In the early stages of the closed beta, Case "Koyuki" Kiyonaga, long time Magic the Gathering player and Legend of the 5 Rings Legend, introduced the Giant Control Paladin to the Hearthstone scene. Playing on the same team as Monk, Strifecro and Trump in ESGN's Fight Night, Koyuki quickly became known for his prowess with the Paladin class and control decks in general. Nowadays, we see him transitioning more and more into casting Hearthstone matches rather than playing, bringing a lot of past experiences and analytical skills to the casting table.

Today we sat down with Case "Koyuki" Kiyonaga and talked about several topics in a lengthy interview, ranging from the Paladin class, Naxxramas and its impact on the game, the current ladder system, to OTK and other combos.

 


 

Recently we see a trend of more and more former (or still active) pro players from other games like Magic the Gathering coming over to Hearthstone, why do you think they are switching now?

The short answer? Money.  

The more in-depth answer is it's something new and accessible. Pro CCG players can basically spend only their free time playing Hearthstone rather than having to spend days or weekend or what have you preparing for and playing in other tournaments.  Grinding on ladder is something you can do very casually and the relative youth of the Hearthstone community makes it a game that's very easy for other CCG players to pick up and play.  Add to that the giant incentives available between streaming and the eye-catching prize pool of Blizzcon, well, it makes a lot of sense for other card gamers to switch over to at least give it a shot

Brian Kibler, Magic the Gathering Legend, just got second place in the Sunshine Open tournament without much time spent on practicing. Do you think coming from a more complex game like Magic gives you an advantage in Hearthstone? Or is it maybe a hindrance, since Hearthstone requires different lines of thought than Magic for example?

Coming from a more complex game definitely gives you an advantage. Obviously. there is a learning curve but mechanics-wise I would expect most high level Magic players to become mechanically accurate much more rapidly than someone who doesn't have that background.

Experienced CCG players will have a lot of practice coming up with lines of play and plans, and even though hearthstone requires different lines than Magic does it's the same type of process at its core.

So if you are planning on being a top player and make some money in Hearthstone, how much do you think previous TCG/CCG experience weights in to it? Is it just helping you get to the top faster, or do you think it may even give you an edge at the top?

It's really only about learning curve.  Once you're at or near the top, past experience stops being a factor.  It's only a factor in how quickly you learn or with deckbuilding experience

PVDDR said in a recent interview that Thoughtsteal is an overrated card, do you agree/disagree? Are there any others that would fall in the same category of “overrated” cards?

I definitely agree. [card]Thoughtsteal[/card] is sort of like [card]Arcane Intellect[/card] except you've got a very good chance of getting cards that don't work well with what you're doing (or even cards that you can't play at all like deadly poison). Another card I think is generally overrated is [card]Auchenai Soulpriest[/card]: it doesn't really work well with what the rest of most priest decks want to do in general.

I also think [card]Haunted Creeper[/card] is being overplayed a little bit (why do I randomly see it popping up in decks that have zero buffs?). Being "overrated" doesn't really have much to do with power level as it does the difference between perceived power level and actual power level: six months ago [card]Ysera[/card] was in nearly every non-face aggro deck; now you barely see her anywhere except the slowest of control decks.

Nowadays we see you casting quite a few games, do you plan of pursuing a career as a Hearthstone caster rather than playing yourself in the future? Will we see you on a team in the near future? Are you in contact with any teams at the moment?

Hopefully I'll be able to do both!  I do want to get into casting more deeply, though I like playing as well.  I'm in contact with a few teams but I don't know if that will be something that happens soon.

I think we all agree that we would love to see you on a team and in tournaments again.

I am going to be in the Deck Wars season finale at least.  Hopefully I don't fall flat on my face!

When you are not casting you are well known for your paladin decks, especially the control paladin. What is it about the class that got your attention when you started playing Hearthstone? Do you think Paladin control is more difficult to play than other decks?

