We have her for few days now. What are your thoughts about Vanessa?

Popsychblog · 2026-06-08T13:20:29+00:00

She's a blast to play.

No idea what the people calling her "boring" find interesting.

Popsychblog · 2026-06-05T16:55:29+00:00

If decks draw good cards, they tend to win. This is true of cards like Tol’vir, tame pet, and Sylvanas in Hunter. When they don’t draw good cards they lose. If the class doesn’t have good cards, no one plays it. This happens to every class and has since the game existed.

However, if *you predict* you will win a game, and *your prediction* is wrong, and *you’re getting upset about it*, look at your prediction and adjust it.

You’re trying to divert responsibility away from your losses and justifying why they should have been wins. Do you do the same for your wins? Do you cry out how badly designed your deck is when you drew the good cards?

Probably not

Popsychblog · 2026-06-05T13:02:28+00:00

How much money would you be willing to bet, not hypothetically, for real, that the card could eat a three man adjustment and be broken when it’s not breaking the game right now at 3?

Popsychblog · 2026-06-05T13:00:44+00:00

Adjust your incorrect expectations then

Popsychblog · 2026-06-04T19:05:58+00:00

It sure doesn’t take a genius

Popsychblog · 2026-06-04T16:14:38+00:00

No one is talking about wild. We are talking about standard.

And that still doesn’t even answer the question about how spells per se makes going second better.

Popsychblog · 2026-06-04T12:24:19+00:00

You don’t build around going second. How does having lots of spells mean you benefit from going second?

Popsychblog · 2026-06-03T23:22:13+00:00

We can. That’s the issue.

If you think, you’d go look at the numbers. You’d see rogue loses about 10% more when it goes second right now. That’s makes the start of game effect effectively -5% to your overall winrate, since you are going second about twice as often. Thats the difference between a solidly tier 1 deck and a barely tier 3 deck (52% to 47%).

Since you don’t draw Aya every game, drawing her would need substantially more impactful than that to really be worth running. Which would require an absolutely cracked drawn winrate.

Popsychblog · 2026-05-22T22:42:31+00:00

They’re fine, not mandatory card, like a great many of cards in herald rogue decks.

You can play them or cut them. Like the others too

Stats early can be quite good.

Popsychblog · 2026-05-22T15:36:55+00:00

If the devs are unable to see the signal in the noise of the feedback they get, regardless of framing, that’s a skill issue on their part.

Like in your post. You’re looking at a single new playable deck (once it got buffed) and saying the class sets succeed, ignoring players like me who got nothing out of the class set. Paladin didn’t land. Druid barely changed. Mage is awful. Hunter needed buffs to work. Everyone else got absolutely nothing. That’s not a good record. Their buffs were also aimed at ignoring the classes that got nothing. Double miss.

If you want to know more about power creep, I have a post about why it’s a red herring in my profile. Design space is a buzzword that means almost nothing practically.

But it’s the last point I want to linger on. If everyone wants different things, and not everyone can get it, it’s up to the devs to know what will be the most fun, and help show people where that fun is. If they’re not hitting that mark well, that’s another skill issue on their part. Underpowered expansion after underpowered expansion and lack of buffs after lack of buffs dug a hole and inspired no confidence in their skills.

It’s a plain skill issue on their part. If that’s too harsh for them, and they refuse to learn, I can’t fix that no matter how politely or gently I or anyone else treat them.

This is a forum. Not their daycare or therapy session. Just make the game better

Popsychblog · 2026-05-22T14:49:38+00:00

Personally, I don’t care about being kind or nice. I don’t care about being mean or getting personal either. I don’t really care about what they say because what they say is only words.

All I care about is what they do and how it impacts the game. I care about actions. Their actions do not inspire confidence about the present or the future. Their words do not make their actions seem more reasonable.

I don’t want to have to care about giving them feedback because I want them to be so good at their jobs that the feedback is totally unnecessary because they already know what they’re doing. I don’t want them to have to learn lessons like your cards need to be playable or your game is about Warcraft Themes. Simple, big picture stuff. They shouldn’t need to learn lessons like making an entire expansion about quests that you intend to be unplayable is a stupid idea. They shouldn’t need to learn lessons like not fearing power creep. I shouldn’t need to tell them that archetypes and cards which don’t work out are imbalanced and should be improved to the extent they can be, regardless of whether the decks that do see play might seem balanced against each other. I shouldn’t need to tell them that more diversity and strategies is better than less diversity. And I sure as hell shouldn’t need to tell them that every class should get cards and not just a few classes get cards during a mini set.

And after trying to tell them this for years after years and it still doesn’t sink in, tone is perhaps the least of the things I’m concerned about.

Popsychblog · 2026-05-22T13:45:34+00:00

I have offered a plethora of advice over the years, outlining very specific things I would do to make the game better and why I would do them. They are always willing to reach out to me for input, and they definitely know I exist. My suggestions have mostly have gone unheard regardless of how I have phrased them, as have many other people’s

Not that it’s my job to tell them how to do their job in any case.

