The Expansion That Almost KILLED Hearthstone
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- Опубликовано: 1 окт 2024
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Rarran reviews an expansion that caused hearthstone to become a completely different game
You should watch me live on Twitch:
/ rarran
▶Discord: / discord
▶Twitter: / rarranhs
▶TikTok: / ytnarrar
Edited By: @ItsBen321
#Hearthstone #Rarran #HS
Rarran is slowly becoming an hearthstone history channel and im not gonna complain
Funnily enough. He started off more as a history channel and that's what initially got me here.
@@nathanbienias2761 i didn't know that, i guess it explain why he's so good at it
Yeah, he did some documentary style, if I recall correctly one of them was about firebat, for example
@@seilamano3974 Yeah it was with the sciency looking frog.
As someone who is trying to design a card game with similar mechanics to hearthstone, it actually really helps me because I like talking about game theory
I think the weakness of TGT also influenced the power creep in Hearthstone. The developers really understood that each new expansion absolutely had to have impactful cards, so you started getting crazier and crazier effects.
Except that has had the opposite effect. We need more tgt and rasta not more of the current idea of one upping everything. It literally shows they have zero creativity if two expansions in a row we had a neutral that was meant to blow up face.
tgt sucked so fuckin much
100% agree. I think they tired again with Rastakhan’s Rumble to make a lower power expansion and it also almost completely killed the game, it was TGT but even worse.
@@Apolloshot And I heard they were rebalancing the game power level with the upcoming expansion.
Sounds like a repeat.
I loved TGT. Everyone else is wrong and the reason for awful power creep
Dude, as a guy who plays for fun, I love discover, I can use cards I dont own and won't probably ever own
you play hs for fun? wtf
@@lordmatz3435 yeah, I'm happy
@Kayke Marlon Ayo don't mind that dumbass. HS has its peaks and lows, but you can still have fun with it
@@kaykemarlon9238 nah dude dont lie to me
@@lordmatz3435 nah, for real, just got my subscription to a public exam accepted, so now I'm employed and I can play wacky decks that sometimes work or sometimes doesn't, you just gotta live the life you want to live
One of my most clear memories of hearthstone was when I was doing a friendly match with a buddy. I had lethal on board, lethal in hand, and 15 health as jaraxxus. He played Nefarian and got sacrificial pact and blew me up. Loved Black rock Mountain.
leggit ran into someone at a bar that played and was excited to play only to run into my full golden wild mage xD
Sacrificial impact on jaraxxus is to this day maybe one of the best comeback scenarios ever. Ran dragon priest/pally a lot back then and had that happen on a few occasions.
United in stormwind still makes my spleen expand in many painful ways
Came here to say the same. UiS was the worst expansion.
Was my favorite expansion, super skill expressive meta, with some of the most fun decks being the strongest (garotte rogue & lifesteal dh).
@@youvegoattobekittenme6908 You are a monster.
@@youvegoattobekittenme6908 it's funny that you say that, because i remember it as exactly the opposite. Quest mage, garrote rogue, and especially quest warlock, are some of my least favorite decks ever. Lifesteal dh was kind of cool, but i basically never ran into it on latter. And then there was the wild meta, which was its own level of shitshow.
@@youvegoattobekittenme6908 skill expressive like waste to get my OTK first?
Is solitaire skill expressive?
The league of explorers main four characters are so fucking iconic. I mostly play battlegrounds now and seeing them makes me happy and nostalgic
They were so iconic they ended up being added to WoW. That really means something.
Rarran talking about the game and things is really cool
The reason why, when Naxx came out in HS, we were spamming in chat "Naxx out" back then, was not because we was excited by the expension but because, back in WoW, the release of the Naxxramas was a mess and much waited :D it's was a WoW meme before the HS meme :)
Another factor was how long it was between Curse of Naxxramas’s announcement and its actual release. It was announced 1 month after the full release of the game, but wasn’t released for almost 2 1/2 months after that.
I mean the delays on it was still a good meme too lol! I remember being in kripps chat and him getting trolled every half an hour lol!
Oh wow! I didn't know that. So kind of like the Leeroy meme.
no. As simply as it is, Naxx expansion was delayed by Blizzard by 2 days ... and people loose their minds. So a lot of them start to troll others on Reddit, or Twitch by saying "naxx out" every hour on these 2 days. There were no reference to Wow or anything.
Nobody cares about wow. Thats a separate meme
I remember being in Highscool during the mobile Hearthstone launch and it turned into a lot of people just playing friendly battles during classes and breaks. I think this time was peak Hearthstone for me!
