I agreed with the statement before I even saw the thumbnail. Who knew that making a cost a benefit was going to break the game in ways not originally intended.
Wow warlock turning what was originally a downside into an upside and broke the game? I wonder where I heard that before *cough cough* demon seed *cough cough*
The real reason it's poorly designed is not because of any cards. it's because Blizzard decided to not let you target hands directly (despite the fact that it's entirely possible, there are bugs that make effects target cards in hand and they resolve without issue). This makes discarding never worth it unless you can safely discard most of your hand, and at that point you have to balance it around cards not having any cost. Discard is much better in other card games simply because they let you choose cards to discard, letting you use less useful cards in your hand as resources.
Absolutely hit the nail on the head. It needs high payoffs because discard is random but then you have too many high payoffs and it just majorly outpaces everything else because they discard the cards and aren’t spending mana on them.
I think discolock has reached a critical point where nearly the whole deck can be discarded safely, even having upsides Only real exceptions are cards like Tiny Knight of Evil, and even then discard cards are still good enough to pull victory against some decks The amount of draw warlock has, both innately (soul tap) and through other cards (hand of gul’dan, chamber) means there’s basically no downside
Discard Warlock's terrible design comes down to the fact that you cannot choose which card you discard at all. All of the flavor and strategy that sacrificing a card in favor of a power boost is made irrelevant, as you will almost certainly have one of your important cards be discarded and cost you the game unless the discard card is a finisher. Even in Classic this happened with Doomguard discarding Soulfire or Power Overwhelming. So Blizzard decided to print all these terribly designed cards which made the downside of discard irrelevant or even an upside if you happened to RNG into the discard payoff, and now we have cards which minimize the RNG nature of discarding by having mass discard combined with mass draw like The Soularium or Tome Tampering/Karazhan Imp, so you can just spew tons of tempo and damage onto the board. Such an unfortunate failure of design, because discarding should've been so damn cool on paper.
Throwing the "When you play or discard this" piece of text into this as well, a crutch design because of the lack of choice that just allows a warlock to use the cards even outside of what would be considered the actual use case
Beta Gwent had peak discarding mechanic available for one class only. You could choose ANY card to discard from your deck or hand (depending on card's text, some would discard from deck only and others from hand). They had an equivalent of Silverware Golem in a 4 power dude that would come into play upon discarding him wherever he was. Because in that game card graveyard is mechanic visible and available for anybody, you could also discard cards that come back to play when they die (unlike in Hearthstone, in Gwent cards go to graveyard after discarding and don't vanish). Because of that you could also choose cards that normally won't synergize with discard, but you would benefit from resurrecting them. So if your big guy is stuck in your deck and you know you're gonna need him you just pressed the hero and ditched him out of there and later on played any res card which that class had plenty of. Around Rastakhan's Rumble Blizzard started taking notes (Gwent at the time was one of their bigger competitors and Discard was top tournament deck) with printing cards like 3 mana 2/6 taunt: discard your lowest cost card. This didn't take off, as it's still barely controllable and support wasn't really there aside from Jeklik and Xavas. They printed several cards like this later on and it was always breaking the wild for a whole expansion because of overpowered discard payoffs. If only Blizzard remade every discarding card to be like Chambers of Viscidus (but draw cards equal to number of cards discarded) and make much lower power level payoffs (and nerf existing ones obviously), this mechanic would be so much more interesting and balanced. Gwent proved that.
@@gromadon1144 Hearthstone has generally always been "accessibility" (mobile compatibility) first. I can guarantee the reason discard was always random was because they thought it was too confusing to have to click on a card in your hand to discard. For the same reason, Hearthstone will never have any cards that let you look at your deck.
