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In a nutshell, classes in this game are divided into great and terrible ones based on their card draw ability. While blizzard seems to have done an ok job, hunter aside, of balancing the relative power of the class cards, it's completely inexplicable how half of the classes have insane card draw and half have nearly none. Let's take a look:
Hunter (best class) - best card draw in the game. Buzzard is a comedy. Hunter has you on a clock due to the hero power so you're forced to play creatures. As soon as you play more than two you lose the game since he will draw 5+ cards from a single combo that costs a total of four mana. In addition, tracking and flare let hunters cycle through their decks.
Warlock (top class) - yeah. Nice card draw there brolock.
Druid (top class) - for some reason druids get to draw cards while putting fat minions on the board. Then, they can draw some more cards with powerful card draw spells.
Warrior (good class) - shield block is just sweet, weapons generate card advantage, add the ability to get the most out of pain acos and you get respectable card draw.
Rogue (good class) - not much to see here, but sprint is at least really powerful. Again, weapons unlike secrets and spells generate card advantage. Miracle rogue draws cards all day.
Shaman (good class) - shaman seems to be the only exception to this trend, due to his incredibly efficient class cards and a really good weapon.
Priest (decent class) - Northshire is ok, and priest will poach your cards and your creatures.
Paladin (crap class) - can you detect a pattern by now? At least this guy has weapons.
Mage (bottom feeder) - zero good card draw options. Grats, you suck.
This seems to be a fundamental problem. The nature of hearthstone is completely geared toward trading cards, and any 2-for-1 is already considered a momentum changing play. As long as classes stay comparably powerful but with crazy disparities in their card draw potential, no amount of new cards will change their relative power. I find it odd nobody has pointed this out.
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I'd just like to point out that just because you dont see paladin played much doesnt mean it isnt strong with little to no card draws. Typical control paladin decks are extremely extremely card efficent and can win games that see you draw 10 less cards than your opponent (See Control Warrior vs Paladin - hilarious matchup where the warrior feels like he can do absolutely nothing).
Oh and mage do draw cards - Arcane Intellect. It just so happens that the rest of their kit is ill equipped to deal with the current meta.
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Arcane intellect is really, really bad. For a class with no reliable heals, relatively expensive cards and little staying power, paying 3 mana to draw one single card is terrible at most points in the game. When you commit mana to drawing cards, you want to draw as many as possible in a single turn so you can go back to playing the game.
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You seem really biased and also plain wrong.
You think Priest is a better class than Paladin? WTF.
Anyway I love the opening bit about Hunters!
If you play more than 2 creatures your opponnent will draw more than 4 cards for 4 mana.
Wanna explain that math to me? Three is greater than four seems wrong to me. But I am no math major..
Anyway, the real card draw for rogue comes from gadgetzan+spells. Sprint is not that great as it uses an entire lategame turn to draw cards.
tl;dr:
I think you are wrong, card draw does not a class make.
If all cards are really efficient you can be succesful without card draw.
And again rating Palading as a "crap class" is SOOOOOOOOOOO off I can hardly take you serious anymore.
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On April 25 2014 20:13 KoD) wrote:
You seem really biased and also plain wrong.
You think Priest is a better class than Paladin? WTF.
Anyway I love the opening bit about Hunters!
If you play more than 2 creatures your opponnent will draw more than 5 cards for 4 mana.
Wanna explain that math to me? Three is greater than five seems wrong to me. But I am no math major..
Anyway, the real card draw for rogue comes from gadgetzan+spells. Sprint is not that great as it uses an entire lategame turn to draw cards.
tl;dr:
I think you are wrong, card draw does not a class make.
If all cards are really efficient you can be succesful without card draw.
And again rating Palading as a "crap class" is SOOOOOOOOOOO off I can hardly take you serious anymore.
I think most top players think paladin is the worst class, with priest as the 2nd or 3rd worst along with mage.
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Unfortunately, this isn't worthy of a response 
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On April 25 2014 20:22 Kickboxer wrote:Unfortunately, this isn't worthy of a response
Pretty much like your original post.
I stopped at "As soon as you play more than two you lose the game since he will draw 5+ cards from a single combo that costs a total of four mana."
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Yeah. I'm sure you do fine vs. hunter with 3 or more minions on your board rank 25-20 must be fun
User was warned for this post
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There's so much more to this game and class balance than card draw. The only fundamental problem here is your warped perspective.
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On April 25 2014 21:36 Kickboxer wrote:Yeah. I'm sure you do fine vs. hunter with 3 or more minions on your board rank 25-20 must be fun
There is no need to be agressive. You're simply listing a high amount of bullshit and I felt like I could point it out.
Cheers.
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If things were that simple, warlocks would dominate arena because they have the best guaranteed card draw (unlike other classes, they do not need to be offered specific cards to be able to draw a lot). According to the stats on Arena Mastery, warlock is one of the worst classes in arena. And mage is the best, even though it is not particularly good at drawing.
