I'll never forget losing a game by a Plague of Murlocs that was created by an Ethereal Lackey that was created by a Transfer Student *JUST* because we happened to be playing on the Dalaran board.

Just draw better amirite

Oh, the good old times when using a coin to summon Yeti on turn 3 was considered exciting

"Force of nature + savage roar, which did a minimum of 14 damage" I remember when that was considered OP.

"Because why would things cost mana?" - this video in a nutshell

Well we got WoW Classic, guess it's time for Hearthstone Classic!

last time i actively played the game, standard decks did suprisingly well in wild given how wild decks were supposed to be the broken ones

Ah yes, Hearthstone, my favourite slot machine

I too used to think the game was random but then i learned: trick totem will always kill itself and the enemies Solarian Prime will fireball you 2 times in the face

Epics used to be fun, often unplayable cards. In a long time they have been essentials and staples in every expansions. I have to use a lot of my dust if I want to experiments with decks and that's not very fun, so I don't.

Switched from Hearthstone to Legends of Runeterra and the difference in randomness is amazing. You can already see them starting to move in the same direction as HS but oh well enjoy it while it lasts. At least it's a lot cheaper.

Finally! A skill based card game

2017's Tempo Mage: The only random generation cards were Babling Book and Primordial Glyph. It also was a quite cheap deck. 2020's Tempo Mage: Literaly half of the deck are random cards which generate more cards and it's expensive as hell. That's how one of my favourite classes got ruined.

holy shit I never realised there were seven different Lackeys! bruh wtf

you really should do more of these history videos :D was surprisingly interesting to hear you talk about what decks have been viable etc :) maybe do one vid for each class and go deeper into history :D

2:20 “a fun combo” that’s not quite how I remember it.

I quit playing last year, came back 3 months ago and already quit again. Just don't care anymore with all the random bs. I either lose due to random and i'm pissed or i win and it feels like its all due to randomness so i can't even feel happy about it.

queued 9 match into 9 Reno priest makes me want to quit.

Wild format already existed, STANDARD was the format introduced.

Well, i started the game during blackrock and i immediatly got hooked when i was smashed 1st time by patron warrior. It was so beatiful that i actually spent money on expansions to get death's byte, emperor and grim patrons. And than it was nerfed. Well, too early to give up, right? I found out that freeze mage is pretty cool deck and there was also miracle rogue that is still playable, but was way cooler with triple leeroy. Hall of Fame gets introduced and both conceal and ice lance gets HoFed)

I love how the thumbnail shows two different cards that do random things, but only one says random

I found a good jumping-off point somewhere around Un'Goro; it was a boiling-up of several issues. Initially, I got into HS because it promised to be a CCG that actually let you have a competitive deck with cards that were readily-available. I loved that Basic cards like Fireball weren't tutorial filler junk that you were supposed to ditch once you bought/earned better cards, but were actually still valuable and usable. Over the years, I saw that the buff/nerf philosophy of HS was to remove Basic/Classic cards from the game in favor of pushing purchases to new cards; I was disheartened that the "nerf and buff cards to keep them interesting and playable" philosophy of the beta was replaced with "nerf cards in Basic/Classic and make them unplayable". This was largely why I gravitated to jank combo decks like Patron Warrior, Anyfin Paladin, and Caves Quest Rogue; rather than play the vanilla Curvestone game they were trying to push, it was like I got to defy the rules of the game that Team 5 was setting up. And we saw how all of those decks wound up. Ultimately, I fell off of the game around Un'Goro because the actual game was less decision-making and more "execute decks according to plan". I think it focused too much on mimicking Magic instead of going in its own direction and bringing interesting new decisions to the table. I also grew sour on the game as the dev team (and some top players like Kibler) endorsed a policy of strict set rotation instead of nerfing and buffing cards--something that is standard practice for most digital games. I don't want to get in a game just to have to keep walking the new expansion treadmill, and it seemed clear to me that Blizzard's balance was catered to Standard and not Wild.

Honestly, this video needs a *lot* and I mean a lot more views. Solem, ya keep doing great content and these are a joy to watch.

It's the same phenomenon as in many other "mainstream" games. "Random" reduces the element of skill, which allows for new players to bridge the skill gap against veterans who know the game a lot better. This prevents scaring off new players who would otherwise rarely win any games. Unfortunately it also spoils the experience -- there's nothing worse than losing because of bad luck rather than because of your own mistakes.

