Hearthpwn

Why Blizzard? All you had to do is make the Treants give normal mana crystals, not empty ones. It's so awful this way. You play this, opponent ignores it, you trade next turn and you STILL only have 1 mana to play with. This shit has 5 overload unless you are threatening some really nasty trades that make your opponent trade into you first. On the plus side, though, at least Savage Roar is still 3 mana so it can be played with Innervate the turn after. But jesus do they make a token player's job hard.

What do you mean kills Kidnapper? He's already buried 60 feet deep below Warsong Commander.

Interesting, Hunter finally gets some draw, and targeted to boot. In Wild, I've been debating between playing Webspinners or Alley Cats (for Scavenging Hyena synergy) and the end result was playing only one of those for fear of drawing them late. Now with this, I can thin out my deck while being proactive. The major downside of thise, aside from stats, is the fact that it's not a beast for beast synergy decks, and is on the 5 slot, meaning it competes with Knuckles, Ram Wrangler and Tundra Rhino in midrange beast Hunters. Don't think I'd be taking out either of those cards for this. In Standard though, that slot is a lot less crowded...but the 1 drops are not as enticing as Webspinner.

Except for the minor detail that a) this card copies cards from the opponent's deck, not their class, and b) Priest has been stealing cards from opponent's deck way before Rogue even dreamed of a card like Burgle. So, really, you don't even have a point.

Might actually be pretty powerful in Wild Hobgoblin decks. A 3 mana 3/7 that turns into a 5/7 on your opponent's turn and protects your Hobgoblin seems pretty decent. Obivously only possible in Druid with Innervate, or perhaps Rogue with coins, nobody is going to wait till turn 6 to play this. Otherwise, this is the quintessential oh shit button when going second in arena and nothing more.

I stand corrected, carry on.

I guess the sequencing of sentences was shit and thus seemed to imply that but no, the deck is in no way built to counter Pirates. It just happens to shit on them on its own, just by accident (btw the over 60 % winrate against Pirates is only estimated, it is likely closer to 70 guessing from what I've played over the last month). I have achieved way better winrates with Midrange Dragon Priest (with an Ooze added in) which WAS specifically intended to counter Pirates. My example was meant to illustrate that you don't even have to try too hard and you can counter Pirates just by virtue of having a really defensive deck that's heavy on removal. Usually a Reno Mage would not be the no. 1 pick to beat Pirates and yet it does so, at least in my version. Ergo the problem with the meta is not that Pirates are OP and uncounterable. You can counter them quite easily in fact. The issue is that, unlike what the guy above me wrote, you don't actually just face aggro, you also have to be able to beat very heavy control, and there is very little played in the middle ground.

If you "literally face the same deck over and over and over and over and over and over again", then you should have easy work countering it. I have a Reno Mage that currently sits on over 60 % winrate against pirates. The problem isn't with the aggro, it's with the polarisation. On one hand you have ultra aggressive decks, and on the other ultra controlly Reno decks. If you tech against one you lose to the other. Sadly people are too lazy to come up with their own solutions and don't try to find a middle ground, so they just slot themselves into one of the camps (aggro or Reno) and bash the play button until their brain turns liquid. Just like people follow builds in ARPGs and build orders in RTS, instead of putting in the work themselves and figuring stuff out.

As a Wild player I can tell you that Arena was entirely different from Wild Constructed. I very much doubt it will be anything like Standard when it converts to Standard Arena either. It didn't boil down to the same decks as you see in Wild with a few cards missing. Your draft was a random scattering of unsynergistic shit, where you get offered Iron Sensei on pick 1 and never see another Mech the entire draft, or commit to Jade synergy because the other cards offered were crap, and then end up with a grand total of 3 Jade cards. The end result was that your deck was often aimlessly stumbling around between being Wild autofill and really, really, really shit attempt at Standard.

On one hand, that sucked for you because through no fault of your own you would often end up with fucking terrible drafts, where 3-4 picks of your draft were choices between cards that are awful without synergy (which you are unlikely to get), and a Wisp or Magma Rager, and on the other, there was little to no point in playing against outs, because your opponent could be playing literally anything, including but not limited to (from experience) two Deathwings, 4 Flame Strikes and 3 Volcanic Potions, 2 Mechwarpers followed by 8 straight Mech minions, an Unstable Portal which gives him Mysterious Challenger, pulling 4 secrets and a 6/6 on turn 3, or a single Murloc War Leader, a Mech Warper with one Annoy-a-Tron, 2 Mind Control Techs, Rend Blackhand with no Dragons in the deck and a single Fireball in the entire deck. And this shit deck then beats you because you've baited his removal and board wipes, saw there was none and then got hit by two MC Techs which lost you the game.

