We can feel it since the first days of Divided in the Alterac Valley : the meta Hearthstone is unhealthy. We have already been able to see the Fed up with OTK decks that seem to be feeling a lot of pro players, but the phenomenon seems to be growing every week. We saw it during Worlds and in the tournament organized by Thijs recently, the archetypes Combo are essential. But ultimately, wouldn’t these decks be a simple symptom of the real disease hatched by our dear TCG?
The pickaxe, a rare asset that has become commonplace
Players of the early days know that the pickax was a scarce commodity for a long time. In the early days ofHearthstone, before the slightest extension comes out, the Handlock Warlock was one of the strongest decks in the meta partly because only Gul’Dan had this ability to draw each turn. Today the pickaxe is omnipresent, to the point of no longer being an asset but a basic game mechanic. This is what Kibler denounces following the cast of the tournament Thijs :
Translation : “I’ve been saying for a while that one of the fundamental problems in the game right now is that there is too much pickax, which was exacerbated in several classes with the release of the Versatile spell caster. It’s just too easy to find all of your parts [de combo] every game. “
According to the site database playhearthstone, there are currently 120 cards that contain the word “draw” in their effect. Standard against only 40 in the set Classic. Here is the breakdown:
Demon hunter | 16 | Non-existent |
 Druid | 13 | 5 |
 Hunter | 5 | 3 |
 Mage | 13 | 1 |
 Paladin | 7 | 5 |
 Priest | 6 | 3 |
 Thief | 15 | 3 |
 Shaman | 6 | 2 |
 Warlock | 8 | 2 |
 Warrior | 12 (including Cutting course also counted in Thief) | 4 |
 Neutral | 20 | 12 |
So today there are three times more draw cards than in the early days of the game and the impact is clearly felt. As we say Kibler, there’s no problem getting all of his combo pieces together in the current meta. However, is it enough to draw your entire deck to win a game?
Mana reduction: the scourge of (0) cards
Following his comment, many people told him that he was wrong and that the pickaxe was not the problem, but that the mana reduction should be tackled instead. This is indeed a subject that has often come up on networks for several days, (0) Mana cards being at the heart of many debates. On August 14, we could already read this Tweet from Hearthstone Top Decks :
The solution they talk about in their article would be to simply make sure that cards whose original cost is not (0) cannot be reduced to less than (1) Mana, a solution that seems to be more or less a consensus in the community. It should be noted that the main cards that caused problems this year were Caster’s Stream in the Mage Quest, Effective Pieuvrobot in all Thief decks, including the Thief Garrote OTK and Celestial alignment who, thanks to Lady Anacondra in the Druid deck of the same name, allowed to have Nature spells at (0) Mana. All these reductions have the same advantage: they have no limits or restrictions.
Ultimately, the meta problem seems to be twofold: it’s very easy to draw all the cards you need, and those cards can quickly cost nothing. “Play your entire deck for free“, that phrase does sound familiar lately. Hopefully the new patch will improve the situation, but as long as the cards can cost (0), the growl is likely to continue in the tavern …
The Worlds are now behind us, and it’s time to give the meta standard a new face. Blizzard did not go dead hand at the end of the year, attacking all the kings of the meta. Conversely, it is the Mage who inherits a whole bunch of buffs.