Turn 5 Oracle of Elune into Razormane Battleguard into any mid-sized taunt is nuts. Could be 2x Archspore Msshi'fn, or 2x Dreaming Drake (particularly great if you corrupted it on turn 4 before this combo) - seems like it has a lot of potential to build up a big board fast. You could maybe even get a little cute with some of the cost reduction cards in Druid, though that seems far less straightforward.
This doesn't even need to be great to be awesome - basically turns Priest into a better Hunter at start of game, finally making Shadow Priest a reasonable archetype.
It's hard to say if Lost in the Park is any good, but it has a few things going for it. It draws a card over the course of the quest, which helps mitigate the downsides of having it in your opening hand. It's also pretty easy to accomplish curve through progress - Quest turn 1, Minion turn 2, Moontouched Amulet turn 3 for the first proc, Park Panther turn 4 to get you close to the second proc and probably clear two enemies, etc.
That's how I imagine this would need to work - in some kind of midrange deck that plans to use Druid's ample "gain attack" abilities to control the board. That's the direction Blizzard said they wanted to move when the took Swipe out of Standard, and the fact that this gains you armor to mitigate attacks seems pretty relevant. We'd probably still need one or two cards to support it, but this seems like it could be solid.
I don't think this fits into a traditional Dude Paladin archetype - you'd effectively lose your first turn to play it - but it does seem compelling as a Control Paladin win condition. There's already a lot of support for this (e.g. First Day of School, Righteous Protector, and a bunch of secrets that can be good for control), and with only minimal extra Dude support (Lothraxion the Redeemed and Pursuit of Justice) you could get a hero power that generates two 5/3 Divine Shield units each turn. Particularly since the new Lightbringer's Hammer seems to be driving a control paladin archetype, that's absolutely where I'd try this.
4/5 soft taunt that draws at least two cards, all for the low price of 6 mana. This is absolutely a fantastic card. It's also probably going to be a card with some hilarious highlight reels, where it gets summoned randomly and then fatigues the crap out of its controller.
It's hard to judge in its worst case (i.e. you just play it to get four random 2/2 minions), but this curves out right after Boggspine Knuckles, and getting 4 random 6 drops for 6 seems pretty good.
Warlock minion - "Start of Game: If all spells in your deck are Holy, draw them." It's just Renounce Darkness, so now you can play one on turn-2 every time lol
I'm wondering how much I can get away with a School+class combination that doesn't exist. Like a Warrior card that says "If all spells in your deck are Fire". If I put it in a custom expansion, can people imagine the rest? Probably not :(
For what it's worth, there are some Warrior Fire spells - Molten Breath and Ironforge Portal are both Fire spells. They also have a single Nature spell with Sudden Genesis. (I'm omitting the dual class cards here, which include Holy and Nature spells, but those tags obviously derive from Paladin and Rogue class identities.)
On the one hand, I think Warrior is a poor choice because they're not expected to get much in the way of spell schools - most of their spells represent physical things to mesh with their class identity/WoW abilities. On the other hand, this templating presumably implies that if your deck has no spells, the trigger is activated (akin to the "no duplicates" rules when your deck has zero cards). In that view, your Fire Warrior spell template would be totally valid, but you'd basically be making a card that reads "If your deck contains no spells."
Personally, I like the idea of pushing those boundaries, but I think your ask for people to "imagine the rest" demonstrates where that really belongs: in a Custom Hearthstone Expansion design competition. (Card competitions, I think, ask the designers and judges to imagine a new card added in isolation.) Maybe Out of Cards should try doing something like that once a year, or once competition season, etc. to give people room to play with bigger concepts that require multi-card support.
Or maybe there's room for something smaller in scope that would satisfy this - something like a "Build a custom class package" competition where you'd design something like six cards to support some new archetype. Then we can all see if we can come up with anything better than Freeze Shaman lol.
