Now, close to a month after TgT release, I noticed that... I rarely actually see TgT cards being played? Just like Kripp said in one of his latest videos, especially at the higher end of the ladder everyone sticks to their old decks.
I have played probably over 200 to 300 games after TgT release but of all the legendaries I have seen like 1 Chillmaw, 1 Aviana and 1 Justicar Trueheart (could me missing some but I'm guessing the total is not more than 5).
And now that I'm looking trough my own decks, I'm actually only using a few TgT cards myself. And I can't think of any reason to include more, or make decks that need them. My most used TgT card is Trueheart (which i actually kinda like in CW, but got out of a pack and wouldn't have crafted otherwise).
I haven't seen a single deck that really focusses on joust or inspire (like the mage inspire deck played in the promo match at the reveal event). Some of the few TgT cards I actually see somewhat regularly and in my opinion re-shaped the meta a little bit are Darnassus Aspirant, Murloc Knight, Mysterious Challenger, Bash, Twilight Guardian and a couple of Shaman and very few neutral cards.
The only deck that got a real boost this expansion (in my opinion) is midrange Shaman, which got 3 auto include cards. Most other decks you see a lot on ladder, like Patron, face hunter, Handlock, tempo mage and so on stayed pretty much the same.
So what do you guys think about this? Is Blizzard starting to get so careful with releasing more overpowered cards like Boom and Undertaker that they just gave us too much un usable cards? Or am I just talking BS and are you all using 30-TgT-cards-Inspire/joust-decks?
Many people experiment with their decks but they mostly come to a conclusion that they are not good enough once you start doing ranked, so they keep playing some older stuff. I personally like the variety of cards, I'm not that good deckbuilder myself, but I tend to try out some new stuff every week.
I'm often extremely critical of the devs game design choices but in the case of TGT I think there's just a massive and disappointing lack of experimentation from the community, including many of the pros. After about 2 days people stopped innovating and when either back to the old decks they had or straight to the TempoStorm ordained "deck of the moment" - Secret Paladin.
I'm quite sure there are plenty of viable TGT decks still to be discovered, which is not something I thought about GvG. No sooner had people written off Shaman due to the failure of Totems than Dragon Shaman appears and is much stronger than it etc. etc.
It's our own fault as a community if we don't see more original decks right now, there's just so little experimentation. If you're a combo Druid or Face Hunter or Patron player you have no right to moan, you are part of the problem, sitting there with your mind numbing netdeck when you could be theory crafting and deck building.
Yea, the bar for playability is very high in ranked construction. Every slot has premium minions or spells in place that are very hard to cut. I think a mode with larger deck capacity might see a little better distribution between sets, but it's hard to cut staples from strong deck archetypes. What will you remove from control warrior? The class minions and weapons smooth out the early game, the legendaries all have instant effect of some kind, and the rest of the deck is armor synergy + brawl. Very little room for new cards, so most variants just swap a few cards for Varian or Bash snce they fit, and maybe justicar for super armor, but none of the joust or inspire cards are reliable or good enough to warrant dropping a staple.
I think you listed all the cards that might consistently find play. Paladins can usually justify 1 Murloc Knight, Darnassus is another potential ramp card, so thats in. Twighlight Guardian plays in any Dragon deck. Mysterious Challanger buffed Shockadin at the cost of running bad secrets. So we pretty much covered TGT's impact on established decks so far. A lot of pros looked at the full cardlist and estimated something <10 playable cards, because all but (<10) cards are not better than any cards in the previous 30 card tier 1 decks.
This may change if someone is able to create a new deck type that is a competitive tier 1 deck, that isn't just a diluted or teched variant of an established archetype.
Blizz still doesn't understand two fundamental things.
First, that the long grind and monthly reset of ranked means that everyone just wants to earn stars as quickly as possible, thus the meta will always be on the bleeding edge of aggro. This means that only cards that add to aggro or add to anti-aggro in a way that makes it easy to farm aggro will ever have a significant impact on the meta for more than a week or two after an expansion. Thus, we have Secret Paladin and Dragon Priest...and that's all TGT did to the Ranked meta.
