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101

Hearthstone / Re: Hearthstone World Championships

« on: February 01, 2015, 02:12:52 pm »

Maybe it's worse for viewer education on seeing the best possible decks. But it's a good format in terms of not just letting one overpowered deck win. To win a match, you have to win a game with your third best deck. You get more variety, and give a better chance for players to show off their third best deck, which is more likely to vary between players.

102

Hearthstone / Re: Has anyone learned Hearthstone yet?

« on: February 01, 2015, 02:10:24 pm »

I thought PvP is player vs player and PvE player vs "everything else".

103

Hearthstone / Re: Constructed General Discussion

« on: January 30, 2015, 01:09:18 pm »

I think rogue aggro is still going to get terrible empty hand syndrome like crazy.  That deck died along with Novice Engineer's extra point of toughness, to me.  Well HME built something pretty good using Jeeves, which really makes a whole ton of sense as a place to turn, but then I suspect it might be a slightly weaker version of Jeeves Mage.

Shaman aggro excites me a lot more.

I think Jeeves Rogue is probably better than Jeeves Mage, but I don't think either is particularly strong. Having a slightly higher curve into Azure Drakes seems more reliable and not that much worse for getting on top of the tempo. The problem is that sometimes you don't draw Jeeves and you're screwed, so you at least need Loots or Shivs or Acolytes, but then you might as well just run bigger stuff and draw later. I don't know, may Coldlight Oracle works? The only aggro class that can happily not have cards to play is Hunter, because the hero power is the best dump of 2 mana. I think Aggro Hunter is still going to be the best pure aggro deck, but just weaker than it was previously.

I think the big winner in the Undertaker nerf is midrange Paladin. Now Minibot, Muster, Consecration, and Truesilver deal with any early game push quite nicely.

104

Hearthstone / Re: Constructed General Discussion

« on: January 28, 2015, 12:28:11 am »

One drop design is this interesting thing.  It's really awkward to design them right.  The thing is that in the agnostic game "mana efficiency game" the abstract concept of, what if i built a deck with 1s, 2s, 3s, etc, how would I maximize my chance of spending all my mana every turn with minimal use of hero power to do that, in that minigame, one drops blow.  They blow at that in Magic too, and they blow even harder in Hearthstone.  So if you want to entice people to actually play one drops, you either need to give them the busted warlock hero power, where the mana efficiency game is trivially easy using any deck and just activating hero power the appropriate amount of times, or you need to hand out one drops that give so much meaning to being 1 pt. ahead on your mana efficiency early on that they are insane.  Which means you basically need to make them as powerful as two drops, but then print 1 on their mana cost and pretend its ok.  It's a lot easier to get away with that if it's Mana Wyrm and class restricted.  Anything neutral is gonna become pervasive.

You really don't need turn 1 one mana creatures to make a good card game, even though Blizzard seems to think so.  Playable one drops are inherently swingy since they provide you some tempo in the first three turns, but do nothing if you draw them later on.  If they're not in your opening hand, they don't offer anything to the mana efficiency minigame.  1 drops like Earth shock and abusive sarge are different, of course, those are good.

I've watched zoo mirrors in modern in mtg, which revolves around 2 mana quality 1 drops duking it out.  I haven't ever found it particularly fascinating.

I think it'd be a good plan to keep all neutral 1 drop turn one plays at about leper gnome power level where only warlock is interested in them, and let the other eight classes design strategies around turns 2-10 instead of printing stuff like undertaker that forces people to play that one drop just because it's a 2 drop.

I don't think undertaker is currently that pervasive. It's in the best hunter deck, and the second best warlock deck (which plays tons of 1-drops anyway). Then there's decks that try to squeeze the deathrattle theme with the mech theme thanks to the good deathrattle mechs, none of which are particularly spectacular. And there's undertaker priest which I guess a couple of people play... Zombie chow is similarly popular because it's actually the value of a 2-drop.

Anyway, I like undertaker because I like things that threaten to grow or make other things grow, because that messes with the calculus of what is worth killing. Do I coin my dark bomb or play zombie chow? Depends on how likely he is to have 2 1 mana deathrattle minions. I do get that it's too strong for a 1 drop though. If your opponent gets 2 early, there's almost nothing you can do. That makes it swingy. I don't think it's useless late game though since it can still grow, so it's not really swingy in the way you describe. Zombie chow is swingy in that way.

