I guess we aggree to disagree.
To me, playing Helya on turns 4-6 is the entire deck. It’s the most 1-card wincon in a while.
If the opponent isn’t Helya’ing I feel 0 pressure.
It’s a stong card, but that’s not the allure of seeing your opponent’s life drain. It’s not really a 1 card win, either. 3 plagues on repeat won’t win you many games.
Odyn is a 1 card win. All you need then is to hero power and stall until you draw any other win con. That might sound like a contradiction, but what I mean is that plagues require a specific deck. Odyn does not. It works in any Warrior deck. Hell, you can’t even play plagues in most DK decks.
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Plague DK is Curse Warlock but bad.
I don’t think I’ve lost a single game to plague dk, I’ll happily draw cards even knowing I have a load of plagues in my deck because they’re so unimpactful.
Curse is so much worse. They can explode n put 3 in your hand, 7 n 8 dmg you can’t deal with, and they burn your cards.
Tormenting your opponent by whittling it down to 0.
You don’t get to disagree about what people who aren’t you find appealing. So no, I’m not wrong.
I do when you stated your reason as fact and it actually makes no sense. You’re delusional minority, if anything. So, yes, you are wrong. To me. It is both fact and opinion.
i think it’s likely popular because it’s an effective death knight deck and for a long time there were only a few options for a death knight deck that could compete at a high level. it’s also probably fun to play. i know the deck but haven’t crafted it.
I can think of a couple reasonable ideas:
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In general, Death Knights are a popular class in both HS and WoW, so people may just want to play it with…
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…a new playstyle. Plagues are new. Sure, it has the same flavor as some other cards we’ve seen before such as Bombs and Hakkar Bloods, but it is different the way it works and for the class as a whole.
Sure, the deck isn’t top tier, but I’m guessing people find it fun/successful enough to take some abuse.
I’m enjoying Plague DK. I was excited back when I first saw the cards come out, but unfortunately, the deck performed poorly. Now that it’s up around the 50% win rate mark, I’m having some success with it. As usual, some players find the deck annoying and seems to believe that curbing their frustration should take precedence over the fun that other players are having with the deck. That’s a shame.
As for the win condition being exclusively Helya, I submit that you don’t fully understand the various constructs of the deck. Helya is certainly important… extremely important. But there is more to the deck than simply waiting on Plagues. First, you still have to defend. You need to ensure your survival through to the end game. That means playing the right cards at the right time. Second, there are more “win condition” type cards in many of the versions of the deck. One example that most of these decks run is, of course, Marrowgar. A late game Marrowgar can be an overwhelming shift in board power if the player times it right and dodges the potential board clear. I also run Ignis (along with 2 Eulogizers), which with some good RNG can also be a potential “win condition” play. It offers me a little more excitement in the match. And lastly, I run Algalor, which is probably bad for my win rate over all, but I don’t care; it’s fun to be able to be a little more active in driving my opponent into drawing plagues.
Ohh you are most welcome! Im always happy to oblige, friend!
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Unlike bombs which have a very large spike and was coupled with a lot of other straight burst like Dr.Boom, plagues was supposed to be this incrementing deck punishing hard control or heavy drag out games, 2dmg per plague is minimal compared to 5 per bomb, but you spam them over the game, and if the game goes to 20 rounds the total potential damage is higher. The idea of this kind of different approach to midrange by having Unholy with throwaway token minions and this inevitable win con vs slow control decks was such a nice take.
Sadly it never got more support and it is hard countered by simply having one card in your deck, and with ETC you can even just sideboard it. Having one card hard shutdown an entire archetype is just crazy, maybe it will be better after nathria rotates out or something.
I tried to make it work for a while because I was trying to make it a tempo deck with burst finish and then stopped because it just isn’t that.
My list was mainly running the plagues for the discounts and one sided aoe. The point was to have your opponent using their resources for removal and then the plagues and chip damage could finish. But there was just too little early support, too many renethal decks, and too little consistency.
Some people seem to like running it as a control deck, but I think the stall tools aren’t there.
In general the meta decks just feel like much worse curse warlock decks.
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i like disrupting dredges and having a cheap 3 damage aoe
There has to be some sort of targeted draw to pull the curses out of the deck because right now it’s just not fast enough to be relevant.
My opponent had 54 cards in their deck before they drew one plague.
Other times it’s not that bad, but that low roll is so low as to be useless.
I am playing curse lock right now, ha.
If only we could assume Blizzard would ever print new cards for this archetype, ever. But if they abandoned Overheal, they’ll DEFINITELY abandon Plagues. It’s a one-set-and-done theme, for sure.
Watching a Control Priest calmly play out a game with 10 cards that cycle-Discover in hand and tutor from deck, while I put 20+ Plagues in there that never get drawn (because Control Priest doesn’t Draw, it Discovers) is probably the least amount of fun I’ve had in Hearthstone in the last couple years. Which is saying a lot.
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Mage is doing this a bit as well, and it plays about as well as this week’s tavern brawl.
It’s a horrible experience to play an opponent that plays more cards that did not start in their deck than cards that did start in the deck. It’s fine once in a while, but the nearly the entire deck creating new things is not fun game play.
I assume you mean Plagues. I use Algalor. It’s not a great tutor, but at one mana, you can pretty much use that hero power every turn.
Trying to kill your opponent exclusively through plague damage is the absolute WORST way to play the deck. Especially now that you can play the entire plague package in a 3U build.
It’s a tempo deck. You use the big tempo cards (Chained Guardian and Tomb Traitor) to manipulate the power to play aggressively. In control match-ups, Helya can force a player for dragging the game out.
The deck needs I think ONE more pay off card for plagues. Probably something that does something really different from the two existing cards,
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Well, simple solution: play Blood DK with Helya and Down with the Ship. It’s still bad because at the end of the day it’s heavily RNG based. Without Helya you deal no damage and sometimes Helya is on the bottom of your deck. And sometimes you lose because opponent has 4 cards and 10 plagues and dodges plagues like a… plague. But the possibility is there.
You are right, Algalor is utterly horrible. It’s understated minion with pretty lackluster Battlecry. Not a great idea if you are running a tempo deck.