So the thread header pretty much spelling out what I think is going to happen once Emerald Dream goes live – the metagame is going to be insanely narrow and will more than likely be the first time that rotation is going to be a miserable experience.
Why? Because the Starcraft mini-set is WAYYYYYY too strong. The fact is that the mini-set has created a deterministic environment where the best decks are all using some form of the mini-set, and that’s great in terms of usability, but it’s less “using” the Star Craft cards and moreso relying on the Star Craft cards. And the thing is that this mini-set is completely making the last 2 years worth of expansions almost totally irrelevant outside of anything that’s directly supporting them, such as death knight’s deathrattle package (the point goes beyond this example).
And right now we have THE MOST access to removal and armor gain in the game. Once these sets rotate, we’re going to be critically low on both removal and armor gain. Moreover, none of these archetypes are really reliant on previous cards. The most reliant archetype seems to be zerg since it benefits the most from wide boards and deathrattle synergies (much of which will be lost) but is good standalone as a midrange strategy to get huge minions. I do think zerg will be the worst out of all the Star Craft cards post-rotation because it’s the archetype most reliant on older cards. Protoss and Terran are going to be totally busted with Protoss just having access to way too much damage and mana cheating and Terrans creating minions that are absolute walls and game-enders if you don’t have access to removal (which again, we’re going to be incredibly short on).
It’s not even that Emerald Dream looks like a bad set from what we’ve seen so far, it’s just that the Star Craft mini-set has cemented itself as being the cornerstones in the meta by pushing out the last 2 years of other strategies that I’m not really sure how we’re expected to compete with anything aside from it. The power creep on this set is really insane and I think it’s going to be more apparent how problematic these packages are once we have limited access to other forms of agency. I am hoping for widespread nerfs to these cards.
