It just seems like something's ALWAYS too OP. And I feel this is grossly mishandled. Something's always going to be the best option in the game. It's just how this stuff works. Being the best option available and being overpowered are very different things.
So I'd like to issue a challenge to everybody -always- complaining about the meta- Were you EVER satisfied with it? I mean, come on. Hearthstone's been around for five years. Are you really going to tell me they got it wrong every single time throughout all these expansions and adventures we've had? Really?
Those are the same people who complain about just every good deck until its nerfed so they start to complain and whine about next good deck. Just over and over again. They will complain about meta even if its ok, they will complain about good decks even if they are not broken, they will complain about totally ok cards like Edwin. Or they will complain something is not good enough. There is no way to satisfied them.
There will always be OP decks that piss people off and 75% of the player base just copy and paste from their favourite twitch personality. Anything that builds a wall late game like hadronox druid and ress priest will always be hated by people who want games to last 4 turns. Face roll token decks like the current murloc pala have never been fun to play against and every meta has had one.
What I would say differentiates the current meta is that it is literally OP. The amount of cards that can swing the game in 1 turn and feel unanswerable is more than ever before, and the neutral highlander cards are just too OP. Going from feeling comfortable to losing in 1 turn just feels bad and it happens far too often with the power level of the current standard card set. I'd quite happily see a dip in power level and less flashy plays over the next 12-18 months to bring back a more considered game style.
Of course there can't be a perfectly balanced meta, but that's not the point. I myself loved the late DoD meta, there was a feeling that you could play any deck and do at least decent with it. This meta tho is too aggresive in my opinion, just look at top decks, they are aggro in majority. Also I think DH is a problem (wow how original) and before you call me that guy always complaining, let me just say that I dont think dh as a class is broken, just some cards make it too powerful. Stuff like Priestess of fury, Altruis, or Skull of guldan, can swing and win a game on their own. When I reached legend I started playing numerous control or fun decks, but they loose so much to dh its not even funny. It feels like only decks I'm allowed to play are Galakrond rogue and Ress priest (as much as I hate it). It just feels like dh is too opressive, and choking out control decks out of the meta.
The first couple years this game was out, it was a blast. There were still very strong decks in both aggro and control but it never felt unfair or helpless. If you had a decent draw or played correctly you always had a fighting chance. You could even experiment with new cards or cards you liked but weren’t necessarily popular and not get clobbered over and over by netdecks. You still might not have won as much as those, but it was never so bad that I felt discouraged from trying new cards or having fun.
I cannot speak much on the state of standard.I play mostly wild, and it’s in a terrible state. It’s frustrating when you get new cards from an expansion like Ashes of Outland, and can’t use them because of oppressive decks. On a daily basis I see res priest, quest mage, darkest hour before nerf, cube cancer, and Baku demon hunter. If you aren’t playing a top tier deck you might as well concede turn 1. Even if you tech against those decks with cards like Loatheb, healing, res pool dilutions, it’s still not enough sometimes. And good luck if you tech something in that’s a dead draw against certain classes. Especially minion summoning cards vs aggro. That doesn’t mean your deck is a “meme deck” or that you aren’t playing right.
Most of the time I feel as if Blizzard’s nerfs are like band-aids rather than actual fixes. I wonder if they make these changes just so they can reduce player contempt towards the game. They don’t actually change the card enough (most of the time) to make a significant impact or fix what was wrong with it or why it was problematic in a certain deck. They don’t actually care that’s it’s broken but they patch in these little band-aids to give the illusion that they are listening and responding when they actually aren’t. They do it so people continue to play and spend money. Barnes was absolutely busted, and ludicrous in res priest. After a long time what we got was a 1 mana increase. Too little too late. It’s the same case with open the waygate now. Only two more spells? Not really going to fix the problem.
