The Sad Year 

I just miss deckbuilding… ever since the design philosophy shifted to very overtly pushing archetypes, so much player agency has been lost

I completely agree. This past year was def one of my least favs. UiS, specifically quest mage, made me want to completely stop playing.

Absolutely with you on this. The most fun game I’ve had recently of HS was versus Control Warrior while playing Big Beast Hunter. The constant back and forth of that match was super fun and helped me remember what I love about HS so much is those board battles. Really excited for rotation and Voyage to the Sunken City to hopefully bring us back to basics in a way

"how many times have you gone against quest mage and thought: I can't do this anymore" YES. I have so many loses against Quest mage because I simply surrender early to preserve my mental

Another great video! Love love love those witty openings, and YES it’s never my fault I lose

Absolutely fecking nailed it again rarran. Agree with everything you said. Great video dude.

Kasakusan was not the “cherry” on top. More like a huge cow pie on top. God I hate that card

Really well said. With the new month starting I'm looking at a brand new ladder climb to the diamond 4-legend bracket that I usually get to and am absolutely dreading it. 12 more days of this same meta, the same polarized matchups where you often win or lose based on what deck you went up against. I've never skipped a set in hearthstone's history but I am finally at the point where I'm seriously thinking about it and just playing mercenaries pve and low ranked wild. It'd certainly save me money. The thought of another year of UiS defined decks just fills me with dread. Alterac Valley was one of the coolest expansions I can think of but also had the meta I liked the least with weapon rogue and questlines abound. Kazakusan warrior was a brief glimmer of joy in this otherwise tiring slog of a meta. I sincerely hope that the reason they haven't shown the core set yet is because they last minute decided to pre-emptively rotate all the questlines out of standard and replace them with something that isn't un-interactable garbage. I'm on the fence about giving this new set a chance. I wanna believe they're gonna make the board matter on the one hand but on the other there's still gonna be questline decks for another year. At least mercenaries PvE never lets me down.

So on point here. Really excited for the standard rotation!! Great vid.

Man, I don't wanna compare because you guys focus on different games, but the quality and the analyses you do makes me feel like you're the Hearthstone equivalent of Exil who does League of Legends videos of these kinds of stuff. I stopped playing Hearthstone a couple years back during Rastakhan and when Hunter Midrange was a budget meta deck but after stumbling unto one of your other vids this month, I've highly enjoyed your content. That's all I wanted to say really since I don't really have much experience on current Hearthstone to put any other sort of meaningful comment.

I had already stopped playing ladder in Hearthstone (I feel like the fun part in designing your own deck a casual way, which was my kind of fun, had died long before this year), but the UiS expansion made me stop watching it. Somehow, it made me realize what I used to like in the game ; there's board interaction, as you state it, but also resource management (in most questlines, you just throw everything you have until the quest is fulfilled) and constant adaptation (quest decks have only one win condition, they basically can't think of winning another way, except in some very specific circumstances). I'm not gonna get into some "What did the designers think" complaining, cause I was just as surprised as they were to see how consistent and absurdly powerful these cards happened to be, and I know how large the gap can be between what you expect and what happens, but I think this is something any card game designer could get insight from : you'd hardly believe that the whole paradigm of your game could rely on a few cards, but well, here it is.

An absolutely BRILLIANT video - In my opinion your best ever and I could not agree with you more

Yyyyyyes. I agree on this one, i was early this season a top legend eu player peaking at rank 7 legend on eu (wild format) and there is so many problems with the current cards, my experience this season as a non-net decker was that nothing worked for me except burn shaman and innerfire priest, both just do nothing and then kill you, nothing interactive about that, the top ladder has always the same player base, my pillager roque player friend joked around about our "do nothing priest vs do nothing roque" match up, the match would always be both players either passing or drawing first turns into turn 5-7 lethal from hand and its not fun, rest of the matchups are pretty much mechathun decks (hooray its just draw into a card that says win the game) or freeze shamans being very desperate to bounce their loatheb 5 times to disrupt these kind of decks, hearthstone has other problems too at the moment other than being un-interactive, i just... i like to compare defias cannoneer into fire plume phoenix in the pirate warrior quest deck and ask my self what choise do i really have as a deck builder, i really hope they make me really think of what cards i want to put in my decks next expansion, i really want to feel like im solving a puzzle when building a deck instead of being forced into win game cards or non interactive combo decks, tbh on the top wild ladder its very rare to see agro, sometimes u might get counter qued with shadow priest but nobody is farming ranks with agro, its all win game combos or win game cards, i apreciate ur passion for hearthstone rarran, i really hope they give the game the love it deserves from the bottom of my hearth, i am hopeful that the legends of runeterras latest horrible update brings back hearthstone players from there and maybe the hs devs see this as an opportunity, im never going to giveup on hs complitely, it will always be a part of my life, but at the moment its definately not my favorite card game