All in all it seems your arguments suggest zombie chow is a problem card. But I guess it escapes because it's a 1 drop that's not good for aggro, so those swings don't end the game as quickly...

105

Hearthstone / Re: 2015: Best Hearthstone Moments

« on: January 27, 2015, 03:21:08 pm »

I got a Cho out of a Shredder, and my opponent's only card was an Unstable Portal, so we went back and forth getting random minions, which was a lot of fun (kind of like arena), until he got a Deathwing... Fortunately, I had a Mind Control, and my final Unstable Portal (now that Cho was dead) drew Windspeaker!

106

Hearthstone / Re: Constructed General Discussion

« on: January 27, 2015, 02:17:16 pm »

That sucks. I guess just too many people playing Undertaker Hunter... I don't know if Undertaker was the problem (I'm looking at you Mad Scientist), but maybe this makes ladder less Huntery?

107

Hearthstone / Re: Constructed General Discussion

« on: January 26, 2015, 10:39:32 pm »

If you're not playing a mech deck, boulderfist ogre is better than mech bear cat. Also, you should craft sylvanas.

108

Hearthstone / Re: Arena General Discussion

« on: January 26, 2015, 06:04:00 pm »

Today I learned that if you play Mind Control Tech as your 7th minion, instead of stealing a random minion, it destroys a random minion. It didn't actually affect the game's outcome, but that was weird to see.

That's intersting. With 6 minions, you can't play Cabal Shadow Priest. I guess the battlecry is a little different since it's targeted.

109

Hearthstone / Re: Critique a Deck:

« on: January 24, 2015, 05:49:03 pm »

^I believe that in Pokemon TCG, you need to have a Charmeleon in play to play Charizard (and Charmander to play Charmeleon), so you have to run more Charmeleons than Charizards (and more Charmanders than Charmeleons).

110

Hearthstone / Re: Critique a Deck:

« on: January 24, 2015, 03:25:52 pm »

Sprint is not so bad without Prep. If you draw a Prep with it, it's only 1 mana more than playing the Prep first. It's worse to not draw a Sprint in the first place.

But yeah I agree that if the class relies on double Sprint, it's not great.

111

Hearthstone / Re: Critique a Deck:

« on: January 24, 2015, 12:46:08 pm »

I don't know for sure what Dog Rogue is, but the most common Rogue I see around has Violet Teachers, a bunch of spells, 2 Sprints, and big legendaries (Boom, Rag, Alex). Oil+Flurry is another potential finisher.

In this deck in particular, I don't think the Kobolds are worth it. You probably want more heal to survive up to Malygos time. And you could probably stand to have another AoE spell.

112

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Individual player analysis tool

« on: January 23, 2015, 11:12:33 am »

Thanks! This is great!

One more request: Can you allow us to specify a range of dates, to potentially allow tracking of improvement?

113

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Individual player analysis tool

« on: January 22, 2015, 10:55:57 am »

Okay, here's the updated output with the games broken down by you bought, opponent bought, both bought, and no one bought.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13mQ1humtQbPLY9nbKscR65dV7hbGPdI3AQkNjMHZpeM/pubhtml?gid=0&single=true

Definitely a lot of small sample sizes here. Data this granular may make more sense to look at in aggregate rather than as an individual player.

Not everything has to have a huge sample size, since you're not trying to draw tons of conclusions from this data alone. As an individual player, I'm going to look at the cards that I perform the worst with given available and see if there is any perceptible trend between the various cases of gain/don't gain. If some of them have hardly any games, I can ignore them as not that important, or I can look at the individual games to see what's going on.

For example, in the case you posted, Chapel is 33.3%. It's 50% in a small sample size in games where only 1 person got it, so that's not a big deal, but in 39 games where both players got one, the win percentage is 30.8%. This might mean I need to work on building engines with good trashing. Let me see if this is reflected in Steward and Remake. No it's not. Those are over 62% in both gain... Is it luck or am I doing something specifically wrong with Chapel? These sample sizes are pretty reasonable... I should fetch some game logs and see some of the differences in broader strategy and gameplay. Maybe post something in the Help! forum.

