I'm in the middle of a Turalyon run right now, and experienced two empty buckets (i.e. an empty bucket with no name, and one intentionally empty "no more" bucket) and I played against someone with Robes of Gaudiness (though I guess maybe they started their run before the fix?). Seems like this isn't really resolved yet.
It's explicitly early access, so everyone playing obviously knows they're effectively beta testers. They have weeks to tweak and/or fix it before it really needs to be ready for prime time.
What I really like most about N'Zoth, God of the Deep is that it gets to be different for different classes. There are certainly some decent neutral elementals and dragons you might be happy to slot into any Darkmoon N'Zoth deck, but that's a lot less likely for other types, and many classes have class minions that are likely to be preferable over those neutrals.
By contrast, a lot of Old Gods N'Zoth decks rely on powerful neutral deathrattles like Sludge Belcher, Khartut Defender, and Sylvanas Windrunner (with only an occasional strong class deathrattle). That package can be slotted into any class, which is nice, but it also makes Old Gods N'Zoth less interesting.
Lunar Eclipse and Solar Eclipse are both really good, but maybe not good enough to auto-include into any Druid deck. On the other hand, tossing one card in that generates the value of both Eclipse spells seems great as the 30th card in a lot of value-oriented Druid decks.
Seems generically good most of the time, and dramatically better than the original Yogg Saron since many of the effects allow for some level of player control.
C'Thun, the Shattered seems like it will be really powerful in Druid, where tons of cards care about holding and playing 5 drop spells, and card draw is widely available.
Just to be sure.. played cards can’t become corrupted anymore right?
Also, would Y’shrash generates uncorrupted versions or does he trigger the corrupt effect himself? Otherwise he would lose a lot of power.
Y'Shaarj, the Defiler explicitly says "Corrupted" in its text, which is the keyword the card gains once the corrupt trigger is met (this is shown in the Fleethoof Pearltusk example from the reveal stream). So, they'll almost certainly all be corrupted versions of the cards.
The difference is largely thematic (with Artifacts representing physical objects and Enchantments representing magical spells and conceptual content).
That said, "interactability" and color wheel balance is a big part of the difference mechanically. Green and White have tools that can remove both enchantments and artifacts, while Red has artifact removal but not enchantment removal, and Blue and Black have basically no removal that specifically targets either. Also, most Artifacts are colorless, and in those cases you'd expect a spell with colored mana pips to be stronger than an artifact with a similar effect and equivalent CMC.
That link is set to the timestamp where those descriptions come up, but I would recommend watching the whole thing if you're a fan of CCGs generally - there's a lot of good design insights in it.
The first week, Aurelion Sol's power level was magnified by the psychological effect of seeing a 10/10 SpellShielded Champion that often levels up immediately. But players have already gotten much better at dealing with him, so he's not quite as demoralizing as he initially was. This in turn makes it more likely people will actually try to fight instead of just giving up, which will result in even more games he does not win.
Eventually, once everyone is used to him and knows how to deal with him, I think he'll settle into a real (not just perceived) power level that's entirely suitable for a 10-mana Champion.
Just so I'm clear on what you mean - are you saying that you believe the other new archetypes are balanced well against ASol? Because I'm not really talking about him in a global sense, but scoped down to the latest expansion. Aurelion Sol Control is not entirely oppressive to the game and all other regions, but it is far and away the most powerful new archetype because the rest of the new archetypes are effectively unusually slow midrange decks. There may be metagames where some of those slower midrange archetypes can succeed, but I suspect any metagame that slow will inevitably devolve into an ASol Control meta.
To your point about adjusting, I think people are basically used to him already, and are able to play around him with traditional aggro and midrange builds. But the Call of the Mountain expansion released a bunch of archetypes that can't simultaneously compete with him and these faster midrange builds that have already saturated the meta for a while, which is why the metagame looks so stale. It's hard to speculate on what the metagame would look like if they had released the full set up front because we don't know exactly what's coming next, but I expect it would look a lot fresher because there would be renewed experimentation with a lot of the regions that got only two cards in the new expansion.
With so little new content to work with, it's no wonder the best Spider Aggro/Endure decks, or Pirate Aggro, or Bilge/Demacia Scout decks already existed. And that's a real failure on the part of Riot to keep the game fresh.
