The Expansion That Almost KILLED Hearthstone 

Funnily enough. He started off more as a history channel and that's what initially got me here.

@@nathanbienias2761 i didn't know that, i guess it explain why he's so good at it

Yeah, he did some documentary style, if I recall correctly one of them was about firebat, for example

@@seilamano3974 Yeah it was with the sciency looking frog.

As someone who is trying to design a card game with similar mechanics to hearthstone, it actually really helps me because I like talking about game theory

Except that has had the opposite effect. We need more tgt and rasta not more of the current idea of one upping everything. It literally shows they have zero creativity if two expansions in a row we had a neutral that was meant to blow up face.

tgt sucked so fuckin much

100% agree. I think they tired again with Rastakhan’s Rumble to make a lower power expansion and it also almost completely killed the game, it was TGT but even worse.

@@Apolloshot And I heard they were rebalancing the game power level with the upcoming expansion. Sounds like a repeat.

I loved TGT. Everyone else is wrong and the reason for awful power creep

leggit ran into someone at a bar that played and was excited to play only to run into my full golden wild mage xD

Sacrificial impact on jaraxxus is to this day maybe one of the best comeback scenarios ever. Ran dragon priest/pally a lot back then and had that happen on a few occasions.

Came here to say the same. UiS was the worst expansion.

Was my favorite expansion, super skill expressive meta, with some of the most fun decks being the strongest (garotte rogue & lifesteal dh).

@@youvegoattobekittenme6908 You are a monster.

@@youvegoattobekittenme6908 it's funny that you say that, because i remember it as exactly the opposite. Quest mage, garrote rogue, and especially quest warlock, are some of my least favorite decks ever. Lifesteal dh was kind of cool, but i basically never ran into it on latter. And then there was the wild meta, which was its own level of shitshow.

@@youvegoattobekittenme6908 skill expressive like waste to get my OTK first? Is solitaire skill expressive?

They were so iconic they ended up being added to WoW. That really means something.

you play hs for fun? wtf

@@lordmatz3435 yeah, I'm happy

​@Kayke Marlon Ayo don't mind that dumbass. HS has its peaks and lows, but you can still have fun with it

@@kaykemarlon9238 nah dude dont lie to me

@@lordmatz3435 nah, for real, just got my subscription to a public exam accepted, so now I'm employed and I can play wacky decks that sometimes work or sometimes doesn't, you just gotta live the life you want to live

Another factor was how long it was between Curse of Naxxramas’s announcement and its actual release. It was announced 1 month after the full release of the game, but wasn’t released for almost 2 1/2 months after that.

I mean the delays on it was still a good meme too lol! I remember being in kripps chat and him getting trolled every half an hour lol!

Oh wow! I didn't know that. So kind of like the Leeroy meme.

no. As simply as it is, Naxx expansion was delayed by Blizzard by 2 days ... and people loose their minds. So a lot of them start to troll others on Reddit, or Twitch by saying "naxx out" every hour on these 2 days. There were no reference to Wow or anything.

Omg, same for me, i remember that half of my friends used to play hearthstone, compare decks and etc

yeah me too, made one of my best friends to this day cuz we were ripping hearthstone during grade 10 english

Bruh that mobile launch had everybody talking about Hearthstone in my high school! I was already a senior about to graduate, but I remember kids on the bus asking each other's tag name. And then even the teachers were like, "what's this Hearthstone you guys keep talking about?" Good times!

Bro you unlocked memories thanks m8

Same here, I think I spent a good 80% of my school breaks of 2015-16 playing Hearthstone

knights was fun, the hero cards were so cool to play and build around rip my golden jaina xD

and I remember playing from LoE to Ungoro, then I had a break through KoFT, K&C and Witchwood only to return during Boomsday - it was so weird to learn about hero cards during Boomsday

I still watch old HS videos, especially WOTOG, LOE

I thought it was Karazhan? I remember there were a lot of Hearthstone players around that time too.

I love Frozen Throne. So many viable decks that format, except for Shaman. Shaman had to wait some expansion in the shits till Shudderwock took all the fun.

