Melon Madness: How a Single Card has Warped Wild

Early into The Boomsday Project meta, it appears that the power level of the new expansion in the Wild format is quite low. It’s not terribly shocking for an expansion to have a minimal impact on the Wild metagame, especially so soon after its release. Because of the eternal nature of Wild and the deep card pool in the format, each Hearthstone expansion introduces less and less disruption. After a new set releases, players toy around with new cards in old decks and fresh archetypes only to find that, with one or two exceptions, the decks were better off as they were before.

This is, in part, due to the Wild format’s heavy reliance on powerful synergies. New sets may introduce independently powerful cards, but if they don’t mesh with the core of an established deck, they quickly lose their spot in favor of past cards that fit better with the deck’s strategy.

A Juicy Exception

There are, of course, always exceptions to the rule. In the case of The Boomsday Project, a single card has created a powerful new deck and bolstered an already potent mainstay in the Wild metagame.

That card, for anyone who hasn’t queued up Wild since Boomsday, is Juicy Psychmelon. While this card is almost nonexistent on the Standard ladder, it has infested Wild since day one of the new expansion.

Drawing four cards for four mana is already powerful, but with the specific restrictions on the cards you draw, you can potentially get even more value from the single spell.

Druid’s Dynamic Duo

The disproportionate strength of Juicy Psychmelon in Wild lies in Druid’s dynamic duo of Aviana and Kun the Forgotten King. Playing Aviana followed by Kun grants Malfurion ten additional mana to spend while only paying one mana for each additional minion. This pair of Druid Legendary minions has enabled numerous powerful combos centered around dealing damage by grossly underpaying for minions with powerful effects. From C'Thun to Malygos to more recent minion combinations, Aviana and Kun have a long history of enabling absurd turns in Hearthstone.

Because of their potent mana ramp and defensive tools, in the past, Combo Druid decks’ biggest hurdle was often draw order. Even with seemingly endless cycle and stall, if one of the critical combo pieces is the 30th card, it was still difficult for the Druid to win the game.

With the introduction of Juicy Psychmelon, however, Druid gained a means of tutoring for minions of a specific cost, the most critical being Aviana and Kun at the 9 and 10-Cost slots, respectively.

Now, what was once a limiting factor that balanced the deck’s potent combo is no longer a concern. A single card (of which two copies can be run) can draw all combo pieces for four mana, dramatically increasing the consistency of multiple combo decks and effectively ending the game once the Druid reaches the requisite ten mana necessary to pull off the combo.

The result was a meteoric rise in the relative strength of Combo Druids in the Wild format. More specifically, two Druid decks are able to abuse Juicy Psychmelon to tutor for each piece of their combo.

The Kobold Way

Wild Togwaggle Druid

Togwaggle Druid was fairly common in the Wild metagame before the Boomsday expansion. After the reveal of Juicy Psychmelon, players quickly became concerned about the deck rising in power due to one card drawing all combo pieces. As predicted, Psychmelon pushed this already potent deck to another level entirely.

Togwaggle Druid’s newfound ability to tutor for the combo pieces allows it to aggressively churn through its decks with far less concern for burned cards before making the infamous swap. In doing so, the opponent is left with even fewer options after the switch, or stuck taking fatigue damage.

The Stars Align

Wild Star Aligner Druid

Something of a meme during the reveal season, Star Aligner was often a consideration for Druid OTKs when paired with North Sea Kraken. Many wrote off the combo due to the number of cards required, the clunky damage breakpoints, uncertainty about the mechanics, and presence of better options.

As soon as players started to include an eight-mana minion with seven health, however, it quickly became clear that, with the help of Juicy Psychmelon, Star Aligner Druid was the real deal. Like Togwaggle Druid, Psychmelon draws enough of the combo pieces to go off. Unlike Togwaggle Druid, however, Star Aligner Druid’s combo turn typically ends the game on the spot. Juicy Psychmelon is so powerful in this deck that it is able to eschew Ultimate Infestation entirely.

