Hearthpwn

:D

       I'm sure everyone is sick and tired of seeing this kind of post. I'll probably sound like a broken record at this point; I guarantee if you look up "Cubelock nerf", you'll find thousands of posts complaining about this very topic. With this said, I wanted to put my own two cents in on the subject. Personally, I find Warlock quite frustrating to play against. This will be a long post, so if you're planning on reading the whole thing, grab your popcorn and find a comfy seat. I'm going to try my best to highlight what I believe to be overpowered about Warlock right now and how this makes the game unfun. The main problem is how flexible the archetype is. With cards like Doomguard + Carnivorous Cube, Warlock can set up for super easy lethals (even getting up to 3 doomguards on the board at once in some instances). It has completely insane hero sustain. Warlocks pretty much mitigate the damage their opponent does for the first 5-7 turns as well as the damage they take from their hero power, and set themselves up incredibly well for extremely potent tempo plays in the late game. It's essentially like the warlock gets to block most of the damage coming towards them, and they get to quickly whittle down the opponent while simultaneously building their board and gaining tempo. Something about this seems unfair right? Shouldn't the Warlock have to sacrifice something in order to gain all of these overwhelming advantages? Yes, I agree Warlocks do sacrifice life totals from time to time. However, they can get up to 30 health in healing from just the 2 cards I mentioned above. This means that if Warlock is able to play them at full value, you essentially have to kill that Warlock twice. Considering the additional value they bring, it is very strong (overtuned in my opinion) in tandem with the other parts of this deck. 

      In the past, control Warlock archetypes have been balanced by limited healing options. Back before Kobolds & Catacombs, Warlock didn't have cards like Dark Pact, Lesser Amethyst Spellstone, or Bloodreaver Gul'dan. Dark Pact is LITERALLY just a better version of Sacrificial Pact, as it heals for 8 and can target any minion. The only drawback is 1 mana, but this is miniscule and its pros heavily outweight the cons. The closest we had to something like  Lesser Amethyst Spellstone was Siphon Soul which cost 6 mana compared to Lesser Amethyst Spellstone's 4. Basically, the healing cards from the newer expansions are just better versions of ones from past expansions. This alone does not make Warlock overpowered or anti-fun. 

On to the minions. If I had a dollar for every time I've played someone who got a Voidlord on turn 6 or 7, I'd probably have enough preorder every single new expansion for at least 4-5 years. People's answer to Voidlord in particular is always something like "Why didn't you play Spellbreaker", or "GIT GUD". Realistically, if you don't draw those 1 or 2 answers in your deck, your opponent can fish for Voidlord and suddenly you're looking at a 9 health taunt on turn 6 that spawns 3 (3) health taunt bodies. I hate to say it, but if this happens to you, you're pretty much SOL my friend. Now, if this happened every once in a while, I'd be perfectly ok with it. However, Warlock can consistently pull Voidlord turns before 9, and this is a major problem. With cards like Possessed Lackey and Skull of the Man'ari, it's quite likely that Warlock can have a Voidlord out before turn 9. Just in case you haven't had enough of Voidlord or Doomguard, Warlock has Carnivorous Cube to literally multiply their value, and Bloodreaver Gul'dan to bring back those evil purple menaces or multiple Doomguard for smorcing. 

     Just in case you somehow managed to build a board amidst all of the lifestealing shenaningans and  Doomguard or Voidlord, Warlock has about 6-8 "fuck you" removal spells. Good luck trying to play something with threats like Lord Godfrey, Defile, Hellfire, Mortal Coil and Doomsayer around. If you somehow do manage to get a few minions to stick, they'll just pop out a sick Voidlord on turn 6 and then proceed to Carnivorous Cube you into oblivion. I already mentioned this bit before, but figured I'd say it twice for good measure. 

To wrap it all up, Warlock as a whole is just too damn consistent. It has a plethora of options that makes it so that anyone who isn't playing a control deck with tons of removal loses a lot more often than not.  It's wide variety of healing in combination with rediculous tempo plays on curve and ressurection of major threats makes it oppressive. It's not fun to play against, and it feels real shitty when your opponent has something like 2 Doomguard cards and 3 Voidlord cardson the board. Again; I'm pointing out some of the more extreme situations, but believe it or not they happen more often than you might think. I wanted to mention that I didn't talk about a lot of the tech cards you can add because that stuff is pretty common already in other decks. Feel free to disagree with me or to start a discussion. I put a lot of time into writing this post, I hope you guys found something you thought was worth taking note of in this long post. If you made it this far, congrats. I hope everyone has a fantastic day/evening ;).

TL;DR Warlock is too consistent, flexible, and has too many answers for it to be considered balanced.

I'm curious, with the deck you made, how does one "mill". I mean, you have the forest guide and naturalize, that's about it. Also, I'm very interested... what rank have you gotten with the deck you made? One more thing; are there any subsitutes for big game hunter? 

Cool deck. I'll let you know if it works. Also, I don't have keleseth or soulthief so I think I'll replace those with jeweled macaws.

Better than other hand druids I have seen. I've been having the most success with this one.

Yeah. It was more of an early meta cheese deck that kind of slipped its way through the ranks. It probably still works really well at lower ranks but after rank 15 I'd assume it starts to even out and fall off a bit. By the time you get rank 10 you should be sitting at around 50% winrate and it did exactly what I intended for it to do, get other free to play players to around rank 15 (if played correctly). 

Thanks for the decklist and the super in depth guide. I'm planning on playing this, I only need around 1500 more dust to craft this deck. This and midrange hunter will be the only decks I play this expansion, as I am free to play. If I can somehow manage to also craft the baku paladin I might do that too, although I'd rather have fun with this deck then play a braindead deck :P that gets me wins. 

You need wispering woods I'm pretty sure. It refills your board, and imagine if you have 7-8 cards in your hand on turn 4.  It's pretty easy to get value and a really good tempo play if you have a big hand.  There are drawbacks because of the low health but honestly I think it's still a nice card.

 Hmm. I have 55% winrate with this deck and I actually got to rank 7 on a winstreak. Not too bad, I'm going to try and theory craft some changes and test it out in casual matches. I'll let you guys know if it works and I can create a decklist. Super fun though, I love this archetype and it's actually not too costly because I already had most of the cards even though I'm free to play. 

Good job! :D

I hate this deck with a passion. It shits on midrange. Shits on aggro, and somehow beats control... If you don't get good draws it's literally an autoloss. Today I had a game where paladin started off with righteous protector, coin, righteous protector. Then kept summoning minions and eventually playing 3 0 mana creepers and 2 other minions + argent squire. Next they drew two vicious scalebanes in a row and finished me off with a level up. Seriously? Fuck this. I'd have to have 4+ board clears to even have a chance of dealing with this or perfect draw. Absolutely rediculous deck, and what's worse? IT'S ANNOYING AS HELL.

Jeweled macaw is a very strong card in general. Honestly, the fire fly is more useful in Aggro decks that play a lot of small minions, compared to this one where there is a ton beast synergy IE: Crackling Razormaw, Houndmaster, Dire Frenzy, Kill Command, Scavenging hyena.... You get the idea. An early 1 mana beast is ESSENTIAL for this deck.

Now that the meta has settled a bit, the deck may not be as strong. However, elemental shaman is definitley a winnable matchup. In fact, out of the 7 games I've played vs shaman, I have lost none. 

Looks pretty nice. I like the idea :)

Thank you! I would be happy if even one person could learn from it, but I am so grateful for all the attention this deck is getting :). I'm glad new players can learn from it.