I just had a game as Healyonar, against the original Magmar General. I lost this game, because he was able to play threats every turn and kill my threats in the same turn, using less cards. Biggest offenders were Earth Sister Taygete, Makantor Warbeast, and that spell that kills the lowest or tied lowest attack minion. I don’t expect free wins at all, man, but I simply cannot beat Magmar because I cannot play enough threats to be able to fight them. Too much hard removal, too much damage.
TBH I don’t understand how the devs consider Taygete balanced. By herself she is the strongest sister by far, far more powerful than any sister in any faction by a large margin.
I’m a bit upset right now, I’m in Diamond and the majority of the decks I face are “kill everything you play every turn until you are topdecking” decks.
What is the point of Lyonar having high health minions if every other faction just instakills them?
What is the point of a deck that focuses on minion healing when said minions don’t have any way to actually survive in this meta?
Problems with Magmar
I completely agree with you. Magmar is off the charts right now.
Okay, here we go again.
Taygete is strong but she is supposed to be strong in order to give magmar competitive edge which he direly needed at the time. Partly because of her, magmar is at a good place now. He isn’t OP, even though he definitely was considered in the first week after taygete was added until people (some of them) realized she doesn’t win the game by default. And makantor is just another staple card which magmar has had for forever, definitely one of the strongest cards in the game too. That being said, when enemy magmar gets an amazing curve it is really difficult to deal with, but it doesn’t happen nearly as enough, nor you can rely on it for it to be considered OP. About natural selection, it’s just a conditional removal and isn’t even considered that great. Fact that you can use it on the sole minion on the board to kill it for cheap is it’s only redeeming factor.
Either way, lyonar is the one who is in a clunky place right now. That’s the issue rather than magmar being too strong (which again, I don’t think is the case). It’s a faction that relies on having the good minions on the board and gets huge value when they stick, but he suffers a lot when they get removed.
You can’t play a single game with ziran, a general that currently doesn’t have enough support (but will get more in the future expansion) and is almost strictly worse than argeon, lose, and then come to forums claiming how that game itself was enough to make you come to the conclusion of magmar being too strong.
I lost plenty of games to divine bond and holy immo and you don’t see me making a thread about how lyonar is too strong. It takes a bit more than that.
I think Abyss-Sister is as powerful but I don’t want to discuss this here. What I want to say in the hole Earth Sister discussion:
You can’t compare the sisters as single cards. You always ever have to set them in their faction context and compare factions instead. Mag was bottom tier before sisters came. Now Mag can compede with the other factions. Mag is still not top tier - this position has Abyss at the moment with Kara little behind.
Also: New cards incoming. Let’s see how they shift the meta. Let’s see how the expansion blows away every tactic we have now.
And then let’s compare how the factions are balanced and not single cards!
At least you’re transparent about the fact that you just got beaten by the thing you’re complaining about, and not: “but its totally my main faction really so look how altruistic i am lol”.
First off, are you complaining about Magmar being too powerful or Heal Lyonar being too weak? Or both? Magmar being too powerful isn’t close to correct, Vaath isn’t even considered one of the top two decks at the moment, no matter how powerful Taygete is.
I’ll agree that Heal Lyonar is quite weak though. Zir’an’s hero power is very powerful if it hits, but way too situational. Like you mentioned, stuff dies very easily in constructed. The thing is, is this necessarily a bad thing? I think that no matter what, unless you add some ability where the defender chooses who gets to ‘block’ attacks like in magic, stuff just isn’t going to stick very long in any CCG constructed. Especially if you’re playing against Zir’an, you know that as long as you clear the board Zir’an’s BBS is worthless while yours generates value. Playing big stuff isn’t going to cut it, you need to play stuff that are sticky, and there aren’t that many sticky minions in Duelyst.
Something needs to be done about Zir’an. Maybe a total rework of her BBS. Maybe crazy stuff happens in the new expansion and new cards make her BBS much better. Maybe they’ll add more viable sticky minions in the game. I’d say the recently revealed Lyonar card is not what we’re looking for: healing is already very powerful when it hits, we don’t have to have more of those type of cards. What we’re looking for is are cards that make use of the BBS when you don’t have a good healing target, maybe a card similar to Auchenai Soulpriest from Hearthstone, maybe a card that lets you add health to it when healing it, not just healing damage.
I was complaining about Magmar specifically. I don’t know what your Healyonar sets are, but mine is working against everything in Diamond except for when I get bad curve or fail to get value out of certain cards. My Healyonar is actually really strong. Conversely, I have been trying everything I can to make Swarm Abyssian to work again, because I used a really good swarm set to get to like rank 3 a few months ago but as of late I just can’t seem to get it going. Earth Sister Taygete can solo kill large groups of guys was my main complaint, and my other was that I’ve been consistently getting destroyed by magmar no matter what deck I play. It’s one of those things where I become dependent on my enemy to fail, rather than on my own skills.
This ^^^^ omg this so much that perfectly describes what it feels like to go against someone summoning taygete after taygete into egg morph it’s pure dominance you are literally just hoping they draw bad from the jump it sucks positioning doesn’t even help a lot of the time. I’d rather face cassyva shenanigans anyday.
Have you ever had your dudes killed every turn all game while the enemy just keeps hitting face… before?