Omg, same for me, i remember that half of my friends used to play hearthstone, compare decks and etc
yeah me too, made one of my best friends to this day cuz we were ripping hearthstone during grade 10 english
Bruh that mobile launch had everybody talking about Hearthstone in my high school! I was already a senior about to graduate, but I remember kids on the bus asking each other's tag name. And then even the teachers were like, "what's this Hearthstone you guys keep talking about?" Good times!
Bro you unlocked memories thanks m8
Same here, I think I spent a good 80% of my school breaks of 2015-16 playing Hearthstone
In terms of the amount of players who played the game, the most popular expansion was Knights of the frozen throne. But I remember how much hype there was around the game when TgT came out. The nostalgia is real
knights was fun, the hero cards were so cool to play and build around rip my golden jaina xD
and I remember playing from LoE to Ungoro, then I had a break through KoFT, K&C and Witchwood only to return during Boomsday - it was so weird to learn about hero cards during Boomsday
I still watch old HS videos, especially WOTOG, LOE
I thought it was Karazhan? I remember there were a lot of Hearthstone players around that time too.
I love Frozen Throne. So many viable decks that format, except for Shaman. Shaman had to wait some expansion in the shits till Shudderwock took all the fun.
Funny that the worst expansion in HS (TGT) introduced us to Justicar Trueheart...which was one of the most beloved cards on the expansion...and ended up leading to another hated expansion such as Witchwood due to the upgraded hero powers :P
I remembered True Heart giving a great boost to control warrior, truly loved the game then with the upgraded Warrior HP
I played from 2013-2017 free to play and managed to hit legend a couple times. Only time I ever spent money was naxx. I remember grinding so much arena to save up gold for the new adventures and expansions. (700g for one chapter out of five for each adventure wtf) 😂
I remember I was in high school at the point and it was a matter of honor not using irl money for expansions. Most of us managed to grind through all Naxx and Blackrock and I think the only time someone spent money on it was one guy who bought some packs in his bday
The random stuff in GvG also made sense thematically in the WoW universe because goblin and gnome engineering items have (had) a random chance to do something else (explode, fail, different effect, teleport you 100 meters into the air)
Undertaker actually wasn't nerfed due to Apple's policy for app store updates at the time. (basically a month's long approval process)
There was a point where they changed how hearthstone was built to allow changes to happen without an update (and eventually Apple abandoned the policy)
Apple and Google both still have an update approval policy
@@lolwutizit yes but it’s not as stringent in terms of certain updates anymore
Damn that's crazy. Following apples policy when you're not even on ios? Das crazy.
@@TJPesce420 they are! mobile updates were notoriously different and also every update costs admin costs
That's actually really cool to know, I know app stores have plagued them for a while due to simply the amount of languages that they have to support...
LoE was my intro to Hearthstone, which made me fall in love for the game. The entire year of the Kraken (WotOG, Karazhan, MSoG) + Ungoro was my favourite time with this game - ever. Played every single day for 2 years straight. I miss that time.
Agreed. Gadgetzan was the only "weak" point of the year, and weak is in quotation marks because the issue was quite literally the opposite: everything was too strong. Patches the Pirate and Pirate Warrior in general, which was and remains to this day one of the most frustrating decks to play against that the game has ever seen, Highlander Mage and Priest with Inkmaster Solia, Raza the Chained, Reno Jackson and good ol' Kazakus, and let's not forget the absolute hell that descended upon Hearthstone with the advent of .... *shudder* ... Jade.
Un'Goro, especially quests, brought something really fun to Hearthstone that no expansion since has managed to replicate, imo, and for all the good new stuff we get with proper balancing patches, improved rewards and an actually fair battle pass system, I miss the time when Demon Hunter didn't exist. I mean seriously, who thought that giving a hyper-aggro class the best draw in the game (during Nathria I played against an aggro DH who hit fatigue on his turn 10 draw for turn) was going to be a good idea?
All this to say: I agree with you. That whole period was peak Hearthstone, and I think that we'll unfortunately never get an experience quite as fun as that year/year-and-a-half, except for maybe, arguably, Dungeon Run in K&C.
Unfortunately you can't really play on mobile anymore though. The last like three or four patches that made it where you can't load your collection at all. So I can't build decks... And being a truck driver it's a little harder to get a laptop up and running and playing.
I would really like to ask a favor and for you to talk to your contacts at Blizzard... Because spending $4,000 on a game and I'm not able to play it on my phone. Kind of makes it sad.
I've been playing since release and I haven't been able to play in like 5 months because I just can't load my collection. I can't change cards out or build new decks or anything.
I've sent them several support tickets. I've reinstalled the game. I've done everything I can try to do on my end and not a single acknowledgment in my area.
Tried to change the device?
