Old school chaos

When I come up north to visit my family I usually end up at a game night at my brother's place.  This week was no exception, and last night we ended up playing a five player game of Magic.  I haven't played Magic much in the past 15 years at least, so I had to shake off the rust.

I remember playing in high school, where some of our games were the standard 1v1 game, but many were just silly group games.  The most extreme of these was a 100 person tournament where we all played a game with custom rules simultaneously.  After half an hour or so the tournament director announced that somebody had won by taking infinite turns, so we gave them the grand prize, kicked them out of the tournament, and kept playing.  I ended up getting beat out of the tournament on the back of an incorrect GM call after outlasting about 60 players.

This five player game reminded me of those old times.  One player declared that he didn't know the game well, so he was just going to draft to try to screw with other people.  Partway through the first game I had a 8/10 creature in play that made a fresh 2/2 every turn and blew up a permanent of my choice every turn.  Nobody else had anything in play but land.  This is obviously fantastic, but in a five player game somebody is going to have an answer.... except that the random guy played Armageddon, destroying all the lands in the game.  I quickly killed the random guy and one other person and was declared the victor.

Random guy seemed extremely pleased, because his plan of screwing with people had come to fruition.  I felt unfulfilled with my victory.

I guess this is what I should have expected.  Group games where you can directly go after people always devolve into dogpiling or kingmaking, that is just the nature of the thing.  Nothing I can do about that.

While I enjoyed the game night overall, this certainly reminds me why I have shifted away from playing group Magic when we have a bunch of people together.  These days I like my games to reward skill a lot more than luck and political posturing.  You can make a good political game (Diplomacy says hi) but Magic isn't it.

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.

A new game

One of the cards I love the most in Hearthstone is Fel Reaver.  I haven't used it a lot but I love it because it changes the game in a big way when it lands, by offering the opponent a new way to win the game.  It isn't often that you play a card that says "Hey opponent!  Want a new win condition?  Here ya go, try and deck me!" and that makes it a card that generates a lot of interesting decisions.

The thing about Fel Reaver that makes it so powerful is that people who play against it in a draft situation lose their minds.  It is +2/+2 bigger than a minion of its cost has any right to be and that is hugely powerful, but people make all kinds of mistakes when it gets played that makes it even better than that.  Usually this involves them trying to deck the owner of Fel Reaver by playing tons of cheap cards and leaving Fel Reaver alive, hoping to make the decking option work.

Look at the numbers:  Most of the time a Hearthstone draft deck goes through 15 cards at most in a game.  Often less, rarely more.  Given that decks are 30 cards this means that the first 5 cards you play against a Fel Reaver do literally nothing.  Oh, they look impressive, burning away the opponent's options, but they don't offer any useful advantage.  At the end of the game if you are dead it does not matter at all if the opponent happens to have no deck left, and it takes a couple of turns after their deck is gone before they really run out of options and lose.

The trick to fighting against Fel Reaver is to pretend it has no text.  It is just an 8/8 for 5, nothing more.  Sure, if you happen to pop off a few cheap cards before blowing it up there is a 1% chance it will help you win an attrition match but you are better off ignoring that.  The most important thing is just focusing on winning the game right as it is.

The same sort of thinking has to apply to the other side too.  When you have a Fel Reaver don't worry about your deck - just try to win the game.  Remember that if the opponent tries to ignore Fel Reaver and deck you then you can always just run Fel Reaver into their minions and get good trades, and if they throw their minions and removal at it then all well and good, it did its job of being a gigantic body.

More than anything everyone involved has to remember that although you *can* deck someone using Fel Reaver it isn't a quick process, and Fel Reaver probably kills you in three swings.  Unless something weird happens you need to focus on winning the game normally, not on the new win condition that just appeared to taunt you from a great distance.

It reminds me of a team Magic tournament I participated in years ago where my team was playing W/U Millstone.  We slowly ground away our opponent's decks and won convincingly, and at the end of the game the opponents tried to get us to trade them some Millstones.

