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[Haly]

Using the terminology I'm familiar with...

Tempo -> Bluefin Murloc
Card Advantage -> Arcane Intellect

So aggro decks are tempos decks whereas control decks are card advantage decks. The first tries to go from 30-0 as soon as possible. The latter will grind you down until you're out of cards and they have a full hand. Midrange is somewhere in the middle, where they'll jockey for board position and put the other guy on a clock (number of turns until death) without giving up card advantage to do it (Piloted Shredder, Flamewalker, Highmane).

Under this gradient both Varian and Ysera would be high card advantage cards and low tempo (because they come very late in the game). On average I think Varian will generate more CA than Ysera because Varian's is instantaneous whereas Ysera's is given in installments. But even at the high end of CA cards, there's still differences in tempo and Varian generates much more tempo than Ysera does, like how Rag will affect the board much faster than Alexstrasza.

 

[Ultrabum]

I think Ancient of Lore is moderate value, like Wrynn is. For 7 mana, a 5/5 is not particularly valuable, but Lore more than makes up for his moderate value by providing tempo through card draw. Wrynn is an even bigger example because he plays the minions he draws: he is pretty valuable (but not incredibly valuable) as a 7/7, but provides an enormous tempo swing, where tempo is the state of your hand + the board.

I consider Wrynn more a tempo card than a value card. Another, different virtue in a card would be something like Wolf Rider; it provides virtually no tempo (i.e. no board or card dominance) or value (a 3/1 is low value) but provides extreme efficiency, where efficiency here is "killing your opponent." Face hunters are certainly not value oriented and also not tempo oriented (as they are willing to lose board control by turn 4-5 as long as they can keep punching face). I call them "efficiency oriented."

So the three things I value in a card are its tempo swing (Arcane Intellect provides no value or efficiency but significant tempo), its value (Ysera provides virtually no efficiency, little tempo, but enormous value) and efficiency (Wolf Rider provides little tempo, little value, but significant efficiency). You can swap these words up if you would like -- I'm much more concerned that these three ideas have distinct words to describe them. You can call efficiency flaxmalog and call value qwyijibo, I don't care, as long as we have words to describe these concepts.

That's a neat way to look at it. I find your description of arcane intellect as tempo confusing. You are trading mana for card advantage.

I think of tempo with rouge cards like backstab and prep, where you trade card advantage for board state.
I guess I think of card advantage as its own separate thing.

I also think of cards more in cost terms than value. But you are right, might as well say dr boom is good because the card has high asdf.

 

[Opiate]

If you have your opponent down to 3 health as a warrior, would you rather draw Varian Wrynn, Ysera, or Wolf Rider? Obviously wolf rider. The other two could eventually win you the game, but wolf rider is an extremely efficient card.

If you are in a battle for board dominance in the mid-to-late-game against an opponent, would you rather draw Ysera, Wolf Rider or Varian Wrynn? I think Wrynn is the obvious choice here; it provides an instant massive board and hand swing. I would call this a "tempo" card.

If you are at the end of the game and you have 1 last card in your deck, would you rather that card be Ysera, Wolf Rider or Varian Wrynn? Again, I think the choice is obvious: Ysera. Unless you already have the opponent down to 2 health, of course, you're going to want your last card to be as valuable as is possible.

 

[Opiate]

Yes, I think you guys are right: card advantage and board advantage are two different concepts as well. Board advantage is tempo -- and Varian Wrynn provides that in spades. Card advantage is a different concept, and may just be called "card advantage," but I think that's an unfairly diminished way to look at it. Card advantage might also be called option advantage.

 

[iirate]

Using the terminology I'm familiar with...

Tempo -> Bluefin Murloc
Card Advantage -> Arcane Intellect

So aggro decks are tempos decks whereas control decks are card advantage decks. The first tries to go from 30-0 as soon as possible. The latter will grind you down until you're out of cards and they have a full hand. Midrange is somewhere in the middle, where they'll jockey for board position and put the other guy on a clock (number of turns until death) without giving up card advantage to do it (Piloted Shredder, Flamewalker, Highmane).

