Iksar-11848

Hey everyone! I spent some time today going through community feedback and interntal statistics for the Standard metagame. Wanted to share some thoughts on where we are now and where we might be headed in the near future.

Still seeing healthy fluctuation in terms of deck power levels every day. Here are some metrics for the best decks over the last four days. Data represents top 1% of players, which is approximately Rank 3 to Legend.

Feb 8

• Quest Hunter – 55.0%

• Aggro Warrior – 54.5%

• Galakrond Warrior – 54.0%

• Highlander Hunter – 53.7%

• Mech Paladin – 52.9%

Feb 9

• Quest Hunter – 54.2%

• Galakrond Warrior – 54.0%

• Highlander Hunter – 53.9%

• Rezz Priest – 53.6%

• Galakrond Rogue – 53.0%

Feb 10

• Galakrond Warrior – 55.0%

• Mech Paladin – 5...

I think under the normal circumstances in Hearthstone history, maybe not.

The influx of card changes this expansion has a little to do with those cards being quite powerful, but it’s mostly that we wanted to try a different approach to the cadence we make card changes.

The changes I feel were absolutely necessary this expansion were the ones to Galakrond Shaman. It was really the only archetype that was at a power level unacceptable under any past circumstance. Even after the first round of changes, there turned out to be an undiscovered deck that played a little slower and was even more powerful than the version being used during the first couple weeks. During playtesting, we honestly just thought that Galakrond Shaman was an incredibly fun deck to play and wanted to push it to a level where it would be considered one of the more powerful decks. We pushed too far, it happens.

As far as the rest of the changes, I think in the past we would have waited a little l...

Face Hunter and Priest have both been very popular and rather successful from about rank 10 and down. Rank 10 to Legend don’t see very much success from either deck.

The reason we chose not to make changes to Priest or Hunter in this patch was not because players at those ranks don’t matter, it’s because we generally see a trickle down effect on the meta that starts in Legend and moves down to rank 17-18. We’d expect the population of both those decks to decrease as players experiment with new decks.

Face Hunter is generally popular at lower ranks because it’s a fairly low cost deck. RIght now it’s weak to a lot of the Shaman, Rogue, and Warlock strategies out there and I imagine that will still be true after the nerfs to those decks. If Face Hunter still continues to be super high population after after 16.2 has been out for a bit it’s likely we would address that deck in some way that makes for a more varied experience.

Edit: I flubbed the matchup data, I was...

It’s a fair assumption to think all expansion keywords are that expansion only unless stated otherwise. Sometimes we have a mechanic that makes sense to keep around in Hearthstone long-term (Rush, Discover) but we let most keywords live in one set only so they rotate to Wild cleanly and make way for new keywords to learn.

Wow I didn’t see that. I was just reading the forums as I usually do and thought the thread was a good place for insight, even if we disagree.

What makes the current reborn quest powerful isn’t really the reborn minions themselves, but what you can do with the hero power. There are enough reborn minions from Uldum alone that allow Paladin to fairly easily complete the quest. Right now, they are using cards like Mechano-Egg and Mechanical Whelp as the payoff cards once the quest is complete. It’s likely we’ll make other cards that are great with the quest payoff over time, making the quest feel a bit different with each set.

This post aged well.

Would agree with most in this thread to say that the cards that fit least with your deck are Goblin Bomb and maybe Cybertech, though that one I like because it’s fun!

I would suggest trying to use the ‘complete my deck’ feature on various cards in your deck. For example, you can just take out the Goblin Bombs and then use complete my deck to see what cards in your collection our data thinks is the best fit. We upgraded the complete my deck feature in the last few months to the point where it’s absurdly accurate. Give it a try.

Quite powerful, I imagine we’ll be seeing lots of Slurper in Shaman decks for the next two years. Lackeys were interesting enough gameplay for us that we thought putting some power behind this card was a good idea. Hope you like it!

This is pretty reasonable feedback, if we’re going to do a reddit AMA we should throw something up here as well. In retrospect it would have been good to see if you all had any questions and answer them in that thread.

Dire Frenzy is probably my favorite under utilized card.

Wild hasn’t recently been dominated by those cards, at least post nerfs. Even Shaman and Odd Rogue were two of the most consistent Wild decks and both were taken down a bit by the changes to Flametongue and Cold Blood.

For now, we want to check out what perception and data looks like post expansion launch and see where the Wild meta lands.

The blog mentioned this, but it’s mostly a future proofing thing. If Druid is very weak at single target removal it makes it easier to give them cards that make them great at other things. When you play against Druid one of the gameplay identities of that class is that they will have a hard time dealing with giant creatures. Naturalize going away reinforces that.

I respect this Pokemon analogy. Who are you saving your master ball for?

Also, I’m hyped for the new forums, I think they look great! We just announced all the stuff we were ready to talk about here:

Looks Around

Hey. How’s it going?