Power Creep in Hearthstone (and other CCGs)

[zugschef]

The second expansion is about to be released and as expected some of the cards are simply a better version of old cards. There is a 5/4 taunt creature for 5 mana in the basic set and now there's a 5/4 taunt for 4 mana. Or the infamous Magma Rager who is simply outclassed by Ice Rager.

Kripparian simply stated that bad cards don't need to exist to which designer Ben Brode answered that bad cards need to exist to teach new players. Trump responds with his own take of the matter but actually doesn't say that much. I'm torn on the subject. I do understand Brode's argument that there need to be bad cards to help new players learn the game, but do they need to be almost useless? On the other hand especially cards like Magma Rager give people a lot to laugh and talk about. You will remember the time when someone crushed you with a Magma Rager in the arena; you probably won't remember the particular time you got owned by an 8/8 tree.

Also, I don't get the whole thing about Dr. Boom vs. War Golem. It's a fuckin' legendary! Of course it has to be a lot better than a basic card of the same mana cost! Which brings me to the totaly non-transparent reasoning behind card rarity. A lot of the cards in the epic slot are really shitty, as are some of the legendaries (Hemet Nesingwary I'm looking at you), and then there are commons such as Imp Gang Boss.

What's your stance on this guys?

[angelfromanotherpin]

I think the 'new cards that make old cards obsolete' thing is likely to be stealth errata; previous versions weren't seeing play, so they get a new version to fill that niche.

I don't see any reason to tie power to rarity, except insofar as it supports a pay-to-win dynamic (which the company obviously has reason to prefer). There are a number of less odious uses for rarity, and in Hearthstone I think the best use would be to have rare cards support rare strategies.

[Username17]

I'm not going to talk directly to Heartstone because of all the many card games I've played and sunk moneys into, that isn't one of them. If I wanted to play a game of Magic where the cards were supposed to be "ha ha" funny, I'd play the Ikki Tousen CCG. For the purposes of this conversation, I'm going to stick to Magic: the Gathering, because it still has the best designers working on it and is by far the most mature card game. Also the only one I know of popular enough to get tournaments on ESPN.

Anyway, rarity is not a mechanic in constructed deck tournaments. A card being rarer means that it costs more, with a highly sought after rare card going for ten dollars and up, while an equally sought after common card goes for twenty cents or less. If a mythic rare is a four-of in a top tier deck, that makes said top tier deck cost like a hundred more dollars, but that will have no real effect on the deck composition at the high end constructed tournaments. But that doesn't mean that rarity doesn't matter to the game. There are limited formats like sealed and booster draft where the frequency in a pack has real impact.

You are never going to be able to four-of any rare in a booster draft. It is literally never ever going to happen. So any "trick deck" which requires metagame counters that relies on a rare card isn't part of the solution set in booster drafts. So a card like Moat was made Rare and that was good. If Moat decks were powerful, you were required by law to have an air corps, have hard enchantment removal, or fucking lose. That's very distortionary to the metagame, and the fact that Moat was rare meant that distortion wouldn't happen in sealed and booster draft formats.

And the reverse is also true. A common card is going to be used frequently in limited formats if it's at all playable. You're not likely to want a Mardu Hordechief over Brimaz, King of Oreskos. But Mardu Hordechiefs are common, which means that in booster drafts with Khans packs in them, white drafting players are going to end up playing Horde Chiefs. You are not going to see a Mardu Hordechief in constructed formats, but you're going to see it in limited.

Another issue is that small changes can mean a big difference in what is and is not playable based on context. One of the big tournament viable decks right now is a Rally deck. It's based on a card that until a few weeks ago was considered a trash rare: Rally the Ancestors. It brings a bunch of creatures from your graveyard to play, and then removes them from the game. Basically worthless (they can't even normally attack in the time they have), but if you pack your deck with enough "entering the battlefield" effects that having your all your old creatures come back into play makes you instantly win... then you instantly win. Seems obvious to me that these decks want to be Jeskai or Mardu Red Devotion and be delivering killing blows with Flameshadow Conjuring + Fanatics of Mogis, but the original version was Abzan and the high end tournament scene is actually amazingly conservative in a lot of ways.