@Wailor I wonder if for the Maelstrom Harbinger, this might be an interesting opportunity to riff off the "improved by Spell Damage" templating found on Ras Frostwhisper and a couple of other Mage cards. Perhaps combining it with Lightspawn's templating to make "This minion's Attack is improved by Spell Damage." I think that reads a bit more naturally than "each Spell Damage you have"; the word "each" implies more than one thing, but you really just have one cumulative Spell Damage number.
Attempt number two. Now it only has an effect that is done at the start of your turn, but still further explores the potential design space for this competition and stays true to flavor. It can also still be played when in your mulligan, unless there is spaghetti code with Casts When Drawn.
It would be really unfair to be able to include a "Cast When Drawn" card in your base 30 card deck. With 2x of these in your deck, you're basically running a 28 card deck, which is incredibly powerful on its own even before you get the free 3/2's. There's a reason in MTG that, despite no max deck size, no one ever runs more than 60 cards in a constructed deck; having fewer cards means you get to find your win conditions faster.
I'm not trying to suggest that aggro should dominate and control should lose - in fact, I strongly prefer midrange and control strategies. But I think you're reducing the question of archetype/class pair matchups down to archetype matchups, and losing some important details. The prototypical Mage approach to dealing with aggro is stalling until they can play big board clears. That was always the case with Ice Block, Frost Nova, etc., and it's no different now. That lack of cheap board control means they're inherently weaker against heavy aggro, and the loss of massive freeze has reigned in a lot of their unfair stall/combo kill playstyles.
So, should Control Mage vs. Aggro Druid be a bad match-up for Mage? Probably yes - Mage's toolkit is way better at playing control against midrange decks because they have single target frost spells and big AOEs. But that's okay in my mind, as there are other control classes that can go toe to toe with Aggro Druid more easily, and probably some midrange decks that can beat it easily. The goal of a healthy meta is to have lots of classes and archetypes beating up on lots of other classes and archetypes, and this specific match can be bad without having Mage be a bad class in the metagame. We just need a metagame with greater deck diversity to create some of that archetype balancing.
Yeah, like I said, I'm not trying to judge your plays - we all make mistakes in the moment (I know I've made plenty of misplays). I just really enjoy thinking about replays and how to improve across the board - it's not personal at all. (Your opponent, for instance, screwed up their turn 2 by not playing around Combustion to preserve their ravens. That's a mistake I probably would have made in the moment too, so I expect I'll be more mindful of that going forward.)
My point was just that lots of other decks that want to play for the board wouldn't end up at this position on turn 7, and that even in your game there were choices you could have made to avoid your opponent getting that far ahead. So using this near defeat as proof that Token Druid is too powerful isn't really fair - Token Druid might be very strong after Lunacy Mage is nerfed, but it won't exist in a vacuum, and lots of other decks are better-suited to deal with it.
More than anything, I think your replay demonstrates the OP nature of Lunacy Mage. You didn't really fight for the board, and thus got overrun, but still won in the last moments thanks to random, super cheap spells.
I agree he should have played Font of Power prior to Deck of Lunacy for the options, but I think otherwise it seemed like the right play to drop Deck of Lunacy rather than float a mana.
You could maybe argue that he should have played Font of Power into the randomly generated Firebrand into Deck of Lunacy with the hopes of killing the Bonechewer Brawler with the spellburst, but the average outcome is that their Bonechewer Brawler becomes a 6/1 and their Toad of the Wilds dies. Then they'd play their new Toad and Mark of the Spikeshell on the 6/1 and go face for 8 (rather than trade with the 3/4 like they did). Now you're starting turn 5 at 16 health instead of 22, but you can trade on board with the Brawler and Apexis Blast the last minion on board. Ultimately that's probably better than what happened, since the Trick Totem didn't stop any incoming damage, leaving him at 14 at the start of turn 6.
I'm not sure that's better than just Font of Power into Fireball like you've suggested, but I'd always play the Deck of Lunacy there at the end of turn 4 regardless.