Honestly, GrappLr's comments are probably self-contradictory precisely because, as you said, Mobalytics is not a great source of information. Their tier lists are defined by two people's personal experiences, and their stats page is nearly impossible to parse through. So, if you're playing against (and losing to) lots of decks with Hush, and seeing lots of decks on the tier list that are old (and so long as you're not bothering to think critically) those are exactly the conclusions you're going to draw.
In general, I'm on board with the idea that the new cards are fairly balanced relative to the other regions, and that avoiding power creep is strictly good. I'm not totally sold on the idea that Riot has done a great job with this expansion, however. I know much has already been said about Aurelion Sol, and I don't want to turn this into just another discussion on him, but I think he has had an outsized impact on what new content can be relevant. The jury's still out on whether, as an individual card, he's too powerful (my gut says he's a bit too good, but it's hard to judge). But because of how the other new archetypes operate (with an emphasis on playing cards prior to attacking), any metagame that uses lots of those new cards is going to experience a massive influx of ASol Control to beat them back down.
This is exactly what we saw with the first week of play in CotM, and it's why everyone reverted back so quickly to old decks*. It's true that the individual play rates of Targon decks are higher than most "meta decks," but those old-archetype, highest winrate "meta decks" still make up nearly 50% of the meta game. That staleness is a problem, and while power creep obviously isn't the answer, but I think releasing a full expansion would have done a lot of good to ensuring the metagame wasn't stale. This whole sets/expansions "release a few regions at a time" thing has arbitrarily stifled the ability of players to develop new decks that don't use Targon, and Targon's ASol problem makes that hard.
*It's common in CCGs for the old meta decks to be the best new decks initially, as they're already optimized and people typically just slot in one or two new cards and call it a day. Eventually that gives rise to new decks as people experiment with new content across the colors/classes/regions of the game. That hasn't really happened thanks to the arbitrary way that Riot has chosen to gate the release of its new content. It has left your options as a) build a deck with Targon, where ASol is king, or b) use an old deck that lacks Targon.
I feel like every morning, I see a lot of whatever deck he released a YouTube video for the night before. He showcases a lot of interesting decks, so I get why people would want to try them out, but the frequency with which I see them just seems crazy to me.
Is Herald of Dragons even worth using even in a dragon focused deck? It feels like you waste your turn 2 to get a dragon a turn earlier. And if you wait to cast it later it defeats the purpose.
I don't like Herald of Dragons, but I have been begrudgingly including her. A lot of the 3-drops I'm running are spells (Dragon's Clutch, Prismatic Barrier, Hush, etc.), but the deck is a tempo deck, and missing a unit on turn 3 can feel bad in matches against faster decks. Since she makes it possible to curve into Whiteflame Protector on 3 and one of your 5-drop dragons on 4, she has made the cut. (Worth noting that Whiteflame Protector on 3 is probably the best play this deck can make - it's like a pre-nerf Loyal Badgerbear that can grow over time.)
That said, she is a terrible top-deck in the late game, and she's easily killed. Depending on how you build the deck, you might be able to leverage Mobilize for mostly the same impact. I think that has much the same problem, though, where it's good on turn 2 after you skipped turn 1, but kind of pointless in the late game. Alternatively, maybe you just run decent 3-drops and plan to curve out a little slower.
In the other hand, pure control decks usually takes over 15 turns or even deck out to finish games so companies decided matches in the modern era should not take longer then an average of "X" time. To acomplish that, they implemented finisher cards, OTK, combo strategies all with powerfull effects that are very hard to disrupt. For example, how do you even disrupt a Warmother's Call deck? Unless you are playing Ionia with Deny, you just can't interact with it.
I don't think the prevalence of "hybrid archetypes" means we cannot talk about pure archetypes. Even if they're never implemented in the most pure way possible, the pure Aggro, Control, and Combo archetypes (and their associated rock-paper-scissors relationship) are useful guides for discussing card games.
But this idea that including powerful finishers means you're not playing pure control seems a bit wrong to me. Control doesn't win strictly on the basis of disruption - that's just how they get to their late game value cards. Eventually those decks have to win somehow, and they usually do so with big, powerful units or super expensive but high-damaging spells.
On the matter of Warmother's Call, Ionia being the only region that can interact with it is probably a case of bad balance, but it doesn't mean pure control can't exist.
