This video is brought to you by Squarespace. Whether you need a domain, website, or online
store, make it with Squarespace. In my home townâs middle school cafeteria,
the card game lunch room nerds were divided into 3 different tables: The Yugioh Nerds,
The Magic nerds, and the PokĂŠmon nerds. Actually, there was a fourth table - the Digimon
nerds, but I mean, come on. I used to float between all of them as a spectator,
but I remember one such day The Yugioh Table was in an uproar, because Upper Deck had released
a new expansion pack that introduced a game-breaking combo which essentially allowed any player
to win on their first turn if they could pull it off. It worked like this... The card Catapult Turtle allowed its owner
to sacrifice a monster on their side of the field and deduct half of that monsterâs
Attack Points from the opponentâs Life Total. Which is a pretty cool move, although because
you can only have a maximum of 5 monsters on the field at a time, it had its limits. However, when combined with the newly released
Magical Scientist, this limit was essentially nullified. This card allowed the player to Special Summon
virtually any number of creatures to the field immediately, which would then be loaded up
on the Catapult, and shot at the opposing player (repeatedly) until their life points
reached zero. Basically, if you got these two cards onto
the field at the same time, the game was over. And, often you could pull this combo off on
turn one, before your opponent even had a chance to play. The kids at the lunch room table were incredibly
bummed out, because, naturally, all of them made decks centered around this combo - and
when everybody is just trying to get an instant win, the game is no longer competitive, and,
yâknow, it stops being fun. I was reminded of that little episode a couple
months ago when Hearthstone, one of the most popular online trading card games today, released
a new expansion, and, in it, a minion whose special effect caused a similar controversy. It seemed amazing to me that, over a decade
later, some of the SAME design mistakes continue to plague the worldâs most popular games. And that raised a compelling question in my
mind that I want to discuss today - namely - what happens when you break a card game? (Sweet jazz music plays.) So, letâs talk about Shudderwock. (Dope drum beat.) In April of 2018, Blizzard released The Witchwood,
the eighth expansion to their online card game Hearthstone. It included a slew of new card mechanics,
and it experimented with the existing ones by turning them on their heads and implementing
them in new and exciting ways. The one we want to focus on is Battlecry. Basically, if a card has a Battlecry effect,
then that effect activates when the card is played. Itâs the easiest mechanic to understand. This card has a Battlecry effect that Restores
3 Health. That means when you play this card from your
hand, your health is, yâknow, restored by 3. Easy peasy, right? But it gets more complicated than that. There are TONS of Battlecry cards in the game,
some with REALLY powerful effects - and while up to that point Blizzard had (arguably) done
a good job of keeping the STACKING POTENTIAL of these cards under control, in WITCHWOOD,
they decided to try something crazy. Enter Shudderwock. Shudderwock is a 9-mana card, which means
youâre usually able to play it on that turn number. Probably means nothing to most of you, but
essentially, this is what you call a LATE GAME card. As a match between two opponents progresses,
the cards get more and more powerful. Your mana tops off on turn 10, so a 9-mana
card usually signifies something with extreme power. And Shudderwock doesnât disappoint. Itâs a 6 attack, 6 health creature. But the REALLY splashy part is its Battlecry
effect, which simply reads: "Repeat all other Battlecries from cards you played this game. (Targets chosen randomly)." This is a crazy and incredibly over-the-top
effect, and one that is really only suited for an online card game like Hearthstone. After all, online games have a built-in memory
that keeps track of each card, and the order in which it's played during the match. Imagine trying to implement an effect like
this during a tabletop game of Magic: The Gathering. A player would have to manually sort through
all of his or her cards played during the match to figure out which Battlecries needed
to be repeated, and, as far as selecting targets randomly, I guess youâd need to assign each
potential target on the field with a number and either have a compatible die or random
number generator to figure out which card is targeted with which effect, which is a
headache in and of itself, and would take forever. Figuring it all out would be incredibly cumbersome
and, most importantly, the opposite of fun gameplay. So, in theory, Hearthstoneâs online arena,
which does ALL that calculation and randomization instantly is the perfect environment to try
out such a chaotic card effect. In *practice*, however, well - see for yourself. So, this is ME verses some random guy. Hi, random guy. Iâm playing a deck which is centered around
Shudderwockâs ability. (Which by the way, in order to get Shudderwock,
requires players to spend about $60 on the expansion pack, and even THEN you might not
manage to pull the card from one of the randomly generated booster packs, meaning youâll
