Fractured in Alterac Valley Was Supposed to Promote Slower Strategies. Has That Come to Pass?

After the dominance of Questline decks in United in Stormwind and the lack of viable slow and control-oriented archetypes, Team 5 member Celestalon has gone on record in a Twitter post stating that the design team’s explicit goal was to “make slower strategies viable” in the new set. With the second batch of nerfs slated to arrive on January 25, how has it gone so far?

A Whole New World

United in Stormwind was all about those Questlines, with Mage, Warlock and Shaman all getting nerfs to these strategies, directly hitting the Questline cards. Flanked by decks like Alignment Druid from one end and Garrote Rogue from another, slow strategies were entirely boxed out from the metagame, so much so that the World Championship finals featured almost exclusively combo lineups across the sixteen-player field.

Enter Celestalon on December 2, promising different times to come:

In terms of framing expectations, one of the balance goals of Alterac Valley is to make slower strategies more viable. While we don’t want to micromanage exactly which cards are/aren’t allowed to succeed, any changes we make will have that goal for balance softly in mind.

— Celestalon???????? #ABetterABK???? (@Celestalon) December 2, 2021

Now, with five weeks and a nerf cycle gone since the release of the year’s final set (and another round of card changes right around the horizon), perhaps we can gauge how this goal has panned out. But first, a bit of philosophy.

What Is a Control Deck?

Traditionally, control decks are meant to be effective against aggro archetypes while struggling against combo-oriented strategies. This classic dichotomy was always a little out of whack in Hearthstone. Originally, it was because of the massive initiative edge offered to the attackers by their ability to sequence the attacks unlike in a game like Magic. Later on, the ubiquity of card draw and their comparatively lower price has rendered combo decks more powerful than they used to be.

With purely removal-based decks actively discouraged by the developers, “drown your opponent in resources” or “have a non-interactive finisher like Purified Shard” are the ways to go for control decks, neither of which lean into the archetype’s traditional strong point: shutting down early aggression in an efficient manner and being able to deny them board control on a consistent basis.

This leaves a very narrow room for control decks to thrive under the current card design philosophy. Whether you love or hate decks built around the idea of removing threats and turtling up, it’s the only efficient way to beat aggro in Hearthstone without mana cheating, as otherwise it just takes too long to develop your game-winning chonky boys as your opponent still has at least one turn to attack past them.

Still, the cards featured in the final sets of the year generally tend to be of a higher power level because they stay for a shorter time in Standard. So perhaps there indeed are (or could be) strong enough control cards to enable decks that can outlast aggression?

The Nerfs, the Buffs and the Metagame

Try to name a well-performing control deck from the recent VS snapshots or your own ladder experience. Yeah, it’s going to be hard. Handlock is in tier 3 at high Legend and it still relies on the quest to pull off nonsense stuff, and that is about it. Pre-nerfs, perhaps a tier 2 Libram Paladin was your best bet. But the issue is that neither of those is a real “control” deck – they are reactive, yes, but they are still just slower Midrange builds. Lest we forget, it all began with the tyranny of Humongous Owl and Tickatus stuff – maybe those have some Control aspects to them, but frankly not the kind I want to see on the ladder.

Let’s look at the first round of nerfs then, introduced in the 22.0.2 patch, featuring nine nerfs and 4(-ish) buffs. Celestial Alignment and its corresponding archetype was nuked from orbit alongside other combo cards in the form of Efficient Octo-bot, Mo'arg Artificer and Runed Mithril Rod (again). To bully Warlocks, long a problematic class, even further, Touch of the Nathrezim also got the bad touch. Sure doesn’t seem like the new release was enough to push the third big deck archetype forward, especially once you consider how the rest of the nerfs all impacted heavy tempo plays (Alliance Bannerman, Bloodsail Deckhand, Irondeep Trogg and Snowfall Guardian). Meanwhile, none of the buffs rolled out in the patch proved to be impactful at all. “Big Spell” Mage could actually be considered a Control deck if the buffs turned out to make it viable, but – as you can probably guess – it’s just too slow to be viable.

Despite the buffs not amounting to much, at first it seemed like the patch would promote a more healthy and diverse meta game. Sadly, Thief Rogue quickly emerged as the ultra-dominant archetype and Poison Rogue soon followed. Once again, it’s tough to slow down the play when the best and most popular deck can reliably toss out 6/6 to 10/11 of stats onto the board turn three or four, and that’s before we bring up the Mr. Smite + Edwin, Defias Kingpin finisher they get to mess around with later in the match. No doubt the upcoming round of nerfs will once again have to address faster strategies: it seems like you’d have to bundle so much into a single card to make slower decks viable these days (think Lightforged Cariel and consider where Paladins are right now nevertheless) that it’s easier to grab the nerf bat over and over again.

Some players have attempted to run Control Warrior – the deck actually has decent matchups against both Rogue decks, but the problem is that it’s quite bad against the rest of the meta. If you want to try something slower, you could also take a walk on the wild side and praise nature together with Wildheart Guff. Ramp Druid is a decently viable deck, and while it’s not exactly a “control” deck, any slower build is appreciated in a meta like that.

And even if it gets us to the promised land of a metagame with slower decks, how long will it last at this point? Team 5’s new approach of higher power levels on release followed by quick and numerous nerfs leads to a gameplay state where any given metagame only lasts a month or so at best once you factor in the mini-set releases.