What is an unbalanced card and how is that shown in Descent of Dragons?

The concept of “unbalanced” or OP is one of the most used terms by the Hearthstone community, yet not many people really understand exactly what power creep is. what. If you get the hang of this concept, you’ll understand why many of the cards in the upcoming expansion are so powerful – and why that’s OK in the big picture.

The overall strength of the cards increases with each expansion

No matter how you understand the term “unbalanced”, it’s clear that no one likes the new cards being stronger and pushing the old cards out of the meta. Yu-Gi-Oh players can understand how troublesome that can be. The old cards are no longer strong enough to make it into the meta, and so you must constantly upgrade your collection to get the cards you need to compete with your opponents. However, this is inevitable: if the new cards are nothing more powerful than the old cards, the expansion will quickly be forgotten and not worth the investment of the player, such as The Grand Tournament three years ago. . Although this expansion introduces the Secret Paladin and some really strong cards in the meta like Alexstrasza’s Champion nice Totem Golem This is still a failure of the design team. However, in any case, it is not a good idea to lure players with an expansion with a bunch of cards that are too strong compared to what has been available before.

While the exact concept of a card’s imbalance varies over time, essentially, power imbalance happens when The power range a card needs to play in the meta increased.Are from Magma Rager up Ice Rager certainly does not impress players, because Magma Rager has simply never been played in the meta, and therefore neither is its brother. Whether the inclusion of such “waste” cards in new expansions is worth it will be discussed in another article.

Consider an example from the past, when the Classic Chillwind Yeti replaced by Piloted Shredder for the best 4 mana card position. At the time, this replacement was notable as the Yeti was the best 4-mana minion since Hearthstone launched, used in many decks, but was eventually replaced by a card that was simply at range. more powerful in the Goblins versus Gnomes version. To be precise, decks then needed a good Neutral 4 mana card, and it was the 2 slots for that minion that required a stronger minion, namely from Yeti to Shredder.

Does this in itself have an impact on Hearthstone in general? This question is also not easy to answer because there is another factor that affects the strength of Constructed mode: the number of sets played at any one time. The more sets played, the less likely a card will be picked to play in a deck, as more sets mean more powerful cards to choose from. We can see that there is a huge difference between the Standard and the Wild on this point: in the Wild the hand quality is much higher and there is a lot of interaction that the Standard does not, and it can be said that very few cards in the current Standard actually do. importance in Wild.

One more thing we also need to consider: the strength of a mode (Standard, Wild or Arena) depends on the limitations of deck building. Basically, the more control a player has over what he or she is going to play, the higher the power range of that game mode. Usually a limited game mode when Arena will not be able to have decks that can compete with any of the meta decks in Constructed, although sometimes some decks have strong combos that make Kripp more salty than ever. Although the above comparison is not the same as the comparison between the two Standard metas, it helps us understand an important factor when it comes to the strength of a certain meta.

OP cards are inevitable in card games, and with Hearthstone still alive and thriving with Standard now less than half of the game’s total set, it’s safe to say that the influence of Unbalanced cards are not too negative.

Dragons, dragons and dragons

So how does all of the above relate to the very strong cards we saw in Descent of the Dragons? As good as they are, the combination of the pre-existing sets and the fact that it’s the year-end expansion probably makes it easier for us to accept them.

Sometimes the fact that a new set is stronger than the old set is criticized as a money-making move by the publisher. However, the truth can sometimes be the opposite: if the new cards are no better than the existing ones, then the player will have to spend money for something that is not worth it. If all the sets in the Standard were equally strong, then the mid and late year sets would be worth less than the beginning of the year set since they were available in Standard for a shorter time, and that would certainly get Blizzard banned as well. heavily quoted. Remember how much criticism Rastakhan’s Rumble was last year to understand why Descent of Dragons has so many strong cards. Having a strong set of cards at the end of the year can solve this headache and maintain meta diversity.

The real problem with these cards lies not in their strength but in the negative side of Blizzard’s design thinking. Unlike other card games where the player is given many different, unrelated pieces and assembles them into a deck, in Hearthstone there are many sets that explicitly state that they will be present in decks. how, and if players don’t follow those pre-determined plays, they will fail. Perhaps, except for Keleseth Rogue and Dragon Tempo Warrior, which are two decks made up of a combination of many mixed cards that do not belong to the same archetype and have little interaction with each other, all the remaining decks in Hearthstone have simply been Pre-designed by the publisher.

Looking at the cards in the Descent of the Dragons set at the moment, perhaps the core reason why players feel unsatisfied is because of their limited use, not their range of power. . For example Breath of Dreams will only be played in slow Druid decks that use Dragon, or Fiendish Rites can only appear in a Zoo-style Warlock deck at most. Invoke and “if you’re holding a Dragon” clearly limit their application as only decks playing in a single style can use the two cards mentioned above. Of course there are other factors that come together to determine if Descent of the Dragons is a successful expansion – we’ll have to wait and see.

According to Hearthstonetopdecks