A Dispatch from Witchwood: What to Expect from the Upcoming Meta

While it has historically been impossible to predict the Constructed metagame early on just based on the card reveals, seeing all the Witchwood cards still allows us to draw some interesting conclusions and make some educated guesses regarding the playstyles of the nine classes populating the tavern. Spoiler alert: darkness rises.

A Brief History of (the) Meta

With this being the start of a new Hearthstone year, there are a few inevitable elements of the meta that we can already look at. Since the overall power level drops by a lot, classes with a comparatively more powerful Classic set are always the winners of these rotations initially. This also means that the strong cards that don’t rotate are going to play an oversized part in the metagame.

Case in point: Death Knights are going to blow out a lot of your experimental decks out of the water if you’re not careful, and late-game bombs like The Lich King and Primordial Drake are likely going to cause a lot of consternation as well. Many of the additional value-generation tools are also going to stick around in the form of Lyra the Sunshard, Fal'dorei Strider and Primordial Glyph, plus the inclusion of Hagatha the Witch and some other goodies like Face Collector also mean that an old-school, removal-based control deck is still out of the question despite the disappearance of Jades.

Of course, the elephant in the room is Cubelock – and it’s not going anywhere.

MVP Gul’dan and His Merry Men

It’s a well-known fact that Cubelock hardly loses anything with the upcoming rotation: Mistress of Mixtures is basically the only card that leaves the format, and the deck’s ability to cheat out stats is basically unmatched in the game. The debate over the control-oriented version and the Doomguard-infused style is likely going to switch towards the latter even more thanks to the loss of N'Zoth, The Corruptor and the fact that many classes got promising mid-range cards (especially due to the introduction of the Rush keyword). The Warlock Death Knight’s value generation needs no introduction, and it’s going to take something special to be able to reliably beat the deck in a long game, apart from perhaps some Hagatha-based shenanigans in Shaman.

Not only that, but both class legendaries have great potential for the archetype: Lord Godfrey is that millionth board clear you didn’t know you needed, and Glinda Crowskin can easily do some disgusting things, especially seeing how high its health is for such a special ability. Also, you can occasionally hide it behind a Voidlord while playing it on curve. It’s true that Warlock got some interesting Zoo-ish cards as well (for instance, Witchwood Imp could be very good in its current iteration that tries to get ahead by buffing a cheap demon), solving a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded is probably easier than building such a deck that outperforms its Cubelock counterpart.

The knock-on effect of this is that Silence is going to likely remain a major part of the metagame and whatever deck you’re going to try out once the expansion releases, it’s going to have to have some sort of a gameplan against an unhealthy amount of Voidlords.

Reinvent the Wheel

Quite a few classes will have to completely change the way they play after the rotation: basically every single Paladin deck is going to get damaged by the changes. Murloc Paladin loses its incredibly important one-drop in Vilefin Inquisitor alongside Rallying Blade – both of which added a lot to the deck’s consistency – while Dude Paladin is also going to be greatly hurt by the disappearance of two reload options in the form of Stand Against Darkness. Silver Sword is an extremely powerful card, but it faces stiff competition in the form of Vinecleaver, which comes down earlier and provides comparable extra stats unless your board is already huge. Meanwhile. the OTK deck becomes impossible to play in Standard due to the rotation of Auctionmaster Beardo, and Control Paladin’s long stretch of struggle will continue as it received absolutely no support in the set – apart from perhaps Genn Greymane. Again, having the weakest Death Knight of them all certainly doesn’t help things when it comes to the long game.

Most of the new Paladin cards are tempo-based, and the same could be said about both Warrior and even Mage – the latter of which will finally have to say goodbye to Ice Block, which, despite the introduction of many healing tools recently, will have a very important effect on the class’ slower archetypes as you can no longer give up the board. The rope-a-dope strategy of healing after the secret getting triggered and only freezing/clearing the enemy minions around that time becomes impossible, and this is also not going to be a viable way of setting up for some sort of a burn-based combo finish anymore either.

Druid loses Jades but the class keeps most of its control tools: the question is if they can successfully replace the endless stream of green men with a different sort of finisher. “Hand Druid” seems to be Team 5’s proposed answer, and the archetype certainly has potential. Can it survive with a loss of some ramp tools and will it have an answer against Cubelock? That remains to be seen.

Enhance

If you wanted to group up the remaining classes, you could say that seem to be receiving tools that enhance their playstyles that we’re already familiar with: Miracle Rogue’s only losing Counterfeit Coin, but received a bunch of fascinating Echo-based tools that could slot into the archetype. It’s also worth mentioning that Kingsbane Rogue is one of those decks that can demolish Cubelock, and Countess Ashmore is another way to pick up the weapon in the mid-game, adding slightly more consistency to its strategy. Cutthroat Buccaneer could potentially help with the aggro matchups, and if the 7-mana draw engine does wind a home in the archetype, even something like Vicious Scalehide could perhaps make an appearance.

Priest needed some serious re-tooling when it comes to the Dragon synergies, and while the new cards certainly don’t replace everything, both the lizards and the Elementals got some support for the class, plus the Lady in White certainly creates some interesting options for Combo Priest. Hunter, meanwhile, picked up a bunch of useful tools for the mid-range archetype that used to be ubiquitous around a year or so ago, including the incredibly promising Houndmaster Shaw. On the other side of the coin, Wing Blast seems like an auto-include in the spell-based deck (which, as we saw, doesn’t necessarily have to go fully minion-free to work).

With the Potion of Madness–Twilight Acolyte combo out of the way, Combo Priest players will find Cubelocks a lot tougher to crack. Again, after all this, we’re back where we started from: unless a nerf comes in, we’re likely going to transition to one of those metagames that is really about one particular deck to beat.