We got our first glimpse of the upcoming Hearthstone TITANS expansion yesterday. Content creators invited by Blizzard had a chance to play with the new cards and stream their experimentation. I had the pleasure of receiving an invite to the event and got nine hours of gameplay experience with the new cards. In this article, I try to analyze that experience to describe what TITANS will bring to Hearthstone.
There is an important caveat when it comes to these promotional events. Every deck had to include ten cards from the TITANS expansion. This means that some of the current meta decks could not be played at the event. Therefore, the event meta was different from what the live meta will be. However, some of the strongest decks are usually discovered already in these events. The real meta will be a mixture of what worked well in the promotional event, the old top meta decks, and some things that were not discovered yet.
Look at the STATS!
TITANS is a powerful expansion. There are many cards in the new expansion that provide huge opportunities for swing turns. Giant boards are built out of nowhere to crush the opposition.
And by Giant boards, I sometimes mean it literally. Here is a picture of a Warlock mirror I played against BabyBear, where she summoned a board of three 15/15 minions and one 3/3 minion on turn six. This was accomplished with Loken, Jailer of Yogg-Saron drawing Fanottem, Lord of the Opera. Then, two copies of Forge of Wills that had been played on previous turns summoned Giant copies of the Tentacle. Even by modern Hearthstone standards, these are some impressive numbers. I actually managed to win that game anyway, which perhaps tells you something about the power level you can expect from the new expansion.
This was not an isolated incident. In another game against NoHandsGamer, he put even more stats on the board on turn six as a Druid. He started his turn with one 2/2 Treant on the board and ended it with six 8/12 Treants and one 6/8 Treant.
Druid’s new Embrace of Nature and Solar Eclipse turned Drum Circle into a monster. Drum Circle, in turn, made Cultivation cost no mana. And that’s how we ended up here. This was too much for me to handle.
While those big swings are flashy, sometimes things also end up being built over time. Here is what my Mech Rogue board looked like on turn 10, moments before Warlock’s demise.
Mech Rogue is the master of Magnetization, and unless you can stop them, they will grow big. Ini Stormcoil arrived to helpfully make a Rush and Windfury copy of my 22/20 that cleared the Taunt minions and paved the way for my original minion to deliver a lethal blow.
We should also not forget about the good old Face Hunter, now more dangerous than ever.
Wildseeds start out dormant, so they cannot be interacted with. They are also Beasts, so Absorbent Parasite can Magnetize on them to give them Rush. Then, Always a Bigger Jormungar can be used to give them trample. This way, a Wildseed that just wakes up becomes a lethal threat if the opponent has any minions on the board. That is exactly what happened to the poor Warlock in the picture. They had a low-health minion on the board on turn six, my Wildseed woke up, I buffed it, and it was game over.
What Do All These Stats Mean for the Meta?
Despite the huge swing turns, the meta did not feel monotonous to me, at least in this event. For example, I had an 8-1 record with Face Hunter. This proves that it is possible to go under those big swing turns. I also had a 3-0 record with Control Warlock, including winning against the triple 15/15s on turn six. This proves that it is possible to handle big boards with the right tools. I also went 3-1 with Mage, burning my opponents down with Sif and damage spells after delaying the game with Solid Alibi. Yeah, Solid Alibi is exactly as frustrating as you remember it to be.
The thing is, Solid Alibi is more important for Mage than ever. You cannot handle these boards with damage-based removal. You can succeed with hard removal. Control Warlock has some good hard-removal tools. Control Priest has a bunch of hard-removal tools. Control Warrior, surprisingly, does not. They have Brawl, but they lack depth in their hard-removal arsenal. Control Warrior was one of my biggest disappointments in the event.
You need a plan to handle almost Battlegrounds-level stats in the upcoming meta. It can be through hard removal. It can be through a huge board of your own. It can be through stalling the game and preventing the minions from hurting you while you assemble a lethal combo. Or it can be through going underneath them and winning the game fast enough. All of these approaches were successful in the theorycrafting event.
I am optimistic about the new meta. It is different. There are more stats on the board than ever. And yet, there were multiple successful approaches to the game in the event. We may discover broken things with the full launch, but the concept is not fundamentally flawed and can be balanced.
