At Blizzard:
“Hey, you know what I really miss. Face Hunter.”
“We can’t make that a deck again. Everyone hated it.”
“No really. We’ll just introduce this “adapt” thing, and people will call it Midrange Hunter. But, really, all they’ll do is go for the face.”
“Great idea! Get on it!”
Okay, are you going for memes or real discussion? Because current midrange hunter doesn’t go face all the time, and certainly way less than old face hunter. Face hunter NEVER traded. Face hunter didn’t care if he had a board. New midrange hunter does, and particularly since adapting a minion that can attack is way more valuable than adapting a minion that can’t. I don’t even think midrange hunter plays any minion that has charge.
Aside from Huffer, anyway.
So after a few weeks, pirate warrior is the top deck and the only quests people are using are warrior, rogue, and maybe a little bit of freeze mage. For such a big idea expansion it didn’t change the meta up at all.
Long ago I hesistantly sharded a captain greenskin and it finally found a use in pirate warrior and I’m a little sad I don’t have it.
I’m thinking of crafting a taunt warrior deck.
Where I’m at, its mostly Taunt Warrior, some Pirate Warrior, Control Priest, Jade Druid, Elemental Shaman, Quest Rogue, Midrange Hunter and occasionally Aggro Druid, Dragon Priest, Miracle Rogue.
I actually prefer facing Pirate Warrior to Taunt Warrior, if I get blown out Turn 4 I get blown out, taunt warrior just goes on and on and on and they all boil down to a bunch of coin flips at the end.
A timely article on the decks going around right now. A pretty varied meta, I must say. It’s still early, of course, but much better than Pirate vs Jade vs Reno.
The return of midrange and control pally is pretty nice. Hand paladin is kind of beastly now, which is also nice. Hunter is new, taunt warrior is new… Really, the meta is quite varied.
Also, no mention of handlock? Because plant handlock is pretty neato.
I haven’t run into a single plantlock. I’m personally running silence priest, though, and I’ve run into others on the ladder as well
Yeahhhh… Plantlock sucks. Which is a shame, it’s such a cool deck and I crafted all the cards for it.
Mage isn’t dead. I managed to get to Rank 2 this month with this tempo mage deck (kinda wanted to push for Legend, but just don’t have enough time).
Got to rank 5 with mid-range hunter, which is the first time I’ve been past rank 8 or 9 or so. Deck feels strong but not unfair; I pretty much wiped the floor with quest rogue, which was fun.
Did they change up arena rewards? Particularly 4-5-6 win runs seem to reward less.
I’ve been seeing a lot of success in Arena with incredibly greedy decks. Like, my last two decks were 7 and 12 wins respectively; both were light on early game and featured tons of lategame. The 12-win one in particular had two Vinecleavers, two Dinosizes, and a Lay On Hands for good measure - that’s a ton of lategame value, and just over half of the 7+ cards in the deck. Dinosize is absolutely insane, FWIW, especially as a followup to Vinecleaver. Many classes struggle to clear that many 1/1s per turn. Lategame value kept clutching out wins, and I kept dodging tempo and aggro decks. So… yeah. Greed FTW.
I’m pretty excited about the copy/paste for decks - which is a long time coming.
I just want proper stats. =(
I just drafted the best arena deck I’ve had in a year at least and only got 5 wins with it. Early on I lost 2 games where the other guy drafted ridiculously perfect. I had a lot of big minions and buffs in that deck, and the guy topdecked deadly shot twice in a row to kill my badass buffed minions on an empty board. The other one managed to adapt 2 poisonous minions on the board behind a taunt so that I couldn’t drop my big minions. Ah well.
I got the rogue quest from a pack and spent too much dust on making a quest rogue deck (somehow I had no preparation even after all this time). It’s pretty boring. I don’t even really feel like I’m playing against another player. I either draw the right cards and win very quickly, or I don’t, and lose quickly. There’s almost no variation and it matters very little what the other guy does.
The Rogue quest is particularly obnoxious. My Priest deck can handle it most of the time, but it’s just not fun to play against. I saw a Kibler video yesterday explaining everything that’s wrong with it and some suggestions on how it can be fixed, but every suggestion is aimed particularly against Rogue quest, which I think is unfair to those who spent dust and/or money to create such a deck. To me, the solution would be obvious: create cards that interfere with quests in general, not just the Rogue one. For example:
Minion: Cave Troll, 3 mana, 1/4
Ability: Quests can’t be progressed
Spell: Mud Slide, 3 mana
Effect: Decrease progress of all quests by 1.
The problem with quest killers like that is exactly the same problem as quests themselves - it reduces the game to rock paper scissors. The quest killer cards won’t be featured in any “normal” deck, and the decks that have quest killers will lose against non-quest decks.
Think of cards like the crabs, Eater of Secrets or Acidic Ooze. Unless the meta is completely dominated by quests, weapons or secrets, these cards never see play. When they do see play, they trivialise the matchup they are teched against.
The problem with Rogue quest in particular is that it’s very binary and deck dependent. Either your deck wins or Rogue quest wins. There’s no real counterplay. The rest of the quests give you lots of time to deal with them, and really none of the quests are even close to the problem that Rogue quest is. By making a quest killer, you’re nerfing all the other quests even more, and not helping the problem of the rogue quest, since you’re making that matchup even more binary. Frankly if you want a 100% winrate against rogue quest, just play pirate warrior or aggro druid - the win is almost guaranteed.
It’s not that I want a 100% win rate, that’s not what this game is about. In fact, it is actually a rock-paper-scissors game, and it should be. Guaranteed wins are boring by themselves and pirate warrior is just as obnoxious as quest rogue, as it hardly has interplay with your opponent either.
I’m not convinced by your reasoning for tech cards. I think these cards have some value on their own, even if they’re not ideal against a non-quest deck. One is still a spell, and the other is still a fair body, both can be comboed. The fact that they target all quests was basically the point. It is unfair to create cards that target one specific deck, and even if you do, it will never see play for the reason you explained: it will be useless against all other decks. But cards like I suggested slow down the progress of quests. That wouldn’t be much of a problem for slow quests, instead of turn 6 they complete it on turn 7, but it would impact fast quests more, evening out the playing field so to speak.
Whenever Blizzard decided to create new game mechanics, they should also think of cards to counter those mechanics. As of now they have a poor record of that.