(Notably, I'm assuming all random card generation would have played out exactly the same as it did - maybe order matters and would have changed the results without Deck of Lunacy being played first.)
I was playing a no minion mage earlier today against a Druid. A tree/token druid. Watch the replay. By turn 7 I was down to 4 health. If I was playing ANY OTHER DECK other than Lunacy Mage, I would have lost 100%.
The challenge for me with this explanation is the idea that the game would have played out the same - with you down at 4 health by turn 7 - if you were playing any other deck. I don't even really believe that outcome was inevitably true in the game you've linked to.
With the exception of an early Combustion, you spend the first six turns doing very little to interact with your opponent's board. Take your turn 5, for example, when you could easily have used your Fireball to take out one of your opponent's minions, but you dropped a Trick Totem instead. That right there was 4 damage you didn't have to take. And that would have set you up to Apexis Blast their remaining buffed taunt, which also has about a 27.7% chance of getting you something to further deal with the board (18.5% taunts, 9.2% rush minions)
My aim here is not to criticize your plays, but rather to point out that the game could have played out differently if you had interacted more with your opponent's minions. And there are other cards you could have run to deal with aggro decks more effectively in the early game that didn't show up in your deck list (e.g. Ice Barrier and Cone of Cold) which would have probably changed the outcome quite a bit.
So it's hard to believe that any other deck would have lost the game. Certainly, any other deck would have lost from that position - down to 4 HP against aggro on turn 7 - but most other decks wouldn't have let the game get there in the first place.
I think they must have assumed No Minion Mage would be less popular/strong. Refreshing Spring Water is a much cooler card in a deck with some minions, and becomes a more interesting potential inclusion that you really have to think about.
They were obviously wrong, but I can kind of see why they might have thought that. They removed a lot of the best face damage in Mage, and added in a Hero Power package that uses a lot of minions and seems like a cool control finisher. Also, the archetype a) wasn't oppressively strong or powerful before rotation, and b) didn't gain a ton of new stuff. (The most common list for this deck only runs two new cards - 2x Runed Orb and 2x Refreshing Spring Water).
That's a big part of why I think the rotation plays a major role here. This deck is really strong in the context of what a lot of other classes are trying to do right now with their archetypes post-rotation, and it blows them out of the water.
Everything that the OP says is true - Lord Jaraxxus offers infinite value, there's not really any competition for his card slot in Control Warlock, and Warlock is already very strong at control. Despite all that, I don't think we can reasonably say that Lord Jaraxxus is a problem. The major advantages of the new Jaraxxus over the old one is that he can safely be played before you drop below 15 life without risking a major blowout loss, and he can be healed back up to 30 so that even if you're at low life when you play him, you can recover.
The first advantage there is critical to making him playable. He was outclassed for a long time because Warlock often had anti-synergies with him in their control decks (e.g. Skull of the Man'ari), and you often had to delay until you had low life to play him. At the point that you're below 15 life and doing little else on that turn you play him, you're probably behind on board and being burst down the next turn.
The second advantage - that he can heal up to 30 - is really a symptom of the real problem in Warlock today; namely, that Warlock has way too much healing. The Soul Fragment package has gotten stronger over time with Luckysoul Hoarder, and Warlock has picked up a ton of lifesteal and an upgraded Siphon Soul with the core set and rotation.
With all that in mind, I think nerfing a bit of the key healing tools of Warlock would go a long way to weakening the Control Warlock deck enough to prevent Lord Jaraxxus's infinite value becoming a problem.
I cant understand ppl that say random is fun. U literally arent playing a win con game. No startegy just trust on the gaming gods. How is that fun? U win not ur fault u lose not ur fault. Fun?
Random isn't fun when it's something like "randomly generate massive power swings" like the ones we see with Deck of Lunacy, but there are lots of way that random can be rewarding. I think the Discover mechanic is a good example of this - it gets to be skill testing by seeing how well you pick the right card for the situation at hand.
