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
I think the weakness of TGT also influenced the power creep in Hearthstone. The developers really understood that each new expansion absolutely had to have impactful cards, so you started getting crazier and crazier effects.
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.
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.
One of my most clear memories of hearthstone was when I was doing a friendly match with a buddy. I had lethal on board, lethal in hand, and 15 health as jaraxxus. He played Nefarian and got sacrificial pact and blew me up. Loved Black rock Mountain.
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.
@@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
@@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.
In terms of the amount of players who played the game, the most popular expansion was Knights of the frozen throne. But I remember how much hype there was around the game when TgT came out. The nostalgia is real
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 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.
Magic the Gathering had a similar phenomenon in 2003-2005 they release three sets all themed together called “blocks” and a super powerful block was released in the Mirrodin block and that was followed up by an incredibly weak block called Kamigawa. The designers have mentioned that Mirrodin’s power level was a bit of an accident and they were instructed by management not to have any cards nearly as powerful in the new block and that basically killed an entire format in MtG for years
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.
I remember being in Highscool during the mobile Hearthstone launch and it turned into a lot of people just playing friendly battles during classes and breaks. I think this time was peak Hearthstone for me!
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!
The reason why, when Naxx came out in HS, we were spamming in chat "Naxx out" back then, was not because we was excited by the expension but because, back in WoW, the release of the Naxxramas was a mess and much waited :D it's was a WoW meme before the HS meme :)
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.
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.
The random stuff in GvG also made sense thematically in the WoW universe because goblin and gnome engineering items have (had) a random chance to do something else (explode, fail, different effect, teleport you 100 meters into the air)
LoE was my intro to Hearthstone, which made me fall in love for the game. The entire year of the Kraken (WotOG, Karazhan, MSoG) + Ungoro was my favourite time with this game - ever. Played every single day for 2 years straight. I miss that time.
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.
Undertaker actually wasn't nerfed due to Apple's policy for app store updates at the time. (basically a month's long approval process) There was a point where they changed how hearthstone was built to allow changes to happen without an update (and eventually Apple abandoned the policy)
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...
I think the main reason why naxx was so good was also because it was the first time we could actually buy S tier cards w/o the RNG from buying packs. That was for me the best thing ever.
Funny that the worst expansion in HS (TGT) introduced us to Justicar Trueheart...which was one of the most beloved cards on the expansion...and ended up leading to another hated expansion such as Witchwood due to the upgraded hero powers :P
I've mourned the grand tournament since it rotated out of standard. Inspire was such a great mechanic to encourage use of the hero power and it was never touched again
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
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
I played from 2013-2017 free to play and managed to hit legend a couple times. Only time I ever spent money was naxx. I remember grinding so much arena to save up gold for the new adventures and expansions. (700g for one chapter out of five for each adventure wtf) 😂
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
Just to summarise it TGT was the pivot expansion because its cards power level was balanced so Blizz decided to go the way of power creeping after that and ruined Hearthstone balance forever Right?
3:08 It wasn't my first game, but I agree that Hearthstone was brilliant in the beginning, especially for newcomers in terms of card games. That also has to do with how ridiculously easy it is to learn. Compared to Yugioh, especially younger Yugioh, and magic as well, Hearthstone is ridiculously easy to get into because you basically go from "I have no idea how this card game works" to "Got it, I now understand everything I need to understand in order to properly get involved and even play ranked provided I have the cards" within like a day.
I'm just gonna say that the mid-2010's were like the best years ever mostly because of Hearthstone. Idk why but the vibe was just so good back then. I noticed things started to go downhill in like 2017-ish and ever since then, it's just been plummeting. I don't just mean Hearthstone, I mean like everything. I wonder if things will get better again.
I had a silver hand deck at that moment and I won a lot of games vs my nemesis, the secret paladin. The cool thing is that I made that deck entirely Oh and I did that because I didn't have the mysterious challenger in my collection lol but I enjoyed it so much
I started playing in Un'Goro, so I haven't experienced everything in this video. For me, Kobolds and Catacombs was the most impactful set. It really powercreeped the game and noone seemed to complain about it, so they kept on doing it. It was also the first time they did non-minion legendaries which were very well received.
