VS Data Reaper #303: Shaman Supremacy Edition

you mean the card they had to buff because it didnt see play at 7?

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This is ridiculous. None of the top 5 decks are “hyper aggro.” Rainbow Shaman isn’t hyper aggro. Frost DK isn’t hyper aggro. Handbuff Paladin isn’t hyper aggro. You might convince me that they’re aggressive decks, but they don’t go all in on an early game push.

There is nothing about your analysis of the meta here that is based on evidence. It is 100% pure ideological projection.

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If anything this meta is proof that people don’t actually like midrange.

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But they just killed a combo deck that was only relevant at higher tiers, something that’s happened repeatedly. I don’t know what the answer is honestly, there must be a market for these kind of decks because they keep making them, but then they kill them when they gain any traction?

I dunno. I’ve had a break so I’m at piece with whatever annoyed me before, and the fact I will be dipping in and out of it until it dies. Maybe if more people did that more would appreciate the game for what it is, not what they hope it could be if they only nerfed the exact things they didn’t like?

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I think the unpopularity of the effective midrange archetypes is exaggerated. As Schyla has pointed out, 1.5% for Rainbow Shaman isn’t that bad when there are so many viable archetypes to choose from.

But in the sense of some people having the fantasy that if multiple midrange archetypes were good then the playerbase would absolutely flock to those decks, yeah, that crackpot theory is effectively disproven. Midrange as an archetype has a niche, some players do genuinely like it, but it’s not this massive majority or anything like that.

Master Wayne, some people just want to see games never end.

dragon druid (and espicially reno druid), buttons DK, handbuff paly are all at least tangentially midrange.

That wasn’t what I said.

I said that you either play hyper aggro, or a deck that does some kind of solitaire blowout play, which is all of them that aren’t hyper aggro.

Frost DK is a pretty pure aggro deck though.

Handbuff paladin isn’t, it just overruns you, or failing that, hits you with a 25 damage Leeroy (the blowout turn)

Rainbow shaman rolls the razzle dice on turn 6 to win the game, or maybe evolves into something uncontestable on 5.

Druid focuses on scamming games via Marin.

It’s aggro, or low agency blowouts. That’s the meta.

I’m pretty sure they are combo mid-range decks in most cases in traditional terminology. The game might be power creeped to an extend but they must be combo mid-range because they are not very slow control like most warriors or the fastest aggros like flood pala or painlock.

I was thinking recently that combo mid-range decks are the proper decks; control and fast aggro are gimmicks to highjack the game; I might be talking nonsense though out of ego since I usually play combo decks now (frankly I’m bored not to play that type of deck).

I always have tended towards them. Especially if they have a board-based early game prior to the combo finisher (e.g. Burn Shaman before the Flash nerf, and Insanity Warlock).

Would you say from your experience that such decks are “low agency,” as Smeet insists?

I wouldn’t call anything very low agency, but they are probably the most complex decks in the game.

It explains Altair insisting rainbow is a bad deck when it’s consistently high in stats (skill issue).

I don’t think it was a skill issue, I think it was a will issue. He went into the “test” wanting it to be bad, so his subconscious mind / bias was against him finding the best plays. The equivalent of being on tilt.

It’s always very difficult to collect objective data when one goes into it already having committed to a particular explanation.

It’s not good for skill to be that biased.

I wouldn’t do that to myself

The version I was playing didn’t have the combos you described as it didn’t run greedy partners, so my combos were less lethal and very much telegraphed ahead.

It was definitely a mistake to put that version as a top of tier 1 in the previous VS report.

I can’t say anything about this one, other than what I concluded based on your formula, because I didn’t test it, but I’m sticking to the idea that it’s bad, because if it wasn’t bad, it would be played more. Your combos still require you to somehow reach turn 9 with 2 coins or turn 10 with 1 coin and all the combo pieces in your hand, which is borderline impossible in the levels I play. You’re not a control deck, you’re an aggro-combo deck.

Besides, all of that is yesterday’s news. We got a broken and bugged Mage taking over, and none of the decks work anymore, which includes rainbow shaman (if it ever did work).

I wouldn’t take any specific VS deck(as opposed to archetype) too seriously. It’s part of their for-profit business to suggest to people decks. Their archetype (not deck) stats are sometimes sort of accurate but I really see no benefit taking them too seriously over hsguru; it’s probably much better to go hsguru yourself; you can filter in various ways and see archetype card stats (mulligan/drawn/kept) and make more complex decisions on specific cards.