Other "heavily random" strategies include Miracle Priest and Burgle Rogue, both of which are decently popular (historically speaking). They satisfies the "Timmy/Tammy" player's desire for big, exciting turns, but it also gives you a chance to see what you can do with a pile of random cards (not all that unlike a Sealed or Draft game of MTG). Having to cobble together a strategy based on a handful of random cards can be very skill testing, and it's certainly a great way to add variety to your games.
Notably, those two archetypes tend to have lower average power levels for their random cards, and they don't get the major discounts associated with Deck of Lunacy. Those two factors are a big part of why the randomness of No Minion Mage today is so unfun.
I agree with you regarding the major bait and switch with all these midrange decks. I was really excited about playing tempo/midrange decks, and have just been clobbered on ladder. But I don't think you can reasonably argue that Tickatus Warlock is responsible for the metagame.
For one, Warlock is no more than about 10% of the decks being played right now (as indicated by the chart in this article). For another, the stats on HSReplay indicate that it loses a lot to Hunter and Demon Hunter, but Paladin and Mage wreck those classes right now (at winrates around 70% for the former, and 60% for the latter).
I get why people hate Tickatus, and any metagame that's dominated by a card that can wipe out a third of your deck over the course of a game is certainly unfun if it's a top meta deck. But I don't think that's true today for Tickatus Warlock, and I think seeing the traditionally aggro and tempo classes regain traction on the ladder would naturally decrease its play rates.
So no, this is not a uniquely bad start, but instead seems to be a common symptom of adding fancy new things without the capacity to test them fully. In this case the move from Classic to Core sets threw a lot of decks in the air, and I appreciate how hard it was to see where they'd all land. I'm still willing to point fingers where its obvious though (I'm looking at you Galakrond Shaman).
The other factor here is rotation. I've been trying to play Taunt Druid on ladder (without much success), and I've noticed that Teacher's Pet has a much better deathrattle nowadays because of how small the 3-drop beast pool has gotten.
I think Mage and Paladin have been similarly improved on the fringes thanks to rotation, which is really hard to fully account for in testing. Combine that with great new stuff like "0 mana draw 2" and you get this kind of mess. Still, this is egregious enough that I'm surprised they didn't see it coming.
Wow - just did this and it worked for me as well! This is neat a little trick, but it really seems like it shouldn't work. I imagine one of these days Blizzard will remove this.
Turn 5 Oracle of Elune into Razormane Battleguard into any mid-sized taunt is nuts. Could be 2x Archspore Msshi'fn, or 2x Dreaming Drake (particularly great if you corrupted it on turn 4 before this combo) - seems like it has a lot of potential to build up a big board fast. You could maybe even get a little cute with some of the cost reduction cards in Druid, though that seems far less straightforward.
This doesn't even need to be great to be awesome - basically turns Priest into a better Hunter at start of game, finally making Shadow Priest a reasonable archetype.
It's hard to say if Lost in the Park is any good, but it has a few things going for it. It draws a card over the course of the quest, which helps mitigate the downsides of having it in your opening hand. It's also pretty easy to accomplish curve through progress - Quest turn 1, Minion turn 2, Moontouched Amulet turn 3 for the first proc, Park Panther turn 4 to get you close to the second proc and probably clear two enemies, etc.
That's how I imagine this would need to work - in some kind of midrange deck that plans to use Druid's ample "gain attack" abilities to control the board. That's the direction Blizzard said they wanted to move when the took Swipe out of Standard, and the fact that this gains you armor to mitigate attacks seems pretty relevant. We'd probably still need one or two cards to support it, but this seems like it could be solid.