Good review. I don't play anymore but it's refreshing nostalgia to see this. Can't believe you neglected to mention My Man Piloted Shredder. Loved that card with a passion. =P
what u said made no sense... If you think classic heartstone need no engagement or investement ur out of ur mind I had friend that were playing 8h a day for a whole year and everytime they release new card they could not finish unlocking what was beford without investing money in it.... It was literally hs biggest problem and this is the very reason it never became as big as it could have been...
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.
To add to the undertaker topic. Back then competitive used a King of the Hill format. So if you’re deck won you would use it again and the opponent would select a new one. And whoever beat all the opponents decks won. So a lot of the time both players would just lock Undertaker Hunter and whoever won the mirror would 3-0 the series.
Man what you’re saying makes sense but I loved the grand tournament. Sure secret paladin was annoying, dropping the best 1 2 3 4 etc drop on curve guaranteed the win almost every time but my little inspire mage deck that I made was so much fun. Seeing my opponent pause to read that 2 mana 2/4 that couldn’t attack unless you inspired it never got old, and when it carried my early games it was just so satisfying. It wasnt a great deck but it was a blast
I would argue that League of Explorers, despite being widely loved, was a huge issue for the long term health of the game. Introducing Discover (reliable random card generation) essentially lead to the death of the classic Hearthstone experience and the continued path away from minion-based gameplans.
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.
The year of the Mammoth was the most bonkers year for Hearthstone. I think you could honestly talk about how ridiculously pushed the power level and new mechanics. Quests, Death Knights, and specialty weapons all played a hand in having to tone down the power level of sets afterward due in part to how the design space was centered around single card game plans. Your decks were all built around one card instead of a cohesive synergy. Gen and Baku took that single-card game plan to the most extreme but even before them, the design philosophy was centered around decks focused on a single powerful card. I will say though 2017 and 2018 was a damn good time to be playing hearthstone.
Unfortunately you can't really play on mobile anymore though. The last like three or four patches that made it where you can't load your collection at all. So I can't build decks... And being a truck driver it's a little harder to get a laptop up and running and playing. I would really like to ask a favor and for you to talk to your contacts at Blizzard... Because spending $4,000 on a game and I'm not able to play it on my phone. Kind of makes it sad. I've been playing since release and I haven't been able to play in like 5 months because I just can't load my collection. I can't change cards out or build new decks or anything. I've sent them several support tickets. I've reinstalled the game. I've done everything I can try to do on my end and not a single acknowledgment in my area.
I don't agree with Rarran here. The fact the he personally hates the Grand Tournament doesn't mean it is the worst expansion. If we talk about "going in the wrong RNG direction" then GvG was the worst one with Shredder and Boom. If we talk about completely killing the game Shitterwock or Shitterwood was the sole reason i left this game years ago. Justicar brought life to Priest and Warrior, before that it was all aggro no IQ smorc. So no, TGT was a good expansion and way better than others. Top 3 for sure for me.
It's funny such an impactful set was themed after an equally impactful raid in WoW. For those that don't remember; the trial of the crusader/TotGC was the end of when Blizzard made entirely separate gear sets for different raid sizes/difficulties. Instead opting to add additional text and stats where appropriate. It may sound small, but putting variable stats on raid gear opened the door to the warforged/titanforged system in later expansions that made the game into an infinite grind. Before then you would set your sights on a particular drop, farm for it, get hyped when it finally dropped, then move on. After those systems were added, it meant you would always be farming for a higher level version of the exact same gear every reset, fighting against ever increasing layers of RNG to stay competitive, it turned the game into a job.
I'm getting tiered of people confusing google trends with a satisfaction metric. If I am enjoying a game I have all the support sites bookmarked or already showing in quick access.
