Board 8 > Hearthstone Topic - C-C-C-COMBO META

(+) Yeah! (+)

I think I just watched the wrong people. I remember toast would do the opposite and title videos something like "This deck has a 100% winrate?!?" with a similarly appropriate thumbnail, but then he'd leave the losses in the video. I also remember it pissing a lot of people off which I imagine was half the reason he did it.

When AoE Alpha Chad Trump used to play Hearthstone, his videos would sometimes do the 100% Winrate titles, but they came off as actual jokes.

So the top deck right now is just a Poison/Thief Rogue fusion where you replace the Strikes and Vipers with Wildpaw Gnolls and Maestra

Scabbs to 8 and Gnolls to 3/4 and 6 please

Yep it's absolutely one of the stupidest things I've ever seen in Hearthstone. Let's remove ice block because it's toxic and then give Rogue an ice block they can trigger whenever they want instead.

LiquidOshawott posted...

So the top deck right now is just a Poison/Thief Rogue fusion where you replace the Strikes and Vipers with Wildpaw Gnolls and Maestra

Scabbs to 8 and Gnolls to 3/4 and 6 please

I honestly predicted other rogues would pick up the Gnoll/Maestra package with zero other thief cards before it happened--Maestra just provides like 80% of all discounts to gnoll, which is stupid, and discourages actually running a high number of thief cards in thief rogue.

Like...think about Gnoll, think about if Maestra didn't exist. Is there ever a world where Gnoll is broken if you need to discount it by playing....five swashburglars? Absolutely not right?.

IMO Just remove the interaction between Wildpaw Gnoll and Maestra.

Change the text to "non-rogue class cards you've added to your hand".

If removing the Maestra interaction is too much of a nerf, you could even buff Gnoll to 4 mana so it's a 4 mana 4/5 rush before any discounts. (Still a card only actual thief rogues will care about).

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TBH, though, gnoll is still genuninely a hearthstone card that is interactive, and encourages both players to play for the board. I don't even think I'd be mad if they didn't nerf gnoll and just nerfed all the uninteractive shit instead. (Vicious Syndicate's suggestions of Incanter's Flow to 4 mana and Cloak of Shadows to 4 mana sounds fine to me. Edwin doesn't need to be a pirate who gains charge from Smite. I would also honestly not complain if they wanted to slightly lower weapon rogue's burn from hand with no weapon. Right now it's 36, which is manageable for armour classes like ramp Druid and control Warrior, but it would be cool if it was like...28 so that maybe a priest who is at 30 health behind a taunt wall can actually beat a weapon rogue. So like...put Garotte down to one bleed or make guild trader only give spell damage +1 would be possible ways to pull that off).

Data reaper breakdown:

https://www.vicioussyndicate.com/vs-data-reaper-report-218/

Poison Rogue with Maestra is unstoppable.

Nerfing Rogue without mage nerfs turns this into MozakiStone

Can only tech to beat Thief or Poison and you'll probably lose to the other one.

Statistically more likely to run into a Rogue disguised as Priest or Warrior than an actual Priest or Warrior at top legend.

Eh not sure I need to immerse myself any deeper into Hearthstone culture than I already do.

metroid composite posted...

I honestly predicted other rogues would pick up the Gnoll/Maestra package with zero other thief cards before it happened--Maestra just provides like 80% of all discounts to gnoll, which is stupid, and discourages actually running a high number of thief cards in thief rogue.

Like...think about Gnoll, think about if Maestra didn't exist. Is there ever a world where Gnoll is broken if you need to discount it by playing....five swashburglars? Absolutely not right?.

IMO Just remove the interaction between Wildpaw Gnoll and Maestra.

Change the text to "non-rogue class cards you've added to your hand".

If removing the Maestra interaction is too much of a nerf, you could even buff Gnoll to 4 mana so it's a 4 mana 4/5 rush before any discounts. (Still a card only actual thief rogues will care about).

---

TBH, though, gnoll is still genuninely a hearthstone card that is interactive, and encourages both players to play for the board. I don't even think I'd be mad if they didn't nerf gnoll and just nerfed all the uninteractive shit instead. (Vicious Syndicate's suggestions of Incanter's Flow to 4 mana and Cloak of Shadows to 4 mana sounds fine to me. Edwin doesn't need to be a pirate who gains charge from Smite. I would also honestly not complain if they wanted to slightly lower weapon rogue's burn from hand with no weapon. Right now it's 36, which is manageable for armour classes like ramp Druid and control Warrior, but it would be cool if it was like...28 so that maybe a priest who is at 30 health behind a taunt wall can actually beat a weapon rogue. So like...put Garotte down to one bleed or make guild trader only give spell damage +1 would be possible ways to pull that off).

