Yeah the bitter taste for me is I decided after this morning that I don’t want to play HS until the nerf goes through. Around 80% of my matches are snakelock and the classes that compete with it are classes I don’t enjoy playing right now.
It’s either play Snakelock in the mirror and hope to be a better pilot (basically how I got to legend), play Druid and hope you highroll (highlander is the overall better deck but pure dragon druid is better for the Snakelock matchup because of consistency – you don’t need Rheastrazsa), and paladin needs to ultra high roll to climb since it is basically turn-by-turn removal where both players are trading cards, both players watch their mana increase until they hit bombs since warlock won’t be excavating early to keep up with paladin board pressure. There’s aggro DH too but I’m not sure if the druid and paladin matchups push it below tier 1 status or not even though I’d generally say it has an easier time against snakelock.
Druid basically pushes everything else out of the meta that warlock hasn’t already cleaned up. It feels like United in Stormwind, IMO. It’s one of the worst openings to a set I’ve seen in any card game in recent years which sucks because I think that aside from the top decks, there are really well-balanced and fun cards that fill out a lot of strategies that were lacking before.
Summary: The best cards in Badlands created a super homogenous environment with a super narrow meta, the rest of the cards pushed really interesting tier 2 decks and is otherwise a super well-designed set.
There’s no need to apologize man. If someone is just looking at winrate stats it doesn’t give off the full extent of what’s really happening.
So here’s the funny thing…I just told a friend the other day that the Snake didn’t surprise me because they seem to always push Warlock as a griefing class. And as a WoW player who’s 2nd main was a Warlock Gnome named Fizzlepuff, I have to agree. If you think about it, it’s what Warlocks do. They are diabolical. It’s not just recent expansions…it’s been this way for awhile.
Think about it. Some of the worst player interaction cards in history have been Warlock ones.
Tickatus and the entire idea of burning your opponent’s library. This has been the case with deck burning curses. This has been the case with the hand discarding hound.
Then there’s curses themselves.
In the past we had Rin destroying your opponent’s ENTIRE deck.
The new Rin designed to destroy more cards in deck and hand.
Immolate destroying cards in hand.
Demon Seed Quest completely griefing your opponent with miserable game play so much it had to be nerfed over and over and now sits as one of the most annoying decks to go against in Wild.
In early HS history you had a card that could literally make your hero immune completely.
This Snake stealing health makes so much sense because all of Warlock’s existence is about being diabolical and doing things to the opponent no other class does.
Griefing is part of the class identity in my opinion. If you like playing Warlock, I think that’s something you have to embrace. I know I do when I play Warlock in HS as its one of my top 3 most played classes. I know I did in WoW. Warlock was easily the most annoying class in WoW, especially as a mage. Their Felbeast could literally solo the best geared Mage on the server while the Warlock player just sat by and afk’d.
If you play Warlock, you sort of have to embrace this. It’s what makes Warlock what it is. They get this special diabolical game plan that no one else gets.
At first I thought they should wait a week or so before nerfing this new deck. But, the biggest problem I see is that counters you think should be counters are not counters. If you ask people what the counter is, they will say Dirty Rat, Theotar, copy it and play it yourself to negate the effect, etc. But none of that is true. If Dirty Rat, Theotar and copying the snake were counters, then Control Priest would have some amazing win rate against it. It doesn’t. Snakelock completes rolls over that supposed counter.
So of the few decks that do counter it, most are hyper aggressive aggro decks that likely might get nerfed themselves. Any combo deck that only really has hyper aggro as the counter usually gets nerfed. And if they nerfed those aggro decks, this deck would even be more disgusting. In reality, there’s no real good counter to the deck. It needs to be slowed down a bit to allow for counterplay that should be counterplay. I’m interested to see what direction they decide to go. I’d still make it at end of turn. That way, you at least get some chance to counter the minion itself by killing it.
100% i think people are really missing the point. it lowers max hp for the rest of the game its nonsense. even at end of turn doesn’t work. life steal is the best option imo. its a terrible card.
Let’s all just breathe a sigh of relief that they gave it to Warlock and not rogue. Imagine the shadowstep and 1 mana bounce shenanigans if Rogue had gotten this absurd card. It is clear to anyone who is not currently abusing the snake that the card is busted and makes control unviable. When people would rather just concede immediately instead of playing against your class, you know something is not right. I have managed to beat a few Warlocks since the last expansion dropped, but only through sheer luck or their own stupidity.
Then you can just reverb it twice and you get to eliminate the trash brewmaster cards from your deck. I actually like the hp steal so I can stop caring about Siff mage, just cut the hp steal in half, end of the story.
I’ve been playing it over the last few days. Most of the wins would have still been wins even if Snake had to go through armour, and I usually like to finish the job in 1 turn so they wouldn’t get the chance to heal up anyway, or had already lost some life they could heal up, but didn’t.
I’ve actually won a number of games by bouncing Astalor (in his various forms) rather than Snake. In a deck with so much copy/ bounce, its insane not to run Astalor.
Astalor bounce would be an extremely powerful deck, if only you could guarantee drawing him, and with just 1 copy, you can’t do that. But with 4x2 cards that excavate, drawing 4 of them isn’t too hard, and the excavate treasures they give you along the way help too.
Also, one of the excavate treasures costs 1 mana, lets you discover a 2 mana card and play it for 0 mana. Guess what? Astalor is a 2 mana card. Its an auto-pick when offered.
Anyhoo… I had a huge win rate at the start, but it fell as I ranked up and ran into more Dragon Druids.
Personally, I would nerf it to 10 damage with lifesteal, so damage can be healed and you can’t bypass armour.
But whatever, I’ve played it for a few days, its time to move on.
Probably just needs to do damage instead of stealing max life so it has to go through armor. Might need a number adjustment too. It’s just too easy to get and there really isn’t a reliable counter outside of just being aggro.
Is it YouTube, or do you mean, why can’t you post it here?
If it’s the latter, I can’t embed videos anymore either. What you can do is put a backtick before and after the YouTube link, and people can see it that way.
Reverberations. Plus in Wild, add Drakkari Enchanter to that. At that point all they need is enough mana or mana cheat and it’s an OTK. End of turn would be worse.
