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Mending Monday Specials #4: Balance? None of your Business!

by - 8 years ago

mysterious-challenger

Design-wise, the Mysterious Challenger is easily one of the most interesting cards of The Grand Tournament. But perhaps more importantly, its also one of the strongest. The Mysterious Challengers brings a lot of power to the table, enough to garner the attention of players and earn the much-maligned “overpowered tag”. With a triple 6 statline, the Mysterious Challenger has earned the nickname of Dr.6, a callback to Doctor Boom’s Triple 7 statline.

But despite the similarity in power level, with both being cards that can be devastating when played on-curve, the two Doctors couldn’t be any more different.

boom-botdoctor-boomboom-bot

In one corner you have Dr.Seven, Dr.Boom is a self sufficient threat that doesn’t need an activator, doesn’t need a big set-up, and doesn’t need an specific deck. You just play Boom and he, along with his trusty Boom Bots will fight for the board to the best of their abilities. Dr. Boom can be fitted into a lot of different decks, to great effect. Basically almost every mid-range and control deck is better-off including Dr.Seven.  The only detail with Dr. Boom is that you can’t control where the bombs will land and how much damage they will do. The randomness on the Boom Bot’s Deathrattle can be highly frustrating as this random effect can often be the difference between a win and a loss, but at least Dr. Boom brings the kind of variance that at least adds something to the game. When playing with or against Boom you need to be smart enough to calculate the different Boom Bot scenarios and make the plays that maximize your chances. Proper sequencing is key when there are Boom Bots on the board, and lesser players are prone to making the kind of sequencing mistakes that can throw away games.  Personally, I like the randomness in my competitive games to be kept to a minimum but I can see an argument being made for this kind of variance having a positive effect on the game.

But things are much different on the side of Doctor Six. The Mysterious Challenger does provide huge value for its mana cost, but it comes with a sizable drawback. Doctor Six, is not a card that you can just throw into any deck. It isn’t just a Paladin Class Card, but it also requires you to include secrets in your decklist. Traditionally, Paladin secret don’t see much play because they aren’t really powerful cards. To get maximum value out of the Mysterious Challenger, you need to include a lot of secrets, so this means that you are using a lot of cards that are traditionally considered weak, and that’s what keeps the Mysterious Challenger from being absurdly overpowered. While the card itself has insane value, you are forced into also playing sub-optimal cads, so the overall strength of the deck is kept in check.

SecretKeeperrepentance

But design-wise, this a double edged sword. There a big positive to “reviving” cards that weren’t seeing play in the meta. Mysterious Challenger breaths new life into cards like Repentance and Secret Keeper, and opens up a completely new archetype to spice up the meta, but this comes at a high price. The Secret Paladin archetype is a wildly inconsistent deck, if you’ve played the deck enough, you’ve gotten to a point where you draw too many of your secrets and they are essentially blanks. This also reduces the value of your Challenger, if the secrets are already out of your deck when you play him, you won’t get the full Christmas Tree that has given nightmare to many players around the globe.

The Secret Paladin is infuriatingly dependent on drawing your cards on the right order, where it feels like too often the god draw will easily run away with games, and poor draws will result in inevitable losses. Sure, all decks do better when you get the correct draws, the luck of the draw is an integral part of card games, but I feel like the Mysterious Challenger turns this natural variance up to eleven. The problem is that this particular type of variance is non-interactive, an inconsistent deck that feels too draw dependent doesn’t seem to add to the skill cap, it doesn’t make games feel fresh and different, its just frustrating. If I wanted to play a card game that depended that heavily on top decks, I’d probably would still be playing Magic: The Gathering and be raging because of drawing too many/not enough lands.

In a way, this is the same thing I talked about in my article breaking down Astral Communion. But unlike Astral Communion decks which aren’t really a viable alternative yet, Secret Paladin is at the point where is good but wildly inconsistent. Can you imagine how Secret Paladin ends up if they release more Secret synergy cards that allow the deck to be more consistent? It is certainly a scary thought.


What do you feel about the Mysterious Challenger? Are you enjoying play with and against this new secret Paladin? Let me know using the comment section below.

 

 

 


JR Cook

JR has been writing for fan sites since 2000 and has been involved with Blizzard Exclusive fansites since 2003. JR was also a co-host for 6 years on the Hearthstone podcast Well Met! He helped co-found BlizzPro in 2013.


0 responses to “Mending Monday Specials #4: Balance? None of your Business!”

  1. SuperUai says:

    The inconsistency of the deck can also be accounted on the players. Since this is the deck of the moment, the most premium easy legend climber, everybody went dusts about crafting it (see? it was a pun!). On the good draw, the deck plays by itself, no need for brains or skills, just play on the curve and go face, much like the old cancer, but on the bad draws, you need to think, you need a strategy, and that is when the average players goes boom, like the dinamite.

    I have seen many Secretdin on ranks 7 and 8 where they did not played around my Brawl, or Flamestrike, or did not even think that I might have a flare playing a Hunter deck that sends out a Webspinner on turn 1, i mean, when I play against hunter and he plays a Webspinner, it is obviously a mid range deck or it is November/2014 and I am playing against Deathrattle Hunter. That is when the deck starts being innefective or inconsistent, you can blame it on the players too.

    Really liked the article, it was a great analisys showing that the balance on Dr. 6 is that it only fits on a deck with shitty cards! From your 30 slots avaiable, about 7 must be secrets, so you have 7 less space for diversity or answers to threats.

    • Dannie Ray says:

      Thanks for the kind words! I agree, the quality of the player makes a huge difference on games where you have a poor draw. Still I don’t like to see competitive level decks that can be highly inconsistent.

  2. Golgo13 says:

    I love playing Kezan Mystic against this guy. Pali burns 5 cards and I reap the benefits while he’s THAT much closer to fatigue.

  3. Dobablo says:

    The current state of play is:
    – A Mysterious Challenger that effectively forces all future paladin secrets to be a bit rubbish.
    – An anti-secrets meta that is non-existent because it is weak against the 90% of decks with no secrets.
    – Individual secrets that cannot get too powerful because there is a lack of tools to defend against them.

    The fix would be to add a few more anti-secret cards across all decks that aren’t useless in non-secret play. For example warlocks could do with a 3 cost 4/3 Beholder demon that removes all stealth and secrets.

    • Dannie Ray says:

      That seems a bit strong though.

      • Dobablo says:

        A 3/4 would be better. Tweak suggestions as necessary.
        I got distracted trying to come up with ideas for 9 classes and then cut 8 of them because I had created a wall of text. Balancing wasn’t a priority so just guessed.