Hearthpwn

Be patience, my dudes.

2 copies of Murloc Raider and just 1 copy of Toxfin? Feels like the reverse would be preferable.

Quote from Shakey >>

How tf do you counter this warrior?

Did it once with whizbang. Got a warlock and pulled rafaam. Turned his whole bombs to legendary minions. Was pretty sweet not gonna lie

 Play a deck with Arch-Villain Rafaam AND Archivist Elysiana for twice the shuffled-bomb cleansing capability!

Quote from Fyrfytr998 >>

Am I missing something? How does Reno Jackson go off in a deck with duplicates?

Reno Jackson's effect actively tests your deck for the absence of duplicates; meaning that when you have one (or less) copy of each card left in the deck, you meet the condition specified by his card text and his effect with be active. As your comment infers, Reno Jackson's effect won't always be active as the Highlander (no duplicates) condition will not always be met. Reno's inclusion in this deck is to fulfill the hail-mary heal role, providing a full heal later on in the game, and certainly once you have decked out, if the matchup reaches fatigue.

Here's one hint to help you succeed in a common matchup you'll be having on Ladder:

Use Arch-Villain Rafaam to turn all the bombs they shuffled into your deck into legendaries that you can get value with! Prioritize Arch-Villain Rafaam in your mulligan and keep him until they've shuffled a majority of their bombs into your deck already, unless you need to use him earlier to survive or feel you can outright take the game by playing him. Arch-Villain Rafaam is not a card you use at the end of the game once you've hit fatigue. Ideally, you'd use him on Turn 7,

and proceed to out-tempo and out-value and oppress your opponent with your newfound legendary friends.

However, Archivist Elysiana is included in the deck as a handcuff (in Fantasy Football: the idea behind handcuffing is drafting a player’s direct positional back-up as an insurance policy should the starter get injured). To complete the analogy, Archivist Elysiana is included in this deck as an insurance policy should Arch-Villain Rafaam, our star player, get "injured". In this case, the term "injured" refers to Arch-Villain Rafaam being played just shortly before or during fatigue, with little or no resources and/or value generated. By including Archivist Elysiana in the deck, you have the opportunity to generate 10 net cards (assuming fatigue), which can be upgraded to legendaries with Arch-Villain Rafaam. Additionally, Archivist Elysiana can provide you with another deck cleansing, should those pesky bombs be plentiful.

Why would you wait so long to play Rafaam? Well, here are a number of possible reasons:

1. Rafaam was taking a sweet vacay at the bottom of your deck, so you didn't get a chance to play him earlier.

2. Rafaam wanted to join the party but you had to send him away with a Plot Twist in order to survive a significant threat presented by the opponent. This is not ideal but may prove necessary over the course of the match against a Bomb Warrior, specifically if you find yourself without an answer to an early Blastmaster Boom with prior bomb-shuffle investment by the opponent.

3. The opposing Bomb Warrior thought they were clever by holding onto their bomb-shuffling cards until you only  had a few cards remaining in their deck, expecting you to blow Rafaam early. The aforementioned strategy does not work in Bomb Warrior's favor, for reasons I would love to explain, if it didn't play right into the hands of Bomb Warrior players viewing this deck (this is war, people).

Please don't go rogue when spelling rogue or I will blush a rather rouge hue.

Nice to see the "When you draw this" text again, unless my memory has failed me, we haven't seen a similar effect since Sea Reaver

Thanks for the feeedback, I'll keep that in mind during my mulligan phase and make sure to prioritize a good curve over all else. I'm currently 3-1 with the deck and will post an update with the final result.

Quote from Mika78 >>

 thx for the guide, hwait for the rest of the classes. What about warrior?

 Warrior is a lot of fun. I can do that next for you, I'll have it up by 1:30PM EST at the latest. 

EDIT: Come to think of it, Warrior is rather similar to Rogue, which I have already posted. You go for a full weapon buffing pirate build that floods the boards with efficiently costed high stated minions with synergies to each other and the weapons. You can infer the rest from there until I can get to posting the actual Warrior guide. Hope this helps!

EDIT2: Here is a recording of a failed attempt that showcases the main build of the Pirate Warrior deck,

Also what is Aggro Hunter? 

The name is ... Hunter. Face Hunter.

It can be, but only if you have all legendaries from that expansion.

No, you cannot get duplicate legendaries.

Quote from ParkettbodenAUT >>

Quote from Sovereign_State >>

I’ve being seeing friends get a lot of relevant legendaries out of those packs.

 Maybe they haven't bought any packs of these expansions yet, so they got the guaranteed legendary inside the first 10 packs.

