I mean, obviously it's a tongue-in-cheek comment. The point is simply that just because a year has a name doesn't mean that's going to have any significant influence on the actual cards released. It's just an indicator of the overall theme, nothing more.
But again... Kraken, Raven and Mammoth would all produce some pretty interesting card sets. What if they were tribals? Seriously, they'd be far more interesting and unique than dragons, which are in literally everything fantasy-based.
It't not because it's the Year of the Dragon, it's because Descent of DRAGONS is an expansion with really MANY DRAGONS. So I'd also expect dragon decks to be more dominant in the meta
As noted in the flesh of my original comment, the game simply doesn't work that way anymore. Hell, it's not like there were really many mech decks around during the mech expansion, at least ones worth talking about. Just Warrior, Hunter and a sprinkling of cheesy Paladin - of which Warrior is the only one with any real sticking power in Standard, and THAT mostly on the strength of Dr Boom.
For a simple tribal synergy to be the dominant force in a metagame requires far too much of the expansion's power to be gated behind arbitrary tribal doors. If you don't properly lock those doors (by including 'holding a dragon' requirements, for example) you won't see tribals as the dominant archetype because you'll typically see a more flexible toolkit if you include the non-gated tools alongside others - which is what we have here. And - and this is the important part - that is good for the metagame because it allows for a much broader pool of viable decks. The alternative is to have a meta which is 'Dragon X' and then everything else in the lower tiers.
Quote From BystekhilcarIt's not like we had Kraken, Mammoth or Raven decks previously (although now I come to think of it... why didn't we get Kraken tribals? That'd be way more interesting than dragons...).
I agree with literally anything except this: every time I've seen this argument I got really annoyed cause it doesn't make any sense at all.
"Kraken" and "Raven" are not tribal tags, whereas "Dragon" is and, to be honest, it's one of the community's favorites too. It was legitimate for us to think about lots of minions with that tribe coming in this year, exactly for this reason.
I mean, obviously it's a tongue-in-cheek comment. The point is simply that just because a year has a name doesn't mean that's going to have any significant influence on the actual cards released. It's just an indicator of the overall theme, nothing more.
But again... Kraken, Raven and Mammoth would all produce some pretty interesting card sets. What if they were tribals? Seriously, they'd be far more interesting and unique than dragons, which are in literally everything fantasy-based.
I've played this one a fair bit at this point. Personally not a fan, but mostly down to my own taste - it doesn't really have a win condition as such, just hopes to stick something on board to be snowballed. Anything that doesn't just punch itself out will have the tools to deal with the (wholly defensive) mass-res boards anyway. That's not to say it doesn't win games - the issue is it just takes forever and never really feels like it's doing anything special in the process.
Oh, and re: some of the people talking about other cards - almost all of the things you've said you'd tech in make the deck actively weaker by weakening the Mass Res pool you're relying on. Albatross and Arcane Dynamo in particular. Whitemane is a decent shout, otherwise just stick to heal value like Damaged Stegotron.
Hot take: Achievements are a terrible idea. They wouldn't bring any new players in, and while they'd provide a short-term happiness boost they would lead to a subsequent drop in playrate because having all the achievements gives a perception of 'completion' which subconsciously discourages people from playing. And I say that despite the fact that I personally would like them a lot.
Frankly the things that would most improve this game are all external to the game and should be being provided by third-parties already. Comprehensive resources developed and maintained by noted professionals (entirely for their name-drop) to explain how game design works, how balance works, and how to judge the relative strengths of cards, would be a great improvement. Primarily because it would stop people complaining about things that don't need to be complained about, and stop them massively overhyping cards like Embiggen :P
There are no 'dragon' decks meaning just cramming a load of dragons into a deck (i.e. old Dragon Priest) because Hearthstone has evolved past that point. You'd need to have a huge amount of power gated behind the 'hold a dragon' tag, even more so than already exists given the power level of the expansion. It's also worth noting that doing so would significantly detract from other potential decks in the meta - if you're not playing a dragon deck, you get (say) 50% fewer cards from the expansion because half are gated behind dragon synergy.
We have a lot of powerful dragons, most (if not all) top-tier decks contain a dragon of some description or other, arena is largely dragon-dominated. Really not sure what more you want. It's not like we had Kraken, Mammoth or Raven decks previously (although now I come to think of it... why didn't we get Kraken tribals? That'd be way more interesting than dragons...).
