So i don’t really want to post here but i feel like this needs to be addressed and even after 3 months of this bullshit nobody else seems to do it so here i go.
The direction this game has taken with the recent expansion is bad, like really bad. There is a discussion going on about whether or not Strategos/Wanderer are too strong but that debate completely misses the point. The actual point that should be made, and the reason why they should be nerfed into oblivion is that they are a completely unfun card design. It’s kind of ironic that a company calls itself Counterplaygames and yet insists on making cards that don’t have any counterplay. Since the trials provide almost infinite value with absolutely no counterplay there is no way for a normal deck to beat a trial deck in the long game. If you want to beat them you have to do so before they can play their trial or shortly after, the longer the game drags on the smaller your chances of winning are. The downsides of this card design should be obvious but apparently they aren’t so i will list them here:
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These kind of cards always end up being either black or white. They are either too slow to be relevant and end up as memes like Doom or they are fast enough to come online regularly like Wanderer and Strategos in which case they usually dominate the meta.
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As long as they are relevant these kind of cards usually shape the meta around themselves. Since there is no counterplay to them, aside from killing the opponent before he can play them, it leaves people with basically 2 choices. Play an aggro/combo deck that is fast enough to race them or play them yourself. This is not a choice i want to make.
Historically, midrange has always been the most common archetype in this game. We only had a select few combo and control decks through out Duelysts history that were viable and by now all of them have been nerfed into oblivion. Aggro was always been there but in most metas midrange was the most prevelant archetype. The problem we have now is that in a meta where Wanderer/Strategos are common, midrange can’t exist, or rather the only midrange decks that can exist are those two. They outclass any other midrange build to such an extent that playing something else is basically memeing around because from a competitive point of view there is no reason to play something that’s strictly inferior. -
It’s just plain disgusting to play against cards like this because it’s always just a race. Your literally not playing against another player, you just play against time. It makes playskill irrelevant to a good extent because no matter how much you outplay the other guy, your still destined to lose unless you can finish him off fast enough.
If i find myself up against them with a slow starting hand i usually just concede because i know there is now way for me to win. Getting snowballed to death without a chance of doing anything is common enough in this game, but this is usually something you can disregard as luck. You can shake it off thinking: “Ok my opponent had a perfect draw/i didn’t draw the need answers. Nothing i could do about it”. But with Wanderer luck isn’t even involved anymore, it’s a certainty. You know for sure that they will be able to play the freaking 7/7 on 6 mana because it stays in hand from the beginning. The only luck related thing here is, do they also have the Flash/DFS to really fuck up your day or is just the “normal” cancer?
The prepatch Standard meta was one of the worst metas i have experienced in this game in my 25 seasons of playing, far worse than Saurian Vaath or Arcanyst Vanar. Against those decks, even if they managed to play their wincons, you still could beat them if you played well. Against Trials this isn’t possible. It’s the first meta since October Reva that made me stop playing. It’s really no suprise to me that the standard ladder was void of players with that kind of meta.
Anyone with a trace of honor probably stopped playing or escaped to unlimited where they weren’t as prevelant, leaving only the jerks and their trinity of cancer (Aggro Zirix, Strategos, Wanderer) in standard. I didn’t play all that many matches in Diamond, maybe 20 before i dropped the game, but it was literally 90% one of those 3 that i had to face. This is as far away from fun as you can get. It was probably the second fastest and also the second worst meta in Duelyst history.
With the latest patch things got a little better, Zirix is less aggressive now and i don’t see as much trial bullshit around but the problem of their sheer existance still remains and depending on how the meta shifts they might take over again.
So please CPG, just nerf that bullshit into oblivion. If you reduce all of them to memeton levels of viability people might actually have some fun playing your game again. I am pretty sure that you will never ever get enough players to support 3 queues while cards like this shape the meta, there can’t possibly be enough masochists around to support that.
Oh and as a side note, next time one of you devs feels like making a card similar to Accumulonimbus, please don’t. That card is almost as stupid as the trials. Absurd levels of burst damage that’s entirely dependend on luck. As the only factor that determines how much burst it gets, is the question how many of them you manage to draw. Even if it’s beatable, getting hit by it at 4, 5 and 7 mana is entirely unpleasant.
Please be aware that most of the people playing your game actually chose to play it above something like Hearthstone is because they like using their brains. If you keep making cards like that we might as well play Hearthstone.
