Hearthstone

Not to mention its reliant on your collection. This offers nothing for new/FTP people and in fact kind of fucks them by taking out a week where they would get a brawl pack. FTP who cares really but new players sorta need that. We'll see where they are going with all this in the long run though. Maybe it really is just a dry run for future game modes or even a tournament mode.

what did you pull for justicar?

Ravishing said:

. Anyway, how I see it is like Arena, and it's the complete opposite of what you envision.

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err.. no.. it isn't.

This happens in Arena when you get 7+ it's all Mage/Rogue/Pal

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Exactly..
Although, it's now mage followed by shaman/rogue in 2nd, then the rest clumped together.. paladin fell pretty far down after all the recent changes.

But, it's not all 'anti-mage' decks at the top end, aka priests, it's still mostly mages. The only class that can out value mage consistently in a long game, loses to everything else, so it's still horrible to play. Even though your first few rounds are often against bad players/decks, so you should theoretically be able to play a counter mage deck and rack up a ton of wins, it doesn't end up working out that way. You still have to have a decent winrate against the random decks to go far, even with one deck making up 30-50% of the meta.

I don't remember the exact % a deck has to be before playing a dedicated counter deck becomes viable, but I'm pretty sure its over 75%.

I won't be touching Heroic Brawl.

I need gold more than I need packs or dust since I'm saving for the expansion, and there is no gold positive result unless you get 12 wins. And it's not like arena where you have two skill testing points, drafting and playing. Even with that, my arena win rate is only something like 66% over the last year. In constructed, 66% win rate is top legend and that barely breaks even in this brawl.

Nah, pass.

If it was some one time only thing I'd pay the ten bucks to give it a shot, once. If this is a regular part of the brawl rotation I'm sure I'll be skipping it entirely.

Well paying gold is nuts with an expansion about to be announced. I'll take ten new packs when they launch over the remote chance of more packs of dusting Whispers cards right now, thanks though Blizz!

Ravishing said:

You claimed heroic brawl won't have all shaman at later stages due to beating each other out which is opposite of what happens in arena.

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I said, in a hypothetical example as an illustration, that if shaman had a 100% lossrate against mage, 100% winrate against other decks, and 50% winrate in the mirror.. that they would thin out 'a bit', not completely. Paper becomes a larger percentage, not the 'largest' percentage yet. Shaman will still be the 'most popular' deck in the early to mid stages, because it's not single elimination like the rock/paper/scissors example. After 2 rounds, every shaman that entered is still in, even if they went 0-2 to start. It takes a minimum of 3 rounds to eliminate any decks. It's from rounds 4-6 that rock starts dropping and paper gets larger in comparison. Somewhere around rounds 6-9 is where paper ends up becoming the most popular deck in the field.

In Arena, mage is actually both rock and paper right now. It's the most popular deck and has the best win percentage against the most decks. The 'counter' deck doesn't even win 60% of the time against them, so the math doesn't completely hold up across the examples. If a class, let's say rogue, beat mage 80%+ of the time and was 45% against everyone else, they'd be all you ran into at 10+ wins, but no one has those kind of winrates against mage. That said, if you took a sample size of the opponents you face in rounds 1-6, and compared it to rounds 6-12 in arena, you'd see that the percentage of rogues/shamans goes up as you get to later rounds. They are the scissors in this example. Mage is the paper, and every other deck is rock. Mage beats every other deck and becomes the most popular deck by later rounds. In the early rounds, they are like 35% of the field, but by the late rounds they are over 50%. The other 6 decks are like 50-60% of the field, and they become almost zero by the end.

But, it seems like you aren't fully understanding how the model works on this, which is fine, but constantly trying to point out that I'm wrong instead of asking for clarification just seems combative. You decided I was wrong, then looked for evidence of that, rather then assuming I was right and didn't fully explain. I used a very simplified version, because it can take up multiple pages just doing a very basic modeling. Flores Friday - The Basic Test of Metagaming Competence, by Mike Flores at StarCityGames.com^®! for example.

In the hypothetical situation where you have a shaman that can get a small edge in the mirror, it'd be the deck that has the highest chance of ending up with a decent record (more wins then losses) OR getting 12 wins. For every 1% you gain in the mirror, you can lose up to 2% in the paper matchup and end up even on overall winrate. So, for example, if switching 2 cards gives you a 4% edge in the mirror and only loses 5% against paper, you will win more games overall, as the mirror is a larger portion of the field to start.

If your goal is to go 12-0 or bust, then you want to play scissors ('other', some deck that beats paper/mage consistently), but you will also have lots of 1-3 win runs. If you want the highest chance of getting around 5-9 wins, then you play paper (mage). Remember, this is for the hypothetical situation only. Real decks have closer to 50% winrates across the board then 0 or 100% like in the hypothetical.

Freeze mage might indeed be the best choice for the brawl, I have no idea and it's irrelevant to the thought experiment. It's hard to pilot, so if you are good at it, have a favorable matchup against shaman and are decent elsewhere, it might have the highest overall winrate. Having a good winrate against the other decks is different then being a 'counter' deck that focuses on beating the most popular deck and loses most of the other matchups. My whole response was based on responding to the idea of 'finding what beats shaman and just playing that' and me simply warning that the non-shaman matchups are more important then suggested.