A player asked me this last night in Wild.
I didn’t know the answer, and I’m sure opinions vary.
Most powerful deck ever in HS history?
What do you guys think?
Day 1 Demon Hunter nothing comes close, all matchups in the green.
Over 10 cards nerfed , total bs never before seen or since.
4 Likes
Are we talking in their respective metas? From what i remember -
Undertaker Hunter was pretty broken
Theoretically a perfectly played Grim Patron warrior would win against anything
Secret Paladin with Mysterious challenger was meta defining far longer than it’s own meta
Overload Shaman back when the 2 mana 3/4 was a thing was so powerful as to get VS to say “Any perceived advantage you accrue against Overload Shaman in a game just happens because they didn’t decide to start dunking on you yet”
Release DH went all the way into the theoretical “Deck is losing winrate because it’s only itself vs itself on the ladder”
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conveniently leaving out jade druid but bringing up the one shaman deck that was actually good after years of the class being actually unplayable is some confirmation bias
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Jade druid was somewhat reasonable when Geist became a thing. Until then if anything else, i was more miffed about Raza Priest.
But anyway i played very little during Mean Streets, so it really did slip my mind. Didn’t find the mage archetypes there particularly compeling
Day 1 DH was so strong and was the strongest we had ever seen a deck at the time. The power creep was turned up way too high. That has to be the strongest deck in terms of perspective of the meta it was in.
You could also make a case for Burgle Rogue when Maestra was released and Rogues were dropping early big minions and other decks couldn’t recover. That deck was so strong that the deck was at something like a 35% play rate which is absurd.
Strongest deck of all time for current time you just have to take the strongest deck in wild currently. Whatever the #1 deck is in wild at current time would technically be the strongest deck of all time.
3 Likes
Rank is an effective measure of piloting skill. Matchmaking matches you against players of similar skill.
If you change piloting skill, the ranking of various archetypes according to power drastically changes. The most powerful deck in Diamond is rarely the most powerful deck at top Legend.
Therefore there is no answer to the title question. It’s just a bad question.
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It’s a subjective question. You need not participate.
Yes as a general concept, though technically incorrect, since they often ban/nerf cards that cause OTKs on turn 1.
Yes, this is true. But you also have to weigh that we are in a constant power creep. So what was nerfed 5 years ago because it did something strong could be virtually unplayable today even after undoing a nerf because of the new power.
So it is hard to say.
So technically we could say the best deck of all time is whatever was nerfed that allowed for turn 1-2 kills. You could argue that Hysteria pre-nerf or Test Subject pre-nerf was the strongest thing ever because it literally broke the game and needed immediate nerfs once the interaction was found.
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I considered something similar. I thought about cards like Shudderwock back in the day. Wasn’t that banned or something for breaking the game?
No, surprisingly, Shudderwock was never really nerfed. It had the battlecries capped at 20 then reverted, but that was more because of animation issues and stuff, not necessarily a nerf to the effect. You really didn’t need more than 20 most of the time anyway.
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I remember vaguely people complaining about the animations. I couldn’t remember the details:)
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Yeah they had to speed up the animations because of the Lifedrinker loop. They would end their turn and the animations took forever.
I only remember because I played it lol
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It’s sludgelock, of course.
It’s always sludgelock.
Not only did it peak at 61% global winrate, it also doesn’t stop being strong 5-6 expansions in
How many decks can you remember got not one, not two, but 3 of their main cards nerfed in the same patch??
EDIT: waste remover from 7/7 to 5/7, sludge on wheels from 2/5 to 2/4, Chaos from deal 6 summon a 6-drop to deal 5 and summon a 5-drop