Second, that adding rewards for gaining higher rank only amplifies this effect, so even fewer people will be willing to even vaguely experiment with other decks until they hit whatever they believe to be their 'peak rank.' This means that it's likely that existing decks will be refined, but highly unlikely that new deck archetypes will spontaneously develop between releases. Thus, Secret Paladin and Dragon Priest are all TGT will ever do to the Ranked Meta, with a slim chance of someone forging a breakaway deck in a couple of months.
It would be trivially easy for them to fix these problems by making it profitable to have longer games. In addition to the Win Streak star, add a star if your game lasts longer than 10 rounds, and another star if it lasts longer than 15. At Rank 5, take away the 10-round star, but not the 15-round star. Presto! Instant valid reason for people to pursue control decks, and a completely radical opening-up of the meta.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I looked at this card originally and I thought, you know, it's a card, and you play this card. The card will be that card that you play so you're playing a card. So, it is one thing to play a card. If you're opponent doesn't really have any cards, the card will screw up the card pretty hard, and that means it's a pretty good card.
Well the problem with a lot of the TgT cards is that they need too much set up, like the inspire mechanic.
You can get some crazy combo's of by setting up a cool Mage inspire board that lets you ping 10 times for 2 damage in 1 turn, but the truth is that stuff like that is not going to happen.
For crazy combo's like that you need your tech minions to survive at least one turn, but you currently only see decks that are A: control decks which won't let them survive a whole turn or B: aggro decks that just kill you if you spend a turn setting up some crazy combo instead of clearing their board.
It seems like the impact in terms of optimal deck lists has been pretty minimal, but the number of viable decks feels like it's gone up. In the designated "Tier 1 Decks" there is very little change. Now, some of this is due to lack of innovation by the community, and some of it is due to the new cards not offering powerful replacements. But it has always seemed like Blizzard is not interested in printing straight up better cards, but rather offering more options.
My impression pre-TGT was that the difference between Tier 1 decks and Tier 2 decks was very clear. If you weren't playing a Tier 1 deck, you simply weren't going to be able to compete. Control Warrior disappeared because the degree to which Patron was a better choice was absurd. Almost no one played Mech Mage or Midrange Hunter because the Tempo and Face variants were just better in every situation.
All of those archetypes are coming back though, along with several others (those were just the easiest ones to remember). The gap between Tier 1 and Tier 2 feels like it has shrunk considerably, and while sure, you can very easily play a deck without any TGT cards and hit Legend, you could also see a good deal of success running a deck with a lot of them.
The impact of TGT has been, to my eyes, expanded deck viability. In terms of straight up upgrades, we don't see much. In terms of cards you can play at the highest level? Also pretty low. But in terms of cards people not shooting for top 20 Legend can play, I think we've gotten quite a few. And I don't think that's a bad thing.
200-300 games and you've seen ONE trueheart? And ONE Chillmaw? And ZERO Gormoks, Varians, sisters, or mistcallers? Are you playing ranked? Casual? Tavern Brawl?
I see Trueheart in an absolute ton of CW decks, a fair amount of paladin decks, and even a Priest deck or two. Chillmaw is in 50-60% of Dragon decks. Gormok is an absolute staple in zoo and aggro paladin. The sisters have been used with some success in dragon priest decks. Even Saraad, Mistcaller, and Paletress are seeing limited play.
Obviously no one is using full inspire decks or full joust decks. There are a whopping 4 neutral joust cards. Inspire is built mostly to be an addition to current decks rather than an archetype of its own, although maybe one day we'll see a refined inspire deck. Many of the inspire cards are doing quite well on their own without any other inspire synergy.
As a player that hit legend last season and is rank 5 this season, I'd say ~40% of decks I play are brand new archetypes (dragon priest or some variation of Secret Paladin) and most decks besides face hunter and Handlock are using multiple TGT cards even though they were perfectly refined decks before TGT came out. I'm really surprised to see so many people agree that TGT has done nothing - I feel like I'm playing a completely new/different game.
I count roughly 33, and I'm being quite picky about what I include. There were a lot of fringe cards that I didn't include. That's roughly 1/4 of the cards seeing regular constructed play in the rank 5 to legend zone. And that's not even counting a bunch of older "dead" cards now seeing play due to new synergies and archetypes.