Initially it was just a good combination of tools to fight the most popular, most powerful deck (freeze mage), during test season 1.  After that I just enjoyed the incredibly strong midgame clear that paladin has while also having the strongest endgame hero power in the game (since it can continually generate threats for you).  I don't think Paladin control is necessarily harder to play than other decks; it's all about practicing and matchup familiarity.
 

A few weeks before the first wing of Naxxramas Paladin kind of got back in style, when Kolento took it to rank #1 on legend and now after all the wings have been released Paladin and even Priest see a lot more play than before. What do you think about those “underplayed” classes climbing the top? Is it just the post Naxxramas hype or are they here to stay as viable options?

In my opinion, Paladin has always had a lot of power, even before Naxx.  Naxx gave control decks some very strong tools to fight against aggro and miracle (most notably [card]Sludge Belcher[/card]).  I still think the top four classes in some order are hunter, rogue, druid, and warlock overall, but the classes have gotten a lot less spread out in terms of powerlevel.

I'm suprised not seeing Warrior in your four choices, since it's also a very heavily played class at the moment.

At the moment there's kind of like... hunter is super solid and super popular, miracle rogue is still super good, but the rest are very packed together (except maybe mage). Druid, warlock, warrior, paladin, priest... pretty much all of them are frequently played.

Why was it that Paladin only got back into style after Kolento played it on stream? Do you think the scene is just too inexperienced and/or scared to experiment with deckbuilding like Kolento does?

That's part of it. Honestly, the Hearthstone community as a whole follows names a lot more than anything else. Kolento is an absolutely stellar player but he's also very well known and followed so anything he does will be widely copied and played in the week immediately following. The same is true for any of the top streamers. There's not a ton of room for innovation (since there aren't that many cards available at the moment) and it's even more difficult with the metagame changing as rapidly as it has been.  Decklists from top players are also very readily available up to the minute while they're live streaming so it's easy to keep up with the changes they make.

Do you have any advice for the readers regarding playing and building Paladin decks? What are the most important cards, what are the bad matchups in general, etc.?

It depends. Paladin is one of the few classes where a lot of the aggro cards don't really carry over with the control cards. The one bit of advice I'd give if you're trying out paladin is to not get too caught up in just adding in all the good cards. It's really easy to just toss a bunch of stuff in to start but then you end up with like 20 cards that cost 4 or more mana and have a very slow, derpy, not very synergistic deck.

So are there any generally bad matchups for Paladin we have to look out for? Or is it depending on whether you play aggro or control?

It depends on if you play aggro or control usually, but zoo warlock tends to be a bad matchup for both.

Is it just because Paladin doesn't have an early targeted removal spell?

Yes that's one of the biggest reasons. I actually use this as an example: if warlock plays a turn 1 [card]Voidwalker[/card] and [card]Flame Imp[/card], paladin doesn't have any way to deal with either minion until turn 4 with a single card.  I believe every other class has not just one but multiple ways to kill off at least one of those minions using a single card (or card/hero power) on turns 2 and 3.

?

If i remember correctly you were the one that told Strifecro to put the [card]Savage Roar[/card] + [card]Force of Nature[/card] into his druid decks, a combo that defined the meta for a long time, any excuses for that? 

I plead the 5th!

But seriously, we were all playing midrange Druid at the time and Strife had a version with two [card]Claw[/card]s and a [card]Starfall[/card].  My argument then was that [card]Savage Roar[/card] has huge upside and is at worst usable as a 2 damage effect (like [card]Claw[/card]) and Force is better than [/card]Starfall[/card] with Savage and isn't really worse since usually you're not getting much more than 6 damage out of a Starfall anyways. It was basically trading off a little bit of efficiency for a huge jump in power potential and it just kind of went from there. Having Strife and Monk playing the combo certainly made it a lot more popular a lot faster (I never got to play druid during that event).

I *am* a litttttle bit salty that strife gets credited for it all the time though. *smiles*

Yeah, that combo kind of spiraled through the community, nowadays we even see double combo.

On the topic of such “OTK” combos, do you think they a good or a bad thing for Hearthstone, since the game does not allow for instant interaction like Magic does?