@@christopherIF yeah I have a pixel 6 pro and a Samsung s22. My friend who has an iphone 14 also has the same issue.
Weird. I have never had that kind of issue on my OnePlus phones. 🤔
Just to summarise it
TGT was the pivot expansion because its cards power level was balanced so Blizz decided to go the way of power creeping after that and ruined Hearthstone balance forever
Right?
Yes
Yes.Also it was all Ben Brode's fault or am I mistaken?
I've mourned the grand tournament since it rotated out of standard. Inspire was such a great mechanic to encourage use of the hero power and it was never touched again
Lol no inspire was garbage. Either your opponent could kill the minion immediately or you started snowballing. There's a reason most of the inspire cards were bad, because they are near impossible to balance. Team5 has even admitted this themselves.
They actually did touch it a couple of times after, just without the keyword. Off the top of my head there's the hunter ballista legendary, and I think there were more
It is by far the worst mechanic ever made, but at least it was interesting.
Inspire sucks because the cards that used it suck. On the custom site, there are some really really good inspire cards, and while the mechanic didn’t do great, I think it’s one of my favorite keywords based on its potential to be insane if done right (which obviously didn’t happen in TGT
@@mrcx6142 really saying inspire is worse than overkill?
Sorry I don’t understand how it was the most important set. What was the thesis here? You never explained it. What did it change?
"Naxx out" is a WoW reference first
I think the main reason why naxx was so good was also because it was the first time we could actually buy S tier cards w/o the RNG from buying packs. That was for me the best thing ever.
Magic the Gathering had a similar phenomenon in 2003-2005 they release three sets all themed together called “blocks” and a super powerful block was released in the Mirrodin block and that was followed up by an incredibly weak block called Kamigawa. The designers have mentioned that Mirrodin’s power level was a bit of an accident and they were instructed by management not to have any cards nearly as powerful in the new block and that basically killed an entire format in MtG for years
Mirrodin was bad, but it wasn’t the block that nearly killed the game. That was Urza’s Saga block.
Urza’s Saga was originally designed as an enchantment-focused block, but also included powerful artifact synergies like Tolarian Academy, combo enablers like Windfall, and a group of free spells that untapped lands equal to the mana spent to cast them, most notably Time Spiral. This was a huge mistake.
The combo deck that formed around Tolarian Academy destroyed all 4 formats, with notable success at the December 1998 Extended Pro Tour (Pro Tour Rome). Wizards saw their mistake and reacted quickly, banning or restricting Tolarian Academy, Windfall, and Stroke of Genius in all formats.
It wasn’t enough. New combo decks popped up. Dream Halls, Earthcraft, Fluctuator, Recurring Nightmare. High Tide was especially powerful. Urza’s Legacy released Memory Jar and Tinker, creating a deck that needed to be emergency banned. All of those decks except High Tide were banned, and High Tide was nerfed heavily by the banning of Time Spiral.
It wasn’t enough. Urza’s Destiny released Academy Rector and Yawgmoth’s Bargain, and all 4 formats continued to be dominated by combo decks.
It would take until the fall of 1999 for the last remaining Combo Winter decks to be banned, which happened at the same time as Yawgmoth’s Will was finally banned.
None of these decks were fun to play against. Many weren’t even fun to play. Attendance at tournaments and sales plummeted, and R&D made changes to ensure that such a mistake would never happen again. (It indeed has never happened again.) Legend has it that the R&D team was threatened with losing their jobs if they ever made a block that powerful again.
Mirrodin was bad, but it only wrecked Standard and was enabled by lax banning policy. Combo Winter was almost a full year of every format sucking despite multiple banlists.
I'm getting tiered of people confusing google trends with a satisfaction metric. If I am enjoying a game I have all the support sites bookmarked or already showing in quick access.
I honestly don't understand what the point he's trying to make here is. Like, besides being bad and overhyped, what did TGT itself do that fundamentally impacted the game in the long run?
Make paying customers pissed off for the first time
Wow, he completely ignored Goblin Shredder in GvG. Wasn't that an auto-include in almost every deck, or am I just misremembering how ubiquitous it was?
It was everywhere, to the point people would assume if you didn't have it in your deck, it was because you didn't own it
3:08 It wasn't my first game, but I agree that Hearthstone was brilliant in the beginning, especially for newcomers in terms of card games. That also has to do with how ridiculously easy it is to learn. Compared to Yugioh, especially younger Yugioh, and magic as well, Hearthstone is ridiculously easy to get into because you basically go from "I have no idea how this card game works" to "Got it, I now understand everything I need to understand in order to properly get involved and even play ranked provided I have the cards" within like a day.