What About the Titans?
I have written a lot about stats and swing turns, but nothing yet about the big stars of the expansion. What happened to the Titans?
The Titans are there, but they are not as powerful as they initially seemed to be. I originally evaluated Titans based on our current meta. TITANS meta is far more powerful. Titans are still good cards, and they see play in many decks. But the decks have so much power in them even without the Titans that Titans often fail to stand out from among the crowd. Sure, I used Sargeras, the Destroyer to clear the board. I used The Primus to destroy a big minion and search for a lethal spell. I smacked some face with Taeshalach from Aggramar, the Avenger. But shockingly, I did not feel particularly powerful while doing so. It was just what I expected my cards to achieve as a baseline. Titans have their moments, but there are many other ways to project power in the new expansion too.
Deck Ideas for TITANS
The theorycrafting event was the first chance to really try the decks in action, and I am sure the lists can be refined more based on those experiences before the full expansion launch. Anyway, here are some decks that I had good success with or saw shine during the event.
- Format: wolf
- Season: season-112
- Posted By:
5,640
I did not play this deck myself, I only met it when it was piloted by NoHandsGamer. You saw the screenshot of its crazy board above, and it seemed very dangerous. You ramp, discount your spells, and make them cast both effects and boom, that’s the game.
- Format: wolf
- Season: season-112
- Posted By:
- 13,260
While I could not get Control Warrior to work reliably, I did have a good time with Blackrock 'n' Roll in combination with Steam Guardian. Steam Guardian tutors and discounts Blackrock 'n' Roll, so you can often play it on turn four and turn your minions into huge threats.
- Format: wolf
- Posted By:
- 11,520
I went with a single-minded strategy to play Mechs until my opponent is dead and went 5-0 with that. Playing the deck does not feel like playing Rogue for the most part, but there are a couple of exceptions. The Sparkbots from From the Scrapheap can Magnetize your Mechs with many abilities, and juggling them is one of the keys to success. Mimiron, the Mastermind is totally bonkers. The gadgets you get really feel Rogue with all the tricks you can pull off with them. You play a Mech deck that resembles many of the Mech decks we have had before with those Rogue twists.
- Format: wolf
- Posted By:
- 6,600
Good old Face Hunter is more dangerous than ever. Any small minions on the board are a huge liability against it because of Always a Bigger Jormungar and Absorbent Parasite. The new tools add a dangerous win condition to the deck, as if Bananas and Wildseeds were not enough.
- Format: wolf
- Posted By:
- 10,980
I don’t dare to recommend Control Warlock, but I did not lose a game with it. Most people would build it with Thaddius, but I chose to build an old-school pure control deck with Sargeras, the Destroyer as the win condition. It is a style I enjoy a lot, even though it is usually not very strong in Hearthstone.
TITANS, Coming on August 1st
A few more days to go and the new expansion will be available to everyone. TITANS looks like a powerful expansion that brings the strongest boards ever to the game. If that sounds interesting to you, there will be good times ahead.
Old Guardian
Ville "Old Guardian" Kilkku is a writer and video creator focused on analytic, educational Hearthstone, and building innovative Standard format decks. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/OldGuardian Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/old_guardian
At risk of sounding like a know it all, I’ve been very confident the Titan mechanic itself wouldn’t be as big a deal as people insisted.
Planeswalkers in Magic the Gathering are much harder to remove if they’re put in a deck as a dedicated part of the win plan (as opposed to say, splashing in Liliana of the Veil to force a cheap 2 for 1 trade on the enemy’s part), whereas there’s no real reliable way to protect Titans, so they seemed liable to end up being more “discover” effects than anything.
Locations and Hero cards, being entirely new mechanics that are (for all intents and purposes) permanent things your opponent had to play around, have a much different feel than Titans just being ‘a big minion’. Unfortunate, but not a surprise. I don’t have any clever ideas for how they could have made them feel better aside from turning them into more direct Planeswalker analogues (maybe needing mana to activate their abilities, but not being minions so they’re immune to at least hard removal?).
Still, seems like it’ll be a fun expansion if things don’t end in turn 5 with bomb turns every game.