Haven't watched it yet, but it's either going to be about un guro or league of explorers for introducing discovery or goblin vs gnomes I think it was that introduced a decent amount of rng with things like the shredders and sneeds. Those changed the game fundamentally I think. Edit: after watching the video, grand tournament is way more impactful than I thought. I would love a video where you talk about the most impactful decks, like the undertaker one. Some more examples might be Baku and genn decks, shudderwock, first quest rogue
@@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.
Being slow to buff/nerf was not just a problem with Hearthstone but with Blizzard itself. Certain classes/specs in earlier World of Warcraft was just unplayable and they still refused to balance them, and i can count the number of times Blizzard balanced abilities in Diablo 2 on one hand. I heard its gotten better in like the past 5 years but its one of the reasons why i dont play any of their games anymore.
I really, really miss the adventures. These days it's just booster packs in expansions. The adventures was what made Hearthstone expansions exciting for me.
I joined after Grand Tournament too. I didnt feel like I lagged behind too. Grim Patron, Freeze Mage, Reynad's Beast Hunter comeback. What a great time.
Wow, he completely ignored Goblin Shredder in GvG. Wasn't that an auto-include in almost every deck, or am I just misremembering how ubiquitous it was?
When people think of "the worst expansion" they always seem to think of expansions with very low winrates as opposed to cards that made everything unfun to play again
This hits my nostalgia hard. I started Hearthstone right around the TGT card reveals. Fortunately I didn't have to deal with the weak releases too much as I was too busy farming casual and arena to get the gold to buy Naxx and build the 0-dust decklists I found on hearthstoneplayers (who remembers that site?). And while it didn't work out in constructed, sticking an inspire card in arena was often game-determining. Also, this was the set that laid the groundwork for Shamanstone that came the following year, with powerful cards like Totem Golem (2 mana 3/4 was nuts at the time) and Tuskarr Totemic (eventually nerfed) being released since Shaman was basically unplayable as a class around this time. And despite these it was still bad throughout TGT.
I honestly don't understand what the point he's trying to make here is. Like, besides being bad and overhyped, what did TGT itself do that fundamentally impacted the game in the long run?
I hate to break it to you, but just because you have a trend line for a game does not mean that it means anything. That teardrop graph with the long tail, that's the trend line for every game franchise which ever succeeded. Plug in 'Destiny' or 'Guild Wars 2' or 'Path of Exile' and you'll find a similarly shaped trend-line, replete with spikes and trougths and a long tail of people hanging on and eventually getting bored, until the game recedes into irrelevance. Was TGT the worst expansion? Maybe. But maybe it was just the *most hyped*. Maybe that was when Blizzard spent the most on RU-vid ads and Adsense, and without that burst of astroturf relevance, you've just got the ordinary garden variety lifecycle of a moderately successful entertainment product.
Man I love the Witchwood. I main Shudderwock in Wild, I loved Lady in White. I love odd and even decks. Calling it the worst hurts my innermost Hearthstone player
@@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.
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 don't agree, like at all. There is a reason the game is so unpopular now, and that is because the power level is waaaaaaay to high. The power level of TGT was good. It was fun.
One of my favourite expansions was Scholomance academy. It introduced a lot of interesting cards and archetypes. Every class was playable: Soul DH, Beast Druid (token druid was always along), Libram Paladin (both pure and not pure versions), Face Hunter (always was alive until core set release), Totem/Evolve shamans (2 really annoying weapons in my memory: Qatar and Splitting Axe), Pain Warlock, Control Warrior (mostly bomb variations), SPD Mage, Miracle Priest, Miracle and Weapon Rogues, and no DK (really miss that).
Oh man I just saw Flame Leviathan when you pulled up the cards lol, god that brings back memories of winning with that card and my opponents being so dumbfounded lmao. I played this game for like 7 years before I stopped but man was it fun while it lasted
I got into Hearthstone during Whispers of The Old Gods and left shortly before Rise of Dragons after a combination of being punished for being f2p, frustration at control warrior in ladder (EVEN OUTSIDE OF RANKED) and the awful Blitzchung controversy. It is always interesting to hear how the game is like before I arrived. I may have missed "the glory days" of Blackrock Mountain and LEague of Explorers but I still have very VERY fond memories of Old Gods, Rise of Shadows and Saviors of Uldum in particular, specially the STELLAR singleplayer roguelikes they released with the latter two. They were so full of interesting mechanics, it felt amazing to get to play cards I could not play either because they had rotated out or were too expensive (sometimes both), and just had so much charm and character. Even if it wasn't for all the reasons I quit, Rise of Dragons' take would not have drawn my attention seeing how they changed how that expansion's adventure worked from what I hear.