I remember the good old days of hearthstone

This randomness especially bothers me in Arena which used to be my favorite mode and primary method of earning card packs. I never directly purchased them with gold, i would gamble everything away at Arena. But nowadays it seems that your draft and skill doesn't matter anymore. There is so much random card generation that it's silly. Half of the time you're losing to cards that weren't in the opponent's deck to begin with. Arena is a mode where you craft a deck from 30 random choices, so you don't have the resources to deal with insane shit like randomly generated Dragonqueen Alextrasza into 2 good 1-cost dragons. Your decent deck played by a decent player can go 0-3 now because of this crap. Want to be good at arena? You pick mage and draft any card that says 'Discover' on it. And hope for the best. Playing 10 discover cards in one arena game? No biggie! We used to hate 4-mana dr boom from unstable portal, but even that is nowhere near 2020 fuckery levels.

I played arena yesterday my shaman opponent played spell lackey into studies inyo 5 mana spell dmg and discover guy into hex to my deathwing

I like this layout a lot, thanks for putting in the effort to edit so much stuff.

The thing that originally inspired me to play the game were the old "Lord of the Gimmicks" videos TotalBiscuit the Cyclical Brit made a long time before he died. my personal favorite being "Healed to Death"

You really care about the details when you're making a video, that's really impressive.

You forgot to mentioned Emperor Thaurissan whose is the progenitor of mana cost discount. You forgot Mysterious Challenger the most hated card (second to Dr. Boom) at the time. I also remembered that Priest's early game was so bad that they had to rely on Auchenai + Circle of Healing combo to survive against aggro players. And the Old Gods brought in one of the most diverse meta (in my opinion).

thank you for stopping me from getting back into Hearthstone. This was the exact video I needed.

i miss the 7/7 boom days, love this time

this about sums up perfectly how I feel about hearthstone now.

I used to watch other hearthstone creators but for the last week and a half I’ve been watching your videos alone. How are you so entertaining?

I love my random Reno’s Mage because it takes the exact principle of the video and takes it to the extreme. Most of the cards in the deck have “random” printed on them in some form or another (discover is used too). It doesn’t do insanely well, obviously, but it still made it to gold 10 without breaking a sweat. The last expansion felt devoid of much interesting content, so hopefully the new mode changes that.

I only play this game because of the visuals and the random, the surprise mixed with the eye candy is the most satisfying dopamine effect ever.

I sense a serious lack of Yogg in this video.

I once played a game where I played first day of school as paladin, which gave me babbling book, which gave me unstable portal, which gave me frightened flunky, which gave me tirion.

Thank you for this fantastic presentation of what happened in the last few years! Pure nostalgia haha :) I played a TON of Hearthstone about 5-6 years ago and was curious what the changes were. This is a perfect summary in about 10 minutes. Honestly, HS does not seem as fun as it did, at least to me.

I disagree a bit on the whole "Hearthstone has become Random". Hearthstone has always been random, looking back on effects like Ragnaros and Sylvanas, it wasn't exactly healthy either. But this is the kicker, it wasn't about how good the random effects were, even though sometimes they were backbreaking, it was about how well you could play around them. This is, in my opinion, what changed over time, as Randomness became such a central part of the game that you can't really play around it anymore. There are still "skillfull" decisions in Hearthstone, there are actually too many, to the point where the individual choices rarely feel like they matter, because every turn is a coin toss anyways.

shadown anduin still gives me the shivers

Fantastic video Solem! I can't imagine how long this took, this video is your best video so far! After I reached Legend I stopped playing "good decks" and these days I just play meme decks, like only meme decks. Yogg has been my BFF since Old Gods, and that friendship got stronger when they reverted his nerf

I remember a match where I was playing Warlock. I played Galakrond, as I already had invoked 4 times and with Galakrond's damage I had lethal, and the first minion that was summoned was Unlicensed Apothecary. I had 14 life. Playing Galakrond literally made me lose, because I received 15 damage. Yes, I got really mad and closed HS immediately to play another game.

I've stopped playing HS when Scholomance came out and already DAY1 of the expansion every deck i saw was either libram paladin or aggro rogue (standart player btw). But i still enjoy your content a lot and you've really outdone yourself this time

I haven't stopped, I still play Arena to this day!

Good video and you bring up some good points. Randomness can alter the course of some games (and allow for some crazy Trolden highlights) but it also keeps the game fresh. One of the most fun decks to play in Standard right now (and I said fun, not necessarily best) is Thief Rogue because you never know when an outrageous win condition might get thrown your way. Is it fun to play against? Well, it keeps you on your toes and you have to be ready for anything. I think Kibler would argue that these kinds of decks are fun because you have to look for the way to win based on what you're given, and you don't have the same "Leeroy + Shadowstep + Eviscerate" ending combo each game. I play Bomb Warrior, which has randomness built into it as you mentioned, but there are games where it comes to choosing my win condition - draw the game out so that my bombs finish them off, or play aggressively to try to kill them, while leaving myself open to burst damage? I think most decks in the game have some interesting dedcision-making along these lines.

