The Expansion That Almost KILLED Hearthstone

would you guys think of the worst expansion in Hearthstone right you often think of the expansion that there are op legendaries things that warp the metagame cards you absolutely despise playing against and I would say that a lot of people would probably think the worst expansion or one of the worst expansions was the witch one right if you don't remember the Witchwood the witch would had this card in it and I'd try to walk in it and Charter Walk was a really really frustrating card because it was like the combo Destroyer no other deck could out value this thing it was insane on top of that block of the Moon eater was a really really important effect in the Witchwood it was so impactful that they ended up rotating it one year early because they just didn't want this play pattern to be in Hearthstone but we're not talking about the worst expansion for the worst and that is expansion is the grand tournament now I know what you guys are probably thinking what are you talking about why would it be the grand tournament let me tell you why we first have to start off with the very beginning of hearthstone which was of course classic Hearthstone classic Hearthstone was a really good game okay now most people when they first got into Hearthstone it was their very first card game at the time Hearthstone was released in 2013 it was a pretty crazy time for blizzard because even if you have never played World of Warcraft you probably heard about Alliance or Horde something along those lines and when you heard blizzards making a card game it's like a really good Studio making a genre that has never really been done well on the virtual like PC virtually this is a really big time for Hearthstone and the way that blizzard designed this game was really important because it was super easy for players to get into one of the biggest problems with car games like magic the Gathering is that there's a huge investment to get into it right not only do you have to go out and buy the cards but you fundamentally have to learn how to play the game and then you have to go find places to actually play the game unless your friends had it and when you're super young when this game came out like when this game came out I was 15 16. I'm not spending my money on Magic the Gathering are you insane but when Hearthstone came out it was free to play it was fundamentally changing the industry forever right and you can see it now runeterra magic Arena um Marvel snap was they're all here because of this particular game right now right it was a very big deal Hearthstone was very successful it was a very very good base set one of the best things that Hearthstone classic had was that they had the ability to balance the game around all existing cards in the format you know when a new expansion comes out and the Hearthstone balance team is all out of whack because they're like oh we're introducing all these new cards we don't really know how they're going to interact with everything classic Hearthstone was great because they balanced the entire game around all of the cards available now did they do a perfect job depends on who you ask but for what it was it was pretty great and Horsea was basically set up to be one of the best games if not the best card game ever made now relax I know some people in the chat are gonna be like wait Magic the Gathering is still best it's fine just hold on let me let me speak after a classic cars that came out in 2014. very soon after surprisingly we got curse of NAX ramus all right now curse of Max ramus was a very big thing for Hearthstone because a lot of players especially even me from personal experience I didn't even think that Hearthstone would have expansions I thought the game was just gonna be those cards and that was it this was a very big moment in Hearthstone right people are typing knacks out in chat people still say knocks out after all these years because it was so impactful to players I couldn't wait to play Max ramus and I guarantee all of these new players who came to this card game were really excited for Max ramus and honestly you gotta really shut up blizzard because the way that they did it was fantastic not only did they give you brand new new cards they gave you a reason to be invested into the story of naxxramus I had no idea what Max famous was and I felt like I had a stronger connection to Max ramus than maybe the the original game because there was a story to it and it felt really fun to earn those cards it felt like it was an actual adventure and Max ramus was awesome except for one thing and that was this card right here now if you don't remember this card this card is called Undertaker this card was a severe problem because it showcased two issues with Hearthstone that we didn't really see in classic up until that point in time number one was the lack of Blizzard doing Nerfs or Buffs to the game this card fundamentally warped The Meta around it and made a deck called Undertaker hunter that deck was an extremely aggressive archetype that Not only was very cheap which is a very big deal and I'll get to that later but on top of that it showcased that introducing new cards into the game increases the power level of hearthstone which goes without saying most of the time when you make something new to the game you want it to be impactful but this card was a little bit over the top I would say that Undertaker during its time in standard was a top three deck of all time in Hearthstone it was warping the format around this card it was ridiculous you might save yourself rarin Hearthstone does Nerfs all the time why didn't they Nerf this card and that was the second big thing about Hearthstone that people did not really expect and that is Ben brode and their team was making a card game for new players and if you're a brand new player for the game one of the things you don't want to do is overwhelm them with information so if you're a brand new player and you're constantly logging into Hearthstone