So you take the lesson to heart, you play around MC Techs for future drafts and never encounter one, because it is just one out of hundreds and hundreds of cards they could draft, and you lose games because you limit your board to 3 minions too often. And the dilution would only get worse with every set, until the cards in all decks might as well be random in terms of what you play around and into. Sooner or later, the pool would have to be restricted, and some would argue that this was already quite late. With the limitation, they can now test how things go, which cards over and underperform, and can then start trying fun twists like rotating sets.

So here's my analysis of Jade, as someone who also played a lot of and a lot against Jade decks, particularly druid, with various wacky archetypes in Wild:

The Jade curve is very linear, i.e. with the exception of Brann combos or mana acceleration, you generally do not generate large power spikes until your Jades are already way out of hand in terms of size. You generally pay pretty high rates for your first two Jade cards. Only after about 3/3 Jades do your cost/power ratios start being very favourable. Ergo, you have a slow start and if you miss your early Jade drops, and start generating your first Jades later on, say turns 3 and 4, your power curve will be delayed significantly. In those positions, you are usually forced to play removal to stay in the game, further delaying your Jade drops (that is why Jade Lightning is so good, since it is both removal and grows your Jade, where Druid and Rogue lack such tools). Simply put, if you get behind, it takes a good deal of effort not to stay behind because of the linearity of your power growth.

Naturally, because of the slow and linear start, aggro decks are a big problem for Jade because by the time the costs you pay for your Jade Golems start being very favourable for you, the game is lost already. Control, on the other hand, gets pretty wrecked by you (though I have had great success against Jade with Reno Majordomo) because they don't put on early pressure and give you time to grow your Jades at your own pace until they hit their late game. By then your Jades are big enough to eat a Ragnaros whole and ask for seconds.

But there are two archetypes that haven't been very popular due to the power of aggro that I think will come back and put up a new challenge against Jade, and those are 1) tempo decks and 2) midrange decks.

ad 1) Tempo decks (like Wild Secret Paladin, or Standard Buff Paladin and Tempo Mage), can generally generate power spikes that Jade has trouble emulating. If they get their power spike before your Jades are large enough to contest, Jade will have a tough time gaining a foothold. There will be a point where you Jades start being so big that their Flamewakers and 5/4 Loot Hoarders don't pose a threat anymore and if you make it there they have to kill you quick or lose the game. They simply cannot compete with you any more at that point. However if they get their good start and you don't get the removal to challenge it in time or your Jade curve is delayed too much, I think tempo will shit on Jade pretty viciously (more so on Druid than Rogue and Shaman who have better tempo removal or Jade generators).

ad 2) Midrange decks like Dragon Priest have always had a great matchup against Jade because they do not rely on gimmicks, tempo, combos etc., they generally just play powerful minions turn after turn after turn since the start, and Jade just cannot catch up to 1 mana 2/3, 2 mana 2/4 Taunt, 3 mana 3/4 with +3 health bonus, 4 mana 3/6 Taunt, 5 mana 5/6 steal target removal, 6 mana 3/6 eat your 3 attack minion, when the Jade curve is also linear but starts smaller and below the curve. They will just keep ahead of you until they kill you. Another type of Midrange that I hope will make an appearance is the Goon midrange, which has the unfortunate feature of inconsistency (depending on which card in your hand eats the buff), but generates massive power spikes similar to tempo decks that Jade cannot emulate. Jade will be on the defensive from the start (not so much Shaman because of Totem Golem) trying to eliminate cards like Grimy Gadgeteer or Rat Pack before they can even get their Jades to decent size. If those then get followed up by a buffed minion, Jade has very little room to maneuver and very few ways to catch up, which I believe was the original intention of Goons.

TLDR: Though a good portion of the existing decks (minus aggro) do have a difficult matchup against Jade, I don't think Jade will own the meta because of its clear and exploitable weaknesses. Tempo and Midrange will take the place of Aggro and usually just keep ahead of Jade or kill it before it becomes too much of a problem. The one deck that worries me is Jade Midrange Shaman, which may just have too good of a start with Trogg and Golem and too good Jade generation with Jade Lightning, which may result in the best of both worlds: powerful midrange curve to beat other Jade and linear Jade curve that turns into deadly lategame against control decks. Naturally for standard this will only be a problem until the Shaman early game rotates out. For Wild, the nerf in Aggro will generally mean that Secret Pally, Midrange Hunter and Tempo Mage will come back, but from those I think only Secret Pally stands a decent chance agaisnt Jade Shaman, while the other two should beat the remaining Jade classes.

I have to applaud Blizzard for this. I didn't think they had the guts to actually just remove some of these cards without nerfing them to the ground. I've always believed Rag to be one of the worst legendary designs in the game with Sylv as close second and they get rid of both. Mind you, it doesn't affect me since I play Wild but I have to give them props for making this move. In addition, during some previous discussion about set releases (I think on a Kibler video) I voiced the opinion that sets need to get bigger, or there needs to be more of them or they have to do something about Adventures because the meta gets figured out way too quickly and usually only ends up changing to a rather minor extent between expansions. And boom, we get 3 large sets a year. I also noted that making sets bigger will make f2p more difficult for people so they either have to keep the sets the same size and just really work on the quality of each and every card or they need to become a lot more generous. Boom, they give people free packs and dust for login before set releases. Great stuff.