Under this gradient both Varian and Ysera would be high card advantage cards and low tempo (because they come very late in the game). On average I think Varian will generate more CA than Ysera because Varian's is instantaneous whereas Ysera's is given in installments. But even at the high end of CA cards, there's still differences in tempo and Varian generates much more tempo than Ysera does, like how Rag will affect the board much faster than Alexstrasza.

This is how I understand it as well. A high tempo play dramatically affects the board relative to it's "speed"(aka mana cost). Soulfire is a dramatically tempo-oriented card: it disregards cards in favor of 2.5 mana worth of damage for only 1 mana.

A high value play has little or no immediate impact on the game, but is designed to put you ahead later. Sprint is a nearly zero-tempo play(you might get some small benefits from casting it, aka combo), but is how a rogue sets up to finish things after expending their resources on high tempo plays early on.

Yes, I think you guys are right: card advantage and board advantage are two different concepts as well. Board advantage is tempo -- and Varian Wrynn provides that in spades. Card advantage is a different concept, and may just be called "card advantage," but I think that's an unfairly diminished way to look at it. Card advantage might also be called option advantage.

I see Varian as a high value and variable tempo play. a plain 7/7 for 10 is very low tempo on it's own, but that can be made up with free minions. Regardless, you're getting a lot of value from the play.

 

[Haly]

You can create these hypothetical situations for every card, and that will just muddle the waters even more.

Labels like Tempo and Card Advantage tend to look at things in a vacuum. Does it care about dominating the board quickly and lowering the opponent's life? Or does it care more about building up your hand and staying alive (which is a very loose term, for example, Jaraxxus is a huge Card Advantage engine)?

By the very nature of this, most high cost cards are CA and most low cost cards are Tempo.

A value card is a card that tries to get both Tempo and CA, like Shredder or Sylvanas.

 

[embalm]

Boom is not just 7/7 for 7 mana. Rag hits for 8 the turn you play him. Who knows Rhonin might find its way to some decks, but Boom nor Rag it is not by any stretch.

Of course he isn't Boom or Rag. He isn't Sylvanus either. Those 3 minions fit ANY deck that cares about board control and hopes to hit turn 8+. They are general cards with great value, but it's all stand alone value.

Rhonin is not built for general purpose. He is very specifically built as late game combo enabler for spell synergy decks. Just like Antonidas, he must have cards that feed him to get insane value.
With Antonidas you usually want at least two to four 1 cost cards in your deck along with two to four spare parts. Arcane Missiles, Mirror Image, Mech Yeti, and Clockwork Gnome usually act as his enablers.
With Rhonin you will want 4 to 8 cards that benefit from cheap spells. Antonidas, Flamewaker, Malygos, and Mana-Wyrm are a few cards that take advantage of them.

Maybe a deck can use synergy between all those cards to out value the general purpose legendary cards, and in those decks Rhonin would be considered better than them. With a side note saying this deck is harder than dropping good legendaries.


I am biased though.
I like tempo mage, but I prefer mid-range decks. I'm hoping Rhonin and a few other new cards can bridge the gap.

 

[daemissary]

This is all semantics but I think value/card advantage should be used interchangeably, anything which has card draw to replace itself or generally requires more than 1 card to remove is value because it theoretically means that your opponent will run out of cards in their hand before you.

Tempo is something completely different and it involves staying ahead on the board instead of cards in hand.

 

[Rockyrock]

Rhonin seems made for Malygos Mage.

add in an emperor and you could see that working.

assuming patron begins dying out lol

 

[Haly]

Yes, I think you guys are right: card advantage and board advantage are two different concepts as well. Board advantage is tempo -- and Varian Wrynn provides that in spades. Card advantage is a different concept, and may just be called "card advantage," but I think that's an unfairly diminished way to look at it. Card advantage might also be called option advantage.

Options are considered Card Advantage under standard Magic theory, IIRC. That's what makes cards like these good CA, because it's one card with the flexibility of 2 (and this is the cornerstone of Druid gameplay):

 

[zoukka]

Value is used pretty loosely in TCG circles, usually people refer to value when they gain advantages. For example you trade 1 card for 2. Tempo usually refers to board state/life total. Card advantage usually falls under it when people refer to value.

Varian gives you card advantage and tempo. It's completely fair to call that a value play. When you reach fatigue, card draw becomes useless and offers no value.

