As the title says, I’m wondering if anyone has put significant work into this.
I’ve been experimenting a lot trying to come up with a deck that has a decent MU spread vs the main polarizing decks in the meta. The main culprits you have to consider are
Brann warrior, if you don’t have minion pressure that is early enough, you will likely not be able to beat them endgame once they get ultra greedy.
Mill druid, similar to Brann warrior, if you can’t pressure them (has to be minion, because burn is not enough with their 20 armor gains) early enough, they will stabalize and take over, chaining infinite titans or worse, milling you
Sludge warlock (non-OTK) version, (the OTK version doesnt appear anymore it seems), this is a very strong early game deck that finishes with insane burn. Have to go toe to toe with them early game, then outvalue them at the end once you stabalize, easier said then done.
Excavate pally (maybe pure as well), this is also a heavy aggro deck, got to watch out for the finely board clear midgame, once you turn the corner with them they will wipe your board for nearly free, so you have to pace yourself.
Treant druid, this deck is largely unchanged, but effective vs all the greedy decks and sees play, but not much.
In my experience its a very polarizing meta where these decks duke it out. Basically,
To use this deck, copy it to your clipboard and create a new deck in Hearthstone
Still trying to refine some of the deck choices though. Not sure if hollow hound or the gnome munchers make more sense. The munchers do sneak in a good number of lethal hits with their pseudo charge… Also could potentially drop the blood rune cards for frost to gain card draw and reska if the munchers are swapped.
If you go to VS you can see the new report. You can look for dark red and dark greed to see the polarizations.
When I look at it, the only deck that stands out as not having any dark red or dark green is Reno Hunter and MAYBE Reno Shaman.
2 Decks that people just stopped playing so you rarely see them
Everyone is playing polarizing decks. I’m playing Mill Druid myself just to see how strong it is. There are matches I am so heavily favored to lose (Treant Druid and Aggro Paladin) and many matches I am so heavily favored to win (nearly any slower deck like HL Warrior, Mage, etc)
I feel like almost all my matches are polarized. I absolutely crush slower decks and get absolutely trashed by aggro.
I used to do polarization analyses of the VS reports. Then I started slacking. I just had a huge deal go through today so maybe I’ll take tomorrow off to do some celebratory spreadsheet work. Yes what I find fun is weird
It would also be important to break it down by rank bracket because what I see in D5-D1 is VASTLY different from what I see friends playing in other ranks. It’s absolutely nuts. There’s tons of experimenting going on in D5-D1 it has me questioning my sanity. If it wasn’t for WorriedCheez witnessing the things I’m seeing and confirming it, I’d think I was going nuts. (ever seen MECH DRUID in D3? I have.)
And Insanity Warlock, much like VS hints at, I think is on the verge of becoming a bit more popular. It’s gotta be experimentation phase right now but if that thing gets refined people are going to lose their minds. I agree with VS take on it - keep an eye out on it.
To be fair, I don’t think the idea of a “draw” occurs as an option to most players, nor do I think most players understand how to make a draw or what a draw means.
It would be the more knowledgeable players that would do this sort of tactic.
I just hope more people don’t learn of it and how to do it.
I went to Reddit and searched “tie” in the Hearthstone page. You will only find a few “newer” posts as people are experiencing this, even stating “I didn’t even know this was a thing”. I say give it a week or 2 and those posts might become more common.
The opponent I had 100% knew what he was doing. He was dead next on my turn. He just made himself immune for a few fatigue points so that he could survive long enough for the next 4 to hit to draw me into negative so he could tie. He 100% knew he was going to die and he played everything in the exact order he needed to in order to tie and not lose. Had he had his Sludge legendary onboard, he would have healed to full and I would have died instead, but since I killed it earlier, he went the tie route.
Take a look https://hsreplay.net/replay/ksGKaxF5FLqiFvFJpQ6wVd
I am using good old fashioned Mill Rogue, people are like omg Druid but forget Rogue can do mill really well too and quite uniquely compared to Druid. I’m also using Even 3xFrost DK for some reason it works?
In the past there were a handful of times I’ve used draws as a mechanic to avoid a loss, but those were always something that you’d never really be able to set up intentionally.
This deck can, and can absolutely mitigate rank losses with it.
I’m not sure how deck trackers record those games though, which might lead to underreporting it’s win rate by having its losses inflated.
Well it’s really hard to get a good polarization calculation for Top 1000 Legend with the way VS doesn’t publish for a sample size below 100. The matchup data is kinda scarce so you only get essentially the top 70%-ish of decks by popularity vs the top 70%-ish of decks by popularity, which is about half (0.7 squared) of all the games. Giving a polarization score with about half of the games might be a kind of rough estimate, but it’s too flimsy for my tastes.
I don’t really consider Legend generally to be a serious rank for data purposes due to bottom Legend meme decks, so really I just do D4-1, where you normally get the matchup data for the most popular 92% of decks vs the top 92% of decks which is about 85% of games and feels like an actual reliable statistic. Albeit not a perfect one because there are no perfect statistics.
In the past I’ve had lower standards and ran the numbers for T1KL and all three times the polarization was significantly higher. Although I’m no longer confident that means much.