Its really hard for me to play more than a few games in wild anymore. Like I wrote before, there was a time where I was having a lot of fun with the game and could play for hours despite facing strong meta decks. That was satisfying. Now I just feel helpless and typically log off after 5-6 matches. One of my favorite classes used to be paladin and it’s literally unplayable in wild unless you are doing mech spam cancer. (I don’t) Res priest is one of the main things that ruined the game for me. I play a lot of control and Highlander and that deck is the most defeating matchup. And now, they’ve gutted my Zephrys by ruining sacrificial pact. Pre-nerf it was a sure way to have a good answer to a demon hunter but now facing them is even more tilting than before. Can’t even tell you how many times a mistress has come down and I used zephrys
I feel like the res mechanic as a whole is really destructive to the game. I’m not just talking about in priest either albeit it’s the worst there.With the deathrattle cards, reborns, and demons we have now a Nzoth or Bloodreaver is absolutely broken. What the hell can you do when your opponent fills the board with these minions and even if cleared they resummon, heal the opponent, and destroy any board you have? It wouldn’t be as bad if the opponent could only do it once or twice but now we have rogues running around with shadowstep and gang up for nzoth. Warlocks getting multiple bloodreavers / summoning 5 Doomguards, and priest repeatedly using one card and getting a vargoth to fill the board over and over. If a priest gets vargoth in the pool they can pretty much fill their entire board without ever using a mass res card. There’s shit like Catarina or Yshaaraj. Yeah you can run minion summoning cards or transforms but I’ve found a lot of the time it still isint enough
I keep seeing people complaining about Priestess of Fury.. Has anyone even seen her in a deck post nerf? All of the top DH decks are the Tempo ones that don't run her... The 1 mana nerf that everyone was complaining was too weak? Literally seems to have made the card unplayable.
Edit: Okay, so I just saw that the meta deck listed on this site runs her, but the HSReplay top performing one certainly doesn't... I keep waiting to see her drop, and she doesn't.
I keep seeing people complaining about Priestess of Fury.. Has anyone even seen her in a deck post nerf? All of the top DH decks are the Tempo ones that don't run her... The 1 mana nerf that everyone was complaining was too weak? Literally seems to have made the card unplayable.
Edit: Okay, so I just saw that the meta deck listed on this site runs her, but the HSReplay top performing one certainly doesn't... I keep waiting to see her drop, and she doesn't.
You must be very lucky then, be glad you dont have to deal with her.
The first couple years this game was out, it was a blast. There were still very strong decks in both aggro and control but it never felt unfair or helpless. If you had a decent draw or played correctly you always had a fighting chance. You could even experiment with new cards or cards you liked but weren’t necessarily popular and not get clobbered over and over by netdecks. You still might not have won as much as those, but it was never so bad that I felt discouraged from trying new cards or having fun.
I cannot speak much on the state of standard.I play mostly wild, and it’s in a terrible state. It’s frustrating when you get new cards from an expansion like Ashes of Outland, and can’t use them because of oppressive decks. On a daily basis I see res priest, quest mage, darkest hour before nerf, cube cancer, and Baku demon hunter. If you aren’t playing a top tier deck you might as well concede turn 1. Even if you tech against those decks with cards like Loatheb, healing, res pool dilutions, it’s still not enough sometimes. And good luck if you tech something in that’s a dead draw against certain classes. Especially minion summoning cards vs aggro. That doesn’t mean your deck is a “meme deck” or that you aren’t playing right.
Most of the time I feel as if Blizzard’s nerfs are like band-aids rather than actual fixes. I wonder if they make these changes just so they can reduce player contempt towards the game. They don’t actually change the card enough (most of the time) to make a significant impact or fix what was wrong with it or why it was problematic in a certain deck. They don’t actually care that’s it’s broken but they patch in these little band-aids to give the illusion that they are listening and responding when they actually aren’t. They do it so people continue to play and spend money. Barnes was absolutely busted, and ludicrous in res priest. After a long time what we got was a 1 mana increase. Too little too late. It’s the same case with open the waygate now. Only two more spells? Not really going to fix the problem.