I was actually thinking that trading a Cutlass/SI7 Extortion could just make your Maestra disguise disappear but it also leads to other weird interactions like Secret Passage being a thing.

I feel like the idea behind Gnolls is fine it's just that Gnolls are so overtuned that they make board centric aggro really hard to be effective. I also think maybe Guild Trader could feasibly go to 5 mana and it could affect Rogue's burn a ton

Patch is gonna be on the 25th and combined with a big BG patch, looks like

Bummer for 2 more weeks of Roguestone but this BG patch sounds cool. Apparently it's so big they're setting up streamer reveals like an expansion.

UltimaterializerX posted...

We have the biggest balance problem since day one DH and they arent doing anything until the 25th.

My pet theory about that is that they are planning to do a more complicated change than "increase mana cost by 1"--stuff like changing how gnoll and maestra work together.

Changes like that take more time than just increasing a mana cost by 1.

(Honestly, though, I don't seem to mind this standard meta--like...yeah, lots of people are playing rogue, but games have been generally pretty fun. And I'm hyped that they're making balance changes targeted at wild).

I just thought its because today is a holiday and they feel it wont roll out on time

Im loving Quest Priest right now

I've only been periodically touching ladder, so I'm at a pretty low rank, and I definitely haven't been following the meta, but I'm not seeing balance issues from the little I've played...or at least not the ones you're describing. Which doesn't mean it's not bad, but it does mean it's not the worst we've ever had. Hearthstone's had some real doozies in the past.

I have my doubts. HSreplay doesn't list rogue until the 10th deck in terms of winrate. Thief rogue is second-played with a whopping 6% of the meta. Quest warrior is twice as prevalent, is the top of tier 1, and is the deck I find myself consistently losing to on the occasions I try to complete a few quests.

It's also not a bad deck that's horribly meta-warping, or there'd be way more discussion about it elsewhere. I remember the days of (the original) quest rogue. Caverns Below was the single worst deck this game has ever had, to the extent that Blizzard nerfed the quest twice and it still saw play as an obnoxious and perverting deck an expansion later. I could name other decks that were very bad, unhealthy, or toxic, but just Quest Rogue alone is a high enough bar that I couldn't possibly imagine anything worse without it blowing up everywhere -- even for me, who isn't actively running in those circles any more.

If there is a rogue deck that really is that bad, please link me to a CC talking about it so I can understand better.

You know what, just for fun, and also to sidestep the current discussion...what are the worst decks of all-time? (Worst for the meta, not plain bad.) I found a reddit post to help me remember some of these, and yeah, there were some awful decks over the years. In roughly chronological order (I forget exactly when these all happened), here are 15 awful decks. This is without even listing a few doozies like OG Shudderwock.

• Undertaker hunter
• Secret paladin
• Patron warrior
• Raza priest
• Jade druid
• Patches pirate warrior
• Quest rogue
• Overload shaman
• Big priest
• Cubelock
• Odd paladin
• Giants hunter (wild)
• Togwaggle druid
• Evolve shaman
• Rez priest

Chakki has been polling basically that question on twitter the past few days. You can see the bracket here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ke7agBg8xLohoG0TXYRhAng8_ZZ1afjumRn3MAlN4DU/edit#gid=736067479

Aggro DH is probably going to win, as it should, with Jade Druid in second.

Jade Druid is gonna go up against Patron Warrior Round 2, think thats gonna be for the one finals spot

Undertaker Hunter vs Patron Warrior sounds kinda likely but possible modern sensations could lead to Poison Rogue winning

Looks like the winner was Aggro DH upon AoO launch

Looking back, almost every card from that deck has gotten nerfed. Only Chaos Strike, Spectral Sight, Umberwin, and Felscreamer have escaped

Battlegrounds Buddies!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYEZicRAk4Q

Looks fun but also a little worried that will limit creativity when it comes to each hero.

uhm, big priest ruled

Yeah my experience was the same playing Poison Rogue. I was also between 2700 and 3000 legend rank!

Yeah it's braindead and I might just play Big Spell Mage until it gets nerfed so I can use Eye of C'thun on their stealth faces. Probably still lose but it's the only counter I can think of.

I finished a rogue with Mask of C'Thun the turn after they stealthed at 10 health. This was the turn after clearing the board with Mordresh, so they probably thought they were safe.

People who are at 3K dumpster legend and STILL playing Poison Rogue. What is wrong with those people?