And of course there are card limits. The fact that you can pack only four of each card means that having a clone copy or near clone copy may make a lot of difference. You really might want to pack more than four Merciless Executioners. Maybe you're playing Abzan Rally, or maybe you're playing an Elemental Bond deck and you just like the idea of drawing cards when you play creature killing cards, or maybe you're running those Flameshadow Conjurings and like the idea of trading flameshadows for real creatures. So the fact that there's Fleshbag Marauder that's exactly the same really helps those decks out. Some cards can be good enough or important enough to a deck that they willingly take inferior versions in addition to the good one so that there's more to have. Not all cards are Monastery Swiftspears or Lightning Berserkers, but with enough 1-red one drops you can fill your deck with them.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

In theory the qualifier for rarity in MtG in not power but complexity. This is to lower the entry barrier for new players and make board states in limited easier to read. Over the history of MtG there has been no shortage of powerful commons.

[karpik777]

In theory the qualifier for rarity in MtG in not power but complexity. This is to lower the entry barrier for new players and make board states in limited easier to read. Over the history of MtG there has been no shortage of powerful commons.

As you said, that is the theory. In practice however we have also seen powerful but not too complex mythic rares as well as simple cards increasing in rarity when reprinted.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Over the history of MtG there has been no shortage of powerful commons.

15 commons that are currently banned or restricted in at least one eternal format. Every single one of them banned or restricted for being too powerful, or for reducing the impact of restricting cards that are powerful.

25 uncommons that are currently banned or restricted in at least one eternal format. At least two are banned not for being too powerful, but for making the game too slow, and one is banned because ante.

[Username17]

In theory the qualifier for rarity in MtG in not power but complexity. This is to lower the entry barrier for new players and make board states in limited easier to read. Over the history of MtG there has been no shortage of powerful commons.

As you said, that is the theory. In practice however we have also seen powerful but not too complex mythic rares as well as simple cards increasing in rarity when reprinted.

Magic has a shit tonne of cards printed for it, so obviously there are going to be some straight up errors. But I think as far as the mythics in the latest sets, complexity pretty clearly goes up as you go up in rarity. The simplest mythic in Magic Origins is the Woodland Bellower, a card which while simple to explain does somewhat require that you build a deck around wanting to tutor for 3 mana green creatures. And that's literally the simplest one. The next simplest is the Avaricious Dragon, who will absolutely destroy you when you play it unless you do something clever involving Dash effects. All the rest are extremely complex. I mean, the ones that don't literally need two sides to fit all the rules text are things you have to really build a deck around like Demonic Pact.

Really, the only card in Magic Origins I can think of which is wildly out of sync with how "weird" it is versus its rarity is Infectious Bloodlust. That spell is weird and wants you to pack several of them to avoid losing card advantage and also make a deck around Akroan Sergeants and shit. It's weird and complicated and deforms the deck it's in quite a lot. If it weren't for the fact that it is "not very good" it would stand out as being much too weird to be a common. The general status where the Sylvan Messenger is uncommon and requires you to make a deck that is 50% Elves by weight and the Llanowar Empath is common and will work with whatever pile of creatures you happen to have holds pretty well. The fact that the Sylvan Messenger is very good in her specific BG Elf deck and the Llanowar Empath is extremely marginal no matter what deck you're fielding is almost beside the point.

Another issue though is that Magic has gotten a lot better over the years of making creatures different enough that there aren't a lot of simple comparisons. In the original set there was the Grey Ogre and the Uthden Troll, and the Uthden Troll did everything the Grey Ogre did plus came back from the dead because fuck you. But these days it's a lot harder to make that kind of easy comparison. Would you rather have a Stonewise Fortifier or a Topan Freeblade? It really depends on what you're doing. A Wandering Champion is a whole lot like a Dromoka Warrior plus having a minor ability - but even that isn't completely clear cut. In the right deck you would indeed rather have a warrior with no ability than a monk with a minor ability.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

Over the history of MtG there has been no shortage of powerful commons.

15 commons that are currently banned or restricted in at least one eternal format. Every single one of them banned or restricted for being too powerful, or for reducing the impact of restricting cards that are powerful.

25 uncommons that are currently banned or restricted in at least one eternal format. At least two are banned not for being too powerful, but for making the game too slow, and one is banned because ante.

Oh man I forgot about Shahrazad. Whoever thought it was okay to put that card into the game must have been smoking something potent.

Either that or it's entire purpose of the game is to force your opponent to resign.

