Yes.
It’s a Tier 4 deck. And it’s not just me saying this, Vicious Syndicate does too. Tier 4 at D4-1 and Tier 4 at T1KL.
The deck absolutely does not deserve a nerf and if you want to nerf it you are ethically wrong. Like a bully who beats up people smaller than you.
Yes it sounds like you are playing good players, the taunts are critical to stopping early aggression and letting you play minions that build your hand. Most lower MMR players don’t understand this and hold onto them and die to aggressive decks.
That’s surprising, I’m generally nearly even with the DH matchup. Basically it depends on whether I can use the taunts to buy enough time to t5 or 6, which sounds ridiculous but that’s how fast DH kills. I’ve been killed t4 before.
Yes there’s no obvious tech that will work with sludge Warlock, the deck is too one dimensional to allow any significant techs. Read last paragraph for my best suggestion.
The strongest counter to otk shaman is armor. After that it’s pulling minions with rat, and if you can manage a stomper or neophyte on the fol turn that works great too.
Once you are about 35 or higher total health you are safe from nearly every otk turn. That means you could tech two armor vendors but then you can’t self damage.
The best single card tech is pozzik. If you drop on curve two slots in their hands messes everything up, slowing the otk to turn 7 or later. This is the strongest single card counter, you can probably win way more games if you run it and hard Mulligan for it.
This is one of the silliest things I’ve ever read.
Let’s look at an actual matchup winrate table:
https://www.vicioussyndicate.com/wp-content/uploads/DRR290-Winrate-All.png
Now if I ask you to pick the deck with the least polarized matchup spread, and you pick Nature Shaman, that is because you didn’t read the chart correctly. There are some deep greens and deep reds there. The deck you’re ACTUALLY thinking about, with a fair game in almost every matchup, is Reno DH.
Oh you think so xD I’m 130 on NA and 200 on EU, been even better before the shaman return
My last win against OTK shaman was against Pocket train himself
That’s not why you can’t tech for Sludgelock. Actually, the deck has 3 dimensions: tempo, aggro-control and midrange. Sometimes I even OTK with it. My deck covers all three playstylsr per need, which is why I’m so successful with it in this meta.
You can’t tech things into it because all the cards have synergies between them and making room for slow conditional tech cards ruins it.
And that’s why my winrate with DH was good. But THAT is one-dimensional and not my playstyle. I only go full aggro to punish players who think it’s fun to draw through the whole deck while removing your threats and spam emotes while doing so. That’s not how I like to play.
I did wish for aggro-meta, but I didn’t think it would be so fast and I DEFINITELY didn’t imagine OTK decks would make it in aggro meta. Like how xD
Aggressively stupid. Saying I don’t like a deck is the equivalent of physically bullying people?
No. Wanting to nerf it is. It’s equivalent to the difference between not liking someone and wanting someone to hit them.
I’ve seen pozzik run in sludge before rotation so it tells me it’s a viable tech, and you’ve seen it in action in DH. In my opinion it’s worth experimenting with it in your build to see if it can greatly improve the mu if you hate it so much, but it’s up to you how much you hate it. Lol.
It was part of the core, but Doomguard is just too insane to pass up on and other cards are all core.
I’ll give it a try, though, I’m desperate. Thank you.
probably wheel shaman is the only reason this deck exists right now
it loses vs almost everything else
I strongly disagree. Speaker Stomper is effectively removal for Flash of Lightning. They play it, Stomper kills it. This plus some early pressure is all you need.
I haven’t seen a single wheel warlock where I play today.
It’s mostly shamans today, with a touch of mage, DK, couple of Zarimi priests and couple of Zarimi druids. They don’t seem to mind all those matchups, even mirrors.
Tic-tac, Norwis, Pocket train, MDroogie → those are just 4 of the top streamers who’re abusing it as we speak.
That’s one current world champion and one future world champion all abusing the same, toxic deck.
Stats are not everything. In top competitive play, be it sports or card games, mentality counts. This deck destroys you mentally. Winner continues winning, loser continues losing. It robs you of your confidence, it robs you of your dignity, it robs you of your will to play.
What makes them top streamers is both that they’re good players and that they can please an audience. But out of the two, it’s a lot more that they can please an audience — there are successful scrub streamers like Kripp. Nature Shaman is a crap Tier 4 deck and they’re playing it for Twitch lulz.
