Is Yogg-Saron Going to Kill Competitive Hearthstone?

Is Yogg-Saron Killing Competitive Hearthstone?

When the card was released, it was like a joke. You saw your opponent play spell after spell before dropping this guy, and you had a nice laugh. “What kind of a win condition is that?”, you may ask. There is way too much RNG to ever be competitively viable with that card! Well, that seems to be the problem in itself – in a professionally played competitive scene, RNG like this can be lethal to a game’s success, especially when it starts actually works.

Hearthstone and Blizzard in general tirelessly work to ensure an enjoyable, fair gaming experience for their many titles, be it Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Starcraft, or Overwatch. While, in a card game, some amount of RNG is difficult to avoid, many argue that Yogg-Saron takes it to a whole new level that was entirely unnessecary to the game itself. We’ve all seen the angry Reddit posts where an angry player lost a game because his opponent topdecked lethal, but we laugh at them and move on – it’s a card game. Of course there will be RNG involved.

The issue we have with Yogg-Saron is that it is was a mechanic introduced to the game that is completely, 100% based on RNG. It can completely ruin your day, or win you the game when it Power Overwhelming’s your Huffer and gives it Windfury. This is criticized because, despite the fact that it was a good play, you, as the player, actually did none of it. A player can completely and entirely turn the tide of a game that an opponent put a lot of thought and mechanical skill to take for themselves in the first place.

A lot of this debated topic falls to you and I, the players. Is Yogg-Saron’s RNG too much? Is this RNG going to do damage to or even topple the competitive scene, and if so, what can we do about it?