Introduction
Hello my beloved readers and welcome to another Blackrock Mountain Nuba Report! On these small series of articles I am to give you guys a small report of everything that both happened and is happening in the past 7 days, including meta shifts, card impact, nice decks, and so on…
This week we had quite a lot of things going on, probably the most changing week so far, since we had a lot of changes in the metagame, and a lot of the definitions made here are to last for more than just a week, given the fact the top players are all trying hard to get high on the Ladder given the end of the season.
The fourth week was also the most impactful of all weeks, because we had a pretty strong batch of cards added to the game, including cards such as hungry-dragon, flamewaker and fireguard-destroyer that are cards set to define what will happen to the game the following months.
The Weekly Report
Don’t ask me about the boss fights, I was so focused on getting the cards and testing them right away, that I simply Face Huntered every boss down within a couple of minutes just so I could get the cards and throw them in the ladder.
Once again, I played no Heroic fights, but as far as people told me this week’s bosses were even harder than before, and stuff like a friend of mine trying for over 6 hours to defeat Chromaggus actually happened.
The end of the season made it so people started trying too hard, which means a lot of the decks that appeared this week are going to be meta-definying decks almost for sure, and I believe the only deck that might end up getting massive buffs after the last week is going to be Dragon Paladin, but everything else is pretty much already set, and being an end-of-season week, we start to get a lot of dominant archetypes.
With that said, we actually got a few interesting builds popping up, but this is not the section to post them, right? Keep reading the articles for interesting deck lists!
Zoo lost some of its strenght and so did Face Hunter, but at the same time Midrange decks kind of got a boost in popularity. I believe the reason is the consistency of said decks, but overall I think these decks are already good by themselves against those Aggro Builds, making it so they got a little more popular.
Card Impact
All the cards were massively playtested, because even though we didn’t know if all the cards were good, we also didn’t know if they were bad either, so we had to playtest every single of them, and the results are the following:
revenge: There was no vengeance here, the card ended up being much worse than whirlwind, because a lot of the times you are to use this card it’s actually a overcosted Whirlwind anyway, and this usually screw your mana, not allowing you to make optimal plays during the turn, which makes it so we won’t really want to run this card in our decks.
flamewaker: Flamewaker is a beast (as in very good, not as in Hunter tribal, lulz), being added to most Mage decks there is no complains about this card. However, I have to admit the real home for this card hasn’t been found yet, and making an optimal tempo mage list is actually pretty hard. Aggro lists, however, were very happy to just add this guy to their core, and we saw a small rise on Aggro/burn mage because of this. This card still has much to evolve, but we already can see its impact on the horizon.
hungry-dragon: This card ended up being as bad as we initially predicted. Having a 5/6 on the board for 4 mana can be devastating, but the nuisance it adds most of the times isn’t worth the effort, because even if we have ways of dealing with it, we still have to deal with it, which can, sometimes, delay our game, or even put us in odd positions. This guy is extremely bad against Decks like Hunter as well as Zoo and Aggro in general because, as said multiple times before, we are simply adding another body to the board that will be ignored by the Aggro while giving him yet another beater so he can throw at our face. Regardless of all of this, Hungry Dragon still saw a lot of play in Dragon Paladin decks, mostly because it is indeed a Dragon, but I believe it is easily going to be replaced by volcanic-drake as soon as the card comes out, instead of being just another card to use in combination with.
fireguard-destroyer: The best 4-drop in the game, was instantly added to every single Shaman build that exists, from the most aggressive ones to the more Controlish ones, this guy is just unbelievably good. Some argued that this was not better than piloted-shredder, but even disagreeing with it, I would ask:
Anyway, I think most Deck Builders agreed with me, because every Shaman deck I saw ended up having 2x Shredders and 2x Destroyers.
dark-iron-skulker: This card didn’t see much play this week, mostly because people are focusing on trying too hard and something tells me this guy needs a whole different Rogue build in order to work, and this is not a very good week to go that far on the Playtesting road.
demonwrath: As we predicted, this card didn’t see much play. The reason behind such happening is that Warlocks already have better AOE, and even as a Demonlock, you don’t want an AOE that will only work against certain decks…. I mean, you don’t want to have this in your hand on a mirror match, do you? And well, the only decks that would suffer from a 2-damage AOE are Hunter and Zoo, but Zoo already runs a pretty big load of Demons, which makes it so this card is only good against Hunters, but Demonlocks are already good against Hunters, right? Berp, not rly something you’ll be wanting to run on your deck, sadly.
chromaggus: Metagame too fast!!! Card too slow!!! This guy saw a lot of play in random playtesting Dragon Paladin decks, but it’s ultimately overshadowed by ysera, and this is just not better than tirion-fordring even on Dragon Decks, at the same time, we don’t really want to run 2x Yseras on a metagame like this, which makes it so this guy isn’t really the best option for your Dragon Paladin deck, at least not now. I still like this guy though 🙁
Overall this week has been very Crazy, and by the time I am writing this it is still pretty far from over, I mean there are still 2 days until the season ends. Probably the Rank #1 Legend Lists are going to be kept secret until the season is over, so prepare your copypasterino skills for day 1 of the Next season, because I believe some crazy list is going to be showing up really soon.
