What’s that one? 
— avid Mercenaries player, never seen such a bounty
(only glanced through the rest of the topic, sorry 
And it’s not my cup of tea anyway)
Just verified from previous VS reports the frost DK matchups are terrible as miracle rogue (heavily unfavored all ranks, unfavored top 1k) which is consistent with my experience. Lacking drakka to go face seems to be especially bad in this mu since you have to rely on board connecting with face, and frost dk is all about stalling board.
Given frost dk is like 30 percent or more of the top legend field, I’m not clear how this deck is performing. If it’s playrate goes up, frost dk will rise to stomp it out.
That said, should they nerf DKs they will need to nerf this deck if they don’t want another miracle rogue meta.
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I am winning consistently across the board with no clearly bad matchups so far; but admittedly, I have seen zero frost DKs and I have just recently hit legend (been busy losing helplessly with mage lists). Early HSReplay data agrees tho, Frost DK is an unfavorable matchup (but not greatly tho, around 45% rn). So is Relic DH, and I figure it’s for similar reasons (board clears and early burst damage). The lack of Drakka is probably felt here the most. The deck is also hard to pilot correctly, as the previous miracle list was, so I do think the deck will never thrive outside of legend regardless of how good it proves to be.
That said, my experience is that the deck does obliterate Pure Pala and Druid; and is greatly favored against any kind of control deck, warlock and hunter. I am still hovering around a whooping 75-80% WR, but that’s probably because I am not hitting any Frost DKs or Relic DHs.
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You would think so, but Patron Warrior was also a hard deck to pilot and still became popular even at lower ranks even though the high skill ceiling meant it performed significantly better at legend than it did at low rank.
Never underestimate the “monkey see monkey do” factor.
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AHEM COUGH AHEM
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Fair enough!
Fair enough!
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Playimg the deck and so far 5-0 this morning on EU. It seems to be the deck to llay as rogue, which sucks, cause i am so tired of this archetype in its current form
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Sounds like miracle rogue is paper, things like blood dk are rock, and frost dk is scissors.
Scissors is abundant in low-mid mmr, so nobody plays paper. In high mmr, scissors goes away and everyone is playing rock, so here paper users have their chance to play.
…not a perfect metaphor, hearthstone is more complicated. Also more likely its just a hard deck to pilot and bad players can’t make miracles.
I use the original draka list with 2xbackstab, 2x fan of knives and 1 astalor. Took me to top 1000 legend
Sorry, just can’t help it when hearing about ‘high skill requirements’ etc in Hearthstone, especially about decks like this — yes, I was around when it was all the rage. Yeah, tell me about high skill required to spam ‘Everyone!’ or go face. 
At best people might be referring to higher requirements for APM (actions per minute), required e.g. to fling 20 spells in the face in one turn before that rope burns out, in such cases, which they confuse with ‘skill’. So yeah, if you have slower controls, you might be at a disadvantage, there’s that.
Patron Warrior had something like a 42% overall winrate because people below ~Diamond had no idea how to count. It definitely required more skill than other decks at the time. Like Miracle Rogue usually does.
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You’re putting it as if those very skilled legend players had (or still have) — or as if it would matter anyway.
Yeah, that’s the usual offended ‘Trogg no stupid! Trogg make you stupid!’ talk by those players that’d like to think they are smart, skilful etc (referring mostly to the original version, think Classic and so on, dunno about the latest… last time I checked briefly, it was more or less the same ‘summon a huge clown with stealth on turn 3-4 and so on’ kind of thing). What they don’t like to acknowledge is that even this requires more choices, strategy, brainwork (yeah, yeah) etc.
(Updated, some errrors corrected and minor edits made)
Well, I’d like to parse that word salad, but overall it seems like you’ve got your mind settled. Please at least ponder why it’s the case that Miracle Rogue so often becomes the best deck at top 1k Legend, while floundering everywhere else - and why it takes significantly longer to optimize Rogue decklists than other classes.
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Your terms are acceptable.
