Back in 2020, Blizzard started giving away free decks for new and returning players. More recently, they changed it from picking one deck right away to “loaning” 6 decks for a week. This way players have access to all 6 options for 7 days and can playtest them during that time. After a week ends, they will have to select one of the 6 to get for free, the other 5 will no longer be playable.
Sadly those decks never include cards from the latest expansion. So in case of the new Whizbang’s Workshop decks, they will only include cards from 2023 (Festival of Legends, TITANS and Showdown in the Badlands). Still, with a few small adjustments they should be good enough to play competitively in the new expansion.
If you just started playing Hearthstone or haven’t been playing in a while and you’re wondering what those decks are and which you should pick, this article is for you!
How to Get Them
There are two kinds of players who are eligible for free decks – new and returning players.
New players get to pick the deck when they reach Bronze 10 rank for the first time (which is the rank to which everyone is reset to every season). To get there, they can either play through the apprentice ranks (special ranks reserved for new players) or straight-up skip them. We don’t recommend the latter option, because if you’re a truly new player, playing on those separate ranks will make you understand the game better and also offer a bunch of extra rewards.
Returning players are those who were inactive for at least 90 days, which is roughly 3/4 of the expansion. In the past, you had to complete a so-called “returning players experience”, but now just logging in is enough to get your shiny, new deck.
After one of those two conditions is met, players get 6 temporary decks for free on log-in. Then exactly 7 days later they will have to choose one out of 6 to keep permanently.
It’s also important to note that this is not a one-time offer. If you already got a free deck in the past, if you stay inactive for over 90 days again, you will be eligible for another free deck. So if you only play at the start of each expansion, you can technically get a new free deck every set.
Full List of Loaner Decks
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Which Deck To Pick
That’s probably the most important question. The good news is that this time there are no bad answers. All 6 decks are pretty strong. While they have some weird card choices here and there, they are very close to full, competitive meta decks.
Now, if you don’t have a strong preference when it comes to classes, if we look closer at the decks, some of them are better than the others. Just one caveat – Whizbang’s Workshop comes with 145 new cards AND a Standard rotation. The meta is going to look completely different than it does now. It means that the power level of those decks might shift around, but I wouldn’t expect the ones that are the strongest right now to become the weakest or vice versa.
In terms of power level, I’d say that Death Knight, Warlock and Warrior are the three strongest decks here. They all see a lot of play, in fact, after a few card adjustments, they would be some of the top meta builds right now. And they will very likely still be viable in the next expansion. The other three decks are not bad at all, but either they aren’t Tier 1 archetypes right now or you would need to make quite a lot of card changes to bring those specific builds to the top level.
And in terms of value, Death Knight is still up there, offering 3 strong Legendary cards and four good Epics. Rogue is also very good in terms of value with 3 Legendary cards and 6 Epic card in total. Sadly one of those Legendaries is likely a filler card (Bounce Around (ft. Garona) is not very strong). Those two are joined by Shaman, which also has 3 Legendaries, one of which is Reno, Lone Ranger. He’s one of the best Legendaries in the game right now and a must-have if you want to play so-called Highlander (singleton) decks. Sadly the deck struggles in terms of Epics, because it doesn’t have a single one. Then the last three decks (Paladin, Warlock and Warrior) only have 2 Legendaries and 4 Epics each, which reduces their value a bit, but they aren’t THAT far behind. Out of the last three, I think that Warlock and Warrior are roughly equal and Paladin has a bit worse selection of expensive cards. (Note: I’m only talking about Legendary and Epic cards you have to craft or open in packs – most of those decks include some Legendaries/Epics you can get for free, but I’m not counting them for obvious reasons.)
Overall, I think that Death Knight is the best pick, offering both supreme value and power. However, it’s followed very closely by Warrior and Warlock (because of very high power level) as well as Shaman (but only if you’re interested in Reno/singleton decks). I would say that Paladin and Rogue are the worst picks, but they are still decent, so if you like playing those classes, go ahead!