This is a separate/new pack so everyone getS a legendary in the 1st 10 packs buyong this bundle

I literally couldn't agree more about murozond. They would argue they couldn't say "summon" because that wouldn't apply to spells, but it is still worded like trash. When you PLAY a card, it gets its battlecries. When you summon it, it does not as you stated. 

It would also make the dragon more interesting and difficult to play around, which it should be at it's cost. It also happens to be a card that doesn't really fit into any priest deck they are trying to push either, so it being more powerful (working how it should) would be fine. 

People always complain that there's never anything but Rez priest and it's so dumb to play against, but you can only use what is given to you. And blizz doesn't give priest crap, and everyone knows it and agree. Hell im sure priest players wish more than anyone there were more options. 

Sorry this is not a Rez priest post, kinda just drifted there. But I agree with both your points. 

First up, druid's embiggen doesnt have a sufficient downside.. compare it to priest surrender to madness where for the same benefit it costs 3 mana, and destroys 3 mana crystals, severely hampering your tempo before you see gains, although minion costs remain the same. Where embiggen costs 0, and increases the mana by 1 to a max of 10.

I see a solution to be one or a combination of increasing the mana cost of the spell, removing the cost limit forcing you to think when using it in case you create unplayable minions (although these minions can still be summoned by other means), changing the rarity to legendary so you can only have one copy, or increasing cost of cards affected by 2 or 3 mana.

The second issue i have is with Murozond, the text states to play each card the enemy played the previous turn... this would infer that minions with battlecries would trigger (because it says play not summon), but they do not. Also minions with stat bonuses also should retain those bonuses. If the text was "play each spell and summon each minion the enemy played" then that is how it's acting currently, but it doesn't read like that. Murozond should be changed to include the battlecries of minions, and retain the stats of said minions.

Please explain the difference between "Fine" and "Just another meta," because right now they combine to 44.1% of the vote, which is a pretty big plurality.

Fist of all I'll start by saying I'm not salty and I somewhat enjoy this meta, it doesn't feel terrible to play and you can actually enjoy your games (most of the times) but I want to discuss some points about why I think  this could be considered as generally unhealthy. THIS IS A LONG POST SO DON'T WHINE ABOUT IT, IF YOU LIKE READING THEN GO AHEAD IF NOT PLEASE DON'T COMMENT ANYTHING STUPID TRYING TO BE FUNNT OR A TROLL.

With the year of the Mammoth set we learned that mana cheating is a terrible mechanic that leads to unh ealthy decks that rely on this absurd turns in where they either burst incredibly fast by putting stuff on board way faster than they should be able to or just playing a lot more than 10 mana if we looked at the stats they put on the table or the cost of said cards. Examples of this are Barnes and the entire resurrect mechanic, Skull of the Man'ari and Bloodreaver Gul'dan, Kathreena Winterwisp and her army of giant beasts or Hadronox and its wall of taunts, to name some some of the biggest offenders. What do this cards and their entire archetypes have in common? Simple, mana cheating, you pay a certain price (lower) to either cheat something huge out of your deck or you can set up insane board states that usually would cost at least 20 mana for at most 10 mana (sometimes even lower which is ridiculous) 

We thought Blizzard learn their lesson during the year of the raven as they didn't print too much mana cheating overall. The sets had their problem in form of infinite value from time to time but at least it looks like Blizzard kinda learnt about this and stopped making infinite value powerhouses. But it terms of mana cheating, with the year of the dragon and specially with the Descent of Dragons set, the mana cheating came back and it came back hard, to the point where pretty much almost every single meta deck has some sort of mana cheating mechanic that makes it viable and other decks that don't have these unholy swing turns just simply fall behind. Here's a list of the top meta decks, in no particular order and untiered, just naming the most relevant decks:

• Embiggen Druid - Mana cheats  
•  Galakrond and Highlander Rogue - Both Mana cheat
• Quest Hunter
• Highlander Hunter - Mana cheats
• Face Hunter
• Galakrond Warrior - Mana cheats
• Galakrond Warlock - Mana cheats
• Resurrect Priest - Mana cheats 