Agreed. Gadgetzan was the only "weak" point of the year, and weak is in quotation marks because the issue was quite literally the opposite: everything was too strong. Patches the Pirate and Pirate Warrior in general, which was and remains to this day one of the most frustrating decks to play against that the game has ever seen, Highlander Mage and Priest with Inkmaster Solia, Raza the Chained, Reno Jackson and good ol' Kazakus, and let's not forget the absolute hell that descended upon Hearthstone with the advent of .... *shudder* ... Jade. Un'Goro, especially quests, brought something really fun to Hearthstone that no expansion since has managed to replicate, imo, and for all the good new stuff we get with proper balancing patches, improved rewards and an actually fair battle pass system, I miss the time when Demon Hunter didn't exist. I mean seriously, who thought that giving a hyper-aggro class the best draw in the game (during Nathria I played against an aggro DH who hit fatigue on his turn 10 draw for turn) was going to be a good idea? All this to say: I agree with you. That whole period was peak Hearthstone, and I think that we'll unfortunately never get an experience quite as fun as that year/year-and-a-half, except for maybe, arguably, Dungeon Run in K&C.

Apple and Google both still have an update approval policy

@@lolwutizit yes but it’s not as stringent in terms of certain updates anymore

Damn that's crazy. Following apples policy when you're not even on ios? Das crazy.

@@TJPesce420 they are! mobile updates were notoriously different and also every update costs admin costs

That's actually really cool to know, I know app stores have plagued them for a while due to simply the amount of languages that they have to support...

Mirrodin was bad, but it wasn’t the block that nearly killed the game. That was Urza’s Saga block. Urza’s Saga was originally designed as an enchantment-focused block, but also included powerful artifact synergies like Tolarian Academy, combo enablers like Windfall, and a group of free spells that untapped lands equal to the mana spent to cast them, most notably Time Spiral. This was a huge mistake. The combo deck that formed around Tolarian Academy destroyed all 4 formats, with notable success at the December 1998 Extended Pro Tour (Pro Tour Rome). Wizards saw their mistake and reacted quickly, banning or restricting Tolarian Academy, Windfall, and Stroke of Genius in all formats. It wasn’t enough. New combo decks popped up. Dream Halls, Earthcraft, Fluctuator, Recurring Nightmare. High Tide was especially powerful. Urza’s Legacy released Memory Jar and Tinker, creating a deck that needed to be emergency banned. All of those decks except High Tide were banned, and High Tide was nerfed heavily by the banning of Time Spiral. It wasn’t enough. Urza’s Destiny released Academy Rector and Yawgmoth’s Bargain, and all 4 formats continued to be dominated by combo decks. It would take until the fall of 1999 for the last remaining Combo Winter decks to be banned, which happened at the same time as Yawgmoth’s Will was finally banned. None of these decks were fun to play against. Many weren’t even fun to play. Attendance at tournaments and sales plummeted, and R&D made changes to ensure that such a mistake would never happen again. (It indeed has never happened again.) Legend has it that the R&D team was threatened with losing their jobs if they ever made a block that powerful again. Mirrodin was bad, but it only wrecked Standard and was enabled by lax banning policy. Combo Winter was almost a full year of every format sucking despite multiple banlists.

Lol no inspire was garbage. Either your opponent could kill the minion immediately or you started snowballing. There's a reason most of the inspire cards were bad, because they are near impossible to balance. Team5 has even admitted this themselves.

They actually did touch it a couple of times after, just without the keyword. Off the top of my head there's the hunter ballista legendary, and I think there were more

It is by far the worst mechanic ever made, but at least it was interesting.

Inspire sucks because the cards that used it suck. On the custom site, there are some really really good inspire cards, and while the mechanic didn’t do great, I think it’s one of my favorite keywords based on its potential to be insane if done right (which obviously didn’t happen in TGT

​@@mrcx6142 really saying inspire is worse than overkill?

