Rumble Run is the newest solo adventure for Hearthstone. While new content is always welcome, it’s a bit of a letdown for many. Despite its unique gameplay, the Rumble Run experience is a touch flat and often frustrating. It’s always disappointing when an adventure doesn’t live up to its potential. But the most worrying part is that Rumble Run inherits a lot of the same issues as the Year of the Raven’s constructed meta. So what ails Rumble Run? And can identifying its problems help Blizzard improve Standard?
He’s come to ruin your Rumble Runs as well as Ladder
There’s nothing worse than your opponent getting Keleseth on turn two. Except, perhaps, your opponent getting Keleseth on turn two while the Tribute from the Tides is up. This was what I faced on the sixth boss of my Hunter Rumble Run attempt, immediately giving my opponent +3/+3 to his entire deck and dashing my hopes of success. There are countless examples of this in Rumble Run – incredibly powerful cards that almost always win the game if drawn at the right moment; by filling your hand with Arcane Missiles, building a massive board of Pirates, or clearing every minion for criminally low mana costs.
Similarly, Constructed has its fair share of mana-cheating minions and tools that can win the game on the spot. Aside from Keleseth, cards like Wild Growth on two, an early Master Oakheart, a turn three Mountain Giant, a turn eight kathrena or a perfect Zerek’s Cloning Gallery are oppressively powerful mana-cheating plays reliant on drawing a few specific cards you’ve built your deck around.
These cards are powerful and fun, but it leads to big spikes in power level from draw RNG that are frustrating for both players. In both Rumble Run and ladder, this often leads to swingy games where players feel like their loss was inevitable.
Hmm, I wonder if I should pick the discard synergy bucket or not…
Part of the problem with Rumble Run is that your shrine synergies are pretty one dimensional. Given that they normally have a pretty straightforward synergy (spellpower from cards in hand, battlecries, hero powers, dragons), your deckbuilding decisions are pretty obvious. Got the hero-power shrine? Those hero-power synergy minions are a pretty safe bet. Get a secret for every spell? Those spells look solid.
We see a similar problem with deckbuilding around Baku on ladder. With Baku so dominant, there a two powerful limiters on deckbuilding decisions. On the one hand, there’s the inherent limit of the types of cards you can bring in only odd-cost cards. On the other, there’s the one-dimensional nature of the hero power and how it commits you to going all-in on a certain playstyle. Between these two constraints, there’s very little room for creativity, and a pretty obvious go-to selection of cards.
By reducing the amount of reasonable deckbuilding choice in many effective decks, both Rumble Run and Constructed reduce interesting choices, and make a huge part of Hearthstone less fun and engaging.
The nature of Shrines encourages one of two gameplans. Either you go all in on tempo, to try and keep your Shrine alive and snowball quickly off your powerful synergies, or you build a super-powerful combo to swing the game in one fell swoop once your shrine revives.
Similarly, in constructed, we see a proliferation of tempo-based board decks that seek to play out minions ASAP, and powerful combo decks that use synergistic tools to create ludicrous value, with not that much in between. Late-game midrange or control decks (with a couple of exceptions) find it very hard to find a home.
When Blizzard excludes many strategies from competitive viability without massive polarisation (or in Rumble Run, risking being inevitably blown out by a lucky boss), it limits playstyles and players’ expressions. Blizzard could do a lot to analyse these flaws, and work that into their plans for the upcoming Standard rotation.
Images courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment via hearthstone.gamepedia.com.
You can like The Game Haus on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for more sports and esports articles from other TGH writers along with Alex.