The thing that sticks out to me about GvG, is that it was a great showcase of what made Hearthstone different from other card games. Almost no other card game was even *able* to integrate that much randomness into its systems. Can you imagine how much of a pain in the *ass* it would be to print Unstable Portal as a Magic card? GvG was an infuriating and imbalanced expansion, but it was a valuable experiment for Hearthstone's developers--and kind of the card gaming world at large--to understand the benefits and limitations of randomness in a card game.
Not sure why but the advertisements near the end of the video once I skipped them it said the video was over. Had to rewind to get the last 2ish minutes. Glad I did too cause I wasn't satisfied with the none ending. Another awesome video. Looking forward to what is next for Rarran once the new set comes out.
Hearthstone on my iphone is the only reason I am playing this game to this day. Got it on the day it came out for it and instantly fell in love. I had a garbage pc for many years and couldnt run it so I played on the phone for a LONG time. Some great memories.
Im gonna put some thoughts into this as well. All my life ive played card games from MTG to Yugioh, to Digimon and FnB, of course with that I played Hearthstone up until the end of the frozen throne. For me personally, I ended up leaving the game because it started to feel like it was way to casual minded compared to the competitiveness that I was use to. I know that a lot of people don't like the extreme complexity of other card games but what gives them their staying power is that complexity and the fact that most of the time (variance is a thing lets not lie to ourselves even in paper card games) the better player will always win and will win with the cards they brought to the table. Hearthstone started to fall off super hard for me due to the fact that not only did it not ever fully reach the complexity to sustain my fried competitive gamer brain, but also because it just doesn't feel good to lose to your opponent randomly getting lucky, even if you have outplayed them even in the smallest margin of the .5 or 1%s. But thats why I quit and I would like others inputs on why they left or why they stayed if I could.
It's funny that the Grand Tournament was when I called it quits in Hearthstone. I was a Priest main and they were so bad for so long. TGT didn't help and got tired of playing a weak class against skill-less decks. Should've waited, I heard Priest got much better later
Funny as soon as you asked the question about the worst expac i thought the grand tournament, but my opinion was formed by how low impact most the set was so im curious to see the rest of the analysis
Speaking of Shudderwoke, it was a point where I clearly understood - players want to win. Before, I used to believe, that one plays the game to have fun. In that sense, Shudderwoke is one of the greatest possible cards: it allows a huge range of game plans which would never work, but are very impressive and require a long setup. In my eyes, it was something between yogg and cthun, which is definitely enjoyable... And then everyone decided to play exactly one same uninteractive combo, because it was giving good winrate
I remembered having to sideload the android tablet apk for hearthstone back in the day to play on my phone. Because it released waaaay earlier for tablets than the official phone app. And the day they dropped the real mobile version was truly shocking.
Nice video with good talking points. I'm personally of the opinion that it wasn't so much the expansions that killed hearthstone or changed it massively, so much as the attitude of the developers and balance team. HS had one advantage over every other card game at the time, it was 100% digital. They could change and balance cards on the fly, refund players for the costs of the cards, adjust things where necessary but they refused. Even when the community both casual and competitive kept pleading with them to change just ONE card so the metagame would be more diverse, they refused. By TGT many of us long term or invested players had become tired of blizzards lazy/slow attitude to balancing the game. This also started to leak to the casual player base as certain deck archetypes were like 70% of the metagame even at casual levels. Mix in the TGT being weak af and ANOTHER stale metagame dominated by one or two deck archetypes and people had enough. The long term players grew bored and were less invested, new players just left and player retention hit an all time low. All in all, the developers decision to not take advantage of Hearthstones one advantage of being a digital card game, ultimately killed it imo.
