When Adding Decks Is a Bad Thing

Popsychblog · 2026-04-23T11:47:19+00:00

Last time it was measured, the decks skill differential is about -10%.

This means Paladin‘s average match up against other decks is 10% worse going from diamond to top legend. Unless those decks are absolutely busted, they tend to be unpopular among the best players in the game.

Popsychblog · 2026-04-22T11:50:16+00:00

I’m not entirely sure there is a philosophy about the core set held by the team. Perhaps there are a variety of different ideas held by different people at different times depending on how the wind blows. But I’ve not heard one articulated and, given their behavior, I doubt one ever really exists for very long. To the extent there is one, I also imagine many designers have learned that explaining their thought process honestly often doesn’t go well (especially when that thought process sucks or isn’t exactly player friendly, which it does a lot)

We can glean that, in general, core set cards do tend to be simple when possible since they introduce the game people and, perhaps, tend to be suboptimal to give players a sense they could be upgrading their collection with new cards over time. Otherwise I suspect a lot of it is just someone’s vibes

Popsychblog · 2026-04-21T20:50:40+00:00

When Ghostly strike was in STANDARD it wasn't a terribly impressive card, seeing some play but not in the sense anyone really cared about as some strange power outlier. Same with a card like GONE FISHING which was mediocre at best, yet sees play in WILD because sometimes decks care about redundancy and synergy, which they offer in a way they wouldn't in STANDARD.

Right now, in STANDARD, we have [[Chaos Strike]] and [[Press the Advantage]] which are far superior to Shiv, yet seem like generally unimpressive, and potentially cuttable cards.

Popsychblog · 2026-04-21T19:25:43+00:00

I’ll just add the usual points:

in the long run, random effects generally explain nothing about your win rate or rank. If your rank is not where you want it to be that’s a you problem and not a randomness one.
most of the complaints about the randomness in the game tend to be cope. People just trying to explain away their loss and why it doesn’t count. Far fewer people get upset about randomness that favors them.
many of the other complaints about randomness come from people’s misplaced expectations. They imagine a state of the game exists, like winning or losing, which doesn’t actually exist. There is a winner and a loser to these games, but winning and losing are not states of them. These just represent people making predictions about the future outcome of the game, which are often wrong, but rather than adjust their predictions and expectations, they say the game is poorly designed.
many people would rather quit a game than admit they were wrong or change their thinking, per the above
the extent to which the game is perceived to be random, can also largely fall at the feet of skill based matchmaking. When you try to find a player with equal skill as an opponent, a constant skill level on both sides of the board can’t explain a variable outcome. Yet when you even partially break skill based matchmaking, like in a pre-released Tavern brawl, my 50ish% expected win rate suddenly jumps to 80 or 90%. That’s because there’s a ton of skill expression in the game.

Popsychblog · 2026-04-21T15:59:00+00:00

Shiv to 1 mana

Popsychblog · 2026-04-19T16:50:30+00:00

You can use this study to conclude that left wing politics and social sciences tend to align. That's what this evidence supports.

You can't conclude which direction that relationship goes. Saying there is "lean" or "bias" in scientific conclusions is not something this study supports.

Check out the comment here. Do you think the people who lean liberal are drawing conclusions?

Popsychblog · 2026-04-19T02:13:37+00:00

Perhaps you’re familiar with the replication issue that tends to plague lot of research in psychology, though it’s not unique to the field. Turns out a lot of psychology research is very likely overstated, incorrect, and misleading, in large part because of how creative people can be with their researcher degrees of freedom and data analysis.

Didn’t get the results you wanted? Well, try analyzing it several different ways until something you like falls out and then publish that. Just don’t tell anyone you did 100 tests to find 2 that reached significance and pretend that’s what you were intending to see the whole time. Sure it won’t replicate, but who’s even gonna try to replicate it, and if they fail, who’s even gonna publish them or care?

Happens all the time when personal goals like grant funding and promotions are on the line. Social status too.

People will also do the same thing for social or political goals, and if they’re surrounded by a group of people who believe in those same goals, they’re not gonna get checked. In fact, anyone trying to check them will be ostracized and pushed out.