Always So good videos Rarran !

Wise and calming video :)

Absolutely, match ups feel like a game of rock paper scissors now, the winner is pretty always decided by what deck they're playing not how good they are now. And the constant leaning towards the board presence being less and less important makes the game feel less interactive

Love you bro! You are still fantastic!

Wow, thanks for this. I've played since LoE and this was the first year standard just felt a bit meh. I'm looking forward to the rotation. New cards look fun, too

When Standard gets frustrating, its always nice to have Wild, Classic and the other Gamemodes where you can get back to. I mean with classic you have a good option to play a chill round like 2014 without these crazy things like questlines etc And Battlegrounds is always fun to play.

I haven't been playing constructed consistently in about a year, so this lines up for me as well. Haven't seen the video yet, but you should've mentioned Tickatus, even though he's not Year of the Gryphon.

Oh man, almost made me cry at the end... Excuse me I need a tissue

i took a break midway through stormwind and came back recently for the murder expansion

7:38 hits home. I promised myself I will stop playing after next expansion if it turns out to be a shitfest again.

"Shaman is playable for the first time ever" Shudderwock says hi

I feel that Wild tended to be a trend setter of things that would become strong in Standard, if not right away with how the past few sets have been (because synergy takes a follow-up set to form in Standard, compared to Wild having it immediately) -Day 1 DH? Broken in both formats -Aggro Secret Paly? Strong in both formats right away -Stealer of Souls/Darkglare/Seedlock? When the pieces assembled in UiS, Standard got roughed up for something Wild already had coming. -Illucia Shadow Priest? Figured out pretty quickly in both formats Now QL Hunter is teetering on the brink of being too strong with how prevalent it is in tourney setting, and Beast Druid is crazy in both sets. When each set is redefining the meta in Wild by more than a few cards, you know there's some power creep coming on when those cards are being picked and built around from the entire catalog of HS's cards in Wild.

Completely Agree, this year was my least favorite to play since starting to play at classic. I think to add to the consistency, the amount of draw outside of pre wailing caverns shaman was absolutely nuts this past year.

Nice April fool's pranks, u almost got me until I heard u mention that mercenaries was a fun game mode.

Blizzard going and releasing Sire Denathrius after trying to move away from killing your opponent from hand.💀

I'm worried a lot about the new expansion, because looking at the colossal minions we've been shown, I can't help but think "but Onyxia is right there and a neutral". It was the same problem honorable kill had -- an underpowered keyword going up against stronger deck concepts. Still, with year of the gryphon being shot in the foot by the previous year, I'm hoping this won't be the case as much this time. But we're still running into the risk that Dredge and Colossal just don't get to exist in a world where Questlines, Mr. Smite, Onyxia and Guff exist.

I just got back into hearthstone this year. I didn’t have a problem until these Kazakusan decks. I used to run a big hunter that I had an 87% win rate. I made it all the way to diamond 5, at the same time Kazakusan came out. My deck went from being amazing to losing every single game against druids, priests, and warriors. Now I run a dirty quest hunter with a special twist.

Deck of Lunacy: Nagrand Slam becomes a Mage card, cost 7 to cast.

I agree with a lot of your observations. I would add that UiS gave a lot more OTK support than any other expansion. Even more than Boomsday that introduced Mechathun. I feel that making an expansion with actual support devoted to OTK is like making an episode of "who wants to be a millionaire" with 50% trick questions. The whole idea of the game is gone.