need to try again and keep spending more and more money until you get it.) Long story short, I finally got mine. So the gameâs proceeding normally. Plenty of fun and flashy animations. Hearthstone does this so well. Itâs part of why itâs been so successful
as a game. Weâre on turn ten, Iâm all set up, I finally
get to drop Shudderwock onto the field and THIS is the exact moment that the game stops
being fun. Youâll see why in just a bit. So to pull Shudderwockâs one turn kill off,
you need to play a combination of different cards earlier in the game,
with the idea being that these smaller Battlecries, when repeated by Shudderwock later all at
once, will be enough to overwhelm your opponent and drop their life points to 0. These are the cards in question: Lifedrinker (a sort of mosquito fellow): whose
Battlecry basically sucks 3 life points from your opponent and gives them to you. Saronite Chain Gang: A really annoying Minion
whose battlecry causes it to make a copy of itself the moment you summon it. And Grumble, Worldshaker, whose Battlecry
returns all other minions on the field to their ownerâs hand and reduces their Mana
cost to just 1. Alone, these Battlecries are tough enough
to deal with during a match. But when you play Shudderwock AFTER them,
well⌠just try and follow me. Letâs say youâve played ALL these cards
in the early game, and now that itâs late game, you have enough Mana to play Shudderwock. Shudderwock enters the game, and its ability
triggers - it now will recast all previous Battlecries youâve used during the match. So it repeats the Lifedrinker Battlecry, sucking
3 health from your opponent and giving you a 3 health boost. So far so good - in fact, letâs say you
managed to play TWO Lifedrinkers before Shudderwock drops, thatâs 6 health sucked from your
opponent! But THEN Shudderwock uses Saronite Chain Gangâs
Battlecry, meaning it summons a copy of itself. But wait a minute! That means this NEW Shudderwockâs Battlecry
is activated⌠which means Lifedrinkerâs Battlecry is activated again, sucking ANOTHER
6 life from your opponent. And then THAT Shudderwock uses Saronite Chain
Gangâs Battlecry⌠so IT creates a copy of ITSELF and then the copy of the copyâs
Battlecry starts, and⌠well, you see what happens, right? Eventually your board FILLS with ShudderwocksâŚ
and even if your opponent somehow manages to survive because your turn reached its time
limitâŚ. I mean, what are they even supposed to do
against a board like this? And remember - you played Grumble, Worldshaker
too, so most of those Shudderwock copies will go to your hand, with a reduced cost of 1. So on your next turn, you literally have a
hand FULL of 1-Mana Shudderwocks to play, who will all create even more copies, and
then THOSE copies will create copies⌠you get it by now. Plus, just for fun you could play Murmuring
Elemental before dropping your first Shudderwock, and it will ensure its Battlecry triggers
twice, if you want this whole routine to last even longer. Now, in THEORY, this ridiculously over-the-top
late game combo should be pretty funny and neat to watch, but hereâs the problem: When a Battlecry effect happens in Hearthstone,
a corresponding game animation plays. For a normal match, no big deal - you play
a card and itâs got a neat little 3-second flurry you get to watch before you can play
your next card. But imagine being caught in a constant loop
of those 3-second flurries - thatâs not really fun to sit through, right? Right. Not only is it not fun for my opponent, itâs
not fun for ME. I literally am forced to wait and stare at
my phone while the Battlecry animations play out, unable to do any kind of input. Because you canât do anything until a cardâs
effect resolves - and this one, well, didnât. (Shudderwock's Battlecry animation playing
again and again and again and again and again and again......) You basically had to just watch until someone's
health finally dropped down to 0. Hereâs an extremely sped up version of me
playing Shudderwock. Iâm not doing anything, here. This is just a solid 3-4 minutes of nothing
but Battlecry animations. Iâm going to win. The second I played the card, I knew the match
was over, my opponent knew the match was over - but both of us had to wait for the process
to play out before we could start a new game. If youâre the loser, this is infuriating. Youâre essentially forced to watch yourself
lose for several minutes. Itâs demoralizing, feels like a total waste
of time, and it makes you want to stop playing. If youâre the winner... this gets old. Really, really fast. After its release, The Shudderwock Situation
became so bad on Hearthstoneâs servers that lots of players would just automatically resign
when they were matched against the deck type because they just didnât want to have to
waste time playing against it. A slow-paced Shudderwock deck can drag the
time of a single match to upwards of 23 minutes - half an hour if theyâre purposely trolling
you. Would you want to sit through a half-hour
game that you know you're just going to lose⌠especially when, in that time, you know you
could play at least two OTHER matches and have a decent shot of winning them? Of course not. And this game-breaking combo was so dispiriting,
that, just like in the middle school cafeteria, lots of players became so frustrated that
they just didnât want to play anymore. I sort-of had an on-and-off relationship with
Hearthstone myself, but after a day or two of dealing with Shudderwock - I decided to
quit the game, and Iâve never played it since. For Blizzardâs part, they EVENTUALLY got
