What Happened to you Hearthstone? Let’s Break it Down…
The Problem
You tried going outside, you really did. You so often heard that it’s great out there. That the fresh air rejuvenates and will gently blow away the winter blues. In truth, you got blasted by that chilly winter wind and it forced you home for shelter. For me, Hearthstone has been the perfect game to retreat from the harsh winter weather. There was something so cozy about the innkeeper’s joyful greetings when you booted it up that felt so welcoming. But something changed.
With the release of the last expansion “Whispers of the Old Gods,” the inn got a bit chillier. I’m not talking about lore or anything, although the innkeeper did get a little paranoid for a bit there. No, I’m talking about the rise of Shaman. One of the best decks Hearthstone had ever seen started running the show and the game suffered for it. Shamans as far as the eye could see.
Midrange Shaman is a deck that has a powerful answer for almost any situation. It has disgusting board presence, solid target removal, and board clear, and if everything goes to plan it’ll burst you down in the later turns. The deck was so consistently good that as soon as a match started against Shaman you basically knew the odds were something like 6:1 against you. The urge to concede and hope that your next match was against a different class became strong.
One can only swim upstream for so long before one’s arms stop working. And that’s exactly what happened with a lot of the community. The Shaman fatigue set in and it made crystal clear a problem that Hearthstone has had since the beginning: The best decks — the ones that are most effective — are often the least fun ones to play against. I’m looking at you too Zoolock, Freeze/Tempo Mage, and Miracle Rogue.
No deck is unbeatable of course but a lot of these decks are so strong and so optimized that the match can hinge on you drawing the perfect starting hand, and then drawing crap. And again, it’s inherently unfun to feel that you’ve lost a game before it has even started. Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that these strong decks are great fun to play with but a game can’t reasonably hope to sustain itself if only one party is having fun at any given time.
So with a new expansion comes the hope of a new meta, and with a new meta comes the hope of some fun new matchups…
Does the problem continue? Click on thru to page two to find out…