But Agnostika, what about the Priest class identity!? You get rid of BS meme decks and what else would Priest be known for? Something ridiculous like healing or something? Pffff. Everyone knows that’s a Druid and Paladin archtype.
i think it’s t4 in top legend and low t3 in d5, basically in a similar boat as priest currently.
but yeah, the deck is basically “drop pirates on curve”. It does have some decisions due to the amount of dredge cards and the lack of draw meaning you have to carefully plan your steps ahead of time, but apart from that, not really what you would call “a rogue deck”. In the past, even aggro rogue decks had some tricks and nuissance to them to make them feel more roguish.
i think we are down to prayers both in real life and game.
but that theme could be a priest.
What did you expect would happen when they lost their best board clears, heals, taunt minion, minion and spell generators, and got a lot of garbage back? Light bomb doesn’t do anything against divine shielded minions, most pirates have more health than attack, their buffs are pathetic compared to what paladin can do. Really, if you want to play control go play paladin instead of priest. They do everything priest would love to do, just better than priest can ever dream of doing it now.
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Someone mentioned class identity. Priest has been known in the past for creating shenanigans, but this meta push priests into a gameplay no one like.
- being milled to death
- mana reset to 1
- or sudden death from the shard
Those aren’t fun for anyone, including the priest player itself. As a priest player of the past, i see priest as a value generating machine, where every game is a puzzle where i have to generate my win condition through random generation or discover. I really loved galakrond priest for that.
When i saw that Lyra is back in the core, i was optimistic, turns out, no serious deck make use of it. Hopefully, either the miniset, or a special event will make mid range value priest playable.
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It’s hard to make use of Lyra when priest spells are garbage and the only good buff costs 7 mana.
disclaimer: I not targeting priest player or you.
The questions that always in my head is, if so, when dont just switch to playing paladin? What is the allure of priest that players stick to it regardless of tier? (likewise applicable to other “class” mains.)
pretty similar to Rogue actually, you have much more variety in your gameplay and a much more satisfying skillexpression than with sth like paladin (usually). Also probably why you rarely see Paladin in top 1k or proplay, it just doesn´t feel terribly skillful, even when it´s strong.
Albeit i have to hand it to them, Holypaladin is definitely more complex than librams.
Priest and rogue have a lot in common 
On a nonrelated matter - were you playing a naga quest hunter late last night? If so, I think I fought against you. I was messing around with a very dragon heavy paladin.
I made a huge mistake in my final turn. I used Alexstraza on my face, when I should have used it to kill your Raj. I knew I was making the wrong play, but at the last second I chickened out and tried to get full value out of Alex.
In any case - good game.
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Yeah that was me. I’m moderately convinced 2x Naga 1 drop is correct for Quest Hunter.
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It seemed strong in our matchup, but I was running less removal, draw, and generation in that deck to make room for all the dragons. It’s certainly not the best iteration of paladin, but it’s kind of fun to mess around with.
I think the naga 1 drops might get significantly less value when matching up against more refined decks.
It depends what you mean by “value.” Over the course of maybe 50 games, I’d say the typical Vicious Slitherspear did between 3 and 4 face damage then was either removed or traded into a minion. That’s very good value all things considered, although it was offset by your lifesteal Explorers in our match iirc. That was actually the Naga slightly underperforming, because the trading cancelled the face.
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I don’t doubt that they’re excellent in general. I’m referring to the fact that in our match up they were a significant challenge for my game plan. They stuck around for multiple turns and did a lot of work, which would probably be an atypically good performance on their part.
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It’s a fair question. I do switch to paladin and it’s my most played class right now in this meta because it has 2-3 viable decks.
I’d like to play priest, warlock and shaman as well, but those are just dead classes. Freeze shaman just got obliterated with the neutral minion. Priest doesn’t have tools to survive to get to its fun stuff, and warlock is just an abysmally broken class… it has a 96% loss rate against quest hunter. That’s unheard of, but true. So if you play warlock, you basically can’t use your hero power.
Damage output far far exceeds healing right now. It’s not even close. So those healing classes are dead. Except paladin, because for some strange reason that class has an abundance of healing and draw and power all wrapped into one.
So, yeah, I do play paladin. I just dislike that my other options are essentially dead.
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I thought you would be happy to know that in Masters tour several people brought Rogue as their 4th deck… and those lists are running Hooktusk because of the pro meta lol. Just thought it was worth noting.
Also I saw at least 1 player running boar preist too. It seems like a pretty tricky deck to play correctly, but I can see why preist would gravitate to otk strats because they have really good draw tools at the moment. Not the best tools to capitalize on the draw, but really good draw regardless
have only seen a few games so far, but Boar Priest looks like Garrotte Rogue after a lobotomy.
In a meta without polymorph effects you just throw down the boars, draw through your deck and ram a sword into your opponent, really not much to think about. What makes it appear difficult is that it´s just a bad deck with limited removal so if you don´t draw in the right order ofc you´ll struggle a lot.
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tournament meta is weird lol. (not really weird tbh, just different due to the ability to ban decks (in this case DH) and due to “lineups” being a thing. So if you are expecting a “control lineup” you can bring anti-control decks, and if you expect an “aggro lineup” you can bring that. Which is totally different than ladder where instead of specific lineups you have to go by population numbers of each deck)
there was even quest druid (which was also i deck i had posted here at the very start of the expansion lol).
But yeah, atm since as pure aggro rogue is worse than all the other aggro decks, the only list that makes sense is the hooktusk one because that one had something unique vs some control matchups.
I assume that’s also one of the reasons why it is brought to tournaments:
Since DH was the most banned, and there were a lot of control lineups, it is an aggro deck with an edge for that for the aggro lineups.
The other reason being that when you want to bring 4 aggro decks, you bring every one of them, including face hunter and rogue, despite being weaker than, say, DH, since you are either way ALSO bringing DH.
You hit it right on the head. Priests right now have worse tools than priest in classic hearthstone, and that’s just hilarious.
You know 2 out of the top 4 players at the Masters tour tournament this weekend were running boar preist. And winning with it vs a variety of decks. I’d say it’s at least a good meme.
Preist has insane draw tools right now setting it up to be the best combo class probably as more expansions are added.