Hearthstone

It is hard to believe Harvest Golem is now even better.

The Master_sl said:

If you get an Undertaker start you usually win so hard that the best strategy on ladder may very well be to mulligan everything that isn't an Undertaker.

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Yeah that's what I do. There are a few cards here and there that I will keep in certain matchups, i.e. keeping Circle/Soulpriest vs Huntard, but in general I mulligan everything for Undertaker and it's always the best decision. There's that feeling you get of just knowing the game is already over and that you've won already when you draw 2 Undertakers in the first 3 turns + a couple of good low cost Deathrattles. It's crazy to me how much Undertaker has warped the meta and people's perception of what a good play is. I was mentioning before how people are putting in a 2 mana or even 4 mana silence creature just for Undertaker and considering that a good play (it is a good play), but never before would anyone have considered a T2 card to counter a T1 card an advantageous play, like using prime removal on an Undertaker, usually after it's already got a a few damage in too. No 1 mana card should be able to do what Undertaker does. I don't care if it's Legendary or what.

Fawe_sl said:

Legendary would be fine since you can only have 1. I played a bunch of hunter the past few days and dropped from rank 9 to 14. I played all the variations and had tons of great openings too but the consistency is just shit. Switched to priest yesterday and got back to rank 9. Priest is my least played class too but seems really consistent in this meta. I even went 2-1 against handlock

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Yeah Priest is my primary Ranked deck at the moment and my win rate is higher than average. I usually win against Huntard and I beat Control Warrior often and even though Handlock is supposed to counter Priest, I do okay in that match up too, certainly feels like I win 50% against Handlock because most games are at least close if I don't win. I don't play much Ranked atm, but when I do play for an hour or two I always rank up (up to around rank 6 without trying that hard). My Priest deck is quicker than most though. I don't run any PW:S or SW: D or a copy of Loatheb. Just straight business, save for the 2 Circles, 2 Thoughtsteals, 1 Holy Fire & 1 Shadow Madness. I've actually been tempted to put in a 2nd Shadow Madness because it works so well in the current meta. You can do a lot of amazing shit that will turn the game around for you with a Shadow Madness right now. My personal favorite is taking Sludge Belcher and then crashing it into another minion and getting the slime. It's actually quite fun.

I've tracked my last 29 games around rank 12 - 9. Results were not surprising in the slightest:
Hunter: 14
Priest: 5
Shaman: 4
Druid: 4
Warlock: 3 (handlock 2, Zoo 1)
Warrior: 2
Mage: 1

So 48% of my games were Hunters. About half the remaining were decks designed to beat Hunters. 2 Handlocks to "counter the counter" as I like to say and a few odds and ends. Annoyingly enough, of the 4 Druids, 3 of them opened their game with Innervate + Shade of Naxx. Fucking annoying.

Yes it's a "small" sample size but that's also how samples work. You take a small piece of the population to draw an inference of the population. The margin of error might be a bit higher but I still feel it's pretty representative.

At any rate, I'm so glad that GvG releases today because this current meta is the most toxic it's been in months.

Fawe_sl said:

I always end the seasons at rank 4-6 because once Im rank 5 I don't want to grind those 100s of games for legend lol... however, I might actually try this month, especially if android is released and I can play on tablet in bed. Only wildcard is how GvG affects things and if it's going to be a complete shit-show or if I can find a deck I can play with a decent win rate.

Yea shadow madness is fun but imo 2 copies isn't worth. The priest deck I was using yesterday was something I mangled together in about 30 seconds (no netdeck) and I ended up winning about 80%. I even forgot to put in pyros until I was already about 6-1 with the deck. Also forgot to put in blademasters, but decided not to once I remembered. I threw in 1 copy of AoE dispell and it has worked wonders. I loved using it when an enemy shaman had 6 minions on board (3 totems and a couple deathrattles/taunts), now that was fun

Also another fun match I had was against control warrior. I ended the game with 30 health and 29 armor. Stole both armorsmiths and used pyros lol.

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Mass Dispel is actually a really interesting choice right now, I need to test that out. A Mass Dispel in this current meta could potentially be pretty devastating. I don't run Pyro though. Haha I've done the same against a Warrior and had 25+ Armor and 30 Health, it's a ton of fun. I played a Priest a few days ago and Thoughtstole Thoughtsteal 6 times. He then added me afterward and bitched that I got lucky because he said "Thoughtstealing Thoughtsteal is what wins Priest mirrors, you got lucky". Meh, I was super annoyed after the 3rd time it happened. We didn't go into fatigue so I don't know what crack he was smoking, it didn't help me much. Thoughtsteal is definitely one of my favorite cards in the game, I've done soooo many interesting and fun things with it.

I disagree about Shadow Madness though. It always nets me value and is almost never a dead card, and when it is, it's only for a few turns. After today when Shrinkmeister comes out, it will be even more insane. You will be able to steal shit like Loatheb and Sylvannas and Cairne. Imagine Shadow Madnessing a Sylvannas and crashing it into something high value and gaining something high value out of it as well. It's going to be nuts. I will put a 2nd copy in after today with x2 Shrinkmeisters and I can't wait to see what it yields. Your board is empty, they have a Sludge Belcher, a Sylvanas and a Cairne. You Shadowmadness Sylvannas after doing 2 damage to her and Belcher, you kill Belcher and steal Cairne. You just spent 2+6 mana and 2 cards to kill THREE of their 5-6 mana high value cards, one of them being stolen. You gain a hugh net value, it's a 3:1 Shadow Madness and you've now got 2 bodies on the board. What other 2 cards can remove 3 minions from the board and give you 2 minions? That's a net of 5 minions. Obviously that situation is specific, is actually a dumb example but I don't see similar things being that unlikely with Shrinkmeister, I think the latter is going to change the meta.