but you don't have a ton of time to play so maybe you're going for like once a week or twice a week you don't want to be overwhelmed you want to just be able to play the deck that you want to play so if they constantly did Buffs and Nerfs the retention of players would feel like they're overwhelmed they're brand new to card games they didn't want to do that there's also the huge economy side for that but that's that's for a different video at this time which means Undertaker Hunter was in the game for a very long time most of the time cards in Hearthstone that are absolutely broken currently I want to say are nerfed within a month this car chat how many of you guys know how long this card was unnerfed six months this card was unnerfed that means that up until the release even after the release of gbg Undertaker Hunter was still in the game absolutely dominating and because the deck was so cheap people were able to craft it they were able to absolutely roll ladder with it let's be real here guys let's be real I'm not gonna say Agro decks are really easy to play but I think it's pretty easy to play Undertaker Hunter right you full mold for it you hit face your opponent dies it's pretty easy so every single person had access to this the only thing you had to do was just unlock the card through curse of NAX ramus by the time this card was nerfed we got to our very next expansion goblins vs gnomes came out 12 so December 8th 2014 chat that's when goblins vs gnomes came out and before we even get to this set because I think the set is extremely impactful as well I want to show you guys just in case you just don't believe me for some reason this card was nerfed January 29th 2015 almost two months after this expansion was released Undertaker Hunter was still a very good deck to play in Hearthstone so goddess vs gnomes comes out and this is the very first time I'm gonna actually look at cards during that were released during the set if I asked you right now how did you feel about goblins vs gnomes I can almost guarantee you that it would either be one of the following you hated this expansion or you love this expansion this was a very polarizing expansion and they did this very intentionally because this expansion was one of the most random expansions Hearthstone has ever done they basically all had the text random plus one attack unstable portal really really good effect it was absolutely dominant random Goblin blast Mage a very impactful card in Mac Mage random random random a card like this random like this is like turbo Randomness I I hope they never make a card like this ever again one of my most hated cards of all time is this one right here and I am a warlock main but you know why they did this is because they realized very very soon after Athens release is that what do new players like more than just playing the game and really thinking about their turns right most players who play Hearthstone are not going to be this High Legend player most of them are going to be in silver or gold or whatever what the ranking system was back at the time let's make the game more random if we make the game more random people who don't want to be a high Legend player can just have fun in Hearthstone and again if you look at a lot of these cards there was a huge emphasis on making sure that Randomness was very important also they released Mech archetypes for some classes cards like Cog Master ended up seeing a ton of Play Because Max were really really good in the expansion and they did that intentionally they wanted players to feel like hey you don't have to be a high Legend God to run Miracle Rogue you could just play Mech Mage it's a pretty simple deck it's not going to take you a lot of brain power but you'll probably have a lot of fun playing it and you'll end up winning games for and it was a super important expansion and that's also one of the reasons why discover is such a popular keyword and they keep bringing it back is because people love Randomness and the core part of this expansion the core mechanic of this expansion was spare parts the mechanic of the expansion chat was Randomness and Randomness is what made Hearthstone come into the Limelight but this satchat I promise you guys after the release of gvg and the Nerf of Undertaker was ginormous for this game and if people think back like I've been playing this game since closed beta if I think back to what expansion I probably played the most it was probably goblins versus dopes also because of gvg hearthstone tournaments got a little bit more exciting one of the tournament moments I can remember where rain ad was against I think life coach the unstable portaled and got a corkron elite and Mage and he won the game and on top of that I can't disrespect my boy Dr boom crazy effect the randomness of the Boombox was extremely interesting to play with and against schneeds another fan favorite here people love this effect because something a random legendary at the time was like what the hell this is insane right it's so crazy Hearthstone realized very very very soon after the release of you know classic that this game isn't just about hardcore card players anymore this game is about you know the Casual player and if you don't believe me Chad the very next expansion showcases what they started to do Blackrock Mountain I don't know about you guys I love this set this is one of my favorite sets of all time not only thematically but just the cards in the game were so fun to play with if you don't remember what this expansion was or I should say Adventure at the time again this was a smaller set this introduced us to two of the probably most famous cards of all time Grim Patron and uh Emperor Thorson these two cards were so important to Hearthstone as well because not only did this add another way of playing Hearthstone with just neutral Mana cheating so combos that you couldn't do before were added to the game it showcased a brand new archetype with grim Patron showing people that like new cards into this game