Marauder is 32.3% and it's below 50% in every split. There's possibly something I really don't get about this card. The worst is when only I buy it at 0-4. That's not a huge sample size, so I can't make a concrete conclusion here, but I can just look at all 4 logs and see what my opponent did. How did this counter my strategy? Then maybe I can do the same with the 3 games where only they gain, etc...

114

Hearthstone / Re: Critique a Deck:

« on: January 21, 2015, 01:18:16 pm »

I also would consider cutting Dr. Boom. It's your only BGH target in a meta where every deck is running BGH. I think another legendary would be better in its place (Loatheb? Cenarius? Maybe even take it out for Haunted Creeper depending on what your bad matchups are. I guess Cenarius doesn't fit with this deck's philosophy, I feel that Loatheb would be a good fit stalling for a turn before combo though.) I think decks either want multiple BGH targets so they can't hit everything, or zero BGH targets so that your opponent can't get great value. Right now, I would imagine it's getting hit by BGH a ton.

But Dr. Boom is so good for Force+Roar decks, since it's 3 minions in one. It doesn't actually die that bad to BGH since most of the value is in the Boom Bots.

115

Hearthstone / Re: Critique a Deck:

« on: January 21, 2015, 01:12:22 pm »

I think Sky Golem is better than Cairne. For a deathrattle minion more attack is better than more health. The normal reaction to Cairne is just to ignore it and eat 4 damage until you can remove the whole thing more efficiently. You can't really do that with Sky Golem because 6 damage is a lot. So you either get more damage or you get the deathrattle sooner.

116

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Individual player analysis tool

« on: January 21, 2015, 11:34:31 am »

I think the interesting stats are win rate given that a card is available and how that breaks down between the 4 possibilities of you both gain, you gain and your opponent doesn't, etc... (how often each case occurs and conditional win percentage)

117

Hearthstone / Re: 2015: Best Hearthstone Moments

« on: January 20, 2015, 10:30:25 pm »

My opponent sees a Druid who foolishly used his second Keeper of the Grove and delightedly drops Antonidas. Little does he know, I'm holding Faceless, 2x Innervate, and Roar. Thanks for the Fireballs!

118

Hearthstone / Re: The GvG arena meta shift

« on: January 20, 2015, 06:13:10 pm »

^It depends on what you mean by "hit turn 2". If you don't have a 2 drop, the increased quality in 3 drops helps you, overall.
If you are second, you coin a 3 drop out. And if you're first, you answer their 2 drop with a 3 drop. So your 3 drop is coming down first, which makes improvements to 3 drops benefit you more than your opponent. Yes you're still behind, but you have a better chance of catching up than you did when your 3 drop was a Raging Worgen.

119

Hearthstone / Re: Critique a Deck:

« on: January 20, 2015, 11:57:24 am »

Token is literally a 1/1 minion.  You generally generate them from Violet Teacher (and now Dark Wispers) and buff them with Power of the Wild.  You run double Savage Roar because you can use it with tokens as well as a single FON.

"Token" is literally a token in other TCGs, generally referring to things that aren't actually cards in your deck, like the damaged golem. The pilot of Shredders are a bit ambiguous since those things exist as cards, but you didn't put them in your deck.

So yeah, it's a questionable terminology thing. I would hesistate to call that deck a "token Druid", because it looks like it plays much differently from the decks people normall think of when they hear "token Druid". It looks pretty much just like a normal Midrange Force/Roar Druid.

120

Hearthstone / Re: Arena General Discussion

« on: January 20, 2015, 11:52:51 am »

^Thanks for referencing the ADWTCA article, I hadn't seen it before. Seems like a good read.

The big thing about his 5 health minion example (where 4/5 > 4/2+3/2) is that you're willing to give up immediate card advantage by trading a minion rather than reducing a big one because you know the big one will get card advantage later while the 2 small minions have a good chance to just give the card advantage right back. In that sense the perceived immediate card advantage is not really worth more than the potential card advantage of the 4/5.

