Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft

Hey i just returned to Hearthstone a few days ago. Funnily enough i catched up fairly quickly to the current metagame even if i haven't played since Knights of the Frozen throne.

I can't stress how many times i lost playing as Toki in Monster Hunting. It's good to know that the RNG factor in HS hasn't changed one bit.

So, what's the current meta? I have Greymane for a start.

Yup, Toki took the longest for me. Something like 120 monsters defeated before I cleared it. Compared to the 10, 8 and 21 of Houndmaster, Cannoneer and Tess respectively.

Good news. Greymane is one of the defining cards in Even Shaman and Even Warlock. Even Warlock is the cheaper of the two, since the only other legend needed is Bloodreaver Gul'dan, whereas Shaman lists tend to run several more legends.

It was also a defining card in Even Paladin, before that deck got deleted from the game.

This week’s brawl is a slightly unfriendly chess match - a game of chess but you get to cheat six extra cards in your deck.

The chess pieces’ Auto-Attack doesn’t count as an end-of-turn effect, by the way, so Drakkari Enchanter is not an instant pick.

I've been running Jaraxxus in it. It's glorious.

If you go pally, i recommend running Liam Greymane to get rid of the pawns in the lategame.

I run a bunch of Priest Board Clear that might leave minion alive (Dragonfire Potion, Lightbomb) along with Northshire Cleric to abuse the healing from the Bishop and Shadow Vision to get them more consistently. Also run Mind Control steal the Queen.

Just went 8-3 with priest in the TOT arena, my best ever priest run- I'd never been past 5 wins with priest before. (I still haven't been past 5 with hunter.)

I only did two runs in the TOT arena, and I probably won't get any more in before the event ends. They were decent runs though.

I did not know how the game would work beforehand, having never played Karazhan. So I foolishly chose the Hunter as my class, and spend the following day or two trying to patch the situation with whatever cards I had. Eventually I did manage to get some mileage out of Cave Hydra, Hunter's Mark and Vilebrood Skitterer, but that's about it.

Edited by Xeroop on Jun 30th 2018 at 11:35:35 AM

Why not just delete your deck and switch to a different class?

Edited by Druplesnubb on Jun 30th 2018 at 12:45:26 PM

Honestly, I didn't know it was possible before you mentioned it just now. Silly me.

Man, I wish there were a "Fuck off and reroll, scrub" emote that is available every time an aggro deck concedes to a control deck. Because it feels so damn good.

Gods the current meta is tedious. Nothing new there and this has been a trend for a while now. Pretty sure if you go back and find my previous post in this thread, it states basically the same.

I've almost completely quit playing HS due to this, but since the Caverns thing was going on I went and made a deck and did my dailies at least. After a few weeks of that I'm so damn ready to quit again.

HS has always had the problem inherent to the system of collectable card games where some decks are just better than others. Naturally, this makes it so that those get played the most and a meta is born. This is, as said, unavoidable and mostly OK.

At the early days of the game if you played something other than the top sevenish decks, you probably lost more than you would if you'd play them, but you could at least eke out a living and have some fun.

What makes meta decks work is usually some kind of a combination of cards that create a situation that makes the other player lose. Something that gives them power beyond that which decks that don't have such a combination can compete with.

For a while now, though, starting with Un'Goro, though there were inklings of it in Gadgetzan, Blizzard has released new cards that push these combos further and furher on the power scale. Back in the past, even if your deck had a lower power level you could win games by playing around the opponents key cards and combos. That seems basically impossible with the current crop.

There's a reason why there's basically zero midrange decks in the meta right now.

Either the dekcs are so fast that they bowl you over or what they do at the end game is so damn ridicilous that who ever gets there is a quaranteed win. This combined with a pretty wide swathe of defensive tools for the latters and tempo tools for the other that nothing can live in between.

You can't just make an OK deck and expect to win.

I can't help but feel that this is profoundly unhealthy for the game.

As a bonus, none of the current meta decks actually look fun or interesting to play. I've played against dozens of Taunt Druids who butcher that deck, clearly have no idea what theyr'e doing and still just win after the second Hadronox. Usually the games against paladins end up so fast that you have no idea if the opponent was any good or not.

And, during these few weeks of play around ranks 15-13 I've seen not a single non meta deck. The most off the curve, rarer decks have been stuff like Aggro Mage or Spell Hunter and those are pretty meta.

I've had, by and large, pretty miserable time and have a hard time imagining anyone truly enjoying themselves.

Edited by GabrieltheThird on Jul 2nd 2018 at 12:10:16 PM

Yeah, while every card game is going to have a handful of top tier decks, I'm really starting to dislike the way top tier strategies work in Hearthstone. They're built around these ridiculous combinations that just seem unbeatable unless specifically teched against.

