Top Standard & Wild Legend Decks - The Great Dark Beyond (Week 15) - February 2025

By Stonekeep - February 16, 2025

New Standard year announcement is behind us - Year of the Raptor was revealed a few days ago. We learned about Core Set 2025 rotation and got to peek at the upcoming patch roadmap. For example, we now know that the big Arena revamp teased last year is coming in Patch 32.2 (so around late April/early May).

But that's just the beginning. The next expansion (Into the Emerald Dream) will be announced next week. While we already know its name and general theme, the expansion's reveal will - as always - showcase the new mechanics and kick off the reveal season. It should make the next few weeks exciting. Patch 31.6 also means that all players are getting a free Legendary card to celebrate the set's announcement. In the past, the quality of those has varied heavily (just to give two recent examples - in Patch 28.6 we got Colifero the Artist and in Patch 29.6 Marin the Manager).

Patch 31.6 should also be a big shake-up in Battlegrounds and a new Arena season, but that's outside of the scope of this post (which focuses on Constructed).

As for the current meta, well, there are some small shifts, but the overall composition of the meta remains similar. Zerg DK, Terran Shaman and Terran Warrior are still the three most popular decks. Together they consistently make up around 40-50% of the meta.

More interesting shifts happen with slightly less popular decks. For example, Protoss Priest and Protoss Rogue - after lots of experimentation - are finally pretty viable. The right builds are probably Tier 2. You might not realize that just looking at the stats, because they are lumped together with bad builds, but those decks have potential. It turns out that you don't want to play Protoss as "slow, Control deck" but rather as an Aggro/Tempo deck and just use the respective Protoss packages as finishers. I mean, it makes sense, Zealots are one of the strongest part of the Protoss package and they have Charge. Turns out face damage is king. On the other hand, Protoss Mage, a deck that looked most promising at first, is not doing that well because it's just a slower build by nature (you need time to ramp up Colossus damage and Protoss spells don't work well with Aggro playstyle).

Another strong deck that needed a good build to work is Zerg Hunter. Early builds were kinda all over the place, players didn't exactly know what to do with Zergs in Hunter. But then they realized that Handbuff might be the way to go. Zerglings are amazing at taking handbuffs, because they double them when summoned. You can often get down two 10/8's (for example) on Turn 4 and if your opponent can't answer them, you win. Even if they can, you can just buff another Zergling and get even more threats. And if you need burst damage, just use Patchwork Pals, leave Huffer in your hand, and buff it instead - then Charge your opponent in the face.

And finally, we've got decks like Zerg Warlock, Hero Power Druid, Weapon Rogue and Dungar Druid which didn't really change in any way recently but all are still viable. They actually do shift between Tier 1 and Tier 2 depending on the exact meta composition, and they all stay within a few % play rate (Hero Power Druid is the most popular and even reaches 10% at some ranks, but is closer to 7% overall).

As you can see, StarCraft is still dominating the meta completely. You can count viable decks that don't use new cards on one hand. It wasn't just a fluke - the mini-set turned out to be more impactful than many full expansions. This kind of situation has both its upsides and downsides. The biggest upside is probably the fact that it shifted the meta and any viable piece of content is good because players got enough value for their purchase. The downsides include power creep (StarCraft packages are very strong and they might become even stronger in the 4 expansion meta after rotation), meta being less diverse (the number of viable decks went down after the expansion, not up), and... well, if you don't like StarCraft decks, you're basically out of luck, because that's 90% of the meta. It will be a tough balancing act going forward. I quite like StarCraft decks to be honest, but I don't want them to still dominate the meta when the new expansion drops, I'd rather be playing new stuff.

Of course, it's too early to say anything, we'll see how things go, and as usual I'm trying to be optimistic. And if it turns out to be bad, I'll definitely let you know :)

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