Its really hard for me to play more than a few games in wild anymore. Like I wrote before, there was a time where I was having a lot of fun with the game and could play for hours despite facing strong meta decks. That was satisfying. Now I just feel helpless and typically log off after 5-6 matches. One of my favorite classes used to be paladin and it’s literally unplayable in wild unless you are doing mech spam cancer. (I don’t) Res priest is one of the main things that ruined the game for me. I play a lot of control and Highlander and that deck is the most defeating matchup. And now, they’ve gutted my Zephrys by ruining sacrificial pact. Pre-nerf it was a sure way to have a good answer to a demon hunter but now facing them is even more tilting than before. Can’t even tell you how many times a mistress has come down and I used zephrys
I feel like the res mechanic as a whole is really destructive to the game. I’m not just talking about in priest either albeit it’s the worst there.With the deathrattle cards, reborns, and demons we have now a Nzoth or Bloodreaver is absolutely broken. What the hell can you do when your opponent fills the board with these minions and even if cleared they resummon, heal the opponent, and destroy any board you have? It wouldn’t be as bad if the opponent could only do it once or twice but now we have rogues running around with shadowstep and gang up for nzoth. Warlocks getting multiple bloodreavers / summoning 5 Doomguards, and priest repeatedly using one card and getting a vargoth to fill the board over and over. If a priest gets vargoth in the pool they can pretty much fill their entire board without ever using a mass res card. There’s shit like Catarina or Yshaaraj. Yeah you can run minion summoning cards or transforms but I’ve found a lot of the time it still isint enough
You have completely missed the point of Wild. It is to have the strongest of the strongest cards and for people to be able to create extremely strong deck. And every time a new expansion comes out, it will get stronger.
If you want to play a balanced meta you should play standard, not wild
WIld is the antithesis of balanced, and I imagine people who play wild enjoy it for that reason. Bored of the people who come into what I'm pretty confident is a thread about standard and starting with 'Well in wild blah blah blah'. They are 2 very different experiences and generally views and opinions don't cross over between the 2 sets.
Post-nerf DoD meta was actually pretty good. But it still had a problem that feels even worse right now: card generation can swing games in one turn. Feels incredibly bad to suddenly get boxed out of a game by Shadowjeweler Hanar or DQA. Feels incredibly bad to lose to Zephrys.
And mana reduction is also a problem. Feels incredibly bad for a Rogue opponent to have up to 7 zero-costed cards in hand. Feels incredibly bad for DH to spam its overpowered cards following a big Skull of Guldan. And what do people do when these things happen to them over and over again? Well, if you can’t beat em, join em. So the meta is full of Galakrond Secret Rogue and “Do Everything” DH. Ironically, DH doesn’t have class access to card generation, but when your class cards are so overpowered, you don’t need it.
Would really like to see the game move away from these two mechanics and for the developers to focus every expansion on ensuring that there is adequate support for aggro, control and combo/value archetypes. That’s how you ensure the players create a healthy meta. Right now, there’s only one viable control deck (Priest), so aggro/tempo is all over the meta too, since it’s the only thing that keeps greedy rogue/highlander decks in check.
It's not that YOU have to be satisfied, but creating new threads every hour just to say that something is too powerful is just annoying. I don't remember such a huge amount of ppl complaining last year (I mean RoS), but it's understandable, since they added many new things and were struggling with balance, but really sometimes the community wants too much. I remember the source of everyones complaints last year - Control Warrior, and I remember that when they nerfed Boom, everyone was yelling "It's not enough!" or simply "Just delete the card!". I think those who complain just don't understand what balance is. They want the deck they hate to become destroyed and unplayable, but it's not like this. Blizzard will not nerf a tier 1 deck to be a tier 4 one. The deck would probably stay tier 1 (or tier 2) but simply lose some powerlevel that makes it stronger than tier 1. It's simple but ppl for some reason don't understand this...
are you serious? its ok to be the best deck in game, lets say 65% WR for the best and 63 second 60 third and so on.
