As a return player, my take on the current meta and the new classes – May 23, 2023 at 05:14PM

I played Hearthstone since 2015 roughly post Warsong Commander nerf. I remember the first deck I started using to climb was a post-nerf Patron Warrior as it has the lowest dust cost on the deck website lol. For people who knows, that’s quite an experience for a noob lmao.

I left soon after our legendary Ben Brode left. (Oh man I wasn’t even using Reddit at the time. Recently I saw the top post for that Un’goro song and it brought so much nostalgia.) Before I afked I made to legend for the first time with Midrange Shaman with Jade packages in Wild.

Midrange decks have always been my favorite architype as I like the constant balance between tempo and value. From my memory I recall playing a lot of tempo Mage, midrange Hunter, midrange Shaman, handlock, etc. I think my ranking from favorite to least favorite for archetypes is something like: midrange, control, zoo, OTK, fatigue, face, combo (like chadlock or miracle rogue).

I returned in about March this year and played Classic to Legend against 80% bots to farm resources while waiting for the rotation. Last month I made it to Legend with Frost DK and this month I made to Legend earlier with Unholy DK. Now I’m chilling with only Blood DK in low Legend (4k).

Here’s my take. For the past 2 months I bought/crafted all the cards used in all DK decks with 250 games in. I freaking love this class. At the beginning I wasn’t a big fan, I was playing my good old Mage. Then as I bought more cards and had my hands on DK, it was amazing. Blook DK gives me the familiar feeling of the Reno decks, drag the game with all the value generating small minions, stall with healing, wait for the tempo to die down and seal the game with big value cards like Astalor.

I love this deck because there are so many slots to play with too (thanks but no thanks to Renathal which I’ll come to later). For example right now I realized in my rank after recent nerf, there’s a lot of ChadLock and Deathrattle Druid, so at one point I put 3 silence cards in my deck. I played Blood DK but I also did a lot of non-meta shit like I cut Dirty Rat, Screaming Banshee and Gnome Muncher for a long time. This is the part I like about the game, where I can learn how to play a deck and then dig real deep into what makes the deck good, dismantle it and then put it back up.

Frost DK is actually a fresh breath of air. It doesn’t feel like anything I’ve played back in the days. It’s not actually aggro but it has a lot of direct damage to face. It doesn’t actually contest board so much as it’s spell heavy, unlike Undead Priest or Pure Pal. Freezing the enemy board and winning by killing their face just 1 turn before they can answer feels rewarding. It actually feels like Tempo Mage, but more fitting the theme of a caster, like why wouldn’t a Mage freeze the board and kill the enemy mastermind. On the other hand, Unholy DK is just value-inflated zoo deck which is meh. It feels exactly like Zoolock and Undead Priest feels exactly like Face Hunter. I never enjoyed playing them.

I didn’t play DH at all. DH feels like the better Rogue with the combo packages. Rogue used to have 3 evergreen themes: weapon, combo, and steal. As a return player, I feel like the team wants to balance the meta by balancing archetypes, which has been advocated by a lot of players before I left. So I actually understand and appreciate that they are creating more classes with each class having fewer themes and viable decks in a meta, so players can have more fun tuning their decks with different cards good for different meta. For example recently I see a lot of Relic DH with finisher like Rowdy Fan + Lady S’theno which I didn’t see very often before.

Renathal is really an interesting card. It adds 10 cards, which ruins consistency but helps with fatigue. I start to feel more and more that 30 is a magic number. When I play a 30-card deck, if I don’t have any good opener, I just full mulligan and most of time I’m good. With Renathal I really have to think hard with a mediocre hand. I think it’s very cool design, as cool as Reno.

At last, I just finished a Blook DK mirror, which is my favorite match up at the moment. If you play it out, there are so many ways the game ends, not only by one side running out of value. It largely depends on what you run in your deck. Like I won that game with an exact 33 damage lethal turn (20+ turn) by a board with a 11/11 Sylvannas buffed by Black Rock’n’Roll from Sunwell combined with a Nightmare from Paparazzi I played on turn 3. Neither of us played Mograine before turn 15. At one time I was about 5hp above his lethal and he was 45. It was truly epic.

I insta-ff when facing Renathal Priest. Fuck that. I have better things to do.