Quote From Hellcopter
If you don't believe me, i challenge you to come up with a theoretical deck that doesn't use a single finisher and relies only on disruptions cards in today's meta. I don't think its going to work. Every deck should be build around cards that optimize its own win condition first and foremost. Disruption cards are added later to replace prior choices when needed, in order to increase the winrate agaisnt whats being played in the current meta. Those disruption cards may not even be needed agaisnt a particular meta, and certainly are not exclusively played in control decks only. Even agro decks can play the disruption game and tech in control cards agaisnt very specific matchups. Secret Eater and Counter Spell are very good examples of disruption cards that were played in both aggro and OTK decks.
It's certainly true that control is harder to build than aggro in the early days of any meta, because control wants to be responsive to the meta and you have to know what aggro and combo decks are doing before you can disrupt them. That said, here is a deck I think fits the basic definition: https://lor.mobalytics.gg/decks/btdipi1la4s85h9vvafg
Now, I don't know how relevant that deck is in today's metagame (I've seen more popular versions like https://lor.mobalytics.gg/decks/btce2k9la4s85h8qvs6g that run Riptide Rex[/runecard, Jack, the Winner, and Atrocity). But the core of the deck in both cases is the same, and even with the addition of the big finishers, the strategy is the same - clear the enemy board a lot while you rack up increasingly powerful The Undying's. The addition of those finishers is helpful - Jack gives you more removal tools, Riptide Rex gives you a board clear that also hits the enemy Nexus, and Atrocity helps shore the deck up against even greedier control decks - but I think the core represents a fairly pure control strategy.
Valid point. We can talk about the definition of what a "control" deck is to see if we are in the same page. I came from an era where control decks didn't have win conditions, so my definition of control comes literally from keeping the board under control, caring about efficient trades and then waiting until the oponnent runs out of resources. In modern card games, most decks have some kind of win condition, so trying to win by the old way is not a good plan anymore. I also believe combo and control are NOT mutually exclusive. A combo/OTK deck can also be a control deck. Freeze Mage is a deck that doesn't care about board state, so its not a control deck, while Shadow Reaper Anduim OTK does.
It's certainly fair to say that there's overlap between combo and control, but I don't think "keeping the board under control" is the right view for control. Both strategies want to go late into the game, and typically both include lots of tools to control the board to ensure they can reach the late game against faster, aggressive decks. The goal of a combo deck is clear - stall the game while drawing to some combo that will win you the game. But control should be able to beat decks by disrupting their strategies. Board control is part of that, but so is combo disruption. This is why the unconditional Obliterate effects and/or super cheap silence effects that you get in ASol Control decks are so powerful.
Quote From Hellcopter
But what i am really want to talk is the fact i don't see why so many people think A.Sol is opressive. My point with this topic was to show A.Sol win condition is on par with other decks win conditions. It seems to me people are focusing way too hard on the strenght of A.Sol level up effect. But is it that different from a board full of AniviasBADCARDNAME? Or when Warmother's Call gets online? Or even when The Harrowing summons a bunch of Hecarim?
I played many games against A.sol, with all of my decks, even the meme ones, and i never felt hopless. Does anyone have numbers if A.Sol is stomping other control decks? It sure doesn't feel that way to me.
I think @skullleigh has really hit on the most compelling point with the remark about Aurelion Sol + Living Legends. This pair is pretty easy to get thanks to Starshaping and Aurelion Sol invoking exclusively from the 7+ cost pool. The result is that it's very common for an L2 Aurelion Sol to generate 30 or more mana's worth of value in a single turn.
That's certainly overkill when you're not in a control mirror, so in that sense I can see why the comparison to other late-game decks makes sense. But it's well beyond what those other decks can do in the late game. This is why I think it's important not to simply ask "Is Aurelion Sol a fair win condition" in the grand scheme of the meta, but also "Is Aurelion Sol so powerful that it makes other control win conditions irrelevant?" My gut instinct is that the answer here is yes, and I have looked over the data available to reach that conclusion, but as I indicated above, the best source of data (mobalytics stats) is hard to parse. It's certainly possible my read is incorrect.
