Who’s with me! Everything about this current meta is meh, just meh to me.
“The current meta is the worst meta ever.
Yours faithfully,
A hardstuck gold 3 player”
No seriously, there were faaar worse meta out there. “Demonhunter” “Seedlock” “Jade”
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Yeah, it’s up there. Probably #1.
It’s not bad because of things being broken. It’s bad because it’s so highly unfun. I don’t like knowing whether or not I’ve certainly won or lost the game based on the first card played.
Those metas were bad for different reasons. They were broken bad. This meta is unfun bad, which is arguably worse because you can’t nerf bad.
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Unfun in what sense?
Ping Mage is a bad deck, but I find it enjoyable. The decks themselves aren’t that unenjoyable. Or is it playing against certain decks that have unfun mechanics? Then some Priest metas were not enjoyable for most people (even if they were rare in mumbers)
But yeah, some cards are very polarizing and having them in your opening hand means that your winrate is doubled or in case your opponent has them, you lost. But that is often the case at the end of the year or in wild^^
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No that Honor goes to Genn/Baku meta hated so much it had the first and only cards from an expansion to be put in the Hall of Fame and rotated out early.
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In the sense that a lot of the meta is RPS. If I play archetype A, I don’t just lose to deck B, I get dominated by deck B. If I play archetype B, I get dominated by deck C. If I play deck C, I get dominated by archetype A.
It’s just a bunch of this dominates this which dominates this which dominates that. It’s not fun. I take no joy in easily crushing the same stuff over and over and over and I take no joy in easily getting crushed by the other stuff over and over.
There are very few matches where I go “Hmmmm I honestly don’t know who is going to win this matchup, this will be a pretty fair fight” except for mirrors.
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Well, if your meta has control then things become more polarizing. A lot ot the last metas were just otk and aggro. Btw what did VS say? What are the stats? Are there sub 25% matchups? Because in the past, this wasn’t an unusual thing.
When you have Day 1 Demon Hunter and Mean Streets of Gadgetzan(Jades and Pirates in 1 yikes) its impossible for any other meta to come close to the top spots.
This meta doesnt even make my worst top 5.
I’d say it’s the opposite. If your meta has some control, it has more balance. The last metas were otk and aggro because it DIDN’T have control. Combo/OTK decks were rampant. If you have Control in the meta, not in abundance, you end up with something that keeps aggro in check, you don’t end up with control polarizing aggro.
Essentially, a fun meta would be one where you’re somewhere in the 60/40 or 40/60 matchup chance AND in a meta where your skill actually matters in making those stats better or worse. Right now, there are tons of matches that are way out of that range.
You never want a bunch of your matchups to feel hopeless or a bunch of your matchups to feel needlessly easy. When I play Control Warrior, there are so many aggro decks that my matchups feel needlessly easy. When I end up facing another deck that has value or OTK, the matchups are hopeless in feeling.
You can repeat this with many of the decks in the meta. You get this same feeling when you play: Ramp Druid, Quest Priest, Face Hunter, Quest Hunter, Beast Druid, Taunt Druid, Shadow Priest, Mozaki Mage, Burn Shaman, Handlock, OwlTk and Control Warrior. I’ve played all of these and the feeling is the same across the meta. And these decks are a vast majority of the meta.
It’s just unfun. I understand a lot of people DO enjoy crushing people with ease. I understand that people do enjoy playing control warrior for example because they get free wins from aggro. I even used it to get to legend. But it was far from fun because it wasn’t challenging. I likewise could have just played Ramp Druid and dominated much of anything that wasn’t aggro, and I did up until D5. It also was lacking in the fun department for me.
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Boomsday Bomb Warrior.
That is all.
I personally think this still kinda far from gadgetzan metagame.
That one was bad in every way possible.
Uninteractive and polarized games with incredible low diversity.
It’s kinda dificult to compete with It.
Maybe early UIS can take the throne but that is about it.
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I think if you have control, your meta looks more healthy in terms of variety.
But I am not sure if the individual matchups between decks will be less polarizing.
If you have just 2 archetypes then, their respective decks both cant lose too badly against their own archetype or against the other one.
And HS is centred around aggro, you have to beat it. That’s why most combo decks in standard have either so much tempo (Rogue) or control (Demon Hunter, warlock), and don’t do that badly vs other aggro decks (in fact they are even favoured against certain aggo decks, which they must, else they wouldn’t be played)
However, if there are more than 2 archetypes, this is no longer true. Decks can afford to be polarizing against cetain archetypes. If I have 4 achetypes, then decks falling in certain archetypes can afford to have a 20% winrate, because they counter most decks but are hardcountered by a minor deck, that feed on this deck/decktype but is bad vs other decks.
If you have more archetypes this feeding on some particular decks will simply be more pronounced and you will have an inceased amount of “leeching” decks, which means more deck variety.
But ofc, most decks don’t belong purely in one archetype. So things are in practice more complicated.
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The solution is for team 5 to stop being so afraid to print disruption cards and nerfing them to the ground whenever they somewhat succeeds in countering a powerful archetype, and give secrets to every class.
Old metas were bad because some cards were too fast and you can’t interact with them. This meta’s problem is still some cards being too fast that they make your entire deck pointless and destroys any hope of winning, still because you can’t interact with them.
I couldn’t agree more. I don’t know why they are so scared to print these cards. If the new core set does not see some very important tech cards, I’m going to be very disappointed.
If we were in a meta where Secrets were prevalent but there was no secret tech, people would be throwing a fit and it would look really bad design wise. But this same thing is true for a variety of different issues and they turn a blind eye.
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Just wait until next expansion and you’ll see how we come to hate it even more. If the last mini-set is anything to go by, the developers are absolutely fine printing outrageous, busted cards in order to get the dough coming in.
Nah, demon hunter was way, WAY worse in my opinion.
Granted I’m bored of this meta and not really playing much at the moment, but still, those first few weeks of demon hunters- that was the only meta that actually made me want to chuck my phone into a brick wall lol
This is exaggeration. Well, maybe not for Control Warrior — deck is polarizing as can be, especially at higher ranks. But for most decks, winrate is around 35% for bad matchups where you run into your rock-paper-scissors counter. That’s not unwinnable, it’s just a bad matchup.
More accurately: you don’t like knowing whether or not you’ve probably won or lost the game based on the first card played. 
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I think you might be correct with normal players in a normal bracket. But when you play with skilled people, it gets more exaggerated.
My prime example is me playing Control Warrior vs Quest Hunter. You go look at the stats, Quest Hunter should win 55% of the time roughly. Now tell me why I’ve never lost to a Quest Hunter when I’m playing Control Warrior? It’s because I know how to polarize the matchup. Same thing with Control Warrior vs Shadow Priest/Taunt Druid/Beast Druid/Face Hunter. The stats say Control Warrior should lose about 25-35% of those games. I’ve never lost once and it’s rarely even close. I’m 100% win rate vs all of those as Control Warrior.
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Both wins and losses need to feel satisfying. We will need to wait another year for even a chance at that.
The only way to achieve that is to achieve a level of winrate balance the game has rarely seen. As long as there are “Tier 1” decks with a winrate significantly over 50%, players who chase wins will play gravitate towards decks they don’t find fun. And a loss can’t be satisfying if the only reason you selected your deck was to win.
Now, what often happens when you’re having fun with a deck is that you started playing it because you thought it was powerful, but because you are having fun with it you don’t even particularly notice if your winrate approaches or even goes below 50%. A quality of fun decks is that they retain their popularity even when their winrate becomes suboptimal.