Just had my first trip to top 100 legend in some time using the ramp druid post nerfs.
Clearly, they did not nerf Kaz very well the card is more insane then ever, especially because now druid is encouraged to run many non dragon defensive tools.
I’m hitting about 50 percent win rate against aggro DH which is insane, I thought after nerfs this wouldn’t be possible. But thanks to the Kaz “nerf”, it more than makes up for the miracle growth nerf.
Basically in the DH match up you have to time ramp vs aoe on the drek turn just right. If you do it’s a pretty smooth win.
For any interested in my build, I had to fine tune it to maximize resilience against DH, so it’s a bit different than some lists out there. I can post it in a bit if there is interest.
Below is the deck, I’ve appropriately called it greed as it is one of the most greedy decks ever.
It’s similar to other lists, but sort of a hybrid of key ideas from different lists I’ve seen, as well as some key original ideas.
These are the highlights
Aquatic form increases consistency by a lot of any ramp druid deck. To not include it is to lose out on consistency, it can find clutch cards at each mana break point. It does not synergize with Celestial Alignment (CA) but this is moot as they consistency it adds to early game far outweighs anything else.
Run one Amalgam, it’s a terrible card to draw and hold in hand, but it hedges against the possibility of your opponent pulling a dragon from your hand so you can’t complete Kaz. Statistically, I found running one is ideal, two is too many for a terrible card. Arguably weakest card in deck, but can save your butt when a dragon is eaten or burned some other way.
Spammy Arcanist is the MVP vs demon hunter. Learn when to use it and to read your opponent. The use of this card in DH mu is a win or lose decision, do not take it lightly. It takes practice to know when to use this or to ramp. Also, if not in hand, but you have 5 mana and you need it desperately, don’t forget aquatic form!
I only run 3 big dragons. These are the only ones that in my experience can be played in current meta. Maly is situational, but if you are low on cards this card can recover a lost game for you. Alex can be used offensively or defensively. The most consistent use of Alex I’ve had is in control mu as either burst from hand or to kill a specific minion that is otherwise impossible, like gigafin. Onyxia is auto include, powerful board dominating card, huge threat if left on board.
There’s some other nuances to choices in the deck but those are the main ones. Hope it works for you. Took me about 3 to 4 hours to play maybe 80 to 90 percent correct with this deck, so be patient. I still make blunders or misplays as there are many key decisions that are not easy to recover if made incorrectly.
If there interest I can post a guide to playing the deck in most match ups. Otherwise if you are not familiar with Celestial Alignment, you will be blundering a lot until you get the hang of it.
Funny enough, this is the exact same list I’m running (at Diamond 2 but climbing Legend with 11 stars). For me, this list was inspired by Tianming’s list in the recent MT but he had Manasaber instead of a second Spammy Arcanist. I found Manasaber is such a burden in the matchup against DH and a second Arcanist just increase the chance of drawing it. I’m also having a bit of 50% winrate with that matchup.
Yup this is exactly what I found when I experimented with mana saber. It’s a nice combo in one turn, but you literally need the stars to align to pull it off.
Also double Arcanist plus Aqua form are a must to get closer to the 50 percent mark against DH. Of course you should generally save the Aquatic form to tutor Arcanist, doubling your chance of drawing this critical card.
That’d be much appreciated. I’ve never tried Celestial Alignment. I’ve had it used against me several times. Any additional tips or even a guide would be awesome if you find you have the time.
Thanks for your list any tips im currently at diamond 4 and the meta is quite different here also you are much more skilled then i am so any advice is welcome.
what are my muligans for dh and quest hunter since i sometimes do it wrong.
Lol, just played this deck (swapped a Jerry rig for a that 1 mana dormant) and even with horrible luck not drawing gruff till the end it was disgusting. Granted, I was playing quest priest which is probably the best matchup possible, but still. This feels like an insane slot machine deck.
Let me rephrase that for you. Real results with a sample size of 15,000 are indeed more accurate than real results with a sample size of 15, even if you personally saw the latter happen.
You seem like an amateur data scientist that is ignorant of the bias vs variance trade off.
Note, I’m not trying to be insulting or saying that in bad faith. I don’t mean to make this an ad hominum fallacy, there is merit to your argument if and only if the method of collecting data is perfect (ie unbiased.)
Not that Wikipedia is a primary source on this topic, it has a pretty good exposition, below is a direct quote from Wikipedia explaining the issue at hand
Intuitively, bias is reduced by using only local information, whereas variance can only be reduced by averaging over multiple observations, which inherently means using information from a larger region.
And the crux of the matter
High-variance learning methods may be able to represent their training set well but are at risk of overfitting to noisy or unrepresentative training data. In contrast, algorithms with high bias typically produce simpler models that may fail to capture important regularities (i.e. underfit) in the data.
Case-in-point can be found in latest VS report, where they at least acknowledge their inability to avoid bias:
Druid’s play rate has fallen after the patch, though the class is still popular. Ramp Druid is messy, and is in the process of figuring out what it wants to do. There are Ramp Druids that cut Kazakusan, Ramp Druids that keep Kazakusan and Celestial Alignment variants, mostly with Kazakusan, which are more popular at top legend. The percentage of games in which the Druid dies before showing what they are is quite high, especially against DH, so reliable recognition of these variants is not possible from the opponent’s side. We’ll verbally discuss the variants and their pros/cons, but with incomplete information it’s impossible to measure their performance separately in a reliable fashion. Any attempt to do so will cause misleading biases.
I could see Druid still having some teeth (lol) but nowhere near as obnoxious as before. Need people to stop playing bad builds before we can really tell, kinda like Naga Mage.
You’re not making any attempt to actually measure the amount of disturbance they’re talking about.
It’s still essentially impossible that Alignment Druid is below 50% winrate at top Legend. VS uses the same raw data pool as HSReplay, and I will easily concede that they process it better. But on the other hand, at top Legend right now on HSR, Alignment Druid is showing 51.96% (basically 52%) winrate with a sample size of 16,000 while Ramp Druid is showing 47.89% (basically 48%) with a sample size of 11,000. So let’s imagine hypothetically that every Ramp Druid was actually an Alignment Druid that simply failed to play Alignment and was thus categorized improperly. Even in this extreme example, Alignment Druid would in reality have a 50.3% winrate at top Legend. Now VS themselves say that it’s messy and some of those Ramp Druids aren’t using Alignment, so it’s not possible for the error to drag the winrate metric all the way down to 50.3%. Alignment Druid is almost certainly within 0.4% of 51.2% winrate at top Legend after cleaning up the data in the manner VS describes. That’s still strong performance.
calm guys, alignment druid isn’t an easy deck to pilot, similar to all combo decks. there is a huge skill gap between average players vs. good players. Just because some pros could take a deck to top legends doesn’t mean others could using exactly same deck.
