Decks to Play – Stalliness at its Best

Introduction

How are you all doing this fine week? Welcome to yet another edition of Decks to Play! This series is all about metagaming and information regarding it – If you ever feel like you need to understand how the metagame’s rotation (or, in today’s metagame case, lack of) occur and how it affects the ladder you’re playing, this is the right place! Here you’ll not only hear my comments and view of the metagame, you’ll also be given awesome suggestions for you to ladder with!

The Metagame

The ladder is completely standing still in these last weeks of pre-Standard format. The game is stale and boring, the best decks requires little to no skill at all to be played and that is hurting the competitive aspect of the game by a lot.

In the tournament scene, people are playing these so called “best decks” and sometimes obtaining good results regardless of their skill level.

On the ladder, anyone can hit Legend by playing either one of: Zoo, Secret Paladin or Midrange Druid as they’re very straightforward and requires very little knowledge or decision making while being the most powerful decks in the game – Let’s just call this kind of deck/strategy “faceroll”, a reference to WoW arena compositions that, according to jokes, can win games by just “rolling one’s face on the keyboard”.

I came to realize how people are being influentiated by Hearthstone websites in their lineup picks in tournament. A famous website just posted their new “meta report” and placed Zoo, Secret Paladin and Midrange Druid as uncontested the all-star decks of the metagame, and because of that I faced seven Secret/Zoo/Druid comps on yesterday’s tournament I played.

Luckily for me, I ended up countering all this “faceroll” train by playing a composition of decks that both were good against these decks as well as requires awareness: Patron Warrior, Malygos Rogue and Face Shaman. I ended up noticing that Faceroll mirror is totally decided by luck, and that the room for outplaying an opponent is very limited, so playing decks that were both uncommon as well as would give me room to outplay my opponent would give me the needed edge in tournaments.

4th Place on this week’s Herminated, passed out during semi-finals and had to drop(I was drunk, nothing to worry about!).

3rd Place on Hearthlytics, winning all rounds up to semi-finals 3-0.

Explaining the Small Delay

As you might have noticed, this article took a little longer to get released than other Decks to Play, the reason behind this is that as of right now it is nearly impossible to find good deck lists that I haven’t posted here yet, that being said the search was still a very surgical one, and I won’t be posting bad decklists here just for the sake of posting. Enjoy these lists 😀

Jambre’s Egg Secret Paladin

Now here is a very different deck that saw some play this weekend. Jambre used this one secret Paladin deck to advance during the Winter’s Prelims and was quite successful with it.

This is a Secret Paladin deck that tries to play around not drawing mysterious-challenger anyway while still retaining a good win rate in case that happens that happens.

We all know that Mysterious Challenger is OP, and will win the game whenever dropped on curve, but what happens when that doesn’t happen? That is what Jambre tried to think when creating this list. This list runs a lot of different cards such as novice-engineer to try and cycle faster through the deck, we can also see a elven-archer to easily activate dragon-egg. The thing I don’t agree very much here is only running 1 Secret of each, but Jambre was the guy who designed this decklist so he must have some reason behind it.

This is a very interesting deck, and in case you’re trying to run away from the sameness of the ladder, this could be a very nice pick! This was also, sadly, the only different deck in the whole EU winter’s prelims.

PS: As a personal suggestion, swap the elven-archer for a second copy of avenge.

Nuba’s Almost-Face Hunter

So I noticed how this week’s metagame isn’t being punished by explosive-trap and unleash-the-hounds and how it needed to be, so I decided to go back to Face Hunter at least for this week.

There are some small changes I did to the actual Face Hunter list you all know, which is I added both Piloted Shredder and Loatheb to the count and removed some cards I disliked. The reason I did this is that the reason Face Hunter isn’t being played anymore is because other decks are curving much better, being a lot more efficient against Mid game decks, sometimes even beating Hunters themselves. So I added the 4 and 5 drops to try and outcurve the opponent while maintaining the good old anti-aggro power of Hunter, that isn’t being exploited on a metagame like this.

This is the list i’ll be playing on this week’s tournaments, and is the one I am suggesting you to use 😀

(Probably)No Decks to Play Next Week

So, this is an important information I have to pass to you guys: There shall be no Decks to Play next week because of how stall the game became and how unfun it is.

This, however, is not me trying to punish the game or anything like that: there just isn’t anything to post. Of course, a lot of decks keep showing up daily but every one of them is terrible. Sure, people will get to legend with some dark-wispers deck or something after a couple hundred games but that isn’t the point of these series: There won’t be any Metagame changes, there won’t be any new powerful decks or changes or techs, so sadly we won’t be able to provide you guys with an update: there’ll be none.

Of course, that is: unless Standard changes are announced, then we’ll have a lot to talk about :D:D

I hope you guys liked the short list of Decks I presented to you this day, and I hope to see you again very soon 😀

Here is me, wishing for a very nice week, see you around in my articles discussing some things about standard 😀

Much love,

Nuba

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