Indeed and I was convinced it was due to my lack of skill but going over the replays there was literally nothing I could do. I did notice one thing though and that was if I didn’t put my threats in his face he couldn’t have egg morphed and killed it would that have changed the game in my favor I don’t know. Because then again there’s natural selection…
What are your thoughts about letting zirans BBS target herself to heal 2 HP? It seems strong to me as a consistent source of healing proc, though it’s still a tempo loss (for comparison, sundrop elixir heals for 5 for the same mana cost, albeit uses one card). It might be enough to make ziran one of the stronger generals.
The problem with zir’an is the come back mechanics if you don’t get the ball rolling you will get left very far behind against a lot of match ups not to say it’s not possible but I’d say it’s fairly draw dependent. And healing yourself for two isn’t exactly a tempo gain for that you can just run healing mystic but there’s a argument that says drawing even her is sometimes game breaking when you want something of more value.
If you want to get the ball rolling more reliably as Zir’an, place your minions further back when first summoned. Key effect guys, if you aren’t using their effect right when you summon them, must be kept out of reach. Because of how much healing the deck typically packs it’s ok to have a little bit of lost pressure early in order to make sure you have your value swing once things get going.
I think Zi’ran self heal would without a doubt make her one of the strongest generals, maybe OP. This isn’t priest in Hearthstone - general health is worth a lot more here. Although I think some variant of it could work. Maybe make it only able to heal herself and one space around her, and, like you said, nerf the heal to 2? Would be pretty cool.
@3zekiel: That Healyonar isn’t good is not just my opinion here, it’s commonly accepted. Keep in mind that this late in the month many decks will work in Diamond.
The issue with Taygete is she trades with most cards in the game, those she doesn’t often have hard-counters (Ironcliffe? Tombstone? I pack Grovekeepers for no other reason, and have been DBed by lyonar only once over two seasons). Her statline makes her a decent threat even if dispelled, making hard removal often the only way to not lose tempo to her. I’ve ran to S-rank with magmar this month and last; it was easier than normal and I wouldn’t say it had nothing to do with Taygete.
Key to her use is the same handy removal-face combo that makes holy immolation so strong, and taygete will earn more value than holy immolation if she survives a single turn without being dispelled, let alone more. She provides fantastic tempo, easily one of the top 3 4 mana cards in the game, arriving in a faction with Flash Reincarnation, which sort of pushes her over the edge into ‘too useful’.
I can understand why people like the card and get the arguments as to why it works for magmar to have ‘their op card’ but the truth of the matter is most of this defense stems from folks not having played magmar well before Taygete’s release. I played magmar the month bbs’s were released and Vaath was doing quite well for me Diamond and above. I didn’t play much Duelyst after that until the Sisters’ release, but chats with veteran magmars led me to believe during that gap that they had no lack of success. Magmar was doing fine before Taygete as far as I’m concerned.
I think Taygete has made the faction unstable in the direction of being too powerful, but I’m holding my breath for Shim’zar. If it doesn’t include a direct nerf to Taygete, it might just change the meta enough that her strength decreases. Taygete is in no way powerful enough that she couldn’t exist as-is, it’s just that magmar has too many “aggressive control” options right now in a world with few cards that handle them well. There are generals that handle current Vaath aggression (see Faie and Songhai, primarily Riva, and certain Cassy decks), but most have a bear of a time.
Yeah you make solid points, I agree that it would be particularly strong. I’m torn on the idea of reducing the range on her BBS. On one hand, it reinforces the idea of strategic zeal positioning. On the other hand, this change would make it even harder to heal her minions, and then zi’ran basically becomes “heal yourself every two turns”, rather than healing minions for board control. Perhaps something like “if cast on your general, heal your general for 1 and deal damage to one of your minions” (selected). This has the effect of discouraging zi’ran from using her bbs on herself too often, but it does leave the option open and allows her to heal her minions a later turn.
Too powerful you say,Find a magmar tournament winner since Lyvern in king of beta.Look for the tournament winners and runnner ups and see how many times Magmar is used as one of three decks of tournament winner.Even recently with Taygete making Magmar better when it time to play serious games Magmar doesn’t get used.
Magmar wasn’t in a good place before for Taygete, It was about same level as current vet faction.
Tourneys aren’t random matchups and thus have extremely different pressures than the ladder. If we had some faction with an incredibly niche card base, possessing cards that were great counters to specific strategies, it would perform great in tournaments, and not-so-hot on the ladder. In the past, Vetruvian has sometimes been like that- a lot easier to tourney with than ladder. Magmar cards bring excellent value, and are easily countered if you know they’re coming, making them the opposite: great on ladder, not-so-hot in tourneys.
This meta is in a very sorry state right now. It’s basically just people chain dropping the same uber-powerful cards with each faction / spicing in some uber-powerful neutrals when needed. There is an absolutely vast power difference between taygete / makantor / lantern fox / revenant / divine bond (these are just instances, there are more cards like this), and every other card in the game. Games just devolve into “i play my uber powerful card, you play yours”, and it just feels stale. I really hope we get some nerfs soon. It’s boring as hell seeing the same stuff every game, and always having to have a silence in your hand for the next imba fatty that drops each turn.
Same reason I dislike magmar, but it is not strong it is because their mechanical way of playing is built like that