Introduction
Hello everybody! This week we had quite a lot of things happening, as it was expected since we just moved on from another one of those historic nerfs in Hearthstone history.
Fact is, an extremely overpowered deck that used to shape the metagame and determine what decks were going to be played just got nerfed into a standard Hearthstone deck, and that makes it so the whole metagame became fluid and now needs to reshape and take another form.
There were quite a lot of different decks popping up, we were able to predict a few and this week is all about it: Metagame decks!
I will try and make an honorable mention, at the end of this article, to a few decklists that we mentioned before that performed well in this metagame, for now let’s start by doing what we always do and showing you guys the lists that are being played around in this week’s metagame!
Patron Warrior
Now seriously, you didn’t expect this to be here a couple of weeks ago, but here it is! Pre-nerf Patron Warrior was such an abomination to the game, that even after a massive nerf the deck is still playable – and very strong, mind you! A few Pro players such as StrifeCro and Xixo were able to take Patron Warrior to very high ranks in the Legendary ladder.
Despite still being playable, the deck suffered a major change, from a Combo centric deck to a Midrange one, that means playing for board Control and such, I guess a bunch of Patrons do help a lot at that!
The thing about Patron Warrior is that it was capable of drawing a lot of cards, and it still does! So why not use all those cards to take control of the board and win like a normal Hearthstone deck instead of rolling over the opponent? That is mainly the Deck’s objective now.
It is still quite unsure how the final Midrange Patron Warrior list is going to look like, but for now the list we are spotlighting is the most updated one.
Today’s spotlighted list is StrifeCro’s Top 12 Legend list, which is merely one of many Midrange Patron builds that showed up, but the one I found cooler!
Tempo Mage
With the almighty Patron Warrior gone, so does the Aggro Mage’s desperation at trying to beat it, so now Mages can finally lean back towards Tempo Mage and start leaving Mech Mage behind.
There are still quite a lot of experiments in Tempo Mage going on, since the deck was nearly unplayable before, it just started evolving now. Today’s list looks a lot like something we would call a Midrange Mage, rather than a Tempo Mage as we use to call it.
Tempo (Midrange?) Mage is something we are already used to: Decent early game, lots of removal, good scaling. A deck focused on Snowballing in order to win the game, that also has a couple of comeback mechanics.
I have to say I like these decks leaning towards consistency, it just proves the fact that the metagame is, at least for now, balanced.
Dragon Priest
Still a deck that is being played a lot, the Dragon Priest lists are now going back to the initial double holy-smite strategy oriented lists. Although Holy Smite is a decent card against most weenie decks, it had the disadvantage of being nearly useless against most of Almighty-Patron’s metagame. Now, however, we are experimenting, it feels like the game just relaunched and we have to test every single card once again and determine which ones are the bests.
Outside of that, the other not-so-standard changes you see here are simply my own changes that you guys are already used to: eydis-darkbane as the 3-drop card of choice and the duo sylvanas-windrunner + justicar-trueheart as odd 6-drop choices, that can give the deck higher odds of winning against strategies that this deck isn’t very favorable, like Midrange style of decks. The rise in Freeze Mage also gives me yet another reason to play Justicar Trueheart, since you can – most of the times – just Hero Power for 2 -> Trueheart -> Hero Power again for 4(total 6 healing), during the turn they drop that Alexstrasza on you, sometimes winning you the game.
Face Hunter
Another deck that showed up in the ladder this week was Face Hunter. Since the main reason for its absence is now gone, Face Hunter is once again labeled as “playable”.
I don’t believe the deck is going to be too powerful, but I do believe that it is going to be good enough that the players who enjoy playing the class shall be able to do so.
This week’s spotlighted list is Forsen’s list, used on the Play it Cool Asus tournament. It is a very different style of Face Hunter, since it uses a lot of the Hybrid Hunter cards, but without savannah-highmane – Such a change was probably done in order to make sure you have an early game as consistent as possible.
This list is slightly more consistent than the Hybrid Hunter, but also much weaker from the Mid to the Late game.
Other Decks to Watch for
I missed posting a couple of lists here, but just in case I would like to say that most list that I didn’t post here were posted in the previous “Decks to Play” articles, like:
Midrange Paladin (Probably the strongest deck in this metagame)
And Control Warrior
Conclusion
The Metagame is still changing, so expect to see new builds being posted and a slightly higher rate of me publishing these articles because of this.
This is it this week for newly meta decks. Like I said it is just like the game was just launched and we still have to test everything once again to make sure they’re really good or bad.
I have to say I enjoyed this week in Hearthstone, I haven’t had this much fun in months playing the game!
I hope I was able to bring you guys the information you need in order to keep track of the Ladder, and also hope you guys enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing :3
Love you all,
