There is one design choice more than any other that made Hearthstone a phenomenon. Yet, it is also a choice that Hearthstone has struggled with over the years. Compared to all previous card games inspired by Magic: the Gathering, Hearthstone was smooth and fast. By allowing no interaction during the opponent’s turn, Hearthstone was able to move away from complexity and a slow pace, and make the game flow. Hearthstone still is those things. And yet, being fast also means a certain lack of intricacy. You’d want interaction, but you also don’t.
One of the answers for interaction in Hearthstone is tech cards. These cards are meant to give you a sense of control and to prevent the meta from sliding too deep into domination by specific decks.
But do they work? Can a simple tech card change the fundamentals of the game? Let’s explore the subject in more depth.
Tech Warrior – The Legend Unicorn Warrior Deck
In early January, there have been many tweets about people reaching high Legend ranks with control decks. The most common decks at the very top are Miracle Rogue and Quest Demon Hunter, and people are building decks specifically in an attempt to counter these two. Reqvam’s Tech Warrior is one such deck:
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This deck features Demolition Renovator to destroy Rogue’s Sinstone Graveyard and Steamcleaner to destroy the Bound Souls generated by Souleater's Scythe, effectively removing all minions from Quest Demon Hunter.
Multiple people built different versions of this concept and played them with some success in high Legend.
But how successful has this concept been on the ladder overall? Not very. We’re talking about a 44% win rate in Legend and a 41% win rate in Diamond. Steamcleaner and Demolition Renovator are among the worst cards in the deck in Legend, and they are clearly the worst cards in the deck in Diamond. Yet, some people clearly had success with the concept at the very top of Legend.
What we can see from this is that these narrow tech cards can work in a very narrow meta. In a way, they are getting their job done. If everyone on the ladder was playing Demon Hunter with Souleater's Scythe, Steamcleaner would be a tremendously powerful card.
However, as the meta becomes more diverse, these narrow tech cards start to fail. They are not viable even throughout Legend. They are definitely holding the deck back in Diamond. The lower we go on the ladder – and the more diverse the meta becomes – the weaker these cards become. They can potentially increase the win rate of only a handful of players who know what they will be playing against at the very top of Legend. Everyone else is ultimately better off without them.
Disruption Tech: Too Random or Too Powerful?
Another tech option is to use cards that disrupt the opponent’s game plan. Blizzard has tried to make Warrior the king of disruption with Call to the Stand and Disruptive Spellbreaker, and there are also Neutral options in Mutanus the Devourer and Theotar, the Mad Duke.
Even though Warrior can put a lot of disruption into the deck, it has not worked out. Randomly removing one card out of up to ten options, sometimes not even knowing if the target card is in hand, just does not do enough.
On the other hand, Theotar, the Mad Duke was so strong that it was nerfed twice. The problem with Theotar was its negligible opportunity cost. At four mana, almost any deck could put Theotar in to trade their weakest card for the matchup for their opponent’s best card for the matchup while also developing a minion on the board. It was the combination of stats and Discover that made the card so strong. If you get a powerful disruption effect for free, yeah, it’s pretty good. Most of the other disruption cards have at least some price to pay.
There are two big success stories with disruption in Hearthstone.
Dirty Rat has been a Wild staple for a long time, and it has struck a good balance of risk and reward. It has a strong body that can be played for cheap. Sometimes it might pull some small minion from the opponent’s hand to the board, and you actually win the exchange based on the Rat’s stats alone. Sometimes you remove a major threat with it. But it can also backfire and pull a major threat to the board at a time when you cannot handle it. There is a lot of complexity in playing with Dirty Rat, and multiple viable strategies to using it. It is more than playing a guessing game of whether the opponent has that one card in hand right now.
Far Watch Post is another disruption tool that has enjoyed a lot of success, this time in Standard format. Far Watch Post was so good that it got nerfed 2 weeks into Forged in the Barrens expansion, but even at 3 health it has still seen a lot of play. It is a generic disruption tool to slow the game down when playing against decks that like to draw and play a lot of cards. You are nerfing your opponent’s cards in real-time as they are being drawn! Yet, Far Watch Post also has a downside. It cannot attack. It also does not have Taunt, so your opponent can simply ignore it if the mana cost of the drawn cards does not matter. It slows things down but usually does not prevent anything.