what is not ok is when more than 20 percent of the meta is one class and that class wins near 70% and the second one is far behind like 63%, and the structure of that class(aggro-tempo) rules out almost all the fun decks in game.
this is not ok and the community have a prima facie right here to complain,
DONT TRY TO SHUT THE COMMUNITY UP
when we talking about an oppressive class we know what we are talking about and statistics are our obvious reason
So I'd like to issue a challenge to everybody -always- complaining about the meta- Were you EVER satisfied with it? I mean, come on. Hearthstone's been around for five years. Are you really going to tell me they got it wrong every single time throughout all these expansions and adventures we've had? Really?
The problem isn't that they collectively fuck up an entire expansion. The issue is that 95% of the expansion is great, except for certain problem cards that they fuck up so majorly, that they take forever to fix. Even though the community is collectively calling for nerfs for (sometimes) months.
Let's look at some examples.
Saronite Chain Gang was such a botched combo with Shudderwock. But this card took fucking months to fix. Almost every Shaman game during the Saronite/Shudder era was just hitting turn 10, and then watching the Shaman play with themselves while they repeatedly bounce 1 mana Shudderwocks to hand.
Raza and Mind Blast.same problem, though he was much slower. Still saw a nerf due to his creation of an uninteractive board. Watching Priests play 0 mana hero powers and mind blasts was NOT fun. Again, people knew these nerfs were coming for months.
Doomguard is another example. Allowed to combo with Carnivorous Cube, creating completely unbeatable board states (again) for months until they finally rotated Doomguard to Hall of Fame.
Ice Block was in the same boat as Doomguard. Featured in OTKO Mage decks that created a completely uninteractive board state. Two turns of spamming card draws with zero possible counterplay was often enough to draw out their combo pieces. Took years till it was Hof'd
Grim Patron Warrior went through several iterations of OTKOs. Each one taking an insulting amount of time to balance. Again, these decks dominated the ladder and even pro play. It took a long time for them to eventually get gutted, and for them to invent the Standard meta and rotate Thaurissan.
Caverns Below wasn't super slow to nerf, but still could have been faster, since it was equally as dominant as DH on launch.
And then there's the whole pirate meta. Again, having to wait until they nerfed Patches and the other card was ridiculous. Because everyone KNEW they were going to get nerfed. It just took too long.
---
Most of the cards and combos I listed were from different metas, and were a black spot on each one. For the metas where these combos were nerfed after a few weeks instead of the next month, the remaining time in the expansion was mostly enjoyable.
Again, your misconception is that the meta is 100% bad, because deck X is bad. The issue is that there are singular decks that bring down an otherwise great meta. Blizzard just keeps the high popularity decks around for a few weeks before nerfing them to drive up pack sales and disenchant rates.
If Blizzard didn't act fucking stupid and buffed/nerfed in a timely manner, then this would be the best TCG on the market. But currently, it's looking like Legends of Runeterra might overtake it after launch, since it has a far better new player experience, is far cheaper, has no pack RNG, and even their draft format is far easier to run infinitely. (7 wins at a 50% winrate is max reward)
It's also unfortunate that this is the worst meta since Mean Streets of Gadgetzan. They fucked up the card draw for Priest, Shaman, Paladin and Warrior so bad that they may as well not exist, with the exception of Res Priest. A deck so awful in design it slows the game down so much that I stopped playing, and ruined the playability of the game on my lunch breaks.
Topic, basically.
It just seems like something's ALWAYS too OP. And I feel this is grossly mishandled. Something's always going to be the best option in the game. It's just how this stuff works. Being the best option available and being overpowered are very different things.
So I'd like to issue a challenge to everybody -always- complaining about the meta- Were you EVER satisfied with it? I mean, come on. Hearthstone's been around for five years. Are you really going to tell me they got it wrong every single time throughout all these expansions and adventures we've had? Really?
No they was not and will never be.
