Hearthstone

With the mini set online for over a week now, let's take a look at how Wild is doing, shall we? Overall, I'm of the opinion we're in a really good place right now. The meta is pretty diverse and while there are some decks with play patterns some players might call toxic, those can be targeted without throwing away your games against other opponents. So here's what I'd take to ladder if I was in a competitive mood, almost all of them curtesy of GetMeowth sharing them on his discord:

Questline Outcast Demon Hunter is a very strong, high skill cap deck I've failed miserably with. A lot of people who are way better at the game swear it's fun and viable though so here you go :)

Questline ("Bonk") Druid is the deck that got me to legend last month. It is able to out-armor and taunt up against aggro and the constant output of attack damage combined with the ability to spam giants very early make it a threat to anything else.

Another reason to run the new Speaker Stomper is that Tony Druid is still doing very well.

Beast Hunter got some very cool tools but still gets in trouble if it doesn't find a decent opener. You might want to try the new Standard staple Hollow Hound in here as well (I'd cut the Razormaws first).

Secret Mage got so much better with Costumed Singer, it's pretty crazy. Also this is your go to if you want to mess with Funnel Cake Priests - they're weak to minion disruption.

Mech Paladin is alive and kicking. With this deck you can make the lives of Questline Druids, any sort of minion based aggro decks and Kingsbane Rogue pretty hard, all thanks to Bubblebot.

The elephant in the room, even though I don't think it's as bad as it looks at first glance: Funnel Cake Priest. There are other versions out there, but this seems to be the most popular.

Shadowpriest is still very strong and very underrated by the community. I for one stay true to Swizard's OG Shadowburst Priest list though, because I don't like the flavor of Pirates in Priest.

Kingsbane Rogue was one of the decks that profited the most from the new cards that Festival of Legends brought us. There are various lists out there, you can swap in stuff like Leeching Poison or Doomerang if you want to.

Pirate Rogue hasn't received any new cards, but still works fine.

Even Shaman is experimenting with Jam Session and Jukebox Totem, it will be interesting to see where this leads the deck.

Of course we wouldn't play Wild if not for those semi-competitive meme decks. Those are what brings a lot of players the most fun in our format, but there's such a plethora of them out there, I'll just stick to what I've recently tried and enjoyed.

Blood Buff Death Knight is a very fun archetype that is just getting better and better with the addition of new cards. There's also a Standard version by FunkiMonki who piloted this to high legend!

Cute Warrior is a deck list that was born from the cooperation of MagmaRager, Warfariner, JambaJooze and Ramanujoke. It can get out of hands pretty quickly and if your board gets cleared, you can always fish for a surprise lethal with Warsong Commander and Power Slider. There's a great guide for this on Reddit.

Big & Undead Paladin takes the familiar Big Paladin shell and tries to make use of the Undead we received in the March of the Lich King and Dance Floor as well as Kangor, Dancing King from the latest expansion. I'm not sure yet if it is better than the OG version, but it's definitely a lot of fun!

Blackrock Reno Warrior is another idea from MagmaRager with a great Reddit guide. Sometimes it bricks, but it's a ton of fun when it works! (The cards in ETC are Provoke, Glacial Shard and Disruptive Spellbreaker)

And that's it for the moment! How do you like the Wild meta right now? Which decks do you like to play? Any undiscovered gems out there?

With recent patch, I just noticed Yogg-Saron, Master of Fate is buggy. Is it just me? Let me know in the comments. Here is what happened:

I played him, fortune wheel hit Curse of Flesh. Upon initiating first attack, game responded with "Too late, your turn is over." even though I had like a min remaining on my turn. I couldn't do anything until I restarted the game, which seemed to fix the issue. It happened on PC if I recall btw.

Title says it all. Well, in case you haven't heard of, a developer called Matt London wrote a post on Twitter, indicating that Blizzard is planning to bring the best experience for Wild format.

I wonder what's going to happen but unless they look into these issues below, I'm not holding my breath. These are my takes and I would like to hear your thoughts as well:

General

• The cost of cards shouldn't be reduced below 1 Mana, no matter what. Mana cheat went way overboard that a hard rule must be applied. That means cards like Emperor Thaurissan and Insight can reduce the cost down to 1 Mana, similar to how Arcane Luminary functions. This rule will keep Pillager Rogues and Secret Mages to not spam 0-Cost cards.
• If necessary, a card should have alternative/different variant for Wild format. For example, Contract Conjurer might be OK in Standard but not so much for Wild.
• A graveyard system must be implemented so Big Priests can't resurrect same minion over and over again. Right now, if Blood of G'huun dies once, you can play 2xResurrect cards right away. Here, I propose you can play Resurrect only once if G'Huun died once. This rule will also affect N'Zoth cards and similar ones, to a degree.