You can nearly count on at the very least one extra flash per gameb if not more, that’s how ridiculous discover is right now. So no. Unless you plan to run 3 stompers and draw them all before turn 6.
What a mentally weak thing to believe, much less proclaim.
I mean, how long is the game? If you’re leaving them alive until turn 10 then they don’t even really need Flash. But the chance that they draw or generate 2 Flashes by turn 6 is about the same as you drawing 2 Speakers by turn 6 (if you’re running 2), and there’s really no excuse for letting them see a turn 8. Unless they use a few spells to kill a Dark Alley Pact, in which case you’re almost certainly going to win anyway.
The point is that 3 Flashes isn’t really a thing. Neither deck really wants to go long here.
Let me stop you right there. Your quoting stats from all ranks so t1000, much less t100 will be dwarfed by all the noobs attempting to play this deck.
Weren’t you the one to make a series of posts discussing how matchups can flip going from scrub ranks to higher? I can assure you that effect compounds exponentially as you approach t100 or higher. At some point it feels like hitting a brick wall the players get so good, they can make one or two techs to their deck and make a unfavorable matchup suddenly favorable.
That’s what I’m trying to explain for months now to some people, but to no avail.
Average and slightly above average players see their favorite streamers and top legend players play a deck successfully, they blindly make a copy and expect results. Naturally, they have awful scores and quit.
10 000 of such players going 1/10 on Nature shaman is perfectly normal and they skew the winrate stats for actual good players by a very large margin, because only a handful of such dedicated players exist.
Meanwhile, they just play solitaire and have 52-55% winrate, and as you said, with very fast games lasting for 5.5 turns on average, and it’s a fast and guaranteed grind to 20.
How’s that not abusing? In what world do the data here have any worth? They don’t. It’s just something that happens but has a very low sample which doesn’t impact the aggregate data.
And what happens then is if you’re trying to compete with them, the best you can do is start playing the same deck and hope for a 50-50 matchup because otherwise, you have no chance to progress as fast as they do.
You might prog, but much more slowly, and that’s how the top ladder gets soo stacked on the bottom that you have to have 60+% winrate to catch them up in a low period of time.
That’s how you have people winning world championship once and then stop even trying. They know what the grind means. It’s lifeless, it’s bizzarre and it’s soul-eating.
Basically nerfing this deck won’t ever impact lower ranks at least not negatively. It might prevent some poor bad players from going 1-20 with it. But it sure as hell can make top ladder more fair - or at least, feel like it’s more fair.
My bad. Just didn’t notice.
https://www.vicioussyndicate.com/wp-content/uploads/DRR290-Winrate-D4-L.png
Yes. The matchup winrates do change, some go up and some go down. That said, data on T1KL matchups is sparse. Like, I could pull the T1KL table from VS for matchup winrates, but it’s going to have just about as many matchups blank, due to lack of data, as it is going to have matchups filled out. T100 matchup data for all practical purposes doesn’t exist.
I think what you’re not getting is that balance doesn’t deal with individual outliers. Like let’s consider the real world example of economic inequality. Black Americans make less income than white Americans, in general. That’s a fact, and if income equality was the goal then we’d want to nerf white income. Yet at the same time, Jay-Z is a heck of a lot richer than I am. The general doesn’t apply universally.
For the purpose at hand I’m very deliberately not caring about your top 100 or even your top 1000. Diamond 4-1 is the balance focus because that’s the key rank of competition for the vast majority of long-term players. And in the case of Nature Shaman it’s a weak deck in T1KL too, just incidentally, so even there the argument to nerf the deck makes zero sense.
You’re doing it AGAIN.
I don’t know what stats you’re looking at to come up with this theory this time, but it’s wrong and you can know it’s wrong simply by playing the deck. Or even just looking at the deck lists themselves.
Shaman has multiple ways to draw and discovering the spell, not to mention copying it or discovering extra copies. You aren’t drawing, generating or discovering Speakers at the same rate Shaman is discovering, drawing or discovering Flashes.
Come on, man.
Do you think Burn Shaman is a deck I haven’t played as?
As Wheel Warlock you should have a 9/9 or two on turn 4. It doesn’t really matter if they have three Flashes on turn 5 if you Speaker, that’s a time walk. You just kill the Shaman before the turn 8 at least, ideally turn 7. It’s a good matchup if you just have Speakers.