Do you see any new combo potential now that Naxxramas is completely released?

I think they're bad for Hearthstone. I know the design team has said that they like the possibility of "the big turn" (and so do I) but I don't think that big turn should be OTK style. Miracle rogue has lately been the most eggregious of those (I can't count how many times I've died from 25+ hp to a miracle rogue with just a dagger on board) and I know it's incredibly frustrating whenever that happens. The Blizzard team has been fairly proactive with removing those kinds of OTK combos (like the molten giant warrior, alexstraza warrior, pre-change UTH hunter, etc) but I think it should be taken a little bit further. Like you said, Hearthstone doesn't allow for any kind of responsive interaction like Magic does, so you're basically at your opponent's mercy while it isn't your turn.

Usually the combo-y cards are Charge oriented, so naxx doesn't add a lot of kill combo cards.  [card]Shade of Naxxramas[/card] is probably the closest thing, and it could be interesting in some kind of priest otk deck but for the most part the Naxx cards are more value oriented.

Staying on the topic, what would be your suggestions to change these combos in a fairer way? Maybe something like an upper limit of how much damage a combo can do? Savage Roar + FoN does 14 damage, while Miracle, as you said, can kill you from almost full health.

I don't think it's actually an easily solved problem. I've toyed with the idea of only being able to Charge a single target once per turn, but that seems like a very clunky solution. Most of the ideas I've thought of have been a complete overhaul of the charge mechanic (like you can only charge minions) but these don't actually work that well with the way a lot of cards are designed. *shrug*

Honestly, I can't think of an easy solution either.

Yeah, other than changing each individual problem card when it becomes a problem, there's really no way to easily solve the issue. Most of the possible solutions change too many cards to be not what they were originally designed to be.
 

The Hearthstone community is still very young, since the game just came out of the beta a few month ago, do you think we figured out all the new stuff yet, or is there much more to explore? Did we even fully figure out the game before Naxxramas was released?

What do you think about the Naxxramas cards so far? What decks did profit the most from the set?

Before Naxx, the environment was pretty stale but a big part of that was there weren't many innovators.  I don't know if the format was figured out per se, but it was probably pretty close to.

As far as Naxx goes, Hunter midrange got a giant boost in consistency with webspinner and haunted creeper.  The decks that seem to have benefited the most are the heavy board control decks (aggressive or not).

In your opinion, do you think Naxxramas was missing anything? Maybe the long awaited early removal for Paladin, or something for other classes and decks? Anything you wished they put into Naxx?

I don't think Naxx was meant to be a full expansion (more like a holdover until they do a full release to prevent the environment from getting stale) so just interesting cards was enough. I just wish there were more new cards. *laughs*

They are working on it. SOOM™

Yes. Soon. Soon.

I read there will be no new keywords, any thoughts on that?

I think that's fine. There's no real need to rush out a whole bunch of new mechanics.

There were voices in the community complaining about the ladder system some time ago, like how legend ranks don’t feel very special, since there are just too many people playing in it, or how annoying it is to lose a huge amount of ranks when losing one single game. What do you think about the ladder system?

I think most of the annoyance comes from the fact that there's no transparency in how ladder *actually* works. You can be Legend rank 10... but you have no idea if you're tied with the next 50 people or not. It's also incredibly frustrating to get matched up with someone non-legend and lose a boatload of points for a loss while getting almost no gain for a win; during the July season, I was gunning for top 16 on NA and around rank 30 I got matched up with a rank 1 (non legend) player.  

It was basically a no win situation for me: I get almost nothing for a win (in fact, I got two ranks for it) while if I lost I'd probably undo the last hour of grinding that I'd done. If people can actually see "oh I'm at rank 600 but I'm tied with 100 other people" or "I'm rank 12 but I'm 300 points ahead of rank 13 and 100 behind rank 11" then there would be a lot less complaining.