We tried to explain to them that they didn't lose because Millstone is powerful - they lost because our decks dominated them and they sat there doing nothing.  We could have won with any card, and in fact I used Serpent Generator to much the same effect in later times.

However, they remained fixated on the awful feeling of their deck being ground away.  There is something very powerful about watching your resources drain off, even when that resource drain has little to do with actual victory.  Seeing cards flip from the deck into the graveyard is an emotional event from both sides, far more so than its effect actually justifies.

Fel Reaver and Millstone are the same in this way.  The takeaway lesson is to focus not on the cards flipping off the deck, but on what actually makes you win or lose.  In both cases the thing to do is ignore the milling effect and focus on winning the game right now, because that is what matters in nearly every case.

Netting the decks

I have been wondering how much the collectible aspect of Hearthstone affects the prevalence of netdecking.  Especially since it is possible to play Hearthstone F2P, and a lot of people do, there are a ton of people out there trying to play the game without a full collection available.

I have seen a bunch of people complaining that the new expansion has only been out a few weeks and still everyone is using whatever decks they see go up on their favourite Hearthstone website instead of making their own.  That is undeniably true, but a lot of people attribute it to laziness and greed while I think it might be more reasonably attributed to poverty.

Hearthstone poverty, at any rate.  Thing is, if you aren't putting real money into the game your resources aren't going to be substantial.  The dust required to craft a legendary could easily take a month of grinding to get at 60 minutes a day, even if you are quite successful at arena.  If you try out something fun that requires a legendary and a few epics and discover that your experiment really sucks, that hour of trying could easily cost you all the dust you earn in two months.  People really don't want to get stuck with cards they regret crafting, especially when getting those cards takes so long.

So obviously they netdeck.  Which doesn't mean they copy the entire decklist necessarily, but they check to make sure that top players are using the cards they intend to craft, and then they make a deck very similar to one that they know is successful.  This at least guarantees that they have something solid to pilot while they grind up dust for their next purchase.

Sure, you could insist that everyone should just be creative and play their own designs, but that is easy to say when you have a full collection and being creative has no cost aside from the time spent playing.  It is a lot harder when you are spending a finite resource each time you want to try something new out.

It makes me wonder how the metagame would shift if Hearthstone were a subscription service.  If everyone was playing with a full collection it would be trivial to build the exact same deck as the pros, but it would also be easy to make whatever tweaks you want.  I suspect this would lead to most players being more willing to experiment and try out wild ideas, but there are pressures both ways.

For example, I want to build a N'Zoth paladin.  The list I found uses Eadric the Pure.  He is not often used and I don't have confidence that crafting him is a good use of my resources, so I will find something else to fit in that spot.  However, I will definitely craft the Forbidden Healing cards that the deck uses because they seem irreplaceable.  I won't be running the same list that anyone else is (except by accident!) but I will definitely be using some of the ideas I have found online, and I will be checking to make sure that if I am crafting something it is something somebody else tried and found useful.

I know back when I was playing Magic a lot I ran rogue decks all the time.  I really enjoyed finding metagame choices that crushed the popular decks but which were unexpected and often terrible against the things that I didn't expect.  I would love to do the same in Hearthstone, but I can't just experiment all the time with wild ideas without just running out of resources and being stuck.

I understand why people netdeck.  I do it, sort of, and it is a natural result of the resource system and financial model of Hearthstone.  While I think going to a subscription model would help with this, that obviously won't ever happen so we can't test.  Unfortunate, that, because I love to learn about whether or not my guesses about social dynamics pan out.

Game over, just in time

In the early going Magic:  The Gathering had a lot of pure control decks.  Some of them were land destruction based and relied on the opponent never getting to play a significant card because they had no land, some just counterspelled everything the opponent tried to do, some discarded the opponent's hand, and some just sat there doing nothing until their combo landed and the game ended.

While I had fun playing with and against these decks, Wizards correctly realized that people enjoy the game a lot more when they get to do stuff like play creatures and beat down.  Being completely shut out isn't fun.  Losing to an opponent who plays better creatures isn't the most fun, but it is infinitely better than losing to an opponent who never let you play your game at all.