I don't think this fits into a traditional Dude Paladin archetype - you'd effectively lose your first turn to play it - but it does seem compelling as a Control Paladin win condition. There's already a lot of support for this (e.g. First Day of School, Righteous Protector, and a bunch of secrets that can be good for control), and with only minimal extra Dude support (Lothraxion the Redeemed and Pursuit of Justice) you could get a hero power that generates two 5/3 Divine Shield units each turn. Particularly since the new Lightbringer's Hammer seems to be driving a control paladin archetype, that's absolutely where I'd try this.
4/5 soft taunt that draws at least two cards, all for the low price of 6 mana. This is absolutely a fantastic card. It's also probably going to be a card with some hilarious highlight reels, where it gets summoned randomly and then fatigues the crap out of its controller.
It's hard to judge in its worst case (i.e. you just play it to get four random 2/2 minions), but this curves out right after Boggspine Knuckles, and getting 4 random 6 drops for 6 seems pretty good.
For what it's worth, there are some Warrior Fire spells - Molten Breath and Ironforge Portal are both Fire spells. They also have a single Nature spell with Sudden Genesis. (I'm omitting the dual class cards here, which include Holy and Nature spells, but those tags obviously derive from Paladin and Rogue class identities.)
On the one hand, I think Warrior is a poor choice because they're not expected to get much in the way of spell schools - most of their spells represent physical things to mesh with their class identity/WoW abilities. On the other hand, this templating presumably implies that if your deck has no spells, the trigger is activated (akin to the "no duplicates" rules when your deck has zero cards). In that view, your Fire Warrior spell template would be totally valid, but you'd basically be making a card that reads "If your deck contains no spells."
Personally, I like the idea of pushing those boundaries, but I think your ask for people to "imagine the rest" demonstrates where that really belongs: in a Custom Hearthstone Expansion design competition. (Card competitions, I think, ask the designers and judges to imagine a new card added in isolation.) Maybe Out of Cards should try doing something like that once a year, or once competition season, etc. to give people room to play with bigger concepts that require multi-card support.
Or maybe there's room for something smaller in scope that would satisfy this - something like a "Build a custom class package" competition where you'd design something like six cards to support some new archetype. Then we can all see if we can come up with anything better than Freeze Shaman lol.
@Wailor I wonder if for the Maelstrom Harbinger, this might be an interesting opportunity to riff off the "improved by Spell Damage" templating found on Ras Frostwhisper and a couple of other Mage cards. Perhaps combining it with Lightspawn's templating to make "This minion's Attack is improved by Spell Damage." I think that reads a bit more naturally than "each Spell Damage you have"; the word "each" implies more than one thing, but you really just have one cumulative Spell Damage number.
It would be really unfair to be able to include a "Cast When Drawn" card in your base 30 card deck. With 2x of these in your deck, you're basically running a 28 card deck, which is incredibly powerful on its own even before you get the free 3/2's. There's a reason in MTG that, despite no max deck size, no one ever runs more than 60 cards in a constructed deck; having fewer cards means you get to find your win conditions faster.
I'm not trying to suggest that aggro should dominate and control should lose - in fact, I strongly prefer midrange and control strategies. But I think you're reducing the question of archetype/class pair matchups down to archetype matchups, and losing some important details. The prototypical Mage approach to dealing with aggro is stalling until they can play big board clears. That was always the case with Ice Block, Frost Nova, etc., and it's no different now. That lack of cheap board control means they're inherently weaker against heavy aggro, and the loss of massive freeze has reigned in a lot of their unfair stall/combo kill playstyles.
So, should Control Mage vs. Aggro Druid be a bad match-up for Mage? Probably yes - Mage's toolkit is way better at playing control against midrange decks because they have single target frost spells and big AOEs. But that's okay in my mind, as there are other control classes that can go toe to toe with Aggro Druid more easily, and probably some midrange decks that can beat it easily. The goal of a healthy meta is to have lots of classes and archetypes beating up on lots of other classes and archetypes, and this specific match can be bad without having Mage be a bad class in the metagame. We just need a metagame with greater deck diversity to create some of that archetype balancing.
