The Prince Renathal Nerf Was Huge But There Are Survivors!

However, that’s about it. All varieties of Control Priest are dead. Blood Death Knight looks quite dead as well, although it shows more signs of life than Priest. Control Paladin and Dragon Paladin are struggling. Ping Mage and Spooky Mage are far better off ditching Renathal and going with a 30-card list. The same applies to Shockspitter Hunter and Frost Death Knight. Running a Renathal variant of these archetypes was viable once, but now you’re just gimping your deck if you do so.

Oh Control Decks, Where Art Thou?

While there are Prince Renathal decks that survived the nerfs, it is notable that none of them are control decks. Beast Hunter is an archetypal midrange deck that plays one threat after another to make reactive opponents crumble and that has a limited number of defensive tools at its disposal to defend against faster decks. Thief Rogue and Ramp Druid both lack reliable removal, one of the key features of control decks. Neither deck puts a serious effort into defending. Druid just tries to race to its big stuff as fast as possible and hopes to be alive when that happens. Thief Rogue is more complicated because it is a jack-in-the-box that sometimes gets very aggressive and sometimes may even have random defensive tools available. You just never know what you’re going to get with that one.

The argument on what exactly is a control deck is as old as Hearthstone itself. However, any control deck has to be able to play a reactive game. If you have no reactive tools, you are not playing a control deck. None of the surviving Renathal decks have a single board clear card, for example. They do not use any disruption tools, either. Whatever control decks are, you would expect to see some removal and disruption cards in them.

The Plague Priests we saw at the World Championship were quite extreme examples of control decks. The decks largely consisted of removal and disruption. They were also able to apply pressure later on through resurrections when the opponent had no tools left in hand to respond, so most games did not go all the way to fatigue. Quest Priest is a slightly different take on the same theme. While the deck ultimately wins with a single card, the Shard that destroys the opponent’s Hero, the game usually ends long before that when all threats have been answered. Both of these decks died with the Renathal nerf. At 35 Health, they cannot survive the pressure.

There does not appear to be a way to build a 30-card control deck either. Survivability is an even bigger issue then, although you do gain consistency in finding your answers for each matchup. As the game goes longer, you will eventually run out of stuff against decks like Beast Hunter, who has 40 cards worth of threats in the deck! The current Renathal does not provide control decks with enough of a buffer to survive, but it still helps some midrange decks, which in turn are even better against control!

Control Died, Renathal Survived

In the end, the nerf killed a specific type of Renathal decks: control. Beast Hunter barely felt it. Ramp Druid is also about the same. In contrast, some Plague Priest lists got hit with a six-percentage-point loss of win rate. That just kills any deck outright.

In some ways, the nerf was worse than just rotating Renathal out of Standard would have been. Now the card is much weaker in Wild, where it was fine before. In Standard, the nerf killed the Renathal control decks and left Renathal midrange decks alive. Then again, Blizzard may have wanted to kill Renathal control decks to keep the Standard meta fast. And as for Wild, it is never the top priority anyway. They can just buff Renathal back up when it eventually rotates out of Standard if they want to make it playable in Wild again. What’s a year or two of waiting for a Wild player, anyway? Right?

Whether the Renathal nerf hit the intended targets or not, it was effective and it changed the meta. March of the Lich King has now been properly launched, and it’s time to play some (Frost) Death Knight!