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Tribal imbalances: Or, some reasons why mechs (/beasts) are currently the top tribe

Intro

At this point in the early Battlegrounds meta, it's pretty clear that mechs, and to a lesser extent beasts, are the top tribes to build your warband around. Within each tribe, there are a few different successful strategies (e.g., Goldrinn + big beasts or Mama Bear + tokens), but you generally aim towards a mech, beast, or menagerie build if you want to win.

On the other hand, you have demons and murlocs. While they're not terrible in all situations, you're definitely hampering your chances of winning when you build around them. Why is this the case? Should this be the cae?

There has been a lot of discussion about these discrepancies, but I haven't seen much comprehensive analysis (yet). As such, I'm going to look at the problem from a couple of different angles: 1) available tribal synergies/utilities and 2) minion counts per tribe.

 

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Available tribal synergy/utility

Mechs/Beasts

Let's look for a moment at the plentiful synergies and utilities that the mech and beast packages currently have: they have options to scale their minions indefinitely (Junkbot, Scavenging Hyena), reliably buff their minions/tokens (Magnetic/Iron Sensei, Pack Leader/Goldrinn), have cleave minions (Foe Reaper, Cave Hydra), have great high tier payoff cards (Kangor's Apprentice, Mama Bear), and have mid-tier minions that synergize with the standard builds (Cobalt Guardian/Security Rover, Rat Pack), carrying builds well into the late game.

Demons

Demon minions have some of these things, like infinite scaling with Wrath Weaver (albeit with a significant drawback) or certain powerful synergies (Imp Gang Boss + Soul Juggler), but they lack a dedicated cleave minion as well as a potent high-tier payoff minion; Void Lord just isn't that good late in the game, especially without a way to buff its tokens. Early on, demons are great, but they lack a minion that pushes them to the next level, like a Junkbot or a Mama Bear.

Otherwise, demon packages have Mal'Ganis, who can be useful in the mid game (especially with Wrath Weaver), but falls out of favour in the late game, when a +2/+2 buff is relatively negligible and your worst minion is often bigger than a 9/7. Annihilan Battlemaster is a great minion (for many builds), but it manages to have negative synergy with the Soul Juggler demon build. I suppose it synergizes with Wrath Weaver, but then you're just dead.

Murlocs

Finally, you have Murlocs. I don't really need to go over them in too much detail, but they're pretty decent early and terrible later on. Basically, they lack everything that makes mechs/beasts great, unless you manage to a) get an early Gentle Megasaur, and b) highroll on poisonous/divine shield/windfury—a small ask. I would suggest moving Megasaur to tier 5, but then everyone else will also benefit since amalgams are such a hot commodity. If aggro strategies were actually viable, murlocs could be competitive, but they're unfortunately (?) not.

 

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Number of minions per tribe

Ignoring all of that for a moment, there's one glaring discrepancy between the "good" and "bad" tribes: the number of minions each has available or directly synergizes with. The number of minions with tribe tags (including amalgam) are as follows, broken up by tavern tier:

Tavern Tier	1	2	3	4	5	6	Total
Mechs	2	8	5	5	1	2	23
Beasts	2	5	1	2	4	4	18
Murlocs	3	3	1	1	1	0	9
Demons	2	2	1	1	2	1	9

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Here it is broken down terms of non- or differently tribed minions that directly synergize with minions of a particular tribe (like Pack Leader or Soul Juggler)*:

Tavern Tier	1	2	3	4	5	6	Total
Mechs	0	0	0	0	1	1	2
Beasts	0	1	2	2	1	0	6
Murlocs	0	1	0	1	2	1	5
Demons	1	0	2	0	1	0	4

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The total number of tribal/related minions available to each:

1. Mechs: 25
2. Beasts: 24
3. Murlocs: 14
4. Demons: 13

Obviously not all cards are created equally; although they have more minions in general, mechs & beasts do have a lot of mediocre/redundant minions. Still, just having any minion of a particular tribe in the early/mid game can make or break a build: one reason why amalgams are so good. But the fact remains: you cannot reliably have a successful demon build if there are no demons available to pick from, especially in the crucial early turns.

Although there are a similar number of mech- and beast-related cards, mechs have an additional leg up over the competition in that most of the mech synergy cards are also mechs. While beasts have double the minions of both demons and murlocs, there are 25% more mechs than beasts overall. It's pretty easy to see why mech compositions are so popular!

 

*^{Multi-tribe buffers like Zoobot and Menagerie Magician do not buff demons; they don't buff mechs either, one of them is a mech and mechs already have plenty of buffs already. This is relatively minor, but it does mean that demons have the fewest relevant cards of all tribes.}

 

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Conclusion

So there are a few (related) issues here: 1) the demon and murloc tribes lack as many synergy payoffs as mechs and beasts, 2) demons and murlocs lack utility in general (such as cleave), and 3) there are fewer demons and murlocs available.

Overall, the mech and beast packages have an advantage of having multiple options available to them, and as such, can afford to be more flexible over the course of a game. These strategies are often going to be more consistent in the long run. Whatever advantages demons or murlocs do have (like Toxfin for poisonous, or Megasaur), other builds exploit anyway due to the prevalence of amalgams.

There are many ways to address these discrepancies, chief among them adding more (good) demons/murlocs into the card pool. Otherwise, possible solutions range from minor (change Zoobot/Menagerie Magician to buff demons instead of dragons) to major (enable aggro strategies... somehow). Nerfing (or even removing) amalgam is a possible—if radical—solution that could help give individual tribes more distinct advantages & disadvantages.

 

What do you think? Is it fine the way it is; that is, is it good to have distinct early, mid, & late game strategies? Or should this be rectified in some way? If so, how would you balance things?

 

EDIT: According to a new Mike Donais interview, he said “we are adding an existing Demon in December to the Battlegrounds, bonus points if you can guess which one.” So that’s neat.

My guess? Floating Watcher or maybe Void Terror... Doubling Imp as a tier two minion, perhaps? What do you think?

EDIT 2: Added a table of tribal minions, broken down by tier level. Thanks for showing me how to do this /u/Azen0n!

EDIT 3: Went ahead and added the multi-tribe minions/synergy cards (e.g., Amalgam/Lightfang) to the tables, which coincidently now means demons have the fewest related cards due to how Zoobot/Menagerie Magician work. They perhaps ought to adjust how those cards work in this game mode (e.g., change "Dragon" to "Demon")... demons already have it rough!

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