Mentioned it in a thread about a month ago, but the only thing keeping Solid Alibi from being a problem was mage not having a good deck. Festival of Legends mage HAD an OTK deck, but it couldn’t play on curve, had very little defense, and relied on RNG to make more copies of Lightshow.
Mage is a lot better now than it was with the last set. They just play for board entirely too well for an OTK deck, generate infinite resources, it’s difficult to play around random secrets especially on pivotal turns (delaying your Jotun, Odyn, or your own Sif is very back-breaking against a deck that can OTK you at any point past turn 8), etc. So all of these are fine since every deck right now seems like it has the goo but no other deck right now (aside from warrior) can survive a Sif turn and having the ability to completely shut down dying just seems absurd especially when they can play more than 2 Solid Alibi.
So although I don’t think mage is in inherently an issue, I think we’re about to see a metagame where Solid Alibi becomes the most toxic card in the game including in legend. Not calling for nerfs yet but I think this is a card to keep our eyes peeled for and I wouldn’t be surprised if the played WR goes over the 70% mark.
Hard disagree. I think games in general, Hearthstone and otherwise, are most enjoyable when the metagame is filled with a bunch of mid-tier or slightly strong decks. Case in point is how some of the most popular MvC2 tournaments are no high tier tournaments. Nobody likes seeing Storm, Sentinel, Magneto comps every time they play.
But this is more my preference. Objectively, I don’t think it’s good when any deck/ character/ strategy breaks whatever game it is in. Cards like Solid Alibi have historically broken metas in HS. I’d be surprised if it didn’t in Standard.
The deck is too slow compared to others to need a nerf i would say.
After seeing
Warlock summoning 40/40 worth of stats on turn 5-6,
Druid Ramping to 10 while you are at 6 and full healing while drawing a whole hand and dropping the Jailer,
Shaman OTKing in turn 6,
Demon Hunter running the most greedy deck ever,
i would say Sif OTKing at turn 10 isn’t as “bad” as these feel right now.
These 4 decks, except Druid maybe because after trying it it still is susceptible to early aggro, i think will be the ones getting nerfed first.
See, it can OTK on Turn 8. While dropping Alibis on 6 and 7. The reason people aren’t upset about Sif decks is that the lists they’ve seen are hot garbage
I used 10 as the OTK turn, because if no luck is involved. 10 seems to me as the average OTK turn for Sif. (No highrolling, No lowrolling)
Of couse, it is possible of getting it on 8, but there is also the chance of getting it on 15.
Yeah, it can but that would still require drawing both Alibis + Sif + Playing enough spell schools to make the OTK possible + holding onto the “burn” cards for the combo.
Shaman does this without any thought put into it and faster. Plus it can’t be countered by cards such as Dirty Rat. I’m not saying the deck isn’t strong, but it doesn’t feel like the strongEST to require a nerf.
This isn’t actually a thing. Reverberations is part of the combo, Frost and Arcane are virtually automatic, and +8 Spell Damage is enough to make 3 Arcane Bolts or Flame Geyser lethal.
What’s actually a concern is getting Naz’jar on Arcane and getting her played.
I mean it’s true that shaman does it faster, but Dirty Rat can still delay the deck (Patchwork has actually killed the entire combo for me) and unlike shaman, mage doesn’t hard lose to aggro since shaman uses the first 5 or 6 turns drawing the cards they need and can’t actually dumb them from hand since they need at least 3 to kill (and possibly 4-5 depending on armor gain from mage or warrior).
Mage can actually fight back against aggro. Still difficult but shaman actually hard loses to any deck that’s aggro
I have no idea why they would print that card, but they did. It’s awful that they can both freeze boards and limit damage so much that even charge or otk isn’t effective. The down side is mage can’t really kill anyone either last expansion, ha. I’d rather mage was more aggressive, honestly.
That would be pretty interesting, but that would also mean the rest of the deck was performing… so there would be other nerf targets before solid alibi.
Yes that’s what it means. However, Solid Alibi could push a strong deck over the top whereas you could actually tone down the strength of the deck itself. There aren’t a lot of ways to really nerf Solid Alibi other than making it so that the damage taken is capped beyond 1 damage
If we sent Iceblock to HoF and then relegated it to wild, why would we print solid alibi and the tools to discover it over and over again… seems like they went down this road and we don’t like it.
All i can think when i hear that Mage can keep up with the aggro, is the 40/40 worth of stats my Warlock opponent played on Turn 6.
The game, just became WAY faster than it was before. The powercreep has reached an actual insane level.
Looking at the 4 mana summon 2/2 Skeletons, while i’m watching what the other classes are doing, i just can’t believe that Mage is the one need nerfing.
I wouldn’t have sent Ice Block to HoF, but I’m also a complete OTK simp so I might be biased.
The point is that it’s a contradictory set of actions. Printing Alibi was roughly equivalent to saying “hey, on that whole Ice Block thing, we changed our minds. We’re cool with it as long as you get the new version because if you can use the old version we can’t sell packs”