Darkmoon Races has been out for some time now and the meta has pretty much stabilized. And sadly, Ramp Paladin is still rampant on the ladder – especially in Diamond ranks.
While the deck’s popularity drops off heavily in Legend (probably because lots of people are running counters there), it’s probably still too much. While I honestly like to play the deck, I don’t think it’s healthy for the game. Nozdormu the Timeless feels pretty fair, to be honest, because it might actually make opponent’s game plan easier to pull off and giving them 10 mana to work with first means that you need to prepare for a power turn. But what’s not okay is High Abbess Alura combo with Tip the Scales. Pulling that off on Turn 4/5 is usually game over – lots of the decks just don’t have an answer for that. But even if the board flood doesn’t win you the game, you’re still in a good position, because you’ve just removed most of the jank Murlocs from your deck and now your draws are much better. I expect that Blizzard will do something with that high-roll soon, because other than that the deck feels fine.
The second most popular deck is Token Druid, which got a massive boost thanks to Arbor Up. The combination of AoE buff and creating more board presence is exactly what the deck needed. But yeah, Token Druid doesn’t seem to be so “hated” mostly because the deck is more straightforward – you know its gameplan, you know what it wants to do every single turn, you just need to clear the board over and over again until they run out of cards or you get some serious board presence which they can’t clear.
Other than that, we’ve seen an increase in Combo / OTK decks too. It may be Warlock with Tickatus, Lifesteal Demon Hunter with Il'gynoth combos, or Mozaki, Master Duelist Mage, Control Warrior with some OTK finisher (ETC/Silas)… overall, they make up for 10-15% of the meta depending on your rank (even up to 20% in Legend), which is honestly quite a lot – we haven’t seen so many successful combo decks in a while. Well, “successful” may not be the best word, because looking at win rates, those decks don’t really perform THAT well (outside of Control Warrior, but it’s not a pure Combo deck). Despite having a relatively low win rate, people still play them and a lot of players have success with them. Maybe it’s the good old “hard to master” issue because decks like Lifesteal DH or Mozaki Mage certainly aren’t the easiest ones to play.
Anyway, like I’ve said, I expect a small balance update with some changes to Ramp Paladin soon (maybe next week, or the week after), but probably nothing major. I don’t think that we’ll have any bigger changes until next expansion… which honestly, might launch in just a bit over a month, so it’s not the end of the world. Darkmoon Faire launches mid-November, so mid-March would make most sense. In his last Q&A, Iksar told that it will be released when it’s ready, might be March, might be April… but then again, I hope that they stick to the 4 months expansion cycle instead of introducing more variance. BlizzCon is coming in 2 weeks, so we’ll definitely see some Hearthstone news there. I expect at least one of three things – new expansion, new game mode, or classic rework announcements (probably together with a new Standard year announcement). Or maybe even all three! But they might not want to drop everything at the same time to spread hype over a longer period of time. Either way, can’t wait!
Below, you will find 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!
If you’re looking for the best Wild Format decks, check out our Wild Meta Tier List!
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