 

[Haly]

Value overlaps with Card Advantage a lot, I'll agree, because Card Advantage is mostly generated by value plays (1 for 2, 2 for 3), but they're still distinct concepts.

Example:

Shielded Minibot

High tempo turn 2 play.
High value because of built in divine shield allowing it to trade and withstand removal.
Low card advantage (because it's still one card, technically).

It's fuzzier when you analyze Deathrattle minions. Is the second minion from Shredder another "card"? Or is it part of Shredder's value? Or both? And if the second minion is a "card", why isn't Shielded Minibot's Divine Shield also a "card"?

So yeah it's not perfect.

 

[Fersis]

Was checkin' Forsen's Top Contributors ...

• SAMB00L: $19815
• FloppenKompis: $11258

So there are people who love Forsen even more than i do!
I remember the night that FloppenKompis showed up, nuts.

 

[zoukka]

Value overlaps with Card Advantage a lot, I'll agree, because Card Advantage is mostly generated by value plays (1 for 2, 2 for 3), but they're still distinct concepts.

Example:

Shielded Minibot

High tempo turn 2 play.
High value because of built in divine shield allowing it to trade and withstand removal.
Low card advantage (because it's still one card, technically).

It's fuzzier when you analyze Deathrattle minions. Is the second minion from Shredder another "card"? Or is it part of Shredder's value? Or both? And if the second minion is a "card", why isn't Shielded Minibot's Divine Shield also a "card"?

So yeah it's not perfect.

You can't say the Divine Shield was valuable before going further. What if Blood Knight comes out, then the shieldbot wasn't very valuable. If the bot kills a minion with the shield then it had great value whatever happens later.

 

[Haly]

This is kind of where archetypes come in to play. A card that is mostly tempo in one deck might be mostly CA in another.

Example:

Tempo Mage plays Mad Scientist to get Mirror Image. This is all focused on overwhelming the opposition with a powerful board.

Freeze Mage plays Mad Scientist to fetch Ice Barrier and Ice Block from the deck. The intent is to stall and get "more cards", as well as thin the deck.

Either way, we can say Mad Scientist is exceptional in its tempo and card advantage generation and that's why it's so strong.

You can't say the Divine Shield was valuable before going further. What if Blood Knight comes out, then the shieldbot wasn't very valuable. If the bot kills a minion with the shield then it had great value whatever happens later.

Average use-case. I don't consider Doomhammer low tempo because of Harrison. I consider it low tempo because of how long it takes to go through all of its damage. But it's also high value because of its synergy with certain cards and the granularity of its damage.

Related is the classic high-tempo, low-CA card: Sap. Sap generates more and more tempo as the game goes on because its effect on the board state scales with the cost of its targets. However, it generates negative CA, because you're giving up one card for zero. You're hinging on the tempo swing to clinch the game for you, and good Sap usage comes down to how much of that negative CA you can offset with your tempo play.

 

[Opiate]

You can create these hypothetical situations for every card, and that will just muddle the waters even more.

I don't think it's muddling the waters at all; the examples I gave (and which you gave later after this post) clarify these concepts considerably.

Labels like Tempo and Card Advantage tend to look at things in a vacuum. Does it care about dominating the board quickly and lowering the opponent's life? Or does it care more about building up your hand and staying alive (which is a very loose term, for example, Jaraxxus is a huge Card Advantage engine)?

That's what we're trying to do, surely; remove all other variables and distil specific concepts. Very few cards will be only one thing or only another, which is actually why I chose the examples I did (I think wolf rider is about as low value / low tempo as a card can get, Ysera is as low tempo / low efficiency as a card can get, etc.) Real world situations will almost.always be more complex, but we can talk about these ideas in a vacuum specifically so that the ideas are clarified and distilled.

By the very nature of this, most high cost cards are CA and most low cost cards are Tempo.

Absolutely, that plays in to it. No deck can be absolutely without tempo -- although I do think some decks can go with very little value (i.e. Face Hunter, Oil Rogue have extremely low value to virtually all of their cards).

 

[FeD.nL]

Well at the very least Rhonin is good for newer players/players with not such a big card pool at their disposal, that get drawn back in due to TGT and buy some packs. It's easy to forget that there are a lot of players that simply don't have the time/willingness to spend a lot on this game and then get a legendary like Flame Leviathan.