Those are the same people who complain about just every good deck until its nerfed so they start to complain and whine about next good deck. Just over and over again. They will complain about meta even if its ok, they will complain about good decks even if they are not broken, they will complain about totally ok cards like Edwin. Or they will complain something is not good enough. There is no way to satisfied them.
Mostly i am satisfied about the meta, i am NOT satisfied with the powerlevel of some cards.
Those cards, however create, a meta.
There will always be OP decks that piss people off and 75% of the player base just copy and paste from their favourite twitch personality. Anything that builds a wall late game like hadronox druid and ress priest will always be hated by people who want games to last 4 turns. Face roll token decks like the current murloc pala have never been fun to play against and every meta has had one.
What I would say differentiates the current meta is that it is literally OP. The amount of cards that can swing the game in 1 turn and feel unanswerable is more than ever before, and the neutral highlander cards are just too OP. Going from feeling comfortable to losing in 1 turn just feels bad and it happens far too often with the power level of the current standard card set. I'd quite happily see a dip in power level and less flashy plays over the next 12-18 months to bring back a more considered game style.
That, well said.
Of course there can't be a perfectly balanced meta, but that's not the point. I myself loved the late DoD meta, there was a feeling that you could play any deck and do at least decent with it. This meta tho is too aggresive in my opinion, just look at top decks, they are aggro in majority. Also I think DH is a problem (wow how original) and before you call me that guy always complaining, let me just say that I dont think dh as a class is broken, just some cards make it too powerful. Stuff like Priestess of fury, Altruis, or Skull of guldan, can swing and win a game on their own. When I reached legend I started playing numerous control or fun decks, but they loose so much to dh its not even funny. It feels like only decks I'm allowed to play are Galakrond rogue and Ress priest (as much as I hate it). It just feels like dh is too opressive, and choking out control decks out of the meta.
Actually, yes.
The first couple years this game was out, it was a blast. There were still very strong decks in both aggro and control but it never felt unfair or helpless. If you had a decent draw or played correctly you always had a fighting chance. You could even experiment with new cards or cards you liked but weren’t necessarily popular and not get clobbered over and over by netdecks. You still might not have won as much as those, but it was never so bad that I felt discouraged from trying new cards or having fun.
I cannot speak much on the state of standard.I play mostly wild, and it’s in a terrible state. It’s frustrating when you get new cards from an expansion like Ashes of Outland, and can’t use them because of oppressive decks. On a daily basis I see res priest, quest mage, darkest hour before nerf, cube cancer, and Baku demon hunter. If you aren’t playing a top tier deck you might as well concede turn 1. Even if you tech against those decks with cards like Loatheb, healing, res pool dilutions, it’s still not enough sometimes. And good luck if you tech something in that’s a dead draw against certain classes. Especially minion summoning cards vs aggro. That doesn’t mean your deck is a “meme deck” or that you aren’t playing right.
Most of the time I feel as if Blizzard’s nerfs are like band-aids rather than actual fixes. I wonder if they make these changes just so they can reduce player contempt towards the game. They don’t actually change the card enough (most of the time) to make a significant impact or fix what was wrong with it or why it was problematic in a certain deck. They don’t actually care that’s it’s broken but they patch in these little band-aids to give the illusion that they are listening and responding when they actually aren’t. They do it so people continue to play and spend money. Barnes was absolutely busted, and ludicrous in res priest. After a long time what we got was a 1 mana increase. Too little too late. It’s the same case with open the waygate now. Only two more spells? Not really going to fix the problem.