So, I guess I should hop into this discussion, as I'm being quoted a bit. With respect to my comparison to Quest Rogue (back in this thread), the goal was not to say "the original Caverns Below Rogue deck is exactly the same as ASol Control" but rather than "the original Caverns Below Rogue warped the metagame despite a relatively low winrate, and ASol Control seems to do the same thing." Obviously they're not exactly the same - the use of bounce effects in Caverns Below Rogue often made the deck entirely uninteractable, which was a big part of why control decks couldn't break up their quest completion and beat them with their own powerful late game tools. I don't think that's what's happening with ASol Control - you can still fight their minions, and with the right spells you can even break through spellshields (albeit at a high price) - but the power level of ASol with a few decent Celestial cards in hand is pretty bonkers, and the work required to level him up (i.e. playing units) isn't just easy, it's an unavoidable part of the game.
So, I think it achieves that warping effect the same way Caverns Below Rogue did, where fast decks can win pretty easily but other control decks struggle to make headway against it. @Hellcopter, I think you're using "late game deck" and "control deck" interchangeably in your original post, but several of the decks you've listed are not control decks - many are combo decks that seek to win with huge burst through Ezreal or Atrocity, and the Ensure Spiders deck is really more of an aggro deck that uses Atrocity as a finisher. The control decks you've actually got on there are the Purrsuit, Anivia, and Maokai decks. Of those, the only one with a chance against ASol is Maokai, and only if they get their win condition off early enough to toss the enemy ASols before they have a chance to come down. With ramp and Thresh driving early Aurelion Sol plays, I think that's unlikely to happen consistently.
I was hoping to actually pull some data for this discussion, but the match-up data on Mobalytics is kind of a mess. They just do region comparisons for the match-up rankings, without any distinction for which archetypes are contributing to wins/losses, so that data can be hard to judge. The deck rankings are a bit more clear, but the top-level "matches" number seems to include all decks of that region pair, which is very confusing and obfuscates true prevalence. At any rate, here's the high level of what I think I'm seeing in both data sets:
Almost every deck with a high win rate is aggro/midrange or combo decks, and the only control decks I see are Aurelion Sol Troll Ramp, Tryndamere Troll Ramp, and Deep Sea Monsters.
The latter two decks aren't very popular, but the data that is available suggests that they're better than ASol in the context of this metagame
The Tryndamere version of Troll Ramp seems to lose to the Aurelion Sol version, which makes sense since the ASol version has access to Obliterate effects and Sunburst to easily handle Tryndamere
Deep Sea Monsters is supposedly a higher tier than ASol, but its almost non-existent in the data (I found a few lists with a total of ~1000 games played across those lists, far lower than the most common version of ASol Ramp). Its match-up data is super hard to parse because a variety of more popular and more successful SI/Bilge decks running Gangplank and/or Miss Fortune show up in the data. I think this is part of why the data reflects it as successful in the top-level deck view.
The Dragon tribal deck seems pretty sweet. I haven't been that impressed with Herald of Dragons - she's super flimsy - but Dragon's Clutch is a great draw tool and the Fury keyword combined with Demacia's various strike spells makes Dragons a very effective midrange deck.
I know the OP doesn't want to talk about Aurelion Sol, but until Shyvana is added to the game later in the Call of the Mountain set, I think it's hard to avoid the overlap. Even if you're not running his as a 3-of, he seems like an important inclusion to make the deck competitive against any Ramp ASol decks, as most of the earlier dragons don't have enough attack to overcome the regenerating trolls.
From my analysis (feel free to disagree or inform me of any mechanics I missed), it seems like a majority of this expansion’s mechanics add strategy rather than swinginess. Therefore, I think it would make more sense to deduce that Riot wants to add strategy and decision making than that they want to add swing plays. I actually think that the biggest flaw in Riot’s design is Flavor, since they seem to have made mechanics like Daybreak and Invoke more to fulfill the flavor of the region than because they thought they’d be the best for the game. Daybreak and Invoke aren’t necessarily bad, they’re just not quite as amazing as keywords like Vulnerable, Plunder, or Frostbite in terms of what they do for gameplay.
I agree with the idea that some of Riot's new mechanics are strictly for flavor, and don't really make sense as evergreen-type keywords, but I wonder about the idea that the expansion reflects a move toward more strategy and less random swings. In particular, while I think your analysis of each mechanic makes sense in terms of the strategic vs. random spectrum, you're treating each mechanic as equal, but I think that ignores a lot of why Celestials are powerful.
First, Celestials are way more powerful in practice than they are on paper because the "extreme variance" of invoke is easily managed. Playing cards like Solari Priestess and Starshaping ensures you can curve out while playing Celestial cards and, since the more expensive ones are more OP, this also ensures you get only really powerful choices. So, any Celestial Control deck is going to have tons of OP cards available to it if/when it reaches the late game.
