The deck seems utter garbage to me. It’s literally playing Russian Roulette. If you have Lightwarden, Injured Tol’vir, circle of healing, divine spirit, and inner fire in your opening hand, you win. If not you lose. You have very little card draw and if you can’t kill your opponent in turn 3-4 you lose.
How is the deck good if the deck is so absurdly inconsistent and the chance of you drawing the key cards on turn 1-2 is the same chance you win the lottery? I’d rather play Zoolock with their safe and guaranteed card draw every turn.
If you don’t draw Wild Pyromancer AND Acolyte of pain at the same time you don’t have card draw. If your opponent removes Northshire Cleric turn 1 or 2 you don’t have card draw. That’s literally all you have for draw.
Not true: some decks also run Bwonsamdi. And even if yours doesn’t, if you know how to use Wild Pyro+Cleric combos, you don’t need more card draw than that.
Deck has high win rate, so everyone who is playing priest right now is getting bad aggro match-ups. Especially on lower ranks, lower than legendary. Game algorithms are in place to rig match-ups to balance the game and stop certain decks to go high above 50% win-rate.
Combo Priest has been the top meta deck since SoU release, so it’s expected that people who don’t play it will instead play something better suited to beat Combo Priests (and Combo Priests are teaching extra silences for the mirror matchup). There’s no need for Blizzard to rig the matchmaker when the playerbase can make the meta more hostile to popular decks.
And of course, the fact that Combo Priest winrates are lower outside Legend makes sense, given that (as OP demonstrates) the deck isn’t exactly easy to figure out. Less skilled players will naturally perform worse against it.
Also, if the system is in fact rigged to keep Combo Priest at 50% winrate, how come it’s currently at 53% in the HSReplay meta report?
53% is OK. System is keeping decks from going above 60% win-rate via bad match-ups. And lower ranks are safest for that kind of balancing without drawing negative attention. No conspiracy theory. It is just the way how the most card games, and gambling games are “working”…
That’s some pretty wide margins of error you have here.
And of course, if you dig into the data for specific decks, you finds gems like this Highlander Hunter deck, which has a 60.3% winrate (above your claimed threshold, if not by much) over 5000 games.
Things returns to norm because of tech. Tempo rogue was so strong in ROS meta yet only having 52% win rate. Why? Because everyone is either playing that (which pushes the number towards 50%) or trying to win it with control warrior. The meta correct itself based on which deck is prevalent and strong and all this pushes decks winrate down despite their strength. This have nothing to do with match making being rigged or anything.
There is no “just do x” in combo priest. It does not have a linear game plan. It can agro you down with Lightwardens and Pyromancers, it can drop a huge midrange curve with Amet, Blademaster, or Psychopump, it can draw its whole deck with Cleric and Acolyte and, at any point in that cycle it can build a huge minion (or multiple huge minions with Amet) with Divine Spirit.
Nothing that the deck does is exceptionally powerful, aside from Cleric plays, but the deck adapts so cleanly to its situation and its opponent’s deck and plays that it is extremely difficult to beat in the hands of an exceptionally competent player.
Fortunately, this means that with its clear game plan(s) being only average to good, it is not really that threatening in the hands of most players and with the Arms nerf the deck list has become somewhat more rigid, making it much less unpredictable in the hands of top players.
The deck is pretty viable. But might be difficult to play for some. The deck has insane card draw, way better than Warlock, wich is why many include the Chef in it.
I used to not know how to play the deck. Then I started playing it on a alt account from rank 10 and almost got to rank 1 in a day with close to 80% wr at one point. Dont play cleric unless you have ways to buff it up or draw on the same turn or you dont think your opponent can remove it.
