Hearthstone Meta Update (October)

Arena
Arena is much harder than it used to be, people are making better decisions and building better decks
It used to be that the first 3 arena matches were against people that kindve sortve understood basic plays but built terrible decks, so the real arena started at the 4th match, basically you got 3 free wins at the start unless you got screwed hard by rng
But now only the first match is a free win, and sometimes not even that
Its changed the ranking of a few cards for me

Demolisher: My ranking for this has gone way up, if you play it at the right time, usually at turn 5 with a 2 cost minion, after the early game fight, it stays up for a long time and does amazing work, ive come to think of it as a smaller, crappier version of rag
The only time its bad is if you lost the early game completely, but you probably lost the game at that point anyway so w/e
If the early game is even or if you came out ahead demolisher on turn 5 will lock the game into a win for you most of the time, even if you play it later, or if their turn 5 is a big guy after you play it, it can help you clean bigger guys up too and let your weak guys trade up

Pyroblast: My ranking for this has gone down, slightly, i will still pick 1, but i dont consider it the "I win" button that i used to since games are a lot closer now and having pyroblast sit in hand isnt helpful
It used to be that if it was pyro vs sea giant id pick pyro without question in all cases, but now i might consider picking sea giant instead, its probably the only epic id pick over pyro

Starving Buzzard: Obviously the nerf to this card has dropped my ranking of it to basically unplayable/never pick in both arena and constructed

Arcane explosion: My ranking for this has gone up slightly, people are making better trades and as a result a lot of their stuff ends up at 1 hp, they think its fine since mage cant hero power all of the 1 hp stuff, but arcane explosion can punish them for that and surprisinly swing the game back in your favor better than flamestike does in some situations
Id still pick flamestike over arcane (im not crazy) but arcane is almost as good if not better some of the time, if i got a spell power minion, like archmage or geomancer i will pick it over even good quality 2 cost minions (if i already have a good number of decent quality 2s)


Constructed
Ive decided im going to attempt to reach legend this month, like arena constructed is also harder now

I started at rank 21 because i barely played ranked last month
From rank 21 to 17 i played my shut up and draw druid, and a hybrid mage thats half freeze and half midrange value that i made with the new meta in mind
After hunter was nerfed i figured control would be popular, handlock would be the most used deck and in casual mode thats what i was seeing, but people at rank 20-15 dont care, they still play aggro hunter (just without buzzard), zoo, aggro mage, and aggro priest, pretty much the only decks i saw from 20-15 (21 had newbies with basic cards, poor guys had to face my epics and legendaries) and my decks expect a control meta so i hovered around rank 17 (i dropped to 18 by the end) until i switched deck types

I started playing aggro mage, i just copied this deck exactly: http://www.hearthpwn.com/decks/91094-fastmage-v-1-6-deathrattle-spell-hybrid-synergy
It was the aggro mage that i had seen so many times while playing my decks
Really i just wanted to see how it works because i didnt understand how i could lose to it with my hybrid freeze mage, honestly i didnt get how it could win at all, it has barely any card draw and no way to hold board control
I played it from rank 18 to 14, lost 2 games, both vs priest, and i realized why it works, its just really fast, much faster than other aggro decks, it gets a ton of damage in with minions early and finishes with spells, if it cant get that dmg in early, or if the damage is out healed it looses, its also really boring to play, you basically just topdeck and hit face, the 1 fun combo is knife juggler into mirror image for 2 damage and its not even that fun

Once i understood that deck i switched again, to priest, i figured if people are playing these aggro rush decks i may as well craft cabal shadowpriest and steal their stuff, so i made this deck: http://www.hearthhead.com/deckbuilder#czR7Mx7Mmz7Mmf7Mml7zkk7MaA7Mrf7MhS7MAV7zAo7Mj57zya7MyJ7MxA7MxB7MgN8V
Which is insanely good in the current meta, its basically the same as the aggro deathrattle priest deck, but more midrange, i went from 14 to 11 without any trouble at all, every game was really 1 sided, i lost 1 game, the last one i played, to another priest that had a similar deck to mine, he kept thoughtstealing my thoughtsteal so i couldnt keep up
The constant thoughtsteals were annoying so i took a break after that

After rank 14 i started hitting non-aggro decks like shaman, handlock, and control warrior, it was mostly handlock
I swapped out a holy nova for a defender of argus for the buffs and the extra taunt, i had enough early game that it hit 2 things most of the time
At rank 12 i swapped mindcontrol out for a 2nd shadowword death as i needed to kill giants faster i couldnt just sit back with MC in hand, i swapped the argus out for kel thuzad the buffs and extra taunt wasnt as helpful as id hoped and kel seemed to fit really well

