Top Standard & Wild Legend Decks - The Great Dark Beyond (Week 2) - November 2024

By Stonekeep - November 17, 2024

Before I start, I want to say that issues with deck codes are sadly still present. Any deck with Zilliax Deluxe 3000 (and let's be real, that's a lot of decks) won't have its code working. The issue turned out to be more difficult to solve and the dev bandwidth I have access to is very limited. Believe me when I say it that I try to solve it as quickly as possible but it might take some more time. As a workaround, I always try to post a working deck code whenever I can. This post will be no different - for every deck running Zilliax, I will paste a working deck code BELOW the deck itself. Use it instead of the usual deck code box. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

Welcome, welcome to the first Legend decks roundup from The Great Dark Beyond. The expansion has been out for almost 2 weeks now so it's safe to say that the early meta has already solidified. It doesn't mean that there's no experimentation at all, we still see some interesting builds popping up every now and then. But most of the meta is likely to stay this way... until next Thursday. Blizzard has already announced that there's a balance update coming (we should get a teaser on Wednesday and the patch itself drops on Thursday).

Overall, I have to say that I'm not terribly impressed with the expansion in terms of impact. Many of the top meta decks are exactly the same builds we had last expansion, maybe with a couple of new cards slotted in. Most of the brand-new archetypes - Starships in particular - seem to be underperforming. I think that the strongest brand-new archetype is Asteroid Shaman. Just don't get baited by the slower lists - they are not good. The way you want to go with this deck is to focus more on the early game tempo. Instead of playing it like a Combo deck, play it like an Aggro/Burn deck and just use Asteroids as a finisher, not your entire win condition (you know, with the whole drawing them with Malygos or reshuffling your hand with Gatekeeper - that's not necessary).

Probably the most notorious new deck is Quasar Rogue. I say notorious because I can't say strong. It's a Tier 3-4 deck, but I would still expect it to get nuked. Why? Because it's just so incredibly unfun to face. The deck is a complete hit or miss - you either beat them by Turn 5-6 with no effort because they didn't draw the right cards, or they pop-off in the mid-game, draw their entire deck in one turn, and kill you from hand. Luckily it's no longer as popular as it was on the first days of the expansion (the excitement quickly wore off for most players) but I think that Quasar is a broken card on a fundamental level. I know you might disagree, but in my opinion the game would be much better off without cards like that.

Then we have a bunch of old decks with some new cards. Mage's new Fire synergy package slotted right into an Elemental Mage. The deck was actually one of the best early Perils in Paradise builds but it got nerfed a bit, now it's back on the top with the new tools. More burn and card draw is exactly what the deck needed. The deck is actually not very popular in high Legend (hence why you don't see a lot of them in this roundup) but it's all over the rest of the ladder. Death Knight got a few good cards and they were exactly what Reno DK needed to be viable again. 6 expansions meta is always the best for Reno decks because they have way more cards to pick from. Hunter's Discover package turned out to be pretty strong but not strong enough to build a whole deck around it. However, some Discover synergies are played in basically every Hunter build right now, Mystery Egg Hunter is the most successful so far. Other than that, we see a new card slotted here and there, but as I've said, most of them are just old decks with small iterations.

But to be completely fair, there are a few factors to consider before sharpening the pitchforks. It's the third expansion of the year, and those are always the hardest to get right. That's when the Standard is at its most bloated, so the impact of each card is lower. The last year, TITANS and Badlands in particular, were also some of the highest power expansions we had in a long time. And that's exactly why it gets difficult. If you make The Great Dark Beyond too weak, you might get a Rastakhan's Rumble repeat (an expansion with almost zero impact on the meta). I don't think that GDB is on this level, but it's still not great. But if you make it too strong, you will introduce further power creep because now in order for the next year's expansions to be playable, you will need to make them even stronger.

That's why Team 5 will need to really give their best when it comes to balance this expansion. What I could see is a mix of nerfs for cards from 2023 (cards that had their time in Standard and are about to rotate out anyway, so they can get reverted then) and some buffs for The Great Dark Beyond cards, but not too many to not shoot it up to insane power levels. That's definitely not an easy job, but it needs to be done. I hope they will be able to salvage this expansion, because in terms of theme and feel, it's really good. The mechanic of Starships is also interesting as it brings back more board interaction, it's just not tuned very well and we have too many cards that can get rid of them or steal them too easily.

Anyway, sorry for a long rant. I'm looking forward to the balance patch on Thursday and how it impacts the meta. Also, if you missed the news, we're getting a Starcraft cross-over in the mini-set. I wouldn't call myself a Starcraft fan, but I enjoyed both games back in the day and I think they fit with The Great Dark Beyond's theme, so it should work quite well. The mini-set should also be more impactful than usual, with 49 cards (instead of 38), three of which will be Hero cards. That might be an opportunity to increase the overall power level of the expansion - but as I've said before, I hope they don't overdo it for the sake of the next Standard year.

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