Patron Warrior was one of the highest skill cap decks in Hearthstone ever because it had lethal far more often than rookie pilots would often imagine. As in, screenshots of relatively common Patron Warrior boards would make good high level “where’s the lethal” puzzles. Due to the significant animation times for any turn, there were intense calculations to perform and precious few seconds to do it before making the critical, mutually exclusive choice to play for the board — one might refer to this as “spamming ‘Everyone! Get in here!’” — or go face.
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By the way, here’s the appropriate way to nerf.
- Forget completely about nerfing due to popularity. It’s completely against any proper balance philosophy. I don’t care how many times you play against Deck X.
- Group all archetypes into the following tiers, per the definitions below:
- Tier 1: Has a winrate over 50% in both top 1000 Legend and Diamond 5-1.
- Tier 2: Has a winrate over 50% in either top 1000 Legend or Diamond 5-1, but not both. There’s two subtiers here: 2D for the decks that are over 50% in Diamond 5-1 and 2L for the decks that are over 50% in top 1000 Legend.
Note: 2L decks have historically been the victim of overnerfing, which is a mistake. We want high skill cap decks to dominate tournament play. If the Diamond players can’t make Miracle Rogue work then Miracle Rogue isn’t a problem. Period.
- Tier 3: has a winrate at or above 45.34% in Diamond 10-6 but is not in an above tier. This percentage is not arbitrary; it’s the winrate necessary to climb while winstreak bonus is in effect, so up to but not including Diamond 5.
- Tier 4: not in any of the above tiers but is popular enough to be statistically significant.
- Nerf all the decks in Tier 1 while minimizing splash damage to archetypes in lower tiers. Do not overnerf.
- Determine which Tier 2 decks benefit indirectly from the nerfs chosen in the previous step. This is done empirically and dispassionately by looking at their matchup winrates against the Tier 1 decks. If an archetype had net losing matchups then the Tier 1s were “predators” to it and it will benefit from their decreased viability; if it had net winning matchups then it was “preying” on the Tier 1s and it will suffer from their decreased viability. Use the matchup winrate data for the rank appropriate to the OTHER subtier, such that 2L decks don’t start dominating Diamond and 2D decks don’t start dominating high Legend. Nerf the Tier 2 decks that stand to benefit from the Tier 1 nerfs, while leaving the others alone.
- Buff all of the Tier 4 decks. Don’t waste time with buffs for decks no one is even trying to make work (Tier 4 is the only Tier where popularity is relevant) and don’t accidentally buff anything from the higher tiers. Do not overbuff.
- Determine which Tier 3 decks are hurt indirectly from the preceding nerfs and buffs. As with Step 4 this means analysing their matchup winrates against the other decks impacted. Use Diamond 10-6 matchup winrate data. Buff any Tier 3 decks that are hurt indirectly. Otherwise, leave all Tier 3 decks alone, and in absolutely no case nerf them (no matter how much the salt mines complain).
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Good, balanced, interactive play style, perhaps? Surely, it takes a lot of skill to build 15-15 clowns with stealth on turn 4 (or what was it) and go face with them.
Don’t know what modes you’re playing, but it’s been years since I’ve seen any difference in decks or skill between rank 25/ Bronze 10 and Legend — used to be you’d meet people with basic decks and such at lower levels, but not anymore (in fact, I’ve seen waves of bots with basic decks up to Legend in Classic, but that’s another story).
The difference between, say, you high-Legend druid and your stuck-at-D5-druid is mostly the following: the former always opens up with something like Innervate-Yeti, followed by a Wild Growth and a perfect curve with good draw, while the latter is having ‘yet another game with nothing but hero power on turn 2 and 3’. Same thing here: the difference is how skilful you are to topdeck a 15-15 Van Clown with Stealth for two turns in a row, as opposed to sit on your hero power shenanigans (a fitting illustration of the subject — without even getting off-topic — overall, by the way, highly recommended!).
PS I’ll even put it here separately:
Yeah, yeah, you’re not the only one who did that Puzzle Lab , so I wouldn’t get too cocky here and instead considered something else. Let me begin with a somewhat abstract example.
