Earlier this week, Blizzard released an update that made changes to some of Rogues most used cards.
Rogue benefited a ton from the Rise of Shadows and is one of the expansion’s most played classes. The Hearthstone team said part of the reason they thought the changes were necessary is that it seldom felt like most top Rogue decks had a bad matchup outside of Warrior.
This resulted in Warrior and Rogue being two of the most popular decks on ladder throughout Rise of Shadows thus far. The hope is that balancing Rogue will result in larger class diversity throughout all of competitive Hearthstone. There are a variety of fun decks that perform well right now but struggle against Rogue. Here are some of the decks you can expect to see more of if Blizzard’s balance changes are successful.
Cyclone/Conjurer Mage
Though the community can’t seem to agree on a name for this new archetype, no matter what you call it you can expect it to be powerful. This Mage decks make use of the new Khadgar Legendary minion alongside the new Twinspell card Conjurer’s Calling.
The deck also runs Mountain Giants and pushes you to have a big hand early on so that you can drop those giants as soon as possible. Many compare playing this deck to playing Cube Lock when it originally dropped. Since Rogue shouldn’t be able to out-tempo this deck as quickly as before, the match-up should be much more winnable.
Token Druid
After being hit with a series of nerfs during the Rastakhan’s Rumble expansion the future looked pretty dim for Malfurion and company. Luckily for Druid players, Rise of Shadows answered the call of the wild and breathed new life into the nature-loving class. That new life came mostly in the form of Token Druid.
Token Druid has been one of the strongest decks throughout Rise of Shadows, but one of its lowest win-rate match-ups has consistently been Rogue. At time of writing, Token Druid has a 55 percent win-rate against Rogue on HS Replay, so you can probably expect that number to increase as more games are played post-nerf.
Mech Hunter
Mech Hunter is one of the more interesting decks to gain popularity during Rise of Shadows and for good reason. Mech Hunter is a minion based deck that plays with a heavy emphasis on value. This archetype is a great option for people who want a minion heavy line-up but are put off by an aggro-heavy playstyle. When you play Mech Hunter you can see decisions you’ve made with your mech’s early game pay off in the late game and it’s incredibly satisfying.
Something that was unsatisfying for Mech Hunter fans, however, was the Tempo Rogue match-up. Even now on HS Replay, Mech Hunter has a 49 percent win-rate against Tempo Rogue, but that could all change very soon. Now that Tempo Rogue has been slowed somewhat it may not outpace Mech Hunter nearly as fast. Mech Hunter performs moderately well against every other class in the game besides Shaman, so dust off Rexar’s Bow if Tempo Rogue made you hang it up.