Vs Druid, it's a bit more copmlicated. If you give the minions all +1 health in the previous example (i.e. 4/6 vs 4/3+3/3) in a game against Druid, I'd rather have the 4/3+3/3, since that is still real card advantage (and it has a better chance of dealing with something like an Ironbark). 4/6 vs 4/3+3/2 is a little tougher, since the latter dies to Swpie + hero power, but you still have to think about how threatening that is compared to Ironbark.

121

Hearthstone / Re: Critique a Deck:

« on: January 18, 2015, 08:31:08 pm »

If you're looking for things to cut, I cut an earthshock from my Shaman deck. With BGH, you can afford to just use Hex on something smaller if needed. And then if you only have 1 Earthshock, you don't really need Thalnos that much.

Also Loatheb I don't think is as useful as in a Bloodlust deck. His main use is to stall out one turn for your board to get a little bigger, but that's less critical if you're trying to win with the big legendaries rather than with the totems.

Re: Argus vs Belcher, you should try it for yourself. Argus helps get more value from your totems as it turns them into 1/3s to kill 2/1s.

And Neptulon and Dr. Boom are both better than Rag.

122

Hearthstone / Re: The GvG arena meta shift

« on: January 18, 2015, 08:15:46 pm »

I'm curious, what tier would you all place Madder Bomber and Bomb Lobber? To me, they belong somewhere around Warlord or perhaps even higher.

Rares are of course different from commons because they compete against different things, but if those cards existed as commons, Bomb Lobber would be one of the best 5 drops. It's very easy to get 2-for-1 out of it. It's almost always going 2-for-1. While it's technically situational, the situation is very common. Madder Bomber is a bit more situational. You don't want to play it when you have stuff it might kill. And even if you don't have anything, you can't expect it to kill anything with more than 2 remaining health. It would be with the third tier, as a more situational but bigger Commando.

Madder Bomber isn't going to do much to help you survive the sea of flame strikes that is the 7+ win territory

Not super relevant, since you're probably not playing Madder Bomber when you have other stuff on board.

123

Hearthstone / Re: The GvG arena meta shift

« on: January 16, 2015, 03:50:47 pm »

Yeah the tiers are only to first order, but I actually do take Infiltrator over Bomber. Infiltrator is like Backstab. You use 1 mana you would otherwise waste, and then some time in the next couple turns, you essentially get to Backstab something. That's pretty solid. Mad Bomber has upside, but it's not quite as consistently powerful, imo.

124

Hearthstone / The GvG arena meta shift

« on: January 16, 2015, 12:48:43 pm »

This started out as a post in Arena Genereal, but then I decided it was long enough that it warranted its own thread. I then, of course, made it longer, but I hope it's worth reading.

Arena Pre-GvG

Before GvG, the game was something like this:
1. Pick Rogue, Mage, Druid, or Paladin -- Warrior if you must
2. Draft good class cards and lots of Raptors.
3. Don't make dumb plays.
4. Profit.

It really was that simple. Just doing that probably got you 80% of the way to optimal play.

Basically, the idea is that if you win the first 4 turns, most of the time you're going to win the game. Of course, there can be some major swings late in the game with the strong class cards, but assuming you have similar deck quality, having the upper hand after turn 4 went a long way toward securing the win. If you had the tempo advantage when you threw out your first good big guy (like Merc or Spectral), your opponent was going to have a hell of a time dealing with it, much less overcoming the inital tempo disadvantage.

So how do you win the first 4 turns? Mostly by having enough Raptors. If on any of the first 3 turns you could play a 2-drop while your opponent couldn't, you'd be ahead. And if they didn't have a game-swinging 3-4 drop (Senjin, Yeti, Crusader, Harvest Golem, Twilight Drake, or class stuff like Truesilver, Death's Bite, Water Ele, Multi-shot, Frothing, Unbound...), you really had your back to the wall. And there were only 4 neutral commons that fit this bill-- Sen'jin, Yeti, Crusader, Harvest Golem. Raptors could trade up with 3-health 3-drops, and with a ping hero power could trade evenly with 4 health 4-drops.

So you wanted to have enough 2-drops that you didn't get run over early, and you really couldn't have too many Raptors since they traded pretty decently with almost anything. What did this add up to? Drafting Raptors was a pretty solid thing to be doing most of the time.