You know, in chess, there are endgames such as two bishops or a queen vs a rook which are theoretically won, but it’s not quite trivial, and it takes some skill to do that, as well as theoretical knowledge. You’d think that’s what can make the difference between winning, as a master can do, or not, like an amateur — except that… not in practice. In your long career as a FM, IM or even GM, you may encounter the two-bishop engame, say, once — or not, having played thousands of games, so if you wanna improve your performance, you’d better start with those rook engames, comprising more than half of all engames overall, rather than these undoubtedly skill-intensive ones.
What’s this got to do with your point? Yeah, show me a practical example where missing a few points of damage would allow for a great comeback, fit for one of those Trolden’s videos of yore with appropriate music, and not getting yet another pile of ‘Everyone!’ etc to the face next turn anyway — and how often this’d impact actual outcomes of games. I’ve already hinted at that above:
— but, I guess, I could elaborate a little.
You mean, show you an example of a combo deck missing lethal and dying next turn as a result?
Are you serious right now? Those are everywhere.
The thing about skill in a card game like Hearthstone is that you either see it or you don’t. To the unskilled player there was no lethal, and then they lost. And there are plenty of games where there REALLY is no lethal before dying. But my point is that the unskilled are oblivious. It’s some real Sherlock Holmes “you see, but you don’t observe” type stuff.
But I’ll be real with you, I’ve never really felt that playing Hearthstone. Maybe I would if I observed more games and had a better friends list, but I don’t. Where I really felt it was with Magic the Gathering. Through a series of coincidences I happened to spend a lot of time at my youth at RIW Hobbies in Livonia Michigan, which I guess could be described as some kinda wannabe Star City Games. But the point is that some pro players were attracted and they put logo’d polo shirts on some of them and sent them to Grand Prixs and Pro Tours and whatnot. In particular I drafted a lot, and did some playtesting with, Michael Jacob, who would eventually be US national champion of the game. And there was a distinct moment watching him play — I barely remember the board state anymore, except it involved Troll Ascetic somehow, but the feels of it — when I realized that there was a whole world of theory to the game that Michael saw and that I simply didn’t. When I realized that I simply was on a lower skill tier than him, that it wasn’t luck, it was thought, and that I couldn’t truly grasp it but just kinda fumble along the edges.
It was like being able to dimly perceive something invisible that had been in the room, in all the rooms, this entire time.
Skill exists in this game, and if you don’t have some level of awe of it then I can only tell you that you haven’t found someone else who can wield it on a higher level than you and spent a LOT of time with them. Maybe that’s because you’re already top 1% and you’ve met a lot of other people in your same tier. I really get that, I’ve been a big fish in a small pond too. But if you think you’re at the upper limit you’re wrong. There’s always someone better
unless you’re like Kasparov or something idk, obviously it’s not an infinite regress, you get what I mean.
Yeah, but for one small thing: in a ‘zero-sum’ game like this (one player wins, another loses — or, in rare cases, it’s a draw) the best deck in the world is gonna have exactly 50% win rate if everyone plays it. By the way, that’s why there’s no such thing as an abstract ‘win rate of a deck’.
Which is arguably the contender for ‘the dumbest way ever to rank anything — or anyone’.
No, but there’s winrate in practice. Abstract winrate is not empirical and an argument without empirical evidence can and should be dismissed without evidence.
It’s a function of the deck’s popularity, that’s the whole point.
Yes, I am. How prevalent are these?
That’s stating the obvious, isn’t it?
That’s the whole point.
If it comes to chess, then I know well what you’re speaking of (as an amateur, I’ve had the opportunity to commune with a master or even a grandmaster, just like many others, thanks to modern streaming platforms, to be specific). If it’s a game of roulette or Hearthstone… I just don’t feel that way.
Oh, how fitting that you’ve mentioned him: last time I heard, he was your D5 player — I wrote a little about him. Yes, that’s the guy with the kind of brain, despite that he’s not what he used to be — old age and all, you know, that probably most, if not all, of this forum participants cannot even dream of having. Speaking of how skill matters in this game…
(Updated and edited a bit)