Well, one new deck archetype (dragon) and one new deck (secret paladin) are more than what we expected from TGT. Honestly, there should be some firing in the Blizzard department by now.
It would be trivially easy for them to fix these problems by making it profitable to have longer games. In addition to the Win Streak star, add a star if your game lasts longer than 10 rounds, and another star if it lasts longer than 15. At Rank 5, take away the 10-round star, but not the 15-round star. Presto! Instant valid reason for people to pursue control decks, and a completely radical opening-up of the meta.
I love the solution you propose. Not sure about 5+ ranks tho, but up to 5 it just feels right.
Agree with Serology, community is too lazy to experiment and try really new stuff. I, personally, try to play with new concepts and put new cards in existing decks. I've already made Dreadsteed deck that totally works, but games are so long that I rarely play it. Last deck I've played was heavy ramp deck with Aviana, and it rocks. I don't know why ppl don't play with deck like this, they are good & fun. Too slow for laddering?
They are trying to avoid excessive power creep, this is what happens. People only play new cards if they are *better* than past options, not merely decent. Each expansion will have less and less meta impact until they A) resort to power creep or B) start rotating sets.
They also need to nerf cards just to make weaker cards slightly better, they are too scared of nerf ing/ buffing, if they wanted for beast Druid ,control rogue, shaman, to be a real thing they need to nerf decks so new ones can cycle in, I'm not saying they should nerf every day, but they shouldn't take 2 expansions to nerf something, only cards that 100% ruin experience in the game like shredder , Dr boom,
Statistically, what do you expect? TGT is, what, about 1/5 of all the cards? So anything more than 6 TGT cards in a 30 card deck would actually be excessive/above expectations.
1. Most players on ladder don't want to risk their rank so stick to what has been rubber stamped by the community as a safe deck to play. Only once a new card or deck has been confirmed are the masses willing to use it on ladder. That's to be expected. Innovators are few and far between.
2. That being said, there are plenty of TGT cards seeing play. It's incredibly challenging to introduce a new set of cards that are going to expand options of play, without merely power creeping, and without removing older sets from the mix. In this regard I think Blizzard has done an amazing job in creating more options - many of which I expect are still to be discovered.
Kitsel gave a nice summary of the impact on ranked play and there are plenty more cards not even mentioned there that are being used. Other cards which have been used in popular deck lists this month or appearing in streams of legend rank players :
Another massive improvement over the last set (GvG) is the number of playable Legendary cards.
GvG has 4 that see consistent play (Boom, Vol'Jin, Neptulon, Mal'Ganis), 2 that see occasional play (Toshley, Sneed's)
TGT has 7 that are seeing consistent play (Dreadscale, Varian, Eydis, Fjola, Gormok, Justicar, Chillmaw), and at least another 4 are being played competitively (Rhonin, Confessor, The Mistcaller, Saraad)
The problem with TGT is that it's "balanced". There aren't any new crazy power levels introduced here. Blizz actually had to change how they value cards for GVG because some of them were way over the top compared to the rest. They back paddled that approach and now we have cards that are just "different", but not necessarily "better". The true tragedy is Warlock and Rogue to be honest, since they have basically nothing new, not even from the neutral cards apart from Gormlok. The class cards should be new, interesting and powerful. Not uber trash and filler and uninteresting... a vanilla class card that is not even mana efficent... seriously Blizz?
It would be trivially easy for them to fix these problems by making it profitable to have longer games. In addition to the Win Streak star, add a star if your game lasts longer than 10 rounds, and another star if it lasts longer than 15. At Rank 5, take away the 10-round star, but not the 15-round star. Presto! Instant valid reason for people to pursue control decks, and a completely radical opening-up of the meta.
I love the solution you propose. Not sure about 5+ ranks tho, but up to 5 it just feels right.
Agree with Serology, community is too lazy to experiment and try really new stuff. I, personally, try to play with new concepts and put new cards in existing decks. I've already made Dreadsteed deck that totally works, but games are so long that I rarely play it. Last deck I've played was heavy ramp deck with Aviana, and it rocks. I don't know why ppl don't play with deck like this, they are good & fun. Too slow for laddering?