Seriously cannot wait to Shadow Madness/Cabal Shadow Priest high value targets like Sylvannas and Cairne. It's going to be epic. 8 mana & 2 cards to put 3 creatures on your board and remove 1 of your opponents. yes please.

Fawe_sl said:

uh yea, after today everything changes for sure. I agree 2x shadow madness if you run shrinkmeisters. Only problem is once you start relying on combos the deck might start falling apart. I bet there will many times you play a naked shrinkmeister simply because he's all you can play early. It's going to be crazy though, these current decks will never been seen again.

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I dunno, Priest doesn't necessarily need to just drop minions just for the sake of having something on the board. You can wait many turns to set up a combo. I've seen Legend streamers going 5+ turns doing nothing just to wait for their opponent to drop another minion so they can get a good Shadow Madness off, and it's a good play a lot of the times. You have the survival tools to wait for amazing combos as a Priest and a 2 card combo isn't that difficult. I will be testing out a hybrid Agro/Control Priest with x2 Shrinkmeister, x2 Cabal and x2 Shadow Madness for sure.

Even if for some reason you do need to drop Shrinkmeister alone, it's still a decent vanilla creature at (2) for 3/2. I doubt you'll need to do it that often though because there are so many great cards that interact and greatly benefit from Shrinkmeister. 95% of the time it's going to combo, particularly if you're also running Shadow Words. It's just extremely, extremely versatile in Priest. There are 6 commonly played cards that interact with it greatly and that's not even counting combat tricks. I foresee a lot of Priests dropping their 2nd SW: D for a SW with Shrinkmeister. It's kind of crazy that 4 Attack minions used to be the bane of Priests, but can now potentially be the worst thing you can drop against a Priest because of Cabal. My 4/6 Spectral Knight with Divine Shield and Taunt getting Cabal Shadow Priest'd was devastating.

Ya it seems like there's a lot of fun things you can do with the shrinkmeister. Screwing around in arena, I opened with a shrinkmeister, light warden, and questing adventurer and was able to get an early advantage that snowballed into a 12/12 questing adventurer. Was fun and won a couple matches with that opening.

BTW, what kind of faggots slum around the low ranks with 5+ legendaries in their deck? Just beat a druid who back to back dropped Geddon, Ragnaros, Ysera, Maexnna, and Alextrasa with my lowly, all commons, no secrets, aggro mage.

Fawe_sl said:

Welp with GvG out today I decided to see what Im missing from the classic deck. 17,200 dust worth of cards still missing. Only things I can see crafting would be the pirates for sure. It's going to be hard to finish getting these cards until im 100% with GvG since the only way will be from buying the packs with gold/money or crafting them. Most likely will craft since it's so rare to get these exact cards I need.

Kinda funny I never got a single Southsea captain / hungry crab / shadowform ever, after many 100s of packs. I know I've had patient assassin a couple times but had disenchanted him.

52 Non-Basic Golds acquired from opening packs too.

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Yeah it's weird. I've opened 1200 arena wins worth of packs. I've now got 2 copies of every Epic in the game save for about 3 cards and every useful Legendary. I've opened a dozen Legendaries and half a dozen copies of most rares and tons of epics, but have never opened a single Pint Sized Summoner. I was missing x2 Sense Demons for over a hundred packs as well.

I'm so bad, only got 11 wins with a paladin draft w/ 1 consecrate, 1 truesilver, 1 lay on hands, dr boom, and tirion. One loss I had 6 cards remaining and didn't draw loh or either legendary and another loss was to a mage who got a value eye of medivh or w/e its called, wasn't even great, but he got copies of 3 decent minions off of it.

Dr. Boom is pretty decent in arena since its less likely you run into bgh, but with no immediate impact and fear of bgh I don't think he's runnable in constructed. The bombs are really unreliable, 1-4 damage, and they can hit the hero so they can have almost no effect. Might be worth in various token decks though.

slippery_sl said:

Early afternoon PST

Zeriyah on Twitter:

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Waking up expecting to be able to buy GvG packs and I see this instead. I'm pretty pissed off.

Man...Blood Knight gets so much value now in arena.

mures_sl said:

I'm so bad, only got 11 wins with a paladin draft w/ 1 consecrate, 1 truesilver, 1 lay on hands, dr boom, and tirion. One loss I had 6 cards remaining and didn't draw loh or either legendary and another loss was to a mage who got a value eye of medivh or w/e its called, wasn't even great, but he got copies of 3 decent minions off of it.

Dr. Boom is pretty decent in arena since its less likely you run into bgh, but with no immediate impact and fear of bgh I don't think he's runnable in constructed. The bombs are really unreliable, 1-4 damage, and they can hit the hero so they can have almost no effect. Might be worth in various token decks though.

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Even with the most amazing deck possible, once you get to 10 wins your games start to be really volatile. You are facing ridiculous decks that can't be countered or overpowered with any rhyme or reason. A ton of it is luck at that point.

My problem with freeze mage are that the counters are pretty much unwinnable. Control warrior destroys it and the priest decks don't have much trouble either. And if Hunter gets a good opening, stalling out does nothing to stop the inevitable.