Second, the way to get around Celestial cards is to focus on tempo and open attacking before your opponent can play their powerful (but slow) spells and big units. But the other mechanics in the set (e.g. Daybreak, Nightfall) incentivize playing units prior to attacking to get value out of their single-round buffs. Even Support has hints of incentivizing board development before attacking, as you may need more units on board to get value out of Support cards. This emphasis on what I'll call "single round tempo" gives Celestials more time to be impactful.
The net result is that the sum total of new mechanics (weighted for this sort of "relative power level") leans heavily in favor of Celestials. I think we saw that in the first week when people were playing with a near-exclusive focus on "new content" - Aurelion Sol was king. The solution to these decks was never to play more new content, but rather to return to old mainstays that emphasize more traditional aggressive or tempo strategies.
I've seen this exact scenario work several times - they have you pick the Celestial card before the spell resolves, so it can appear that the two events are not connected.
For anyone pointing to the Mobalytics tier list to say it's fine - Aurelion Sol doesn't need to be top tier to be problematic. The quintessential counter example to this kind of argument was Caverns Below Rogue from Hearthstone. The deck had a pretty meh win rate - just slightly over 50% - but that never stopped it from being a menace because in every match-up it was either unbeatable or trash, meaning every game played against it was never fun or interesting because you could predict the outcome perfectly without playing a single card.
Aurelion Sol seems to operate in much the same way - he's such a dramatically overpowered control win condition that either you're playing an aggro/midrange deck that can beat the enemy down before they do anything interesting, or you're playing a slower deck that's going to lose 100% of the time. I imagine either tweaking the level up condition or changing the cost reduction factor for Celestial cards (or both) would go a long way to balancing him out as a control win condition and leave room for other control decks to have a chance in those control mirror matches.
One last note to the original poster - I don't think I'd call ASol decks "Dragon Decks" because the popular ones feature very few dragons, and none of the Dragon synergy cards. I expect the Call of the Mountain expansion that features Demacia will enable an earnest Dragon deck, but right now they just seem to have teased it a bit with this first expansion of the set.
I'm in the middle of a Turalyon run right now, and experienced two empty buckets (i.e. an empty bucket with no name, and one intentionally empty "no more" bucket) and I played against someone with Robes of Gaudiness (though I guess maybe they started their run before the fix?). Seems like this isn't really resolved yet.
It's explicitly early access, so everyone playing obviously knows they're effectively beta testers. They have weeks to tweak and/or fix it before it really needs to be ready for prime time.
What I really like most about N'Zoth, God of the Deep is that it gets to be different for different classes. There are certainly some decent neutral elementals and dragons you might be happy to slot into any Darkmoon N'Zoth deck, but that's a lot less likely for other types, and many classes have class minions that are likely to be preferable over those neutrals.
By contrast, a lot of Old Gods N'Zoth decks rely on powerful neutral deathrattles like Sludge Belcher, Khartut Defender, and Sylvanas Windrunner (with only an occasional strong class deathrattle). That package can be slotted into any class, which is nice, but it also makes Old Gods N'Zoth less interesting.
Lunar Eclipse and Solar Eclipse are both really good, but maybe not good enough to auto-include into any Druid deck. On the other hand, tossing one card in that generates the value of both Eclipse spells seems great as the 30th card in a lot of value-oriented Druid decks.
Seems generically good most of the time, and dramatically better than the original Yogg Saron since many of the effects allow for some level of player control.
C'Thun, the Shattered seems like it will be really powerful in Druid, where tons of cards care about holding and playing 5 drop spells, and card draw is widely available.
Y'Shaarj, the Defiler explicitly says "Corrupted" in its text, which is the keyword the card gains once the corrupt trigger is met (this is shown in the Fleethoof Pearltusk example from the reveal stream). So, they'll almost certainly all be corrupted versions of the cards.
The difference is largely thematic (with Artifacts representing physical objects and Enchantments representing magical spells and conceptual content).
That said, "interactability" and color wheel balance is a big part of the difference mechanically. Green and White have tools that can remove both enchantments and artifacts, while Red has artifact removal but not enchantment removal, and Blue and Black have basically no removal that specifically targets either. Also, most Artifacts are colorless, and in those cases you'd expect a spell with colored mana pips to be stronger than an artifact with a similar effect and equivalent CMC.