I have the card. She's not really that good long term. She and Varian LOOK awesome, especially when facing weaker decks.
Interestingly enough, pushing the game into Control would ruin them. They focus on flooding the board.. in late game.. when control has very easy ways to wipe everything out. Varian is a bit more useful since he pulls from the deck, but he messes up battlecries, some of which can be game ending, and pushes you into fatigue. In a control vs control matchup, the LAST thing you want is to draw too many cards AND leave your board wide open for a 1-card field wipe.
Aviana is worse in that respect. You get the battlecries but once you dump your hand and your opponent wipes the board you're out of threats in your hand with a class that isn't really that great with card draw beyond Lore and isn't as strong in control vs warrior. Note that I'm including Aviana+ innervate. I pulled that off and learned, very quickly, NOT to EVER do that again.
Such cards work best against decks that are poor vs control: Tempo decks and Combo really. Rogue and patron can't handle a board full of BIG threats. But if the meta slows down then you'll be seeing more Healadin and Control Warrior and Ava/Varian will be dead draws for most of the game.
Trying to rig Ranked into some pro-control matchup is like swimming upstream: you have to basically gut the system or else create some ugly hybrid that either won' twork or results in a very ugly exploit. It also ignore the fact that there are people who prefer faster matches. There's entire games who have died due to their average matches being too long. Better to have a new mode ilke Tournament: one where you play a very limited number of matches but a VERY critical need for a high win rate. Note that the aggro decks that tend to show up in ladder aren't high in win rates-except against weak players-but are fast enough to make up for it. This is why tournaments tend to sport slower, more reliable decks.
For me the real prob is that player are scared to test new things coz they don't want to lose star or it's too frustrating to have a 20lose streak with a homemade deck. It's just human mentality not more not less
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Hey guys,
Now, close to a month after TgT release, I noticed that... I rarely actually see TgT cards being played? Just like Kripp said in one of his latest videos, especially at the higher end of the ladder everyone sticks to their old decks.
I have played probably over 200 to 300 games after TgT release but of all the legendaries I have seen like 1 Chillmaw, 1 Aviana and 1 Justicar Trueheart (could me missing some but I'm guessing the total is not more than 5).
And now that I'm looking trough my own decks, I'm actually only using a few TgT cards myself. And I can't think of any reason to include more, or make decks that need them. My most used TgT card is Trueheart (which i actually kinda like in CW, but got out of a pack and wouldn't have crafted otherwise).
I haven't seen a single deck that really focusses on joust or inspire (like the mage inspire deck played in the promo match at the reveal event). Some of the few TgT cards I actually see somewhat regularly and in my opinion re-shaped the meta a little bit are Darnassus Aspirant, Murloc Knight, Mysterious Challenger, Bash, Twilight Guardian and a couple of Shaman and very few neutral cards.
The only deck that got a real boost this expansion (in my opinion) is midrange Shaman, which got 3 auto include cards. Most other decks you see a lot on ladder, like Patron, face hunter, Handlock, tempo mage and so on stayed pretty much the same.
So what do you guys think about this? Is Blizzard starting to get so careful with releasing more overpowered cards like Boom and Undertaker that they just gave us too much un usable cards? Or am I just talking BS and are you all using 30-TgT-cards-Inspire/joust-decks?
Many people experiment with their decks but they mostly come to a conclusion that they are not good enough once you start doing ranked, so they keep playing some older stuff. I personally like the variety of cards, I'm not that good deckbuilder myself, but I tend to try out some new stuff every week.
I'm often extremely critical of the devs game design choices but in the case of TGT I think there's just a massive and disappointing lack of experimentation from the community, including many of the pros. After about 2 days people stopped innovating and when either back to the old decks they had or straight to the TempoStorm ordained "deck of the moment" - Secret Paladin.
I'm quite sure there are plenty of viable TGT decks still to be discovered, which is not something I thought about GvG. No sooner had people written off Shaman due to the failure of Totems than Dragon Shaman appears and is much stronger than it etc. etc.
It's our own fault as a community if we don't see more original decks right now, there's just so little experimentation. If you're a combo Druid or Face Hunter or Patron player you have no right to moan, you are part of the problem, sitting there with your mind numbing netdeck when you could be theory crafting and deck building.