I understand getting legend with the best deck but why do you keep playing it once you hit legend? Are these people trying to get rank 1 or some dumb shit?

Downloaded the Yu-Gi-Oh game on Steam and holy shit this game is so complicated and unwieldy for a new player.

It really makes you appreciate the simplicity of Hearthstone when every card in YGO has an actual paragraph describing the effects.

Wild balance changes have me excited, so I'm going to talk about them

The raid the docks nerf raises the number of pirates of one (all?) of the steps to 3 pirates. So...8 or 9 pirates total that need to be played, instead of 7. I'm assuming 9.

Expected to delete the deck from standard--you will run out of pirates in hand before completing the quest. Wild is a different story, since you get Ancharr in wild to draw 2 more pirates, but you will consistently need to play Ancharr now to complete your quest (no completing the quest on turn 5), and might need to do things like play Mr Smite for quest completion (or alternatively, cut mr smite so you never need to play him for quest completion).

I don't think the deck goes away, and would be surprised if it stops being tier 1. Just...still such a problem for all the old timey wild aggro decks like secret mage and odd paladin--they can't beat the quest reward. Raza priest has also historically struggled to beat the quest reward--one turn delay helps, but it's probably not enough to turn the matchup around. So like...if any of those decks resurface, quest warrior is still going to have massive favourables against those decks.

Rapid shot nerf is big for odd quest hunter, because it was basically like drawing 2 cards. You would put 1 mana deal 1 damage into that deck, so yeah. Costing 2 now means it's deleted from the odd version of the deck. Some people are hyping the non-odd version of the deck, but I've played a Reno quest hunter in wild, and in my experience is that the non-odd version sucks, so I'm not too worried about that. (Like...it has moments--Dragonbane is a hell of a card when you have 0 mana repeatable hero power, but...overall I lose a lot with that deck, in casual so lol, yeah, not worried). Which...basically just leaves odd quest hunter down their best card, with no actual replacement. (They would literally play 1 mana deal 1 damage if it existed, but they're already playing all the 1 mana and all the 3 mana damage cards. Fucking powershot is being played in wild, LOL).

That said, Odd Quest Hunter...might still be just fine. You can run the version that runs all the tradable beasts including Imported Tarantula, and then runs Master's Call to draw three tradeable cards (and sometimes baku, who is a beast). It's a slower version of deck, more focus on card draw, and can't run Auctionmaster Beardo so no surprise kills, but it will still have the same inevitability, and also still be a great anti-secret deck thanks to Flare being good in the deck as a 1 mana draw 1 spell.

Apprentice--so...there's someone on reddit who likes running computer simulations for ignite mage, and according to them, the average turn to kill of ignite mage has only been slowed down only by half a turn:

https://old.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/s7m3it/leaked_balance_changes_for_222/htb5ed2/

Accounting for ice block (incl. Magister): wins on effective turn 5.71 at 2 mana and turn 6.2 at 4 mana.

Most of the other wild combo mages are largely deleted, of course--nobody is going to be using Drek'thar to pull out sorc apprentices and flamewakers anymore. (Although one other noteworthy mage combo deck that slipped away is quest mage using parrots to get lots of extra turns--keep an eye on that one).

The one thing I will say is that anti-secret tech like flare should be a pretty reliable way for aggro decks to counter ignite mage now.

(The other four balance changes are all for cards that are pretty irrelevant in wild).

So...honestly, despite how big these nerfs look, I don't think any of these decks has actually been deleted in wild. But...still these are not small nerfs, so maybe it's enough to bump these decks down to tier 2 or low tier 1.

Weekly guaranteed rant post from me:

Just spent the last hour and a half losing every match so I'm completely over Standard unless this patch makes huge changes.

I dislike so much about this game why do I continue playing it.

Played 3 games last night. Won 1, lost the other 2 to Mister Smite. Dunno bout the rest of you, but that's one card I will be happy to see Blizzard do something with...they HoF'ed Leeroy, and then went and printed another one.

Anyway, I'm both excited and scared for the battlegrounds update. Buddies means relearning the game, every hero, the new pacing of the game, and probably reckoning with some OP strategies until Blizzard brings things back to parity. It's gonna be a mess. Hopefully a beautiful mess, but a mess, nonetheless.

I think Mr Smite is okayish--he costs 6, Leeroy cost 5, this is a substantial mana increase. I dunno how I feel about the Juggernaut randomly spawning Smite, but the warrior quest is about to get deleted from standard thanks to nefs for wild, so I guess that's not going to matter pretty soon. I am unclear on why the new edwin is a pirate, knowing the interaction with smite would be there. Like...rogue already has good pirate synergy for smite; stuff like giving Prize Plunderers and Swashburglars charge. Was that not enough?

