Why The Boomsday Project Hasn’t Spawned New Archetypes Yet

Evolution, not revolution – for an expansion featuring an oppressive mad scientist, Hearthstone’s latest set hasn’t brought along the seismic shifts Dr. Boom likely was hoping for in his quest for world domination. While The Boomsday Project is regarded as an excellent expansion by the higher levels of the playerbase, it has undeniably failed to establish brand new archetypes in the metagame – so far, that is. Some mechanics and cards often need additional tools and some time to bake into a strong strategy and most of TBP’s tools certainly seem to fit this bill rather than the Freeze Shaman-like “dead on arrival” moniker.

The Long Tail

For starters, the competition is undeniably strong: both the extremely powerful Kobolds and Catacombs set and the hero power upgrades from The Witchwood allow for very strong strategies on all ends of the spectrum. Tank Up! is the dream of all control decks while Poisoned Dagger, Odd Paladin and the last set’s Heal Zoo archetype pretty much lock down the aggro department – unless you want to lob pure burn at the opponent’s face, in which case you’ve got Mage to turn to with its Aluneth -based build which was also a spawn of an earlier metagame. Druid is an entirely different question with its iron-clad shell of over 20 cards allowing for a wide variety of endgame strategies with a distinctly similar path towards their execution. While many of the ideas presented in The Boomsday Project are just fine, they can’t hold a candle to the power spikes introduced in the last two sets.

A good example would be the much-hyped Mech Paladin options which seemed like the most promising variant for the tribe before release: the class is uniquely suited for buff-based strategies and already had viable aggressive options both with the Even and Odd restrictions during The Witchwood, especially before the nerfs. As it turns out, this is exactly the problem we ran into in the new set – the Mech-specific archetypes simply ended up worse than the already existing Genn/Baku builds, keeping them out of contention for the time being. Of course, Paladin has also fallen by the wayside in the metagame due to many other reasons, but these cards haven’t had a chance to shine specifically. Adding a Mech shell took away from the archetype’s core consistency instead of adding to it and the even-costed tribal cards were nowhere near strong enough to warrant a downgrade in hero power.

A similar example would be the interesting Deathrattle Rogue archetype popularized by Feno and others shortly after the set release, a deck which relied on Necrium Blade, Necrium Vial and Mechanical Whelp alongside the usual suspects of Devilsaur Egg and Carnivorous Cube. It is a perfectly serviceable deck in its own right but Odd Rogue is a better choice if you want to aggressive while Deathrattle Hunter – an archetype which also experimented with a Mech shell but more or less returned to its re-Boomsday state, only adding Spider Bomb and the ubiquitous Giggling Inventor to its arsenal – does a better job at generating sticky boards.

The same story occurred with Shaman, a class which got a bunch of very interesting cards that encourage a token-based, more tempo-oriented archetype – it clearly has potential, a homebrew version got me to high Legend shortly after the release – but it doesn’t hold a candle to the different Shudderwock-focused builds that are available to the class. Weirdly, the situation is analogous to the circumstances that led to the introduction of Standard: interesting new sets hardly had any impact on the metagame apart from a few individually powerful cards and specific class-based ones that fit already existing archetypes. While the current metagame is fairly varied and interesting, the dynamics in play have got to be a concern for Team 5 and are a serious indictment of the runaway power spike that was KnC at the end of last year.

A Quick Fix?

Thankfully, the problem doesn’t seem as bad as it perhaps was back in the day – though it’s worth mentioning that the meta just before Standard’s introduction was one of the most varied ones we’ve ever had – the up-and-coming archetypes don’t need that much help to shine. Beyond the aforementioned ones (Mechs in particular seem to be very close to the breaking point, it’s just that they lack good curve cards to magnetize), Control Paladin has now got a decent shell with Crystalsmith Kangor, Shrink Ray and Lynessa Sunsorrow, it’s just that it is still lacking a reliable finisher. Even its current iteration was strong enough to propel Thijs to a top ten placing on the ladder recently.

While Priest is clearly struggling, the recent innovation of a Malygos-based deck with echoes of Big Priest and the inclusion of Zerek's Cloning Gallery for added shenanigans already shows some promise with some notable players getting decent results with it on high ladder. In retrospect, five of the set’s Warrior cards made into the current Control builds, turning it into a formidable contender even if its Mech synergies are woefully underutilized. Aggressive Hunter decks could also make a return soon: Odd Hunter was not that far away from playability in The Witchwood and the class has sneakily received a burn tool in the form of Bomb Toss that has not yet made it to the forefront of the metagame. These ideas were not dead on arrival like Freeze Shaman: if anything, the problem with the recent sets was the plethora of rapidly introduced and quickly abandoned archetypes – again, Shaman could say a few things about that – if the last expansion of 2018 actively supports these high-potential decks, it could create one of the most unique and interesting metagames we’ve ever had.