Which Battle-Ready Decks Are The Best And Which Are Most Picked?

Overall, I’m not very surprised with those win rates. You might be thinking – “hey, that Paladin deck has to be really overpowered” or even “wow, Shaman is performing so well, the deck might be actually good”, which is… not exactly true. We need to keep in mind that HSReplay win rates at lower ranks are very inflated. It probably has something to do with the fact that players who use deck tracker and contribute to those stats are, on average, slightly better than those who don’t (or maybe the deck tracker itself is giving them that advantage – but that’s a topic for different discussion). “Real” deck win rates might be 5-10% lower, depending on the deck. In some rare cases, they stay similar or even increase at higher ranks (where the stats are more precise), but that’s rather uncommon. In this case, it was pretty consistent – while higher ranks had a much lower sample size, after filling some gaps I could tell that those decks had – like previously mentioned – 5-10% lower WR in there.

Paladin is a monster simply because of how well the class is doing. This particular build is not even that great – there are definitely better ones. But you can easily get there by simply swapping a few cards. Like removing Cannonmaster Smythe, which is not performing that well and was probably added to increase the Legendaries count and keep the deck’s Dust cost up. Talking about Dust cost, from what I see it’s pretty common here. Some of those decks include non-meta Legendaries / Epics that you would have better results replacing with a Common or Rare…. but are there just to increase the value. They clearly didn’t want some decks to cost 3k Dust while others to cost 10k – and it makes sense since you pay the same amount of money for all of them. But I see it as an added value. Yes, you’re getting Legendary you don’t need… but you can just replace it with a cheaper card, make the deck better, and either Dust the bad Legendary or keep it around in case it gets better.

Similarly, the results of Hunter and Warrior don’t surprise me. Both Rush Warrior and Face Hunter are solid meta decks, and while Hunter in particular includes some odd card choices, you can easily switch them out for better options. Then Control Warlock… well, the deck hasn’t been performing very well on higher ranks, but it’s been a good deck in lower ranks, so I don’t see anything wrong with those stats.

5th position is where the surprises really start. Aggro Shaman is basically an off-meta deck – Shaman is the least played class. It doesn’t mean that the can can’t perform okay-ish, I’ve seen some people hitting Legend with it and doing pretty fine. It has its strengths, and

Guardian Druid, Deathrattle Demon Hunter and Spell Damage Mage don’t surprise me. They all were all around 50% or even sub-50% WR in higher ranks, which would line up with the current strength of the builds. They are your basic Tier 3 decks – ones that you CAN play and CAN do well with, but certainly not the most optimal choices. Still, as you can see, if you play in lower ranks and you pick one of them, you should be able to win more than you lose if you know what you’re doing.

Now, the biggest outliers are Secret Rogue and Control Priest. But here’s the thing – those two classes are notorious for showing lower WR in stats than their true WR, especially when we’re looking at the lower ranks. For example, different variants of Control Priest (or Highlander Priest last year) nearly always had sub-50% WR despite being solid meta choices. The thing is, it’s a difficult deck to pilot, with long games, TONS of decision making, and thus many opportunities to make a mistake. I know that hating on Priest is all hip, and I know that the class can decide games with card generation RNG, but the truth is that it’s not an easy class to play right now. As for the Secret Rogue – it’s a bit similar. Current iterations of Secret/Miracle Rogue aren’t very straightforward. It’s not your Aggro Rogue, where you just want to equip weapon and go face. You have many hard turns that you can easily mess up, and you don’t have a “clear” win condition, so you need to adapt depending on the matchup and situation. All of that said, neither of those builds is optimal. Rogue is running a weird mix of Secret and Miracle builds (it’s Secret, but it plays Field Contact without enough cheap ways to activate it consistently) and Priest is playing some suboptimal cards (Holy Nova? Really?) while not including some good cards such as Mindrender Illucia (it definitely wins some matchups) or Devouring Plague + Flesh Giant combo (even Plague alone is just better than Holy Nova in most matchups).

All in all, I still think that in terms of power level, Top 4 decks listed above are definitely Top 4. The only real changes I would make to the list would be putting Rogue and Priest higher up, but only if you know how to pilot them. However, no matter which deck you pick, you should consider making some changes. What I would do is look for top meta lists from the archetype and do your swaps based on that.

Popularity

Measuring popularity is sadly more difficult than power level, because while I have stats on how many times each deck was played, I don’t have stats on how many times each of them was BOUGHT. This might vary depending on let’s say game length – e.g. if we had the same total length of Priest matches and Hunter matches, Priest would end up with a much lower number of matches, because they’re much longer on average. It will also definitely vary depending on how close the build is to popular meta builds. Some of them were close – they could pass for full meta builds without any changes (like Warlock). So more players would be inclined to just run them like they are. However, other decks included some uncommon picks that many players would have quickly swapped, making the battle-ready deck no longer appear in those statistics.

I’ve added up the number of matches played since the Battle-Ready decks were announced from all ranks together. Even though the method is not perfect, I still decided to include the results. I won’t link all the decks again, but here’s a quick popularity chart:

1. Control Warlock – 20.000 matches
2. Rush Warrior – 13.500 matches
3. Secret Rogue – 8.200 matches
4. Guardian Druid – 7.900 matches
5. Spell Damage Mage – 4.200 matches
6. Control Priest – 4.000 matches
7. Face Hunter – 2.700 matches
8. Aggro Shaman – 2.500 matches
9. Secret Paladin – 2.400 matches
10. Deathrattle Demon Hunter – 1.500 matches

And here are some conclusions. I’m not at all surprised by Warlock, because it’s basically a full meta deck. It doesn’t include any weird card choices, and the only notable exclusion is Ogremancer (which isn’t even “must-have”, some other builds don’t play it either). Because of that, people are more likely to just run it straight up without making any changes. I also know that Control Warlock, despite its rather low win rate, is still a very popular deck, simply because people like to play it. And I get that – we don’t really have many Control options these days, so being able to play a slower deck with admittedly cool win conditions (Tickatus and Lord Jaraxxus to a lesser extent are frustrating for the opponent, but really satisfying for Warlock) is something many people want to do.

