If you make a Protoss Mage you have to use armor building or if you make a Willow warlock you have to have board clears or if you make an Imbue paladin you need the AOE clears too.
So I wonder is there any chance for pure decks, or are those just broken-bad because they are too greedy?
Pure, or extreme in one direction, decks usually work best at the ends of rotations, not the beginnings, because you have more tools that can go extremely in one direction
It’s very unlikely to be able to build such a deck on the onset of a rotation such as now. Aggro as an archetype in its purest sense doesn’t work at the moment for the pretty much the same reason
Now the question becomes, can we go pure midrange or pure control? Will that work?
Well, I’m not the right person to answer those two questions, as I’m not that versed in slower decks (both piloting and deckbuilding-wise)
But in theory, since this is a control meta, managing to build a purely midrange deck should give you an advantage over the others, as midrange counters control
So good luck trying to do that. I recommend building a deck in a way that your average turns to win is between 7 and 9, that’s when midrange decks usually end
According to that, on the Meta in 1k on hsguru, following are the midrange decks based on turns to win beeing between 7-9, from highest to lowest winrates:
That would be all whose winrates are positive. I must emphasize that this perfectly aligns with my classification of archetypes and complete theory.
Ofc, you also have to be aware of the differences in win conditions/how the decks are played. Although all midrange, some of them are midrange aggro decks, some are midrange tempo decks, and others are midrange combo decks or midrange control decks.
What do this sentence mean?
Pure defense is interesting as an idea, though it might be a waste of time (low climbing-speed metric). Not sure what “pure mid range” would be because in this context “pure mid-range” is what most netdecks are (they don’t do pure aggression but they are aggression with the best AOE/clears of their class).
If coupled with one of the highest winrates on the ladder, you get a slow, but consistent grind, such as Starship Succ DK’s 0,77 stars/hour right now, while the fastest decks go around 1.28 stars/hour, so not bad at all
Strictly by theory, pure midrange would be a deck with entirety of its focus laying on building a strong and inevitable board with a possibility of buffing it (Drunk Pally, Fryakk Rogue) or half-OTK-ing from hand (Spell dmg Druid)
You will hardly find these decks reaching turn 9, they usually either win or lose before
Those 3 appear to me to be the closest to the pure midrange right now, but if you were attempting to build your own, I’m quite sure it can be done better, just not sure how
Most players detest playing a pure control warrior for various reasons. How long games are is generally the biggest reason. Pure control warrior is not a bad deck in this meta but the way it is played after rotation is much different than it has been in the past. The days of limitless removal options are long gone. You need to be playing aggressively but using your control elementals to dictate the pace of the game instead.
An example of a card that was a powerhouse in old control warrior is this card.
In the current rotation and how control warrior is played this is 100% bait and a bad card to have in your control warrior.
The combos themselves are limited by the Devs in most cases to not be that fast anyway. Eg the druids and the paladins and the shamans have to wait to build their hero powers, and after they have that limitation they build their defenses.
PS most aggro decks feel like flukes to me / unintended by the Devs. I can’t believe for example that a Dev liked piloting a deck of pirates that kills by round 5 without the opponent being able to defend at all.
They have been fascinated with Aggro pirates all the way back to Patches. It’s an easy deck to make cards for and has a theme. Very easy to sell to the customer base.
They liked 2023-2024 warrior when it was good, but now the win rate is too low. Though to be fair they were still illogically playing it because the win rate was not that high to justify 40-minute games back to back.