Here's a first-order approximate list of draft priorities:

1. Game-swinging 3-4 drops (Sen'jin, Yeti, Crusader, Harvest Golem, and Dwarf (which lets you trade Raptors up for Sen'jin/Yeti))

2. Top tier big guys (Boulderfist, Merc, Spectral, Tiger, Champ) to close out the game

3. Good situational/utility cards (Ooze, Cult Master, Cleric, Inventor, Spellbreaker, Farseer)

4. Good 1-drops (Chow, Infiltrator)

5. Good/decent 2-drops (Amani, Bomber, Panda, Loot, Dire Wolf, Faerie Dragon, Raptor, Bluegill, Unstable Ghoul, Creeper, Bloodsail Raider, Croc) and second-tier 5 drops (Silver Hand, Warlord), Raging Worgen

6. Third tier 4+ drops (Smith, Fen Creeper, Commando, Big Panda, Stormwind Knight, Frost Ele, War Golem) and Abusive Sergeant

7. Third tier 3-drops (Wolfrider, Acolyte, Flesheating Ghoul, Grizzly, Razorfen, Panther)

8. Weak stuff, depends on your deck.

This is only a rough outline, and there were some shifts depending on your class and what rares you end up with, but for a first-order approximation, this is pretty close to what you wanted to be doing.

Notice there are only 18 cards that were significantly better than Raptor. (Yeah Bomber is strictly better, but often just did the same thing.) That's 18 neutral commons out of 87, just over 20%!

So what changed with GvG?

1. There's way more stuff that can 2-for-1 Raptors.
2. There's way more playable 2-drops.

Shredder, Mech Yeti, Spider, and Brute all join the top tier, nearly doubling its size. Plus there are a couple rare 2/4 3-drops (Sapper, Illuminator).

The new playable 2-drops are Annoy-o-tron, Sheep, Gilbin, Mechwarper, Micro Machine, Puddlestomper, Ship's Cannon, Stonesplitter, and one per class except Warrior (if you count Glaivezooka, which isn't really a minion). That's about a 67% increase.

But the total common card pool only grew by about 23% from 103=87+16(class) to 127=109+18(class).

Between these two factors, the importance of drafting Raptors has gone way down since:
1. It's easier to win the tempo on turn 3-4 rather even if you don't on turn 2.
2. There's so many 2-drops that if you find yourself short on them, it's not hard to catch up in the last few draft picks. It's of greater relative importance to draft the better high-end cards, since there was only ONE good 5+ drop added (Force Tank).

So draft-wise, it seems you want to bump up all the decent 5+ drops. And play-wise, the game is less likely to be decided by someone failing to draw their 2-drop. With the games going longer, classes with better high-end cards (Druid, Priest) or later-game hero powers (Warlock, Priest, Shaman, Paladin) get bumps relative to the better early-game hero powers (Rogue, Mage). Also, the increase in sticky minions makes buff cards better, and thus the classes with more buffs (Paladin, Shaman, Priest).

I haven't really figured out how all the classes stack up against each other yet, or what the right draft priorities are beyond the very top, but late game seems much more important than before, and Raptor seems much more like a vanilla card than an arena dominator like it was before.

For reference, my new priorities are something like this:

1. Game swinging 3-4 drops (Shredder, Mech Yeti, Yeti, Crusader, Spider, Brute, Dwarf, Sen'jin)

2. Top tier big guys (Boulderfist, Merc, Spectral, Tiger, Champ)

3. Harvest Golem (2 attack power makes it much weaker than the new top 3-drops) and stronger situational/utility stuff (Ooze, Cult Master, Cleric, Spellbreaker -- no Inventor for reasons similar to Harvest Golem, and no Farseer since there's more stuff that straight-up kills it for 3).

4. Second-tier 5-drops (Silver Hand, Warlord)

5. 1-drops (Chow, Infiltrator)

6. 2-drops with upside (Amani, Bomber, Panda, Dire Wolf, Micro Machine, Loot), third-tier 5+ drops (Smith, Fen, Commando, Frost Ele, Tank), and Inventor and Farseer.


Thoughts?

125

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: The Opposite of Mint

« on: January 15, 2015, 05:43:09 pm »

To really be the opposite of Mint, it should trash actions when you buy it.