I'm just gonna say that the mid-2010's were like the best years ever mostly because of Hearthstone. Idk why but the vibe was just so good back then. I noticed things started to go downhill in like 2017-ish and ever since then, it's just been plummeting. I don't just mean Hearthstone, I mean like everything. I wonder if things will get better again.
Honestly this is pushing what I consider you can get away with for clickbait. This *entire* video is just a big buildup framing itself like it will reveal a big, unknown positive impact that Grand Tournament had, only for the reveal to be ”it wasn’t as good”.
If the title was ”This expansion was the worst for Hearthstone” I would be fine with it, but this whole video just made me feel missled.
he revealed how the game changed forever, i read coments and the big mayority are surprised by how much a bad expansion changed the game, also it's not the worst, the worst is and always will be rastakhan rumble.
Baku and Genn were mistakes
Honestly I can't believe you only talked about Baku, Genn is way more of a menace in wild
Historically Odd decks were more impactful. Even shaman and warlock were the only ones that made Even a threat for a long time and now you can add death knight. For odd, It had hunter, mage, Paladin, warrior, Rogue, Demon hunter all as competitive decks for big stretches of time. Even hunter and Paladin had a small splash but questlines were better than both now. Odd decks are on a decline now but the only classes that never really had an even or odd deck function were priest and druid. Both are extremely good. They weren’t targeted to rotate early for power though. They were targeted for consistency issues. Matches felt too samey
@@Skullhawk13 My first decks that helped me see some success were Odd Rogue and Odd Paladin, one of the reasons why they saw a lot of play is that you really only needed one legendary to have a reasonable chance to compete, though, Even decks are more value oriented with the cards they provided so they tend to be more on the expensive side. (I quit around Dalaran Heist cause burnout)
I had a silver hand deck at that moment and I won a lot of games vs my nemesis, the secret paladin. The cool thing is that I made that deck entirely
Oh and I did that because I didn't have the mysterious challenger in my collection lol but I enjoyed it so much
I thought I was too young for nostalgia, but this video hit me in the memories way too hard.
I don't agree, like at all. There is a reason the game is so unpopular now, and that is because the power level is waaaaaaay to high. The power level of TGT was good. It was fun.
I hate to break it to you, but just because you have a trend line for a game does not mean that it means anything. That teardrop graph with the long tail, that's the trend line for every game franchise which ever succeeded. Plug in 'Destiny' or 'Guild Wars 2' or 'Path of Exile' and you'll find a similarly shaped trend-line, replete with spikes and trougths and a long tail of people hanging on and eventually getting bored, until the game recedes into irrelevance.
Was TGT the worst expansion? Maybe. But maybe it was just the *most hyped*. Maybe that was when Blizzard spent the most on RUclips ads and Adsense, and without that burst of astroturf relevance, you've just got the ordinary garden variety lifecycle of a moderately successful entertainment product.
I feel the reason random stuff is so popular is that it's something that's really hard to do in a physical card game.
Also everyone wants to see what's in the box.
Just role a dice. One of the oldest game-ultilities: a cube to determin randomness.
Or flip a coin ... you can just add any mechanic, that is not a card. Or you shuffel your deck and the order is random.
Randomness is easy for a physical card game.
@@SoulAcid1 ok how do you "add a random spell to your hand" in a physical card game?
Do you have a deck full of a copy of each you randomly draw from. And do you do that for every unique type of card you can generate?
@@Isabelle-mp8rk I have never written that. But "random stuff" is possible. It was your wording. And yes, you can have a sideboard to do "random stuff", too.
@@Isabelle-mp8rk Someone actually tried making a physical version of Hearthstone once. I'll see if I can find the video again.
Maybe I'm weird, but I liked witchwood :D
They added the best keyword there - Rush - which is super important and healthy for the game
you wish
We got a lot of awesome cards in witchwood, but unfortunately Shuderwock ruined it completely
@@skuty4882exactly what I was gonna say, the first day was literally all “MY JAWS THAT BITE, MY CLAWS THAT CATCH!”
UiS is the worst expansion ever.
Best expansion, overload quest is the best thing that ever happened to the game. Maybe after buckets in arena drafting, then they took it away
@@jari948 terrible expansion. Combo was the only viable strategy
When people think of "the worst expansion" they always seem to think of expansions with very low winrates as opposed to cards that made everything unfun to play again
Man what you’re saying makes sense but I loved the grand tournament. Sure secret paladin was annoying, dropping the best 1 2 3 4 etc drop on curve guaranteed the win almost every time but my little inspire mage deck that I made was so much fun. Seeing my opponent pause to read that 2 mana 2/4 that couldn’t attack unless you inspired it never got old, and when it carried my early games it was just so satisfying. It wasnt a great deck but it was a blast
what u said made no sense...