Yeah, like I said, I'm not trying to judge your plays - we all make mistakes in the moment (I know I've made plenty of misplays). I just really enjoy thinking about replays and how to improve across the board - it's not personal at all. (Your opponent, for instance, screwed up their turn 2 by not playing around Combustion to preserve their ravens. That's a mistake I probably would have made in the moment too, so I expect I'll be more mindful of that going forward.)
My point was just that lots of other decks that want to play for the board wouldn't end up at this position on turn 7, and that even in your game there were choices you could have made to avoid your opponent getting that far ahead. So using this near defeat as proof that Token Druid is too powerful isn't really fair - Token Druid might be very strong after Lunacy Mage is nerfed, but it won't exist in a vacuum, and lots of other decks are better-suited to deal with it.
More than anything, I think your replay demonstrates the OP nature of Lunacy Mage. You didn't really fight for the board, and thus got overrun, but still won in the last moments thanks to random, super cheap spells.
The Fireball was only 3 mana thanks to an earlier Incanter's Flow - he could ping the 4/1 Toad of the Wilds and Fireball a second minion in the same turn. Instead he floats a mana and drops Trick Totem.
I agree he should have played Font of Power prior to Deck of Lunacy for the options, but I think otherwise it seemed like the right play to drop Deck of Lunacy rather than float a mana.
You could maybe argue that he should have played Font of Power into the randomly generated Firebrand into Deck of Lunacy with the hopes of killing the Bonechewer Brawler with the spellburst, but the average outcome is that their Bonechewer Brawler becomes a 6/1 and their Toad of the Wilds dies. Then they'd play their new Toad and Mark of the Spikeshell on the 6/1 and go face for 8 (rather than trade with the 3/4 like they did). Now you're starting turn 5 at 16 health instead of 22, but you can trade on board with the Brawler and Apexis Blast the last minion on board. Ultimately that's probably better than what happened, since the Trick Totem didn't stop any incoming damage, leaving him at 14 at the start of turn 6.
I'm not sure that's better than just Font of Power into Fireball like you've suggested, but I'd always play the Deck of Lunacy there at the end of turn 4 regardless.
(Notably, I'm assuming all random card generation would have played out exactly the same as it did - maybe order matters and would have changed the results without Deck of Lunacy being played first.)
The challenge for me with this explanation is the idea that the game would have played out the same - with you down at 4 health by turn 7 - if you were playing any other deck. I don't even really believe that outcome was inevitably true in the game you've linked to.
With the exception of an early Combustion, you spend the first six turns doing very little to interact with your opponent's board. Take your turn 5, for example, when you could easily have used your Fireball to take out one of your opponent's minions, but you dropped a Trick Totem instead. That right there was 4 damage you didn't have to take. And that would have set you up to Apexis Blast their remaining buffed taunt, which also has about a 27.7% chance of getting you something to further deal with the board (18.5% taunts, 9.2% rush minions)
My aim here is not to criticize your plays, but rather to point out that the game could have played out differently if you had interacted more with your opponent's minions. And there are other cards you could have run to deal with aggro decks more effectively in the early game that didn't show up in your deck list (e.g. Ice Barrier and Cone of Cold) which would have probably changed the outcome quite a bit.
So it's hard to believe that any other deck would have lost the game. Certainly, any other deck would have lost from that position - down to 4 HP against aggro on turn 7 - but most other decks wouldn't have let the game get there in the first place.
I think they must have assumed No Minion Mage would be less popular/strong. Refreshing Spring Water is a much cooler card in a deck with some minions, and becomes a more interesting potential inclusion that you really have to think about.
They were obviously wrong, but I can kind of see why they might have thought that. They removed a lot of the best face damage in Mage, and added in a Hero Power package that uses a lot of minions and seems like a cool control finisher. Also, the archetype a) wasn't oppressively strong or powerful before rotation, and b) didn't gain a ton of new stuff. (The most common list for this deck only runs two new cards - 2x Runed Orb and 2x Refreshing Spring Water).