Awww the memories. I remember Priests suddenly shot up in popularity cause it was the only class that can completely ruin a Grim Patron Warrior's day. They ran like 6 board clears that no other classes can compete with. The entire meta warpped around "pile it on" and Priest was the best class to counter it.
For me ultimately the reason I stopped playing was a mysterious challenger. Imagine loving a game a lot, playing it tirelessly and at some point you hear "who am I? None of your business" again after hundreds of times. I still remember how I felt that something has died in me at that point, I stopped playing within 3 days. I've never enjoyed card games as much since then. I tried returning to hearthstone after many years, spent 200 Euros, couldn't build all decks I wanted. Deleted the game an never touched it again.
As someone that played HS from beta to Whispers of the Old Gods, I would say that you are extremely WRONG. What killed HS was not an expansion, but rather 3 BIG issues: 1. They introduced standard and wild, but they actively refused to balance WILD and treated WILD as a trash mode. 2. They cancelled the two expansion + adventure format and opted in for a triple expansion format with small card (less than 250 cards) sets and yearly rotations. 3. They started releasing cards that break "the fourth wall" of TCG game design.
Hey Rarran, love this video! I found your channel through your video essays and I have been missing them recently. I know you said on a stream they probably won't be coming back which is fine. But this video kind of gave me the same feeling. I know this isn't the same thing but I love hearing you talk about the game. Hope to see more
Before I watch this vid, ima drop my concept here. I feel like the reason that HS started going down hill is not because there was truely a bad expansion, it's just that "Whispers of the Old Gods" was the best expansion with the most inclusive and active gameplay during the time, and brought in the most players, and thus, every expansion made afterwards just started drawing players away since it wasn't feeling the same, and thus when cards began to expire and go into wild that were popular during the Old Gods Expansion, that's when people just decided to leave not wanting to spend cash on cards that just didn't scratch their old gods itch.
Ok I was instantly wrong within the first minute. Now I am really curious to see where this goes XD Though BlackRock was also the most popular in the community during the time, and the grand tournament did bring in the most Divine shield and charge and deck reveals and easy card removal/nerfing like making things have 1 attack only, or just buffing priest in general, which did bring annoyance to the players and plagued the meta for a while up to the old gods.... I guess.... #RemovePriest (Meme)
People don't say Naxx out because its so impactful. People say Naxx out because the launch got delayed like 3 times and we joke about it still not being out.
I started Harthstone around the beginning and stopped play a little bit after Grim Patron but before I quit I played almost exclusively Warrior and I to this day have "EVERYONE, GET IN HEEEERE" burned into the back of my brain.
Its funny because I was writing a comment saying I hated GvG just as much as TGT. I loved inspire, hated joust. The thing about GvG is it was almost completely random. Dr. Boom bots could be a game changer. Brann Iron Juggernaut Control Warriors. Imp-losion was a huge one for playing the expansion because I too loved Warlock. Piloted Shredder into a doomsayer. Shaman decks with up to 22 burst potential because of high roll crackles and lava burst. Lightbomb. Goblin blast mage. Enhanco-mechano kills. Bomb lobber. Mad Bomber.
I came into this game sometime after the Grand Tournament released. Have taken a couple of multi-month breaks, but I've really enjoyed it over the years.
Funnily enough, even though I only started playing in Old Gods, I remember the TGT legendaries the most. Confessor Paletress, Nexus-Champ Saraad, Justicar Trueheart, Chillmaw, Kragg, Icehowl, Aviana, Anub'Arak,
I remember Patron being nerfed and that's when I stopped playing as much- it was just such a fun deck that scratched the combo itches, really needed to be good at it too in order to make it work, and it was competitive. I wouldn't have minded a small nerf, but they killed the deck entirely and I thought that was super bad. Then to me they just started not doing super interesting mechanics and there was a lot more legendary creep for a while, and there just wasn't anything to replace Patron for me.