Druid

• Play Floop's Glorious Gloop to gain infinite mana, if utilized well. How about a hard cap, which you can gain up to 10 Mana Crystals, even if you have Guff Hero card played? Like, you have gained 9 Mana and spent them, then 2 minions killed but only one is granted to you, not two. It also shouldn't stack with cards such as Solar Eclipse.
• Wildheart Guff should have 15 Mana Crystals at max, not 20.

Mage

• Kirin Tor Mage cries in the corner because Kabal Lackey and Anonymous Informant are much better. These cards should reduce the cost of secret to 1 Mana, not zero. While at it, their cost should be upped by 1 Mana.
• Kabal Crystal Runner should reduce her cost by 1, not 2.
• Contract Conjurer should cost 1 less for each secret controlled. Maybe make him 7 Mana, perhaps?

Priest

• New graveyard system, please look above.
• Some resurrect cards Big Priests use should have mana cost raised by one. Candidates are; Resurrect+Eternal Servitude.
• Shadow Essence should summon 3/3 or 4/4 minion, not 5/5.
• Illuminate should cost 1 Mana and reduce the cost of spell by 2, not 3.
• Radiant Elemental limits design for future Priest cards, which has proven pretty much with Mind Sear. This card belongs to Ungoro expansion and it's Elemental. Thus, I propose the following change: "Your Elementals have +1 Health" which looks thematically fitting.

Rogue

• Maybe not a problem right now but either increase the condition for The Caverns Below or change its reward to set minions to 3/3 instead of 5/5.
• Swordfish should either have 2 durability or grant +1 Attack.
• Cutlass Courier has very good stats for his ability if compared with similar cards. Reducing his stats to 1/4 looks like a right balance choice.
• Scabbs Cutterbutter should be...
  • 5 Mana, rest is same.
  • 4 Mana, reduction is 2.
  • 3 Mana, reduction is 1.

Shaman

• Splitting Axe converted into a Deathrattle card rather than Battlecry one prevents the insta-snowball effect.
• Totemic Might and Totemic Surge should cost 1 Mana.
• Why are Thing from Below and Gigantotem same cards? To differentiate, I suggest Thing from Below reading "Cost 1 less for each Totem you control." 

That's all what I can think of. Let me hear your thoughts. With the insight shared from Blizzard, I really look forward to see Wild format grow even better.

-BTBW Listener Series Season 5 is here!
-Wild Hearthstone Tournament Series
-MIGHT OF THE NAGA
-Incorporated Lore Elements
-2 Deck Building Restrictions Each Week
-FREE to play in
-Prizes for Top 4
-Info: https://borntobewildhs.com/listener-series

For anyone who reads this series - please let me know your thoughts on increasing the rate of articles! To for example 2 or 3 a week on average.

Would this be too much and an overload or would that be something you’d like?

My dream is to have 100 Wild off meta decks with full guides that are all updated (both decks and guides) each expansion and miniset, and increasing the output will help that happen faster.

This is a thread to see the interest level in Wild Tournaments on the site. 

Here’s how it would work: it wouldn’t be on a particular day, it would last over a month or more. For each match, people would have a week or a few days and they would use one of those time availability website such as https://www.when2meet.com/.

When they have a time that works for both of them, they’d have to login and add each other on the app and hold the match or matches if we do best of 3.

Any conflicts would be handled by screenshot evidence but hopefully people will be honest about who won so there wouldn’t be a need for a staff member to also have availability and spectate those matches.

If you are interested please comment with your server (we would have to do separate ones for NA and EU). 

If you have any ideas on tournament format, we would appreciate any feedback.

Hi everyone,

Trying to get a sense of what type of wild content in terms of one-off things like a general guide to deckbuilding or long-term things like a series people would like to see. If you have any ideas or suggestions as to what you would like to see on the site for wild, comment it below.

Thanks!

Morning all, I'm sitting at Diamond 3 and I'm currently facing endless amounts of Pirate Warrior, Quest Hunter and big Warlock decks.

Really hoping someone can reccomend me a deck to try which could see me up to legend. I've never got there before in my 5 years of playing and I'd love to get that card back! 

Any tips welcome, have a great weekend. X

GetMeowth has interviewed Dean "Iksar" Ayala on his podcast! You can watch the whole thing here:

I've also tried my best to transcript their talk. No big news, but they are very close to nerf APM Mage.

Dean has been playing a lot of Wild lately, what has he experienced?
- He’s very happy about the diversity Wild has to offer. He’s been playing Secret Mage for ages and recently played like 500 or 600 games of Handbuff Paladin. Even at high levels of play, you get to meet lots of different decks. Highlander decks are a big part of this which he much approves of.

