HSguru stats for 1k legend (using this as most refined competitive field):
1- Zarimi Priest
2- Lynessa Paladin
3- Cycle Rogue (lolololmao)
4- Dungar Druid
5- Starship Rogue
6- Discover Hunter
The only change that has had an impact is the hit to Flood Shaman, which has given Lynessa Paladin room to breathe.
Hilariously, the nerf to Sonya only served one purpose: ruin a fun card for those who liked her and appease her haters. The card was never an actual power outlier (bottom third stats in her decks) and, as a consequence, the nerf didn’t do much to rogue decks. Dungar, as expected, continues to be fine - people just stopped playing it for a while but it’ll probably ramp up in play again. Zarimi is now the aggro deck to play to shut down greed.
It’s looking like the meta will end up looking pretty much the same as before the patch, just without shamans and with lynessa as the new flavor of the month. Another great success of the nerf bat if you ask me. Truly new decks, except for discover hunter and starship rogue are nowhere to be seen and 1 new card, Ethereal Oracle, is pumping up cycle-heavy combo decks that no one likes to play against.
Unless something new happens, that’s more or less how the meta is shaping up 
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The *1K meta. Lower ranked players are usually bad with some of those decks because they are high skill cap (especially anything that involves a rogue).
The absolute best deck right now for players whining against asteroid shamans and the like is probably elemental mage.
It’s extremely robust when it high rolls against almost everything, and if it low rolls it seems to have a chance.
i havent seen swarm shaman in a while and thats the deck they targeted more than any other deck (for a good reason)
what i understand from your post is decks that were tier 3 or tier 4 like discover hunter and starship rogue are now doing better
i dont understand whats wrong with it
I didn’t say Discover hunter or starship rogue are doing better relatively. The top 4 decks are significantly above all other decks in wr currently, and both starship rogue and discover hunter were fine, competitive decks before - same as now. The only significant difference is the collapse of swarm shaman and the rise of Lynessa paladin as a consequence.
Aside from this, the meta doesn’t seem to have moved much after the dust settled, which means the patch achieved very little. That is the point of the post. If anything, it made the meta smaller and killed a few cards in the process needlessly to arrive at the same place (Sonya, pylon and the druid ramp card)
Because this is what people are aimming for despite of the BS they talk.
Like…
Really want a meta shift?
Launch a patch focused on buffing draenei in general. Not only new draenei but even older ones like argus defender and stargazer luna.
Try to ressurect warlock and mage from the dead and for those i would focus on changing cards that were launch this year but never saw decent play.
There is a insane amount of cards of those classes that you can compare to classic cards and they will still look balanced.
In 2024 that means dead class.
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It’s all you would see pre-nerf if you happened to play anything slightly slow
Sighs of relief good to hear it’s not just my incompetence watching that Sonya be a dead card in my hand and never able to utilize it xDD
Half joking only, it’s kinda logical, the card has an effect which depends on the cards you combo with that one, so of course it’s not strong in a vacuum.
It’s quite intuitive to know such cards won’t be valued highly in the linear, 1-dimensional statistics we’re using on a daily basis. We need hardcore complex system equations to get the real data (or simple scientific experiments where you play a deck with it, and a deck without it, and then subtract the winrates, but that’s also not something the trackers are able to do for us, yet).
The latter is also not feasible to do because if you remove Sonya, then perhaps there are few additional cards which also need to be replaced to optimize the deck, and when you do, only then is the tracker data completely correct, but then you don’t need those data, because it’s not the same deck.
Paradox of relying on statistics in our business, yo. Lie, bigger lie, statistics.
EDIT: Just my 2 cents, because I’ve been letting people know I’m not a slave to statistics, but couldn’t quite find arguments that are convincing enough, and I think this example is a good one to show the logic behind it in action, and the futility of hoping to prove it.
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I will be the first one to say Sonya needed changed but that change was too much and really highlighted how much the design team crutched on Sonya the ENTIRE season for decks in each expansion.
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when people talk about the meta they usually focus on the best deck at the time not just some randompicks among all the decks people are playing
Who could have saw that coming. That Priest deck always slips under the radar.
I just cited all the decks with over 50% WR in order in top legend. That’s the meta. And sure, swarm shaman got a hit, never said the patch didn’t achieve anything, just that it achieved little. It swapped Swarm shaman for zarimi and allowed lynessa to come up for a while (we’ll see if Zarimi doesn’t pull it back down to where it was). To get there, it nerfed some wrong targets, didn’t nerf other things that would have had a greater impact and got shy of buffing unplayable cards.
Balance patches happen to open up the meta and allow for more fun things to happen, not simply to change one top performer for another.
do you really expect every single viable deck to get killed every balance patch ?
Are you being dense on purpose I really don’t understand anymore.
you made athread listing decks that were tier 3 and 4 being more competitive now and are complaining about it and what else im supposed to think you meant besides the bit about you not liking these decks becoming tier 1-2 ?
and all patches are going to change whats on top because something always has to be !
because you listed these decks and complaining about " wrong targets " all i can think is you wanted ALL decks we had in the meta killed by the nerfs
I was playing cycle rogue with some refinement earlier I was surprised people already refined cycle rogue with moonstone mauler and thalnos right now.
That’s the opposite of practical reality.
The most surefire way to open up the meta is new cards. Yes, expansion, minisets, rotations. There is the occasional event where they allow old cards back (e.g recently rena was back in standard for a bit, another year they brought back Knigths of Frozen Throne for a bit)
Balance patches come after/in between content releases to smooth things out.
You might see bigger shifts in the early patches after new content, but that’s because the new content shook things up so much that a patch would also need to do a lot to smooth things out. The more patches you apply after the content release, you should see less drastic changes. Otherwise that implies your previous patches failed to creating a balanced meta.
It’s like soup. Or turkey stuffing. Or whatever food you have for Xmas. The big content release is like if they just dumped a whole big blob of the food on your plate. Then the balance patches is where they trim bits here or there, sometimes adding things back, until the portion is just the right size. If your server is dumping huge amounts of food and then taking back away equally large amounts back and forth over and over, they would be pretty terrible servers (or a very good troll messing with your food 
)
Ok so genuine question: what was a good meta in recent memory for you all?
I know that both Un’goro and whispers are remembered as the best metas among people that played them and honestly I remember old gods fondly but had it’s anoyances, I want to know what do people want?
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I think there was a short window inside Whizbang’s, that the balancing patch was pretty decent. But they broke it again after max 1 or 2 months.
I don’t know about old metas. I started playing around Bandlands’ launch.
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They don’t want balance, that’s for sure. The last few months with purposeful and effective balancing, surgically precise and generous, as well, brought this misery upon us.
What people actually want is that every class, every playstyle has a broken deck, one for everyone’s taste. The resultant meta is highly polarized*, but diverse, sort of like what we had 3-6 months ago (2x Warriors, 3x Warlocks, 2-3x Pallies…basically, everything except Hunter, since we already have a better Hunter being broken).
That’s what we want. Question is: when are we going to realize that? When are devs?
*winrate polarization → refers to having matchups with 33-66% spreads or even more, etc, leading to the phenomenom where people concede whenever they see their counter deck to grind faster. It’s a decent indicator of a true rock-paper-scissors meta.
Please don’t. I hate that play style - you just keep spamming them when they’re green and you win by overwhelming the board with your stupid buffs. It’s even less brain cells than handbuff paladin.
They are really that much of a contrarian … person. Just put them on ignore and thank me later.
I was happy with the meta for most of this year, actually.
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