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Part of the strength of Dirty Rat and Far Watch Post is their wide field of use. Unlike Steamcleaner, there is something useful you can do with these cards in every matchup.
The Wider the Effect, the Better?
One of the most successful tech cards in Hearthstone right now is Smothering Starfish. It has also been hit by a nerf once, but it is still strong. Yet, even the Starfish does not belong in every deck. It is mostly usable in slow decks because it also affects your own minions, and you generally do not want that when playing a proactive deck. Being able to silence the entire board is borderline broken as an effect, and only held back by slow decks generally being weak in the meta.
Sometimes, such a wide effect is not possible. Take weapon destruction, for example. Not all classes use weapons, so any weapon removal card is limited in its application. Yet, there are often enough relevant weapons in the meta to make one consider teching against them. Rustrot Viper is the most powerful weapon-removal tech card we have ever had. Tradeable is the keyword that makes it so good. No weapons in this matchup? Fine, back to the deck you go. Even so, the stats show that Rustrot Viper is only worth it some of the time. Yes, being able to trade it for another card is a huge upside, but you still need to pay 1 mana for it, and each mana point matters. Occasionally, there have been enough weapons in the meta to make good use of it with the Tradeable option for non-weapon matchups. Right now, it looks like there are not enough weapons around.
To Tech, or Not to Tech?
The vast majority of successful Standard Hearthstone decks right now do not use any tech cards. The most successful archetype that uses a tech card is Big Spell Mage with Far Watch Post. But you could argue whether that even is a tech card in the deck or just the regular way of building a deck that starts out so slowly.
There are some Smothering Starfish and Rustrot Vipers around. In general, the decks that include them are not the strongest versions of their archetypes. There are occasionally times when including them in the deck is the right choice. The peak of Deathrattle Rogue was a good time to run Smothering Starfish, for example. Early March of the Lich King with loads of Death Knights and the initial versions of Shockspitter Hunter was a fine time to run Rustrot Viper.
To recap, tech cards are usually overrated in Hearthstone. It feels great and is memorable to win with them. But over large sample sizes, they tend to make decks worse. There are some exceptions, mainly some top-Legend metas where you know you will face a narrow band of decks, and some hype waves where a single deck or a group of similar decks become really popular for a while. In the current meta, including tech cards will mostly make your deck perform worse. Also, there is no Unicorn Warrior just yet. That’s some dreams crushed.
Old Guardian
Ville "Old Guardian" Kilkku is a writer and video creator focused on analytic, educational Hearthstone, and building innovative Standard format decks. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/OldGuardian Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/old_guardian
How could we all forget Loatheb, the king of tech cards, and his evil daughter Cult Neophyte
I wonder if those are actually (by definition) Tech cards… I mean, spells make up like almost half of the game.
Most decks contain mostly minions, but some decks consist almost entirely of spess, and those decks are hit hard by Loatheb – it’s almost like a Time Warp aganist those decks.
Cult Neophyte is not as effective against individual spells as such, but against decks that want to play several spells in one turn
I had a lot of success with pirate rogue using smothering starfish to deliver the final blow through a wall of taunt minions.
on the other hand, Rustrot Viper stole a lot of games for me against pirate rogue by killing the swordfish (saving me 8 life) and leaving a spider tank behind.
Dirty Rat, Mutanus and Theotar often screwed me by hitting Tavish, Master Marksman (Questline Hunter) when I was not cautious
yes, I play a lot of wild
One good option would be to make Steam Cleaner and Demolition Renovator tradeable. After all we already have tradeable cards with much wider applicability that these two with very narrow application.
Exactly this. Every single ‘tech’ card should be tradeable.
Tradeable is really one keyword they shouldn’t be abandoning like they do with most of the expansion-related ones.
You must be really desperate to run steamcleaner e renovator on the same deck. Steamcleaner only for DH (and for some fun kazakusan deck) and the other only against rogue, for the rest of match up you can ask to yourself “why i put such bad tech card in my deck?”.
It feels always bad add tech cards. ???????????? I realy was hype about Steamcleaner but misread the card. I hope his Battlecry affecta both habds yoo, not only decks.