I’ve been a fan of this game for a very long time, and I’ve seen my fair share of bad metas, but this one might just take the cake. Mage cards are so broken right now that it feels almost impossible to stand a chance. We’re looking at things like 4 mana dealing 15 damage in one turn, 4 mana filling your entire board, and if your opponent doesn’t have an immediate answer, you just win outright. And then there’s the new expansion that gives your whole board spell damage, leading to ridiculous combos like 3 mana dealing 20 damage in one turn. No matter how good your early game is, if you don’t have above 40 health, you’re done. Great job, Blizzard.
I even tried playing the deck myself, and it’s just so boring and broken—there’s almost no strategy involved. It’s just one crazy card after another. For example:
5 mana 7/4 that destroys your opponent’s board and deals damage to their face.
2 mana 2/3 that buffs your entire board unless your opponent has an immediate answer.
Here are some nerf suggestions I’d propose:
Overflow Surger: Change the text from “Summon a copy for each turn in a row you played an Elemental” to “If you played an Elemental last turn, summon 2 copies.” A 4-mana 9/6 is still strong, but not absurd.
Tainted Remnant: Adjust its stats to 5 mana 4/4. It’s currently too overpowered for its effect and tempo swing.
Lamplighter: Change its effect to “Deal 1 damage to a minion for each turn you played an Elemental.” This would limit the card’s insane damage potential.
While the new expansion has some interesting mechanics and cards, they just can’t compete with the power level of Mage right now. I’ve deleted the game for the time being because it’s just not fun to play in this meta.
Are you playing rogue or hunter or some mana cheat deck that needs until turn 5 to do its thing because everything else stands a pretty good chance.
I mean if you want to do targeted nerfs the 3/1 that draws 3 would be your first start. Another good target would be the one elemental thats been around for a while that discounts the next elemental by (2). The large amount of draw without drawback is what pushed the deck into competitive mode.
If you cant clear a board of 2 health minions than your deck is losing to any aggro deck and the deal x damage when played elementals are so good that people dont even play the 4 mana fireball elemental.
The deck pretty much targets those mana cheat decks that defer doing anything until their big powerspike turn 5 and its nice to have a counter deck for them because those decks are boring for a lot of people.
It really only loses to warrior because it can’t deal with the armor gain unless it does get the super early Saruun. Afaik it doesn’t lose to dk at all. Can’t really see how anything loses to dk tbh, I dunno why there are so many of them and they all suck.
I’m seeing a 46% wr against mage in hsguru for the 2 only competitive dk decks rn (highlander and buttons rainbow). A lot of people are playing bad elemental lists tho, which might be the reason so many people’s perception of this is a little skewed. Anyone playing Blasteroid, for instance, isn’t playing a real deck.
Yeah, based on the vs report today, it’s weaknesses seem to be more what I thought they’d be, stuff that just takes the board better or can burn them down fast.
Frost DK, spell damage druid, aggro shamans, all seem to beat it, along with control warriors.
Yeah, I have a heavy armor focused Starship DK deck and Ele Mage can roll right over me. The matchup is mainly based around how good Mage draws and very little to do with what DK is doing.
8 classes and mage covers (again, after BSM) ~25% of all played games across diamond to legend (and across legend ranks). meanwhile, people trying to gaslight others again, telling “mage is fine, just play a different deck” is quite hilarious.
I think there’s a way to fix BSM without destroying the deck. You either do one of two things. The conman gets reverted back OR the elementals from Tsunami can only hit minions on the summon. You cannot have both for how easy it is to cast.
They should Just buff stuff this meta really.
Most New cards Just don’t even make a scratch and the amount of nerfs to change that would be dumb.
As for elemental mage a mana nerf on saarum is probably enough for people who know math because deckbuffing is affected far harder by it than the usual card.
People would still be Burst sometimes but considering the amount of armor and lifesteal that exists the deck is on par with the absurdity of the meta.
I am a little shocked with some of the discourse surrounding this deck. I think every other deck is doing so many ridiculous swings, armor ups, health gains, removal, etc, that we have lost the point of reference here.
I just died on turn 6 to an elemental mage from full health with no Saruum played. This deck has amazing tempo with very hard to deal with boards, coupled with an amount of damage from hand that makes no sense. Lamplighter aka deal-a-ton-of-damage-to-face-lolol, Remnant spread 7, 2 mana deal 4, 0 mana deal 2 AoE, 1 mana deal 2, 3 mana deal 3/2x3. You can spend your mana dealing with their board and it doesn’t matter cause they’ll just keep doing the damage from hand and also simply dropping something advances their game plan whatever your response is. The cherry ON TOP is that they can turn those same minions into damage buffs, just in case.
The devs just went crazy throwing bones at this thing and there is some collective delusion going on that it’s really not that bad. It is. It’s an absurd deck and needs much more than a 1 mana nerf to Saruun.
Funnily enough the only actual counter is to simply kill them faster than they kill you.
I was thinking the same thing cause ya rarely play tsunami when there is an empty board but a lot of times you need it to hit or freeze a minion on board
