“Someone hit #4 Legend with it, so it’s a good deck” is a complete fallacy. High level players are capable of hitting even rank 1 legend with garbage. It happens quite a lot, and has done since beta. Also, there are all kinds of weird high legend pocket metas which make certain decks viable there that aren’t on the rest of ladder (see Meati’s #1 Legend fatigue warlock from just this week). ALSO, we have no stats to accompany this deck. All we know is that it PEAKED #4 legend. The pilot could have played 5 games for all we know after reaching high legend with Aggro Naga DH. Who knows. I’m not saying the deck is definitely bad, and I get your point, but saying it’s good just because it reached #4 legend is simply dumb.

The Raid the Docks change will 100% make a difference. Pirate Warrior is already pretty bad at decent ranks because its play patterns are predictable and often easily exploited.

It is already dicey getting the Quest Reward down safely in the vast majority of matchups. And now you have to potentially wait a whole extra turn? In my opinion this is enough to kill pirate warrior outright in standard (although it will still see play in lower ranks).

You are right that it’s still infinite value against control decks, but control decks make up a tiny portion of the ladder. If pirate warrior gets worse in all its other matchups, people just won’t play it nearly as much. So then even if it beats control, it doesn’t matter. Because basically nobody is playing it.

It’s not designed to be a Swiss Army knife deck. The reason this reached top 1 legend is because it’s targeting a high legend pocket meta. This is not a deck that does well against the whole of ladder. It’s basically built to beat stuff like OTK demon Hunter almost 100% of the time, and not much else.