After you've played the game for a while, constructed just plain sucks. The meta always revolves around 4 or 5 tier 1 decks that get figured out in the first few weeks of a new expansion and above that the game keeps recycling the same deck archetypes over and over: zoo warlock, control warlock, control warrior, OTK decks, midrange curvestone decks, etc. Every zoo warlock deck plays the same as the previous one (classic zoo, discard zoo, heal zoo), every control warrior deck plays the same as the the previous one (wallet warrior, justicar warrior, odd warrior), etc. etc.

It's not necessarily Bizzard's fault as there is only so much blood you can get out of a stone. It's designed to be a relatively simplistic game and to echo the complaints of Lifecoach, they don't want complex decks to be strong.

Not only does arena mix it up because you are playing as and against a different deck every single time, but you don't have to spend hundreds of dollars or grind hundreds of hours to keep up with the treadmill of content that gets released. 150 gold is easy to get so you can play whenever you want and not have to worry about doing your dailies or getting to rank 5 or whatever bull**** F2P mechanics they throw in to get people hooked via the sunken cost fallacy.

It really isn't that hard to keep up with constructed. If you buy the pre-release bundles, complete the daily quests and disenchant unnecessary cards you can pretty much have every meta deck at your disposal at all times.

That's $17.50/month and less than 10 hours of play per week. Not that unreasonable for a hobby imo.

I recently came back to hearthstone. Played for a bit, completed a few solo adventures and left again. I dunno why it isn't as fun as it used to be. I've also noticed that my old decks can still hold up to the current ones. That's good to know if I ever decide to come back again.

They change the rules too drastically too often in arena for me to feel like I'd want to ever get seriously into it. There's always completely busted cards/classes, even more so than constructed imo.

There's no 80/20 match ups in arena. The best class in arena still can lose to the worst class depending on draft.

What I don't like about arena is weapon classes without weapon picks or spell classes without spells just feel god awful. Or when you run into those classes and they got all the tools, but for the most part arena has always felt better than constructed for playing more tempo oriented games.

The dual class is fun for the memes but is so full of random stuff at low wins it get annoying.

arena is ok. constructed is ok. hearthstone is ok.

Getting rank 5 this month was a literal chore, and i think it only took me 10 games. I used to put in 1k games a month no problem. I think it says something about the state of this game; it’s super stale.

or maybe you just outgrew the game?

I’m in a similar spot, and don’t think it’s down to outgrowing the game. I’ve literally gone from 20-30 games per day to just not even opening the game in weeks. This expansion just feels like a real chore to play. There are too many class cards which are in every single deck build for that class. Deathknights, while introducing some interesting game trees, are just way too strong.

I don’t think it’s me outgrowing the game, I spent about 60 hours last month on a golf clash knock off app.

I know exactly what it is I don’t like- and I’ve seen some comments related to this in the last few months, but basically I don’t feel that my decisions in the course of a game really influence the outcome that much compared to previous expansions. I mean sometimes they hardly seem to matter at all. I don’t know the root cause of this but it’s super frustrating and not fun

I think that depends on what decks you play. I play deathsta's control hunter a lot and let me tell you my decisions do matter.

Fwiw I quit hearthstone a while back (like 3/4 months ago). A few weeks after the xpac hit I played again for about 3 days.

Wow this expansion is really really bad like the worst one since I started (one knight in kara) , I am not sure what it is but often you seemed to have match ups where you just have no chance of winning. This happens all the time oh it's X deck I win or it's Y deck I lose.

I quit again after 3 days and am really glad I did.

I am actually playing MTG arena and it's a really good game. Artifact comes out at the end of Nov also. So not only is HS in a bad place meta/expansion wise there is actually some competition now as well.

I think HS is actually in a bit of trouble. Game has been around a long time, new competition, top streamers leaving it, terrible xpac, bad nerfs (lol druid).

Think blizzard have some serious work to do as people are leaving in hoards.

I had a long conversation about Blizzard games with a friend of mine since Blizzcon is in a few days. My primary game is HOTS, and the issue with HOTS is that it's a great game that was marketed terribly; most of its problems stem from popularity and player count, rather than the game itself.

Hearthstone is the complete opposite. The problem is at its core its just not a very good game. It's super popular and easy to play, so it attracts a lot of people (like me, who play in little time chunks here and there) but its hard for it to stick because it just is filled with game issues.

I don't really see a solution for it. I played a lot of it, don't see myself playing much more of it to come.

I think hearthstone is a good game at its core, but the design team is ass backwards. Look at druid and recent nerfs. They don't know what they're doing.

Also I've played a bit of MTGA lately. It's given me some decent perspective. A lot of people whine about RNG in HS, but drawing all land or no land in that game is probably the worst feeling...

As a former constructed player who reached legend, I felt that the game had run out of design space. But Magic: The Gathering has been around for 20+ years so who knows. How has that game stayed relevant? Do players just cycle in and out of the game every couple of years? Or is the game able to retain players for long periods of time with more complex deckbuilding and play strategies?

It seems like they print a lot of OP cards instead of printing 60-70% bad cards like Hearthstone so the game is more dynamic. There seems to be meta decks, but also more variation.

I'd also the sealed/draft format seems to be a fair bit more popular than arena in HS, and I don't think that ever gets old.

Yea I'll never play a card game with lands/color system. It's just brutally annoying.

And the design team definitely doesn't play their own game on a level high enough to understand card design. They need a professional player either on their team or speak to more pros more often about design decisions.

Sealed draft format is super great, constructed hinging months at a time in between expansions does get pretty stale, at least to me the past 2ish years

new xpac will be announced this weekend at least!

Rastakhan's Rumble?

I dig that

I just played a 20 minute game of Odd Warrior vs. Odd Warrior. Turn 3 he played Shield Block. First mistake. He played Acolyte of Pain on turn 4. I coined out a Dyn-O-Matic and settled in for the long haul of killing every single minion he played. He conceded with 64 effective health when he drew his last card and I had 6 left in my deck.

Spirit of the Shark-Rogue--0/3 Stealth for 1 turn--Your minions and Battlecry Combos Trigger Twice for a turn--Epic

Shirvallah the Tiger--7/5 Beast-25 maan cost is 1 less than each mana you spent in spells--Divine Shield, Rush, Lifesteal-7/5--Legendary

New Keyword-Overkill--if you kill something with let's say you a weapon you can attack again

Rumble Run--New Single Player

Rastakhan's Rumble

Release Dec 4th