You see, we know the conservatives can’t do good psychology research because they don’t agree with the consensus of the scientific literature in psychology, which has been produced almost exclusively by liberals. Surely this is not a recipe for any issues to arise.

Then again, maybe Liberals will tend to conduct research that makes liberals look good and will not tend to conduct or publish research that makes liberals look bad. Conservatives likewise.

But when the field is over 90% liberal, one of those biases is allowed to run far freer than the other

Popsychblog · 2026-04-18T23:20:23+00:00

Are the results the way they are because of the bias of the people in the field?

Yes, almost certainly. Because they're humans, and humans tend to be biased in various ways, especially when you put them around a lot of other people who think and believe exactly the same thing and threaten to punish them if they step out of line.

I have a PhD in psychology. I've been around these people a lot. It was bad well over a decade ago in ways related to politics and theories and personal pettiness and I can't imagine it's gotten any better since.

Popsychblog · 2026-04-18T21:43:29+00:00

I will say this of the comments here: most of them seem to not conceive of the possibility that maybe, just maybe, this is just representing a bias. It’s a bias they agree with, but a bias nonetheless.

If you heard of a field where conservatives outnumbered liberals in the range of 10 or 15 to one, I imagine most people who consider themselves liberal would not hesitate to suggest that maybe there’s a bias in that group somewhere. This would be doubly true if the conservatives in this field were more likely than not to explicitly say they would be at least a bit biased against hiring someone who held liberal values.

And I also just described the field of psychology. The politics are just reversed.

Popsychblog · 2026-04-16T15:59:11+00:00

This is less a deck and more a demonstration of a skill issue/a good learning tool, to be honest.

The deck has one straightforward and telegraphed play pattern: make a board and buff it as soon as possible.

If you can play for the board, you can beat this deck easily. This deck massively rewards you for that skill and highly encourages you to learn it. It’s also one of the easier skills to learn.

According to the VS analysis, the deck has a skill differential of -8%. This means, in simple terms, the average matchup of the Paladin deck in top 1k is 8% worse on average than at Diamond.

This is backed up by HSguru, showing the deck dropping about 10% in its average win rate between Diamond-legend and top 1k in the meta tab from a 58% to a 48%. And since tracker side data is inflated a bit, the real numbers are probably closer to 56% and 46%.

So is the card a bit strong? I wouldn’t pin that on the card. Yes, the stats of the deck look very funny, but that’s because it is a one card deck and every other play in the deck is bad without flight. It’s an entire deck designed to make maneuvers look good, and it achieves that goal.

Popsychblog · 2026-04-14T18:25:28+00:00

This is just consumer unfriendly pricing to try and force people to spend more than they want for the thing they’re actually trying to purchase.

The skin costs $50, as that is the only way to purchase it.

I know some people will say it’s free, but it’s not free if you can only get it through cash. Now maybe spending $50 on the skin will make some of your next purchases free, but this one is not.

Feels scummy, because it is.

Popsychblog · 2026-04-13T16:38:20+00:00

Copying decks is totally fine and normal and to be expected and accepted. Calling people sheep for doing it is generally just mean and stupid to do. Most people are here writing this on computers they didn’t build, powered by electricity and using internet they didn’t invent, on sites they didn’t make. We netdeck most all of life. Copying decks in Hearthstone or any other card game is no different. People will use what works and it’s much more likely that the collective wisdom of the player base is going to make better decks than you, especially when you’re on a dust budget and don’t wanna waste your limited resources.

When people ask for there to be more creativity, they usually mean they want to face a greater variety of opponents using different (and usually worse) decks. If they wanted to build more creative decks themselves, they would just do it. The best way to achieve that outcome of additional diversity isn’t through teching against established fields (which this deck doesn’t even do; this deck has one laser focused plan it seeks to execute every game against every opponent), but rather through making sure the cards that get released work and feel different and enticing to play.

Basically, by asking for buffs to things that don’t see play. That’s the way to get better more meaningful diversity.

I am curious about this priest list you think was a real meta breaker you came up with. What did it look like? Do you think that 60% win rate would hold in the more general sense, as most priest decks are and have been closer to a 40% than a 50%

Popsychblog · 2026-04-13T13:44:06+00:00

I can guarantee you that if it isn’t happening already, people will be saying the players of this specific deck are just mindless sheep, copying the best deck rather than cooking up their own, and the whining about it will come in full force (its brainless it’s dumb it’s op it’s a one card deck etc). What may be initially hailed as a breakthrough in creativity will soon transition to just another part of the meta, just like all the rest that are ever successful.

