This is fairly unique in the history of this game.
I’ve always liked the deckbuilding part of the game and I’m spending most of my time trying to bring a homebrewed deck as high as possible. Having done it for years, I’d consider me fairly ok at it, currently en route to wild legend (diamond 2 atm) with a very unique self-tinkered deck.
That said, I’ve had problems in standard this season. Big problems. I’ve struggled to reach gold and normally I breeze through that without even noticing. Then it struck me that I’m always seeing the same decks again and again, with very little variations. Up to this point, you could always put up a fair fight against meta decks with something you refined yourself. Of course the odds were never in your favor, but I’d say you could reach a 35-40% winrate against the top dogs easily even with the most weird of decks, within reason of course.
Those times are over. The decks that rule standard atm straight up **** on everything else. I’d consider them pretty much unbeatable by anything, and this is important, Blizzard did not intentionally lay out.
And this is the problem, in my opinion. There are way too many forced, designed synergies that work way too well. I’m talking about the imp package in warlock, skeletons in mage, ramping in druid. There are always tools that work especially for exactly those decks, and nothing else, and they are strong as hell.
I’ll take Imp warlock as an example here:
They have very strong, especially pre nerf but still, cards like impending catastrophe, vile library, flustered librarian and rafaam that are designed to just be thrown in one deck and work insanely well together. But those super strong tools ONLY work for imp warlock, nothing else.
Same things exist for other classes as well, but interestingly not for all classes.
I wish they’d take a few steps back from these insanely strong specialist cards, back to interesting generalist cards that can work for more than one archetype, sometimes cards that need to be figured out first. Right now the good decks build themselves when you search for a keyword, and they are too strong- way too strong for decks outside the box that weren’t predestined to be an archetype by the devs for this expansion.