I would like to point out that Zoo was not invented by Reynad but by Brian Kilbler back in his MtG days.

*Opponent plays Jandice, getting Bittertide Hydra and Tundra Rhino for lethal* Well shit, I should have played around it.

Random cards are fun. I had a ton of fun playing a homebrew Spectral Cutlass Thief Rouge but the problem lies in the fact that those incredibly random cards aren't just meme cards but actually competitively viable. Yogg-Box is the perfect example of this.

awesome video. that zoolock nod to reynad got me to like

Thank you for the summary man. I haven't played this game for years and looks like it'll stay that way XD

Solem: Why did you leave hearthstone Me: Yes, exactly all the reasons you stated after that question😭

I personally play Hearthstone for the adventures. Battlegrounds and constructed are just there to farm the gold needed for the next adventures. :p

Man you guys have it rough I remember playing the game when Dr. Boom was a thing and randomly deciding the game. Had a ton of fun with hearthstone but I don't miss a bit after random become the new meta.

There are a lot of great Hearthstone content creators. But you are without a doubt the best one. Keep making great videos

'Lets look at a nerfed hero. Jaina' me staring at her chest realizing what I was thinking at first

Drinking game: take a shot whenever he says random

Love this video. I only started 4 months ago but I appreciate how much the game has changed (for better or worse)

I remember when the most random swing was when a mad bomber would kill an enemy 2 drop if you're lucky

"Vorerior" - Solem trying to say 'Warrior'

oh well, was thinking about getting back but after a bit of research I found out that the game I fell in love with when it was still beta, became complete and utter horse shit. back in the day when ,,random,, was appearing more and more I said if this wont stop, this game will die.......and well.....here we are....rip HS, we had some good times

2:14 "and finish the game by using a *fun* combination of Force of Nature and Savage Roar" - I'll find any excuse to support what Solem says, but after this sentence, I could tell we are just not on the same page at all xD I much prefer Hearthstone in 2020 than 2014, and I like the mechanic of adding some random cards to your deck. Keeps games fresh instead of the same cards in every game. Everyone enjoys different things of course.

hey, i have a question: how hard do you think it would be to pick up the game now for someone who hadn't played in forever ? i am often nostalgic. i stopped at a point where i had just ground up the necessary amount to forge a legendary (1600 was it?), and i didnt know which one to do. the main reason i stopped tho is because i found it frustrating how fast the expansions came out, everything always seemed outdated so fast. so is there any way i could achieve something with my okay non competitive deck from back then if i started again ?

Remember when Randuin was neat cuz of all the random effects?..

game died when they separated wild and standard cuz it means they will just keep printing same cards each 3 months cuz imagine X class loss his board clear they need replacement each 3 expansion and thus makes wild mode insanely op broken decks that get snowballed and get feeding over time and dev refuse to balance wild cuz its no longer main mode and doesn't make them money compare to standard as for standard you just buy same card with different art style each 3 month that does same thing cuz old version of it now in wild mode , also making expansion only and not rotation of 1 expansion 1 adventure means casual won't be able to catch up cuz developer bad greeds of activision blizzard and developers also to blame they work for this scummy company and all they care their pay checks and not quality of the game

Cool video, I like this nostalgia theme

What a great video! So well made

The fun part about standard is how you can play games where the more random deck wins because random or the face hunters that you can't play a card without losing first

I feel like in GvG they introduced a lot of random effects and there was a lot of community pushback and they dialed it back. Nowadays the random effects like adding cards to your hands are considered less of a problems since adding cards to your hand in a traditional way is also random.

Nobody: Solem: Vorrior (subscribed at this point)

I had already gotten to this conclusion 5 years ago

If you're reading this and considering coming back to the game, PLEASE DON'T. The phrase "competitive Hearthstone" is an oxymoron. You can and will lose games in a single turn from cards that didn't start in your opponent's deck; if that isn't the antithesis of strategy, I don't know what is.

I think it's actually healthy that it's become more random, when I compare it to YuGiOh for instance, wherein the game has evolved to be completely centered around combos to the point where games are consistently over by turn 4

League of explorers freeze mage, pre-warsong nerf patron warrior, and dead man's hand warrior are my favorite decks of all time.