Curious why galakrond warrior is so popular all of a sudden since it's not among the strongest decks.
Depends on the variant. My midrange tempo warrior wrecked Shamans, but now they're dead it struggles to compete as it's not defensive enough to abuse aggro and absolutely cannot either outrace or outtank HW Paladin.
Context - I wrote this last Christmas as a joke for a friend at work. Everything in the story is true - including dropping to 1 health from a lowrolled Crackle and finding lethal with Leeroy - which is why I was hyped enough to write something this cheesy.
Let this be a lesson to all - no matter how acerbic and waspish someone can act, they're still quite capable of doing something incredibly cringey and making themselves look like a pillock on the internet if it might make someone smile.
Curiously, while Zephrys is a little poor at providing Silence-related cards in this specific context (I agree with an above poster that the combo effect seems to be throwing it off a tad), what Zephrys DOES correctly recognise is that this is a minion with 2 attack. If you hold him for later and play him on 8 (or 10 with a hero power) he'll usually offer a Cabal Shadow Priest which is even more effective than simply silencing.
Honestly pretty amused at the cluelessness in this thread. Not much point re-hashing old points, though, so may as well just leave the posts to ripen, so I can pull them out in two months' time and shine a spotlight on how aggressively foolish they are.
On the topic of HSBG, though, there's actually some interesting stuff happening there. The blanket Murloc nerfs seem a little bit overkill, but we'll see. Amalgam being removed should shake up the meta pretty significantly... in theory. The problem is, HSBG really doesn't have much depth to it right now. Even if you nerfed Murloc into non-viability, there's then what, two viable comps? Three if you count the typically underperforming Demon. That's really not enough for 8 players, in my view, and hasn't been for some time now (since people learning how to play has trickled down the rankings some).
Right now, the game feels like 6 people flailing for Murlocs, and whoever lucks out and gets the most picks up the win (while the two people who didn't go for them get stomped). But really, I feel like that's always going to be the case - just changing Murloc for whatever comp is strong at that time. Compare to TFT, where there's dozens of -potential- comps, even if a handful are generally on the stronger side, and you can see my concern at oversimplification.
Much like a lot of people in this thread already, I heavily disagree with the OP. Aggressive decks have, if anything, been on the weak side for some considerable time now. They are, as iWatchUSleep correctly notes, favoured on ladder because faster games means faster ranking. Despite that, we're only really seeing an aggressive meta now, after several late-game-centric expansions, because Galakrond Shaman (which I personally would class a midrange deck) is eating the Control players.
And realistically, that's all aggressive decks are doing right now - countering Shaman. They're not really any stronger now than they were last expansion (relative to their competition), they're just in a more favourable position in the metagame.
A further note, though, on the few people who have posted saying they 'hate aggro'. I don't want to be mean here, but I think it needs to be said - you are wrong. Yes, I'm aware it's an opinion. It's still wrong. Aggressive decks exist to keep players honest. As soon as they're not a part of the meta, the game becomes a dull, irritating stalemate of value generation after value generation, wherein both players spend 20 turns playing cards but don't actually progress the gamestate at all (see: Dr Boom meta recently).
If you're playing control and regularly losing to aggro, you're either building or playing control badly. Under normal conditions, aggro decks are a gift to Control - your entire deck revolves around shutting down boardstates, and that's where aggressive decks in Hearthstone get their damage from (notwithstanding rare exceptions like the Pirate Warrior days). There's an article series on here (I forget the name) looking at various deck archetypes and, while a simplification, it does note the general tendency for deck winrates - Aggro > Midrange > Control > Aggro. Control loses to tempo, not aggression.
[ Generalisation]People who say they hate aggro are the same people who complain about netdecking. People who don't actually understand, or care about, a strong or healthy meta. They want to be left alone to play solitaire to do whatever weird thing they decided to make a deck to do, and are upset that they can't do so because hey, their opponent is trying to actually win. And while I have no issue with people wanting to build weird decks and have fun with them, I do take issue when those people complain that they can't do that in high-level ranked ladder. [ /Generalisation]
Sorry for the rant, but yeah. It's one of those comments that gets sprayed a lot by people who don't really know what they're asking for, and who'd complain a lot if they ever actually got their wish.
Honestly getting kinda tired of people whining about secret mage at this point. It's not like the deck can't be countered. My Mech'thun lock ran at 76% winrate against them on the Legend push this season.