If you think classic heartstone need no engagement or investement ur out of ur mind
I had friend that were playing 8h a day for a whole year and everytime they release new card they could not finish unlocking what was beford without investing money in it....
It was literally hs biggest problem and this is the very reason it never became as big as it could have been...
Funny that you didn't mention the Legendary card for 6 mana that upgraded your hero power
I would argue that League of Explorers, despite being widely loved, was a huge issue for the long term health of the game. Introducing Discover (reliable random card generation) essentially lead to the death of the classic Hearthstone experience and the continued path away from minion-based gameplans.
100% agree
To be honest, classic hearthstone had Miracle rogue Leeroy combo and Druid Savage roar + Force of Nature. I think "Minion combat" is a pipe dream that only exists in Arena.
@@mudkipmilk Don't forget how burn-centric Mage was.
Discover literally is why Highlander which was also introduced there is literally overpowered.
dont forget about brann, he was really bad for the future balance of the game, make it so much more difficult
Would love to see you keep going with this, talking about the expansions after the grand tournament
It's strange that Witchwood was so meta warping, because aside from hero power modifiers and the dreaded Shudderwock, it was one of the most underwhelming sets. Tons of utter shit, weak cards on a level not seen since TGT. It speaks volumes though that both sets were still produced in the Ben Brode era, to wit: The philosophy of nerfing cards only as an absolute last resort, and being scared to death to have to do so in the first place. Far too many cards in this era were generally undertuned and played safe to such a degree that huge swathes of them were never going to affect the meta.
TGT being based off of one of the least popular WoW raids in Trial of the Crusader didn't help much either.
Man I love the Witchwood. I main Shudderwock in Wild, I loved Lady in White. I love odd and even decks. Calling it the worst hurts my innermost Hearthstone player
Very late comment but for me what "killed for me Hearthstone" and make me quit was the "Mean Streets of Gadgetzan" :
- Shaman was very stupid OP with the best mana curve from 1 to 4 lol
- Pirate Warrior was stupid because of Patches
- Actually , any deck running Patches was THE THING
- You slap there the "Jade theme" on druids which also make the games slower and very tedious
- While discover mechanic was introduce before , this expansion push this beyond that
- Thankfully , Knight of the frozen throne and Journey to Ungoro save this .... and then got killed by The Witchwood again lmao
- So yeah , fuck patches the pirate lmao
Love these "documentry-type" videos. I also hope the new expansion wont lead to a similiar decline.
Shudderwock sucks. I was going to say. . .the Only card I’ve really objected to - the only card that should NEVER EVER EVER been printed - is ‘Defile’. It takes 2 seconds looking at ‘Defile’ to see it should have NEVER EVER been printed. You’re not quite finished reading the card text before it’s obvious this card should never have been printed. I would guess Hearthstone’s popularity began to decline soon after ‘Defile’ was printed. Most people mentally balanced likely quit some time during that set or the next set. I wil say, ‘Shudderwock’ is somewhere in that territory. At least it costs 9 mana, and doesn’t kill every creature on the board (and all the reborns and deathrattles spawned too).
I don't agree with Rarran here. The fact the he personally hates the Grand Tournament doesn't mean it is the worst expansion. If we talk about "going in the wrong RNG direction" then GvG was the worst one with Shredder and Boom. If we talk about completely killing the game Shitterwock or Shitterwood was the sole reason i left this game years ago. Justicar brought life to Priest and Warrior, before that it was all aggro no IQ smorc. So no, TGT was a good expansion and way better than others. Top 3 for sure for me.
TGT was the first expansion I preordered and it was very disappointing. To this day, patron warrior is the most OP deck ever made. Everyone ran it in 2014 finals. Secret Paladin was the worst archetype because you really couldn’t predict what happens next and it was until Old gods where we got a strong counter. League of explorers is one of the greatest additions to the game ever, brann and Reno are fundamental for so many decks to this day in wild and recently standard. It also introduced discover which is by far the most successful card effect ever to be introduced. The power creep has gotten crazy though and that really started with old gods. Anyone remember wallet paladin, 16000 nzoth deck that was the first control deck to truly dominate the meta next to handlock. Nonetheless it was a great expansion and one of my top three favorite expansions to this day next to gadgetzan and frozen throne. Witchwood or tgt are probably the worst expansions. Dumbest deck ever made to this day is switcheroo priest, so bad they had to introduce their first ban. Miss the old days where a card like sneed or dr. boom was OP, nowadays sneed is shit and boom is mid at best. Remember when sludge belcher used to be one of the most op defensive cards? Battlegrounds was the best thing hearthstone ever did and really the only thing I play now. Constructed it’s basically who gets the best draw, but battlegrounds the strategy and decision making can still get you wins even if you are behind.
