It took me a couple posts to figure out everyone wasn’t mad at Schyla, and just spelling his name wrong.
All that aside, Skyla is the correct choice to nerf the deck and mages will just have to deal.
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They do, I do not argue this at all.
The problem is that it costs you in deck building elsewhere, and the synergies aren’t good enough to make the deck strong on their own.
So yeah, the data will show that when they have the cards, they win, but it doesn’t capture the fact that it’s also those cards keeping the deck in the tier 3 range by preventing it from beating decks that exploit the holes.
It’s ok. It’s becoming borderline unplayable in top legend due to not having a good matchup against almost everything that was popular up there prior to the mini set.
The deck needs to adapt to survive, and it can’t.
It’ll also probably eat a Skyla nerf next week, and it can’t survive that without people rethinking how the deck is built overall.
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Much as some of us would want him to be nerfed, Marin won’t be touched, while Skyla probably will. Makes more sense than them nerfing Tsunami and ruining it completely for mage decks that don’t rely on Skyla shenanigans to cheat out big spells early. For the power of the effect, it is far too easy to activate it and then either bounce her back to hand or replay the spell with Conman. Sure, some classes can shrug off the 4 water elementals, but not all have that capability and the fact that the effect can be repeated for at least a couple more rounds is an issue. The only other option I see is for Blizzard to take a hammer to the elementals and make them unable to attack the enemy hero. Would at least allow for the card to be used as a means of board control or stall via freezing (both of which mage has been known for throughout Hearthstone’s life). This at least gives the opponent a turn to do something about the elementals on board without being mauled to oblivion.
The core issue is that you, and many others, are piloting the deck incorrectly.
The issue here is that Skyla + King pull the pilot in the opposite direction as Surfalopod. With the first two, you have an incentive to ensure that Tsunami or Volley are in your hand on turn 4/5, which makes them seem like attractive mulligan “keep” choices. With Surfalopod, the incentive is inverted — you’d prefer those cards to still be in your deck, so you’d prefer to send them back into your deck on the mulligan.
And I will admit that Skyla and King average to a power level that is higher than the power level of Surfalopod. King is significantly worse than Surfalopod, but Skyla is significantly better, by a larger margin.
The real trick is to always send Tsunamis and Volleys back, not keep them in the opener. If you have King Tide, a Watercolor Artist on 3 solves the problem (in this case, not a noob play). If you have Skyla, stop worrying so much, you’re probably going to win anyway because it’s the best card in the deck.
Your deckbuilding is suffering because your piloting theory is incorrect.
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No it’s just 30% of the meta so pe try to beat it. And only super fastvdecks can beat it or uber blood dk control, which is playable because of the broken shaman package. So Don’t try to lie this deck is bad because it’s not. You either killl them on turn 4 or 5 or you can remove their 5 turn scam. Which only one deck can do right now.
Suddenly even token hunter became playable. Just because people are desperate to counter this and btw I’m high legend eu player
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First of all, I never even attempted deckbuilding for you to say this. I made my first deck yesterday, and it’s broken.
Secondly, I don’t even play BSM. I played 5-6 games of the meta-one and 2 games of Smeet’s one, just to see their weaknesses (or if by some miracle I enjoy playing them).
So this whole sentence of yours is literally nothing, but a lame attempt at offending me.
I can’t be offended if you’re speaking only obvious falsehoods. Next time try to be more on point.
It loses to:
Pirate DH
Pain lock
Big shaman
Reno druid
Dungar druid
Overheal Priest
Blood DK
You have plenty of options to beat big spell mage. There’s literally no data driven reason for that deck to be anywhere near 30% of the meta.
It was just the only shiny new thing the expansion launched, and it scratches the itch to scam wins.
Since I personally play this, every time I see it quoted that this deck counters it, I get triggered.
Let’s make one thing clear for people who are trying to decide what to play next:
It’s not Pain lock that’s strong against Mage. It’s Painlock with 2x anti-spell 2 drop and 2x- speaker stomper. That painlock hard-loses to most of the other decks in the meta, of which literally none rely on spells (20-30% of them even run Magatha to prove this point further), which is exactly why you don’t see everyone suddenly spamming painlock.
Now, the REAL painlock deck, without the tech cards, loses to mage pretty convincingly (43-57) but wins against others more often than not (52.6%)
Since number of mages is slowly declining, Painlock is a safe pick (the normal version, not the bad, anti-mage one).
