Hearthpwn

Quote from RavenSunHP >>

I am just unconvinced with those who chose Mage in their setup, considering the moderate amount of Control decks?

Am i underestimating Standard Mage?

Mage is not so bad.  It has the innate chance to highroll that mountain giant and has a fair chance against midrange decks.  The German players have apparently brought an anti-aggro build of mage with 2x MCT, 2x Rabble Bouncer and less top end overall.  I'd be interested to see how this deck does

Quote from Nargacuga15 >>

Quote from Deck_Fiend >>

I just picked roger. I know if I left it much longer I might miss out. (initially I'd have not picked him for his decks neither, so I am just going against the grain here myself. I know through analysis he seems the best, but he doesn't have control warrior and thats probably going to be the deck that wins a lot of games.

If you pick tyler, means we're duking it out in the first round :)

 Right, but you forget that there is a ban and he is running an anti-warrior lineup. This is guaranteeing Roger at least one free win against every Warrior all but 2 other opponents are running. This is a huge advantage, on top of that most of these decks will suffice for anti-aggro too. I feel his deck choices are solid. It's going to come down to if someone Aggro god draws into his face more often than not.

I took my first serious look at his lineup this morning and didn't like what I saw.  He's taken archetypes that are innately polarized to counter control and beefed them up further with many super greedy cards on top.  Mech hunter with Da undatakah, dire frenzy and carine; mage with hexlord malacraz and 2x power of creation and 2x big dragons; bomb warrior with elysiana and banker but only 1 brawl; mech pally with da undatakah, blessing of kings, immortal prelate and zero board clears.  These are decks that will absolutely not suffice for anti aggro.  Seems like he's all-in on hard countering control decks.  I don't like such all-in strategies; all you need to lose the series is an opponent getting lucky once with their control deck.  You could also run into people with no control decks, which exist in the tournament

That said, I hope he does well because I picked Bunnyhoppor and he's going to auto win if he meets Roger in the top 8 :)

For those who are interested, this is what came out of my spreadsheet.  For each series, I had each of one player's deck fight each of their opponent's deck.  The highest winrate deck from each side are then banned and the series are recalculated.  Winrates are pulled from HSReplay.  R1 is the likelyhood of winning the 2nd series; R2 and R3 are the 2nd and 3rd series respectively, weighted by whichever opponent they're more likely to find; the others are what they say on the tin

There's admittedly a lot of flaws here.  It's early in the meta, so the stats might not be the most accurate.  There's a lot of shamans that don't fit any of the documented archetypes well and I had to select the closest thing.  I also do not have HSReplay premium, so the stats include winrates from rank 25

Obviously this also doesn't take into account tech cards and player skill.  I have not voted for Roger yet despite the stats telling me he is the clear favorite because I've seen him throwing games left and right and don't trust him with my packs

This also can be skewed because I don't know what bracketing happens after the initial grouping stages.

The 2-0s each match with a 2-1 player from another group.  Which group exactly can probably be seen by looking at past HCT brackets but I'm too lazy to check for sure.  I think it's not worth looking that far ahead because of all the variance

btw, can you please explain why everyone thinks Bunnyhoppor is a good pick?  I know he's a great player and I'd like to vote for him but my stats are saying not to