Do you think a ladder system like in Starcraft 2, with some kind of “Grandmaster League” that consists of only the Top 200 players of the respective server, followed by other leagues with certain percentile shares of the player base would be more appropriate, since the Hearthstone community gets more and more competitive and the current system doesn’t quite embrace that fact very much?

It's definitely possible that a leagues system would work better than a points/Elo system, but I think there's just too much movement for that to really work that well. You'd replace the complaints we currently have with "why haven't I moved into grandmaster league after winning 733 games straight, Blizzard has it out for me" complaints

The biggest problem I see is that before legend ranks a win rewards you with a star, no matter if you won versus a better player or someone worse. In legend ranks on the other hand, as you said before, you never know where you really stand in the ladder, you lose a bunch of ranks versus non legend players and doesn't gain much from winning. Also I think the range of players you can get matches against is extremely wide, so that you have a lot of outliers with huge skill differences

Yes for sure. Honestly I feel like the star system is fine (sort of) but if you're going to use Elo's as well they should probably be calculated the whole time. If you miss the first two weeks of the season but are a phenomenal player, you should get more than just a star for beating someone in high legend while you're still at rank 1-3.

There is quite the controversy going on in the community regarding certain Hunter class cards.

On one side we have [card]Flare[/card], a 1 mana cost spell that destroys all enemy secrets, reveals stealthed minions and draws a card, on the other side is [card]Hunter's Mark[/card], a 0 mana cost spell that sets a minions Health to 1.

What are your thoughts on these cards? Are they too strong? Are they doing too much for their respective mana cost?

Yes, I think these cards are a little too efficient. [card]Flare[/card] is a particularly devastating card when you get anything with it, and in practice [card]Hunter's Mark[/card] is a zero mana cost equality a large portion of the time.  The thing I dislike most about Flare from a design standpoint is that if Hunter is even reasonably played it completely pushes all secret focused decks out of the environment because of how devastating it is to destroy even one secret with it. It's not even a narrow card because it replaces itself and the loss of efficiency you feel from playing a 1 mana card is negligible.  I think both cards could stand to have their mana costs increased or in flare's case it might be better to just rework the card period.

What about [card]Starving Buzzard[/card], does it need any change in you opinion?

I don't really think it's that much of a problem though it's definitely something that will need to be watched.  It's an engine card so as long as the rest of the vehicle doesn't get too powerful it's fine... you just need to make sure that doesn't happen

While we are on the topic of Hunter, in recent events it was one of the most banned classes in tournaments with a banning format. What do you think about about that format? Will Hearthstone always need such a format to help establishing a healthy tournament meta?

From a deckbuilder perspective, do you think such a format hinders creativity and innovation, or does it maybe even encourage it?

I think it says something about the balance of the format when classes need to be banned (notably hunter and rogue). I think the ideal in terms of tournament meta is for all the classes to be equally represented

Hunter is just a little bit too powerful against too many things right now and needs to be banned in a lot of tournament situations. Honestly, the prevalence of Hunter on ladder and in tournaments really pushes a lot of decks out of the environment. If you could actually ladder without ever facing a Hunter (because you're banning it out in tournament) then it would promote creativity a lot more, but since that's not possible players don't really have a lot of freedom to try decks that would lose horribly to hunter if they care about their ranking at all. So I guess I'd say it doesn't really have any impact on innovating or creativity since it's not a situation that's really testable in normal setting unless you have a really dedicated team.

So would you like to see a banning system for ladder? Blizzard can't really implement permanent bans for a class, but maybe something like "you can't face class x in the next 5 turns"? I played Warcraft 3 for a long time and you could ban maps on ladder, which would be kind of similar.

I don't think that's really feasible or desirable. Honestly, the only long term answer is "better balance". Short term, tournaments have added the ban system.

I think having non-eliminator style tournaments would be another positive since it will showcase the really innovative decks a lot more strongly.

The current system we have makes it so that players have to have 3-5 strong decks, which means superb innovation only improves 1/5-1/3 of your tournament preparation...so it's basically not worth it.

 

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He streams regularly from around 1pm - 4pm PST on weekdays. No stream on the weekends.