And yet, on my climb from the 12 I was sat at having not really played in two months, to my current rank 4 (haven't played all that much to be honest, managed a respectable 85% winrate getting there), I never had issues with Shaman. Met plenty of them, sure, but beat most of them and never felt overwhelmed at any point. Teched a pair of Brawls into my midrange warrior and that was that - they contest board well, but as soon as they lose board their only out is two boards of 8/8s (i.e. Galakrond and then Shudderwock). If you have answers for those boardstates, whether via Brawl or duplicated Scions of Ruin, you're pretty much set. They also pack basically no healing, so aggressive strategies shut them down pretty hard.
The winrate is high right now because it's the start of an expansion. I made an entire essay-post primarily devoted to telling people not to make ridiculously greedy decks, precisely because that's exactly what people do at the start of an expansion.
Anyway. That's not even the point. The point I'm trying to make is that the argument as to whether Shaman is overpowered right now is entirely redundant because it's literally impossible to tell at this point whether the meta can resolve it on its own or not. We've all seen decks pop up out of nowhere and break into the meta hard. A week into the expansion we've barely even found our feet. Anyone can have theories, but we don't have enough data to actually form a strong position because that data does not exist. Deckbuilding is a fundamentally iterative process, and when those iterations have yet to be performed - and the meta has yet to react to them - we cannot say with any sort of certainty what's overpowered and what's just strong.
Though, of course, I fully expect to get as downvoted on this post as on my original one. Because people are predictable, and 'burn the witch' is so common a reaction as to actually be boring at this point.
My issue with the 'nerf anti-fun' position is both a) your point on enjoyment being subjective, and a broader b) that people are really bad at knowing what's actually fun.
I realise that statement sounds phenomenally arrogant at first glance, but consider - how many 'be careful what you wish for' stories are there in popular culture and mythology? People think they want the big bad deck they're scared of to go away, and yet as soon as it does, something else rises to take its place. To put it in Wild terms - nerf the Mill Rogues keeping control honest and suddenly greed becomes king.
Yes, genuine anti-fun should be removed - but frankly, it should never actually get into the game in the first place with good pre-release testing. And it takes way more than a week to figure out whether something's genuinely anti-fun or just something people need to work out how to deal with.
I've seen the 'token druid is anti-fun' argument in a dozen different expansions now... and I don't think token druid was in tiers 1 or 2 at the end of any of them. The meta resolves these things most of the time.
I'm apparently in the minority here, but I really dislike the balance strategy of late. I used to admire what a lot of people have whined about previously - back in the vanilla days, Blizzard were very reluctant to perform any direct balance changes.
That, in my opinion, is the desirable state of affairs. It is a source of continual frustration to me that so many cards have been nerfed - and often not because of any actual balance reason, but because people continually whine about them. The biggest example is probably Quest Rogue on release - barely got above a 50% winrate at any time, and yet got nerfed into non-viability just because people were whining about it. And then ate multiple other nerfs over time, too.
The desirable state of affairs in any card game - hell, any game at all - is for players to find their own solutions. I've gotten to Legend multiple times almost entirely off the back of hating on the most popular decks. Let the meta resolve balance issues, don't just nerf anything that looks like it's doing well before players can react to it.
Unfortunately, that state of affairs is not directly conducive of more people playing (and therefore more money being spent), because people like to whine about things that aren't really problems.
Personally been having a fair amount of success with a slower variant of Galakrond Warrior than the one shown here, but not a Control list. This is more what I'd class as being a tempo/midrange deck, basically just curving out dragons/rushes with just Galakrond and Mad Deathwing at the top end. Has enough game to go toe-to-toe with pretty much anything on the board before finishing with swings to face from Galakrond.
P.S. Playing a Galakrond-buffed Fluffy Kibler Dragon Scion of Ruin (that will always be its name to me) is one thing. Picking one up from Galakrond with its cost reduced to (1), copying it with War Master Voone, then playing it on the following turn alongside Barista Lynchen? That's quite another. Hand full o' fluff.
That's fair - if I was going to include any tech, it would be that plus 1-2 ASO. I maintain, however, that the BGH include is a next-level tech that will catch a lot of people out.
As noted in the flesh of my original comment, the game simply doesn't work that way anymore. Hell, it's not like there were really many mech decks around during the mech expansion, at least ones worth talking about. Just Warrior, Hunter and a sprinkling of cheesy Paladin - of which Warrior is the only one with any real sticking power in Standard, and THAT mostly on the strength of Dr Boom.
