Brought to WEC 2014 as a legal guardian for his under-aged team-mate Dima "Rdu" Radu, Portuguese player Nuno "Ignite" Pinho finds 15 minutes of his time to chat with our on-site reporter, Skim. We take the GosuCup #1 winner and regular weekly powerhouse through an array of questions, covering WEC 2014 and it's unorthodox deck format, the way Curse of Naxxramas was released and why Blizzard made a mistake with it and what's it like being a competitive Hearthstone player.
We’re here at WEC 2014 and there’s going to be Western players competing against Eastern players. Have you followed the Eastern scene?
It’s hard to follow the Eastern scene currently, there isn’t much coverage on the Western websites. GosuGamers have tried to shed light on this but still the western scene feels distant. You can’t really get involved in the Asian scene because they don’t really allow for that, whilst there is a lot of interaction between European and NA players – European players compete in NA tournaments and vice versa. There’re no language and country barriers which can be hurtful to the scene otherwise. If you have a global one, the meta can evolve much faster.
So, you’re in favor of having more international tournaments, including all the regions?
Yeah. Globalization. New world order. *laughs*
The first clashes between regions were way back, when NA vs CN was held, followed by EU vs CN. In both tournaments, the western players proved much stronger, but hopefully we can see a change in that in WEC. There are new cards out and maybe the Asians have prepared some secrets we haven’t seen yet. That’s highly unlikely, though – the card pool has been increased by 30 cards only. It’s not too few, but at the same time this doesn’t allow you to make a deck nobody knows about. There’s nobody that’s going to be way far ahead.
Let’s get to the tournament. WEC are implementing a format that might be new for the western players. Players are going to use nine different decks between four classes, what do you think about that?
The western scene has been accustomed to the 4-decks-1-ban format for Bo5’s but the tournaments that employ are usually smaller tournaments. It takes a lot of skill and a lot of deckbuilding, though, when you go against another seven players and the meta that you expect from them. If you’re given the ability to prepare four classes but nine decks, it decreases the skill ceiling because you can prepare so many decks against so many other archetypes that you basically don’t fall short against anything. You can tune your deck by including several tech cards to cover bad match-ups.
After round 1, people will already know what their opponents are playing. And if you have nine decks to pick from it’s going to be way too easy to know which decks you want to pick. I think the four pre-submited decks format used in western tournaments forces you to put way more thought.
Don’t you feel having nine decks available leaves room for pocket strats, though? Right now, the meta is figured out and there isn’t much room with for surprises but if you have room for nine decks you can go “Oh, maybe I can try this crazy combo”.
I don’t think we’ll see any crazy combos come out. What I think might happen is you see decks that are rarely used, for example the controlish Mage deck that doesn’t even [card]Fireball[/card]s I believe, played by Hyped from Tempo Storm if I’m not mistaken. It’s actually a strong deck in control meta, it can beat Warriors and Priests consistently and it fits the meta perfectly.
At the same time, though, when you have 9 decks you will maybe just play 4 or 5 of them most of the time, and you’ll have 2-3 builds that are sort of secret and that’s going to be the surprise factor: people techning in [card]Harrison Jones[/card] or [card]The Black Knight[/card], those swinging cards.
We’ve been talking about the meta quite a bit, one of the biggest changes obviously is the Naxxramas expansions. What do you think about it, overall? Strongest card?
When all 30 cards were revealed, everyone knew that [card]Loatheb[/card] will be the powerhouse. And indeed he is, he’s played in 90% of the decks. But there’re are plenty of other cards that see a lot of play. [card]Webspinner[/card] and [card]Haunted Creeper[/card] brought Hunter back to the pre-UTH nerf power level. The Creeper, and also [card]Echoing Ooze[/card] are also very versatile and also go into decks like the rush-down Druid.
The board flooders are becoming very important in many match-ups, even against Hunter where you don’t want to have a board with more than two minions by T5 to feed their UTH but at the same time it’s so good to populate the board on T1-3 to trade with their [card]Webspinner[/card]s, Creepers, maybe [card]Scavenging Hyena[/card]s and decrease your board before the T5 combo. Those flooders also allow you to keep up the tempo, just build up the board and prepare for a T6 [card]Savannah Highmane[/card], etc.
Naxx was actually released weekly. This is something, if you compare it to other card games, quite different, getting periodical updates and all. Do you think this impacted the competitive meta at all, only getting a few cards every week?
I used to play Word of WarCraft for the past three years and Blizzard have been testing the gating system where they’ve been testing a gate system, where they release raid wings like this. Even though Naxxramas dates back to WoW vanilla and all wings were released at once, Blizzard are trying to follow the WoW model of today.
What they failed to realize is that Hearthstone is a card game – no card game ever has used gate content. Considering this was the first batch of new cards since release, it made no sense to create one-week-long metagames. Players had to practice and train hard constantly so they can be prepared for the next weekend of competition. It’s negative for the competitive scene overall, as it brings out all the good decks for this particular week.
If you release all 30 cards at once, you will have a period of time where the best decks aren’t figured out completely. The meta will be chaotic and there you can see the best players. The gated release eliminated that – by week 5, everyone already knew which decks were good or not, and that was final.
So for future expansions they should stick to the all-at-once model?
For sure. The gated system was good in the sense that every week for five weeks you had something new and that’s very interesting from a card game point of view, it gives you some progression. But at the same time, they could’ve just gated the bosses and the challenges, not the cards. Cards should be released on a set basis and that’s what they’re thinking of doing next.
Speaking of which, what should Blizzard be implementing next?
Aside from observer mode, a tournament lobby will be very helpful – you can create a chat and gather all players there. For example, ESL have an IRC channel which you must access – imagine they could make their own lobby and add their admins there, it would be much more convenient. Chats for more than people would also be great, instead of forcing people to go to Twitch to communicate. Why not have a big chat for everyone – just log in, find a group, join and you’re done. That’d be pretty cool.
Being part of MYM, how active is your training regime?
Hearthstone is not a game like Dota or LoL where you need to practice every day. What’s important is information and that’s the key in this game. What you want is to keep up – you want to know every new decklist, tech or idea so you’re on top of everything at all times so you can predict the meta.
Do you think that Hearthstone more than any other eSport will need coaches and stats people more actively? For example, in League and Dota several teams use people to gather data on other players and teams.
In Hearthstone, every single professional knows he should be checking out the scene as much as they can. Every player on our team does it, it’s a routine – you go to GosuGamers, to IHearthU, to Twitch, you check news streams and upcoming players. There are people coming up with new stuff that you don’t see every day and that’s good information before even if you’ve never seen that player before.
Since you’re a team and your players are awake during different times of the day, you post this information in group chat and the information is shared. That’s how you flourish as a team.
Personally, how much time do you devote to Hearthstone?
Since I’m unemployed and not studying at the moment, I watch streams all the time, playing ladder, checking up on decklists from tournaments and I try to keep up with the meta as much as possible. I’d say at least five hours a day.
Would you consider it your job and profession, or HS is just a hobby?
You can’t really say it’s a profession until you make a living out of it but I like to consider myself a professional in terms of my dedication to compete on the highest level possible. Unfortunately, I’m still not making a living out of HS, which is obviously the dream.
