It’s been roughly 1.5 weeks since the release of Audiopocalypse mini-set and the meta has mostly stabilized. The mini-set definitely affected it in a major way – while it didn’t lead to many new archetypes, the balance of previous ones has changed a lot.
The biggest winner of Audiopocalypse is definitely Paladin. Pure Paladin took ladder by the storm – it was already a good deck before, but it had trouble closing out the matches unless it high rolled with The Countess. But thanks to the Horn of the Windlord (aka the new Doomhammer) + attack buffs such as Feast and Famine and For Quel'Thalas!, you have a lot of extra burst. Previously, even at 10 health you were usually safe vs Pure Paladin. Right now, 20 health with no Taunts is kind of risky at times. And so, the deck’s popularity skyrocketed. Ironically, before Audiopocalypse it was more popular at lower ranks and almost unplayable at higher ranks. Now the situation has flipped and the deck has only 10-15% play rate at low ranks with ~30% in Diamond (reaching as high as 40% in Diamond 1).
Other winners include various Hunter decks (Big Beast, Face, even Arcane builds are now all viable) and Warrior (Menagerie is still meh, but Enrage Warrior is a great deck now). Totem Shaman, a few Demon Hunter builds and maybe Death Knight are also doing well. The sad news is that besides those, no other deck surpasses 50% win rate. Sure, Control/Undead Priest or Skeleton Mage are quite popular, but if we look at the stats, they’re quite mediocre.
Pure Paladin is in a league of its own right now and it keeps a lot of the decks from being viable. Almost no deck beats it (it has like 2-3 bad matchups and by bad I mean 45/55, so not really THAT bad), but most of the other higher tier meta decks at least have a shot (pretty even or slightly bad matchup). I suspect that a balance update is coming soon, maybe next week. The current meta doesn’t actually need THAT many changes and just a few hits to the right decks (yes, mostly Pure Paladin) should make it quite enjoyable.
Below is a full list of the Legend decks from last week, sorted by the highest placement.
If you want to see all of the current top meta decks, go to our Hearthstone Meta Tier List post!
Hearthstone Standard Legend Decks of the Week
- 1Arcane Shot2
- 1Ricochet Shot2
- 1Trinket Tracker2
- 1Urchin Spines1
- 2Arcane Quiver2
- 2Barrel of Monkeys2
- 2Conjured Arrow2
- 2Silvermoon Farstrider2
- 2Spirit Poacher1
- 3Halduron Brightwing1
- 3Harpoon Gun2
- 3Wild Spirits2
- 4Eversong Portal2
- 4Twinbow Terrorcoil2
- 6Mister Mukla1
- 7Faithful Companions2
- 7Hydralodon1
- 8Stranglethorn Heart1
- 9King Krush1