Featuring possibly my fastest-ever Legend climb and bucketloads of fun, the new year of Hearthstone is off to a great start for me. No wonder so many other people are complaining about what’s going on.
- 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
In Praise of Pure Aggression
All hail Frost Death Knight, the great equalizer in a jungle of stat-vomiting decks! Longstanding readers probably know that I don’t get much enjoyment out of mana cheating, RNG rolls and math-busting combos in general. So, just the sight of Guff and Temsin makes me cringe, and there are other repeat offenders.
All too often, modern archetypes can just pull out back-breaking turns from their behinds where the only possible response is a shrug and an “I guess I lost,” with little to no value in slowly gained incremental edges in the previous turns. The power plays are just too powerful for my liking, and they are way too focused on solitaire to let me get any enjoyment out of it on either side of play.
This is fine: I’m long past the fifth stage of grief, and I accepted that a mature card game needs to keep upping the power level to keep the remaining player base happy, and that the Year of the Raven, which I really enjoyed (in its first two expansions), was a horrible period from a commercial perspective due to the cards’ relative lack of strength. There are many formats to dip in and out of; taking breaks is absolutely okay – things change. Less and less of my Hearthstone playtime is spent on Constructed as the years go by.
But every so often, there is still a deck that scratches the itch and makes me want to ride again, and playing the burn-based Frost deck might be the most fun I had with Constructed since the early Demon Hunter days. I know there’s a lot of hate going around right now about all the OTK and burn decks, but here’s the thing: nowadays, the only limited resource in Hearthstone is time.
Card draw is cheaper than ever, and there are more specific tutor tools available than ever before, greatly increasing the consistency of all combo strategies. (Seriously, when do you need to draw your whole deck to execute a finisher anymore, and how many turns does that take?) 30 starting health is no longer a cap either – and we’ve seen how impactful that has been –, and it’s been a very long time since slow decks have been about the careful allocation of a limited set of resources. The payoff for Pure Paladin? 2-mana Discovered Legendaries. Whoop de doo.
No, the only thing that can still be limited in modern Hearthstone is the time you have to execute your strategy – and unlike in the case of combo decks, where you are looking to optimize your chain of card draw, aggressive decks like this have to carefully portion out a consistent stream of damage, part of which is, by necessity, based on board presence, and you’ve got eight or nine turns at most to do so before the cavalry arrives.
What I’m trying to say is that I finished my Legend climb in just two days, sporting a healthy 65% win rate, and it’s been super fun.
A Frosty Reception and Alternative Deck Ideas
This was a lot more like it.
As I got higher, the clearer it became that Miracle Rogue is a significant threat in the hand of more competent players, and it’s also the reason why I would suggest shying away from alternative builds. Unless you can very quickly deliver the kill, maybe after one or two successive freezes, that matchup is awful. It isn’t a dealbreaker at the lower levels of play, but higher up, it’s a significant issue.
I just used the VS list for the climb, and I’m quite convinced by their arguments about running extra one-drops instead of combo tools. Here it is below:
- Format: hydra
- Posted By:
9,120
There have been some interesting alternatives in high level, which are also fun to play but they seemed a lot less effective to me than the Frost build. I might spend a bit more time with them for the next edition if they still show relevance. Check them out:
- Format: hydra
- Season: season-105
- Player:
- 8,640
- Format: hydra
- Season: season-105
- Posted By:
- 10,320
As for other formats, there’s little reason to venture into Wild as a Death Knight player after the latest round of balance changes. The pocket pick option against Discardlocks is no longer relevant, and there is no way to innovate on your lists: HSReplay only shows the usual suspects, with the occasional Zola the Gorgon and Armor Vendor showing up in Blood decks.
Even after the balance changes, Death Knights remain super stupid in the Arena, but I’m not going to devote too many column inches to the matter here because I’ve extensively discussed it in our latest Arena tier list update. It’s a great way to farm gold and wins, or it would be, if you could reliably roll it in the class selection, which you can’t do with eleven different potential options. We’ll have to see what Matt London and his merry men will try next to sort things out over there.
The same issue exists for the current weirdo version of Duels, and it’s perhaps a sign of the times that my first test game with the class ended with a Mage player instantly conceding upon seeing Sai’s visage. There are some very nice aggressive builds in the vein of the Frost deck from Constructed, with powerful Treasures and busted Hero Powers to make it all the stronger.
The Future of Death Knight: Surely This Is Not the Answer?
A recent, somewhat controversial interview over on Shacknews shed some light on Team 5’s plans for the future of the class and its design process. I was always somewhat skeptical about adding more and more classes to the game: it comes at the expense of valuable neutral cards (which removes a lot of the deckbuilding complexity and makes it even more expensive to play a variety of decks), and the devs’ track record of balancing over the years and across different leadership teams made it pretty clear that the number of playable meta decks at one time won’t increase because of this. So, really, what’s the point? For me, not much, but I’m not really a flavor guy. I’d take nine classes with more viable archetypes any day of the week.
Runes promised unprecedentedly broad options for the class, and it seems like we’re very quickly running up against its limits, while the class isn’t even at its first mini-set, as evidenced by this somewhat controversial statement from Cora:
“Going forward, we are just going to be doing ten Death Knight cards per expansion, same as all of the other classes. And, we decided that in a full year of Hearthstone expansions, we want to give each of the Rune specializations some new toys, something new to do, some interesting deck that they didn’t have access to before. But, because we don’t want each expansion to feel only minimally impactful for each of the Rune specializations, we feel it’s probably going to be the best approach to focus in one area for each expansion and then just make sure that we hit all of them over the course of the year.”
So, it seems like our extra-broad class will, by necessity, end up fairly shallow, with even more pre-built archetypes than before. (The devs’ reticence towards promoting rainbow rune decks is also a bad sign in this regard.) I don’t mind the idea that the particular runes will dip in and out of the metagame due to the shifting power levels: however, I’m very concerned about the further reduction in unique deckbuilding options and the presence of even more railroaded archetypes. We’ll have to see what the future brings.
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.
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