The vast majority of Hearthstone games are won with tempo: whether it is Secret Paladin taking over the board with early Sword of the Fallen and Crabrider or Token Druid snowballing with Gibberlings, the basic design of Hearthstone with its guaranteed resources and attacker’s advantage in choosing targets favors the brave aggressor.
However, there are some moments in the meta when the card pool is just right for something else to succeed. There are usually at least some good Warrior control decks in the game thanks to the armor mechanic, and we have even seen a brief moment during Rastakhan’s Rumble where combo decks were common.
The early days of Forged in the Barrens were devastating for control decks. The power of Spell Mage with the pre-nerf Deck of Lunacy and the dominance of Libram Paladin with the face-hitting Pen Flinger were just too much to bear. Not only for control decks but for pretty much any other deck as well.
The balance patch essentially reset the entire expansion and the meta started to be built anew. In this new, less oppressive world, there are viable control decks again. Not many, and not for a wide variety of classes, but some control decks are capable of climbing the ladder and bringing a slower playstyle back to the game. This article is their story.
Control Warlock
The most prolific control deck in Forged in the Barrens has been Control Warlock. It is the control deck that destroys other control decks with the power of Tickatus, and that puts it in a strange position: it is weak against aggro as far as control decks go, but it can farm any other control decks that would like to try fighting aggressive decks better and thus forms a major obstacle for other control decks to enter the meta.
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The standard Control Warlock decks look somewhat like this Phoeba’s list. The Corrupt package of Tickatus, Cascading Disaster, Strongman, and Y'Shaarj, The Defiler shines against slow decks and is mostly a liability against aggressive decks.
The quest to find more survivability has led to the addition of Void Drinker to the deck, and it is a somewhat functional solution that makes Control Warlock viable, even if not great against aggression.
Control Warlock’s true niche in Forged in the Barrens has been farming Priests and Rush Warriors: generally, the better a deck does against the mainstream aggro decks, the worse it is against Control Warlock. In a way, by playing Warlock you are making aggro decks more successful. Not exactly the expected result for playing a control deck, but that’s how it goes.
There have been attempts to free Control Warlock from Tickatus and this is the most successful such attempt:
- 2Drain Soul2
- 3Backfire2
- 3School Spirits2
- 3Tamsin Roame1
- 4Siphon Soul2
- 5Void Drinker2
- 8Lord Jaraxxus1
This deck has been able to maintain a steady 50% win rate in Legend, which means that, well, it’s OK, but slightly worse than just running Tickatus in the deck.
There are some fun ideas in it: Flesh Giant synergizes well with the Warlock Hero Power and provides the Warlock with a pro-active threat, and getting rid of Cascading Disaster enables Kazakus, Golem Shaper, which can be used as a defensive tool and also as a major threat.
While this style of Control Warlock is slightly better against many aggressive decks, especially Mage, it is less dominant in Warlock’s good matchups and also weaker against Paladin as it does not have enough threats to compensate for the reduced removal capabilities.
Perhaps these ideas can be combined to a single superior Control Warlock deck, but as of right now, the Tickatus style reigns supreme despite all of its flaws.
Control Priest
One of the biggest winners of the nerf patch has been Priest. Control Priest is actually a viable deck now!
The current standard Control Priest style consists of a ton of removal and healing with some randomness from Sethekk Veilweaver and some anti-combo capabilities from Mindrender Illucia thrown in the mix. There are no Nazmani Bloodweavers or Rally! in the deck, as while those can sometimes enable almost infinite free spells, pulling off the combo is too difficult and the few high rolls are mixed between long streaks of defeats. Slow and steady is better than flashy but dead.
Priest has a sweet matchup spread that sees it beat most of the aggressive decks in the meta: Mage and Paladin can still give it a run for its money, but Priest does not feel too bad about facing them either. However, Priest is absolutely farmed by Control Warlock. The matchup is possibly the worst one in the entire history of the game, with Priest’s win rate dipping down as low as single digits. It is hard to even imagine a win rate below 10% in Hearthstone, but Control Priest vs Control Warlock is the one matchup where we get to see such figures.
If waiting is ineffective, can Priest become more proactive while still maintaining its good matchups?
Inspired by the Flesh Giants in some Control Warlock build, I attempted to make Priest more proactive and less random by adding threats such as Flesh Giant, Lightshower Elemental, and The Nameless One.
My initial results with the deck have been promising, although it seems that Control Warlock is a fundamental issue for the class that cannot be contested properly no matter what you do. More threats and even more healing are good against Mage and Paladin, and it seems that Lightshower Elemental and The Nameless One are generally undervalued at the moment. I expect great things from them in many Priest decks, but the Control Warlock puzzle is nigh impossible to solve.
Control Warrior
What happened to Control Warrior, anyway?
It looked like Control Warrior was an unmoving object, the prime control deck that would always be present, but it turns out that the loss of card draw and armor generation (Risky Skipper, Shield Block), alongside a huge blow to win conditions (Bloodsworn Mercenary, Kor'kron Elite, Inner Rage), did manage to topple over the giant.
With worse survivability and limited ways to close out games in a meta where resources are easy to generate and outlasting the opponents is difficult, Control Warrior is struggling. If there is one piece of good news for Control Warrior, it is the rise of Rush Warrior, which is a deck with limited resources that Control Warrior can control and outlast.
