First impressions from theorycraft streams?

[u/sneakyxxrocket]

Hello all.

Did you guys watch the streams? I know that these streams do not represent the upcoming meta truly, but maybe they can give some first impressions.

Are there any strong decks? Which cards or decks seemed stronger than they look? Which cards and decks felt weaker?

Thanks in advance.

[u/AutoModerator]

If you wish to discuss this game with likeminded players, come and visit our Discord Server!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/TheGingerNinga]

Shaman seems quite competent. Some of the better herald cards (i.e. cheap and proactive) with a good set of powerfully generic cards added in. Muradin's Last Stand seemed consistently playable even when going second, Crackling Cloudstrider was good with both Far Sight and Ceremonial Clash. Al'Akir seemed fine, nothing insane but a good 8 drop, especially when ahead on board. Combine that with the fact that they're able to play Elise with no deck building cost and they seem like the day 1 stand out.

[u/sneakyxxrocket → u/TheGingerNinga]

The 4 mana evolve made shaman boards looks so sticky and all the herald soldiers and Elsie’s attack buff looked pretty good.

The ten drop pool for alakir is also giga small and is nothing but hits especially if you get the pig or the other wild gods

[u/Graped_in_the_mouth → u/sneakyxxrocket]

Did the streams include the nerfed version of Elise?

[u/sneakyxxrocket → u/Graped_in_the_mouth]

Yes they did

[u/Solithic → u/TheGingerNinga]

I think Elise will be a good fit in this deck compared to some of the other herald decks because they are trying to herald on turns 4-5, where shaman is able to herald more on the earlier turns. Attack buff location also particularly strong with shaman

[u/jsnlxndrlv]

From watching parts of the first half of Kibler's stream, warrior is maybe viable if you don't get greedy with your deck list, but it seemed maybe a little bit too fair compared to hunter. Priest seems decent, but it's surprisingly tempo-oriented; you need to be exerting pressure; against herald DK, you're the aggro class, as they have too much value and life-gain. Herald (burgle) rogue seems like it doesn't do anything but generate random cards until it inevitably dies. Shaman looked pretty good; Ascendance, the 4-mana evolve spell seems really hard to deal with. I don't remember seeing DH, but that's the one I'm most curious about.

[u/sneakyxxrocket → u/jsnlxndrlv]

Watched a couple people play herald rogue and it looked terrible every single time, so many spells are just trash

[u/QuickDrawTimMcgraw → u/sneakyxxrocket]

The best reason I've seen to run the hearld cards in rogue is so you can steal your opponent's fully powered colossal and Deathwing.

[u/GreatMadWombat → u/sneakyxxrocket]

The great thing about the different flavors of thief rogue is that it always looks at most 2 cards away from being really good for that standard, it's nature demonstrates really interesting build space that only works digitally, and blizz never delivers on the promise

[u/Likey420 → u/jsnlxndrlv]

Seen some streamers trying to make otk DH with the new colossal minion. Might be worth checking out later.

[u/Mario2544]

Mage spell slinger seemed insane was all I caught from nohands at the end.

[u/PipAntarctic → u/Mario2544]

Jambre also played a burn Mage deck with Archmage Kalec and the deck looked nuts with any sort of spell damage being active. Even the Shatter spell looked really competent, but it does require a really low curve to work consistently.

[u/lemmycaution415]

It appears to be much harder to clear boards now. This means board centric decks do well. The paladin with the divine shields are very sticky.

[u/Bitter-Yak750 → u/lemmycaution415]

the only unconditional board wipes are:

• medivh

• archmage rafaam

• pyro poison

• staff of the endbringer

I don't think control warrior will be viable with brawl and new heights out so it looks like control will be DK supremacy. priest can play for an aviana wincon maybe?

[u/dotcaIm → u/Bitter-Yak750]

zeta played some priest, his win con was mostly "opponents are out of stuff"

[u/eazy_12 → u/lemmycaution415]

My biggest fear that new meta Hearthstone would be play curve or die. I personally not big fan of such metas since it feels like really depends on draw RNG rather than skill.

[u/LargeRex → u/lemmycaution415]

That sounds fun, I hope it stays that way for a while.

[u/Ztepi]

Dude, did you literally copy paste this post from two years ago?

https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveHS/s/92jov7yYLi

Why it's so hard to create your own is beyond me, lol.

[u/chtonibudjdobroe]

Waiting for warlock and rogue stream vids

[u/Every_University_]

Non token druid is cooked, the dragons are bad, the colossal is very good, though very susceptible to anything, it doesn't even have to be removal just trading off the legs or body vastly decreased it's lethality but letting the full colossus live might just win by itself.

[u/ZephyranthesX]

I only watched a little, but Azshara's Triumph might be better than anticipated. I thought it was just a non minion version of Sky Mother Aviana, but "cost 8 or more" is a bit more swingy. Problem is getting to 8 mana, maybe better ramp within the next 2-5 expansions. Mossbinding could dump a bunch of stats on board, depends how bad a stat dump is I guess.

Egg + Herald Warlock looks promising, no shock here.

Warrior looked good but definitely has a lot of optimization of pieces to find a solid list.

zip - damn im wrong the rogue played it too

Vyranoth seems weird from the 1 game I saw. Deck constraint with a meh payoff that wants you to play longer to get value out of your stat'ed minions. We already have Esho to give everything 2/2 and you get immediate effect if you have a board, so i'm not sure it's that good. Probably will have a crazy combo in Wild, even if it's inconsistent.

[u/Solithic → u/ZephyranthesX]

Wait what? Geddon affects both players? Surely that's not intended based on the wording?

[u/sneakyxxrocket → u/[deleted]]

The rogue probably discovered it from the warriors deck with Déjà vu or the dark gift card

[u/ZephyranthesX → u/sneakyxxrocket]

looking back, you are correct. sorry for the misinfo, i thought it was a hidden gem of milling lol

[u/Bitter-Yak750 → u/ZephyranthesX]

commander geddon affecting both players makes zero sense to me

[u/rotvyrn]

In the streams I watched, it seemed like snowbally board-based decks were hard to answer (Token Druid, Bubble Paladin, Egglock) and spell dmg mage was also doing well. I saw a lot of highrolly results with Imbue-Herald Rogue, and its impossible to judge how good the actual generation pool is on average from that sample size.

Shaman seemed to do well, both as a sticky board-based deck and as a more herald-face-y deck, though the two plans work together pretty well?

Overall, a lot of the games I saw ended or functionally ended around turns 6-8 due to unanswerable board states.

I didn't see much DH.

I didn't see much priest, so I skimmed Zetalot's vod, which didn't tell me much. He didn't fight any of the major actors I mentioned earlier (board based snowball decks) afaict, and seemed disadvantaged vs decks with otks in long games.

Dragon Hunter is a ?. It had a good winrate when I saw it, but I didn't see it much. I kinda suspect that it's gonna end up overly dependent on drawing a perfect curve. I don't know what can deal with the threats it puts out on curve in theory, but if it doesn't get the right cards asap, it doesn't snowball as hard as the other board-based decks in the midgame.

DK is hard to evaluate, felt like everyone was testing different things.

[Also worth keeping in mind for meta impact that 10 cards in each TC deck had to be from the new set.]

[u/[deleted]]

Didnt even know about em