Top Standard & Wild Legend Decks - Perils in Paradise (Week 11) - October 2024

By Stonekeep - October 6, 2024

Last week has been very uneventful, with no announcements, no patches, no teasers, not even a hotfix in sight. Either Blizzard is gearing up for a bigger announcement, or they have been busy putting all the fires in Chinese server. From what I've heard, the launch wasn't very smooth. But it's a bit of a "suffering from success" meme given that one of the reasons why it wasn't smooth was insane interest in the game. Hearthstone suffered a massive loss of players when the CN servers closed, simply because most of the players quit the game instead of starting over on another server. And now we've seen a massive return of those people (and probably a bunch of new players too). For example, Vicious Syndicate has reported a much bigger uptick in their incoming data than during an expansion launch (!). And that's in the middle of the set. The next expansion's release will undoubtedly be the biggest one in the last couple of years (Chinese servers have closed in January 2023).

Big Spell Mage's play rate has stabilized around 10% on the ladder overall and 15% in Plat-Diamond range. The patch didn't kill the deck (we already knew that) but it gave some other builds room to breathe. Interestingly enough, we've also seen a MASSIVE uptick in Reno Warrior play rate... but only if we include data from the Chinese server. It looks like Chinese players love this kind of playstyle and now that they aren't held back by the deck's cost (since they got all of the older cards for free) they can play it from the get-go. The deck still only has about 5% play rate on the other servers, but it's closer to 30% in China.

Other decks that got more popular after the last patch include Buttons Death Knight, Aggro Demon Hunter and Pain Warlock, all hovering in that 5-10% play rate range. But those are the decks that were already some of the most popular before Big Spell Mage nerfs. Do we have anything new?

In fact, yes, we do. Players are experimenting with stuff like Mech Rogue, Testing Dummy Warrior, and Big/Dungar Druid. All of them became more popular after the patch and show some signs of promise. Even if they aren't mainstream meta picks just yet, another balance update might push them over the edge. And we still expect one balance patch in this expansion cycle.

Talking about the expansion cycle, it's about time we hear about the next expansion. I expect the announcement to happen either in the upcoming week or the week after that, alongside Patch 30.6. I don't think we'll get any balance changes in 30.6, BUT we're going to get a free Legendary card. Assuming that it's a good one, it might have some impact on the game. Last expansion they also experimented with bringing back Baku & Genn, but it had basically zero impact on the meta. We'l see whether they decide to do something similar this time. Then about 2 weeks later (in mid-late October) we should have one final balance patch before the expansion's release in early-mid November. So while this week has been very slow, the next few should be much more eventful.

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