Randumb Effects and Hearthstone

So I play this game called, Hearthstone. Think of it as an online card-playing game. If you're familiar with Magic: The Gathering, it's like that in concept. You have a deck of cards filled with creatures and spells and you fight other player's decks to see who can reduce his opponent's life points to zero first. It's not about who has the biggest deck but about who uses his deck the most effectively.

Hearthstone is fun but only for a while. Fatigue starts setting in when you realize you're fighting the same decks over and over again. You see, back in the old days of collectible card games, the "pros" would do all the complex math and calculations to come up with the best combinations of cards. The pros would eventually find the best deck that can win tournaments. As a result, other pros would create decks specifically made to counter the tournament decks. This layer of trendsetting and trend-countering is what is called a "meta". It's this high level of play that separates the tournament pro and the scrub.

Of course, back then card games weren't online. Tournaments weren't fought and won day after day. Things took time and the meta-game took long to develop.  In Hearthstone however, everything moves so fast. Thousands of card games are played everyday and thanks to social media, players can easily watch the  high-ranked pros play live on their stream. The meta-game is realized quickly as players can see which deck leads to the most victories.

I find this annoying.

Fatigue sets in. You start to get tired once you've fought the same old decks again and again. If you fight a warlock, you know he's either going to be a "zoolock" or a "handlock". It used to be that when you fought a rogue, she was always going to be a "miracle rogue" who was always gonna end the game with the Leeroy card. If it was a hunter, you could expect hounds to be played always and forever. 

It got repetitive but Blizzard has attempted to remedy this by releasing a new expansion called Goblins and Gnomes. GnG added plenty of new cards to the game. This is good but the noticeable gimmick with a lot of the new cards is that they have random effects or can summon random creatures.

 Before you think I'm some killjoy who doesn't enjoy random effects, then let me explain why I find this to be a lazy but inevitable solution to the repetitiveness problem.

Eventually, the best decks will emerge. As always, people will look it up online and copy-paste it and use it to climb up the competitive ladder etc. However, the randomness ensures that we won't feel that we've seen the same match twice. Let's say, hypothetically, that "bomber warrior" and "mecha mage" became the new hotness (I made these up but part of me wishes they were real). Everyone will run these decks and we'll fall into repetitiveness. BUT since random effects happen, it would ensure that no two matches are completely the same. In one match, a random crappy minion could randomly appear from a shredder or unstable portal. However, in another match, a legendary card or the perfect situational minion could come out and win the entire game! 

It's these games that we remember the most; the games with the random game-winning bullshit that gives players hilariously undeserved victories. We find it so funny, that we forget the fact that everyone is playing the same thing and nothing interesting is happening otherwise. Randomness may be good or bad but randomness is necessary if we're gonna play the same damn thing over and over again. It prevents the game from becoming too stale too fast.

Personally, I used to have a problem with randomness until I thought about it and understood its necessity and inevitability. If you don't like randomness, then it's perfectly fine to craft a deck without cards with random effects; then you'll have only the luck of the draws to complain about.

It's still annoying though.