@@dracoblizzard7944 hearthstone was desinged with randomnes and simplicity in mind its why constancy is so op So giving a class thats supposed to be high risk consitancy would way too op especially in classic hearthstone
Hey just wanted to say I like trying the new thumbnails but I didn't recognize this as a flare or even a hearthstone video cause I didn't recognize malchazar imp (and the red outline too)
Playing LoR makes me wonder why discard is random in Hearthstone. It wouldn't have been that hard to implement mechanically, right? Choosing the cards you wanna discard is so nice and interesting that I don't get why it's random
I assume mechanical implementation is the reason since you cant target cards in hand. After 10 years handbuff effects are still random or target every minion in hand. All cards that I can think of right now that "target" stuff in hand just allow you to pick one out of 3 (aka discover).
@@peschionator7873a lot of HS bugs actually allow things to target cards in hand, and most of these effects resolve without issue. it's not a matter of possibility, it's entirely a design philosophy of not letting you directly target the hand.
@@darkomihajlovski3135 The whole reason why discard can be oppressive is because inconsistency was kept in mind when designing the cards. Soul barrage wouldnt exist if there was no randomness involved.
@@peschionator7873 I mean, if it was a 3 mana deal 1 damage to 3 different enemies it could. Discard payoffs are usually just compensation from losing a card, making them akin to 0-1 mana play. Payoffs right now are too big and need to be nerfed, like a 1|3, 1|2 taunt, A 2|1 instead of 2, drawing 1 instead of 2/3 or drawing once per turn instead of each discard. In return, no longer make it random.
In card games if there is "discard this card payoff" the best design is if the discarding method is targeted and the payoff is very small The moment the discarding method is random and the payoff can be big then it becomes too swingy and badly design Baseline is you can deal 4 damage for 1 mana and you also need to get rid of one of your cards, sure that sounds fine But the roof is you can deal 4 damage for 1 mana and you get to summon a 3 cost card for free randomnly, obviously that is unfair Marvel Snap also suffers from this where there is a 4 cost card with the stats of a 4 cost card that gets summoned when discarded I think the best the game that has done the discard payoff with targeted discards is Legends of Runeterra where at most the payoff is 0-1 cost so stuff like summoning a 1/1
Or what's basically a mirror image token, the payoff is usually a compensation instead of an actual play. The deck btw has been slightly problematic, BUT that has always been easy to balance around.
The biggest problem comes from the different “balancing” factors used, originally you would get a stronger effect/stats at lower mana I’m exchange for losing resources, then eventually they made cards that suck to hard cast but were literally free when discarded, turns out free cards are op
Discard Warlock is just awkward *at its foundation* because Discarding resources from the hand is risky at best, wasteful at worst. I do like that they've significantly upped its power level by releasing cards that want to be discarded and habe powerfull effects too boot, but it came at the cost of making it the definition of a coin flip. Its either busted or not worth the effort cause you still run the risk of discarding something you didn't want to.
In my opinion the worst deck archetype in the game doesn’t have an official name. The best way to describe it is solitaire decks. Questline decks, nature, shaman, miracle decks, etc. Decks whose win condition centres around damage from hand, a stockpile of synergistic cards that all do the same thing so there are few key must draw cards, minimal set up, and as little interaction with the board and opponent as possible.
Nah it would be just as hard to balance since that would be a huge consistancy boost over the other classes, so cards would have to be barely better then normal ones
And all because they refuse for you to select cards in your hand, which they showed they can both mechanically, code-wise and semi-randomly via "discover". And it seriously needs fixing because the deck is always going to become broken on wild and being useless in standard.
The Ban and subsequent nerf to tome tampering was the most disappointing balance changes in the game for me personally. I loved tome tampering when I came out, the first deck I ever got legend with in wild was Tome Tampering Mecha’thun Warlock. It’s still probably one of my favorite decks of all time, the play pattern just felt so satisfying to me, and it’s a shame the deck is forever shit now cus the devs refused to just ban / nerf Soul Barrage when it wasn’t even remotely good in standard.
Oh how I wish to have been in the room to see when and how the devs flipped from not caring much to do much with pain warlock/discard to them wanting to see them succeed cause my god was that a long waiting game.