As someone who didn't play hearthstone for over half a year because I was just incredibly busy, United in stormwind questlines were and are the bane of my f**king exsistance, my most played heroes are mage and demon hunter and I have not purchased a lot of the UiS packs because Mercs kept me pretty occupied the better half of my time on the game. But once I got back in the classic game..... If I see a UiS quest at the start of the game I just concede because I know even tho my decks are pretty good, they never ever win from how aggressive these quests are and then the games stops being fun indeed... I have very high hopes for the new expansion! More board centric is all I ask for ^^

"Thief Rogue was too consistent" Excuse me what

« deck of lunacy was unfun to play against » Good one

All good games gives a challenge to the player to keep them coming back to practice

Hmm, this year got me back into HS

It was a rough year. I'm hoping alot for this year.

Hey rarran, great vid as always!, I saw that in this video you really liked the back and forth interaction of you do something and the enemy reacts to your plays, if so maybe "Cardfight Vanguard!" Could be a card game for people who like this type of gameplay, maybe you could check it out in your feee time ☺️ Sadly though as of now there's still no official digital CCG yet that is true to the physical TCG, but there is a fanmade game called Cardfight area where you can just play with randos / a friend with any cards that has been released to date!

The escalation of powerful, non-interactive combos killing control/grinder decks, and, in turn, allowing aggro to run wild, killing midrange. I’m a wild player that used to do crazy stuff like using togwaggle’s scheme on N’Zoth and such. Then Cutterbutter and the new Alex came out, and I developed a combo deck that hits for 56+ damage on turn 7 extremely consistently. Now I can no longer play my old, late game strategies without feeling that I am purposefully playing sub optimally. And I got bored of cheating wins with the combo deck after 20 games…

I quitted the game this year, I just didn't have much fun, coming back little by little and I'm liking mercenaries so I'm playing it a lot. Awesome video!

Can confirm it is rock paper scissors now

This is why I love arena, even if you play a bad run, it's all board based & feels a lot more like classic hearthstone.

I actually had a great time with Hero Power Mage

Another good one is “the game you lose because of RNG, but win because of skill”

I actually left hearthstone for the entirety of this past year and didn't come back until Sunken City, which felt a lot better to play in compared to everything going on in that year. I think I stuck it out until just before Forged in the Barrans ended, playing deck of lunacy mage since I got a golden card for it, and honestly I was just playing it to get rewards not because I enjoyed the deck.

I like the mini quests, but the major quests force you into an archetype for sure. I'd like to see more mini quests & no major quests.

One of the rare moments when author said true basics about card game: this game is about how your opponent react on your board and his guesses about your deck. Last year was about selfish decks playing solo. This year I was grinding legends, brawls and daily quest for packs and then leave the game with no joy. One of the worst years as for me (in the game since Karazjan)

my favorite deck was RIN THE DISCIPLE CONTROL WARLOCK BABYYYYYYY

Sadly not an april fools joke

wild had a lot of the same problems but if you are not hight above gold then the game had like a 25% chance of being fun because you would still find weird decks to fight against.

I agree with you the quests are not fun at all and make the matches repetitive. Thats why I played a lot of classic Hearthstone and I really enjoyed it.

This wasn't even April fools joke, this is just joke

Even with this arguments this years was much funnier then the Raven years

Funny to come across this video on the very same day I uninstalled a game that feels nothing like Hearthstone anymore.

Think the biggest issue with the questlines was the infinite value. Most of the Questlines were/are trash, but the ones that are good are the ones which, given long enough, are guaranteed to kill your opponent (Warrior, Mage, Warlock). It meant you couldn't out armour or out heal them as a slow deck so just completely forced them out at the time of its release and boiled the game down to kill your opponent by turn 6 or lose. Every deck had to have massive reach, perfect curve or an aggressive start. Think the worst one by far though was the original pre-nerf quest mage. A deck which actively punished you if you played minions with the 0 mana freeze card to progress quest. Luckily theres only really one problem/potential problem quest with Hunter. But I suspect they'll nerf/tune that if its too strong after the upcoming expansion.

Agreed. If the new expansion and core set isn't good I'm out lol

Saying that like face pirate warrior and 4 mana 7/7 tunnel trogg never existed before lol

Rarran is the Hero Hearthstone needs, but does not deserve.