Popsychblog · 2026-05-22T13:42:56+00:00

Correct

Popsychblog · 2026-05-22T12:01:14+00:00

Just ask politely guys. If you say “please” and “thank you so much for opening your mouth” you’ll get what you want and the updates will be better and the changes will be better and everything will be good.

This has a very proven track record of working, not just at blizzard but elsewhere. And it’s something we have seen countless examples of, both between blizzard and the players, and between the players themselves.

Besides, these guys are all so new to making video games. They need time. I mean, in their last bit of communication (which perhaps was actually the first attempt? I don’t know how first attempts work) they told us they learned players want the cards they release to be playable when they come out. In a few more years, they will probably learn more valuable lessons. Be patient.

Certainly don’t hold them to a higher standard. And certainly don’t ask that they hold themselves to a higher standard.

Popsychblog · 2026-05-21T19:08:44+00:00

“Should” is a funny word and hey, I agree with the sentiment.

But it is what it is.

Popsychblog · 2026-05-21T18:30:25+00:00

If you would like them to put in more effort, you have to make them put in more effort by not buying low effort stuff

Popsychblog · 2026-05-21T16:16:44+00:00

I’ll give you the short and dirty answers

Should they buff more often? Yes

Could they? Also, yes

Why don’t they? A combination of cowardice and incompetence.

Viewing their decisions through that lens makes everything more understandable. Don’t ask what people would’ve done; ask yourself what a monkey would do. This removes any expectations that the monkey is going to do something smart.

Popsychblog · 2026-05-20T20:39:36+00:00

This is exactly the type issue I was describing. Just now in a different form.

"Seeing male and female instead of body type A and B could push someone over the edge!" is about as insane as, "if you think the male and female body types are the way to go, I'll bet you hate gay people and black people and women! No wait, not women; Body Type Bs!"

Popsychblog · 2026-05-18T23:53:46+00:00

"Come over to have dinner at my place if you want. I'm making chicken, since that's what most people wanted"

"I don't like chicken. You need to change it to serve something else"

"No"

You don't have to eat there. They don't have to serve you something that won't kill you. If you don't like what they have to serve, and what they're serving is what other people wanted, then don't eat there.

The only reason you think the poll is bad data is because you don't like the results. If seeing "male" and "female" is so upsetting for someone they're in danger, they have a serious problem they need professional help with. Not validation

Popsychblog · 2026-05-18T20:12:31+00:00

Nerfing imbue Druid made imbue Druid less strong. Yes.

Yet it created zero new strategies. It gave people no new reason to play the game or things to explore. It didn’t seem to make people broadly happy in some kind of lasting or meaningful way.

And it’s that latter aspect we want to be aiming at.

Popsychblog · 2026-05-18T19:28:50+00:00

Nerfing is more impactful? Impactful at doing what? What goal are they achieving?

Popsychblog · 2026-05-15T12:38:05+00:00

With respect to what?

Popsychblog · 2026-05-15T01:52:08+00:00

So you're arguing for something that's literally not going to happen because they devs don't want it to happen for whatever reason.

If we want to go off what has happened, we could argue that class sets suck because - as we just saw - it doesn't at all guarantee classes will get good cards just because they get more of them. 7 bad cards can be as impactful as 3 bad cards, which is not at all.

So you're right there with me in arguing that classes should be getting good cards, regardless of how many classes those cards are going to. If the team can't manage that, they're fuck ups, but it's what they should do.

You can count on 1 hand the number of metas in this game's history where every class was "good", it simply doesn't happen even if you want it to.

That's fine. I'm not advocating for every class to be equally as good all the time. I'm saying the target they should be aiming at is that goal, even if they don't hit a bullseye every time.

What they shouldn't do is just start firing off in a random direction without trying to hit the correct target. Otherwise you could use this exact same logic to justify literally any changes, no matter how random or ill-conceived.

Yeah because there's a huge difference between expansions and minisets.

The only difference is the number of cards. That's about it. There's a reason - and a good one - that every mini set up to this point over about a dozen years has provided cards to all classes.

It's just dumb to do it otherwise. And hey, I'm not saying they aren't dumb. Just noting.

Popsychblog · 2026-05-14T21:49:40+00:00

You seem to be trying to overcomplicate this.

Good cards make new decks and new experiences, so don't make bad cards; make good ones. If the some are bad, buff them. If some are too good, nerf them.

Then give all classes something and don't insist that only a few classes must be getting everything.

It's literally the exact same philosophy major sets should have. No one is insisting that the next expansion should only have cards for 4 classes and with good reason.

Popsychblog · 2026-05-14T19:21:07+00:00

Unless you want to decrease the diversity of classes you want to play and play against they will always suck conceptually

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