The current Control Warrior decks look something like this Phoeba’s list:
In this context, it is worth discussing C'thun, the Shattered. Many control decks have attempted to use C’Thun as their win condition, but the only one that has truly succeeded is Control Warrior. Thanks to armor, Warrior is the only class with sufficient survivability and removal to survive until they can actually play C’Thun. Just think how often you’ve seen C’Thun, the minion, played. Not often, I bet. Putting C'thun, the Shattered into a Priest deck is simply a mistake, and you will never get to use it. For a Warrior, however, C’Thun is the only one of their current win conditions that is actually good against Priest.
Before Priest became more commonplace, there was an attempt to make Rattlegore the main win condition for Warrior. Add in Faceless Manipulator and maybe even Teron Gorefiend, and you have the makings of a sweet Rattlegore board. The problem with this deck was that it just lost to Priest, whereas the C’Thun variant is favored against Priest as long as you don’t play your Rattlegore in the matchup.
However, as with all control decks, there’s the matchup against Control Warlock. Yeah, about that… At least it is better than the matchup between Priest and Control Warlock! It is even slightly better than the matchup between Freeze Mage and Control Warrior used to be for the Mage! We’re not talking about 10-90 or 20-80 here, but more like 25-75. Yeah, that’s still really, really bad.
There are some alternatives to building Control Warrior. For example, Big Warrior lost only a little in the Standard rotation and is still ready to serve:
- 1Athletic Studies2
- 1Stage Dive1
- 1Sword and Board2
- 2Bladestorm2
- 2Minefield2
- 4Kargath Bladefist1
- 4Outrider’s Axe2
- 4Rancor2
- 5Brawl2
- 8Troublemaker2
- 9Rattlegore1
I played around with Big Warrior for a couple of days and ended up with this list.
As an upside, it is better against Control Warlock than a regular Control Warrior. However, it is still unfavored against Control Warlock, and it is also unfavored against Priest, who will have ample opportunities to steal or copy good minions.
Big Warrior is a roughly 50% win rate deck: just good enough to have some fun with as you’re not losing all the time, but not quite good enough to climb with.
Where Are Control Decks Going From Here?
One simple fact: Tickatus is oppressive. It is not a great card in general. There are lots of matchups where it is completely dead. But looking at the performance of Control Warlock against other control decks, no matter what win condition the other control decks try to use, it is a simple fact that Tickatus is an oppressive card that single-handedly destroys an entire archetype, control. Even though Control Warlock is worse at defending against aggression than other control decks, whenever the meta would be suitable for control decks, Control Warlock will often be better, because it obliterates all other control decks. This is a major problem.
Right now, Priest is the best all-round control deck. It has the best overall control package, and its main weakness is Control Warlock. Despite being better in every other matchup, Priest is close to Control Warlock in overall performance thanks to this one 10-90 matchup.
To succeed, a control deck needs to have an answer to losing 10 cards from Tickatus and the constant onslaught of 6/6’s from Lord Jaraxxus, or it needs to outperform Warlock everywhere else. No control deck has achieved the former, whereas Priest has achieved the latter in the current meta (the deck works better than Warlock in other matchups).
This is a grim time for control decks. Not as grim as early Forged in the Barrens, where no control decks saw play at all, but more fundamentally demoralizing, as while there are some viable control decks, none of them can reach greatness because Tickatus and Lord Jaraxxus will always hold any non-Warlock decks back. The only path to a top-tier control deck in Forged in the Barrens lies with improvements to the current Warlock decks to make them better against non-control decks. For the rest, we will have to wait until next year (or possibly some balance changes).
Old Guardian
Ville "Old Guardian" Kilkku is a writer and video creator focused on analytic, educational Hearthstone, and building innovative Standard format decks. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/OldGuardian Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/old_guardian
I think the question here is how to nerf Tickatus either change the effect by number of cards or more likely the card’s cost by 1 which should be enough as it takes out another 3 cards that can corrupt it. Leaving only Jaraxxus, twisting nether and Alex. Personally I’d just love to see it nerfed into oblivion, even though I own it.
Early Tickatus decks ran a package of Watch Posts.
The new version eschews those in favor of Tamsin Roame.
In my playtesting, this is a huge mistake.
My Tamsin Roame version loses as much as Vicious Syndicate says it does.
The Watch Posts SIGNIFICANTLY slow down aggression and buy Warlock time to corrupt a few cards and regain control of the board.
I go with the full package. Two each of Far, Mor’shan and Ogremancer.
VS is right that Ogremancer is not overwhelming against No-Minion Mage.
However, it is a nice midlevel big body to fend off the aggressive decks that complicates the aggros that run spells too.
The Ogremancers might be negotiable. the Far Watchposts and Mor’shan’s are huge helps.
Very interesting… now that I’ve finally hit legend, I might take that idea out for a spin. Do you run Kargal as well or just the posts?
Just the posts.
The win conditions in plain old Warlock Control are pretty good as they are.
Reincarnating 6/6 taunters for free plus Tickatus plus being able to replay your minion removal AND having Y’Sharaaj be big in and of himself is very powerful.
Particularly when your opponent has lost a bunch of cards from his deck.
Sounds interesting. Do you mind sharing the deck code?
Please share deck!
Its the same deck just with 2x ogre and 4x posts. Its not great. It was great prenerf when posts had 1 more health but now, its just meah
I know pre-nerf Watch Posts could attack it they were Silenced is this still the case?
Yes, any minion with “Can’t attack” can attack after being Silenced (since Silence causes card text to no longer apply).