It doesn’t lose to reno druid lol such a bs. Unless reno decks have some uber highroll they will get flatlined turn 5 with the scam bsm will pull off. All reno druid can hope for is having 10 or 9 mana by turn 5 or 6. Again pire dh and all the qggro decks can beat it which is tge inly thing that beats this deck. Dungar druid maybe if they got lucky.
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Fair, but it still can convincingly beat the BSM players if built for it.
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Surfalopod is pretty good on the current running list, but it heavily limits the deck capacity in anything else by limiting spell choices in mage, of all classes.
As soon as the deck stops being a one trick pony, Surfalopod will probably be cut from lists, and I don’t see the deck surviving as it is even if it wasn’t nerfed.
Balance isn’t the only reason to make changes to card power.
Crappy, unfun play patterns of “they have the card guess I lose now” are to be avoided. You know the card game War? It’s perfectly balanced, the outcome is a simple coin flip that is predetermined by the shuffle. Each player has exactly the same chance to win. But it sucks to play because you don’t get to do anything - as soon as you realize that, it stops being a game even though it’s “fair.”
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That will never happen because the one trick is too good. You’re imagining some movement away from that, when that movement is strictly losing.
I’m not saying that people won’t do it. Mand, for example, thinks it’s boring not to. But if such a movement occurs, it won’t be optimization.
I think Bottles has a good take on Surfalopod, because it’s strong in BSM decks that do not run spells other than Tsunami and Sunset Volley, which can make Surfalopod a reasonable card to keep during the mulligan.
Surfalopod is an awkward trade off in BSM decks that include spells like Star Power, Heat Wave, Reverberations, The Galactic Projection Orb, or Oh, Manager. If a BSM deck runs a lot spells beyond the key four, then it may be best to cut Surfalopod from the deck. My current version of BSM runs some extra spells, so I tend to mulligan away Surfalopod.
I have experimented with 2x Instrument Tech in BSM, and I think one is a better choice. The deck wants to include so many cards the it has to make some careful choices amongst which cards to trim out of the deck. There may be a build where 2x Instrument Tech is a good choice, but there are good reasons for why most lists only contain one Instrument Tech.
I was curious how Marin would do in BSM and I still had the event quest to complete. I have made it to Diamond Rank 3 so far with Marin in the deck, and I just need to play one more treasure to complete the quest and the event.
I am still not sure if Marin belongs in BSM. I would have to play without it in my deck for awhile in order to determine if Marin makes my deck better or not.
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Those versions suck so hard that they shouldn’t even be considered the same archetype.
How do you know? There’s no data for you to parse on what I’m running.
I very smoothly climbed to top 500 with no under the sea or Surfalopod and focused on beating the “bad” matchups rather than doubling down on the good ones.
The approach works just fine. That package was skippable before the mini set, and still is. My version will also survive a nerf to Skyla, where the current BSM won’t because of how dependent it is on the high roll for a slightly positive win rate.
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Your take is 100% quality, but I wish to reiterate a known piece of wisdom followed by mostly everyone in top ranks - it’s ALWAYS 1 tutor card per 2 cards that get tutored.
It’s a mistake to run 2.
I know this statement is easy to “discredit” with examples from VS, but those examples are bad.
Handbuff pally running 2? A mistake. If there ever actually existed a top 200 player playing handbuff pally, he wasn’t running 2, because he knows that one of them is a dead card.
Most of the time you don’t need 2 weapons at all, and when you do, you have an equal chance of drawing it with or without the second tutor card (tutor cards are only useful for #1 card you want to draw, as there’s a great probability you won’t draw it soon enough; however, after 6-7-8 turns have already passed, your chances of drawing the other are greatly increased).
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That’s where you’re wrong.
I mean, I highly doubt that anyone else has used the exact list I’m playing with since the mini set, and I’ve had around a 70% win rate with it over my last 70 games or so. It took until top 1k before it started to approach the 50:50 win rate point.
I highly doubt that I’d have climbed faster with the popular version, given how many people I’ve beaten along the way running lists specifically designed to counter the original version harshly.
Surf/under the sea are basically just this deck’s version of Reno. They open up a way to blow out games at the cost of flexibility. So long as the meta can’t respond to what they do, run them. If it can (which it is), ditch them and play a value game that big spell mage can also easily win.
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Certainly never had that happen because I thought I hadn’t already cast a fire spell…
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