Like, who builds a deck that can handle 3-5 waves of powerful Taunt minions being summoned in a single turn? Most decks built normally simply don't have the resources to either clear that or survive the attacks from that.

Plus Druid has so much armour gain that they can conceivably gain more life than the damage your deck can deal.

Priest has a solution: send all those minions back to the Druid's deck and then "borrow" them with Benedictus. Other decks have to ram damage through.

I also ran into an OTK Priest variant recently that does 48 burst damage.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 2nd 2018 at 5:14:14 AM

Benedictus is another one of those cards, though. Most decks aren't capable of beating their opponents deck and a large chunk of their own. Then you've got the Amara-Zola-Benedictus decks where you need to be able to beat a 40+ card deck that can potentially have 100+ life.

Umm... *cough*... looks at his own deck. Yeah, that one. It's really tough to beat. I guess aggro decks are the only thing holding me back from legend rank.

Squeezed in one more arena run on the last day of the event, just to help clear out my quests. Went 6/3 with shaman.

@20087: Yeah, the combos and synergy have kinda gotten out of control. Back when I first started playing (just before Naxxramas), the guy who invited me to try the game said that there was enough randomness in the card draw and whatnot that even a suboptimal deck could win a good portion of the time by drawing better curve and better answers. Well, that just isn't the case anymore. If you're not playing the exact high-synergy decks that Blizzard planned out for you, you are playing wrong and you will lose, all the time, with no chance of recourse. Things have been gradually getting this way for a long time, particularly starting with Gadgetzan (jade druid and Patches were kinda ridiculous) although the origins go back even farther (patron warrior was a similar sort of thing). But it's gotten really bad with Frozen Throne and Kobolds, and Witchwood has done nothing to fix the problem (although the balance changes helped a bit).

I think the root of the problem is that Blizzard's design philosophy has shifted from card RPS to deck RPS. In the classic set, there were a variety of cards that were kind of open-ended counters; things like doomsayer, MCT, crazed alchemist, swamp ooze, stampeding kodo, etc, which were good against particular other types of cards, and you could mix and match these to get certain types of synergy and hopefully play around what your opponent had. But since then there have been a lot fewer of these. There are way more cards designed with *positive* synergy for very specific game plans, and practically nothing in the way of cards that can stop those cards from doing their thing. The result is that the only way to really counter your opponent is to reach your win condition first. Judging from their comments about silence, Blizzard seems to think that having your combo countered is 'anti-fun' which is why they no longer print cards that can do that. The problem is that it's even more anti-fun to just waste your time playing matches where the outcome is basically predetermined by which decks you and your opponent are running, as well as losing any and all opportunities for creative deckbuilding at the same time and for the same reasons. If Blizzard had stuck to the design philosophy they used for the classic set, the game would be far healthier right now.

I also play that deck I held off on crafting Benedictus because of the investment though. Already had the quest and Zola went into multiple decks.

Most of my decks are some form of crazy value, because they fare much better than the simpler or midrange-y decks I've made.

What I like about playing aggro decks is that it's not always about maximising value, which results in different plays from me. While it can be fun to Zola my Amara or save my voodoo dolls/polymorphs for the DK Jaina hero power, it can be frustrating having to hold out for that value to win certain match ups. It starts to feel samey and uncreative.

The fact that it can be the correct play to throw two artificers under a Dragon's Fury for the armour gain makes the games feel more unique to me. When the game lasts long enough to draw your whole deck, it really reduces the variance.

Of course your draw order matters way more in an aggro game that will end quickly and it's no fun to just brick either.

It's no fun to brick against aggro. That's what makes me the saltiest.

That's what I meant, yeah. You can still kind of brick in control match ups, though, if you need to rely on certain tech to have a chance at stopping them.

Heh, I just played another Benedictus Priest and the game ended in a draw at the turn limit. I can see that as a reasonable argument against the deck.

I confuse ranks 20-17 with my Quest Warlock when I feel like playing. 52% win rate and it made me like playing Warlock for the first time. Actually, I can zone in on cards that changed Warlock for me: Bloodreaver, Rin, Lakkari Sacrifice and cataclysm.

A few tribe adjustments and a new art for Witchwood Grizzly:

• Mountain and Molten Giants are now Elementals.
• Witchwood Piper is now a Demon.
• North Sea Kraken is now a Beast.
• Jungle Moonkin is now no longer a Beast.

Most of these is largely inconsequential, except for the Mountain Giant (a huge, if not even giant - har har - buff for Elemental Mage).

So apparently July 12th the next expansion will be announced.

Any guesses for the theme?