are always going to be impactful how many of you guys who played during the set tried different Patron Warrior because either you saw a high level streamer play it or maybe you went against it on ladder and what what the hell just happened to me on top of that we were also introduced to nefarian which added you know two random cards from your opponent's class again not a very impactful card but God damn bro this card was hyped as hell this was a very good set in Hearthstone dragon priest was finally alive which was cool that was probably the bigger thing flame Waker again randomly split among all enemies Not only was Grim Patron a really good way of appeasing the competitive Hearthstone players but they were still realizing that most of our player base was a big fan of Randomness a big fan of doing crazy wacky stuff if you go watch these trollden videos from a while ago Dude you will see exactly what I'm talking about which leads us to our next expansion chat the grand tournament now I said at the beginning of this the grand tournament was a very big deal and the reason why it was a big deal was because this was the first big expansion because I did not mention this do any of you guys remember what happened between goblins vs gnomes and Blackrock Mountain do any of you guys remember what happened it allowed people to play Hearthstone on their mobile device Mobile gaming in the year 2015 was the year that Hearthstone had an IOS and Android application you don't need a PC to play Hearthstone anymore you just need your mobile device and you know like you know that blizzard meme you guys not have phones yeah more players than ever we're gonna try Hearthstone we also got Tavern brawl during this time which was like I believe the very first Tavern brawl they ever did was like nefarian versus ragnaros people were big fans of that uh Tavern ball was a brand new way to play Hearthstone it just changed the rules slightly it was a big deal I want to show you guys something that I look at regularly which is Google Trends here is the Google trend of hearthstone now some of you guys might not understand what this means Google Trends is basically how popular a search term is at any given time so if you write in Hearthstone right now you are affecting how popular Hearthstone is during March 2023 when I'm recording this video this is when Hearthstone was released right around here this is when cursive NAX ramus was released this is when goblins vs gnomes was released this is when mobile device for harstar was released do you guys know what this tick is right here the highest on the Google Trends that is the grand tournament and you can see how hyped this expansion was you can see the most popular time ever in Hearthstone was the Grand tournament and this is where we come to the Grand tournament fundamentally changed Hearthstone forever now before we go any further we first have to summarize what I've been talking about for the past 20 minutes or so number one there's a really fun feeling of looking at new cards and trying to react to them trying to guess how good a card was going to be it was a really big moment it's always a big moment in Hearthstone every expansion has been extremely impactful to hearthstone's metagame we look at curse of Dax ramus dominated by Undertaker gvg came out after Undertaker was nerfed we saw a huge change in the metagame then we saw Blackrock Mountain come out huge difference of flamewaker Mage into uh Emperor Thorson decks into Grim Patron right things were looking up we had the mobile release for Hearthstone two we have to remember that right I don't know about you guys but the flavor of the grand tournament was what did my favorites of all time it looked goofy as hell right it looks crazy interesting there are so many different characters coming into who who doesn't like a huge Battle of all these really interesting characters right look at the just array of different characters in this cinematic just this just this one shot alone you thought I didn't pause this on purpose chat I did trolls I believe this is like an undead we have like this cute looking frog thing we have Mech horse a panda a dwarf I believe that's a dwarf whatever this guy is probably just a stray human there's so much going on that even if you weren't invested into the World of Warcraft Universe this got you really excited this was expansion was gonna be released August 24th 2015. Not only was there gonna be a couple of new keywords and like a sudo keyword basically which was the Jost we also got this Quest log which is the introduction of the high rank bonus chest now this bonus chest was pretty great because it a reward for doing well in ranked and at this time a lot of you guys probably don't remember that harsher was not the best game in terms of free to play because the economy was mimicking real life car games so when they announced this it was a pretty big deal right it gave you an incentive to play more it gave you a reason to play better it was a pretty great time we got two exciting ideas for keywords right we got Inspire Inspire was basically when you hit your hero power your cards do an additional thing we also got joust which was a mechanic of you pull one card from each player's deck Whoever has the highest cost card if you're the card who played the joust card you win the joust right which means you get an additional effect but it doesn't make any sense playing joust because joust was all about Tempo and in order for you to win joust you had to build a pretty high-end deck so it kind of ended up just being a useless mechanic into the game unfortunately but I will say even though Inspire and joust did not end up being a super impactful mechanic people were excited right I remember when they showcased Inspire and I was like damn that sounds like a really cool thing I love using my hero power there's something really juicy about playing for value and the randomness didn't disappear with his expansion by the way the power level of this expansion cannot