Hearthstone, Meta Diversity, and Why It’s Important

Feels like it's been a while since I have talked about one of my favorite games of all time, probably because it has been. Not without good reason, obviously, as it has been an insane and frankly, still very depressing year. Still, it's worth remembering everything that happened.

The game got a whole new class in the form of Demon Hunter that ended up terrorizing the meta for quite a while. After all, when you give a class whose identity is built around attacking the opponent in large bursts the ability to also clear boards and also draw a bunch of cards, that’s usually a recipe for being broken.

On top of that, there was a return to old mechanics in the form of Dormant minions from “Ashes of Outland,” and the introduction of Dual-class cards in “Scholomance Academy.” In the list of new mechanics, we also got a contender for one of the worst in the game's history: Corrupt, which requires you to play a card of a higher cost first in order to get the corrupted effect.

More recently though, the meta seems to have settled down, and, outside of the recent rein of Evolve Shaman and the currently dominating Ramp Paladin, it feels pretty open. It is not often that I get to say something like that considering the game’s extremely long history of broken mechanics, but with a lot of cards in “Madness at the Darkmoon Faire” feeling a bit underwhelming, and the “Darkmoon Races” mini-set only bringing a few more relevant cards to the table, there are plenty of decks sitting in tier two that can succeed.

Which is a good thing, right? Well, yes. Oftentimes I see people complaining about stale metas, and while yes fighting the same decks over and over again certainly is not the most fun, it does come with some benefits. When there are only a few decks that are considered top tier, as the case currently in the wild meta, it makes the predicted matchup spread significantly smaller. This, in turn, means that there is a smaller pool of decks against which one needs to reasonably come up with counter-play. Thus, less competitive decks ostensibly make “figuring out the meta,” and by extension winning, much easier.

However, people are people, and as much as competitors want to be good at something, they also want it to be fun. Cards games like Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering implement rotating formats for that reason so that if a particular strategy becomes dominant, or the game just becomes too stagnant, there is a built-in way of changing the game at some point.

Now, as previously mentioned, there are times when the game needs to change much more rapidly than that, as certain strategies become so dominant as to feel nearly unbeatable. This is why having a card game be online is convenient because it allows the developers to make adjustments to cards that become too powerful.

What was this post about? I don’t remember. While the last year of Hearthstone, much like the year in general, was tumultuous, there is reason to believe that it will get better.

How do you folks feel about Hearthstone these days? Let me know in the comments below.

If you can’t, or just don’t feel like it, no worries. Thank you all for reading, and goodbye, for now, friendos!

Originally published at http://animatedobservations.com on January 31, 2021.