What’s going on… the deck plays itself with card draw?
You can AFK 50% of the time and still win games.
Because the deck falls off massively as you climb. It does play itself, it also isn’t good enough to carry you to high ranks. So most stay in diamond MMR ranges
Yep, I have literally never seen this deck once on NA where I’m high rank, but when I played a bit on EU to hit legend for the first time on that server last month it was all imbue paly-- and I actually struggled against it because I only have 1 deck right now on EU being Aviana Druid lol
The deck is kinda like asteroid shaman from last expansion in that regard, good at low ranks (4-3 digit), bad at high ranks (2-1 digit).
2 Likes
Literally the same situation is with me on NA xD Wall of Imbue Pallies, and I only got Imbue Druid there
It’s my only losing matchup in those ranks, but it’s 90% of all games in Diamond on NA
2 Likes
I wish I were in those MMR ranges right now. My imbue mage deck farms imbue paladin, but it is struggling against the wall of ship DKs and spell damage druids above them.
3 Likes
I played Imbue Paladin last month and lost my 11 star bonus. This deck is board-centered, relatively fun… and giga unplayable if your opponent understands what you are doing and plays cards.
In my experience playing Imbue Paladin was like:
Fast decks: dragons? We don’t care. We go face. Imbue Priest plays 3-3 on the turn 1. You play 3-4 on the turn 3. You must be joking. Don’t expect you will be able to cast Renewing Flames, you will be dead on the turn 5.
Slow decks: how do you like my starship and 50+ armor? Oh, you have Ursol aura and play Anachronos? All my small stuff, to the board, go! And I still have 40+ armor btw.
I am stuck in Diamond because there are still too many decks which can beat imbue Paladin mainly by OTK spread again… This game will never have balance again… when they start to reach balanced state, another stupid expansion kills the game again… getting tired of this really.
One problem with the deck is so many people play it and it’s so easy to play, almost everyone knows how its played, therefore they know how to play against it.
Though there are people who just want nerfs instead of actually having to think how to play against it
I’m just bored of seeing it. It’s so predictable. Gee guys I wonder what’s going to happen on turn 8. It’s a mystery I tell you. Anything could happen. My opponent hit their hero power again. Didn’t see that coming
Although, it is fun to freeze their board when it’s completely full and all they have left in their deck are free dragons that are just going to go poof
In other words.
Because it is easy to play despite of not being the best deck to the point of people giving up on learning to play.
Sometimes we need to call things what they really are.
…are not the imbue paladins, but those who lose to them.
Like they can’t even learn to just try playing imbue paladin themselves to at least reach 50/50.
Given how ranking works, just a little bit of luck should push you above 50%, and that’s enough to start climbing out, and they can start seeing less pallies.
:::Omni-man pointing to head pose:: THINK PEOPLE THINK
It’s not that. The deck just has a very linear play pattern that’s not particularly difficult to play around. Because of this, many decks get better against imbue paladin as the person playing them gets better, but the imbue paladin itself does not see gains against other matchups.
Plus the field gets increasingly more hostile to imbue paladin as you climb.
Imbue paladin is non-competitive by the time you reach high legend.
What happens when a deck Pattern is THAT linear?
People do little to no missplay and what happens when they don’t missplay on average?
They win more given they aren’t playing at the top of the ladder.
This is about the micro and not about the macro exactly because we aren’t talking about the top of the ladder.
This is why stuff like that should not even pass the design part to start with.
Who dare even got print and buffed on top of it.
No. They probably:
learn.
Play it.
Get bored as hell after gaining some extra ranks because don’t missplay is more than enough to get out of lower ranks and the deck holds your hand on that department.
Go do something else.
Anyone with the minimal understand of design should Just not let stuff like that get out to public.
And to be fair most hero Power decks play like that. This is not exclusive to imbue paladin.
I said it’s people who lose to imbue pally
If somebody did learn and play pally, even for a while, then they would by definition, stop losing to pally
So no. They couldn’t have learned.
edit: oh and whether one gets “bored” of playing a deck has nothing to do with whether one has learned to play. If anything, letting one’s personal feelings cloud their decisions is a sign they’re doing the opposite of learning.
“I could start making different decisions based on what I just learned to improve my situation, but because my feel feels are hurt, I’m not gonna!”
Except that this argument not holds against someone not talking about powerlevel of the deck.
It also not holds for someone doing their climb and having to play against what feels like a zombie army.
Between imbue paladin and some other decks this metagame is Just boring and sometime we need to talk about that defective design people liking to talk about it or not.
Stuff like that is not only something most not like to play against but a opportunity cost where could be in place something people do like to play against.
No, except your own comment that started this was
That’s what I responded to.
Not about power levels
Not about climbing
Not about how boring one deck is or another
Nothing you said changes what I said. Whatever “giving up on learning to play” metric you assign to imbue pallies, those who still lose to imbue pallies are, by definition, even worse, as they can’t even learn what imbue pallies learned (which is to say, play some imbue pally themselves so they can stop losing so much to imbue pallies)
Considering that the gist of the problem is that most of our accounts that get stuck in Diamond because of all the imbue Pallies are stuck precisely because we lack the dust to craft anything we want
It’s a slim chance I’ll be playing such boring classes and decks on other servers. I have too little dust, so I have to invest it in fun decks which are already to proven to work for me
And this is quite rare, that a suboptimal deck of any class acts successfully as a gatekeeper against people proven to be able to hit legend with almost anything, anytime.
I think it at least shows how unbalanced Paladin as a class is at the moment, but perhaps it also tells us that top 1k don’t really have it all figured out and maybe there will be space for that deck somewhere in the future.
EDIT: It’s a semi-metabreaker, is what it is. It can’t break the meta completely because tougher decks exist in the meta which defend against its penetration, but it can at least gatekeep a few of the staple meta decks that are ill-prepared to deal with it. Nerfing DK, Rogue and the strongest Paladin deck should bring it to full light
Well, here’s what minami said the other day
So I have little sympathy that he has a problem with imbue pally. Imbue pally is the exact kind of deck that needs certain expensive cards to work
Ursol
The epic 4 mana dragon and like one copy of ancient of yore
Malorne
Ceaseless
It’s not the most expensive, but it’s expensive enough that each piece matters a lot.
And amusingly enough, fishing priest is imbue pally’s worst match up according to HSR
And fishing priest is a relatively budget deck. Tourist is like the one must have. But according to minami such decks ought to die (so we can all bow down to imbue pally diamond overlords 
)
Why do people keep using HSR as a reference guide? It only covers up to Gold, for the stats Platinum+ you have to pay.