Its really hard for me to play more than a few games in wild anymore. Like I wrote before, there was a time where I was having a lot of fun with the game and could play for hours despite facing strong meta decks. That was satisfying. Now I just feel helpless and typically log off after 5-6 matches. One of my favorite classes used to be paladin and it’s literally unplayable in wild unless you are doing mech spam cancer. (I don’t) Res priest is one of the main things that ruined the game for me. I play a lot of control and Highlander and that deck is the most defeating matchup. And now, they’ve gutted my Zephrys by ruining sacrificial pact. Pre-nerf it was a sure way to have a good answer to a demon hunter but now facing them is even more tilting than before. Can’t even tell you how many times a mistress has come down and I used zephrys
I feel like the res mechanic as a whole is really destructive to the game. I’m not just talking about in priest either albeit it’s the worst there.With the deathrattle cards, reborns, and demons we have now a Nzoth or Bloodreaver is absolutely broken. What the hell can you do when your opponent fills the board with these minions and even if cleared they resummon, heal the opponent, and destroy any board you have? It wouldn’t be as bad if the opponent could only do it once or twice but now we have rogues running around with shadowstep and gang up for nzoth. Warlocks getting multiple bloodreavers / summoning 5 Doomguards, and priest repeatedly using one card and getting a vargoth to fill the board over and over. If a priest gets vargoth in the pool they can pretty much fill their entire board without ever using a mass res card. There’s shit like Catarina or Yshaaraj. Yeah you can run minion summoning cards or transforms but I’ve found a lot of the time it still isint enough
I keep seeing people complaining about Priestess of Fury.. Has anyone even seen her in a deck post nerf? All of the top DH decks are the Tempo ones that don't run her... The 1 mana nerf that everyone was complaining was too weak? Literally seems to have made the card unplayable.
Edit: Okay, so I just saw that the meta deck listed on this site runs her, but the HSReplay top performing one certainly doesn't... I keep waiting to see her drop, and she doesn't.
...Priestess of Fury never got nerfed. Did you mean Anatean or something?
Nope. My mistake.. She just got cut from the top list... Thanks for the wake up.
You must be very lucky then, be glad you dont have to deal with her.
You have completely missed the point of Wild. It is to have the strongest of the strongest cards and for people to be able to create extremely strong deck. And every time a new expansion comes out, it will get stronger.
If you want to play a balanced meta you should play standard, not wild
Silver Hand Recruit
WIld is the antithesis of balanced, and I imagine people who play wild enjoy it for that reason. Bored of the people who come into what I'm pretty confident is a thread about standard and starting with 'Well in wild blah blah blah'. They are 2 very different experiences and generally views and opinions don't cross over between the 2 sets.
"Bored of the people who come into what I'm pretty confident is a thread about standard and starting with 'Well in wild blah blah blah'. "
I mean, I posted this in the Standard section for a reason.
tyk3: Well I agree with you on every point. All of this plus the tad bit too much rng on some decks.
Post-nerf DoD meta was actually pretty good. But it still had a problem that feels even worse right now: card generation can swing games in one turn. Feels incredibly bad to suddenly get boxed out of a game by Shadowjeweler Hanar or DQA. Feels incredibly bad to lose to Zephrys.
And mana reduction is also a problem. Feels incredibly bad for a Rogue opponent to have up to 7 zero-costed cards in hand. Feels incredibly bad for DH to spam its overpowered cards following a big Skull of Guldan. And what do people do when these things happen to them over and over again? Well, if you can’t beat em, join em. So the meta is full of Galakrond Secret Rogue and “Do Everything” DH. Ironically, DH doesn’t have class access to card generation, but when your class cards are so overpowered, you don’t need it.
Would really like to see the game move away from these two mechanics and for the developers to focus every expansion on ensuring that there is adequate support for aggro, control and combo/value archetypes. That’s how you ensure the players create a healthy meta. Right now, there’s only one viable control deck (Priest), so aggro/tempo is all over the meta too, since it’s the only thing that keeps greedy rogue/highlander decks in check.
