I complain a lot about when card text doesn't match behavior, because I really hate it. Leeroy + Knife Juggler, Warsong + Bloodsail Raider, and Divine Favor+Fatigue don't do what their text says they should do. Neither does Wild Growth or Mindgames technically in that they have unwritten rules for corner cases, which I feel should at least be noted somewhere in game.
Their lazy, sloppy determinations that whatever the code they wrote is doing is what the card "really" says might make the new expansion a little less fun due to the new Joust mechanic. The Giants (and their cousins, the mourners like Volcanic Drake) all have variable cost abilities that don't specify when they function, and therefore should function at all times. They all say "This costs X less for whyever". But it was easier to code "While this is in your hand, this costs X less for whyever". It's a really great example of why a good starting point is to implement the cards to do what they say. If instead of narcisstically insisting that the card is somehow correct as is the development team faced up to a need to correct the text to match the code, they would raise a question of "Why do we need the "while this is in your hand" restriction? Is the card better designed with that restriction?", and design and R&D would actually have to think about it, and ArenaWarriorsMatter kinda demonstrates that they prefer to avoid striving for good design or, moreover, thinking, altogether.
OTOH, if the code matched the original text in the first place, these new Joust cards would have a more fun feel to them. As it stands, the best Jouster is a Giant, one that you usually cast for 0 mana. The second best Jouster is also a Giant, one that you usually cast for about 4 mana.
ALL the runners up after that group require you to have lots of mana crystals when you slam them on the table, which is supposed to add the coherency and insular feel to the mechanic. You play some ramp, you play some jousters, you play some fatties. That pattern creates a new subtype of decks that feel different to play, and fun to play because their new. They are fun to play against because they have new characteristics that can be addressed for specific weaknesses: if you don't like losing to Joust decks, you run Faerie Dragon to punish the lack of cheap minions and go aggro, voila. That being just one example.
It seems likely that this vision will just get betrayed in favor of exploitation of the incorrect implementation of the Giants, and Jousting will just become a Handlock accessory if we actually get any real viable Jousters. Handlock cuts a couple cheap dudes from their builds, throws the jousters in, calls it a day. Every other new deck designer then decides: should I make this a joust deck? Hm, I need to at least tie the other decks that contain joust, therefore this would need to be a Giants deck. Can I make this a Giants deck?
Giants is already an insular, cohesive deck, so adding a little smidge of value to it is not as exciting as adding a different build-around-me mechanic would have been. There's no Faerie Dragon anymore, Giants are a more dominating and dramatic feature than joust, so the answers are just whatever the answers to a Giants deck were in the first place, things like Equality, BGH, Shadow Word Death, and tauntskipping damage that counters Molten Giant, generally. This all arises because drawback written on the text of Joust is just overwritten by "lol ignore that drawback" on the software of Giants.
Just a rant. It seems kinda like a lose lose. Maybe joust is never competitively costed enough to see play in any way, so that's a lose. It becomes a Handlock accessory or creates new class Giant decks that feel like Handlock and add no archetype variety (while buffing an existing archetype, making it more likely that a finite number of archetypes are major players). Or they actually fix the bug, but leave Divine Favor, Knife Juggler, and Bloodsail Raider with incorrect behavior so I get extra relative deprivation whenever I feel upset about those bugs (mostly Bloodsail Raider, if you're wondering, since it is more fair about how it circumvents the restriction than other cards that are permitted to circumvent).
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Topic: Card text versus card behavior mismatches in Hearthstone, and Joust Giants (Read 2060 times)