I remembered True Heart giving a great boost to control warrior, truly loved the game then with the upgraded Warrior HP

Yes

Yes.Also it was all Ben Brode's fault or am I mistaken?

Also everyone wants to see what's in the box.

Just role a dice. One of the oldest game-ultilities: a cube to determin randomness. Or flip a coin ... you can just add any mechanic, that is not a card. Or you shuffel your deck and the order is random. Randomness is easy for a physical card game.

@@SoulAcid1 ok how do you "add a random spell to your hand" in a physical card game? Do you have a deck full of a copy of each you randomly draw from. And do you do that for every unique type of card you can generate?

@@Isabelle-mp8rk I have never written that. But "random stuff" is possible. It was your wording. And yes, you can have a sideboard to do "random stuff", too.

​@@Isabelle-mp8rk Someone actually tried making a physical version of Hearthstone once. I'll see if I can find the video again.

League of Explorers introduced discover, actually.

@@petrie911 thanks I couldn't remember. I only started playing when death knights came out

I don’t get what was impactful about TGT at all. In fact I don’t understand this video’s point.

@@Begeru Basically, Blizz learned that people are very happy to throw money at them so they made sure that each expansion is stronger than the last one, leading to huge power creep.

Tried to change the device?

@@christopherIF yeah I have a pixel 6 pro and a Samsung s22. My friend who has an iphone 14 also has the same issue.

Weird. I have never had that kind of issue on my OnePlus phones. 🤔

you wish

We got a lot of awesome cards in witchwood, but unfortunately Shuderwock ruined it completely

@@skuty4882exactly what I was gonna say, the first day was literally all “MY JAWS THAT BITE, MY CLAWS THAT CATCH!”

I remember I was in high school at the point and it was a matter of honor not using irl money for expansions. Most of us managed to grind through all Naxx and Blackrock and I think the only time someone spent money on it was one guy who bought some packs in his bday

Mean streets did the big powercreep thing first imo

I mean, the Un'Goro Quests were also non-minion legendaries

100% agree

To be honest, classic hearthstone had Miracle rogue Leeroy combo and Druid Savage roar + Force of Nature. I think "Minion combat" is a pipe dream that only exists in Arena.

​@@mudkipmilk Don't forget how burn-centric Mage was.

Discover literally is why Highlander which was also introduced there is literally overpowered.

dont forget about brann, he was really bad for the future balance of the game, make it so much more difficult

Make paying customers pissed off for the first time

It was everywhere, to the point people would assume if you didn't have it in your deck, it was because you didn't own it

Historically Odd decks were more impactful. Even shaman and warlock were the only ones that made Even a threat for a long time and now you can add death knight. For odd, It had hunter, mage, Paladin, warrior, Rogue, Demon hunter all as competitive decks for big stretches of time. Even hunter and Paladin had a small splash but questlines were better than both now. Odd decks are on a decline now but the only classes that never really had an even or odd deck function were priest and druid. Both are extremely good. They weren’t targeted to rotate early for power though. They were targeted for consistency issues. Matches felt too samey

@@Skullhawk13 My first decks that helped me see some success were Odd Rogue and Odd Paladin, one of the reasons why they saw a lot of play is that you really only needed one legendary to have a reasonable chance to compete, though, Even decks are more value oriented with the cards they provided so they tend to be more on the expensive side. (I quit around Dalaran Heist cause burnout)

I mean, not everyone played Magic, Yugioh, or Pokémon as a kid, regardless of age.

@@Begeru I suppose it being digital and free made it more accessible, although I knew very few people who never in their life had at least tried one. And I don't just mean pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh and magic, you had so many card games getting made in the early 00s that they were hard to avoid. It felt like every company was trying to hit it big with some card game. I think most people had at least one friend who tried to convert them to this or that card game. Not to mention that things like baseball cards were still popular back in the 90s and 00s(not sure about the 2010s or nowadays). Obviously not all, but if you were playing video games in 2013, there was a good chance you had at least tried a card game at some point. Personally the main reason I tried hearthstone in the first place is because I had hoped it was like the WoW TCG.