At rank 10 i started hitting hunter, lots of hunter, i was really surprised at how many hunters there were, there was so much hunter that i swapped out a thoughtsteal for shadow madness, took kel out for 2nd holy nova, and took the 2nd death out for smite which powered through the hunters to rank 9 where i stopped playing because i was tired of fighting hunter
I had lost 2 stars at 10 cause of hunter, almost dropped to 11, which is when i made those changes

Its weird how 2-3 card changes can change a matchup so much


Also, something i noticed, everyone is including bgh and black knight in their deck, i think handlock is being hard countered by everyone
Some aggro wont have bgh, as far as i can tell, but they all have black knight

And something else i noticed is that the ladder is a lot more layered than it use to be, meaning people playing non-hunter aggro are mostly stuck at rank 20-15, handlock is stuck at 14-11, hunter aggro is stuck at 10-9 (possibly more, idk yet)
Last time i went from rank 20-5 decks were spread out fairly evenly across the ranks, but now its just 1 style of deck after another every 5 or so ranks, it makes it somewhat easier as you can make changes to your deck for that specific layer but more boring because you see the same decks a bunch of times until you rank up a few ranks


Bots
Bots have become a major issue in constructed, every game against shaman was a bot (except 2, 1 was a normal shaman, the other was playing the deck that shaman bots use manually, it was really weird to see), and like 1 out of 7 of the other games from rank 20-11 were also bots with most of them being rank 20-15
You can tell by the way they play that they are bots, the targeting arrow glitches out, and the time between actions is very regular and usually slow
They all play aggro hunter (with sea giant in the deck) zoo, shaman (with bloodlust), or aggro mage, the shaman and hunter bot is terrible, the zoo bot is average, and the aggro mage bot is the best one (mainly because all it needs to do is play the cards it draws as fast as possible and attack face)
I was really surprised to see a shaman bot at rank 11, how it got that high i have no idea
I didnt see a single bot from rank 10-9, it was nice, hopefully that continues
Its pretty much blizzards fault that there are so many bots though, making golden hero portraits take 500 wins in a type of game where bots can actually win some of the time was just dumb

Rank 9-8 was more hunter but they thinned out as i went
8-6 was a mix of control warrior, a few handlocks and zoo, and for the first time ramp druid, i hadnt seen a single druid from 20-8 they were all rank 7+ apparently
I didnt see a single bot from 9-6

I changed my deck to be hard anti control, with an MC and 2 deaths to get through it, i even dropped holy nova for black knight, i only faced 3 aggro decks from 9-6 and only lost to 1 of them, the rest of the games went smoothly, the only other loss i had was when i didnt draw death, mc or black knight against ramp druid

I got to rank 6 a week or 2 ago, i have to be in the mood the play seriously in ranked and wasnt in the mood for it for awhile, now that i am in the mood for it i think its too late to try for legend, 5-legend is a huge grind that takes longer than 20-5 most of the time, ill give it a shot though and if i can get to rank 4 without much trouble ill keep going, if not ill just give up again

pat1487 wrote:

I got to rank 6 a week or 2 ago, i have to be in the mood the play seriously in ranked and wasnt in the mood for it for awhile, now that i am in the mood for it i think its too late to try for legend, 5-legend is a huge grind that takes longer than 20-5 most of the time, ill give it a shot though and if i can get to rank 4 without much trouble ill keep going, if not ill just give up again

My same feelings about trying to get to masters

I got to rank 3 and dropped back down to 4 before giving up on the climb

Rank 6-3 was control warrior, miracle rogue (the newer one with malygos) deathrattle priests and a few of the aggressive druids (with spectral knight, echoing ooze and 2 copies of the combo)

This mix of deck types was impossible for me to adapt to, any change i made would make me much weaker in at least 1 of those matchups so i started playing my control warrior which i thought would give me the best chance, but there was several issues with that, im not that experienced with control warrior yet, my deck is unfinished (missing shield slams, i have 1 of those now though) and the priests at that level all learned the same thing i learned when i was playing priest which pretty much guarantees priest beats control warrior 90% of the time (games will usually go into fatigue so if you draw too many cards as a preist you end up losing because of fatigue, so if you just limit your card draw to be about equal to the warrior's you should end up winning as priest)
So that didnt really work and i didnt feel like playing any other serious deck so i just gave up on it (also that loosing streak was pretty demoralizing, if the seasons were longer id probably have gone back to it in a week or so)


Control warrior seems to need war axe to do well, it seemed that way to me when playing against control warriors, but now that i am playing control warrior i see that its way more important than i thought, ive been throwing cards back in the mulligan aggressive trying to get axe but i will end up with a hand like grom, ysera, and alex (which has happened to me twice)
I dont really get how its such a popular deck, that gets wins when most of the game is decided by if you have 1 of like 4 cards in the deck in your hand at the start of the game, against control its not that big of a deal, but against aggro its so important
Its so much harder to win without the axe, ill keep playing it, i might just be playing against aggro wrong like the way it was when i was learning handlock, but there i was able to control the issue and figure it out where as here it just seems random no matter what i do