you mean the card they had to buff because it didnt see play at 7?
This is ridiculous. None of the top 5 decks are âhyper aggro.â Rainbow Shaman isnât hyper aggro. Frost DK isnât hyper aggro. Handbuff Paladin isnât hyper aggro. You might convince me that theyâre aggressive decks, but they donât 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.
If anything this meta is proof that people donât actually like midrange.
But they just killed a combo deck that was only relevant at higher tiers, something thatâs happened repeatedly. I donât 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. Iâve had a break so Iâm 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 didnât like?
I think the unpopularity of the effective midrange archetypes is exaggerated. As Schyla has pointed out, 1.5% for Rainbow Shaman isnât 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 itâs 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 wasnât 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 arenât hyper aggro.
Frost DK is a pretty pure aggro deck though.
Handbuff paladin isnât, 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.
Itâs aggro, or low agency blowouts. Thatâs the meta.
Iâm 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 Iâm 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 âlow agency,â as Smeet insists?
I wouldnât 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 itâs consistently high in stats (skill issue).
I donât think it was a skill issue, I think it was a will issue. He went into the âtestâ wanting it to be bad, so his subconscious mind / bias was against him finding the best plays. The equivalent of being on tilt.
Itâs always very difficult to collect objective data when one goes into it already having committed to a particular explanation.
Itâs not good for skill to be that biased.
I wouldnât do that to myself
The version I was playing didnât have the combos you described as it didnât 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 canât say anything about this one, other than what I concluded based on your formula, because I didnât test it, but Iâm sticking to the idea that itâs bad, because if it wasnât 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. Youâre not a control deck, youâre an aggro-combo deck.
Besides, all of that is yesterdayâs 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 wouldnât take any specific VS deck(as opposed to archetype) too seriously. Itâs 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; itâs 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.