I finally tried to play discolock recently The deck sucks now but it definitely deserved those nerfs It's 1 strong discarder away from being broken again for sure
It's just mana cheat tbh. Most of the "broken" stuff of discard is just free. Tbh when we get 30 cards that want to be discarded it will probably be extremely annoying
Honestly, I'd love to see a slower more value oriented version of discard instead of degenerate aggro, but the idea of discarding your cards in a value deck sucks so idk
Plagues ... Helya is good on 4, most of the time, vs control. The rest of the kit has always been C tier at most. Too slow and low impact vs aggro, too slow vs combo and control with actual strong win cons. You can have the most amazing plague game, shuffle 15 in your opponent deck, and they only draw 3 or 4 before killing you. Trying to play pure plagues as a win con is pure disappointment 90% of the time. Also, if you shuffle 15 plagues in your opponent deck, but Helya one of the last cards in your deck, the whole mechanic sucks. FFS, if you play vs plagues, and your opponent hasn't played Helya yet, you actually want to draw fast to burn the plagues ... that's how irrelevant they are.
Bro actually went out of his way to make a PowerPoint on just discard warlock
Aw you must be new here ❤😂
@ I’ve been here for a WHILE. I knew he HATED discard warlock but I thought he was joking when he said he’d actually do it
“Went out of his way” to create the exact content he always creates. Was joking about doing a video on his RUclips channel? You hear yourself right?
@ did you ignore the word “just”? Because I know he creates content but usually not THIS specific
I agreed with the statement before I even saw the thumbnail. Who knew that making a cost a benefit was going to break the game in ways not originally intended.
Wow warlock turning what was originally a downside into an upside and broke the game? I wonder where I heard that before *cough cough* demon seed *cough cough*
The real reason it's poorly designed is not because of any cards. it's because Blizzard decided to not let you target hands directly (despite the fact that it's entirely possible, there are bugs that make effects target cards in hand and they resolve without issue). This makes discarding never worth it unless you can safely discard most of your hand, and at that point you have to balance it around cards not having any cost. Discard is much better in other card games simply because they let you choose cards to discard, letting you use less useful cards in your hand as resources.
Absolutely hit the nail on the head. It needs high payoffs because discard is random but then you have too many high payoffs and it just majorly outpaces everything else because they discard the cards and aren’t spending mana on them.
I think discolock has reached a critical point where nearly the whole deck can be discarded safely, even having upsides
Only real exceptions are cards like Tiny Knight of Evil, and even then discard cards are still good enough to pull victory against some decks
The amount of draw warlock has, both innately (soul tap) and through other cards (hand of gul’dan, chamber) means there’s basically no downside
Discard Warlock's terrible design comes down to the fact that you cannot choose which card you discard at all. All of the flavor and strategy that sacrificing a card in favor of a power boost is made irrelevant, as you will almost certainly have one of your important cards be discarded and cost you the game unless the discard card is a finisher. Even in Classic this happened with Doomguard discarding Soulfire or Power Overwhelming.
So Blizzard decided to print all these terribly designed cards which made the downside of discard irrelevant or even an upside if you happened to RNG into the discard payoff, and now we have cards which minimize the RNG nature of discarding by having mass discard combined with mass draw like The Soularium or Tome Tampering/Karazhan Imp, so you can just spew tons of tempo and damage onto the board.
Such an unfortunate failure of design, because discarding should've been so damn cool on paper.
Throwing the "When you play or discard this" piece of text into this as well, a crutch design because of the lack of choice that just allows a warlock to use the cards even outside of what would be considered the actual use case
@Furionic696 that is what I was primarily referring to in the second paragraph
Beta Gwent had peak discarding mechanic available for one class only. You could choose ANY card to discard from your deck or hand (depending on card's text, some would discard from deck only and others from hand). They had an equivalent of Silverware Golem in a 4 power dude that would come into play upon discarding him wherever he was. Because in that game card graveyard is mechanic visible and available for anybody, you could also discard cards that come back to play when they die (unlike in Hearthstone, in Gwent cards go to graveyard after discarding and don't vanish). Because of that you could also choose cards that normally won't synergize with discard, but you would benefit from resurrecting them. So if your big guy is stuck in your deck and you know you're gonna need him you just pressed the hero and ditched him out of there and later on played any res card which that class had plenty of.
