So I made another post about imbue mage and how that deck just feels underwhelming. I decided to switch to other decks to experiment with ranging degrees of success. Basically went on to play imbue hunter, dragon warrior, and then finally hit legend with armor DH.
Just as a baseline, none of these decks except for imbue mage feel bad. Imbue mage, like most modern decks, can have some pretty good plays but decks aren’t just their high-end, you need to look at the anatomy of what it does turn-to-turn and what the wincon of the deck is. Right now the metagame is majorly concerned with putting up boards every turn whereas imbue mage isn’t even establishing a board until turn 5. This is kind of true with the other imbue decks as well except druid just has a much more massive payoff that accelerates its own strategy much because of the nature of cards like Photosynthesis and Hamuul Runetotem.
I don’t have much to say about imbue hunter. There are a ton of ways to play it with different packages including what I played which was a mostly aggro package looking to filter targets for the hero power and play a big King Plush as a finisher which can regularly just spin the board (return to deck) and hit for 20 damage. This basically works against anything that isn’t armor DH.
Then we have dragon warrior. This deck is actually good. The problem is that this deck unfortunately has a huge issue with bunk turn 1 hands where you can’t mulligan into any dragons for your low cost creatures and those turn into non-games since you either have to accept you’re going to play vanilla 2/3s against everything else that’s actually doing things to progress their gameplans (such as drawing or imbuing) OR you sit on them and hope you topdeck a dragon for a turn 3 play where you play either of the dragon two drops and a Darkrider/ Giftwrapped Whelp. This still is clearly not ideal since by this time Giftwrapped Whelp no longer performs its function of being an early game threat and you’ve lost any damage it might have done playing it turn 1.
Outside of the insane low floor the deck has, it ALMOST has infinite gas, or at least has enough in the tank to play through most games. Priest has literal infinite cards so that might be an issue if you can’t threaten late game but luckily the efficacy of this deck’s own minions as well as priest and everything else having limited board wipes means you can usually continue to have range even in the late game to get a win since the priest usually is behind on tempo. They big hose out you need to worry about is Repackage. This deck doesn’t care about leech DK or imbue mage. Imbue hunter can actually threaten it since the deck doesn’t have access to a lot of armor gain since the core set doesn’t have what should have been staples with Emberscale Drake and Molten Breath (Descent of Dragons and Rastakhan’s Rumble). We also missed out on important aggro pieces like Alexstrazsa’s Champion but whatever.
So this all comes down to armor DH. Basically every strength of every good deck in the format is in this deck. Infinite value? This deck has infinite value. Efficient board clears? This deck has efficient board clears. Early pressure? Card draw? This deck has all of those two. And unlike warrior, the literal armor class, this deck is actually unkillable. I have had mirror matches with this deck that have lasted 40+ minutes because we both play a Kil’Jaeden and it devolves into a slog of playing whatever minion we draw next after we Black Knight our Starships and it really is just Don Frye vs Yoshihiro Takayama (if you know you know). I’ve won a lot of my games by playing Dirty Rat and trying to hit their own Kil’Jaeden on low-power turns (where it’s most likely they’ll follow up with a Kil’Jaeden to win the race on the buffs) but this mirror match is MISERABLE. Not only that but I basically do not lose games against any of the other decks listed above aside from very unfortunate games where I brick early and can’t get my game pieces onto the board before I die. I went from Diamond 5 0 stars to legend in like 5 hours playing this deck with 1 loss and the other losses I’ve had have been since hitting legend and only in the scenarios listed above where I’m sitting at 2800 legend. So not super high legend but not low either.
In any case I can’t speak to what’s happening in top 1000 but in other seasons where I have been top 1000 legend, 500 legend, etc. deck lists change very little and it’s mostly players playing better and maybe one high skill deck that you don’t see outside of the top ranks (like some variant of rogue). I suspect that armor DH is still probably the best deck in top legend and although I don’t think I care to continue playing this deck to get there, I also don’t care to climb further with any other decks because many of the games I’m playing right now are mirror matches and it’s a tall order to kill DH before it gets going.
So basically, armor DH needs nerfed. All my other games with other decks seem fun (except for mage which just feels like I do very little in most cases even though it’s probably my favorite deck) and the meta is ALMOST really good except for this looming threat that’s armor DH and is honestly ruining all the fun I’d probably be having otherwise.
)