A Week in Review – One Deck for Each Class

Introduction

Take this as a sting if you like, but I had to change the introduction in the last minute that I was writing simply because you guys spammed me so much about it:

I KNOW! This week’s Tempo Storm’s meta snapshot was quite the inaccurate one, and the deck lists were outdated as well.

Luckily for you, I was already working on a “Week in Review” article for this week, discussing the most powerful decks in the game for each class and why.

I don’t have the people to write a true snapshot, I don’t have enough data to write winrates and fully matchups, but I do can give you all the most powerful decks in the right order without having to fabricate the data or to randomize it.

So, this article (that could, eventually, become a weekly thing) is to talk about each class, separately, in order of strength and the most powerful Deck lists for each and every one of these classes, shall we begin?

Rank 1 – Shaman

Shaman is indeed the strongest class in the game right now, despite some wrongly claiming the Aggro version to be the strongest, despite all of us that actually played it knowing it isn’t, the fact is that the class is indeed at the top.

Whispers of the Old Gods gave Shamans thousands of very powerful tools, some might even say more tools than League of Explorers and The Grand Tournament combined, so it was natural to see a rise in the class’ popularity so quickly.

Now, to the deck that actually dominated the ladder we have Midrange Shaman. Loyan started the Totemic trend by reaching rank 1 Legend last season, but his list wasn’t the final one as XiXo actually made the list much better as Loyan ended up switching to XiXo’s list and reaching #1 Legend again with it.

XiXo’s Shaman list was posted in one of our Decks to Play article, and can be found here:

https://hearthstoneplayers.com/decks/xixo-totem-shaman/

Rank 2 – Warrior

Warrior is the follow up of what dominated the Ladder, if you wanted to win games but didn’t want to play Shaman, Warrior was simply your best option.

And why wouldn’t it be? There were just too many options for you to play:

C’Thun Warrior, Control Warrior, Patron Warrior, Pirate Warrior and the final and strongest list of them all up until this very moment: Midrange Warrior.

Midrange Warrior is also known by some as “Tempo Warrior”, but since we all know that there very little of “Tempo” in the deck’s name and a lot more of “Midrange” on it, i’ll just go ahead and call it Midrange Warrior.

The list was not only played by BoarControl (the deck’s creator) to the very top, it got multiple players in the Top 100 finish and is the list we’re going to choose to represent the Warrior Class this week.

https://hearthstoneplayers.com/decks/mid-warr/

Rank 3 – Warlock

The whole potency of the Warlock Class this week was carried by Zoolock omnipotent power.

Deck lists based upon darkshire-councilman and forbidden-ritual completely dominated the Ladder as not only the most powerful Aggro deck in the ladder, but also as the only possible Counter to Shaman there is right now.

Zoolock is indeed number three, because despite being good against Shaman, the deck still struggles against all those Greedy Control decks packed up with sweepers and little-guy removal while Midrange Shaman has just too many comeback mechanisms and ways to stay ahead.

Nonetheless, Zoo is still powerful, and there is nothing better than playing a Deck that counters the strongest deck in the game while not having any absurdly bad match against anyone, and that is what makes Zoolock the third strongest deck this week.

https://hearthstoneplayers.com/decks/zoo/

Rank 4 – Rogue

Well, at least they got something right didn’t they?

Rogue is the one of the most played class to high Legend this week, but I believe that this hype has its day counted as the Deck appears to lose more and more strength as weak “Old-Gods” based decks are being played less and less.

Different from the other three classes, Rogues current power is completely dependant on playing against opponents that don’t have actually good decks. Miracle Rogue is indeed a decent deck, but I don’t think it has the power to ultimately compete with the wave of refined decks that is to come within the next month, and while defeating those C’Thun and N’Zoth based decks is piece of Cake, Miracle Rogue has quite the issue playing against Aggressive decks unless the Rogue starts with the most perfect of the hands.

Despite all this, we are still facing a lot of random N’Zoth and C’Thun decks of the most strange types, and Rogues are still pumping hard and grinding all these poor experimenting souls, and that is what makes Rogues our 4th best option to play.

The list I am posting here is Ryzen’s latest updated list, which seems to be the strongest one right now

https://hearthstoneplayers.com/decks/miracle-nuba/

Rank 5 – Druid

And now we move on to what seems to be the last class that actually had some presence in the metagame as a powerhouse: Druid.

Druid started off during this metagame as a deck that was played by many as C’Thun Druid, it was the first deck I playtested the second the servers were up with Whispers of the Old Gods, and I have to say I faced quite a lot of C’Thun Druids in the first hours of WOG.

However, C’Thun druid quickly fell on popularity as a lot of Midrange Hunters and Aggro Shamans started to pop up.

And then Druid kinda died for a whole week, Sjow made a Beast Druid deck but it was ultimately inefficient and got discarded but then….

Seven days ago a Hearthpwn user named Kbushi posted a Ramp deck on both Hearthpwn and CompetitiveHS claiming to have finished top 32 Legend with it.