Rush Warrior – also no issues here, it’s nearly a full meta deck without any super weird choices, so you can just take it straight on the ladder and do fine with it. But wait… shouldn’t Secret Paladin and Face Hunter be somewhere up there? They’re some of the best builds you can pick, after all. And honestly – that’s why I’ve said that the method is a bit flawed. I’m nearly sure that Face Hunter and especially Secret Paladin are some of the most picked battle-ready decks simply because they’re established high tier meta decks. But like I’ve already said in the previous section, those builds are definitely not optimal. Paladin runs Cannonmaster Smythe version, a card that’s underperforming heavily. Your Secrets are triggered quite easily and going into Turn 5, Smythe is often a vanilla 4/4, which is obviously terrible. Even turning a single Secret into a minion is okay at best – you’d need to run more “sticky” Secret for it to work. 5-drop slot is mostly occupied by Taelan Fordring, and the deck also runs Alexstrasza the Life-Binder as a finisher (but given that both are Core Set cards, it’s not a big deal at all, since you can just put them in yourself for free). And Argent Squire? Really? There are definitely better options, such as Argent Protector or Blessing of Authority.

As for the Hunter – Tame Beast (Rank 1) in particular is a weird choice in Aggro build, Scavenger's Ingenuity is also uncommon. Trueaim Crescent + Ace Hunter Kreen is also not a popular duo, but some builds do run them. I think that I’d remove them and play other cards instead (Arcane Shot and Imprisoned Felmaw are some better ones that come to mind). But the choice was clearly made to increase the Dust value of the deck. They didn’t pick THE BEST build per se, but a more “valuable” one. Which is a good thing. The replacements you can run are cheap anyway, so if they just included them in the deck in the first place, you would be scammed out of some free Epics/Legendaries.

As for the others, I’m not really surprised. They pretty much line up with what I would expect. Secret Rogue includes some staples like Kazakus, Golem-Shaper and Jandice Barov, plus it’s a really fun deck to play.  Same for Guardian Druid – while the deck is not that popular, it looks fun to play and I can see why so many people would want to test it out (and after I checked it, it actually reaches ~3% popularity in some ranks, which is not a lot, but still higher than ~1% in Legend). Spell Damage Mage “seems” to be in the middle of the pack, but in reality it’s much less popular than top decks (only ~1/5 popularity of Warlock), and yeah, it’s a pretty cool deck with a bunch of good cards in it that people wouldn’t mind owning. I think that just like Hunter and Paladin, Priest was played a bit more, but some of the cards got subbed out and that’s why it’s so low. But that’s just my theory. Aggro Shaman and Deathrattle DH are on the bottom, because they’re least popular archetypes, I can understand why some people didn’t want to pick them.

Conclusion

So, were battle-ready decks successful? Of course, I don’t have internal Blizzard stats, but it looks like there were enough people to play them to form some meaningful stats. Just from the stats above, I’d say that at least a few thousands of people bought them, which is not too shabby… but it doesn’t really tell the whole story. Only a certain portion of the playerbase uses HS Deck Tracker. And again, players who are using it are most likely familiar with things sites like our own or HSReplay, and they probably check the best meta builds there are. The chances that they will buy the battle-ready deck and just run it without any changes are… slim. I would be surprised if they made up for more than 10% of the overall sales. While we’ll never know true numbers, the best indication will probably be whether they make a comeback or not. This one is clearly a test run – if they perform well, Blizzard will surely bring them back, because why wouldn’t they?

As for their power level, it’s not bad. I would definitely make a bunch of card swaps, but almost none of those card swaps include adding Epics or Legendaries, which is a big deal. Swapping cards for Commons / Rares shouldn’t be a problem for anyone, and you can easily turn half of those builds into actual, viable meta decks. Others are worse, but… the truth is that it’s not entirely the fault of the decks themselves. For example, Shaman is just a bad class right now, no matter what they built wouldn’t work that well. Or in case of Mage, they picked Spell Damage version to maintain the Dust cost of the deck. Spell (No Minion) Mage is a very cheap deck all things considered, and you can’t really add some random Epics or Legendaries to make it more expensive. Even running Deck of Lunacy version would put you in maybe 6k Dust range, which is still not enough compared to other decks. But Spell Mage being cheap means that you don’t need it to be a battle-ready deck – you can just build it yourself without any problems (you really only need four Epics and that’s it, so it’s 1.6k Dust if you own the Commons/Rares, which you probably do).

There are still things that could be improved. For one – I think that they should just pick optimal meta builds and just price them depending on their Dust cost instead of trying hard to match the Dust cost of each build, making some of them weird. Another thing is that they should definitely offer those earlier into the expansion. A month in feels too late – most of the players who wanted to build their decks already did it. Yes, I know that they can’t do it TOO early because the meta is still volatile, but I think that ~2 weeks in, after the potential first balance update, would be the best time for them. But overall, I’m pretty happy with battle-ready decks. Giving players more purchase options is always a good thing. Packs can be thrilling to open and we’re used to them, but the truth is that they’re basically gambling. You never know what cards you’re going to get. You can buy 50 packs and not get anything you wanted. Those decks are more healthy in a way that you know exactly what you’re getting for your money – and that’s a good thing.