To add to the undertaker topic. Back then competitive used a King of the Hill format. So if you’re deck won you would use it again and the opponent would select a new one. And whoever beat all the opponents decks won. So a lot of the time both players would just lock Undertaker Hunter and whoever won the mirror would 3-0 the series.
Good review. I don't play anymore but it's refreshing nostalgia to see this. Can't believe you neglected to mention My Man Piloted Shredder. Loved that card with a passion. =P
How the fuck does this guy compare Grim Patron to Nefarian
Also Dr. Boom only gets a footnote despite being the most valuable card for years to come?
My hot take i REALLY miss Adventures, like having to do a wing to earn the expansion card
And then Dungeons came out which offered tons of replayablity, and was so fun....
And they sort of been abandoned. Book of heros was fine but once you played it there was no reason to do again, Mercs was the same but at least it had a story which spanned the entire set.
I really wish we would go back to adventures and Dungeons I think Tomb of terror was our last one? and Knights the last adventure i think
Haven't watched it yet, but it's either going to be about un guro or league of explorers for introducing discovery or goblin vs gnomes I think it was that introduced a decent amount of rng with things like the shredders and sneeds. Those changed the game fundamentally I think.
Edit: after watching the video, grand tournament is way more impactful than I thought. I would love a video where you talk about the most impactful decks, like the undertaker one. Some more examples might be Baku and genn decks, shudderwock, first quest rogue
League of Explorers introduced discover, actually.
@@petrie911 thanks I couldn't remember. I only started playing when death knights came out
I don’t get what was impactful about TGT at all. In fact I don’t understand this video’s point.
@@Begeru Basically, Blizz learned that people are very happy to throw money at them so they made sure that each expansion is stronger than the last one, leading to huge power creep.
The year of the Mammoth was the most bonkers year for Hearthstone. I think you could honestly talk about how ridiculously pushed the power level and new mechanics. Quests, Death Knights, and specialty weapons all played a hand in having to tone down the power level of sets afterward due in part to how the design space was centered around single card game plans. Your decks were all built around one card instead of a cohesive synergy. Gen and Baku took that single-card game plan to the most extreme but even before them, the design philosophy was centered around decks focused on a single powerful card.
I will say though 2017 and 2018 was a damn good time to be playing hearthstone.
Mean streets of gadgetzan killed control warrior forever, so i hate that expansion with passion.
Funny as soon as you asked the question about the worst expac i thought the grand tournament, but my opinion was formed by how low impact most the set was so im curious to see the rest of the analysis
I started playing in Un'Goro, so I haven't experienced everything in this video. For me, Kobolds and Catacombs was the most impactful set. It really powercreeped the game and noone seemed to complain about it, so they kept on doing it. It was also the first time they did non-minion legendaries which were very well received.
Mean streets did the big powercreep thing first imo
I mean, the Un'Goro Quests were also non-minion legendaries
Grand Tournament was a lot of fun. "Who am I? None of your business." "Stop asking questions." What a time to be alive.
I remember having loads of fun with Control Warrior in TGT. Justicar Trueheart just made you feel unkillable.
rarran is a kurtis conner fan??? and here i thought i couldn’t appreciate rarran more
Being slow to buff/nerf was not just a problem with Hearthstone but with Blizzard itself. Certain classes/specs in earlier World of Warcraft was just unplayable and they still refused to balance them, and i can count the number of times Blizzard balanced abilities in Diablo 2 on one hand. I heard its gotten better in like the past 5 years but its one of the reasons why i dont play any of their games anymore.
I was surprised TGT wasn’t considered the worst expansion as well. At the time, I remember a lot of the cards to be super underwhelming with the exception of a few MEGA powerful cards.
Witchwood I remember as the game mode where there where quite a few Uber broken decks that were reeeeeeally fun to play. And even when you were on the losing end, it never felt as fucking oppressive as Jade Druid.
I LOVE control and I remember when I queued into Jade Druid as control it was an automatic concede.
Goblins vs Gnomes was AWESOME miss those days
I mean, isn't it dead?
12:00 The actual Expansion
Upvote me, fools
TGT was the first and only expansion I preordered. Also finally crafted a patron warrior deck like a week before the nerfs hit. Needless to say I vibe with the message of this video haha
brooo grand tourney was fucking lit, it's after grand tourney that everyone left
I really, really miss the adventures. These days it's just booster packs in expansions. The adventures was what made Hearthstone expansions exciting for me.
The idea that hearthstone was someone's first card game makes me feel old because I was already an adult when it came out.
I mean, not everyone played Magic, Yugioh, or Pokémon as a kid, regardless of age.