This is actually a term used by the MTG design team, and it refers back to the Fairly Odd Parents: https://youtu.be/QHHg99hwQGY?t=2648
That link is set to the timestamp where those descriptions come up, but I would recommend watching the whole thing if you're a fan of CCGs generally - there's a lot of good design insights in it.
Just so I'm clear on what you mean - are you saying that you believe the other new archetypes are balanced well against ASol? Because I'm not really talking about him in a global sense, but scoped down to the latest expansion. Aurelion Sol Control is not entirely oppressive to the game and all other regions, but it is far and away the most powerful new archetype because the rest of the new archetypes are effectively unusually slow midrange decks. There may be metagames where some of those slower midrange archetypes can succeed, but I suspect any metagame that slow will inevitably devolve into an ASol Control meta.
To your point about adjusting, I think people are basically used to him already, and are able to play around him with traditional aggro and midrange builds. But the Call of the Mountain expansion released a bunch of archetypes that can't simultaneously compete with him and these faster midrange builds that have already saturated the meta for a while, which is why the metagame looks so stale. It's hard to speculate on what the metagame would look like if they had released the full set up front because we don't know exactly what's coming next, but I expect it would look a lot fresher because there would be renewed experimentation with a lot of the regions that got only two cards in the new expansion.
With so little new content to work with, it's no wonder the best Spider Aggro/Endure decks, or Pirate Aggro, or Bilge/Demacia Scout decks already existed. And that's a real failure on the part of Riot to keep the game fresh.
Honestly, GrappLr's comments are probably self-contradictory precisely because, as you said, Mobalytics is not a great source of information. Their tier lists are defined by two people's personal experiences, and their stats page is nearly impossible to parse through. So, if you're playing against (and losing to) lots of decks with Hush, and seeing lots of decks on the tier list that are old (and so long as you're not bothering to think critically) those are exactly the conclusions you're going to draw.
In general, I'm on board with the idea that the new cards are fairly balanced relative to the other regions, and that avoiding power creep is strictly good. I'm not totally sold on the idea that Riot has done a great job with this expansion, however. I know much has already been said about Aurelion Sol, and I don't want to turn this into just another discussion on him, but I think he has had an outsized impact on what new content can be relevant. The jury's still out on whether, as an individual card, he's too powerful (my gut says he's a bit too good, but it's hard to judge). But because of how the other new archetypes operate (with an emphasis on playing cards prior to attacking), any metagame that uses lots of those new cards is going to experience a massive influx of ASol Control to beat them back down.
This is exactly what we saw with the first week of play in CotM, and it's why everyone reverted back so quickly to old decks*. It's true that the individual play rates of Targon decks are higher than most "meta decks," but those old-archetype, highest winrate "meta decks" still make up nearly 50% of the meta game. That staleness is a problem, and while power creep obviously isn't the answer, but I think releasing a full expansion would have done a lot of good to ensuring the metagame wasn't stale. This whole sets/expansions "release a few regions at a time" thing has arbitrarily stifled the ability of players to develop new decks that don't use Targon, and Targon's ASol problem makes that hard.
*It's common in CCGs for the old meta decks to be the best new decks initially, as they're already optimized and people typically just slot in one or two new cards and call it a day. Eventually that gives rise to new decks as people experiment with new content across the colors/classes/regions of the game. That hasn't really happened thanks to the arbitrary way that Riot has chosen to gate the release of its new content. It has left your options as a) build a deck with Targon, where ASol is king, or b) use an old deck that lacks Targon.
I feel like every morning, I see a lot of whatever deck he released a YouTube video for the night before. He showcases a lot of interesting decks, so I get why people would want to try them out, but the frequency with which I see them just seems crazy to me.
I don't like Herald of Dragons, but I have been begrudgingly including her. A lot of the 3-drops I'm running are spells (Dragon's Clutch, Prismatic Barrier, Hush, etc.), but the deck is a tempo deck, and missing a unit on turn 3 can feel bad in matches against faster decks. Since she makes it possible to curve into Whiteflame Protector on 3 and one of your 5-drop dragons on 4, she has made the cut. (Worth noting that Whiteflame Protector on 3 is probably the best play this deck can make - it's like a pre-nerf Loyal Badgerbear that can grow over time.)