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On April 25 2014 21:54 Scarecrow wrote:
There's so much more to this game and class balance than card draw. The only fundamental problem here is your warped perspective.
I just pointed out a connection between card draw mechanics available to each class and their respective power, as it's something that isn't talked about much when debating balance. Also, this happens to be separate from most other factors as I very clearly tried to explain in my post. Unless you make some classes fundamentally stronger than others, which is currently not the case, the quality of class cards or hero power will not offset any card advantage the classes receive. I don't know what's warped about that but to each his own, I guess.
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On April 25 2014 22:24 Kickboxer wrote:Show nested quote +On April 25 2014 21:54 Scarecrow wrote:
There's so much more to this game and class balance than card draw. The only fundamental problem here is your warped perspective. I just pointed out a connection between card draw mechanics available to each class and their respective power
You took it much further than that.
On April 25 2014 18:30 Kickboxer wrote:
In a nutshell, classes in this game are divided into great and terrible ones based on their card draw ability.
....
The nature of hearthstone is completely geared toward trading cards
If you don't see how hyperbolic these statements are you're a lost cause. Correlation does not equal causation.
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I think this is an interesting post made by OP. Maybe his conclusions are stated a little too strongly, but there's no need to be rude about it.
Buzzard is a very powerful class card, but I was hearing a month ago about how beasts are too underpowered to be worth using in a hunter deck, back when it was all eaglehorn bows, traps and leper gnomes. The bottom line is that there's only two buzzards in a 30-card deck and if hunter doesn't pull them early enough, either he can't afford to wait to unleash, or the extra cards are too late to matter. I think it's wrong to act like Buzzard + Unleash is a sure thing. Tracking is a powerful card, but it has similar and relevant downsides.
Additionally, your point gets more confused the farther you look into it. We start out by saying that card draw mechanic determines class power, but once we hit warrior and weapons we start talking about card efficiency instead. Warrior's card draw mechanics are pretty good - to make up for the fact that his minions are fragile and his removal very limited.
But if weapons are what make warrior good and not card draw, then clearly card draw isn't all that matters. (If warrior decks were designed differently, there's a lot of ways to make Battle Rage draw as much as unleash - run a bunch of > 1 health 1-drops, whirlwind, wild pyro, Mad bomber...)
Druid's card draw is pretty good, but that's more or less the core strategy of the deck. There's no good case that Druid as a class is definitively better than other ladder classes just because it has both Ancient of Lore and Nourish - which is no better than either sprint or arcane intellect. A 5/5 on turn 7 should be killed for free, all other things being equal, by what the oppo should have played that turn. So druid has above-average card draw, but you can have an above-average class without it, as you yourself point out with Shaman.
And when discussing Paladin, you forgot divine spirit, which if the oppo has a slow deck and pally has a fast one, will absolutely draw him 4+ cards, no way around it whatsoever.
I don't see card draw discrepancy as warping the game when this many classes have this much of it, and classes are competitive without it. I don't think giving priest a nourish or an ancient of lore would make him rise to the top. Draw is important, and one of the reasons this post is interesting is trying to figure out just how important it is. I can tell you that in arena, I would say drawing a bunch of extra cards only helps you in like a third of the games. In another third, you actually lose because you spend too much time drawing cards while the other person creates a board state that can't be reversed quickly enough to save your life, and in the other third, you lose because you were losing anyway and the cards you draw can't be played fast enough to turn it around.
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I disregarded this thread why Mage was put at the bottom. They have arcane intellect and neutral draw cards.
I guess you were not around when mages were the shit. wombo combo loothoarder+novice+arcane intellect and cheap pyroblast+frost card you got yourself an OP class. Which you can still do, except mage cards suck now.
Paladin, I played aggro pally this season in high legend and it works. If you spend your cards right and have divine favour, you win tons of games. You have to run paladin like mage, neutral draw cards and divine favors, 1-2 hammers etc. And the RNG of getting it is no less than getting buzzard. Without ofcourse tracking in hand.
Priest has potentially some of the best card draw in the game. Cant believe you even put it there lol.
You look at the basic(dumb?) factors why you win or lose. Its more of the burst DPS that hunter can provide with our without UTH+buzzard combo. I have won tons of games without buzzard uth, since the DPS from hunter is nasty. I guess DPT(damage per turn) is better for hearthstone.
I think what we need to look at is the amount of cheap-easy clear cards top classes have. Hunters mark(FREE) Shield Slam/execute(1 mana) Sap(2 mana) etc etc.
Cheap clear makes games easy. The more mana you have to spend the more DPS you can do. Mages while sick clear, cost alot of mana. 6/7 mana clear, 4 mana polymorphs.
