There are dozens of people who have come to the forums to complain about this deck. The issue with most of the complaints is that they are primarily anecdotal (personal experience or of limited sample size). This is, by my estimate, offset by the volume of complaints coming to the forums, on streamer chats, other media complaining. Many of the posts are victims of other fallacies as well but their concerns are real thought their arguments may be flawed or incomplete.
The primary defenses I have seen to defend murloc pally are
- It doesn’t have a good win rate at higher levels of competition and therefore is not a problem.
(This is a oversimplification and narrow focus deflecting to balance and performance as opposed to entertainment and frequency) - It discourages slow or poorly built decks by beating them out of the game.
(This is almost always a red herring deflecting from the concerns brought up) - It’s easy to defeat if you make an aggro deck and go face.
(This is typically a false dilemma deflecting that the only options are to play other decks or quit) - There are other more powerful decks so clearly this one isn’t an issue.
(relative privation fallacy attempting to dismiss a problem by deflecting to other larger problems) - There has always been a pug stomp deck and this is no different than any other time in Hearthstone history.
(This is an appeal to tradition attempting to dismiss the concerns)
Now looking past all of these arguments I think the deck is clearly bad for the community with how many people who wouldn’t normally be on the forums running here to complain. In addition the defenders of the deck tend to be the same half dozen forum cybernauts with thousands of comments and posts behind each of them while there are dozens of complainers for the decks.
As for me I find the deck an issue because it zones out so many decks at the low levels where people are learning the game. People are discussing winrates at different tiers which is not relevant to the complaints being offered. I think the best tool is to look at total games played by deck because complaints are most frequently the frequency of the deck!
Hearthstone Meta Stats shows that in bronze in the last 4 days there have been around 6,000 games of quest paladin. The second highest is Beast Hunter with around 2,300 games played. At higher ranks you don’t see paladin any longer but if you count ALL the beast hunter decks played from bronze, plat, diamond, and legend you still only have about 4,000 games played. THATS 2/3 of the number of games of paladin IN ONE RANK!
Lets look at hsreplay. All decks sorted by games and the top two decks are two different paladin quest decks that account for 314,000 GAMES in the last 30 days. The top two Beast Hunter decks are second highest number of plays with 106,000! (by the way there are 2 more quest pally decks on the list before the second beast hunter deck which would technically make the quest pally number 368,000 but I’m trying to handicap it) That’s at MOST 1/3 of the number of games as quest pally! (edited out an error I had in rank disparity)
Lastly, though these are generally at lower ranked matches the win rates are still around 62% and if we consider how many of the games are mirrors messing with the win rates by inflating the pool of total games that’s a very very good win rate.
TLDR, after seeing all the arguments I’m very convinced quest pally is a huge issue but not for the reasons all the forums seem to believe. The deck isn’t a power issue, but a fun issue based on its absolutely incredible prevalence in the ladder and poor interactions in the game itself.