Yea, the bar for playability is very high in ranked construction. Every slot has premium minions or spells in place that are very hard to cut. I think a mode with larger deck capacity might see a little better distribution between sets, but it's hard to cut staples from strong deck archetypes. What will you remove from control warrior? The class minions and weapons smooth out the early game, the legendaries all have instant effect of some kind, and the rest of the deck is armor synergy + brawl. Very little room for new cards, so most variants just swap a few cards for Varian or Bash snce they fit, and maybe justicar for super armor, but none of the joust or inspire cards are reliable or good enough to warrant dropping a staple.
I think you listed all the cards that might consistently find play. Paladins can usually justify 1 Murloc Knight, Darnassus is another potential ramp card, so thats in. Twighlight Guardian plays in any Dragon deck. Mysterious Challanger buffed Shockadin at the cost of running bad secrets. So we pretty much covered TGT's impact on established decks so far. A lot of pros looked at the full cardlist and estimated something <10 playable cards, because all but (<10) cards are not better than any cards in the previous 30 card tier 1 decks.
This may change if someone is able to create a new deck type that is a competitive tier 1 deck, that isn't just a diluted or teched variant of an established archetype.
Blizz still doesn't understand two fundamental things.
First, that the long grind and monthly reset of ranked means that everyone just wants to earn stars as quickly as possible, thus the meta will always be on the bleeding edge of aggro. This means that only cards that add to aggro or add to anti-aggro in a way that makes it easy to farm aggro will ever have a significant impact on the meta for more than a week or two after an expansion. Thus, we have Secret Paladin and Dragon Priest...and that's all TGT did to the Ranked meta.
Second, that adding rewards for gaining higher rank only amplifies this effect, so even fewer people will be willing to even vaguely experiment with other decks until they hit whatever they believe to be their 'peak rank.' This means that it's likely that existing decks will be refined, but highly unlikely that new deck archetypes will spontaneously develop between releases. Thus, Secret Paladin and Dragon Priest are all TGT will ever do to the Ranked Meta, with a slim chance of someone forging a breakaway deck in a couple of months.
It would be trivially easy for them to fix these problems by making it profitable to have longer games. In addition to the Win Streak star, add a star if your game lasts longer than 10 rounds, and another star if it lasts longer than 15. At Rank 5, take away the 10-round star, but not the 15-round star. Presto! Instant valid reason for people to pursue control decks, and a completely radical opening-up of the meta.
I looked at this card originally and I thought, you know, it's a card, and you play this card. The card will be that card that you play so you're playing a card. So, it is one thing to play a card. If you're opponent doesn't really have any cards, the card will screw up the card pretty hard, and that means it's a pretty good card.
About 5-10 good cards out of 130 is abysmal. Inspire and joust are pretty bad mechanics.
One is a huge tempo loss(unless you play paladin) and the other is rng based.
Well the problem with a lot of the TgT cards is that they need too much set up, like the inspire mechanic.
You can get some crazy combo's of by setting up a cool Mage inspire board that lets you ping 10 times for 2 damage in 1 turn, but the truth is that stuff like that is not going to happen.
For crazy combo's like that you need your tech minions to survive at least one turn, but you currently only see decks that are A: control decks which won't let them survive a whole turn or B: aggro decks that just kill you if you spend a turn setting up some crazy combo instead of clearing their board.
It seems like the impact in terms of optimal deck lists has been pretty minimal, but the number of viable decks feels like it's gone up. In the designated "Tier 1 Decks" there is very little change. Now, some of this is due to lack of innovation by the community, and some of it is due to the new cards not offering powerful replacements. But it has always seemed like Blizzard is not interested in printing straight up better cards, but rather offering more options.
My impression pre-TGT was that the difference between Tier 1 decks and Tier 2 decks was very clear. If you weren't playing a Tier 1 deck, you simply weren't going to be able to compete. Control Warrior disappeared because the degree to which Patron was a better choice was absurd. Almost no one played Mech Mage or Midrange Hunter because the Tempo and Face variants were just better in every situation.