[Red_Rob]

Another issue though is that Magic has gotten a lot better over the years of making creatures different enough that there aren't a lot of simple comparisons. In the original set there was the Grey Ogre and the Uthden Troll, and the Uthden Troll did everything the Grey Ogre did plus came back from the dead because fuck you. But these days it's a lot harder to make that kind of easy comparison.

I don't know. They are still willing to print things like the Serra Angel at Uncommon and the Baneslayer Angel at Mythic Rare, or the Air Elemental at uncommon and the Djinn of Wishes at Rare. It's pretty clear they aren't averse to rarity = power.

On the topic of bad cards MaRo wrote a pretty seminal article on the existence of bad cards here. One of the main points he makes is that cards are only powerful or weak in comparison to other cards. In any given pool the players will find the top 30-40% of cards and make decks from those. You literally can't avoid the existence of bad cards because making some cards better will make other cards bad.

A final point about card power I'd like to make is that making a strictly better version of a card isn't necessarily a problem if the original card isn't seeing play. An example is Creatures in early Magic, or Stage 2 evolutions in the Pokemon TCG. They simply had the dial wrong on the power level for these cards and as a result they were known in the tournament scene as being unworthy of play. In both cases they were later increased in power until they became worthwhile, even if it meant the earlier printed versions became obsolete. Ensuring your game is balanced sometimes means reassigning the power level of certain card types regardless of whether this makes earlier versions worthless.

[Previn]

Kripparian simply stated that bad cards don't need to exist to which designer Ben Brode answered that bad cards need to exist to teach new players. Trump responds with his own take of the matter but actually doesn't say that much. I'm torn on the subject. I do understand Brode's argument that there need to be bad cards to help new players learn the game, but do they need to be almost useless? On the other hand especially cards like Magma Rager give people a lot to laugh and talk about. You will remember the time when someone crushed you with a Magma Rager in the arena; you probably won't remember the particular time you got owned by an 8/8 tree.

Bad cards do not help players learn the game. Simple cards do.

What do you learn from playing Magma Rager? Is 1 toughness bad? No, there are good 1 toughness creatures. Does it teach anything about 3 cost cards? Nope. Does it teach anything about synergy with other cards? Nope. It doesn't teach you that cards with no abilities are bad, most other no ability cards have some good use, or are actually good because they're a big body for their cost. Does it inspire you to think about Hearthstone differently or inspire anything new play? No. Does it teach you about board control, tempo or card advantage? Maybe in an off-hand way, no and no.

What you learn from Magma Rager is that Magma Rager sucks.

The big reason that magic gets away with 'bad' cards is due to limited formats over constructed, where bad cards can be useful. However hearthstone's Arena format has 2 big differences:
• You have to use every card you pick. This means that you can't drop out the worst of the worst. If you pick it, it goes into your deck.
• You have 3 choices for every card, and Magma Rager is never the right choice. If you see it in Arena, someone did something wrong in picking it.

There is a range of acceptable power difference between cards. It's not a razor thin line of balance that needs to be maintained. That's a strawman for keeping bad cards that have no reason to exist in Hearthstone. If a card isn't played in constructed, and is never chosen in Arena, why is it in the game?

Ben doesn't seem to get that there is a difference between a card being 'bad' and a card being a 'trap' that wastes a choice in Arena card picks, is wasted draw from a pack and doesn't get played if people don't just dust it. He's off on a strawman about every card being equivalently good which isn't the point of buffing cards that are in every way obsolete and trash.

Ben tries to use the River Crock as card that doesn't get played anymore, except that he's wrong. It's fallen off almost completely in netdecks, but it's a decent choice in Arena because it's a 2/3 and can trade with a lot of low mana cards and survive, and it's a beast which has synergy with other cards.

[Previn]

On the topic of bad cards MaRo wrote a pretty seminal article on the existence of bad cards here. One of the main points he makes is that cards are only powerful or weak in comparison to other cards. In any given pool the players will find the top 30-40% of cards and make decks from those. You literally can't avoid the existence of bad cards because making some cards better will make other cards bad.

Except that Hearthstone has hero powers. The existance of the Mage hero makes Magma Rager automatically the wrong choice in 1 in 9 games. Hero powers make the Magma Rager mostly the wrong choice in 5 out of 9 games before you ever consider another card.

A final point about card power I'd like to make is that making a strictly better version of a card isn't necessarily a problem if the original card isn't seeing play. An example is Creatures in early Magic, or Stage 2 evolutions in the Pokemon TCG. They simply had the dial wrong on the power level for these cards and as a result they were known in the tournament scene as being unworthy of play. In both cases they were later increased in power until they became worthwhile, even if it meant the earlier printed versions became obsolete. Ensuring your game is balanced sometimes means reassigning the power level of certain card types regardless of whether this makes earlier versions worthless.

