How One Card Broke A Card Game 

Imagine

I know right, because this animation thing is still a problem against decks that play stupid amounts of cards in a turn and its even happening in battlegrounds...

@@MrMoustachioo battlegrounds is still a hassle on mobile. I am limited by the game aesthetics, not my real actions per minute

I cannot imagine how crazy the game must be written that they can't change it to the turn timer starting on your own turn...

literally the most obvious fix known to mankind, "make your turn start when your turn actually starts", and yet

Oooh i forgot about that. Good one!

However, they fixed it

@Hysteria favorite move. With a knife juggler. Just one.

Aviana+kun combos were my favorites

One of my colleagues during education did that once. So stupid

Unfortunately that could also be abused by bots since they can move so much faster than any human could. The very first Noz abuse was by Blizzards own AI in the singleplayer modes because their turn took a fraction of a second even though the animations were much longer. The problem isn't that animation times count towards the turn timer its that the other players animation times and "start of turn" animations count towards your turn timer. If they just set your turn timer to start when the card drawing animation finished (or something similar) then 99% of these problems would never pop up.

It's called a bug, if you were a game devloper it would be easy for anyone to look at the bugs you made and critizes them starting with "why would anyone". Granted this seems like something that could be fixed with enough tinkering but given the rumors I wouldn't be suprised if blizzard's game devlopers are underpaid.

Hearthstone is a multiplayer game, and the turns timers are obviously handled server-side, while the animations are purely client-side

Funny that people defend this. Sure, having animations not count towards timers would be abusable, but at least you couldn't skip entire turns anymore like this. If fucking Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel can get that right (except for bot protection, which basically doesn't exist), then Hearthstone should have been able to as well. Bot prevention could be handled client side and server side by counting the time between player actions (client side) and if it's the same time 5 times in a row, that would almost certainly be a bot. Further you could try to count inhumanly quick actions (under 0,2 seconds) towards the same strike system. You cannot fully prevent bots from appearing, but those measures alone would at least get rid off the simpler ones, which are usually the majority of them.

@@narfd.8837 I'm not defending it, I'm just saying that there are technical reasons for why this exists and is pretty untrivial to fix

The card that pushed me away

@@weaselhatgaming1010 the card that put me into legend, then i quited. Really never got close to legend again, shudderwock was just stupid.

Yeah I remember in my extremely brief stint in playing hearthstone getting burned numerous times by that card. Literally quit the game because of it and other very overpowered cards. Just wasn't fun honestly to watch or play against players that cheese their way to wins through mechanic abuse.

@@kid10249595 jokes on you shudderwock got me to legend, it was fun sometimes people just conceded on saronite extractors.

One of my favorite decks of all time

Shudderwock was a whole new level of problem...

My jaws that bite! My claws that CATCH!!!

This isn’t just a Shudder problem, too. Similar issues can arise with quite a few cards. Some that come to mind are Tess, Yoggs, and the Xyrella hero. I kinda wish Hearthstone had a proper stop between your turn and villain’s turn to check if animations were still going, and if they were, pause both player’s timers until they’re done.

shudderwock was fun though.

@@RMGamer31O "villain's". xD

If I could make these videos instead of the daily ones, I would and I will try to get there!

@@Rarran yeah, weekly videos is okay

It's a fun idea but it's such a terrible design even aside from the bugs. What if someone's computer lags? What if one of the players has bad eyesight and needs more time to read? Too bad guess you lose xd

They didn't have the time to stop and think, they only had 15 seconds on the clock

I mean in the alpha or beta I can't remember which, there was a card that would literally flip the screen horizontally. So, you can probably imagine that because they were one of the first few online card games, they went a little wild with what they could come up with. As a result, you get stuff like Nozdormu.