The deck seemed quite strong, had double Mulch as removal and a decent ramping base. Since then the deck was used as Base for many other Ramp decks and a lot of people made different versions of it and are doing quite well.

I made my personal version of the deck, using both the-black-knight as well as big-game-hunter instead of the double Mulch as I was facing a lot of tempo-oriented midrange Deck and these seemed less damaging to me, and since the list seems to be quite powerful, I ended up concluding that it was indeed the last powerhouse of this week’s Metagame.

https://hearthstoneplayers.com/decks/ramp-druid-3/

Rank 6 – Hunter

I am still quite unsure as which one should be the number 6 class, if Paladins or Hunters, but i’ll just go ahead and call Hunters because it was indeed the class that had the highest number of playable decks during this week.

Hunters got an obvious powerful addition in the form of call-of-the-wild that made Midrange Hunters that much better, the problem though is that there is no clear deck base, so there has been quite a lot of experimenting with Midrange Hunter since WOG came out.

I fear the response is “There isn’t a deck base” but I have to say I am still going to be trying to find the perfect Hunter deck base regardless, because that is just how I am.

Since the lack is indeed of decent early game cards, I ended up coming up with a desert-camel based Hunter deck with a pair of explosive-traps that seems to be doing quite well – not only for me, but for everyone that is playing it – and is the Hunter list I am going to be posting here.

https://hearthstoneplayers.com/decks/mid-hunter/

Rank 7 – Paladin

Paladins lost nearly the totality of their Midrange Deck base with the rotation of Naxxramas and Goblins versus Gnomes, leaving them with a crippled Aggro shell and a finisher-less Control Shell to work with.

There has been quite a lot of semi-decent Aggro decks showing up last week, but I haven’t seen any this week which leads me to believe the deck is being totally outclassed by most.

However, the Control based Paladin decks are taking on the nzoth-the-corruptor shell to work with, and it is actually being partially successful!

There has been a lot of changes to the list, but I believe the one Kolento came up with to be the most updated this far, still I have to say I am quite reluctant to call N’Zoth Paladin a powerful deck this very moment.

Mostly, the deck runs on to a similar game plan of Pre-WOG Murloc Paladin deck, which is to draw a lot, sweep a lot and then finish the game with a big Anyfin N’Zoth. Thing is this deck plays the slow game a lot more, and the N’Zoth isn’t a game winning card as the Deck only has one Taunt Deathrattle minion: tirion-fordring.

So, basically, the deck plays around the assumption that it’ll curve decently, sweep the board, stabilize, heal itself, play Tirion, get it killed, take value out of the Weapon, play N’Zoth, get Tirion killed again, and win the game with a massive value depth.

Well, I don’t know about you, but that seems quite inconsistent to me, not to mention the times where you see yourself forced into playing N’Zoth without a dead Tirion or something, or when playing against hex or polymorph or entomb, I just don’t know if the deck is going to be strong enough to survive the whole perfecting process of the ladder that we’ll be experiencing within the next months.

Nonetheless, N’Zoth Paladin decks are still quite powerful (maybe something close to unbeatable) when playing against Control decks because Control decks usually let the opponent do their game and try to play a more responsive plan, and that is what makes this deck a viable option in the ladder.

https://hearthstoneplayers.com/decks/pala-control/

Rank 8 – Mage

Mages aren’t really in a good position this week.

Hotform started playing a pretty cool version of Casino Mage, but the deck was ultimately outclassed by so many decks that it is nearly unseen these days in the Ladder.

Sure, you can still play Tempo Mage, but in the end you are just playing a weaker version of any of the decks posted above with the simple little bonus that this deck can be the jack of all trades.

That being said, Tempo Mage is still the good ol’ known Casino Mage, and as such the deck has the possibility to defeat nearly any opponent if drawn perfectly and randoming perfectly.

Freeze Mage is the other mage deck that was played this week, but given the high number of Warrior and Paladin decks on the Ladder it is just too unsafe to play. Not to mention that with the loss of mad-scientist the deck struggles with Tempo a lot more. Despite all this, Freeze Mage is still a decent laddering option for those looking for a challenge as the deck requires quite a lot of skill to pilot.

The list I am posting this week is my variation of Tempo Mage.

https://hearthstoneplayers.com/decks/casino-mage/

Rank 9 – Priest

And Priest seems like the last class in this week’s review.

Priest’s deck list is still totally uncertain. Despite Dragon Priest having reached Rank #1 Legend in the first day of WOG, the deck was quickly outclassed by other lists and thrown into oblivion soon after.

However, there are still some Priest freaks trying to make Priest work and playtesting thousands of decks, such as Zetalot and myself.

I made a pretty cool Control Priest version, so in case you really want to play Priest, the deck posted in the article https://hearthstoneplayers.com/decks-play-totems-really/ should sufice your needs!

Closing

And this is it for this week’s recap, notice that we indeed posted a deck for each class this week in our Decks to Play articles, since all the lists posted here were indeed taken from these articles, so don’t forget to put Hearthstoneplayers in your daily reading schedule as many other lists are bound to be shown here!

Love you guys, see you all later,

Nuba

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