to why they lose to aggro decks.  You have to have cheap spells!  You have to DO things!  The plan of just sit there until you can slam down amazing stuff turn after turn doesn't work if the opponent's plan is to actually kill you.

I guess what people love is the rush of beating people up with big dudes.  It is hilarious fun to watch Ragnaros The Firelord burn your opponent to death, yelling DIE INSECT every turn.  I get that.  But you have to *get* to Ragnaros in order to have that fun.

Play things like Earthen Ring Farseer.  Less exciting, more consistent. It keeps you alive until you can cast Ragnaros.

It all reminds me a lot of my Magic playing days when people ran ridiculous stuff like Demonic Hordes and Lord of the Pit and then couldn't win games.  I was guilty of this too, of course.  I recall my first big tournament win that came with a deck that had 4 Desert Twisters in it, as well as 4 Clone, 4 Control Magic, and 1 Doppelganger.  Plus another 12 cards that cost 5 or more mana.  Greedy!  It worked that time, though.

There isn't to say everyone should play aggro of course.  Control decks are all well and good.  I love them!  However, there is a real problem when you try to play control and do that by just jamming all the biggest stuff you own into a deck.

You have to pay attention to aggro.  You have to recognize that you are going to get attacked.  Control is all about stopping those attacks, not just being super greedy.  Control decks that are just full of expensive stuff aren't controlling anything; they are just shitty aggro decks.

So there you go.  Play control, not bad aggro.  There is my deck advice for all those new players out there.

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