It's a good thing new(er) players now get to pull a legendary from TGT with some fun mechanics and allow them to built around it and get creative with it. Because so far all the legendaries revealed are a definite step up from a lot of the previous ones, with the exception of perhaps Icehowl.

 

[Opiate]

Yes, I think Rhonin is an example of "just below par" legendary, not a Hemet Nesingwary or Lorewalker Cho.

It's probably less valuable than Dr. Boom or Ragnaros -- two of the comparisons we have made in this thread -- but it's not so bad that playing it instead makes you a horrible player with a crappy deck.

 

[embalm]

I was thinking about Ram Wrangler and decided that it has to beat Silver Hand Knight if I were to consider it in a deck. So I need a total of 7 stats on the summoned beast for it to be a card worth playing. I am taking text and lack of battlecry into consideration.

Trash - 13 crappy Beasts, 3 are situational - 30%

• Webspinner
• Timber Wolf* (When summoned with a weak board)
• Stonetusk Boar
• Hungry Crab
• Young Dragon Hawk
• Angry Chicken
• Direwolf Alpha* (When summoned with no trade)
• River Croc
• Bloodfen Raptor
• Captains Parrot
• Ironbeak Owl
• Silver Back Patriarch
• Ironfur Grizzly* (When taunt is useless)

Meets Requirements - 9 fair beasts, 3 are situational - 20%

• Timber Wolf* (When summoned with a board of beasts ready to trade)
• Direwolf Alpha* (When summoned and can allow a previous beast to trade up)
• Ironfur Grizzly* (When taunt is useful)
• Haunted Creeper (1+2+1+1+1+1 = 7 stats)
• Scavenging Hyena (Since a beast is required, I would assume it trades and turns this into a 4/3)
• Emperor Cobra (decent text for late/mid game)
• Jungle Panther (Weak stat, but the stealth allows it to trade up against some 5 drops like Azure Drake)
• Oasis Snapjaw (Beats the stat line, but distributed poorly)
• Starving Buzzard (Weak stat line, but if it survives the upside is incredible in a beast deck)

Above & Beyond - 19 above average beasts, about 9 give you a huge advantage - 50%

• Core Rager
• Lost Tallstrider
• Savage Combatant
• King Mukla
• Mukla's Champion
• Stampeding Kodo
• King of Beasts
• Tundra Rhino
• Stranglethorn Tiger
• Maexxna
• Savannah Highmane
• The Beast (Even when with the 3/3 on death)
• Core Hound
• Malorne
• Ghaz'Rilla
• King Krush
• Armored Warhorse
• Hunter Legendary Worm #1 (Assumption, but it should be far better than 3/4)
• Hunter Legendary Worm #2

 

[Haly]

I disagree about Wolfrider, Opiate. Charge/Haste is the very definition of tempo because it does something the turn it comes down. This is even more important in Hearthstone when every minion doubles as removal. but it's offset by very poor value (1 health is a trivial amount of health).

The opposite of Wolfrider in the 3 slot would be... Acolyte of Pain. Which is very low impact (1 damage is inconsequential) but has a high potential for CA that makes it worthwhile.

Neither of these cards are very value since they're both trading one thing for another. Value at 3 would be Dark Cultust, Imp Gang Boss and Tinkertown Engineer. All are big bodies on their own. They have high health, and moderate to high attack. They can trade down, and two of them can trade up. And they will do something that will further build your board/hand unrelated to raw stats.

 

[V-Faction]

I feel like my opinion on Rhonin has changed like 10 times already. Whomever suggested he be like Toshley with Battlecry & Deathrattle was right. And the reason is because, Dr. Boom is still so much nicer. This is a class legendary we're talking about. Its power should be a little bit better than average. Boom bots grant disposable bodies that can hit for up to 8 damage for free, whereas you need to cast each of your Arcane Missiles (3-mana cost), and the damage is split up far too much. Great if you've got the pieces for it, but abysmal without 'em.

EDIT: Speaking of Ram Wrangler, let's talk about what the most successful enablers might be among the beasts should it take off. I'm guessing either low cost, low commitment, high health, or damage avoidance would be the biggest ones. So, spit balling...