This whole dust fiasco is the epitome of Hearthstone.

Eh, the moment I saw dust added (with no context or announcement or explanation in the popup), I was immediately suspicious and didn't spend it. Not remotely surprised to see that there was a mistake.

Speaking of the balance changes, the official patch notes are out:

https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/news/23765270/22-2-patch-notes

And there's some interesting tidbits in there, like apparently the warrior quest is only being nerfed from 7 pirates to 8 pirates, and the nerf is targeting standard, not wild (since the deck does have an unusually high winrate at low MMR in standard).

7->8 will be a pretty soft nerf for wild, probably doesn't require any deckbuilding changes--you aren't going to run out of pirates or be forced to play Smite to finish the quest, but it's still probably enough to make playing the quest reward on turn 5 very rare, so that's something.

Also, there's mechanical changes, where they're trying to increase consistency of buff layers:

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/hearthstone/t/patch-220-card-effect-priority-update/76118

Some interesting notes here include that in the process of making things more consistent--Moonfang now always takes 1 damage, even if there's a Mo'arg artificer in play. Also the paladin quest will work more like stormwind champion, and provide a passive +2/+2 on top of the current stats (so using equality will set the silver hand recruits to 3 health, not 1 health, for example).

MC is talking about the wild version

UltimaterializerX posted...

I know. That deck would be lucky to be tier 3. Here was the previous Wild meta before the new quests happened.

https://www.vicioussyndicate.com/wild-vs-data-reaper-report-28/

How is a pre-quest meta report going to tell you how good quest decks will be?

Like...this is a meta report after the quests happened:

https://www.vicioussyndicate.com/wild-vs-data-reaper-report-29/

Wild basically became a 3 deck format, quest hunter, quest warrior, and even warlock. (Those three were tier 1. Aggro Shadow Priest was tier 2. Everything else was deep into tier 3).

This report is a little out of date, since VS hasn't done a wild report since Alterac Valley launched. Alterac Valley made Freeze Shaman into a deck. But it's safe to say that quest hunter is still very much shaping the format, since it also dumpsters Freeze Shaman, and tends to run flare which makes it a natural predator to any mage combo decks that lean on ice block.

Obviously quest hunter is losing rapid fire, but I really don't see how looking at a pre-quest meta is going to tell you very much about quest hunter without rapid fire. They still have the quest, there's no deck you can look at from a pre-quest meta that's going to have the same kind of matchup spread.

Honestly I wonder if wild bans Drekthar at some point

LiquidOshawott posted...

Honestly I wonder if wild bans Drekthar at some point

Can't see why they would.

They just made Drek'thar unable to pull Sorcerer's Apprentice, and there's really not a whole lot else left with Drek'thar that is really all that concerning.

None of quest hunter, nor quest warrior, nor quest mage run Drek'thar.

C'thun Druid has better things to do than Drek'thar (they're busy with Oaken Summons).

Warlock decks with giants and battlegrounds battlemaster aren't running Drek'thar cause they have high cost minions

Warlock decks with Mech'a'thun aren't running Drek'thar cause they have high cost minions

Shadow Priest isn't running Drek'thar. (They actually want to, but Darkbishop Benedictus disables Drek'thar).

I would expect Drek'thar in Paladin (as a third call to arms) but most paladin lists right now seem to be opting to run Loatheb and Battlegrounds Battlemaster instead. (Not to mention, popular paladin lists right now include Reno paladin, which is going to run Reno at 6, and handbuff paladin, who wants Blademaster Samuro and Glowstone Technician and often Chillblade Champion).

Like...I'm trying to think what deck is even going to run Drek'thar after the nerf? Oh wait: frog shaman. Yeah, playing drek'thar to tutor spirit of the frog will probably still be a thing. But that doesn't sound ban-worthy.

So...I saw someone post a wild odd ping mage list on reddit.

It looked like complete unplayable garbage, way too greedy to be good (five 7-mana cards, and Brann Bronzebeard in case you get to 10 mana and can summon two ragnaroses with Jan'alai the dragonhawk). But I've been messing around with it and getting more wins than I expected.

I don't think the deck is good, I just think ice block is OP. (Incidentally, I have never won with the deck in matchups where they have anti ice block tech, such as quest hunter running flare or mech'a'thun warlock).

I'm also highly amused that Dawngrasp is one of like...three new hero cards considered playable in wild, almost exclusively because they're a 7 mana Ice Block.