around to addressing the issue. After a month of letting Shudderwock rip through
the metagame, they released a patch that attempted to alleviate the issue by doubling the animation
speed of Shudderwockâs effect, and giving it a 20 Battlecry limit. This isnât the first time Blizzard has attempted
to fix a broken mechanic. They regularly alter the properties of certain
cards in a process called ânerfingâ to try and keep the game balanced. But that raises an ethical question, namely: If YOU were a player who spent $60 dollars
or more to get hold of a certain card so that you could remain competitive, and then the
makers of the game CHANGED how that card worked so that it no longer had the same properties
you sought in the first place⌠Do they have any obligation to compensate
you? This opens up a bigger discussion about the
nature of online card games as a whole, compared to tabletop. If you buy a physical card that gets nerfed
for competitive organized play (or placed on some kind of restricted list, which is
more often the case) you can still theoretically play games privately using that card as it
was originally released - and, in that way, retain a little bit of the original purchase
value. But in an online system that can LITERALLY
change the text and value on every card you purchase at any time without your consent
or even warning, what are you actually purchasing? In that sense, do you even own the card? And, where should game designers draw the
line? Because, after all, you can apply this same
conundrum to ANY kind of game in the digital era in which we now live. In 1997, I could go to the store, purchase
a video game, and I could trust that the game would play the same way every time I turned
it on. I knew what I was buying, in a sense. But today, when I purchase a game through
an ONLINE service, that game will likely be routinely patched - sometimes altering the
game so much that after a year or two, it bears little to no resemblance to what I originally
purchased. This CAN be a positive, but, in a game like
Hearthstone which has a regular rotation of cards and gameplay mechanics, the negatives
can often be glaring. These days, games are perishable items. Just like milk, they have a shelf life. They will not stay the same after you purchase
them, even if you want them to. Does this mean that gamers need to adjust
their expectations? Or, do designers need to be more accommodating
to their customer base? I canât give you an answer to these questions
because I donât know the answer. But Iâd love to hear what you think in the
comments. One thingâs for sure: card games have come
a very long way since I played them as a kid, and I find myself both excited and scared
to see where they go from here. Big thanks to this video's sponsor, Squarespace. Hey, do you have an idea for a website? I promote Squarespace often on this channel,
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When you summon a copy of itself the battlecry doesnt trigger.
So much wrong information
This video has alot of misleading information. copying form a great comment. "In conclusion, this video is very misleading is is made up almost entirely of fallacies. Although I do no know the reason Austin made the choices he did in this video, but I suspect he only did it because he was emotional about the subject and to earn views. He clearly did not do his research on the topic, and the excuse that he did some of the things listed above to simplify the situation for unfamiliar audiences is unacceptable. Austin, if you are reading this, I ask that you respond with why you made the choices that you did.ďťż"
Surprised there wasn't more discussion of MTG in here. Infinite or 1TKO combos are a recurring problem in Magic, particularly in formats like Legacy, Vintage or even Commander where one new card may combo with an obscure card from literally decades ago. Trying to catch all these potential combos is impossible, so they just bill it as "part of the game."
A better comparison, however, is Duelyst - another digital card game. I personally like it a lot, because its "chess board" makes it possible to beat strong cards with good positioning, and its rules and card designs explicitly prohibit infinite no-input loops. But it does have a problem with cards that "break" the game, and solves it by distributing those cards evenly - for the most part.
One infamous example is Grandmaster Variax. An 8-mana card (out of a max of 9) that permanently alters your Bloodborn spell (similar to Hearthstone's hero powers) to an exponential version of itself. The turn after you play Variax you can, depending on which General you play, summon five to ten 4/4s every single turn. You can't even dispel the effect or end it by killing Variax. HOWEVER... It's slow. You have a whole turn to respond, and maybe eke out a win, which is far more generous than the Hearthstone example given above. But this card is in the faction that can reduce the mana cost of a minion by 2, 4, or even 6 in one turn if you get a god-hand. Yikes.
Variax was never fixed. In the latest expansion, similar permanent-effect cards were given to all factions... But some are incredibly strong, while others are so-so at best.
As for the monetary/value problem of changing games - that's a different puzzle entirely.
Great video, hilariously bad understanding and explanation of how hearthstone works. Also there is always compensation when cards are nerfed.