be understated of how bad it was for Hearthstone and it's the first time I'm really gonna talk about bad this expansion having super weak cards was really really bad for a Hearthstone but there was a couple of fun ones right um spelling was really cool it was fun people really like caldara Drake it was super interesting murloc Knight ended up being a pretty great card uh this was like probably one of the best jazz Cards into the game because it actually works we all know about about this card this card ended up being very powerful because of it this card I think fan favorite card right here burgle oh my God people with burgle but again card was just so weak this card really showcased the balancing for the set this card is really bad it's pretty [ __ ] chat it's pretty garbage the main thing I want to talk about this expansion is that most of the cards in this set were just not good this was a big deal because like I showed you guys before going up until the grand tournament this is still according to Google Trends the most popular Hearthstone expansion of all time the grand tournament is the very first expansion where I pre-ordered chat I was so excited and maybe I'm not doing enough Justice here of actually hyping up this expansion enough but everything was coming together dude it was so cool I wanted the car back so bad as well I was so amped for the card back you might be asking yourself raren what is this huge significant drop does does anyone know what this is the downtrend is from the grand tournament all the way into the league of explorers and we can see where the league of explorers comes out it's that little tick right here this is where the league of explores this but look at the dramatic drop From This Moment up until the release of the grand tournament and why did this happen people didn't feel like they got their money's worth right if I'm gonna put 80 for a bunch of packs I want them to be good and this is speaking from personal experience I felt horrible I was pissed I was like blizzard taking my money and because there was no duplicate protection at the time a lot of the cards you opened suck ass Grim Patron ended up being nerfed which was a very big deal because the most popular deck in the format ended up being a deck that played on curve for the entire time secret battle B ended up being really good because of this card right here it turned out that you know 6x66 pulling a bunch of Secrets out of your deck was really good again just like Mech made from goblins vs gnomes this was a pretty easy uh deck to play it was very cheap it ended up being super popular So Not only was Hearthstone disappointing in the sense that the cards didn't live up to the expectations Not only was the mechanics of this set just not super impactful for the game we ended up going against the deck that was basically Face Hunter version 2.0 but arguably more frustrating to play against because if you died to Undertaker Hunter it was quick right you knew it was over mysterious Challenger you'd be like Oh I'm finally okay they would play this card bunch of Secrets came out how many of you guys don't like Secrets I guarantee there are a couple of you that just don't like secrets and this card would come out followed by Dr boom followed by Tyrion Ford ring and it felt like almost every single deck played the exact same for a really long period of time and remember when I talked about Nerf chat blizzard didn't think that secret Paladin was a problem and to be fair comparatively to like undertake 100 before it or Grim Patron Warrior it wasn't as dominant but you did see it still a lot this is my thesis chat of why the grand tournament was not only the most hyped but the most disappointing expansion of all time and it fundamentally changed Hearthstone forever because what if chat Hearthstone had the philosophy they do now or they made balance changes imagine if a lot of these cards were just more powerful where would Hearthstone be on this Google Trend would it have maybe maintained its popularity we'll never know I'll give blizzard credit because they clearly saw what happened with the grand tournament and they made probably the most unexpansion uh I want to say maybe ever like it was if you know you know which ended up being the league of explorers people loved the league of explorers I I still remember fondly another great adventure it had a really good trailer it was hyping people up it introduced discover and thankfully because of the league of explorers it did bring some hype back and then this is where I believe we got the first rotation with all gods but then you could see what happened after that well that's my video I guess on why the grand tournament fundamentally changed harzone forever

Channel: Rarran

Views: 172,023

Keywords: hearthstone, card game, new expansion hearthstone, new expansion hs, kripp, trump, regiskillbin, zeddy, hs, hearthstone battlegrounds, hearthstone rotation 2022, hearthstone new, hearthstone gameplay, thijs, thijs hearthstone, sunken city hearthstone gameplay, review, hs review, hearthstone review, core set, hearthstone core set, new core set, best colossal hearthstone, tier list hearthstone, tier list, grapplr, magic the gathering, magic online, pvddr world championship, pvddr

Id: i0lWuCK5Muw

Length: 21min 39sec (1299 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Pale_Investigator922]

Dont all expansions technically change hearthstone forever

[u/dragonbird]

Well, that went through a few different thought processes.

First - "Clearly clickbait, not going there"

Then I saw it was on my Youtube feed and thought "Rarran, I love you, but that's a really clickbaity title".

Then I watched it and thought "Good video, shame about the clickbaity title".

[u/mortimus9]

I don’t get his conclusion. Like he never really explains why it changed hearthstone more than any other expansion. I feel like LoE was way bigger deal because it introduced Discover which fundamentally changed rng/value generation mechanics for this game.