“Now I stand, the lion before the lambs. And they do not fear.”
“Strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
- Part 1: 50/1000 wins
- Part 2: 131/1000 wins
- Part 3: 203/1000 wins
- Part 4: 276/1000 wins
- Part 5: 324/1000 wins
- Part 6: 402/1000 wins
These quotes, from The Lich King and the supercomputer from War Games, respectively, are my explanation for why I haven’t yet racked up a lot of wins with the fancy new class since the launch of the new expansion.
You see, the new class wasn’t actually all that fancy around the time of its release. If Demon Hunters needed a day one nerf, arguably Death Knights would have benefited from a day one buff. We got the next best thing on Monday in the form of a fairly expansive set of balance changes, but it remains to be seen if the class can hit the coveted 50% win rate mark on HSReplay. This article covers my pre-patch experience, I will talk more about the impact (or lack thereof) of those changes in the next installment.
Just like last time, our aim with this series is to highlight how the role of Death Knight in the meta develops on a regular basis based on my personal experience, with a commitment to explore every viable archetype which emerges over time. It’s just that there wasn’t that much to explore so far!
That said, it’s not all doom and gloom. I quite like some of the gameplay facets the various runes are aiming to promote, and as the class’ utter dominance in Arena clearly shows, the individual card power level is definitely there to match the expectations of modern Hearthstone. It’s just that there just isn’t enough cohesion to allow for a strong enough deck in Standard to go up against the onslaught of end-of-year options for every other class since they operate with such a significantly larger card pool. Indeed, this is part of why it’s so odd from a gameplay perspective to get a new class at the tail end of the year, and why I’m otherwise not worried about the future potential of Death Knights.
So no 100 freebie wins this time in the first week courtesy of a ton of overpowered cards. Instead, it became obvious very early on that the Unholy package is not strong enough from a Constructed perspective, and that… the other two aren’t all that strong either, really?
From a play pattern perspective, the Blood XL deck also offered a unique sort of problem for my little self-imposed quest. There was just no way that I was going to jam games with a 40-card 60+HP control deck with a subpar win rate for the first few weeks without running into severe burnout later in this project. For what it’s worth, the deck did perform alright, but it wasn’t anything spectacular. Worse yet, it was a Renathal deck – and there are no words in the English language to convey how much I grew to despise Renathal decks.
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Similar issues emerged with the Frost XL deck, where the clock is always ticking against Blood decks in the mirror, and you might as well just concede against Ramp Druids – or at least that was the case before the patch.
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So I mostly stuck with my homebrews for this one. First, I tried a pure Frost deck with an aggressive outlook, but it didn’t have the staying power on the board nor the burn potential in the hand to get things done. As a follow-up, I started mucking around with the Unholy rune cards, and I put together a fairly satisfying one Frost/two Unholy deck with very Zoo-like gameplay patterns.
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It has to be said that even these unoptimized aggressive builds had decent success against the field as a whole, but this is a fairly unique metagame in the sense that everyone is running Death Knight on the ladder because it is the exciting new thing, even if it has a fairly bad win rate overall. It will be an interesting challenge to optimize the builds specifically for the mirrors should this trend continue later into the set’s life cycle.
The one deck these homebrews absolutely tanked against? Blood Death Knight.
So where did this leave me? I decided to lay low and avoid the adventurers for a while. I figured, surely Blizzard can’t leave the shiny new thing in this stat. No way they will ignore poor little 46%-winrate, ignored-at-Worlds-despite-the-no-ban-bonus, fun-but-weak Death Knight? Indeed, they didn’t, as the latest set of extensive balance changes made abundantly clear. It remains to be seen how it will turn out.
Instead, I dipped into the other formats and found very different experiences. There just isn’t enough here to play with to warrant a trip to the Wild side: the Baku hero power gives you a 2/1 Ghoul instead of two 1/1s, which would have allowed for some interesting Corpse shenanigans. Too bad.
But there is the Arena. Oh, goodness me, the Arena.
Back when Demon Hunter burst onto the scene, it dominated across all formats, including Hearthstone’s limited mode. Even that pales in comparison to the monstrous win rates Death Knights achieved in the Arena.
With so many new gameplay elements involved, it wasn’t clear from the outset that this would be the case as the individual cards themselves weren’t that obscenely powerful. The class’ success boils down to two elements: the presence of Corpses as an additional resource that no other class has access to, and the ease of discovering impactful Unholy cards regardless of your Rune choices during the draft.
Team 5 recognized this and put a band-aid on the wound in the recent patch, severely limiting the draft appearance odds of DK cards “that generate more cards” or “remove opposing minions and leave a board presence behind.”
With the Constructed buffs, the overall effect might be a wash at best. At the time of writing, Death Knight’s Arena win rate is still above 60%(!) – however, this data could be polluted by the presence of pre-patch decks. Worringly, now all other classes are below the 50% mark, even Paladins, who were performing quite well previously.
Will this turn into an Arena series? Will I keep retiring runs until I get Death Knight, then try my luck repeatedly in mirror matches? Nah. But in terms of win grinding, that would be the optimal strategy right now. Hence the War Games quote.
So, onwards and upwards through the frozen marches. We shall prevail. The undead forces will (hopefully) rise. Please? Otherwise, this is going to be a long one…
Yellorambo
Luci Kelemen is an avid strategy gamer and writer who has been following Hearthstone ever since its inception. His content has previously appeared on HearthstonePlayers and Tempo/Storm's site.
Check out Yellorambo on Twitter!
Duels is where it’s at for farming DK wins, I’m at 304 currently. Sai is an absolute powerhouse, glaciaxe can win first three games all by itself as a single card regardless of build or treasures. Scarlett is also very strong. Frost and unholy setups in both are fast 70-80% win rates. Blood can be unstoppable with the right treasures but games take longer. So, for farming wins I’d recommend frost Sai, just unload cards on face, or unholy Scarlett, and play wide and aggressive.
I had hoped you were doing another one of these. Godspeed to you sir.
Ironically, I’ve been running unholy the (w)hole time actually. At first a 2/1 unholy/blood, before just diving in full 3 rune. I found a lot of success at first, but as the bloods saturated things it slowed down. Post patch though I went on a tear again. I haven’t gotten to put in the time I used to but I definitely have over a 50% win rate so far.
New class is a lot of fun, corpses are just great for token-y things. Haven’t even touched frost other than in duels yet. Blood is good but control always makes me restless I can never stick to it. Looking forward to seeing how things evolve and will be glued to your journal like last time. 🙂
Good luck and may the frozen wastes be with you.
In the 1st week I noticed triple blood reno was a hard counter to discard lock in wild, so farmed quite a lot of wins there. Experimenting with reno frost and even and odd versions as well. Now trying something with undead and dragons/kazakusan. Fun but slow road to 1K. Just passed the 100 win mark.