In one of the biggest updates in Battlegrounds history, Team 5 has introduced a new tribe in the form of Pirates, a system which allows the rotation of five different tribes for each game, four new heroes and a bunch of new minions. Though this was guaranteed to shake up the metagame and promise an interesting and varied long-term gameplay experience, the current Battlegrounds meta is anything but. Read on to find out more about the changes and how to navigate Bob’s Tavern now that it’s been overrun by a motley crew of seafarers!
Battlegrounds Shifting Minion Pools – How Does it Work?
The 17.4 update has brought along a sixth tribe in the form of Pirates, and the developers’ solution to avoid “overcrowding” in the Tavern was to permanently limit the number of tribes present in a game to five, allowing a consistent enough recruitment pool for every match yet still preserving the variety provided by the extra options in the long run. For now, with only six tribes in play and Pirates permanently locked in as an option (because they are the fancy new thing), the gameplay implications of this change are somewhat limited. Still, you can already see the impact of a no-Murloc or a no-Beast lobby, and no doubt this change will make things a whole lot more interesting for the future.
New Battlegrounds Heroes
Four new Pirate-themed heroes were added to the game in the latest patch, two of which have instantly become top-tier in the tavern. We’ll provide a short overview below of their abilities, when you should choose them, and what’s the best playstyle to get to the top!
Say hello to the winningest Hero in Battlegrounds at the time of writing. This ability is deceptively strong and can get you rolling as soon as turn one. You can basically re-roll your first purchase into another tier 1 minion, adding a lot of consistency to strats revolving around Rabid Saurolisk and Wrath Weaver. And yet, this isn’t even where Captain Hooktusk shines the most. The fact that you can use up a valuable Battlecry effect, re-roll the now-useless minion for free, then proceed to sell it works quite well in higher tiers as well, making the captain uniquely well-suited for Murloc strategies as well. It’s very difficult to draw a blank with this Hero, and as its 76.4% pick rate shows, most of the playerbase has already figured its strength out.
The other top-tier option from the new patch, the fellow Captain has a great Hero Power which may be a bit difficult to figure out at first based on the opaque wording. You need to invest one gold four times (over the course of four turns, that is) to get a Golden minion in your hand. It’s a completely random one based on your current Tavern Tier, but once you play it, you get to Discover a minion from the next Tier per the normal rules. This means you need to spend four gold for a Discover reward, potentially getting a high-impact Golden minion next to it – which you can still just re-sell if it turns out to be a dud – at which point the Hero Power refreshes so that you can go on a brand new treasure hunt. You want to dig on every single turn, taking the early hits so that you can catch up with your powerful bounty in the mid-game, spiking your way into the top four.
Haven’t we all wished for a one-time cash injection at some point in our Battlegrounds career? Skycap’n Kragg makes this dream a reality, and though it’s difficult to offer a general overview for every single possibility, it’s worth noting that you can engineer a leap from Tier 3 to Tier 5 by investing your Piggy Bank into a second Tier upgrade on that specific turn.
Patches has returned but unfortunately he still isn’t in charrrrge here: his Hero Power locks you into playing Pirates, which is far from the best strategy right now, and it’s no wonder his overall winrate is fairly similar to Alexstrasza’s: it’s a finicky setup which requires a decent amount of highrolling to get to work, and you have many better options to choose from in the Tavern.
17.4 Battlegrounds – Best Comps & Strategies
It’s one of those metas where it didn’t even take a week for many of the top players to cry out for a nerf, and with good reason. Now that Holy Mackerel has been removed from the game, most of the endgame comps are basically about piling stats upon stats upon stats in various degenerate forms, two of which are arguably game-breaking in some fashion.
Rabid Saurolisk still serves as a consistent way to scale from the early game without changing a comp, and multiple Heroes are very good at getting this strategy done. Nozdormu’s literal and Captain Hooktusk’s figurative free re-rolls on the early turns give them a strong baseline to establish a Saurolisk setup which they can then stick with for the rest of the game, with Arch-Villain Rafaam’s occasional chance to disrupt the proceedings. Since it requires such little investment, you will always see someone in your lobby trying to make this setup work. 
It also ties into the absolute monstrosity that is Monstrous Macaw – an appropriately named minion that is wreaking havoc on the Battlegrounds meta. It’s a comp-defining bird that’s already available on Tier 2, allowing you to trigger extra copies powerful Deathrattles on your first attack without even having to kill off the relevant minion. It also synergizes with Baron Rivendare, making Beast comps revolving around their interaction with Goldrinn, the Great Wolf one of the strongest options you have in the game right now. Requiring only a few turns of setup, a build consisting of a few Macaws, Baron Rivendare, a taunted Beast, one or two copies of Goldrinn and a Cave Hydra or two will demolish any other late-game build (with the exception of fully adapted Murlocs). It’s quite likely we’ll see this card or at least the specific interaction nerfed at some point in time, but for now the most efficient course of action is to either try to get this build yourself, or accept that you’ll be beaten down by them and settle for a top 4 finish.
A word about Pirates: they’re… not that good unfortunately. Their stats-scaling only happens during combat and the gains they make are not permanent, and even the strongest late-game Pirate setup can be matched by the aforementioned Macaw build or even a beefier Rabid Saurolisk composition. You should never force Pirates (that is if you want to climb) and should only steer in that direction if you get to pick up very early copies of Salty Looter, your only real source of tribal scaling.
Keep in mind that there’s an APM option for Pirate players, which has literally infinite scaling potential but nevertheless still isn’t consistent enough to purposefully go for as an endgame strategy: a golden Cap’n Hoggar and a regular copy alongside of it allows you to recoup all your gold when purchasing a Pirate, allowing you to grow your Salty Looters basically infinitely between the turns. It’s a setup so degenerate that you’re actually expected to quit out of your game during the combat stage so you have a bit of extra time in the Tavern to re-roll: the nature of this composition also suggests that it will be adjusted in a future patch, and though it’s far from game-breaking, right now it’s by far the best option the limited Pirate toolkit offers to you in the late game.
Yes, yes, insert BOAT joke here. It’s actually not that good because you often miss out on part of the Deathrattle and it doesn’t even have the Pirate tag.
Now you are ready to set sails to the Tavern and gain some juicy MMR in the 17.4 Battlegrounds patch! Though it seems quite likely that the developers will step in to adjust the current top-tier compositions, the lessons learned in this meta will no doubt serve you well once Pirates get some sort of a makeover and Monstrous Macaw loses some (or all) of its monstrosity. Don’t forget: Bob believes in you!
What do you mean by ‘quit out of your game during the combat stage…’? Is there a way to quit combat without completely quiting the lobby you’re playing in?
Force quit the game by closing the app on your handheld or task manager on desktop. The game treats it as a crash. The game then returns you to your lobby when you log back in, but similar to hearthstone ladder animations are delayed compared to actual code execution.
When the battle starts in BG the winner is determined in seconds as soon as the game runs all of the combat code. Animations (i believe) are client-side, so by reconnecting the BG game it skips the combat phase because the game already ran the code for combat that turn.
When you shut the game and quickly relog, you get reconnected straight back to Bob’s Tavern and not into the combat (which is already determined). And since everyone starts combat at the same time, you have some more time for buying / selling stuff.
A great shake up on BG. 🙂 Really good! And Tabern Pass -50% Off.