Let's just hope that the control finishers Blizz prints in the near future are a sufficiently powerful replacement. And please, no more one-size-fits-all legendaries like Rag or Boom. We need synergies, finishers that suit specific strategies and don't just fit into every deck because they blow up (or steal) shit for free regardless of circumstance. Think more Rhonin, Hobbart, Raza, Iron Juggernaut, Finja, C'Thun, Gazlowe, less Cairn, Tirion, Loatheb, Ysera.

Pretty much this. 1 drops should establish some semblance of board control to support two drops, get some early damage in, contest opposing early game, like they do in Magic and Shadowverse. They are a risk to play because they may not get value if the opponent's curve starts at two, they make you run out of fuel quickly and are worthless when drawn late. They should not even come close to competing with 2 drops, let alone anything above that. Yet we see cards like Undertaker, Mana Wyrm, Tunnel Trogg and Small-Time Buccaneer become a problem over and over again, like the devs don't learn. It took them half a year to fix Undertaker. It took them 3 months to "fix" Buccaneer. Mana Wyrm and Trogg are still broken, and Mana Wyrm will remain so apparently forever. How is it even remotely balanced to have to spend a coin and a 2 cost removal to kill an opposing 1 drop to prevent it from becoming like a 4/3 in two turns? At BEST these cards should gain their buff temporarily, i.e. when you play a weapon, when you play a spell, when you play a card with overload, they get a bonus until end of turn. Because currently they might as well be a better version of 3 drop Questing Adventurer. If Mana Wyrm was playable in Rogue, nobody would see Questing played ever again. And if you are so behind from turn 1, how will going second ever be balanced?

The issue is not all spells are created equal. If you increase a Mage's spell occurence by 20 %, you'll have fireballs, frostbolts and flamestrikes galore. Do the same for hunter or paladin and you will weep over the trash you are being offered, because these classes win more on minions than the quality of their spells. When is the last time a constructed Hunter was interested in playing anything other than some Quick Shots, Unleashes and Kill Commands?

"Easy" *proceeds to list two mindless nerfs that render both cards utterly unplayable, then boasts about the quickness of the nerf*

These nerfs are almost at the level of Warsong Commander in terms of subtlety. Difference is, Warsong Commander nerf was intended to actually eliminate a mechanic that the Blizzard team wisely didn't want to have in the game anymore. Your nerf just kills two cards completely for no real reason.

If you want to actually balance the cards to make them playable but not OP, then the real solution is keeping the reason they are played in the first place intact, and nerfing some other aspect of them. Small-Time Buccaneer is strong because it is an early, well-statted minion that can go unchallenged for a long time. If you nerf it in mana cost, then it is no longer early and well-statted enough to do anything, and will be challenged (and handily beaten without a weapon already equipped) by every single two-drop in the game. A CONDITIONAL 2 mana 3/2 is trash-tier. The logical way to nerf it without killing it is:

1) reducing its health to 1, which will still make it a problem for some decks but allows 3 classes to just kill it with their hero power. That will mean the card is less attractive against those classes, to the point of making the deck considerably lower in win-rate simply because Reno Mage alone utterly shits on that card and makes the matchup nearly unwinnable. As a result, many will opt out of using the card, and may abandon the deck entirely, and it will make it harder to rank with it simply because of how disadvantageous the card is againt Mage, Rogue and Druid.

2) reducing its attack bonus to +1. A conditional 1 mana 2/3 without the downside of Zombie Chow is still very well suited for aggro play, but does not challenge most 2 drops on its own anymore and will do considerably less damage over the course of the game if left unchecked.

As for Spirit Claws, again its strength lies in the conditional high attack this early on which allows better board control. Even without bonus attack, 1/3 weapon is borderline acceptable as long as Small-Time Buccaneer is being played. Nerfing its attack bonus makes it an equally awkward version of Stormforged Axe: it does not have the mana cost and the overload, but it only becomes a 2/3 with Spell Damage and fits into a mana cost that doesn't flow well with anything (a Stormforged Axe follows up Small-Time better than Spirit Claws if all you want is a 2/3 weapon on turn 2, plus Axe at least does not require Spell Damage and synergises with Tunnel Trogg). The logical solution is to make Spirit Claw's durability 2. It becomes a conditional 1 mana War Axe which is utterly trash without spell power, allows the early board control which made Spirit Claws popular, but does not stick around FOREVER and deal 9 to your face for 1 mana if unchallenged.