Magic changed for the better to make that happen, and Hearthstone seems to be doing the same thing with the new Whispers expansion.  Check out the newest Legendary card to be revealed, N'zoth the Corruptor.

N'zoth is amazing.  In the right deck, your 10th turn involves slamming down 7 big minions, 6 of which have deathrattles so they do extra stuff even if your opponent has a full board clear.  Sure, sometimes your opponent will Brawl twice and wreck you but nearly all the rest of the time N'Zoth just ends your opponent's day.

The reason this matters is that control decks in Hearthstone have been aiming for long games, often being designed to win by simply running the opponent completely out of cards.  Elise Starseeker has accelerated this trend, setting up a game style where you don't try to win at all until the last couple turns when both decks are already empty.  That is a long time to play, especially if you are the aggressive deck and you knew you lost ten turns ago but kept playing out of a faint hope of a disconnect or outrageous luck.

These new cards in Whispers of the Old Gods enforce a new kind of control.  That new kind of control tries to stay in the game until turn 10 and then do something absolutely outrageous to blow the opponent out.  These new 10 mana cards are worthy of the cost, which has not been true of most 10 drops in the past.  This new kind of control isn't going to be playing nothing but removal, and it isn't aiming for fatigue.  It is going to be playing minions, brawling for board control, and doing lots of trading.

And that stuff is FUN.  People like playing minions and bashing them into each other.  That is just plain old fun and is the core of Hearthstone, much as it was the core of the joy of Magic.

There is plenty of strategic depth in playing hard control with nothing but removal.  You do need to think, plan, and consider.  No question on that.  However, the masses of people really do enjoy monsters brawling each other, and this new soft control style will do plenty of that.

Not that every hard control deck will go away, mind you, but I think they will have huge difficulties fighting the new soft control decks.  Sure, you can load up on nothing but removal and keep your opponent's board clear, but how will you deal with the turn 10 that hits you for 20 to the face, summons a complete set of 7 monsters, or does whatever else the remaining 2 Old God cards will do?  How do you prepare for all of those eventualities, while still keeping yourself secure against hyper aggro decks and midrange?

I think the answer is that you won't be able to have enough answers for all those things.  Pure control, hard control, of the kind that just sits there waiting for fatigue, will get squeezed out.  Soft control decks that play enough healing, taunts, and removal to fight for the board will be the new big thing, but they will be playing tons of minions too.  Whether those minions are cultist types like C'thun decks will have, deathrattles for N'Zoth, or something else entirely, they will be out there on the field of battle duking it out.

None of this is accidental.  Blizzard wants to build a game that is fun for newbies, and getting beaten by control warrior on turn 25 isn't as much fun as throwing down dorks, brawling, and then dying to something absolutely spectacular on turn 10.  Especially so because then you can go and get your own turn 10 monsters and blow other people out too.  While the Old Gods are part of a theme, I am confident that this theme and the way it affects the metagame is deliberate and designed to do exactly what I am describing.  The game plays best when it is resolved somewhere between turn 8 and 12, and a combination of aggressive decks trying to close things out early and control decks playing 10 cost monstrosities is exactly the ticket to getting there.

To the ground, Commander

In the Hearthstone metagame there is a deck called Patron Warrior that has been a real fixture for some time now.  It focuses around (surprise!) a card called Grim Patron that is a 3/3 which makes a new copy of itself if it survives damage.  This effect is potentially really powerful and interacts well with all of the ways that warrior decks have to AOE the board for 1 damage or ping their own creatures.  The deck can just play for value and use its synergy to try to beat the opponent down, but usually they just sit around waiting for their big combo and kill the opponent in 1 turn. (OTK)

Nobody really has a problem with the interactive Patron play that focuses on getting good value.  It requires thought and strategy on both sides.  However, people really don't like having full health, a few minions in play, their opponent with nothing, and then dying to a OTK combo.  Players really object to having no idea what the game state is and then suddenly blowing up.

