What Makes a Hearthstone Keyword or Mechanic Bad

every hearthstone expansion they introduce a brand new keyword into the game sometimes it's really well designed sometimes it's just okay and other times it feels like the keyword doesn't even exist so i thought it would be fun to go through the worst keywords that hearthstone has introduced and let me know with a comment down below which one you think is the worst and while you're down there make sure you subscribe a lot of you aren't and i would appreciate it so obviously we're gonna start off in the grand tournament which introduced us to the keyword inspire now for those of you who don't know what inspire is inspire is you have to use your hero power to actually get the effect so in other words you have to spend two mana demon hunter was not released at this time i don't want to see a single comment that says well technically there's one hero power that's one mana i don't care so every single time you see the keyword inspire you have to think i have to spend two mana in order to gain this effect and sometimes it makes total sense to have a keyword like this thunderbluff valiant is a really good design of this where you're gonna summon a totem from your hero power anyways and you just give your totems plus to attack the synergistic aspect of this makes total sense and i can get behind confessor paletress as well because this mechanic is supposed to be a little bit more value oriented so using your hero power to summon a random legendary minion feels like the payoff is worth it i also think that nexus champion sarod murloc knight savage combatant and spawn of shadows are all pretty well designed around in the inspired mechanic and i think that makes total sense the inspire mechanic is created around value and because most of the hero powers are created around value it makes total sense that the good inspire cards are catered around value but i'm obviously cherry-picking here let's look at the really bad inspire cards argent watchman literally makes zero sense why am i playing a two minute two four that can't attack and then i have to hero power to make an attack doesn't make any sense silverhand region a three-man three-three neutral minion inspire summon a one-one silverhand recruit what class wants this besides paladin and if i'm putting this in paladin it just makes my hero power even more redundant ogrimar aspirin also doesn't make a whole lot of sense because in order for you to actually use the inspire here you not only have to have a weapon but you have to hear a power to get plus one attack that's ridiculous i think even with demon hunter's hero power being at one mana a lot of the inspire mechanics still don't make a whole lot of sense but it did make lowly squire a playable card in wild so i guess it does make a slight difference even though this isn't a keyword the grand tournament did introduce the joust mechanic which was revealing a minion in each player's deck and then seeing which one had the higher mana cost which i actually think was a pretty well done mechanic because it made your deck building a lot more interesting and i wish they actually looked at it a little bit more because i think during the grand tournament it was not really utilized that well i want to take a moment to talk about lackeys in jade golems because both of these keywords were played quite a bit but both of these are a problem in the design space rather than the actual balance space first we'll talk about lackeys the issue with lackeys is that it sets you down a path of random generation that can't be really recovered until the entire mechanic is just rotated out see here's how this works you play a card that generates lackeys and a lot of those lackeys especially after descent of dragons comes out generates another card and then those cards can generate more cards and then you keep generating cards until you don't even know where your cards came from and draconic lackey really made it hard for control decks and dissented dragons to win games because tempo decks could discover troll comic lackeys which gave them dragons and some of these dragons were really good dragon queen alexstrasza was just a absolute hyrule that can win a game for you out of nowhere and that leads the player who lost that game to these random dragons feeling absolutely horrible to give an example of a good way of doing this and hearthstone actually did this already in their game with goblins vs gnomes in the spare part mechanic spare parts were well designed because all of the spare parts felt impactful but not really impactful there was a fine line of just giving a minion plus one health could make the difference but it didn't feel like you lost a game because of them and jade golems are here for the complete opposite reason which is consistency all jade golems had to do was just be summoned and there wasn't a really interesting aspect of this keyword it just felt horrible to play against majority of the time and a card like jade idol is the worst offender of this because it literally pushed an entire archetype out of the game because it just could not keep up with unlimited jade golems one of the most recent mechanics released in fracture in alterac valley was honorable kill and i get the idea behind honorable kill because it's a really cool thing if you can kill someone at the exact damage the problem with this is that this rarely happens and it leaves a lot of these honorable kills to feel like feast or famine which most the time they're in famine because they're not gonna get the honorable kill and when a card is completely designed about getting the honorable kill it makes such a huge risk in actually playing that card because if you don't get the honorable kill the card is literally useless if you look at a card like siphon mana which is a 2 minute mage spell deal 2 damage with the honorable kill to reduce the cost of spells in your hand by 1. this card only has two options and it's either to be a really really good card or a card that's not even good enough to be played i also want to talk about the variance damage mechanic they had for a little bit there in goblins vs gnomes with implosion crackle in the boombots the problem with this mechanic is that there's too much polarization you have no agency of how much damage this is going to do and oftentimes this might be the difference of you winning or losing the game and that just feels awful to leave it up to randomness so let's talk about the worst keyword in hearthstone history and i'm sure a lot of you expected this and yeah it's overkill from rastakhan's rumble let's start off with one of the biggest aspects of overkill that makes it feel so bad is that you have to be able to deal more damage than the thing you're killing and that seems like a really easy thing to do on paper but it's not it actually is one of the hardest things to do in hearthstone which means if something does get an overkill the payoff of the overkill keyword has to be very worth it for you to actually run a card like this in your deck and this is very comparable to the inspired mechanic but the biggest difference between them is that you decide when you're gonna hero power with the inspire mechanic overkill i need a minion on the board that i can overkill so if i'm putting an overkill minion or spell or weapon in my deck i have to not only rely on you know getting the overkill but i also need my opponent to play into it a little bit both overkill and honorable kill are just both in the same wheelhouse of just being extremely hard to actually get this keyword to proc and therefore a lot of these cards are just really vanilla minions that don't really have a keyword let's now take a minute to look at some of these overkill cards and ask ourselves what were they thinking garabashi chicken can't even get an overkill over anything because you literally can't go lower than one health otherwise embiid will just strictly die which means in order to get the overkill for this card you have to buff it first this card was just so bad arena patron is a 5 minute 3-3 with the overkill to summon another arena patron which means in order for you to actually get a 5 mana 66 you have to overkill a minion and play this as a 5-man of 3-3 dude come on i think my favorite one here though is the faraki battle axe for paladin a five minute three three weapon overkill give a minion in your hand plus two plus two like i know that this expansion wasn't super great and there was a lot of mediocre cards but i don't know how this card was like okay this is fine like the gurubashi chicken is a meme on angry chicken but the battle axe dude no way anyways that's gonna be it for me i hope you ended up liking the video and i'll see you guys in the next one you look fantastic

Channel: Rarran

Views: 106,278

Keywords: hearthstone, hearthstone gameplay, hs, hs gameplay, best hearthstone deck, hearthstone new, hs new, hearthstone expansion, hearthstone cards, Hearthstone cards you forgot existed, hearthstone best legendary to craft, zeddy, hearthstone mini set, hearthstone rotation 2022, hearthstone rotation, How Onxyia's Lair Showcases the Future of Hearthstone, Onyxia's Lair, onyxia's lair mini set, What Makes a Hearthstone Keyword/Mechanic Bad, hearthstone overkill, hearthstone keyword

Id: RN8ZZ2PeDaE

Length: 8min 3sec (483 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 17 2022