That said, she is a terrible top-deck in the late game, and she's easily killed. Depending on how you build the deck, you might be able to leverage Mobilize for mostly the same impact. I think that has much the same problem, though, where it's good on turn 2 after you skipped turn 1, but kind of pointless in the late game. Alternatively, maybe you just run decent 3-drops and plan to curve out a little slower.
I don't think the prevalence of "hybrid archetypes" means we cannot talk about pure archetypes. Even if they're never implemented in the most pure way possible, the pure Aggro, Control, and Combo archetypes (and their associated rock-paper-scissors relationship) are useful guides for discussing card games.
But this idea that including powerful finishers means you're not playing pure control seems a bit wrong to me. Control doesn't win strictly on the basis of disruption - that's just how they get to their late game value cards. Eventually those decks have to win somehow, and they usually do so with big, powerful units or super expensive but high-damaging spells.
On the matter of Warmother's Call, Ionia being the only region that can interact with it is probably a case of bad balance, but it doesn't mean pure control can't exist.
It's certainly true that control is harder to build than aggro in the early days of any meta, because control wants to be responsive to the meta and you have to know what aggro and combo decks are doing before you can disrupt them. That said, here is a deck I think fits the basic definition: https://lor.mobalytics.gg/decks/btdipi1la4s85h9vvafg
Now, I don't know how relevant that deck is in today's metagame (I've seen more popular versions like https://lor.mobalytics.gg/decks/btce2k9la4s85h8qvs6g that run Riptide Rex[/runecard, Jack, the Winner, and Atrocity). But the core of the deck in both cases is the same, and even with the addition of the big finishers, the strategy is the same - clear the enemy board a lot while you rack up increasingly powerful The Undying's. The addition of those finishers is helpful - Jack gives you more removal tools, Riptide Rex gives you a board clear that also hits the enemy Nexus, and Atrocity helps shore the deck up against even greedier control decks - but I think the core represents a fairly pure control strategy.
BADCARDNAMEIt's certainly fair to say that there's overlap between combo and control, but I don't think "keeping the board under control" is the right view for control. Both strategies want to go late into the game, and typically both include lots of tools to control the board to ensure they can reach the late game against faster, aggressive decks. The goal of a combo deck is clear - stall the game while drawing to some combo that will win you the game. But control should be able to beat decks by disrupting their strategies. Board control is part of that, but so is combo disruption. This is why the unconditional Obliterate effects and/or super cheap silence effects that you get in ASol Control decks are so powerful.
I think @skullleigh has really hit on the most compelling point with the remark about Aurelion Sol + Living Legends. This pair is pretty easy to get thanks to Starshaping and Aurelion Sol invoking exclusively from the 7+ cost pool. The result is that it's very common for an L2 Aurelion Sol to generate 30 or more mana's worth of value in a single turn.
That's certainly overkill when you're not in a control mirror, so in that sense I can see why the comparison to other late-game decks makes sense. But it's well beyond what those other decks can do in the late game. This is why I think it's important not to simply ask "Is Aurelion Sol a fair win condition" in the grand scheme of the meta, but also "Is Aurelion Sol so powerful that it makes other control win conditions irrelevant?" My gut instinct is that the answer here is yes, and I have looked over the data available to reach that conclusion, but as I indicated above, the best source of data (mobalytics stats) is hard to parse. It's certainly possible my read is incorrect.
So, I guess I should hop into this discussion, as I'm being quoted a bit. With respect to my comparison to Quest Rogue (back in this thread), the goal was not to say "the original Caverns Below Rogue deck is exactly the same as ASol Control" but rather than "the original Caverns Below Rogue warped the metagame despite a relatively low winrate, and ASol Control seems to do the same thing." Obviously they're not exactly the same - the use of bounce effects in Caverns Below Rogue often made the deck entirely uninteractable, which was a big part of why control decks couldn't break up their quest completion and beat them with their own powerful late game tools. I don't think that's what's happening with ASol Control - you can still fight their minions, and with the right spells you can even break through spellshields (albeit at a high price) - but the power level of ASol with a few decent Celestial cards in hand is pretty bonkers, and the work required to level him up (i.e. playing units) isn't just easy, it's an unavoidable part of the game.