Notable Deck Lists
We had so many deck lists added to the game this week that I actually have to filter which ones I am going to post here, we even had deck lists showing up that don’t use cards added this week but are actually so strong that I just have to post them here too! So, are you ready for some massive information flow? Let us begin!
I love Shamans, every one of you know that by now and because of this I am going to be posting two Shaman lists on the notable deck lists. This first one is my Personal Shaman Mid-range List, which is an Overload list that doesn’t run lava-shock. The main idea of this list is generate a lot of value with a bunch of Cards that are good by themselves. Because of unbound-elemental we are actually able to run a little more Overload cards such as bloodmage-thalnos that also gives you some more Draws, allowing you to filter through your deck a little faster. Overall I think this deck is pretty well-rounded up, and only suffers against Face Hunter, a deck that, as said before, is going down on popularity.
Going into the other side of the coin, I introduce you guys the Hyper-Aggressive Mech Shaman list made by Ding. This list was able to hit a very high-ranking on the NA Ladder a few days ago, and it is a pretty interesting one. This is obviously a tempo-oriented list, made to never fight behind, and runs a lot of cards that are made for that idea. Being a Mech deck makes it so this doesn’t have any Card Advantage, and usually you’ll rely on drawing that last bit of damaging spell in order to win, but the Aggressive nature of this deck can catch a lot of players unprepared, because this deck is also capable of generating Attrition, winning in the board by dropping off-curve bombs such as fel-reaver and fireguard-destroyer.
Moving into Dragon Paladin deck, this list is the one I think performed the best, but as I said before there is still a lot to do here. After a lot of playtesting I would not be playing Dragon Paladin right now, but in case you still want to run Paladin, just add 2x dragon-consort and 1xYsera to your standard non-Dragon Paladin list. After the wing 5 is released, however, there is a lot that we’ll have to discuss, so only take this advice if Wing 5 isn’t out yet. About the deck its a Control deck made to either Outtempo other Control and Mid-range decks or to outlive them, by running bigger threats than the opponent.
What… the… flux… Wtf did I just see?? I mean, this is a completely random Face Mage with some stalling tools, this deck was designed by some Chinese guy and seems to be quite popular this week on the Ladder. It was also able to reach a very high Legendary rank, the randomness in this deck is so high I wouldn’t advice you running this (mostly because I hate RNG), but since it actually win games, why not? I haven’t personally played this deck, but all my friends who did actually enjoyed it, so it’s up to you if you want to play this or not. I am still trying to figure this deck, but it for sure looks fun!
Probably the strongest Deck this week, Mid-range Hunter came back to the metagame with some pretty serious Strenghts. The deck is very consistent, which makes it so it’s a good pick for the end-ladder grind, it also has a lot of good Matchups against most decks, while its bad matchup, which is supposed to be Paladin Mid-range, is having issues finding itself the best build because everyone is playtesting a lot with Dragons. Because of all of this, Hunter Mid-range became the deck to beat this week, and will be until the season is over.
Lists for Tomorrow!
The most wanted section of this article, at least by its own writer (Hehe) is here!
Ladies and Gentlemen, we finally are in the last week of Blackrock Mountain Release!!!
And to celebrate such a magnificent week, we come to you guys with some nice Playtesting builds for you guys to spam the ladder with during the first days of Season!!
Starting with Dragon Paladin, I took the Liberty of Editing the Week #5 Dragon Paladin List introduced to you guys on the Three Weeks of Dragons! article I wrote the last week.
Just giving some extra explanations, Hungry Dragon sucks, I hated the card. Ok ok, now what? Well, since I now know that I don’t need to play it, I decided to take it out in order to add some more consistency to the deck, in this case: Taunts. By adding 2x defender-of-argus to the deck I make sure I have at least 4 Taunts through the course of a game, the Argus also has some nice synergy with both muster-for-battle and shielded-minibot and as far as playtesting goes, its everything the Deck needs: Taunts.
Moving foward, we have a complete rework of Last week’s Dragon Warrior list, which was also introduced to us on the Three Weeks of Dragons! article.
this time, we added much better cards in replacement for the older weaker cards, but overall the main idea of the deck remains the same: A Hard Control Warrior deck, with better card advantage mechanisms and Dragon Themed.
With these 2 Lists I believe you guys are going to be able to playtest the best cards added to the game on the 5th and last Wing of BRM.
Conclusion
With this, the batch of Untested BRM Theorycrafting comes to an end!
Next week we are going to have a final Article of the Weekly BRM Nuba Report, which is going to be a final comparison to our predictions, telling you guys everything that happened during all these 5 BRM Weeks as well as doing a last Weekly Report on what will happen on the game during the next five days!
Once again, I hope you guys enjoyed reading all of this as much as I enjoyed writing, it was a blast writing all of this for you guys! I would like to, once more, thank all of you for making part of Hearthstone Players Community, it’s because of you that guys like me are able to keep writing over and over about things that I like, and passing all my knowledge to you guys is just something I love doing!
Much love guys!
See you in the next article,
Nuba
/TheNubaHS
Published: Apr 29, 2015 10:10 am