I would say those are the decks you'll encounter the most on the ladder and as you can see almost all of them mana cheat but 2 (kinda), Quest and Face Hunter. Quest Hunter is a board centric swarm deck that gets rewarded by doing so with an amazing hero power, on this one the mana cheat is almost not present, we only see this on the side quest (not that big of a deal) and on Veranus as it has an effect that allows you to trade big stuff with your scrubs while developing a nice body. Face Hunter on the other hand is just a hyper aggro deck that pushes everything face everyturn unless there's a taunt on the way, pretty brainless and doesn't seem to have any (major) mana cheating mechanic. Other than that every other single meta deck has some sort of mana cheating aspect to it that puts in on top of every other deck that doesn't have this. This post was mainly inspired by the fact that I tried to play some sort of Book Elemental Dragon Mage after chapter 2 f Galakrond's awakening got realeased and with the new cards (including last's week ones too), Mage got 2 interesting elementals added in Animated Avalanche and Arcane Amplifier (Ironically both represent forms of mana cheat lol). As I said I made a Book build with the best dragons and elementals on standard and also wanted to test Jan'alai before she rotated. After a couple games I realized that a deck like this just simply can't compete against all the mana cheat the top decks have, this type of deck is simply too fair to do anything. Most games I was actually winning by having nice curves and then bop, one swing turn and I got destroyed.

Now I'll give samples of every one of the mentioned decks and how is it exactly they mana cheat and how is that unhealthy (I'll be using the builds I'm currently playing, there could be better/more optimized build but I'll talk from my experience here):

• Embiggen Druid: 

This one has multiple ways of cheating mana, the most obvious is Frizz, she makes all your dragons cost 2 mana less and as almost half of your deck is dragons it means that you're cheating around 20 mana with all your dragons. The less notorious but even bigger offenders are Embiggen and Strength in Numbers, the former boost your deck by 2/2 and the latter cheats out something usually huge by doing nothing more than playing your deck. If you have been playing for somewhere around 2 years you know how powerful Prince Keleseth was and Embiggen is a card that gives you extra 1/1 while being able to run 2 off and it doesn't restrict your deck building, yes it does make everything one mana more expensive but that is usually irrelevant as you're gonna be playing 1 big thing every turn anyways. With the side quest it just feel stupid to me, most sidequest usually make you do something specific or somewhat build the deck around it, but this one is just, play your big boys and get a big boy as a reward. The decks becomes even worse if you get Frizz as you can play both Embiggens and not care cause half of your deck has +4/4 with no backdraw at all. This deck mana cheats a lot.

• Galakrond and Highlander Rogue

Putting both on the same category as they do the exact same thing, the only difference is that pure Galakrond is more consistent and Highlander as an extra form of mana cheating. This is by far the biggest offender of the mana cheating fiesta we currently have. These decks can play a total of 7 cards for 0 mana due to Galakrond himself and Heistbaron Togwaggle which is just ridiculous. Tog was a card that saw some play in the past but now it's a core card in this builds as you can generate so many lackeys, you'll always have an activator for him. And also in 99% of the scenarios there's no reason to pick a treasure that's not the wand, only in very few niche scenarios you may want the crown and the other 2 treasures are pretty much obsolete.

And then come Galakrond, mana cheating embodied. This cards gives you an Arcanite Reaper which costs 5 mana, which means that if the total draws cost more that 3 mana then you already started to mana cheat and if you have played this deck you know that this card can easily give you 15 mana worth and obviously the simple swing of drawing 4 cards would cost mana on its own (Sprint) so at worse you're getting 12 mana worth of value without counting the 0 cost cards you'll get. On Highlander we have the extra spice of Dragonqueen Alexstraza, she rewards you by making your deck less consistent and gives you an 8/8 body and 2 free extra dragons which are usually decent, more mana cheat yay! You can argue that all this cards can flop and give you bad results but it's not like the outcome sucks every time, more often than not you'll swing the game and win cause of them. This class is the biggest offender as I said.

• Quest Hunter 

This is one of the more "honest" decks we currently have. As I said it almost doesn't mana cheat, you can only see Clear the Way and Veranus as forms of mana cheating and let's be honest, with all the ridiculous swing turns we have on the meta this is pretty acceptable. So if this deck barely mana cheats, how is it so good? Well it's a sort of perfect storm for Quest Hunter, a deck that was previously unplayable became good cause it exploit one of Rogue's weaknesses in being able to swarm the board multiple times, if you pair that with a finisher like post-quest Leeroy + Hounds then you have the perfect Rogue slayer. Also Veranus does play a big role, if it wasn't for him, a deck like Embiggen Druid would absolutely farm you, but he allows you to not fall behind while you finish your quest. Overall is probably the most fair deck we'll see in a while.

• Face Hunter

My second most hated deck but it's arguably the only one that doesn't mana cheat. You could argue the side quest is a bit of mana cheating but not really, it just happens to click incredibly well with your main and only game plan and it rewards you with more of the same stuff. I hate this deck cause it's just brainless and has 1 plan, push all face and hope you draw enough damage, that's it, but I said this was not a salt post and I intend to keep it that way. A hyper aggresive deck that tries to maximize damage to the face, no mana cheating here.