When they print a new version of a card, you generally don't have to worry about also getting the old version of the card because they're in different sets, and they stop printing the old version. Getting the old card is something that can happen in Hearthstone Arena and as rewards even when the new version is out.

[Josh_Kablack]

1. Thoroughly playtesting a CCG/LCG is insanely hard. The number of potential combinations and interactions is truly astronomical and some things are not going to work as intended - and patching rules or issuing errata or card bans to deal with those is going to open up other unintended consequences.

2. Even if you magically had every card perfectly balanced with every other card, each new set would result in powercreep, as a larger card pool results in a larger set of potential combinations, and in a larger set the odds increase that there exist more powerful combinations.

[Red_Rob]

2. Even if you magically had every card perfectly balanced with every other card, each new set would result in powercreep, as a larger card pool results in a larger set of potential combinations, and in a larger set the odds increase that there exist more powerful combinations.

This is something Magic figured out back in the 90's. It's the reason they introduced the Standard format and the rotating block system. By having cards leave the pool they are able to have the environment change without constantly accruing the best cards from every set.

This means that instead of constant power creep you have an evolving cardset that can emphasise different strategies in different environments. In some sets the game swings towards fast attacking creature decks and away from the slower permission decks, then a few years later they print a set with worse creatures and better countermagic and the environment changes again. It keeps the game fresh and interesting and allows them to print cards without being beholden to their entire 20 year legacy.

I honestly can't see how Hearthstone can avoid doing something similar or else they are going to fall into the same trap.

[Username17]

I don't know. They are still willing to print things like the Serra Angel at Uncommon and the Baneslayer Angel at Mythic Rare, or the Air Elemental at uncommon and the Djinn of Wishes at Rare. It's pretty clear they aren't averse to rarity = power.

This would be a more convincing argument if either the Baneslayer Angel or the Djinn of Wishes had been printed recently enough to be standard legal. Also it would have helped to not link to the alternate art Serra Angel that came out as a Mythic Rare. I think those two choices really undermined the point you were trying to make.

A better idea would be to link to decks people actually play in current competitive formats. Like this rant here. It provides three deck lists for decks that high end players might want to take to a major tournament. The first deck provided has a 75 card complement (including sideboard) with 7 Mythics, 32 Rares, 17 Uncommons, and 19 Commons. The second deck provided has 5 Mythics, 41 Rares, 8 Uncommons, and 21 Commons. The third deck provided has 11 Mythics, 38 Rares, 17 Uncommons, and 9 Commons. Rare cards are well over represented in the decks of the Mr. Suitcases who can have everything, but Mythics are not. And a good portion of that is actually rare lands, as none of those decks packs less than 11 rare lands. Take out the lands, and Rares are still over represented, but only slightly (Esper Dragons fields 19 Rares and 17 Uncommons without the lands).

Bottom line is that it's really the specialist lands and cards that drive the search for Rares. And those are the result of specialization of decks. A Windswept Heath (rare) is better than an Evolving Wilds (common) iff your deck is White and Green. A Polluted Delta (rare) is better than an Evolving Wilds (common) iff your deck is Blue and Black. An Evolving Wilds is an acceptable card in either a Blue/Black or a White/Green deck, but in tournament play people obviously would rather play the more specialized card. And that is why a Polluted Delta costs over twenty dollars and an Evolving Wilds costs 12 cents. Not because all or even most decks are Blue/Black, but because any competitive decks are Blue/Black and specialist lands exist for every type of deck you might make.

-Username17

[maglag]

Bottom line is that it's really the specialist lands and cards that drive the search for Rares. And those are the result of specialization of decks. A Windswept Heath (rare) is better than an Evolving Wilds (common) iff your deck is White and Green. A Polluted Delta (rare) is better than an Evolving Wilds (common) iff your deck is Blue and Black. An Evolving Wilds is an acceptable card in either a Blue/Black or a White/Green deck, but in tournament play people obviously would rather play the more specialized card. And that is why a Polluted Delta costs over twenty dollars and an Evolving Wilds costs 12 cents. Not because all or even most decks are Blue/Black, but because any competitive decks are Blue/Black and specialist lands exist for every type of deck you might make.