How much thought goes into the impact on Wild when the devs are creating a new set?
- There is a lot of correlation between Standard and Wild, what’s fun in Standard is usually cool in Wild as well. They do check if a new card would improve one of the already best performing decks in Wild even more and try to avoid that.

How did the team decide which cards should be unnerfed when rotated and how happy are they with the results so far?
- They look at all the cards in the past and ideally, they unnerf them all. Wild should be the place where you can play the cards as you remember them. But then the question pops up “Is the game really gonna be more fun if we do that? If we make Leeroy 4 Mana, is that gonna make Wild more fun?“ They’re trying to decide this for each individual case. The team disagreed about Arcane Golem for example. Raza is also a card that they look back controversial on because it deletes other decks from the game, especially at super high levels.

Wild has less information, a smaller player base, less streamers and so on. Has the player base been sleeping on a particularly strong deck?
- There are so many people playing Hearthstone out there, it’s pretty much impossible for a strong deck to slip under the radar. What happens quite regularly is that the best performing decks aren’t the most played ones because they are boring (Odd Rogue was the best deck for about 2 months, but never even cracked top 5 or 6).

The meta game is different at lower levels like Diamond 5 and high Legend, Darkglare Warlock is a good example for this, as it sees way more play at the top. Is that something the devs have in mind and are they catering to special groups of players?
- Again, they don’t design cards for Wild. The devs are trying to create interesting tools for the game and the cards will find their way into Wild if they’re strong enough. That way, archetypes like Discard Warlock get stronger over time, because that’s a returning mechanic for Warlock. The team does check if a new card would make an already strong and much played deck even more powerful though, and tries to avoid that. Balance is usually tailored to the highest level of play, not because those players are more important, but because information usually trickles down. They have tons of data that prove this. The only exception are skill intensive decks like Miracle Rogue which take some more time to trickle down. There’s a very big range in MMR on Diamond 5, you can meet players with a 25% win rate there. That happens because people are willing to play decks with bad win rates if they do crazy stuff like Big Priest or Tickatus. Nobody would play Odd Rogue with a 45% win rate.

Does Dean have an idea how big the population of Wild players is that only play for fun? Are there any trends of player engagement in Wild over the years?
- Player engagement has been pretty stable for a long time. Trend is upwards in the east, where Wild is very popular compared to the west. One of the reasons for this is that card rotation is a lot more accepted in the western player base.

Darkglare was nerfed a lot faster than Sn1p-Sn4p, even though the former was still in Standard at the time while the latter wasn’t. Does this mark a change of philosophy?
- Dean assumes there have been technical issues about the Sn1p nerf like there was no patch scheduled at the time or something. The difference between the decks was that Sn1p-Lock did something pretty crazy, but it didn’t reach the raw powerlevel the original Darkglare Warlock had. There were match ups with a win rate of 50 or 51% when the deck was still new and they hoped for the meta to adjust by itself which they always prefer to stepping in. In comparism to this, there were no indicators in the data that Darkglare would fall off without them doing something.
The most important question when it comes to nerfs is still “What will happen afterward?”. Most of the time, the second best deck will just rise to the top and be even more dominant. Making an impact in Wild is naturally more difficult than in Standard because of the enormous card pool. The goal is always to create a better experience after a nerf and there are less opportunities to do so than most players think. Sea Giant Warlock was a good example for this, that wasn’t really Hearthstone anymore. It was just getting to turn x and then you win or you lose. Mage is close to this point these days.

How do the devs feel about cost reduction to 0, which is looked at very critically from the player base and allows decks like Sn1p-Lock, APM Priest and APM Mage to thrive?
- They are aware of the fact that cost reduction cards more often than not will become problematic in Wild at some point, even if they are not that strong in Standard. At the same time, playing a lot of cards in one turn is something very exciting and being able to reduce the cost of cards is something as inherent to a card game as buffing the Attack of your minions. They are reluctant to nerf cards like Sorcerer’s Apprentice because decks like Freeze Mage, Sea Giant Warlock or Barnes Priest make Hearthstone a unique experience. As long as you don’t get the feeling you have to play these decks because they are the most powerful and as long as they don’t get too popular, they won’t step in. APM Mage is really close to that point now and maybe nerfing Sorcerer’s Apprentice even is the answer, but they are very careful about that decision.

I am curious what the rankings are for the 10 classes for wild players and why for which classes you like to play the most and are your favorite.  By rankings I mean ranking the classes from number 1 to 10.  Obviously this can change over time but it is still interesting to see what it is.

With the arrival of Darkmoon Races, we might have gotten the final pieces to revive the old Freeze Mage archetype!