Around Rastakhan's Rumble Blizzard started taking notes (Gwent at the time was one of their bigger competitors and Discard was top tournament deck) with printing cards like 3 mana 2/6 taunt: discard your lowest cost card. This didn't take off, as it's still barely controllable and support wasn't really there aside from Jeklik and Xavas. They printed several cards like this later on and it was always breaking the wild for a whole expansion because of overpowered discard payoffs.
If only Blizzard remade every discarding card to be like Chambers of Viscidus (but draw cards equal to number of cards discarded) and make much lower power level payoffs (and nerf existing ones obviously), this mechanic would be so much more interesting and balanced. Gwent proved that.
@@gromadon1144 Hearthstone has generally always been "accessibility" (mobile compatibility) first. I can guarantee the reason discard was always random was because they thought it was too confusing to have to click on a card in your hand to discard. For the same reason, Hearthstone will never have any cards that let you look at your deck.
@@dracoblizzard7944 hearthstone was desinged with randomnes and simplicity in mind its why constancy is so op
So giving a class thats supposed to be high risk consitancy would way too op especially in classic hearthstone
Hey just wanted to say I like trying the new thumbnails but I didn't recognize this as a flare or even a hearthstone video cause I didn't recognize malchazar imp (and the red outline too)
Playing LoR makes me wonder why discard is random in Hearthstone. It wouldn't have been that hard to implement mechanically, right? Choosing the cards you wanna discard is so nice and interesting that I don't get why it's random
I assume mechanical implementation is the reason since you cant target cards in hand. After 10 years handbuff effects are still random or target every minion in hand. All cards that I can think of right now that "target" stuff in hand just allow you to pick one out of 3 (aka discover).
@@peschionator7873a lot of HS bugs actually allow things to target cards in hand, and most of these effects resolve without issue. it's not a matter of possibility, it's entirely a design philosophy of not letting you directly target the hand.
The game was designed to be random so giving warlock the high risk class consistency would have be way too opresive as seen here
@@darkomihajlovski3135 The whole reason why discard can be oppressive is because inconsistency was kept in mind when designing the cards. Soul barrage wouldnt exist if there was no randomness involved.
@@peschionator7873 I mean, if it was a 3 mana deal 1 damage to 3 different enemies it could. Discard payoffs are usually just compensation from losing a card, making them akin to 0-1 mana play.
Payoffs right now are too big and need to be nerfed, like a 1|3, 1|2 taunt, A 2|1 instead of 2, drawing 1 instead of 2/3 or drawing once per turn instead of each discard. In return, no longer make it random.
In card games if there is "discard this card payoff" the best design is if the discarding method is targeted and the payoff is very small
The moment the discarding method is random and the payoff can be big then it becomes too swingy and badly design
Baseline is you can deal 4 damage for 1 mana and you also need to get rid of one of your cards, sure that sounds fine
But the roof is you can deal 4 damage for 1 mana and you get to summon a 3 cost card for free randomnly, obviously that is unfair
Marvel Snap also suffers from this where there is a 4 cost card with the stats of a 4 cost card that gets summoned when discarded
I think the best the game that has done the discard payoff with targeted discards is Legends of Runeterra where at most the payoff is 0-1 cost so stuff like summoning a 1/1
But hearthstone is disinged to be random and swingy
Or what's basically a mirror image token, the payoff is usually a compensation instead of an actual play. The deck btw has been slightly problematic, BUT that has always been easy to balance around.
PS: I though the roof was a 1 mana pyroblast that draws 1 card. That's how you know the deck is awfully designed.
