Top Standard & Wild Legend Decks - Perils in Paradise (Week 7) - September 2024

By Stonekeep - September 8, 2024

I skipped last week's compilation because it was so close to the balance update that I didn't have enough decks yet. And it turns out that this week's might be a bit pointless anyway given that the mini-set is launching in 2 days, but hey, maybe some of you will find it useful until then.

It's been a bit over a week since the balance update and the results were, again, relatively minor. Nerfing Tidepool Pupil has pushed out Sonya Rogue (the version that could loop the combo ad infinitum) out of the meta, but it hasn't been popular outside of high Legend anyway so most of the players might have not noticed it. It also killed Combo Druid, at least the Concierge version - some high Legend players attempted to come up with different versions (you can see one below) but they don't have any mainstream presence just yet. Nerf to Doomkin made some impact, although not huge. At least if players were choosing the right build, haha. Many still stick with exactly the same Doomkin version and that deck has lost a few % win rate. But if we look at builds that cut Doomkin, they are perfoming nearly identical as pre-patch. That said, even the Doomkin version is still good, it's a solid Tier 2 deck now. And it's still one of the most popular decks in the game.

The patch also came with 14 buffs, but majority of them had basically no impact on the game. Players have tested the buffed cards and quickly realized that they are still not good enough. There are some winners of the patch, such as Egg Hunter, Rainbow Mage and Lynessa Paladin, but none of them have hit the mainstream - they are mostly played in Diamond-Legend but have quite middling win rates (all of them hover around low Tier 2 - high Tier 3). To be perfectly fair, it's still better than before the patch, and if you enjoy one of those decks the update was definitely a win. But overall it didn't change the general shape of the meta that heavily.

Of course, we have the mini-set coming in just a couple of days and that's another opportunity for some power level shifts. However, to be perfectly honest, the power level of this mini-set looks very low. There are a few standout cards, but majority of them look like they were designed 4-5 years ago before a lot of the power creep happened. Of course, given that they can be played in more than one class and actually have two new Tourist cards (Shaman can now use Hunter cards and Mage can use Rogue cards), there's a high chance that some of them end up making an impact. For example, I have high hopes for Big Spell Mage, the deck is already borderline playable and the mini-set should boost it quite nicely.

And that's an interesting potion of discussion. Hearthstone had A LOT of power creep over the last few years, it's undeniable. So on the one hand, it would be pretty nice if they released a few low power expansions/mini-sets to compensate for it and bring things down a notch. But it means that a whole Standard year goes down the drain basically, as older cards dominate all of the new cards and the meta doesn't change much. But if they keep pumping cards that are even better and better, the power creep will never stop. The current Standard looks like Wild a few years ago. I think we do really need some sort of balance "reset" eventually, but it's going to be a gargantuan task. Anyway, I guess that's a worry for another day, for now we can only hope that the mini-set ends up having a decent impact on the meta, because many of the top meta decks are getting pretty old now.

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