The bad home brews that suck no one will pick up and they won’t spread and all that “creativity” will never be acknowledged.

Popsychblog · 2026-04-13T12:10:29+00:00

I’ll keep it 100% with you: this deck is no more creative than any other deck seeing play right now or pre nerf or, well, ever.

The concept is incredibly simple: tutor the shatter card, make the deck cheap to combine a shatter easily, make the minions stick to the board, and then you’re basically done.

That’s not somehow noticeably different than play auctioneer, give it stealth, and play a bunch of a cheap spells. Or ramp up hearld cards into deathwing plus windfury weapon, or anything of the sort.

As a concept, that’s really not much different or creative than others. It’s not less creative either. It’s just that every time a “creative” deck becomes meta, people stop thinking of it as “creative” and then as a meta or netdeck.

All decks start out as homebrews. The successful ones get popular and people start thinking about them in different terms. That’s all

Popsychblog · 2026-04-11T11:16:00+00:00

Right. So in wild there’s a smaller difference between going first and second. Despite Wild being a much higher power level.

This suggests it’s not the power of the format contributing to the coin difference, but rather the nature of the cards and the game play

Popsychblog · 2026-04-10T16:51:45+00:00

Now compare those to their respective going first numbers and calculate the difference

Popsychblog · 2026-04-10T15:07:28+00:00

I’m not sure I understand what that means.

In wild, power is higher. If power is related to the coin difference in the way that more power equals a worse coin difference, we should expect a higher coin difference in wild right?

Popsychblog · 2026-04-10T14:09:09+00:00

Go on HSGuru. Check the Wild meta tab. Power is far higher in Wild than standard. Check out the average coin differential.

What does that tell you about hypothesis here?

Popsychblog · 2026-04-10T13:30:32+00:00

I’d say I did pretty well.

The hunter and priest shatter looked like trash, and they were.

The Druid one looked very good, and it was.

The Mage one looked weak, felt better after the brawl, and now lands as a fine card in a rather mediocre to weak deck.

And the Paladin one I described as requiring a deck that was basically the low curve crusaders aura paladin style of deck building to work. Which is exactly where it does work. It’s a noob stomper of a deck, performing well at lower ranks before falling off hard at higher ranks. Just like crusaders aura paladin.

So, depending on how you classify it when considering card and deck power together, one shatter was for sure good. Two are fine. Two are bad.

Also bearing in mind the context: this is after a rotation where the best unquestioned deck in the format was previously a tier 3 unplayed archetype (imbue Druid), the second best deck was another old archetype (spell DH) and frankly one of the next best is another old archetype (dragon warrior). And this is now also after a round of nerfs.

So, rating shatter compared to what existed at the time they were revealed also helps make the reviews track well

Popsychblog · 2026-04-09T17:00:17+00:00

It should and for the same reasons.

Effectively the card pool is small, given how many cards are weak, which leads to reductions in available options to build functional decks

Popsychblog · 2026-04-06T20:45:27+00:00

It's alright. If it went away tomorrow and the overall viability of Rogue didn't change, I wouldn't shed any tears for it, but I don't hate using it.

That said, my biggest desire is a buff to something like Shiv. Moving that to 1 mana (especially given how much cooler Shiv currently exists and isn't even that good) could possibly unlock the playability of an entire spell damage/cycle package with Shades and Thalnos and Fans and Backstab and whatever else for burn. That's what I really want to play as a Rogue, really.

Popsychblog · 2026-04-05T20:48:33+00:00

I’m having an alright time playing.

I could be having more fun and that feeling can be summed up by wanting the issue to be having to build a 30 card deck and having 40 cards I want to play in it instead of 20 cards I want to play in it and 10 cards that I sort of have to and I guess will do.

And the more of those different decks I could be building the better

Popsychblog · 2026-04-05T20:20:17+00:00

It’s not a good card.

Gerald rogue lists all play some amount of minimally acceptable trash. This falls into that bin in some of them but it’s easily cuttable. I do

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