Snaketrap (trap - 3 snakes)
Haunted Creeper (deathrattle - 2 spiders)
Oasis Snapjaw (7 health)
Jungle Panther (stealth)
Hounds (potentially a lot)
Emperor Cobra (deterrence?)
Webspinner (1 mana and deathrattle)

 

[IceMarker]

I main midrange-control Paladin yet I'm falling ranks right now with my best deck that wasn't netdecked like these assholes on ladder are running. (AND THIS IS FUCKING RANK 15 FOR CHRIST SAKE)

 

[Haly]

Well, people wanted Ranked rewards. This is what happens when you attach awards to rank.

 

[ZealousD]

I disagree about Wolfrider, Opiate. Charge/Haste is the very definition of tempo because it does something the turn it comes down. This is even more important in Hearthstone when every minion doubles as removal. but it's offset by very poor value (1 health is a trivial amount of health).

The opposite of Wolfrider in the 3 slot would be... Acolyte of Pain. Which is very low impact (1 damage is inconsequential) but has a high potential for CA that makes it worthwhile.

Neither of these cards are very value since they're both trading one thing for another. Value at 3 would be Dark Cultust, Imp Gang Boss and Tinkertown Engineer. All are big bodies on their own. They have high health, and moderate to high attack. They can trade down, and two of them can trade up. And they will do something that will further build your board/hand unrelated to raw stats.

Wolfrider = Reach. I hesitate to call it a tempo play because it doesn't threaten much on its own. Hyper Aggro decks aren't really the same thing as Tempo decks because they aren't min-maxing every turn.

Acolyte of Pain is low tempo but builds card advantage.

I consider a card to have "value" whenever your opponent has to spend more resources dealing with a card than you spent playing it.

 

[Opiate]

I disagree about Wolfrider, Opiate. Charge/Haste is the very definition of tempo because it does something the turn it comes down. This is even more important in Hearthstone when every minion doubles as removal. but it's offset by very poor value (1 health is a trivial amount of health).

The opposite of Wolfrider in the 3 slot would be... Acolyte of Pain. Which is very low impact (1 damage is inconsequential) but has a high potential for CA that makes it worthwhile.

Neither of these cards are very value since they're both trading one thing for another. Value at 3 would be Dark Cultust, Imp Gang Boss and Tinkertown Engineer. All are big bodies on their own. They have high health, and moderate to high attack. They can trade down, and two of them can trade up. And they will do something that will further build your board/hand unrelated to raw stats.

So what would you call the difference between wolf rider and, say, flame waker? Both of those are 3 drops. Flame Waker is the pivotal component of the current mage tempo deck, and strikes me as a quintessential tempo card. These cards operate very differently and offer very different upsides.

Do you feel there is a difference between tempo and aggro? Because I do.

 

[Haly]

Flamewalker would fall under the same category as Imp Gang, Cultist, and Tinkertown. High value tempo and CA (generates effective CA through its ability)

It's better to think of Wolfrider as a more expensive Darkbomb that can potentially be reused. Tempo is also closely tied to opponent life total, which is what direct damage excels at.

Do you feel there is a difference between tempo and aggro? Because I do.

I agree there is a difference between tempo decks and aggro decks. But I don't evaluate cards with "aggro", it falls under "tempo" for me.

Aggro ---------- Tempo ---------- Midrange ---------- Control
Increasing Tempo <----------------------------> Increasing CA

 

[CoolOff]

I was thinking about Ram Wrangler and decided that it has to beat Silver Hand Knight if I were to consider it in a deck. So I need a total of 7 stats on the summoned beast for it to be a card worth playing. I am taking text and lack of battlecry into consideration.



Trash - 13 crappy Beasts, 3 are situational - 30%

• Webspinner
• Timber Wolf* (When summoned with a weak board)
• Stonetusk Boar
• Hungry Crab
• Young Dragon Hawk
• Angry Chicken
• Direwolf Alpha* (When summoned with no trade)
• River Croc
• Bloodfen Raptor
• Captains Parrot
• Ironbeak Owl
• Silver Back Patriarch
• Ironfur Grizzly* (When taunt is useless)

I sort of disagree with Webspinner being in the bottom bracket. I mean, the card goes in Beast Hunter, so getting another shot at an insane beast seems fair to me.