This is something that Magic dealt with back in the day when Counterspell decks, land destruction, and discard were all strong at various points.  People, new players especially, absolutely hate playing against hard control where they don't get to do anything.  They may not win against a superior player who just plays better creatures but at least they feel like they were playing the game.

Blizzard decided that the OTK aspect of Patron Warrior had to go and I think they were absolutely right in that regard.  The trick is to figure out what part of the combo needs to die.  Patron himself is iconic, has plenty of interesting tricks going on, and can be used in cool ways that aren't OTK so he isn't a good target for a nerf.  What Blizzard went with instead is Warsong Commander.  Right now she gives all minions that enter play with 3 or less Attack value the Charge ability so they can attack right away.  This is extremely powerful when played in a combo that hopes to generate a half dozen minions in a turn, and is the engine behind the OTK.  In a non combo situation like a draft she is playable, sometimes quite good, but never overpowered.

The new version of Warsong Commander loses her current ability and gains "All your Charge minions gain +1 Attack."  This isn't just a complete change of her function, it also reduces her from having a good ability to having a extremely weak one.  She is utterly finished in constructed play, worthless beyond belief, and in fact is so bad that she will crash to unplayable garbage status in draft too.  Was this nerf on the right card, and to the right degree?

My feeling is that the answer is yes to the first question, no to the second.  WC is a problem.  Any new minion is going to have to be designed with the idea in mind that it may have haste from WC.  If minions spawn more minions, everything has haste and keeps on beating.  If anything is fragile to make up for its incredible power, it can go right away and ignore that fragility on the first turn.  WC's current effect is a huge design constraint because Charge has consistently been a massive balance issue.  It always will be, I suspect, and WC is a serious problem in generating OTK decks or other more general balance issues.

So what is the answer?  To my mind the key thing is to make sure that WC is a powerful card in draft but not let it be a combo generator.  If Blizzard wants to keep the bonus to Charge minions Attack value then WC has to have better stats - Charge isn't a common ability.  If WC's cost was dropped to 2, she would be a 2/3 for 2 which is a totally reasonable pick in draft.  Similarly if her stats were bumped to 3/4 and cost kept at 3, she would again be a okay draft pick even without a bonus ability.  However, Warriors are absolute garbage in draft right now so I lean towards making her absolutely superb in draft to try to give them another powerful common card to use.

I would make WC a 3/4 for 3 with the ability "Your Charge minions have +2 Attack."  She would be a fine body to slam down in any case, reasonably survivable, and if you have a few Charge minions she would be fantastic at making them butcher the enemy.  In constructed my version of WC could end up becoming a staple in some kind of aggressive warrior deck, would be a great draft pick, and wouldn't cause any combo problems.

Blizzard is making a reasonable choice in nerfing WC to try to stop the current OTK frustration and to prevent it in future.  However, when considering the rest of the game I think it is clear they should take this opportunity to change Warsong Commander into something that will shore up one of the glaring weaknesses of Hearthstone at the moment - Warrior performance in draft.  Should they go forward with their stated intention WC will end up in the heap of worthless cards that nobody ever plays, and that would be a waste.

Enter the Arena!

Having acquired all of the Hearthstone adventures I am now investing all my spare gold into drafting.  Doing so introduces the question of whether or not I should be using automated deck builders to make my choices.  I am signed up on Hearth Arena where I can input each of my card choices and it tells me which of the three cards to pick.  It isn't just going off of a single rank - it actually figures out synergies between cards, tries to build a good curve, and works on building a strategy.  It isn't perfect obviously but I am actually really impressed with just how good it is.

Thing is, it feels like cheating.  I am not picking my own cards, but rather I am asking a computer to pick them for me based on a pro's theories.  I do overrule the site's suggestions, but not that often.  Once I get to the games I am on my own but while drafting I am a proxy for a robot in some ways.

