Someone just reached rank 1 Legend (yes, rank 1) with a seemingly meme Big Spell Mage deck recently. The deck is actually very powerful, it’s just that most people have zero idea how to play it and the popular versions on meta report sites are just bad.
Forget Face Hunter. Big Beast Hunter is a very good deck that plays for both value and late game, still not bad. Combo Hunter and Boar Hunter, despite not being the best for climbing, are still at the high end of tier 3 if you play them right.
Forget Quest Warrior. Control Warrior has very good win rate in high ranks where people know how to play it even though it’s on the low end of tier 2 in low ranks.
Warlock’s best combo deck, OwlTK Warlock, is very bad and inconsistent in high ranks when you play the garbage popular variant online with Goldshire Gnoll and Archmage Thalnos, both of which are either not very useful or is even counter synergistic towards the deck. When I switched these cards out with Full-Blown Evil and Spice Bread Baker, my win rate instantly increased to almost over 55%, up from the poor 30%.
Mage has multiple decks that are actually viable even in the highest of ranks, if you make the correct changes to the flawed popular lists online and play them the right way. Big Spell and Ping Mage both have at least 55% win rate for players with the most optimized lists that play them at high ranks, it’s just that these statistics are ignored in favor of new players’ bulk matches where they make mistake after mistake with poorly constructed popular decks.
When I checked most of the deck stats online, 90% of it comes from low ranks where what you are facing is literally the weakest, most beginner versions of decks. The lists look more like incomplete F2P versions instead of the real good lists. Many of the cards don’t make any sense at all. These websites are not a good source of actual win rates.
Every class can win, with a wide variety of decks. The only bad aspect of this meta right now is extreme polarization where if you face an opponent playing a specific deck, you are almost guaranteed to lose.
Heck, I reached legend (for the first time in a while) with Demon Hunter last season. If I had more than one mirror match per week it was a miraculous occurrence.
This is not how it works. Legend #1 is the same (useless) anecdotal evidence than if someone claims he beat control warrior to a pulp with shadowpriest.
I think they are saying that if you want to play a deck and you are good with it, you can do it even if the meta says otherwise.
It’s like when people come here to complain they can’t win with their tier1 op deck, but in this case it’s the opposite.
Instead of complaining about your deck not being good, we should try to make the deck better or learn how to play better. If someone got legend 1 with a certain deck, I am sure we can have fun with it even if it’s not tier 1, we just need to accept the fact we can’t always win
You might find that big spell mage is incredibly polarized in that if you have enough people playing the slots eventually someone will hit big despite the overall average being significantly in loss. #1 legend place seems to change often and I am not entirely sure but it might have a lot to do with someone’s ability to play more than the pack of other pros at a given time and maybe this guy got high up with some other deck anyway, I kind of doubt he just played the one deck and if he did he must be so miserable.
it´s also an insanely narrow pocket of the meta. If you get to 50 and then suddenly Brute-DH wins it all you´re going #1, doesn´t matter if the deck is still Tier 4 for every other part of the game.
I imagine it’s a bit like some of the tavern brawls we have had where people start copying then someone counters, people copy the counter so forth, so in that sense the so called pocket meta changed every few hours because there was such a limited amount of people facing off against each other. So in that sense it’d take you a few games each day to settle in then everything after that should be gains providing you cut and change frequently.
The top 10 legend meta is different from other areas of the ladder. You typically know who is in your bracket, what they play and if they are on your friends list, when they play and when they are queueing. All you’d have to do is identify if your relatively weak deck happens to counter the few people you face based on you knowing exactly what you are queueing into and avoiding queueing when you see your counter deck opponent searching for a game.
Yes people can take their effort into climb the ladder with any class.
The issue i see with that and that haunts many is the effort dissonance and to explain that we first need to explain one Basic thing:
Not every card and strategy is designed to be “viable” because many of those are made with the intent of making the game more Fun for people just chasing for flashy interactions.
With that explained we can reach the point that because of this the winrate of an actually balanced deck isn’t 50% but something a little higher like 51%/52%(or tier 2).
So decks literally under 50% winrate are indeed underpowered and take far more from the player to use than your average tier 2/1 deck to climb with.
They aren’t by any means “unplayble” but can and should have a small buff sometime.
I agree that some non-meta decks are viable to climb with. Last season I climbed from beginner to rank 300 something legend with a combo hunter deck of quest / face hunter. And I didn’t even reach High Warlord yet.
But I think it is hard to make a novel deck that works. I’ve tried many seasons in the legend ranks and I couldn’t get any of them above 50% win rate. Part of the reason is because I don’t play near enough to get a really good baseline, but another reason is because it is hard and I am not good / creative enough.
I don’t even understand what people are arguing over here. All OP said is that plenty of decks are viable right now. To me, being viable means being capable of a win rate over 50%, since that’s literally all you need to reach legend. Because of the current RPS Meta, it’s not even difficult to achieve that by just targeting one of the three types. It doesn’t matter when the guy started playing the Mage deck IMO. The right Mage list can absolutely target an archetype and climb.
As for a deck’s overall win rate vs it’s tier placement, well we have 2 somewhat recent examples that show these can’t always be taken at face value. Quest warrior was low tier in top legend, but improved significantly as you lowered in rank, resulting in a very high average tier placement. And Spell Priest back when they nerfed Renew and some other stuff. The deck was tier 3 or 4 overall because of how difficult it was to pilot optimally while simultaneously being the best deck in top legend.
As long as you can consistently beat either rock, paper or scissors, you can succeed with just about anything right now (A little MM luck doesn’t hurt either) IMO.
I still think they create pack fillers from a psychological standpoint, you feel like you are getting more because you are opening like a ton of cards, but actually you’re getting very little of the content, when you are new you don’t realize how little content you are actually acquiring and when you are a veteran you are already heavily invested. The only other purpose of junk cards is when climbing in your first year. If everyone was playing with limited cards then I imagine you could still have an enjoyable time mostly and also its that most people who are playing right now aren’t very limited and those who were very casual and f2p have mostly been pushed out of the mode into various other games/modes.
Just check the advance of the cards during the last years.
The more later the set has become the more cards it use with the only exception to that process being the raven year sets witchwood ,rastakhan Rumble and grand tournament from pre rotation era.
And for who don’t know the lesser tested set up to date is rastakhan Rumble.
They genuinely try to avoid pack fillers but even without pack fillers there are cards where the function isn’t competitive gameplay.
Those aren’t pack fillers either.
Just because you reach a certain rank with some deck doesn’t mean it is viable. You are semi-protected from losing ranks in Hearthstone and if you play enough, even the worst deck will eventually progress because the dice rolled in the deck’s favor.
I have a hard time imagining something like slithering deathscale or hedra the heretic is not designed as a pack filler. Wrathspine and Enchanter and Whirlpool also look completely meme. I also imagine they make some classes weak intentionally each expansion just to keep you swapping and switching so you have to buy/grind more.
Except that the sensibility between viable and not viable is too big to a point were a 1 mana change on a single cards makes entire decks dissapear.
A literal 1% drop in winrate is actually enough to drop a deck popularity by half on most classes.
Even spending a ton with capable people you gonna still face that type of situation because card games are that dificult to balance.
That to not even start with popularity.
The community itself can and do delete entire archtypes from the viability just by deciding to play it’s counters without any specific reason other than " because they’re Fun".