Personally I stopped playing back in 2019 just after the hong kong drama. That didn't actually have any impact on me personally quitting the game, it's just in the right time frame. No, I quit because the price of new cards and expansions was ludicrously expensive, new expansions made old decks invalidated and the awkward rotation made sure that there would only be one viable deck for each class in standard, if even that, all while wild was ignored by blizzard. But I think the biggest reason was that a better alternative for me as a player came out in Legends of Runeterra.

I used to play standard. then I got bored and switched to wild to play mostly meme decks while climbing the wild ladder. And I got results with at least a little bit of fun.

its the same thing over and over. 2016-2018 was my favourite time in hearthstone

The most fun decks for me were Malygos Rogue and Control Warrior from TGT era

In Pokemon (the TCG and the competitive video games) we have had this from the very beginning. The game moves from being more hard deterministic, -- victory depending on your choices only, because only your choices can effect the game-state -- to being more probabilistic. This was bound to happen with a "card game" that was a computer game from the beginning.

I stopped playing after the second expansion, now it’s just people delaying the game until they have all the cards for their combo, the whole game is boring delay until someone does their combo

Sold my account after 5 years. I wanted to see every cool legendary animation collect cards. Play some control decks. Playing warrior and out controlling rogue until they shuffle 40 kronxs from random togg scheme. Played for 5 years, spend some money, had 70% of the collection still didn't see 50% of the legendary cards other than on yt.

Just passing by, I abandoned hearthstone more than 2 years ago and KZfaq algorithm randomly put your video up, nice work by the way, hopefully the game will find direction and don’t die from stagnation, cheers 🥂

still playing. started playing 1 month after release and spent like 80 bucks on it...i kinda just like the collecting aspect. i often only do my dailies and thats it

I wish they made a mode where only expansions till Ungoro could be played.. I liked that.. 😇 Now it's.. Yeah.. 😔

I played to hit high legend, I did, I quit. Came back a year later, did it again, I quit. Actually 0 no reason to put time into being good at this game.

Only been playing for a few months so I assumed the randomness always was a key feature of the game with how much randomness there is in hearthstone

Ya point out really interesting and appealing stuff. Totally with you on this

Maybe you would be a better player if you believed in the heart of the cards.

Yes, it is. Hearthstone is too expensive to play competitively. Battlegrounds is "free". So I switched.

You hit the nail on the head. Trying to compete against people who spent hundreds of dollars on the "Free" game I had once Loved became so frustrating that I finally quit. I remember being more excited about the launch of this game than I had been about anything else in Years.

If some people ask themselves why sometimes they like random and sometimes not, it's due to pre or post random (before or after the player decision).

I really hadn't realised that RNG had become such a huge things in HS until I played LoR, since then I just can't unsee the 'Created by' and I play a game of 'count the number of cards my opponents played that WERE ACTUALLY in his starting deck.

I recommend giving legends of runeterra a good try I gave it a chance and I haven't played hearthstone since. It's amazing! When I lose in runeterra ots 95% of the time my fault and not rng also the game dosen't make you pay 100s of dollars to keep playing it. You can actually play legends of runeterra and have every card for free just by playing

I like this new video format, great job

I miss the old days because they had interesting single player content. it was like a puzzle to solve then you get rewarded with a specific card that is themed around that adventure and can only be acquired from that adventure. nowadays you either get randomly generated bosses that you fight with randomly generated cards, or you fight the lich king and get your ass handed to you for a pack of random cards. I still don't have Arthas hero portrait because he keeps beating my ass as paladin.

Hearthstone has been my favorite game for years, I just love it. I've always loved playing combos and control, and the thing I absolutely despise is Aggro decks. Every single time I face an aggro deck, I either lose at turn 6 with just no interaction cause I didn't draw my board clears or I survive until turn 10 and... The game is over. Cause he's aggro and he played everything on it's hand. There was a moment where I just couldn't play the game cause every single time I faced 3 aggro decks in a row and just rage quitted lol Yeah I just hate aggro :]

I love the amount of randomness currently in Hearthstone, probably wouldn't play the game if it wasn't there. I just feel like it helps games feel more fresh and requires you to think on your feet.

I am manely still playing because it is just feeling sooooo good to see a combo work and get these big bois on the board. That moment when N'Zoth summons a board of big minions is just so awsome(I know I get hated for playing resc priest but at least not a version of it where catherina resummons herself and than my opponent is f*****)

When life coach made that video i saw the writing on the wall.