Priests only real clear is either 4 mana auchenai+circle of healing,SWD/SWP(which is egh at best for clear)
I hope you change you perspective. While card draw may seem like the culprit, I think you have tunnel vision on this problem. While it is an issue, its not the one that needs to be addressed.
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Anyone that remembers last year when Battle Rage was nerfed should see the exact same problem with Buzzard/UTH now. Every naysayer who said "don't play more than 2 minions" then, and who say it now are just clueless. As Savjz said last week on his stream, the game shouldn't punish you for playing minions (or using hero power for Shaman or Paladin for that matter), and yet Battle Rage did, and Buzzard/UTH does exactly that.
How does one not even see that cycling through at least maybe 3 cards for such cost efficiency in those cards or combos, is not a problem? Why don't we just bring back Adrenaline Rush if we want to continue to have above efficient card draw in this game? It's beyond me how this game currently as it is can be taken seriously as an esport when at least one flawed design like this continue to exist in this game
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Card draw is super powerful - in most card games actually - but the flaw in your theory is that the bottom classes really have some nice draws too. Miracle Priest is almost a thing, Mage can ping Acolyte/Thalnos, Paladin can pull off aggro with Divine Favor etc etc. Sure, they are bad, but not because of lack of card draw class options.
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There's a flaw in this logic, which is that there are lots of neutral cards with card draw mechanics...and classes with poor card draw tend to be balanced around that, so when you load them up with neutral card draw they can often become really good.
For example, I (and, to judge by ladder, many other people) recently started running an Aggro mage deck built around 2 things: card draw, and direct damage with spells. The decklist looks like:
2xIce Lance
2xArcane Missiles
2xMirror Image
2xMana Wyrm
1xArgent Scquire
2xLeper Gnome
2xSorcerer's Apprentice
2xKnife Juggler
2xLoot Hoarder
Thalnos Bloodmage
2xFrostbolt
1xWolf Rider
1xAcolyte of Pain
2xArcane Intellect
2xFireball
2xWater Elemental
2xAzure Drake
7 of the 30 cards in this deck are card draw, and 3 of them allow me to draw multiple cards.
Since its an aggro deck, the typical match is only running about 6 rounds anyway, which means I can absolutely keep up with any Warlock on card draw over that time (in 6 rounds, an average Warlock aside from Handlock is only gonna lifetap like 3-4 times, depending on their draws). In fact, the deck plays similarly to many Warlock decks, in that most rounds I'm drawing 2 cards, and playing 2+ cards as well....
But unlike a Warlock deck, it has 32 points of unblockable, untauntable direct damage in the deck (more with arcane missiles, knife juggler knives, and spell damage buffs).
It is essentially hardcountered by Priest, Healadin, and Druids who runs heals instead of taunt for protection....but those are incredibly rare in the current meta. Against Warlock and Hunter though, its amazing--Zoo and Handlock both rely on taunts to keep them alive while they lifetap a lot to apply pressure or get to their giants, and taunt is worthless vs this deck and lifetapping just helps me race them down faster. And since so many of the cards are spells, I can apply a lot of pressure without loading up on minions on the board, which makes it tough for hunters to get off a big unleash the hounds combo. And the damage comes out so fast, and can't really be stopped by taunts or removal, that most control decks never get to their win condition. This deck destroys Watcher Druids, for example.
In other words, by taking a class that was balanced around having strong direct damage, but mediocre card draw, and loading them up with neutral card draw, the result is a deck that can dish out ludicrous amounts of untauntable damage really quickly, without running out of steam. I'd say on average I kill most Warlock by the 5th round, and Hunters only take a round or two longer.
If running lots of heal ever takes off, the deck will be lousy, but at the moment its kicking ass. I've won well over 70% of my games since switching it, and went down from rank 8 to rank 3 in just a few hours of laddering....
I've also had more people "friend" me so they could message me insults than ever before--even more than when I ran a Zoo deck. Turns out, people really, really hate playing vs decks that can kill them in 5 turns while ignoring the board and all taunt, and winning races against even the most aggro Hunters and Locks. I think the funniest was the game where I accidentally drew into a pseudo-otk combo...it was turn 6, and it looked like i was about to lose, and i only had 1 sorc's apprentice on the board. I dropped another sorc's apprentice, thalnos, then cast 2 frostbolts (for free), 2 ice lances (for free), arcane missles (for free), and fireball (for 2 mana)...for a total of 29 direct damage from my hand for 6 mana, when my opponent only had 25 life. I'm pretty sure I could hear him smash his keyboard from somewhere far away.
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I've made card draw decks in constructed and they were just too slow. Similarly, warlock has the lowest win rate in arena, often dying before getting to the point where both players are down to 2 cards or both players are topdecking.
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warlock has the lowest winrate in arena because it play completely differently from the other classes, for the average player it much more difficult to be in this mindset than a control mindset like with all the other classes
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EPT