Erodos' Imprisoned Phoenix OTK deck was the first list I've come across. The goal of this deck is to stall and draw until you've got your combo pieces together, a task Mage is really good at. The major difference between this deck and older lists is that you can't play around the Imprisoned Phoenixs. A really cool side effect is that you're able to mill unsuspecting opponents. In my own experience, you usually have to go to turn 10 to pull off the combo. It's certainly possible to do it earlier if you gamble to draw missing combo pieces during the 2 turns the Phoenixes need to prepare.

Bonus tip: Don't play Doomsayer the turn before your Imprisoned Phoenixes wake up :D

RavenSunHS uses a more flexible combo, built around Mozaki, Master Duelist. This deck also makes good use of two new cards from Darkmoon Races: Imprisoned Phoenix again and Conjure Mana Biscuit. This list looks to finish earlier, but I haven't tried it yet.

All in all, I have high hopes for a return of the Freeze Mage archetype. Both of them don't look like Tier 1 decks to me, but Tier 2 or 3 seems possible (Secret Mage is a bad matchup and Odd Warrior is insta-concede). Have you tried those decks yet? Do you think they will end up being permanently viable? And if so, is that a good thing?

Coming across a lot of this deck in wild ranked right now, and it seems a little too strong.

The problem card is Deathspeaker, and I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of nerf soon.

I think that Deathspeaker is not a fixable card if they want the other cards to still exist.

This new meta report https://www.vicioussyndicate.com/wild-vs-data-reaper-report-25/ just came out today which is stat based, not opinion based, and it shows secret mage as the best deck by a large margin and having favored or highly favored matchups into every other deck except pirate warrior, where the matchup is neutral.  So there is no meta counter to this deck.  I wonder what experiences everyone is having with wild ladder related to secret mage?

Priest is completely broken in Wild. Here some suggestions how to balance it.

Wave of Apathy -> 2 mana

Mass Hysteria -> 6 mana

Psychic Scream -> 8 mana

Palm Reading -> 4 mana

Archmage Vargoth -> 5 mana

Raise Dead -> 1 mana

Spirit Lash -> 3 mana

And no I don`t vote for one of these nerfs, I vote for ALL of them.

PS: Over 40% of my meta at rank diamond 5 is Priest.

What Wild decks are you enjoying experimenting with thus far into the Darkmoon expansion?

So far I've only played:

Deathrattle Hunter 

Spell mage

Secret Mage

Token Druid

1/3 of the hole ladder is Priest atm and I see no viable counter against it - but Priest has counters against everything.

I am allready playing an ultra-aggressive deck in the hope to rush the Priest down - but this doesn`t matter  against infinitive removals and infinitive heals. :(

If you would've told me a year ago that I would be hitting Legend I would have doubted you. I've never played to reach legend until this month, and the reason why? I was having fun.

I casually climbed the Wild ladder using Quest Mage up until Diamond 6-7, then Scholomance Academy came out and I went ALL the way back to Diamond 10. Then I stumbled across Discard Warlock which took me to Diamond 3, then loss after loss to a different kind of Warlock got my attention. The new, big, and scary Pain Warlock took me to Legend and I got that sweet, sweet card back.

Climbing the Wild ladder was fun, and I'm glad I got to see alot of old cards I've forgotten about while climbing. Now I'm hoping for a new Format so I can see more old cards get played again.

So what's next?

Does anyone else find that Priest's and is increasingly un-fun to play against? Like unless you're also a Priest and have or you're playing equally un-fun Mage secrets, there's no way to deal with it. 

I'm not trying to be salty here, just really tired of running into this. I don't even know how you'd fix it. Nerf Vargoth to 6 mana? Does Blizzard even care enough about Wild mode to do something? 

EDH (Elder Dragon Highlander), or as it is more commonly known, Commander, is one of the most popular game modes in Magic: the Gathering. The way it works is you pick a Legendary Creature to be your "commander". The commander doesn't go into your deck, but instead is in a special zone where you can always play him as if he were in your hand. You also build a 100 card deck, with only one copy of each card, centered around your commander.

So I was thinking, what if we had something like this in Hearthstone? You could pick a Legendary minion, and then build say a 50 card deck with only 1 copy of each card. The legendary minion wouldn't be shuffled into your deck but would instead go into a separate zone where you could cast it whenever you had the mana for it. 

Decks would be really inconsistent because you are playing with 50 different cards, but you also get to pick one Legendary who you get to play every game which increases consistency. You would have to adjust the UI a bit to make room for the "commander", but I think it would be pretty fun. 

The main downsides is that Highlander cards would be no-brainer inclusions, but you could always ban them in that format. I am not sure if that is the best fix, but it would solve the problem. 

I am not sure if this format would work in Hearthstone, but I thought it would be fun to speculate. It may be really broken getting Deathknights on curve or always having Shudderwock whenever you need him, but it could also open up a lot of room for brewers like myself to have a lot of fun. What do you think? Could Elder Dragon Highlander be a format in Hearthstone?