They have an achievement which requires you to summon a 7th (!?) generation Mida while every game end at turn 8 lmao

Yea of the Raven (2018) was the saddest year consisting of three expansions which were Witchwood, Rastakan Rumble, and Boomsday. The number one deck (Some of you probably forgotten) was Odd Paladin for that entire year with 60%+ wins on a monthly basis. Worst part is that the #1 Odd Paladin deck for the year of Raven consisted of cards from the core & Witchwood expansion. Two expansions came out with over 400+ new cards & mechanics, but Odd Paladin stuck with the original cards from the 1st expansion of that year. When HS releases two new expansions and no one is playing them due to the meta than that to me, by definition, is a sad year. Note: Dr.Boom hero card was nice for a while and had some fight, but didn't compete as successful as Odd Paladin

So...this means i skipped the sad year unintentionally.

I don’t know what it is but last year I played more hs than any prior year.

The thing I hate about Quests aren't that they make metas feel stale, it's that they force entire expansions/years of cards to cater specifically to Quests which makes them the only viable archetype for that class most of the time. If they actually designed sets around multiple playstyles it wouldn't be an issue, but as it stands Team 5 still has that bad habit of them basically designing decks for you to play and then selling you the RNG packs to try and make the deck they made for you. It is very hard to be creative in HS because Team 5 just doesn't design sets in a way that allows for creativity. They tell you what your class identity is for the next year or so and you just kinda have to deal with it. The addition of Demon Hunter just makes things worse because now each class gets even fewer cards per set to try and actually give them multiple identities for any given format. fwiw though they have done Quests properly in the past, but the good ones get overshadowed by the meta defining ones.

With what program did u make this Video?...is free?

Year of the raven & gryphon, were the years I had the worst time playing for similar reasons. Both had issues of repeating metals, but the otk meta brought about by gryphon was probably the most annoying.

actually expecially high sodium levels on this one. "Just handcombos and no board" is an oversimplification to the point of falsehood. All mentioned decks but weapon rogue were powerful, focused and linear, but they all had many moving pieces and were highly interactable. I'm pretty confident in saying that this year was collectively the most skill-testing and rewarding in hearthstone history. I'm all for slow turn-delayed board interactions- I even love party priest mirrors -, but clinging to self identifications like "slow control player" while writing every combo deck off as uninteractable bullshit and loudly proclaim it consistently repetitive is (un)intentional blindness to all parts interesting. If you want to see the bad, you will.

one of my favorite years. I've been able to make so many different decks with the new reward track.

I know this might be a bit odd... but any chance we will get some wild content soon?

I quit HS in late 2018 when they bring back N'zoth to standard, back then the game is quite dumb but the competitive scene and tournaments are quite active, what about it now ? I'm on my way to get back to the game and the next expansion is the perfect time because of rotation

Hey man, could you make a video about Zalae? I really feel like you could do the community a service here by creating a proper video that reflects on the situation.

During the wait between late Stormwind and the next expansion I quit playing Hearthstone and changed for Magic the Gathering Arena

good video

I would honestly want a separate arena mode, just like constructed. Call it 'traditional' or whatever, with none of the discover random bullshit to cheat out of a loss type of cards. You enjoy that? Sure dude, to each their own, there's the all-round arena for that, but for me and someone who wants to play the board, without worrying of them pulling a 'deathwing' type of card or whatever after you perfectly trade, clear and so on, there has to be an option. Very nice videos btw, watching some of your gameplay playlists too! :)

I swapped to LoR for the most part because I saw they actually care about expanding their Dalaran Heist-type content instead of the Books Hearthstone has been doing for the past few years, and they’re planning to do a big update to it. The thing about good replayable PvE content is that even if you’re not enjoying the meta, you can play with the new cards in a different mode altogether. Duels, Books, and Mercenaries are not nearly as engaging for me by comparison, and I’m especially disappointed that Mercs took so many resources to even be part of the main menu to end up like that. I’ll still check out the new expansion, but I’m not too hopeful they’ll give us good replayable PvE. I’d love to be wrong though.