@@randomusername1735 then it lags, the card is awful. The design is fine, it wasn't meant to be competitive and never was

Games shameful to begin with

Excellent point. I play Pokemon myself, and due to the nature of the game there haven't been too many truly broken cards. I remember just a standard rotation ago Arceus Dialga Palkia GX was called a broken card by everyone because of it's once per game attack which allowed you to take an extra prize (your game winning resource) and deal extra damage for the rest of the game. It was a powerful deck in standard, absolutely. However, a testament to it being overpowered and not broken is expanded where it is rarely used. The standard did not allow for many counters let alone other win conditions to happen (as a control player, it truly was the bane of my existence for that standard). Like I said, it's incredibly rare for cards to get banned in Pokemon (with the exception of legacy formats). Should ADP have been banned in standard play? It's hard to say. They released a standard legal ADP deck that was easy to obtain, so many players were able to get their hands on the best deck in format and I think that had a large hand in the hatred for the deck (which isn't the problem, it would have been played in abundance regardless, given that people like to win and I love how easy it is for players to get their hands on meta cards and decks for relatively cheap). Compare that to the current BDIF in format which sees a decent amount of play, but does not dominate in the same way. Or compare that to YuGiOh, which again many cards are necessarily broken it's the interactions due to the nature of not having a standard rotation. The most broken cards tend to be utility cards like Pot of Greed. It's usually not a single busted card but broken mechanics between certain cards. MTG on the other hand... Never play Vintage l. Especially the way it was truly meant to be played. Outside of that, I think standard versus expanded formats again give us a good idea if a card is truly broken or just powerful in the standard vacuum. Just interesting how much more potent powercreep is in MTG versus Pokemon (Pokemon looks a lot more powercrept on the surface but in expanded formats, many older decks are still viable and just improved with newer utility cards, versus something like oh I don't know, Jace). The example in the video shows what a truly broken card is. More then just a BDIF, or a card overused for it's power in standard, but one that literally breaks the game and makes it impossible to overcome due to the rules and how it must be played out. TCGs are just very interesting games to me.

@@JoelRiter I mean half of the supporters are literally required to play the game, pokemon has some absolutely awful balance.

@@Squidmoto3 the difference is the supporters are extremely easy to get a hold of and cheap. If boss's orders was a chase card or even worse professor's research, you would be absolutely correct. But I can buy a full set of four of all the most used supporters for under 30 bucks. And Pokemon is extremely fun to play. If anything hearthstone is a mess due to it being strictly online and thus has no real world value. If blizzard stops supporting it, then what? And the resource system is not exactly wonderful. You have a similar idea to a mana curve in MTG without having to count on the potential to draw unwanted resources. Each TCG is relatively unique in some aspect. Hell, even the modern mess that is Yu-Gi-Oh has its own merits despite Konami being Konami. If it's not for you, that's fine, but there's a reason Hearthstone isn't considered one of the big three but MTG Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh are (in that order). Now I can get into the actual design and theory and why each supporter has different applications depending on the style. I'm a control player so I use quite a bit less draw support then most other decks. Even then, it's rare for there to be a truly broken card or deck in the game (with the exception of standard when we had to deal with ADP but there was a lot more reasoning to that then just a single card, Zacian V truly broke it in unison but again rarely sees play in expanded). You prefer Hearthstone, that's fine, but it's no more or less superior then any other TCG. I mean I could argue that, but you enjoy what you enjoy and I can see what someone would enjoy Hearthstone more, might not fully understand it, but I can see enjoyment gleamed from it.

@@Squidmoto3 and as for balance, let me give you an example. Mew Vmax is hands down BDIF right now. But it still doesn't win big tournaments due to how streamlined it is. It becomes a solitaire match that anyone of any skill level can play. Rapid Strike Urshifu has won far more tournaments without being as consistent because it allows for more decisions to be made. You might always have what you need to attack for high damage with New, but that's it. No true counter play. I can easily beat either of those decks with Durant Mill right now due to the excessive options I have, but that also leads to bricks quite often. Like any TCG it's a balancing act and you have to understand what you are playing and how to pilot.

only brainlets use "broken" to mean "too good"

Pretty sure it is skippable now for a while. Just tap the animation/card

@@nikkosmit6985 Very few animations are actually skippable. Most aren't.

