Team 5, like wow, d5 to legend is all about the burn decks.
Death frost knight - burn from hand with to many spells to list
Aggro mage - burn from hand with frost and arcane bolts
Rogue - burn from hand with concoctions and wicked stab and astolor
Hunter - burn from hand with spitters
Curse implock - burn from hand with normally a 3 curse finisher.
Then we got the comboers
Armor druid - 64 dmg finisher
Mine lock - like 56 dmg or maybe more finisher
Demon hunter - so many versions but all from hand.
All these decks are lookong to pull off their finishers around turn 7, so much fun (sarcasm here) i am sure i left some off the list.
Yeah. This meta is pretty gross for anyone that would like to play minions and have them do anything but generate spells or explode for damage.
Making a pretty good case for spellward jeweler being a permanent addition to core.
To be fair, when it was a minion heavy meta due to sire denathrius and druid, everyone complained about that.
So team 5 thought y’all wanted games that burn you from hand turn 5 or 6. Careful what you ask for. Lol.
The issue seems not to be which particular play type is most popular, it’s that this game is heading into an noninteractive pile of dog sht where every dominate strategy doesn’t give a crap about what the other player does. There are a multitude of reasons this turns into the meta but some obvious issues are:
Power creep
Mana cheating
Ridiculous draw
Otk cards encouraged (astalor)
To name a few, but there are way too many issues to place full blame on a single one.
This is almost inevitable in a sorcery speed game where you can do next to nothing to interact with your opponents turn. It is a flaw in the design of the game unless it wants to stagnate. It’s pretty tricky to avoid this when you design your game to isolate players to their own turns, even during combat.
The big issue there was that the “minion heavy” meta was largely overshadowed by Denathrius being the burn ender that the deck was really aiming for.
Druid wasn’t minion heavy. It played removal spells that happened to be in the form of tokens for infusions.
If Denathrius hadn’t been the inevitable end for every deck, a better argument could have been made for it being a minion focused meta, but Denathrius just made it a weird OTK meta where your minions didn’t matter too much because if they couldn’t finish the job, Denathrius would.
Well as of this week’s tavern brawl, every class should be able to do absurd amounts of damage from hand!
Every minion is a 1 mana 1/1! Including brann and all those juicy battlecries!
Troll Centurion and humongous owl are also notable options!