Same, questlines destroyed fun

I think killing off value control and most midrange decks has really messed up the meta. Almost every non-aggro deck is just racing to get their OTK/burn win condition as fast as possible, they can't afford to include many reactive cards, which is how we end up with decks like aggro druid at 60% win rate because not a single deck aside from control warrior and some warlocks runs decent AoE. I wonder if Hearthstone on mobile is partly to blame for this. Very few want long games on mobile, so all of those players want to play exactly the decks that are viable right now, decks that are certain to either win or lose by turn 10 (usually earlier). In a meta with lots of back and forth on the board there can never be a guarantee for when games will end, you could gain board control and chip down the opponent for a turn 7 win, or you could keep trading until turn 20 when both run out of cards. I love that variation but it's probably something Blizzard wants to get rid of.

I think if they'd stop making a god damn quest EVERY TWO SECONDS WE'D ENJOY IT

Some typos in the description: say instead of sad, hopefully instead of hopeful =)

It's just too much instant removal, i wanna go back to the time where u actually had to clear the board to go face

"more gold then ever"... which game did you play again ?

prestani plakat čitav život :)

TLDW; Rarran hates Mage. 🤣

I mean I dropped standard this year and completely switched to bgs. 4 Year player and this year did it for me can you believe it :/

Descent of Dragons was awesome, the theme of this year was so fun and beautiful but jeez the content was painfully overpowered towards otk/effortless infinite value. People hated Forged in The Barrens until the powercreep of United in Stormwind

After United in stormwind I kind of gave up on the game, couldn’t agree more with your point on how uninteractive the games were

Honestly if next year is like this one with the devs making choices so foolish it feels like they are incompetent at their jobs then Hearthstone will lose even more players and be at risk of falling off entirely

I know casino mage was bad for the game, but damn that deck was fun.

Forged in the Barrens was good. Quests and Combo decks made the game unplayable after that though. It was either play a hyper aggressive face deck or play an OTK deck that often relied on a linear quest that would kill you by turn 7. Control and Midrange was completely dead since there was no way to interact with these combos outside of RNG Mutanus/Tickatus and praying to RNGesus.

Last night i won a game against aggro druid with my lunacy mage. Dude was so salty 😂 Ha had the audacity to tell me stupid while playing druid 😂

I personally had a lot of fun this year. I loved the cards in the expansions too

When it comes to variation I kind of disagree . I think we had more viable classes and decks then we usually do. I believe you feel this way because of the other thing you talked about. The thing I believe is the true problem. When there is so many decks that can win without playing anything on the board the game becomes incredibly uninteractive. Even though there are many different decks, so many of them just don't do anything on the board and therefor feels the same to play against. "I will try to do my thing before he does hes thing". This year have the board-less year and therefor also the worst one in the history of hearthstone in my opinion. Great video :)

I like how your speech about board centric Hs is backed with an Arena video . Was constructed ever really board centric or is it just another case of "it was all so good back then" with freeze mage , combo druid , miracle rogue , face hunter etc etc . I agree they pushed that to 11 with some combo and quest decks but expecting to go back to that dreamy "board centric" Hs (that never really was there in the first place) seems quite wishful thinking . I wonder if they increase the starting health and make the cards with broken combo potential less powerful will that lead to more focus on actual board interactions and less on just killing your opponent. But ofc even that has bigger implication of making games longer and just killing off aggro - its a really fine balance to thread .

u look fantastic

I will say this and I imagine some will understand the reference. Standard hearthstone has felt a lot like modern mtg to me this past year, and I dont think that's a good thing.

I hate that almost every card game turns into "how fast can you win". I often lose in 4-5 turns (mostly hunter and DH) really kills my mode for the game and had for a long time. Same reason I quit yugioh because it just turn into win as fast as you can and not even play the game. I like a good back and forth game, a nice duel, not face face face win, that isn't fun to me. Now i only play battlegrounds, at least I have that now

Well at least the solo adventures are fun, and also battlegrounds is cool because you dont have to buy cards

I mostly agree, but i don't actually mind thief rogue and kazakusan decks, definitely not the worst best decks of meta in history.

Side note, you enjoying Elden ring?

Can't tell if this is a April Fools joke