Introduction
Whispers of the Old Gods is within its final weeks, and while it has been an amazing run, it should be nice to point out new discoveries we learned with it so we can move on better players.
Thinking about it, I decided to bring the subjects that came to mind when I was watching this week’s Dreamhack tournament, hope you guys guys enjoy the read!
Bad Cards Can Become Good
This one point has been proven again and again so many times throughout the course of Whispers of the Old Gods that I just can’t even begin to count, and it says much about our ways of dealing with our collection, especially the limited ones – Those trash cards we use to disenchant might become luxury ones when new content shows up.
Let me remind you there were a lot of pre-WOG unplayable cards that ended up being played, let’s talk a little about some, shall we?
ragnaros-the-firelord – Became an 8-drop pick of choice for a lot of Midrange and Control decks, since dr-boom rotated out of standard something needed to fill in that void, and Ragnaros was the best option by far. The card was a fringe card at best pre-WOG because Dr. Boom was better and cheaper.
cairne-bloodhoof – The card saw initial play in every single nzoth-the-corruptor deck there was, lately its been finding homes in a couple of Tempo and Midrange decks here and there even without N’Zoth, however the card itself is still a powerhouse in any N’Zoth deck.
far-sight – The card was absolute trash before Whispers of the Old Gods, never being played before it finally saw play in Control Shaman as yet another way of generating tempo by reducing one of the many possible combo pieces mana cost, while cycling through the deck efficiently. The deck wouldn’t be the same without it.
stampeding-kodo – A card that saw nearly no play after Naxxramas was released and brought us sludge-belcher, Stampeding Kodo saw lot of play in the first month of WOG release as the 5-drop of choice for most Control deck and some Midrange variants of Hunter as well. Even now it is still used in a couple of decks here and there.
There are at least 10 other cards that saw no play before Whispers of the Old Gods that we now see being played here and there, but the message is given: Disenchanting Classic cards isn’t something you should be doing(unless we are talking about low power-level Legendaries such as millhouse-manastorm, gruul, nat-pagle and others).
Metagames Developments are Happening Faster
Another thing that I noticed during the expansion was that the development of the metagame is becoming faster than ever before.
This means we are being bombarded by a constant flow of decklists, counters, and a whole metagame tree gets formed right in front of our eyes while getting constantly reshaped by the quick development of the metagame.
The conclusion of all this? We are only four months into the expansion, and we are already starting to feel tired of the metagame, despite new decks appearing here are there, the flow of new decks was gigantic in the first weeks of WOG and now they are nothing more than one new deck per week.
Maybe this is just me being a Hearthstone grandpa and being tired after countless seasons, but the hype-train feels like it is in immediate need of refueling.
Bad Classes Need a LOT of OP Cards to Become Good
So this is what we saw in Shamans:
Blizzard added a couple of overpowered cards to the Shaman Class in The Grand Tournament, but the class couldn’t do much because there weren’t enough cards to make it playable, so they added even more in League of Explorers and Shaman became viable, after some hype the class once again became a bottom tier-2 Class, and only after Whispers of the Old Gods, with yet another completely broken card, the Shaman was able to make it up for the horrible cards it has to run, and don’t take me wrong: Once TGT and LOE rotate out, if there aren’t any new overpowered class cards added to the game in the first 2017 expansion, the Shaman class will die out once again.
But why am I saying this again? Well, it is simple: The Priest class is still dead.
Priest is a class that has been struggling since the game began. Different from Hunters, Warlocks and Warriors, Priest never had a decent flow of consistent cards being thrown at them, instead they are constantly left with situationally horrible cards to play with.
This, combined with the fact Priest’s Classic cards are terrible, makes it so the class is in a completely horrible state and something tells me that even one or two completely broken and overpowered Class cards being added to the Priest class in the next expansion won’t be enough to keep the class at the top.
The conclusion? Both Priests and Shamans (The classes with no Basic/Classic support) will need a constant flow of good cards in order to be competitive, every year, but in case Blizzard gets it right, completely different strategies of both Priests and Shamans will be viable every different Standard, making the game more fun for everyone.
Closing
This is likely to be one of the last WOG articles I write, but probably not the last! WOG is coming to an end, and Hearthstone is moving very differently than what it did when it initially was created, probably even different than what Blizzard had in mind when they created Whispers of the Old Gods themselves. What does this mean? I still don’t quite know, but I have high hopes.
A new expansion is going to be announced within a couple of days, and while the theme doesn’t interests me that much, i’m betting on a Pandaria instance for some reason.
Hope you guys enjoyed this article, we’ll see each other again soon!
Love you guys,
Nuba