-Username17

I believe that the actual bottom line is that rares are still better than commons in MTG, period. A deck packed full of rare lands will be superior than a deck with just a few rare lands, just like a deck packed full of rare non-lands is still superior to a deck packed with mostly common non-lands.

I actually stopped playing MTG during when they decided to start mass-banning efficient commons and uncommons that allowed you to "gasp" make tournament-worthy decks with just 8 rares total.

[RelentlessImp]

Ben Brode answered that bad cards need to exist to teach new players

Monte Cook and Sean K Shitlord say trap options need to exist in tabletop to teach new players. Fuck this mentality in every form.

[Eikre]

Without any particular purpose, I'd like to submit for consideration the Invasion sac-triple lands (Irrigation Ditch being an example), which, at the time of their release, I think were pretty terrible. Ostensibly you're supposed to look at your tempo and decide you're willing to underwrite a one-turn, 1-mana uptick with a 1-mana downtick for the rest of the match, but then, they also come down tapped to prevent them from just being unconditional upgrades against basic lands, so now you're borrowing from both directions, and with the mismatched colors making construction more difficult... It's just hard to imagine playing these things straight under any circumstances.

But in the next block, you've got Balancing Act and Terravore and now the downside of a sacland is completely subverted and becomes a twisted asset. Not even one that's usually very easy to come by; clearing land off the board and getting it into the graveyard is ordinarily pretty hard.

And that's Balancing Tings, a certified cool deck for cool people.

[OgreBattle]

It would be interesting if 2/2 2 mana bears happened to have enchantments or lords that really boosted their power compared to two mana drops that are strong by themselves (say a 2/3 or 2/2 first strike).

So if you had the right rare card your 'bad commons' become usable.

[Eikre]

[K]

Ben Brode answered that bad cards need to exist to teach new players

Monte Cook and Sean K Shitlord say trap options need to exist in tabletop to teach new players. Fuck this mentality in every form.

It's a bad argument, certainly. Pretty much everyone realizes that simply not having synergy is enough bad for any game to do that, so deliberate trap options are unnecessary at best and downright counter-productive at worst.

In truth, I think it's just a cover for bad design. Making terrible things is very easy and making good things is very hard, so just writing off a chunk of your game as "designed to be bad" is a great way make it look like you were working on the afternoons when you didn't have any good ideas.

[Red_Rob]

Yeah, or see the various Lords that can make being a merfolk or whatever a hidden benefit.

Although really the poster child for "unplayable for years then later banned in all formats" is Lion's Eye Diamond. An attempt at a "fixed" Black Lotus, it's downside was so crippling that for a long time it was considered a useless junk rare. Then they printed cards that let you cast from your Graveyard and suddenly it was a key component of one of the most brokenest decks in all of magic, Burning Tendrils.

Lion's Eye Diamond now goes for $80 a pop and is restricted in Vintage and a component in some high profile Legacy decks. The difference between a useless card and a broken one rests entirely on the other cards in existence, so any new printing could make existing bad cards good.

[Longes]

Hearthstone is quite special among the CCGs though, due it's randomness by design. And it's getting more and more random as the cards come out. Bombers, jousting, recombobulation, unstable portal, shredders, etc. Hearthstone is a game of Skill.

[Eikre]

Yeah, I've been meaning to ask about that for a long time- Shouldn't Lion's Eye have already been finding use as tutor support? Tutor on the stack, Lion's Eye on the stack. You discard your hand and float 3, then Tutor goes off and you fetch a game ending finisher so you don't really care about the cards in hand.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Yeah, I've been meaning to ask about that for a long time- Shouldn't Lion's Eye have already been finding use as tutor support? Tutor on the stack, Lion's Eye on the stack. You discard your hand and float 3, then Tutor goes off and you fetch a game ending finisher so you don't really care about the cards in hand.

[Username17]

Yeah, I've been meaning to ask about that for a long time- Shouldn't Lion's Eye have already been finding use as tutor support? Tutor on the stack, Lion's Eye on the stack. You discard your hand and float 3, then Tutor goes off and you fetch a game ending finisher so you don't really care about the cards in hand.

Usually hard to end the game with just 3 mana, but there are plenty of things you can do to draw cards and you could put one of those on the stack and then empty your hand for one or more Lion's Eyes. Hell, even the current set has things like Nissa's Revelation that put a huge pile of cards in your hand.

-Username17