 

[Professor Lich]

Well, people wanted Ranked rewards. This is what happens when you attach awards to rank.

They should have Casual rewards as well. If you play at least one Casual game, at the start of a new season a Window should pop up with fireworks congratulating the player for playing a match. Could even have the fire works last longer the more games you play! It's only fair because people play a fair amount of Casual as well.

 

[Raxus]

With no more card vote I am assuming they are revealing the rest of the set this weekend?

 

[Nirolak]

Well, people wanted Ranked rewards. This is what happens when you attach awards to rank.

The number of Golden Portrait Legendary Card Back players I've seen at Rank 12 has been astonishing for this far into the season.

 

[ZealousD]

"Aggro" is a very general label that can be applied to any deck with a low curve. Tempo is essentially min-maxing value cards at every mana level to keep a consistent pressure. Face decks don't min-max at every level, they just try to include as much reach as possible and try to ignore a huge portion of the game to focus on hero life total only.

Both Imp Gang Boss and Wolfrider can be "aggro" cards but IBG is tempo and Wolfrider is Face/Reach. Zoo and Face Hunter are both aggro decks but they play very differently.

 

[Haly]

I consider the "tempo" in "tempo deck" to be different from the "tempo" in "tempo card". This is just how I learned about the game!

 

[Opiate]

We need to standardize, fellas. Our definitions are all over the place.

Note I'm not saying anyone is specifically wrong; I'm saying our definitions are different, and that makes conversation hard.

 

[Santiako]

With no more card vote I am assuming they are revealing the rest of the set this weekend?

In exactly 24 hours if they keep the same time of reveals as these last weeks (hopefully).

 

[CoolOff]

With no more card vote I am assuming they are revealing the rest of the set this weekend?

There's a stream tomorrow. Expect a release date and a card dump shortly after.

 

[Kenaras]

The problem you're running into is that Hearthstone borrows most of its terminology from Magic: The Gathering. "Value" as you're using the term basically doesn't exist in MTG, because there's no fatigue system. I suppose you could make a case for cards like Feldon's Cane (shuffles the graveyard into the library) but that's a bit of a stretch.

I'd say value simply has slightly different meanings in a normal game vs. a fatigue game. Either way, it primarily refers to generating card advantage over your opponent. (Indirectly, that can include finding ways to trade low-cost, low-value cards 1-for-1 with high-cost, high-value cards.) The difference is that "card advantage" in a normal game refers to your hand+board; in a fatigue game it refers to your library+hand+board.

We need to standardize, fellas. Our definitions are all over the place.

Note I'm not saying anyone is specifically wrong; I'm saying our definitions are different, and that makes conversation hard.

Standardize our terminology? A noble goal, but probably a hopeless one.

 

[Dahbomb]

Arcane Golem is low value for a control deck.

But for Face Hunter it's the highest "value" possible for 4 mana.

Which is to say it's the most DAMAGE PER MANA they have access to at 4 mana.


That's essentially what aggro decks are looking for. They are looking for damage per mana spent.


So yeah value is different for different types of deck. Some cards give value through card advantage other cards give value through board control or tempo advantage.

In the case of Varryn that's an interesting case because it's potentially providing BOTH card advantage and tempo advantage. Like if you get 3 Legendaries off of those 3 draws then the tempo gain is RIDICULOUS! That's why the card is potentially good.

 

[slayn]

There are 3 main resources in a card game/hearthstone - cards, health, and tempo
most cards in the game convert one resource into another and you choose your plays based on which of those resources you are most concerned with at the time. Either you are concerned with increasing your own resources, decreasing your opponent's resources, or both.

'value' is a more abstract concept that people use, is ambigious, and shouldn't really be used at the same time as the other 3. When people refer to a 'value' deck they typically mean a deck that prioritizes the card resource.

tempo is, generally, a measurement of the strength of your board. It's a sort of measurement of the amount of threat you have in play without having to spend additional resources.

You can't really call a creature a tempo creature because its tempo is dependent on the situation. A flame waker on an empty board *can* be high tempo but isn't necessarily. If you can't leverage its ability then a spider tank would have been more tempo. A wolf rider can be reach, or removal, or tempo depending on the situation.

 

[embalm]

I sort of disagree with Webspinner being in the bottom bracket. I mean, the card goes in Beast Hunter, so getting another shot at an insane beast seems fair to me.