It's not that YOU have to be satisfied, but creating new threads every hour just to say that something is too powerful is just annoying. I don't remember such a huge amount of ppl complaining last year (I mean RoS), but it's understandable, since they added many new things and were struggling with balance, but really sometimes the community wants too much. I remember the source of everyones complaints last year - Control Warrior, and I remember that when they nerfed Boom, everyone was yelling "It's not enough!" or simply "Just delete the card!". I think those who complain just don't understand what balance is. They want the deck they hate to become destroyed and unplayable, but it's not like this. Blizzard will not nerf a tier 1 deck to be a tier 4 one. The deck would probably stay tier 1 (or tier 2) but simply lose some powerlevel that makes it stronger than tier 1. It's simple but ppl for some reason don't understand this...
are you serious? its ok to be the best deck in game, lets say 65% WR for the best and 63 second 60 third and so on.
what is not ok is when more than 20 percent of the meta is one class and that class wins near 70% and the second one is far behind like 63%, and the structure of that class(aggro-tempo) rules out almost all the fun decks in game.
this is not ok and the community have a prima facie right here to complain,
DONT TRY TO SHUT THE COMMUNITY UP
when we talking about an oppressive class we know what we are talking about and statistics are our obvious reason
"DONT TRY TO SHUT THE COMMUNITY UP"
Read my post and tell me where I did any such thing.
What I did was pose a question. And if you have to resort to straw men instead of actually answering it, doesn't speak well to your "points".
In fact, I'll do you one better. Name me one point in my post where I EVER pointed out ANY specific class as being "oppressive" in today's meta?
I'll save you the time, you can't, because I didn't say word one about any of them.
The problem isn't that they collectively fuck up an entire expansion. The issue is that 95% of the expansion is great, except for certain problem cards that they fuck up so majorly, that they take forever to fix. Even though the community is collectively calling for nerfs for (sometimes) months.
Let's look at some examples.
Saronite Chain Gang was such a botched combo with Shudderwock. But this card took fucking months to fix. Almost every Shaman game during the Saronite/Shudder era was just hitting turn 10, and then watching the Shaman play with themselves while they repeatedly bounce 1 mana Shudderwocks to hand.
Raza and Mind Blast.same problem, though he was much slower. Still saw a nerf due to his creation of an uninteractive board. Watching Priests play 0 mana hero powers and mind blasts was NOT fun. Again, people knew these nerfs were coming for months.
Doomguard is another example. Allowed to combo with Carnivorous Cube, creating completely unbeatable board states (again) for months until they finally rotated Doomguard to Hall of Fame.
Ice Block was in the same boat as Doomguard. Featured in OTKO Mage decks that created a completely uninteractive board state. Two turns of spamming card draws with zero possible counterplay was often enough to draw out their combo pieces. Took years till it was Hof'd
Grim Patron Warrior went through several iterations of OTKOs. Each one taking an insulting amount of time to balance. Again, these decks dominated the ladder and even pro play. It took a long time for them to eventually get gutted, and for them to invent the Standard meta and rotate Thaurissan.
Caverns Below wasn't super slow to nerf, but still could have been faster, since it was equally as dominant as DH on launch.
And then there's the whole pirate meta. Again, having to wait until they nerfed Patches and the other card was ridiculous. Because everyone KNEW they were going to get nerfed. It just took too long.
---
Most of the cards and combos I listed were from different metas, and were a black spot on each one. For the metas where these combos were nerfed after a few weeks instead of the next month, the remaining time in the expansion was mostly enjoyable.
Again, your misconception is that the meta is 100% bad, because deck X is bad. The issue is that there are singular decks that bring down an otherwise great meta. Blizzard just keeps the high popularity decks around for a few weeks before nerfing them to drive up pack sales and disenchant rates.
If Blizzard didn't act fucking stupid and buffed/nerfed in a timely manner, then this would be the best TCG on the market. But currently, it's looking like Legends of Runeterra might overtake it after launch, since it has a far better new player experience, is far cheaper, has no pack RNG, and even their draft format is far easier to run infinitely. (7 wins at a 50% winrate is max reward)
It's also unfortunate that this is the worst meta since Mean Streets of Gadgetzan. They fucked up the card draw for Priest, Shaman, Paladin and Warrior so bad that they may as well not exist, with the exception of Res Priest. A deck so awful in design it slows the game down so much that I stopped playing, and ruined the playability of the game on my lunch breaks.