Warping Wild’s Metagame

With the potency of Combo Druid archetypes skyrocketing in power after the introduction of a single new card, players quickly began flocking to Malfurion shortly after Boomsday. The quick rise had many players calling for immediate nerfs to reduce the strength of Druid.

Now that the meta has settled a bit, it seems that Combo Druid decks aren’t as egregiously broken as they appeared at the start of the expansion. Both variants are certainly beatable, and many of the best decks from The Witchwood Wild meta maintain strong matchups against such slow-developing Druid decks.

Still, both Combo Druid decks remain powerful and popular decks in the format. More importantly, the manner in which it wins necessitates specific answers. Even the threat of facing Druid on ladder warps the Wild metagame around the archetype.

Teching for Druid

Slower decks are beginning to realize how damaging hand disruption is for Combo Druids. As a Neutral option, Dirty Rat is pretty much a requirement for any deck that doesn’t win through early game pressure.

Similarly, Deathlords can rip combo pieces into play but suffers from the speed at which it does so. Too often, Druids can ignore this eight-health minion long enough to play Juicy Psychmelon, eliminating the risk of disruption.

Warlock has some class-specific combo disruption in Gnomeferatu and the newly-released Demonic Project. The former is a bit too unreliable, but the latter allows Reno Warlocks to offset the restriction of a single copy of Dirty Rat with a second hand-disruption tool.

Regardless of the tool used, Wild Control decks are required to dedicate card slots to Druid given the prevalence of the class on the ladder.

Killing Them Quickly

Alternatively, many players are finding greater success by queuing up aggressive decks on the Wild ladder. True, Druids have ridiculous defensive tools and seemingly endless amounts of armor generation, but forcing them into a reactive gameplan often prevents them from pursuing their own win condition.

As a result, the popularity of Odd Rogue, Odd Paladin, and (especially) Even Shaman has returned nearly to where it was before the new expansion, helping keep the win rate of Druid at a reasonable place. Likewise, a return of swashbuckling Warriors may be in order to combat the high concentration of Druids near the top of the ladder.

A Familiar Wild Landscape

Clearly, even with Juicy Psychmelon, Combo Druid is beatable but that’s not the problem with class at the moment. With such a high population of a class capable of pulling off a game-winning combo as early as turn four or five, the Wild metagame ends up being extremely polarized.

Players are forced to choose between decks that decks that win before Druid can combo and decks that grind out the Druid after disrupting the combo. Anything in the middle just can’t be considered reliable enough for high ranks. Being forced to give so much attention on a single deck or archetype limits variety in a format that, for many, class and deck diversity was a major draw.

Overall, the current Wild landscape nearly resembles the reign of a five-mana Naga Sea Witch. Similar to the current meta, Wild players were forced to either score an early kill or have an answer to a board full of Giants by turn five. It’s not so much that either deck, Giantslock or Combo Druid, has an oppressively high win rate; it’s more about the polarized gameplay that the decks impose on the Wild ladder.

Solving this Psychedelic Problem

If Juicy Psychmelon is such a problem, then clearly a solution is required. Many suggestions have come up within the community to reduce the dominance of this new four-mana Epic spell. Let’s take a look at some of the more likely scenarios!

Breaking Up the Aviana and Kun Romance

If left untouched, Aviana and Kun the Forgotten King will always be a difficult balancing act for Blizzard in Wild. The pair enables so many game-ending combos that perhaps a change is in order. Frequently, the suggestion is to increase the cost of Aviana to ten mana, forcing players to run Innervate in order to achieve the extra turn’s worth of one-mana minions. Critically, this also disrupts the ability for Juicy Psychmelon to draw all combo pieces at once.

This would certainly reduce the effectiveness of both Juicy Psychmelon and Druid OTKs, in general. Still, the Aviana and Kun combination has a long history in Hearthstone, including a brief stint in the Standard format, and at least offers a unique and interesting win condition. Sure, the nerf wouldn’t ruin the combo-potential for Druids completely but, prior to Boomsday, the pair wasn’t necessarily oppressive.

Reduce Druid’s Defenses

Another course of action may be to reduce the efficacy of some of Druid’s defensive tools. Part of the problem is how much time Malfurion can buy simply by ignoring boards and tanking up. Much of the Druid removal is flexible enough to fit the needs of nearly any situation and the class’s armor gain is outrageous. Likewise, with a full board, even an already-nerfed Spreading Plague can essentially heal Druids for 35.

While limiting the some of the class’s survival doesn’t directly impact Juicy Psychmelon, if the Druid is dead, he or she certainly can’t make use of the combo cards drawn to hand. Cutting down some of these tools can go a long way in reducing the strength of Combo Druid’s potent shell.

Increase the Mana Cost

A common change to Hearthstone cards, especially Spells, involves increasing their cost. Unfortunately, with so much mana ramp available in Druid, a card’s cost often feels irrelevant. As such, this change is unlikely to have much impact on the card’s inclusion in Druid decks. Compared to Sprint, drawing four cards with Psychmelon is already a bargain. Even increasing the cost to six, a 50% increase, would still make Branching Paths playable on the same turn, allowing the Druid to buy an extra turn before the combo is played.

Reduce Druid’s Ramp

Part of the issue with Combo Druids is that, with Juicy Psychmelon, as soon as the Druid hits ten mana, the combo is not only possible but likely. This problem is exasperated by the sheer number of ramp spells available to the class, especially in Wild, giving Druid the chance to get to ten mana ridiculously fast.

Mana Ramp is a critical part of Druid’s identity but will remain a problem to balance around as new high-cost cards with powerful effects are introduced. But what can be done about such a key component of Druid’s livelihood?

Nourish is a good starting point in this regard. Not only does the card generate two mana crystals, but it cycles deeper into the Druid’s deck when ramp is unnecessary. The flexibility of this card makes it, along with a handful of others, an automatic inclusion in any slow Druid deck.

Why Was Six Afraid of Seven?

Finally, Psychmelon’s strength can be reduced simply by reducing the number of cards drawn. Rather than dismantling the Aviana and Kun duo, eliminating the 10-Cost card that’s drawn from Juicy Psychmelon prevents a full combo from being drawn and has a similar effect. If only 7, 8, and 9-Cost cards are drawn, combo turns become far less consistent.

With Biology Project or Innervate, the King Togwaggle and Azalina Soulthief combo can still be pulled off, but draw order once against becomes relevant in both this and Kun-enabled combos.

Ending the Madness

Regardless of how, until something is done about Juicy Psychmelon (or the Combo decks it enables), the Wild metagame will continue to be warped around this lone Hearthstone card.

Roffle

A card game veteran, Roffle has been infatuated with Hearthstone since closed beta. These days, he spends most of his time tinkering with decks on ladder or earning gold in Arena (f2p btw). In particular, Roffle has a wealth of experience in competitive Wild Hearthstone, including a top 16 finish in the inaugural Wild Open Tournament and numerous high end of season finishes since the format’s inception.

Check out Roffle on Twitter or on their Website!

Leave a Reply

27 Comments

  1. […] the Star Aligner Druid reign of terror shortly after The Boomsday Project, Wild players have been fearful of combo decks running rampant […]

  2. Mel
    September 5, 2018 at 9:35 am

    Oh my god, thank you for posting this article. I looked to the internet for other people complaining about Wild Druid and no one seems to be anywhere else. It’s all I get in wild, honestly, every game. If I get any Druid now they automatically get a friend add and a personal “thanks for being a good person” comment. Haha. But seriously, well written article. Can I have your opinion on something? I think we can all agree this is unbalanced and something needs to be done, but— do you think they will? What do you think? There have been some past nerfs I was 100% expecting any day (ex: Shudderwock) but the nerds never came. I think this one is worse but now I’m just despontant and the Blizzard thugs. Do they even play the game? I don’t know what to think.

    • Mel
      September 5, 2018 at 9:36 am

      (That should read “any OTHER type of Druid”)

      • Mel
        September 5, 2018 at 9:43 am

        (Further typos: “nerfs” not “nerds”, “despondent”, “AT the Blizzard thugs”…. yikes)

  3. DocShi
    September 3, 2018 at 10:52 am

    In my eyes there is just one problematic card: Spreading Plaque!

    Without that card, the whole comboparts become what a combodeck should be: not over 45% winrate.
    And we would have other druiddecks.

    Cause the mix between ramp, carddraw and a lot of armor is to OP with Spreading Plaque together.

    Just my two cents.

    By the way; good article

  4. Eg
    September 2, 2018 at 12:38 am

    What if Psychmelon drew 4 but discard a random card that it draws? It would be more of a value card than a tutor effect still playable in a big ramp deck but bad in a combo deck, which maybe is what was intended with the card (or did they really want druid combo to be super consistent? I think they probably just disnt consider wild very much).

  5. laughing
    September 1, 2018 at 4:40 pm

    there are a plenty of ways to stop combo decks. wild is joke town and seriously calling for nerfs so the joke town wild is will be more fun is pretty absurd. im pretty sure the team stalestone didnt overlook that when they made the card. asking for a nerf is cryin over spilled milk. wild is nothing more than a coinflip of garbage broken cards that nobody even cares about much less blizzard. its easy enough to get rank 5 with odd ropgue in 3 hours so who really cares about wild…nobody plays the shit anyway. when you q into the same dummy 18 times in a row in casual should tell you something right there. I made legend in wild beofre the xpan and came in at 99 never played another game for the next three weeks and still made top 200. NOPBODY PLAYS WILD sorry.

    • BDIZZ0927
      September 3, 2018 at 3:18 pm

      Go lick your salty ass in a corner you fun sucking leach. No one cares you have a miserable life.

      • DukeStarswisher
        September 4, 2018 at 6:53 am

        I second this statement. But I’m glad people like this don’t play wild. So its a win for me.

  6. CD001
    September 1, 2018 at 4:06 pm

    **Reduce Druid’s Defenses** <– so very much this… Druid and Rogue have been the main OTK classes for a long, long time (plus Freeze/Exodia Mage) – and the one thing an OTK class should *not* have, IMO, is really strong defensive power – they need to be tempered by aggro (and this is coming from someone who's favourite deck was Malygos Miracle Rogue back when it was good – before MSG).

    Druid's massive ramp and Aviana/Kun/Malygos OTK combo were not *that* big of an issue before KFT – but with Spreading Plague, UI and Malfurion the Pestilent – further bolstered by Branching Paths (and to a lesser extent Oaken Summons) in K&C and finally Psychmelon to fix any combo-draw issues now, Malfurion has all the tools for insane combo plays, better (more reliable) card draw than Valeera AND almost as much survivability as Garrosh.

    I still really like the Aviana/Kun combo – especially with Maly/Alex – but I just think Druid has too versatile a toolbox now.

  7. Tarquinius
    September 1, 2018 at 11:01 am

    Really great article, it was a fun and informative read for sure! I played a tonne of wild Togwaggle Druid in Witchwood but have exclusively played standard since Boomsday dropped, so it was nice to read about what’s going on over there. I can see why a change might need to be made (personally I’m a big fan of the ten mana Aviana one, necessitating the Innervate) but I’m still really looking forward to giving Juicy Togwaggle a go. I was very excited to play him properly in standard this exp, but realised upon playing that I was too used to the strength of Poison Seeds and leaving a big board behind after the combo.. the inferiority just hurt my enjoyment more than I thought it would, and I moved over to other decks.

  8. Brb
    September 1, 2018 at 1:40 am

    Reducir el numero de cartas a robar me parece la mejor idea, dado a que hay otro arquetipos como malygos y jade que buscan beneficios de Aviana y kum, y a diferencia de los anteriores tienen menor provecho de pm,

    • beerslater
      September 6, 2018 at 5:13 am

      donde esta la biblioteca?

  9. mm
    August 31, 2018 at 8:53 pm

    Can anyone tell me one control deck that would be tier 1 if Juicy Psychmelon did not exist? i can’t think of any. Juicy Psychmelon is actually helping renolock wich is the only tier 1 control deck atm.

    • Sheikh
      September 1, 2018 at 7:17 am

      Big priest

      • mm
        September 1, 2018 at 7:56 am

        Big priest is not really a control deck, and i still see too much big priest to my taste. But that is one deck that druid push out of the game. Thanks druid

        • DukeStarswisher
          September 4, 2018 at 6:55 am

          Big Priest is definitely a control deck. All of its non-minion cards (so all except 5 cards) are meant to establish board control.

    • Vraisourire
      September 2, 2018 at 8:07 pm

      Control warrior

  10. Sheikh
    August 31, 2018 at 5:35 pm

    I am using wild exodia mage which is good against all control deck, however dirty rat is the problem but still have a wr of 80% against control decks the same combo technique which you mentioned in in your ” best wild decks” with some changes like i have two ice blocks,,two primodial glyph and keysmith,, so with luck you can have 6 ice blocks/extra turns max, plus 2 research project, 2 extra research project (which you can find in glyph) and and oricle coldnight, so with luck you burn their 12 cards, my average combo turn is 12 min you can do the combo on turn 8. And this season i hit rank 3
    All i am saying combo cant be op if you know the right fit for it now the exodia mage according to you is currently tier 4.

  11. Quelqunx
    August 31, 2018 at 5:17 pm

    Agreed. Any ctrl deck that doesn’t run 2 dirty rats (or 1 for reno decks) is doing it wrong.

  12. Indefinite
    August 31, 2018 at 4:10 pm

    First off,really like this article. Well written and organized.
    Secondly, I used Star-Aligner to quickly get from rank 20 to 12 before I started seeing direct counters to it. I was amazed at how little effort I had to put into the combo. The deck played itself. I agree this card needs to be addressed in some way. The power creep in hearthstone is getting out of hand and each new expansion leaves me feeling overhyped and disappointed.

    • Roffle - Author
      August 31, 2018 at 4:27 pm

      Thanks for the kind words!

      I had a similar experience playing the deck to Legend shortly after the expansion dropped this season. Despite playing rather poorly, I kept winning games simply because I drew Juicy Psychmelon. Eventually, the wins came so easily that it stopped being rewarding to pilot. At least players have adjusted to answer some of the Combo Druid decks, but the result is a metagame that’s somewhat lacking in diversity.

  13. mm
    August 31, 2018 at 11:55 am

    Wild is ruled by aggro, the best deck is even shaman, but Juicy Psychmelon killed every slow deck except renolock with several anti druid cards. Not even kingsbane survived, since druid beat kingsbane and there is no slow deck left to farm. Despite Juicy Psychmelon power, aggro still rules

    • Roffle - Author
      August 31, 2018 at 12:07 pm

      A big part of Aggro’s reign, however, is Juicy Psychmelon pushing out the slower Control decks that were equipped to keep Aggro in check.

      • mm
        August 31, 2018 at 8:17 pm

        True, but renolock is enjoying the moment, since it only need to worry about aggro and druid. It no longuer need to worry about value decks (fatigue), and kingsbane- mill decks , witch always was a problem

    • Memnarch
      August 31, 2018 at 1:46 pm

      The only reason aggro “rules” right now is because combo druid has put control on life support. The only real control deck left is renolock now because it does not fold too hard to either aggro or combo. The reason this is like this is because of melon making the combo so easy acquire. If you want to ladder you simply can not queue with control right now because you will automatically lose to 20% of the field which is druids.

      • mm
        August 31, 2018 at 8:27 pm

        yes, but i don’t know if a control deck that can beat all the aggro variants exist, shaman, paladin, mage, zoo and much more, there is any deck that has more than 50% win rate against even shaman alone? i don’t know. We need raza priest back ( it can’t beat druid anyway)