For a simple tribal synergy to be the dominant force in a metagame requires far too much of the expansion's power to be gated behind arbitrary tribal doors. If you don't properly lock those doors (by including 'holding a dragon' requirements, for example) you won't see tribals as the dominant archetype because you'll typically see a more flexible toolkit if you include the non-gated tools alongside others - which is what we have here. And - and this is the important part - that is good for the metagame because it allows for a much broader pool of viable decks. The alternative is to have a meta which is 'Dragon X' and then everything else in the lower tiers.
I mean, obviously it's a tongue-in-cheek comment. The point is simply that just because a year has a name doesn't mean that's going to have any significant influence on the actual cards released. It's just an indicator of the overall theme, nothing more.
But again... Kraken, Raven and Mammoth would all produce some pretty interesting card sets. What if they were tribals? Seriously, they'd be far more interesting and unique than dragons, which are in literally everything fantasy-based.
I've played this one a fair bit at this point. Personally not a fan, but mostly down to my own taste - it doesn't really have a win condition as such, just hopes to stick something on board to be snowballed. Anything that doesn't just punch itself out will have the tools to deal with the (wholly defensive) mass-res boards anyway. That's not to say it doesn't win games - the issue is it just takes forever and never really feels like it's doing anything special in the process.
Oh, and re: some of the people talking about other cards - almost all of the things you've said you'd tech in make the deck actively weaker by weakening the Mass Res pool you're relying on. Albatross and Arcane Dynamo in particular. Whitemane is a decent shout, otherwise just stick to heal value like Damaged Stegotron.
Hot take: Achievements are a terrible idea. They wouldn't bring any new players in, and while they'd provide a short-term happiness boost they would lead to a subsequent drop in playrate because having all the achievements gives a perception of 'completion' which subconsciously discourages people from playing. And I say that despite the fact that I personally would like them a lot.
Frankly the things that would most improve this game are all external to the game and should be being provided by third-parties already. Comprehensive resources developed and maintained by noted professionals (entirely for their name-drop) to explain how game design works, how balance works, and how to judge the relative strengths of cards, would be a great improvement. Primarily because it would stop people complaining about things that don't need to be complained about, and stop them massively overhyping cards like Embiggen :P
There are no 'dragon' decks meaning just cramming a load of dragons into a deck (i.e. old Dragon Priest) because Hearthstone has evolved past that point. You'd need to have a huge amount of power gated behind the 'hold a dragon' tag, even more so than already exists given the power level of the expansion. It's also worth noting that doing so would significantly detract from other potential decks in the meta - if you're not playing a dragon deck, you get (say) 50% fewer cards from the expansion because half are gated behind dragon synergy.
We have a lot of powerful dragons, most (if not all) top-tier decks contain a dragon of some description or other, arena is largely dragon-dominated. Really not sure what more you want. It's not like we had Kraken, Mammoth or Raven decks previously (although now I come to think of it... why didn't we get Kraken tribals? That'd be way more interesting than dragons...).
Depends on the variant. My midrange tempo warrior wrecked Shamans, but now they're dead it struggles to compete as it's not defensive enough to abuse aggro and absolutely cannot either outrace or outtank HW Paladin.
...
And the last of the bunch
In the office that evening
Queued some Hearthstone at lunch
With the nerfs that had changed
The way standard was styled
He decided to change up
And queued up in Wild
At once he was queued
His Odd Rogue opposed
By a Thrall Even Shaman
Most deadly of foes
Once the mulligan was done
He soon found that he lacked
A one-drop on one
So the odds quickly stacked
The pressure soon mounted
The game had to be saved
So he slammed down a Swashburglar
And ripped Healing Wave
He pointed at face, crossed his fingers and toes
And the minions were seen
His Owl beat Thrall’s Golem
And he healed for fourteen
Despite this respite
Pressure mounted anew
And as both hands ran dry
He knew what he must do
His health was still low
And few minions on the table
But with no other options
He played Myra’s Unstable
He must heal and swing board
He accepted these facts
So he played out a Vilespine
But not before Zilliax
He now had the board
But his health was at six
And with fatigue now at two
Thrall had plenty of tricks
He topdecked for lethal
Found a crackle with glee
Pointed it at face
But he lowrolled a three
So our hero odd rogue
Knew that Thrall did not win it
With one health remaining
Valeera was still in it
He played out some minions
Cleared board best as he could
And then boosted the Zilliax
With a combo’d Cold Blood
His foe could not answer
With much power at all
So our hero now knew
He could defeat Thrall
So he searched for the lethal
To pick up the win
And the game closed with a cry
LEEEEROOOOOOY JENKINS!
