Introduction
And what a release. I have to admit I didn’t think we would be having so many playable cards this week, so many cards making so much work and diversity that I am actually happy I was wrong about this week’s cards.
We playtested a bunch of cards, even ones people didn’t see too much, like swashburglar and we have some amazing results for you guys tonight, including a list you won’t find anywhere else!
So get ready: open your Hearthstone, prepare that coffee, because we’re on to some amazing brews for you guys to play tonight!
Arcane Giant
Let’s start with this week’s most discussed card: arcane-giant!
Hours, even days before Opera was released we all thought barnes was going to be the star of the second wing, but Arcane Giant actually overshadowed Barnes as the best card released this wing.
The card saw tons of obvious addition to so many obvious decks that it just feels strange.
It may be the pure hype, but the card is actually being played as a 2-of in tons of different decks: token Druid, Miracle Rogue, Tempo Mage and even Patron Warrior as an alternative Win-condition!
The best thing about Arcane Giant, however, is how it can easily replace the big Legendaries out of Token Druid such as onyxia and cenarius, making the deck cheaper to craft.
At the same time, grim-patron based Warrior lists gets an alternative Win Condition in the form of a 20-damage 3-card combo with arcane-giant, charge and faceless-manipulator. Actually, that can be played in literally any spell heavy Warrior deck! Maybe we’ll be seeing Midrange versions of Warriors in the near future simply because of this!
So, the card was just released and already saw tons of play, probably should eventually be yogg-saron-hopes-end best friend, but I don’t know how consistent having two of those in the hand will be in the long run. Maybe I am worrying too much, but I feel like I’m always the unlucky guy with the terrible draw order.
As for the deck lists, the Patron and the Druid ones are just the obvious ones we should be looking at this weekend. Sure people should eventually make much better lists, and possibly we are seeing versions that, with a lot of work, should eventually outshadow the ones posted in this article, but I don’t believe we’ll be seeing it this weekend, so I suggest sticking to the ones posted here!
Barnes
Barnes was kind of a “meh” card this week. A lot of people were running him, and he actually won games here and there for some players because of some stupid outcomes in the most random of the decks (some dude got yshaarj-rage-unbound against me, pulling off a big Legend, he still lost though because his deck was too random, lol).
Anyway, the obvious Barnes decks didn’t work, and in the ones he actually saw Legit play were overshadowed by the possible bad outcomes and how much of a “bad arena filler card” he seemed to be, sometimes being a simple 3/4 with a blank 1/1 in play.
All in all, Barnes isn’t a bad card, and eventually we’ll be figuring out the best deck to run him on, but as of right now there are only a few lists that actually really want to play him.
One of those lists is the Midrange Hunter list we were working on this week, the deck’s playstyle was adopted by MrYagut who reached rank #13 Legend with it. The list was so similar to the one we posted on our Premium article this week that it makes us happy!
Swashburglar
And the one card nobody really tested this week except me was Swashburglar.
My initial analysis of the card was that it was a bad card, and I ended up noticing how wrong I was after I played it in my Tempo Rogue deck.
Obviously, the card doesn’t fit Miracle Rogue and is the reason people didn’t play it much this week: It doesn’t fit any obvious already existing deck.
Well, I was grinding the last 50 wins for my last Golden Hero, and I simply figured I why not playtest this and make a super different deck in the process? That is where I started playing my version of Tempo Deathrattle Rogue.
You want to know the most interesting thing? Of all the lists we played, this was the one with the highest winrate, nothing even came close to winning as many games as Tempo Deathrattle Rogue, The deck just got too consistent with both swashburglar as well as deadly-fork.
But why does Swashburglar ended up being so good? Because it both activates Combo as well as is a relevant Late game card. Despite being a super random card, it always has the chance of getting that one card you need to win the game, while being a simple 1-mana card always helping us to enable Combo.
So I won’t go too deep here, since we already discussed other versions of Tempo Deathrattle Rogue in the past and we already know how it works.
I playtested a lot to get to this final list, changed a lot of cards, and the win rate (even during the playtest) was just absurd: above 70% in an 80-game sample, getting a 10-game win streak at some point.
So, maybe I am being too biased on my own Brews, but this is the list I would recommend you playing the most this weekend!
Closing
I wish we have had more time to playtest other cards, but this week was just too busy for me.
These decks, however, are possibly the best ones that I could be picking and sending you guys, so I don’t think the top deck lists will be lacking for you guys!
Now, don’t forget to let me know your playtesting results too! How about the other cards not mentioned here?
Next week we’ll have so many obvious good cards that we’ll be releasing multiple Brews article very soon! So don’t forget to stay tuned in hearthstoneplayers for more amazing brews next week!
Love you guys!
Nuba