@@Begeru I suppose it being digital and free made it more accessible, although I knew very few people who never in their life had at least tried one. And I don't just mean pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh and magic, you had so many card games getting made in the early 00s that they were hard to avoid. It felt like every company was trying to hit it big with some card game. I think most people had at least one friend who tried to convert them to this or that card game. Not to mention that things like baseball cards were still popular back in the 90s and 00s(not sure about the 2010s or nowadays). Obviously not all, but if you were playing video games in 2013, there was a good chance you had at least tried a card game at some point.
Personally the main reason I tried hearthstone in the first place is because I had hoped it was like the WoW TCG.
Rarran yells into his mic so much that it hurts my head.
too much expansions anything beyond black rock is too much
Im gonna put some thoughts into this as well. All my life ive played card games from MTG to Yugioh, to Digimon and FnB, of course with that I played Hearthstone up until the end of the frozen throne. For me personally, I ended up leaving the game because it started to feel like it was way to casual minded compared to the competitiveness that I was use to. I know that a lot of people don't like the extreme complexity of other card games but what gives them their staying power is that complexity and the fact that most of the time (variance is a thing lets not lie to ourselves even in paper card games) the better player will always win and will win with the cards they brought to the table. Hearthstone started to fall off super hard for me due to the fact that not only did it not ever fully reach the complexity to sustain my fried competitive gamer brain, but also because it just doesn't feel good to lose to your opponent randomly getting lucky, even if you have outplayed them even in the smallest margin of the .5 or 1%s. But thats why I quit and I would like others inputs on why they left or why they stayed if I could.
Bro i dont know if its just me but, witchwood was peak hearthstone. i dont play anymore but man i miss those days.
Oh man I just saw Flame Leviathan when you pulled up the cards lol, god that brings back memories of winning with that card and my opponents being so dumbfounded lmao.
I played this game for like 7 years before I stopped but man was it fun while it lasted
I liked witch wood, it was based on a setting that I personally really enjoy, I love that fairy tale grim theme.
For me the game really went downhill in Kobolds with a sharp rise in uninteractive gameplay and insane highroll turns. I kept playing hoping Witchwood would fix the meta, and when it instead made it worse I quit the game for several years.
So yeah, those expansions were what killed the game for me.
At the Grand Tournament, you win or go home.
GTG Murloc Paladin will always be my favourite deck, first deck I got into Legend with.
I left hearthstone during this time due to power creep. It became increasingly difficult to play the game f2p with the little time I had to grind.
I came back when they announced call of cuthulu and the move to a rotation of sets for standard play, where classic cards would always be one of the available sets.
That meant if I had collected mostly classic cards I could always build something ok because I would always have access to like 1/3 of the cards available for play. I spent better part of that set grinding for classic legendary cards that I had been told would always be in play. Yes they nerfed some of them a bit but they were still good forever useful cards.
Then it happend. The very next set they changed their kind amd said they had to ban some of the classic cards from play. Every...single...one...was a card I had grinded for. I Uninstalled the game and have not played since.
It's funny how I'm watching this video as a player who literally stopped playing because of secret paladin in TGT. I played since beta, loved the game, but TGT just somehow only managed to increase the frustration without introducing anything exciting. And any glimpse of exciting archetypes were just stomped by secret paladin.
And now the game has just evolved too far for me to feel like I can hop in anymore. This video just hits the nail in the head.
Old hearthstone without Brode's crap stubborness to refuse to nerf cards would have been absolutely god like. I have massively fond memories of HS in the first 2 years, but I would have had sooo much more fun if they had actually nerfed Undertaker when they should have.
4:58 The assertion that adding cards changes necessarily adds power creep is incorrect. Complexity and Power are tangent to each other and if draw complexity out by adding obfuscations of previous mechanics (or start with them) you could create expansions with permutations of those mechanics whose design space could spiral near infinitely without treading the same ground. MTG is experiencing this (partially; it's not perfectly designed so there has been alot of power creep in recent years) and has been skirting around power creep by making alternate modalities that collapse to base mechanics since... well, since Urza's or maybe Masques
I started Harthstone around the beginning and stopped play a little bit after Grim Patron but before I quit I played almost exclusively Warrior and I to this day have "EVERYONE, GET IN HEEEERE" burned into the back of my brain.
Your video randomly showed up on my feed I'm glad I watched it. I was having so much fun with heartstone before the first expansion and during beta, but when the first "random" expansion dropped I quit the game.
League of Explorers up to Frozen Throne were my favorite years of Hearthstone. Before that the game was a bit too bland, and after that the game got too crazy.
Commenting again to rag on the editor.
Bro. Rarran pulls up Imp-Losion and you DON’T do a hyper-cut with Reynad getting noodled by it?