---
Context - I wrote this last Christmas as a joke for a friend at work. Everything in the story is true - including dropping to 1 health from a lowrolled Crackle and finding lethal with Leeroy - which is why I was hyped enough to write something this cheesy.
Let this be a lesson to all - no matter how acerbic and waspish someone can act, they're still quite capable of doing something incredibly cringey and making themselves look like a pillock on the internet if it might make someone smile.
Curiously, while Zephrys is a little poor at providing Silence-related cards in this specific context (I agree with an above poster that the combo effect seems to be throwing it off a tad), what Zephrys DOES correctly recognise is that this is a minion with 2 attack. If you hold him for later and play him on 8 (or 10 with a hero power) he'll usually offer a Cabal Shadow Priest which is even more effective than simply silencing.
Running at 60% against face hunter with a slower tempo warrior build atm.
Then again, I also had a 65% winrate against Shaman, and that was allegedly OP, so what do I know...
RIP Amalgam. Best boy.
Honestly pretty amused at the cluelessness in this thread. Not much point re-hashing old points, though, so may as well just leave the posts to ripen, so I can pull them out in two months' time and shine a spotlight on how aggressively foolish they are.
On the topic of HSBG, though, there's actually some interesting stuff happening there. The blanket Murloc nerfs seem a little bit overkill, but we'll see. Amalgam being removed should shake up the meta pretty significantly... in theory. The problem is, HSBG really doesn't have much depth to it right now. Even if you nerfed Murloc into non-viability, there's then what, two viable comps? Three if you count the typically underperforming Demon. That's really not enough for 8 players, in my view, and hasn't been for some time now (since people learning how to play has trickled down the rankings some).
Right now, the game feels like 6 people flailing for Murlocs, and whoever lucks out and gets the most picks up the win (while the two people who didn't go for them get stomped). But really, I feel like that's always going to be the case - just changing Murloc for whatever comp is strong at that time. Compare to TFT, where there's dozens of -potential- comps, even if a handful are generally on the stronger side, and you can see my concern at oversimplification.
Much like a lot of people in this thread already, I heavily disagree with the OP. Aggressive decks have, if anything, been on the weak side for some considerable time now. They are, as iWatchUSleep correctly notes, favoured on ladder because faster games means faster ranking. Despite that, we're only really seeing an aggressive meta now, after several late-game-centric expansions, because Galakrond Shaman (which I personally would class a midrange deck) is eating the Control players.
And realistically, that's all aggressive decks are doing right now - countering Shaman. They're not really any stronger now than they were last expansion (relative to their competition), they're just in a more favourable position in the metagame.
A further note, though, on the few people who have posted saying they 'hate aggro'. I don't want to be mean here, but I think it needs to be said - you are wrong. Yes, I'm aware it's an opinion. It's still wrong. Aggressive decks exist to keep players honest. As soon as they're not a part of the meta, the game becomes a dull, irritating stalemate of value generation after value generation, wherein both players spend 20 turns playing cards but don't actually progress the gamestate at all (see: Dr Boom meta recently).
If you're playing control and regularly losing to aggro, you're either building or playing control badly. Under normal conditions, aggro decks are a gift to Control - your entire deck revolves around shutting down boardstates, and that's where aggressive decks in Hearthstone get their damage from (notwithstanding rare exceptions like the Pirate Warrior days). There's an article series on here (I forget the name) looking at various deck archetypes and, while a simplification, it does note the general tendency for deck winrates - Aggro > Midrange > Control > Aggro. Control loses to tempo, not aggression.
[ Generalisation]People who say they hate aggro are the same people who complain about netdecking. People who don't actually understand, or care about, a strong or healthy meta. They want to be left alone to play solitaire to do whatever weird thing they decided to make a deck to do, and are upset that they can't do so because hey, their opponent is trying to actually win. And while I have no issue with people wanting to build weird decks and have fun with them, I do take issue when those people complain that they can't do that in high-level ranked ladder. [ /Generalisation]
Sorry for the rant, but yeah. It's one of those comments that gets sprayed a lot by people who don't really know what they're asking for, and who'd complain a lot if they ever actually got their wish.