That's a big part of why I think the rotation plays a major role here. This deck is really strong in the context of what a lot of other classes are trying to do right now with their archetypes post-rotation, and it blows them out of the water.
Everything that the OP says is true - Lord Jaraxxus offers infinite value, there's not really any competition for his card slot in Control Warlock, and Warlock is already very strong at control. Despite all that, I don't think we can reasonably say that Lord Jaraxxus is a problem. The major advantages of the new Jaraxxus over the old one is that he can safely be played before you drop below 15 life without risking a major blowout loss, and he can be healed back up to 30 so that even if you're at low life when you play him, you can recover.
The first advantage there is critical to making him playable. He was outclassed for a long time because Warlock often had anti-synergies with him in their control decks (e.g. Skull of the Man'ari), and you often had to delay until you had low life to play him. At the point that you're below 15 life and doing little else on that turn you play him, you're probably behind on board and being burst down the next turn.
The second advantage - that he can heal up to 30 - is really a symptom of the real problem in Warlock today; namely, that Warlock has way too much healing. The Soul Fragment package has gotten stronger over time with Luckysoul Hoarder, and Warlock has picked up a ton of lifesteal and an upgraded Siphon Soul with the core set and rotation.
With all that in mind, I think nerfing a bit of the key healing tools of Warlock would go a long way to weakening the Control Warlock deck enough to prevent Lord Jaraxxus's infinite value becoming a problem.
Random isn't fun when it's something like "randomly generate massive power swings" like the ones we see with Deck of Lunacy, but there are lots of way that random can be rewarding. I think the Discover mechanic is a good example of this - it gets to be skill testing by seeing how well you pick the right card for the situation at hand.
Other "heavily random" strategies include Miracle Priest and Burgle Rogue, both of which are decently popular (historically speaking). They satisfies the "Timmy/Tammy" player's desire for big, exciting turns, but it also gives you a chance to see what you can do with a pile of random cards (not all that unlike a Sealed or Draft game of MTG). Having to cobble together a strategy based on a handful of random cards can be very skill testing, and it's certainly a great way to add variety to your games.
Notably, those two archetypes tend to have lower average power levels for their random cards, and they don't get the major discounts associated with Deck of Lunacy. Those two factors are a big part of why the randomness of No Minion Mage today is so unfun.
This has 100% been my experience trying to target No Minion Mage, and it hasn't gotten me very far
I agree with you regarding the major bait and switch with all these midrange decks. I was really excited about playing tempo/midrange decks, and have just been clobbered on ladder. But I don't think you can reasonably argue that Tickatus Warlock is responsible for the metagame.
For one, Warlock is no more than about 10% of the decks being played right now (as indicated by the chart in this article). For another, the stats on HSReplay indicate that it loses a lot to Hunter and Demon Hunter, but Paladin and Mage wreck those classes right now (at winrates around 70% for the former, and 60% for the latter).
I get why people hate Tickatus, and any metagame that's dominated by a card that can wipe out a third of your deck over the course of a game is certainly unfun if it's a top meta deck. But I don't think that's true today for Tickatus Warlock, and I think seeing the traditionally aggro and tempo classes regain traction on the ladder would naturally decrease its play rates.
The other factor here is rotation. I've been trying to play Taunt Druid on ladder (without much success), and I've noticed that Teacher's Pet has a much better deathrattle nowadays because of how small the 3-drop beast pool has gotten.
I think Mage and Paladin have been similarly improved on the fringes thanks to rotation, which is really hard to fully account for in testing. Combine that with great new stuff like "0 mana draw 2" and you get this kind of mess. Still, this is egregious enough that I'm surprised they didn't see it coming.
Wow - just did this and it worked for me as well! This is neat a little trick, but it really seems like it shouldn't work. I imagine one of these days Blizzard will remove this.