So, I think it achieves that warping effect the same way Caverns Below Rogue did, where fast decks can win pretty easily but other control decks struggle to make headway against it. @Hellcopter, I think you're using "late game deck" and "control deck" interchangeably in your original post, but several of the decks you've listed are not control decks - many are combo decks that seek to win with huge burst through Ezreal or Atrocity, and the Ensure Spiders deck is really more of an aggro deck that uses Atrocity as a finisher. The control decks you've actually got on there are the Purrsuit, Anivia, and Maokai decks. Of those, the only one with a chance against ASol is Maokai, and only if they get their win condition off early enough to toss the enemy ASols before they have a chance to come down. With ramp and Thresh driving early Aurelion Sol plays, I think that's unlikely to happen consistently.
I was hoping to actually pull some data for this discussion, but the match-up data on Mobalytics is kind of a mess. They just do region comparisons for the match-up rankings, without any distinction for which archetypes are contributing to wins/losses, so that data can be hard to judge. The deck rankings are a bit more clear, but the top-level "matches" number seems to include all decks of that region pair, which is very confusing and obfuscates true prevalence. At any rate, here's the high level of what I think I'm seeing in both data sets:
The Dragon tribal deck seems pretty sweet. I haven't been that impressed with Herald of Dragons - she's super flimsy - but Dragon's Clutch is a great draw tool and the Fury keyword combined with Demacia's various strike spells makes Dragons a very effective midrange deck.
I know the OP doesn't want to talk about Aurelion Sol, but until Shyvana is added to the game later in the Call of the Mountain set, I think it's hard to avoid the overlap. Even if you're not running his as a 3-of, he seems like an important inclusion to make the deck competitive against any Ramp ASol decks, as most of the earlier dragons don't have enough attack to overcome the regenerating trolls.
I agree with the idea that some of Riot's new mechanics are strictly for flavor, and don't really make sense as evergreen-type keywords, but I wonder about the idea that the expansion reflects a move toward more strategy and less random swings. In particular, while I think your analysis of each mechanic makes sense in terms of the strategic vs. random spectrum, you're treating each mechanic as equal, but I think that ignores a lot of why Celestials are powerful.
First, Celestials are way more powerful in practice than they are on paper because the "extreme variance" of invoke is easily managed. Playing cards like Solari Priestess and Starshaping ensures you can curve out while playing Celestial cards and, since the more expensive ones are more OP, this also ensures you get only really powerful choices. So, any Celestial Control deck is going to have tons of OP cards available to it if/when it reaches the late game.
Second, the way to get around Celestial cards is to focus on tempo and open attacking before your opponent can play their powerful (but slow) spells and big units. But the other mechanics in the set (e.g. Daybreak, Nightfall) incentivize playing units prior to attacking to get value out of their single-round buffs. Even Support has hints of incentivizing board development before attacking, as you may need more units on board to get value out of Support cards. This emphasis on what I'll call "single round tempo" gives Celestials more time to be impactful.
The net result is that the sum total of new mechanics (weighted for this sort of "relative power level") leans heavily in favor of Celestials. I think we saw that in the first week when people were playing with a near-exclusive focus on "new content" - Aurelion Sol was king. The solution to these decks was never to play more new content, but rather to return to old mainstays that emphasize more traditional aggressive or tempo strategies.
I've seen this exact scenario work several times - they have you pick the Celestial card before the spell resolves, so it can appear that the two events are not connected.
For anyone pointing to the Mobalytics tier list to say it's fine - Aurelion Sol doesn't need to be top tier to be problematic. The quintessential counter example to this kind of argument was Caverns Below Rogue from Hearthstone. The deck had a pretty meh win rate - just slightly over 50% - but that never stopped it from being a menace because in every match-up it was either unbeatable or trash, meaning every game played against it was never fun or interesting because you could predict the outcome perfectly without playing a single card.
Aurelion Sol seems to operate in much the same way - he's such a dramatically overpowered control win condition that either you're playing an aggro/midrange deck that can beat the enemy down before they do anything interesting, or you're playing a slower deck that's going to lose 100% of the time. I imagine either tweaking the level up condition or changing the cost reduction factor for Celestial cards (or both) would go a long way to balancing him out as a control win condition and leave room for other control decks to have a chance in those control mirror matches.
One last note to the original poster - I don't think I'd call ASol decks "Dragon Decks" because the popular ones feature very few dragons, and none of the Dragon synergy cards. I expect the Call of the Mountain expansion that features Demacia will enable an earnest Dragon deck, but right now they just seem to have teased it a bit with this first expansion of the set.