The biggest problem comes from the different “balancing” factors used, originally you would get a stronger effect/stats at lower mana I’m exchange for losing resources, then eventually they made cards that suck to hard cast but were literally free when discarded, turns out free cards are op
Discard Warlock is just awkward *at its foundation* because Discarding resources from the hand is risky at best, wasteful at worst.
I do like that they've significantly upped its power level by releasing cards that want to be discarded and habe powerfull effects too boot, but it came at the cost of making it the definition of a coin flip. Its either busted or not worth the effort cause you still run the risk of discarding something you didn't want to.
either extremely strong or extremely weak, no in between
In my opinion the worst deck archetype in the game doesn’t have an official name. The best way to describe it is solitaire decks. Questline decks, nature, shaman, miracle decks, etc. Decks whose win condition centres around damage from hand, a stockpile of synergistic cards that all do the same thing so there are few key must draw cards, minimal set up, and as little interaction with the board and opponent as possible.
Honestly, Discard Warlock would be so much better and easier to balance if Discarding was no longer random.
Nah it would be just as hard to balance since that would be a huge consistancy boost over the other classes, so cards would have to be barely better then normal ones
I just wanna play any hunter deck at this point
And all because they refuse for you to select cards in your hand, which they showed they can both mechanically, code-wise and semi-randomly via "discover". And it seriously needs fixing because the deck is always going to become broken on wild and being useless in standard.
Production value going up 📈
i wonder if theres some sort of "copies everywhere" archetype jeklik can abuse since she makes so many copies of herself
Do a video on how you would balance these cards and decks.
Bro casually had the idea and followed up one day later bc he was so mad lmao
my favorite deck. been playing it for years.
The Ban and subsequent nerf to tome tampering was the most disappointing balance changes in the game for me personally.
I loved tome tampering when I came out, the first deck I ever got legend with in wild was Tome Tampering Mecha’thun Warlock. It’s still probably one of my favorite decks of all time, the play pattern just felt so satisfying to me, and it’s a shame the deck is forever shit now cus the devs refused to just ban / nerf Soul Barrage when it wasn’t even remotely good in standard.
Oh how I wish to have been in the room to see when and how the devs flipped from not caring much to do much with pain warlock/discard to them wanting to see them succeed cause my god was that a long waiting game.
Love the pokemon theme
Nah he actually made it 💀
are you eric parker?
I finally tried to play discolock recently
The deck sucks now but it definitely deserved those nerfs
It's 1 strong discarder away from being broken again for sure
nice thumbnail
It's just mana cheat tbh. Most of the "broken" stuff of discard is just free. Tbh when we get 30 cards that want to be discarded it will probably be extremely annoying
Honestly, I'd love to see a slower more value oriented version of discard instead of degenerate aggro, but the idea of discarding your cards in a value deck sucks so idk
Damn the music was distracting most of times. Great work otherwise
Discolock truly was the shittest archetype, until it wasn't
I will not stand for Jeklik slander
at least discard warlocks play the game. mill druid is just sitting there while both players watch their cards get burned
Plagues ... Helya is good on 4, most of the time, vs control. The rest of the kit has always been C tier at most. Too slow and low impact vs aggro, too slow vs combo and control with actual strong win cons. You can have the most amazing plague game, shuffle 15 in your opponent deck, and they only draw 3 or 4 before killing you. Trying to play pure plagues as a win con is pure disappointment 90% of the time. Also, if you shuffle 15 plagues in your opponent deck, but Helya one of the last cards in your deck, the whole mechanic sucks.
FFS, if you play vs plagues, and your opponent hasn't played Helya yet, you actually want to draw fast to burn the plagues ... that's how irrelevant they are.
YOOOOOO
Flare finished the discard section in the worst designed cards video and decided to hate some more.
complains complains , maybe try enjoying the game once in a while
You clicked on a video talking about poorly designed cards and are shocked that the person making the video is complaining? Are you stupid?
Womp womp