@@Owlr4ider can’t you just Click them?

@@nikkosmit6985 No... Some happen between turns, some have voice attached to them, some just ignore clicks, etc... Remember we're talking about animations as a whole, from the animation of drawing cards to the various pop ups in single player content to cards like Ragnaros shooting his fireball and many many more. P.S all the above examples aren't skippable and waste a ton of time, be it in single or multiplayer.

Yeah, I've noticed that. I feel like as cards are getting more complicated, more and more cards are having incredibly long animations, which is bad for both the pace of the game, and for the ability of players to make decisions based on these animations. I honestly think its gotten to the point where Hearthstone needs to do something like double the speed of all their animations.

Or the knife juggle combo with that naxxramus card that has dethrattle return a minion to your hand. You could return a card to your hand part way through it's summoning which allowed all sorts of insane things (especially with Chameleos)

In due time? The card was in HS from the start and years later it still wasnt fixed. They shouldve scrap the ability altogether and come up with something else. They vehemently defend the ability to showcase what digital card game can do but instead making it worse. Noz isnt even the real culprit, the whole animation timer thingy is borked (Re: BG's apm pirate).

The peoblem never was the card but HS stupid approach to animations. Shudderwock broke the game later bc of the same problems with abimations

Even without of all the bugs it cause it was terrible for the game since it made the game functionaly unplayable on mobile as it just take longer to play stuff on a phone than with mouse and keyboard.

@@XenithShadow i mean yeah, outside of bugs it messes with something in the game that simply shouldnt be messed with.

What this video doesn't tell you is that this card was an actual MEME for years because of how bad it was. Terrible stats and effects for 9 mana with the negative effect for both players. Other than that 2 at a tourney, the clips you see here are from low rank shenanigans. It was never a popular or common card to see

Nozdormu is, in my opinion, the worst-designed card ever made. The game’s bad designs peaked in the first ever set, and it literally could only be uphill from there.

just pause the move timer when animations play, other online tcgs do that

Well, there's a whole 'nother heap of problems in Wild going on While standard is beloved and gets a lot of care, Wild...is wild, alright I love getting killed on turn 2 because the enemy rolled arguably not bad

I play Wild exclusively out of the traditional game (i.e. not counting Battlegrounds, Mercenaries, Adventures, or Tavern Brawls). I hate Standard, I don't want to give up on cards it took me forever to collect playing (mostly) F2P since 2014

smol indie compani

He'd lowkey be an insane floodgate lol

As you said, you have the benefit of hindsight. I'm guessing they thought that it was a counter to combo decks that take long times to perform, and also means that if you're faster at thinking than your opponent, you'd benefit from the shorter turns.

early heartstone was more focused on fun cards nozdurmu, millhouse, gelbin mekk, ETC if anything, reducing the turn timer is a better mechanic than the other scrapped fun cards, such as gaining stats for lose streaks or taking damage when hovering over a card

Because it shakes shit up (variety is fun) god damn it!! Hearthstone was practically BUILT on cool / wacky ideas and the interesting interactions that arise from that!!

I dont know much about hearthstone but this card seems exceptionally bad outside of this one specific niche, so that probably why it lasted for so long: no one was playing it.

@@Clickstop24 As someone that has only played yugioh, usually it’s best to remove cards like this even if their not actively played, cards like this are just waiting for a random one off to completely break the game, and when you have to design cards around other broken cards you know you have a problem.

@@shylogik ah the snake rain / block dragon problem in yugioh to be fair snake rain is still a problem it just konami is ultra careful with that

well, i was wrong

honestly same

I mean, that card was broken for very similar reasons...

Wait, he actually returned to HS?

@@riatorex8722 he returned briefly, did not stream most of it, got to masters and i believe stoped again. He mostly memed it when he stream, putting it on the side while playing valorant

Blizzard's greed and incompetence has ruined the company

there might be issues but its so rare the effect actually happens since both players need to have him in their deck