I’m not mad…just disappointed.
That was prolly my favourite year in hearthstone
I didn’t play too much but have fond memories of witchwood, rastakans, boombsday, catacombs
Maybe it’s just me been a boomer but… most of my friends left because of how the constant changes push their decks out of the meta, and every time they do come back the game punishes them as a casual fan for not keeping up with the meta
Secret Paladin was one of the most toxic decks I think I've ever played, knowing exactly what was happening and not being able to do anything about it
Its kind of fitting that the Grand Tournament caused HS to fall off a bit when the Argent Tournament was a very controversial patch in WotLK.
It's funny b/c the tournament patch in wrath of the lich king is often considered the tipping point of wow's downfall. It curses everything it touches!
This channel makes me want to play Hearthstone again so bad.
But I committed to my boycott of Blizzard after they threw that Hong Kong player under the bus.
Anyone who punished someone for publicly supporting Hong Kong forever lost my support and permanently earned my ire.
Imagine going from a western style democracy into a CCP authoritarian government. It would be the most traumatic experience of your life.
Asking a player to "shut up and play sportsball" is always a bad move no matter what game it is.
F Blizzard. I won't ever support them.
im telling you tier lists is a goldmine for the channel. tier list for expansions, you could do tier lists for cards in each expansion, man you're missing out
Secret Paladin wasn't really that strong back then.
I played roughly 500 games back in TGT and 150 of those were secret Paladin. 80-90% winrate up to Gold. 70-80% up to Platin and 60% wr up to Rank 5. 50% at best in Diamond 5 and well below 50% onwards from anywhere better than that. With alot of luck and many many games you could climb to Diamond 4, but you'd always bounce right back. After some testing I found a deck which was really good from Diamond 4 to mid Diamond 3 and then another deck which was really good from mid Diamond 3 to Legend. I remember legend friends recommended Zoolock to me, but it didn't work well in Diamond 5 and 4, but very well lower than that. Secret Paladin was week in legend too and while it was played in pro tournaments, it wasn't the strongest deck there either. But: Secret Paladin was very good at punishing back decklists and lack of knowledge on how to play against the Christmas tree of secrets. So no wonder it performed well and was well hated among 80% of the playerbase, which was lacking either or both. I started with various fast versions and ended up using lifecoaches greedy list including Ragnaros. I was and am 100% F2P and TGT helped me greatly, as I really didn't need many packs and could save up alot of gold. Ever since then it was pretty much always so that you had to have one of a dozen combinations of three specific decks in order to climb to legend. Though usually you could do with one deck if you have not the skill of top 0.3%, but top 0.03% of players.
Started playing in closed beta as well. Was following the scene and grinding regularly. Naxx and GvG were insane at the time and we never got anything quite like that again. BRM & TGT were ok but not quite as amazing & groundbreaking. LoE was really really cool, loved that one. Then WooG had some really strong cards but Karazhan was meh and just around MSoG I stopped playing because I couldn't be bothered to grind as much anymore & pay for new cards. Lost interest in the game which is a shame because JtU was my favorite theme but haven't played since the start of 2017.
Random cards being added to hand was what made me leave hearthstone. Took away the skill of both the deck maker and the player never really went back.
I started a short while before Knights of the Frozen Throne, so I wasn't around for all the early stuff, but I fell in love and stayed a very committed player for years.
For me, personally, Disaster in Stormwind just took all the wind out of my sails for Hearthstone. The questline decks were un-interactive and oppressive, playing for value was asking to be punished, and it just beat the will to continue on out of me. I would return a few expansions later, but mid Titans I dropped the game again.
IDK, maybe I've outgrown it, maybe I like other card games more now, but in my heart Stormwind was the doomsday of Hearthstone. It's never been the same after that, and it probably never will, for me anyways. I still keep tabs on Hearthstone from time to time, but I haven't even considered logging in since the last time I dropped it. Learning that Trump, my personal go-to content creator, was slowing down too...well...that kind of sealed the deal for me. Can't see myself coming back anymore...
Good video though, it was very enlightening and fun to learn about the days of yore, before my time with the game that (in memory at least) I still love.
Hey, to be fair to Magic, there was MtG Online before Hearthstone!.. well... okay, that was was and still is a bit jank. Kinda a "2001 internet webpage" aesthetic. And cost real money to try...
Pokemon TCGO was and is pretty good though! (well, is as of March 2023, was as of April 2023. Live is looking like a great upgrade though)
For whatever reason, digital card games didn't really "stick" with most players until Hearthstone, though since then there's been hearty contenders like YGO Master Duel and the aforementioned Live. Or Krosmaga if you want something quirky and niche from France.