All of those archetypes are coming back though, along with several others (those were just the easiest ones to remember). The gap between Tier 1 and Tier 2 feels like it has shrunk considerably, and while sure, you can very easily play a deck without any TGT cards and hit Legend, you could also see a good deal of success running a deck with a lot of them.
The impact of TGT has been, to my eyes, expanded deck viability. In terms of straight up upgrades, we don't see much. In terms of cards you can play at the highest level? Also pretty low. But in terms of cards people not shooting for top 20 Legend can play, I think we've gotten quite a few. And I don't think that's a bad thing.
Nothing doing, traveler.
200-300 games and you've seen ONE trueheart? And ONE Chillmaw? And ZERO Gormoks, Varians, sisters, or mistcallers? Are you playing ranked? Casual? Tavern Brawl?
I see Trueheart in an absolute ton of CW decks, a fair amount of paladin decks, and even a Priest deck or two. Chillmaw is in 50-60% of Dragon decks. Gormok is an absolute staple in zoo and aggro paladin. The sisters have been used with some success in dragon priest decks. Even Saraad, Mistcaller, and Paletress are seeing limited play.
Obviously no one is using full inspire decks or full joust decks. There are a whopping 4 neutral joust cards. Inspire is built mostly to be an addition to current decks rather than an archetype of its own, although maybe one day we'll see a refined inspire deck. Many of the inspire cards are doing quite well on their own without any other inspire synergy.
As a player that hit legend last season and is rank 5 this season, I'd say ~40% of decks I play are brand new archetypes (dragon priest or some variation of Secret Paladin) and most decks besides face hunter and Handlock are using multiple TGT cards even though they were perfectly refined decks before TGT came out. I'm really surprised to see so many people agree that TGT has done nothing - I feel like I'm playing a completely new/different game.
Cards I've seen relatively frequently:
Druid - Living Roots, Aspirant, Savage Combatant
Hunter - King's Elekk, Ram Wrangler, Bear Trap, Brave Archer (somewhat)
Mage - Effigy, Spellslinger, Rhonin (somewhat)
Paladin - Challenger, Jouster, Competitive Spirit, Murloc Knight, Seal of Champions
Priest - Wyrmrest Agent, Flash Heal
Rogue - lol.
Shaman - 7 out of the 8 cards (all except totemcarver) are seeing use in either Zeus shaman or Totem shaman.
Warlock - Nothing really, the occasional Wrathguard or Dreadsteed but not enough to count them.
Warrior - Wrynn, Bash, Alexstraza's Champion
Neutral - Chillmaw, Trueheart, Gormok, Sisters, Guardian, Refreshment Vendor, Horserider
I count roughly 33, and I'm being quite picky about what I include. There were a lot of fringe cards that I didn't include. That's roughly 1/4 of the cards seeing regular constructed play in the rank 5 to legend zone. And that's not even counting a bunch of older "dead" cards now seeing play due to new synergies and archetypes.
Well, one new deck archetype (dragon) and one new deck (secret paladin) are more than what we expected from TGT. Honestly, there should be some firing in the Blizzard department by now.
I love the solution you propose. Not sure about 5+ ranks tho, but up to 5 it just feels right.
Agree with Serology, community is too lazy to experiment and try really new stuff. I, personally, try to play with new concepts and put new cards in existing decks. I've already made Dreadsteed deck that totally works, but games are so long that I rarely play it. Last deck I've played was heavy ramp deck with Aviana, and it rocks. I don't know why ppl don't play with deck like this, they are good & fun. Too slow for laddering?
They are trying to avoid excessive power creep, this is what happens. People only play new cards if they are *better* than past options, not merely decent. Each expansion will have less and less meta impact until they A) resort to power creep or B) start rotating sets.
They also need to nerf cards just to make weaker cards slightly better, they are too scared of nerf ing/ buffing, if they wanted for beast Druid ,control rogue, shaman, to be a real thing they need to nerf decks so new ones can cycle in, I'm not saying they should nerf every day, but they shouldn't take 2 expansions to nerf something, only cards that 100% ruin experience in the game like shredder , Dr boom,
the pala card where it takes all your secrets out.. is clearly the most ridiculous TGT card blizz came out with
Statistically, what do you expect? TGT is, what, about 1/5 of all the cards? So anything more than 6 TGT cards in a 30 card deck would actually be excessive/above expectations.
