I ask this every expansion.
How are we this expansion?
Shaman as a class seems really good but I feel like I am fighting through insane amounts of armor gain against warrior and Zilliax can just ruin a ton of progress.
I think Zilliax is the reason for most of my losses for the class but I think it’s a strong deck. Tier 1 maybe, tier 2 definitely. Card winrates suggest that some of the stronger elementals in shaman are tier 1 but this is from people playing with new toys and the dust needs to settle. There are still some issues with certain popular matchups.
I suppose it depends on what you want to do.
As expected lamplighter made elemental shaman playable if not competitive.
Aggro nostalgia shaman is same as it was and can get you to legend
Interesting enough shaman has one of the few ways to counter ‘unkilliax’ hydration station decks with both the excavate murloc / nostalgia so if that deck continues to be everywhere shaman probably has the best tools to play against it (paladin too I guess but boring).
As far as new archetypes I tried a cliffdiver evolve deck which was borderline playable (play cliffdiver… evolve one of the things that comes out… also the 10 mana 6/7 mech will resolve and summon a 6/7 before going back in the deck) but it just seems to lack that sort of finishing power you’d want… and obviously mana cheating out a 11 (your 10 drop will always evolve into the 8/5 reborn minion) drop on turn 6 isn’t exactly great in todays hearthstone.
I also tried razzle dazzle spell school shaman and quite frankly it comes down to equip weapon… make the steal 4 attack shadow spell 1… play conductivity pack the house/razzle dazzle and then have your weapon swing for 30 damage. It ended up morphing into an OTK deck because playing a million giant boards does nothing in hearthstone.
Incindius OTK is a gimmick deck but its there
So I guess theres a few viable decks… a few could be viable decks with a decent miniset but otherwise theres not much new flavor with shaman this expansion. Reno is all but deader than it was as well because OTK druid/rogue will take you out.
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