Certainly I look forward to abandoning my cybernetic drafting crutch.  It will feel good to toss it aside once I am better than the algorithm, but at this point I am not.  I am focusing on using it to teach myself though so I figure out my pick before asking it for its opinions and then adjust my sense of the game based on what comes up.  Sometimes I end up being surprised at how wrong I am - I thought Ironbeak Owls were pretty good, and the computer does not! - but I pick the correct card about 90% of the time according to Hearth Arena.

I would like to test it thoroughly, to check its results in actual play when cards come up, but that is a tough thing to do.  After making a tricky pick I change my drafting in response so I can't just imagine that my Azure Drake is a Knife Juggler when I draw it because the fact that they cost 5 and 2 mean that I draft later cards differently after making that choice.  Sometimes I really do get smacked in the face with why a card is good though.  Today I used Mind Vision based on the advice of the site even though it looked totally janky to me... but I saw a Mind Control Tech in my opponent's hand and seeing that changed my game completely and let me play around his card.

My learning is progressing nicely.  Since I started recording drafts my win rate is 65.91%, which seems pretty great for only having ten drafts under my belt in total.  I am certainly not at the point where I go infinite yet and I will have to improve substantially to achieve that but I am definitely on my way.

Mostly I figure I shouldn't feel guilty for using external resources to draft.  I am learning quickly, enjoying myself, and using a resource that everyone has access to.  Add onto that the fact that the algorithm is fall from infallible and it is hard to see it as The Dark Side Of Gaming.

Someday I am going to be someone who can say "Pah, people who use bots to draft for them are noobs."  I look forward to my opportunity to be an elitist asshole.  Someday!

I must say though that I am so happy with the format of Hearthstone drafts compared to all the Magic drafts I did back in the old days.  I don't have to haul myself across the city to draft, it doesn't take tons of setup, and I can commit to it in fifteen minute chunks if I am so inclined.  I remember needing to devote several hours and ten bucks to a Magic draft and the fact that I can have that same experience spread out over several days for no money (or, I suppose, I could pay $2 for it) is just ... magic.

Bloat and splat

Today I am wrestling with the conundrum of how much is too much when it comes to system bloat.  DnD is the best game example though this crosses genres very nicely.  In every version of DnD from ADnD to Pathfinder there was an incredible amount of additional material put out for the game that added in spells, classes, weapons, feats, and other options that drastically increased the power level with time.  For a new player these things eventually became overwhelming and the simple act of picking one feat at first level was impossible to do in an informed fashion.  On the other hand the hardcore players seem to love having endless permutations of options to peruse to make bizarre (and usually overpowered) characters.

System bloat in other formats is usually a lot more benign.  For example, in MMOs there is generally a constant stream of expansions and updates that add content and options.  While the enormity of the system can still be a big challenge for new players at least the new content often obsoletes the old and new players can ignore much of what has gone before.  Magic:  The Gathering is similar to an MMO in this sense because maintaining a comprehensive collection continues to get harder and harder but the great majority of cards will someday become totally irrelevant.  Still though a new player these days who wants to play Magic competitively will have a brutal time getting caught up with the veterans because there are so many expansions.

It is clear that adding content is mandatory to generate a large revenue stream but I don't think all of this churn is actually good for the games themselves.  Certainly in a subscription model MMO churn is necessary because otherwise they could not maintain the revenue stream necessary to keep the servers on.  In a tabletop game the rules are very different though.  The publisher obviously wants lots of money and that requires new expansions but the game itself can be perfectly fine without them.  Whether the expansion in question is Gods and Kings for CiV or Cities and Knights for Settlers of Catan the usual effect is to increase the complexity without really improving the game experience.

While having no expansions seems fine for the game itself it does appear that it makes for a small community.  If you look at the most popular games and franchises out there it becomes clear that people really want to be doing the same thing as yesterday but bigger and shinier and are happy to shell out for that.  Games that never expand or change do develop loyal followings but those followings are very small.  The lesson I take away from this is that you don't need constant expansions and the problems that those generate to make a good game but if you want to make a lot of money or if you want a huge following you simply must produce a constant stream of product to take people's money.  If you don't take their money somebody else will and they will go play the game they just bought.