Honestly getting kinda tired of people whining about secret mage at this point. It's not like the deck can't be countered. My Mech'thun lock ran at 76% winrate against them on the Legend push this season.
And yet, on my climb from the 12 I was sat at having not really played in two months, to my current rank 4 (haven't played all that much to be honest, managed a respectable 85% winrate getting there), I never had issues with Shaman. Met plenty of them, sure, but beat most of them and never felt overwhelmed at any point. Teched a pair of Brawls into my midrange warrior and that was that - they contest board well, but as soon as they lose board their only out is two boards of 8/8s (i.e. Galakrond and then Shudderwock). If you have answers for those boardstates, whether via Brawl or duplicated Scions of Ruin, you're pretty much set. They also pack basically no healing, so aggressive strategies shut them down pretty hard.
The winrate is high right now because it's the start of an expansion. I made an entire essay-post primarily devoted to telling people not to make ridiculously greedy decks, precisely because that's exactly what people do at the start of an expansion.
Anyway. That's not even the point. The point I'm trying to make is that the argument as to whether Shaman is overpowered right now is entirely redundant because it's literally impossible to tell at this point whether the meta can resolve it on its own or not. We've all seen decks pop up out of nowhere and break into the meta hard. A week into the expansion we've barely even found our feet. Anyone can have theories, but we don't have enough data to actually form a strong position because that data does not exist. Deckbuilding is a fundamentally iterative process, and when those iterations have yet to be performed - and the meta has yet to react to them - we cannot say with any sort of certainty what's overpowered and what's just strong.
Though, of course, I fully expect to get as downvoted on this post as on my original one. Because people are predictable, and 'burn the witch' is so common a reaction as to actually be boring at this point.
My issue with the 'nerf anti-fun' position is both a) your point on enjoyment being subjective, and a broader b) that people are really bad at knowing what's actually fun.
I realise that statement sounds phenomenally arrogant at first glance, but consider - how many 'be careful what you wish for' stories are there in popular culture and mythology? People think they want the big bad deck they're scared of to go away, and yet as soon as it does, something else rises to take its place. To put it in Wild terms - nerf the Mill Rogues keeping control honest and suddenly greed becomes king.
Yes, genuine anti-fun should be removed - but frankly, it should never actually get into the game in the first place with good pre-release testing. And it takes way more than a week to figure out whether something's genuinely anti-fun or just something people need to work out how to deal with.
I've seen the 'token druid is anti-fun' argument in a dozen different expansions now... and I don't think token druid was in tiers 1 or 2 at the end of any of them. The meta resolves these things most of the time.
-21 and counting. I don't care - frankly, the majority are wrong an awful lot of the time :P
I'm apparently in the minority here, but I really dislike the balance strategy of late. I used to admire what a lot of people have whined about previously - back in the vanilla days, Blizzard were very reluctant to perform any direct balance changes.
That, in my opinion, is the desirable state of affairs. It is a source of continual frustration to me that so many cards have been nerfed - and often not because of any actual balance reason, but because people continually whine about them. The biggest example is probably Quest Rogue on release - barely got above a 50% winrate at any time, and yet got nerfed into non-viability just because people were whining about it. And then ate multiple other nerfs over time, too.
The desirable state of affairs in any card game - hell, any game at all - is for players to find their own solutions. I've gotten to Legend multiple times almost entirely off the back of hating on the most popular decks. Let the meta resolve balance issues, don't just nerf anything that looks like it's doing well before players can react to it.
Unfortunately, that state of affairs is not directly conducive of more people playing (and therefore more money being spent), because people like to whine about things that aren't really problems.
Personally been having a fair amount of success with a slower variant of Galakrond Warrior than the one shown here, but not a Control list. This is more what I'd class as being a tempo/midrange deck, basically just curving out dragons/rushes with just Galakrond and Mad Deathwing at the top end. Has enough game to go toe-to-toe with pretty much anything on the board before finishing with swings to face from Galakrond.
P.S. Playing a Galakrond-buffed Fluffy Kibler Dragon Scion of Ruin (that will always be its name to me) is one thing. Picking one up from Galakrond with its cost reduced to (1), copying it with War Master Voone, then playing it on the following turn alongside Barista Lynchen? That's quite another. Hand full o' fluff.
I'm glad this was useful to people, and hope people aren't playing warlock getting beat too bad ;)
That's fair - if I was going to include any tech, it would be that plus 1-2 ASO. I maintain, however, that the BGH include is a next-level tech that will catch a lot of people out.