• Galakrond Warrior

This deck took a hit with the most recent nerfs but it's still decent. To start with I'll just say that getting 9/6 with rush split into 3 bodies for just 4 mana is pretty "generous", the mana cheating starts in the mid-game with this Warrior deck. With Galakrond it's a different story, to begin with as stated before you get an Arcanite Reaper and draw 4 cards off this bad boy, which by Hearthstone standards it's 12 mana so you already cheated 5 mana to begin with, but then we see a different way of mana cheating, stats buffing, this one might not make your cards cost 0 like rogue does but it gives 4 of your minions +4/+4 making them way stronger than they should be for their mana cost, so this is as well another form to mana cheat, if I play a 1 mana 1/2 then it's okay but if I play a 1 mana 5/6 then that seems a bit unfair and sounds like mana cheating to me.

• Galakrond Warlock

On this one the mana cheating is like on the middle of the pack, not too strong but impactful and consistent. Invoking gives you 2 1/1s every time and that is obviosly very good, specially when you have cards like Sacrificial Pact and Plague of Flames to push this even further. Then drawing 3 cards and getting a 5/4 on top of that also seems pretty cheaty if you ask me. Finally Galakrond himself also cheats, you get your 5 mana weapon as every other Gala and then 4 random demons, which means that if the combination of them gives you at least 3 worth of stats then you already started to mana cheat and as there are no 0 cost demons it means you always cheat at least 2 extra mana on the worst case scenario. Most builds also run Dragonqueen Alex but I won't talk about her anymore as she's been covered on the Highlander Rogue section.

• Resurrect Priest:

I'm not even gonna try to hide the fact that this is by far the deck I hate the most on the meta. Priest was my favorite class when I started playing, it seemed like the unicorn class that had not so good cards but you could make decent decks that felt fun, my favorite deck of all time is actually Raza Priest, and I know that deck has been one of the most unhealthy and bullshit on HS history but, what can you do? I just loved it so much. Having said that I've always thought the resurrect mechanic is pure unbalanced bullshit, it's supposed to be balanced by the fact that most resurrect cards are random and you could revive anything but this is easily avoidable by just playing cards that you want to revive thus making your revive pool contain only good cards, this is not enough of a back draw to ever make resurrect even a mediocre mechanic. it's simply the embodiment of mana cheating.

I was so happy when the spellstone and Eternal Servitude rotated and then we get Psychopomp and Mass Resurrection with extra Katrina Muerte flavor on top. The resurrect mechanic is simply lazy and poorly balanced from its core and I'm not afraid to said that it's at least top 3 on the most hated mechanics from the community. Blizzard stopped supporting the Charge mechanic entirely as is felt "uninteractive" and "unfair" and it was "frustrating" to play against and I sincerely can't think about anything more frustrating to play against than the resurrect mechanic as a whole. This deck is just a cesspool of healing, removal and mana cheat.

This post was intended to spark discussion about how people see the current meta and how does it feel, do you feel it's fun or not? Even if it's fun do you agree that it's unhealthy and it comes down mostly to swing turns and to the point of whoever highrolls harder and/or faster wins the game? 

I ended up giving some insight and showcasing most of the prominent meta decks right now so if you want to discuss about their composition and how they stand in the meta I guess it's alright as well, any sort of discussion is welcomed. Thank you for reading this long post and sorry for any mistakes.

my predictions are

Shield Slam : they seem to want to be taking warrior into more of an aoe removal class direction rather than a single target removal class direction, in fact ever since  un'goro and vilespine they've made it clear they want rogue to be the dragon slayer class (single target removal for big things like Vilespine Slayer or Walk the Plank.

Divine Spirit: same reasons they hofed Mind Blast apparently they want priest to be about small board gains that evetually stack

Stonetuskboar As it was alredy stated blizzard themselves admitted that they axe a lot of designs during playtesting just because of this card source: https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/65q7yq/team_5_addresses_quest_rogue_basically_says_its/, and not only that they also axe a lot of designs that get into the game just because of this card, (i do think the apothecary nerf was needed though)

other than that i can't think of a card that has more potential to be hofed, yeah yeah i haven't talked about leeroy, but look even though aggro and myself aren't exactly in good terms; having finishers and game closers in a game is still needed and healthy as long as they aren't stupidly cheap (looking at you boar)  or some turn 1 snowball card, and leeroy isnt any of that, he has a fair price range and isn't exactly a super flexible card with the potential of breaking the game