With the expansion The Grand Tournament, Hearthstone players will finally be able to stand up to the rush decks – the developers share their thoughts on the design.
The endless possibilities of Hearthstone reduced to 2.
Basically, Blizzard’s card game Hearthstone is blessed with a seemingly infinite number of deck combinations. However, in recent months, most players tend to play rush decks that mercilessly overwhelm the opponent in 4-5 turns. No wonder, their success proves them right. The so-called Face Hunters and Rush Locks need only about 1/3 of the time to finish a game. Those who are frustrated by this eventually switch to such a deck themselves. Now Blizzard wants to finally give players new counter options, one of which is the jousting.
Superiority from the depths of the deck
Joust is at first glance just a fun, chance-dependent mechanic, but those who delve into it a bit longer will recognize the great advantages. In an interview with gamespot.com, Senior Game Designer Mike Donais and Executive Producer Hamilton Chu revealed how jousting is intended to work:
The new mechanic improves slow decks! Slow and late-game decks usually have expensive minions and should therefore benefit more from jousting – because the effects come into play when your own minion has higher mana costs than that of the opponent. This allowed the developers to create cards that are fundamentally a bit stronger, but whose advantage is not always realized, instead, it is hidden behind a semi-random mechanic.
Rush decks benefit from anti-rush cards
The difficulty in the past was to create cards in the low mana range that could counter rush decks (like Deathlord or Zombie Chow) without being exploited by them. Because almost all cards that could restrain the hasty hunters and warlocks can also simply be used by them. However, if rush decks want to reliably benefit from jousting, they need to focus on what could break their neck: slow cards.
Of course, Blizzard does not want to completely eliminate rush decks with the new expansion, but only provide players with new options to better defend themselves against aggro decks, and to bring the game’s meta back into motion – because it has been a bit stagnant in recent months.
Those who want to convince themselves of the new cards should take a look (or several) at our gallery with all 132 cards from The Grand Tournament.
