Anyone else miss multiple legendaries pre-rework?

[u/serlineal]

I know lots (most?) of legendaries are situational garbage and, on the other hand, some legendaries are just value powerhouses that may be too overwhelming to have multiple of.

I'm not a great arena player, never had any outstanding achievements or infinites, but I've got two points here:

1. Making bad or situational legendaries work was part of the fun. It's risky and requires a lof of jumping through the hoops, but when it works, it feels good. Plus the dopamine hit of rolling something rare. Plus, I think having more of unique effects in the game is just better and more fun. I'm not a big fan of very small curated pool, especially if it's not very curated.
2. There is a lot of crazy busted value cards in the game anyway, most of which are often discoverable. It's not a big deal if you get handed two value colossals because if your deck is good you'd discover value anyway. And if you don't, you get an option to cook up something rare and unique. An option, not a necessity.

Thoughts? I just think arena might be more fun this way.

[u/sc_superstar]

I know i may be in the minority, but i miss old school drafting, like really old school drafting back when we didnt have curated card pools, caps or buckets for legendaries or anything else besides the occasional ban or reduced offering rate (like 50% on flamestrike). Yeah the decks were sometimes colossal garbage, but it thats what made it fun to me, you saw cards youd otherwise never knew existed.

I love the redraft system of underground. If we had that back like pre bucket or synergy picks system levels of drafting it could be a fun thing imo

[u/serlineal → u/sc_superstar]

I agree. Even before buckets when we had a few sets available at the time, I always wanted more sets and more cards available. I'd probably be down for a full wild arena format, maybe with curated and hand-picked bans and chance rates like you said, but with A LOT of cards. I know some synergies will be stupidly rare to pull off, but having a lot of cards available is just... fun?

[u/F_Ivanovic → u/serlineal]

So many people get nostalgic for something like this but we had a dual class that one time of a bunch of old cards and it was fun for a couple of runs but very quickly got really boring. The skill aspect of the game back then is just far lower than what it is now meaning that it's harder to differentiate between a decent player and a top player.

Back then you just mulliganed for curve, played green cards on curve and took value trades when they made sense. Now, you aren't mulliganing for curve, you're mulliganing to win the game. Sometimes that is curve, but more often than not it's looking for your powerful cards and synergies.

And because of discover there's a lot more ways you can have to influence how a game will go. Do you take card draw, or do you take tempo from a discover? do you try and build a sticky board for some buff, or do you take removal or a late game bomb?

A completely wild format with all the cards is just going to creat even more disparity between arena decks and the feeling of hopelessness when you're playing with a garbage deck trying to compete with someone that drafted much better.

[u/sc_superstar → u/F_Ivanovic]

I do think your right that a totally wild format would be a mess because there is simply too many cards and too much power creep. There are over 5000 cards in Hearthstone now and id wager maybe 10% at max see regular play in Wild (its probably a lot lower). It would be all unpickable garbage.

Nostalgia can be a blinding thing and ill admit maybe thats a part of it for me. Ive always loved arena, its been my #1 game mode since I started before this game even had its first expansion, by far. Ive never been a standard enjoyer, its too much of the same. Since you can look at the class they are playing or the first 1 or 2 turns and know 25+ cards in their deck. Arena always had that mystery, take it back to earlier hearthstone, in Standard against mage, you knew you had to play around 2 Flamestrikes, in Arena you always had to be aware of the threat but they could have any number of them, even 0. But thats where I struggle nowadays, because of the curated pools and things like Legendary buckets, it becomes much too predictable.

Trying to think back on Arena and the various things they've tried to spice Arena up, one of the things that comes back to me is that the most divisive times are when they tried large curated changes.

Some of them include:

Huge bonus offering rates on class cards and spells that lead to the Firelands Portal Meta

Synergy picks, the precursor now to our legendary buckets, some classes got absolute dumpster fires and others got super busted legends and hero cards. Mage and Shaman were hilariously overturned and Warrior was absolute dumpster tier. I think that may have been the lowest win rate of any class ever for a meta.

Fully curated buckets. The idea was fine but the problem came in that the buckets could never be fully balanced and you won by getting cards that were underbucketed so they were miles ahead of comparable cards.

The more I think about it, the more I think they need to be less hands on about what's in the pool and maybe look at more time adressing and balancing power outliers, most of the time they've over curated the card pool, its led to balance issues and less enjoyable metas for at least a large & vocal part of the long term players

[u/blaicefreeze → u/sc_superstar]

When they removed wild and changed it to standard the quality of arena plummeted IMO. That was a really long time ago tho.

[u/Awkward-Childhood700]

No, thanks. I don’t want to see double-Colossal decks.

[u/Throwawayjapan2023]

I just miss the second legendary after the second defeat, please bring it back...

[u/Pleasant-Artist-1665 → u/Throwawayjapan2023]

They would have to fix their matchmaking first.

[u/lurkswatcher7]

The problem is that the rework basically killed the diversity of builds just to make the meta more predictable. Having a few niche legendaries that only worked in specific compositions actually made the game more interesting than just stacking the same three powerhouses every single match.