I almost put a note next to it, because card draw is important, and Webspinner is obviously better than a Parrot or Chicken. What I need a 5 mana card with conditions to trigger to do for me to play it is met with that summon though. It's 5 stats short of reaching the stat goal, and card draw is usually valued at 2 or 3 stat points.

 

[Haly]

I don't think so Keneras. Thragtusk is what I based my definition of "value" on. Just a creature that's so good by itself that everyone wants to play it. The Thragtusk of Hearthstone is Shredder, which finds its way into decks ranging from aggro to tempo to mid range to control. Dr. Boom would be the big brother of Shredder in terms of value-per-mana-spent.

 

[Brakara]

Nvm

 

[Professor Lich]

If confusion really is a problem, we should just make our own terms. Though that would be a huge pain since people outside of the thread also use different terminology.

This does remind me how I would always use the word midrange whenever I posted a deck because I thought it was just a word people used for every deck.

 

[Dahbomb]

I don't think so Keneras. Thragtusk is what I based my definition of "value" on. Just a creature that's so good by itself that everyone wants to play it. The Thragtusk of Hearthstone is Shredder, which finds its way into decks ranging from aggro to tempo to mid range to control. Dr. Boom would be the big brother of Shredder in terms of value-per-mana-spent.

LOL that's like Shredder if it also had the effect "Battlecry gain +5 health".

 

[Opiate]

So yeah value is different for different types of deck. Some cards give value through card advantage other cards give value through board control or tempo advantage.

In the case of Varryn that's an interesting case because it's potentially providing BOTH card advantage and tempo advantage. Like if you get 3 Legendaries off of those 3 draws then the tempo gain is RIDICULOUS! That's why the card is potentially good.

Okay, that's fine, dahbomb. What would you call the property I am describing as value? Let's say I play Ysera and it generates a card for me, then you have to use two fireballs to kill her. That means it took you 2 cards to kill my one card, and also I generated a card out of thin air.

If you want a more pedestrian example, let's imagine I have an ogre magi on board (4/4) and you play a spider tank and a knife juggler. I the kill your knife juggler with my ogre (he's now 4/1) and then the turn after kill the spider tank (which also kills the ogre magi). Very straightforward 2:1 value out of that ogre.

What would you call this property of getting more out of your cards than your opponent gets out of his?

 

[Nirolak]

LOL that's like Shredder if it also had the effect "Battlecry gain +5 health".

Creature damage is also not persistent in Magic, so it can be even more ridiculous than it looks.

 

[Kenaras]

I don't think so Keneras. Thragtusk is what I based my definition of "value" on. Just a creature that's so good by itself that everyone wants to play it. The Thragtusk of Hearthstone is Shredder, which finds its way into decks ranging from aggro to tempo to mid range to control. Dr. Boom would be the big brother of Shredder in terms of value-per-mana-spent.

Weird, I've never seen "value" used that way. I've always seen that called "quality."

 

[Haly]

Every deck played it when it was legal. Decks would splash green (the tree symbol in the top right which is like a colored mana crystal you need at least one of) just to play this guy. It was insane.

 

[slayn]

Okay, that's fine, dahbomb. What would you call the property I am describing as value? Let's say I play Ysera and it generates a card for me, then you have to use two fireballs to kill her. That means it took you 2 cards to kill my one card, and also I generated a card out of thin air.

If you want a more pedestrian example, let's imagine I have an ogre magi on board (4/4) and you play a spider tank and a knife juggler. I the kill your knife juggler with my ogre (he's now 4/1) and then the turn after kill the spider tank (which also kills the ogre magi). Very straightforward 2:1 value out of that ogre.

What would you call this property of getting more out of your cards than your opponent gets out of his?

This is exactly card advantage

 

[ZealousD]

The Thragtusk of Hearthstone is Shredder, which finds its way into decks ranging from aggro to tempo to mid range to control.

Honestly, I think Shredder is only REALLY popular in Midrange decks. He's not an auto include in aggro or control decks like he is with midrange.

 

[Nirolak]

Every deck played it when it was legal. Decks would splash green (the tree symbol in the top right which is like a colored mana crystal you need at least one of) just to play this guy. It was insane.

Similarly: