Top Standard & Wild Legend Decks – Across the Timeways (Week 12) – January 2026

It’s been almost 2 week since the mini-set arrived, and the trends we were observing last weeekend have been continuing with no big new upsets or breakthroughs. The meta has pretty much settled, and we’ve entered the “deck optimization” phase.

Imbue Rogue is continuing to be #1 in terms of popularity (on average, there are some ranks in which it drops to 2nd or 3rd spot). Although it slightly declined week to week, many players really took a liking to it and continue to play it. But I think it’s safe to say at this point that it’s not a very strong deck. It’s balancing around 50% win rate – some builds are slightly below it, some are slightly above it, but on average it’s just… average. And it doesn’t seem to be one of those “high skill cap” situations – Rogue decks often tend to have a low win rate across the board, but they get insanely strong when mastered (that’s why Rogue is often overrepresented in high Legend). Imbue Rogue is a more straightforward deck with a lot of randomness attached thanks to the Hero Power – in fact, it appears to be performing even better at low ranks (probably because low ranked players don’t close the games fast enough, and Imbue Rogue scales very well into the late game).

Biggest winners of the mini-set are definitely Aura Paladin and Dragon Warrior, as well as the “new” Broxigar Demon Hunter. Aura Paladin was already a very good deck but now it might be the best one to climb with. As usual, Paladin has the exact opposite of the Rogue effect I was talking about – it’s very strong to climb with, but once you hit high Legend it falls off hard because its skill cap is pretty low. But stats indicate that it might be the best deck all the way until high Diamond. Acceleration Aura made a big difference, letting you play ahead of curve for a few turns. Thanks to Violet Treasuregill, you can get it very consistently and then overwhelm your opponent with an early Elise or Crusader Aura (or simply play it in the mid game to drop Gelbin of Tomorrow a turn earlier).

Dragon Warrior experimented with a few new cards at first, but it turns out that only Prescient Slitherdrake is good enough. Dimensional Weaponsmith still sees some play, but most of the strongest builds have already cut it. It’s not a BAD card by any means, the deck is just already very packed and optimized, and Weaponsmith is just slightly too weak. The deck doesn’t need many 3-drops because it can often drop a 2 + 1 combo on T3, such as Stonecarver + Sanguine Depths or Petal Peddler + Giftwrapped Whelp, and those are just much stronger. 2/5 with no immediate impact is very slow, and the deck wins mostly through early-mid game tempo. But a 4 mana 6/9 with Elusive? Well, that IS some crazy tempo. Flamewreathed Faceless rolls in his grave (okay, it’s technically not DEAD, but still).

And last, but not least, Broxigar Demon Hunter. The deck is not exactly new, players have tried something similar at expansion’s launch, but it was just too weak. However, with the mini-set adding A TON of new card draw (Press the Advantage and Remnant of Rage), the deck is finally viable. Now that players had more time to test stuff, it appears that there are two ways to build it. You can either run the Deathrattle package (Blob of Tar, Ravenous Felhunter and a few support cards) and just stall the game this way with a Broxigar as a finisher. Or you can go all-in on card draw and play more like a pure Combo deck, akin to Cycle Rogue. In fact, many draw-focused builds have even started running Incindius to get some extra reach. So far, it appears that the Deathrattle build has a higher win rate up to Legend, and that Draw build is better in high Legend, which honestly was pretty expected (because, which is becoming a pattern in this writeup, skill cap differences).

Overall, the current meta is actually quite diverse, and it has no clear outliers that dominate everything. Almost every class has decent options to climb with. So at this point, I honestly wouldn’t be surprsied if Blizzard skipped the balance update. We haven’t heard anything about it, and it might be because they simply don’t feel the need to change stuff. Especially now that the rotation is very close. We should actually be hearing more about the new Standard year within the new few weeks, given that the expansion is expected to drop mid-March.

Below is a full list of the Legend decks from last week, sorted by the highest placement.

If you want to see all of the current top meta decks, go to our Hearthstone Meta Tier List post!

Hearthstone Standard Legend Decks of the Week

Hearthstone Wild Legend Decks of the Week

Stonekeep

A Hearthstone player and writer from Poland, Stonekeep has been in a love-hate relationship with Hearthstone since Closed Beta. Over that time, he has achieved many high Legend climbs and infinite Arena runs. He's the current admin of Hearthstone Top Decks.

Check out Stonekeep on Twitter!

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