Respondents in this thread have nailed it.
1. Most players on ladder don't want to risk their rank so stick to what has been rubber stamped by the community as a safe deck to play. Only once a new card or deck has been confirmed are the masses willing to use it on ladder. That's to be expected. Innovators are few and far between.
2. That being said, there are plenty of TGT cards seeing play. It's incredibly challenging to introduce a new set of cards that are going to expand options of play, without merely power creeping, and without removing older sets from the mix. In this regard I think Blizzard has done an amazing job in creating more options - many of which I expect are still to be discovered.
Kitsel gave a nice summary of the impact on ranked play and there are plenty more cards not even mentioned there that are being used. Other cards which have been used in popular deck lists this month or appearing in streams of legend rank players :
Druid of the Saber, Powershot, Dreadscale, Arcane Blast, Coldarra Drake, Holy Champion, Burgle, Fist of Jaraxxus, Kodorider, Maiden of the Lake, Garrison Commander (some of these you can see on the front page of this site right now)
Another massive improvement over the last set (GvG) is the number of playable Legendary cards.
GvG has 4 that see consistent play (Boom, Vol'Jin, Neptulon, Mal'Ganis), 2 that see occasional play (Toshley, Sneed's)
TGT has 7 that are seeing consistent play (Dreadscale, Varian, Eydis, Fjola, Gormok, Justicar, Chillmaw), and at least another 4 are being played competitively (Rhonin, Confessor, The Mistcaller, Saraad)
How interesting
The problem with TGT is that it's "balanced". There aren't any new crazy power levels introduced here. Blizz actually had to change how they value cards for GVG because some of them were way over the top compared to the rest. They back paddled that approach and now we have cards that are just "different", but not necessarily "better". The true tragedy is Warlock and Rogue to be honest, since they have basically nothing new, not even from the neutral cards apart from Gormlok. The class cards should be new, interesting and powerful. Not uber trash and filler and uninteresting... a vanilla class card that is not even mana efficent... seriously Blizz?
I have the card. She's not really that good long term. She and Varian LOOK awesome, especially when facing weaker decks.
Interestingly enough, pushing the game into Control would ruin them. They focus on flooding the board.. in late game.. when control has very easy ways to wipe everything out. Varian is a bit more useful since he pulls from the deck, but he messes up battlecries, some of which can be game ending, and pushes you into fatigue. In a control vs control matchup, the LAST thing you want is to draw too many cards AND leave your board wide open for a 1-card field wipe.
Aviana is worse in that respect. You get the battlecries but once you dump your hand and your opponent wipes the board you're out of threats in your hand with a class that isn't really that great with card draw beyond Lore and isn't as strong in control vs warrior. Note that I'm including Aviana+ innervate. I pulled that off and learned, very quickly, NOT to EVER do that again.
Such cards work best against decks that are poor vs control: Tempo decks and Combo really. Rogue and patron can't handle a board full of BIG threats. But if the meta slows down then you'll be seeing more Healadin and Control Warrior and Ava/Varian will be dead draws for most of the game.
Trying to rig Ranked into some pro-control matchup is like swimming upstream: you have to basically gut the system or else create some ugly hybrid that either won' twork or results in a very ugly exploit. It also ignore the fact that there are people who prefer faster matches. There's entire games who have died due to their average matches being too long. Better to have a new mode ilke Tournament: one where you play a very limited number of matches but a VERY critical need for a high win rate. Note that the aggro decks that tend to show up in ladder aren't high in win rates-except against weak players-but are fast enough to make up for it. This is why tournaments tend to sport slower, more reliable decks.
One does not simply walk into Mordor,
unless they want to be the best they can be.
How is this topic any different than this?
Lifecoach prediction about TGT the most accurate?
Anyway I am not sure if we are really playing the same game. I am still facing a lot of TGT-related deck. Maybe it's EU kind of thing to not play TGT.
For me the real prob is that player are scared to test new things coz they don't want to lose star or it's too frustrating to have a 20lose streak with a homemade deck. It's just human mentality not more not less