Pre-nerfs, perhaps a tier 2 Libram Paladin was your best bet. Handlock is in tier 3 at high Legend and it still relies on the quest to pull off nonsense stuff, and that is about it. Try to name a well-performing control deck from the recent VS snapshots or your own ladder experience. So perhaps there indeed are (or could be) strong enough control cards to enable decks that can outlast aggression? The Nerfs, the Buffs and the Metagame Still, the cards featured in the final sets of the year generally tend to be of a higher power level because they stay for a shorter time in Standard. Whether you love or hate decks built around the idea of removing threats and turtling up, it’s the only efficient way to beat aggro in Hearthstone without mana cheating, as otherwise it just takes too long to develop your game-winning chonky boys as your opponent still has at least one turn to attack past them. This leaves a very narrow room for control decks to thrive under the current card design philosophy. With purely removal-based decks actively discouraged by the developers, “drown your opponent in resources” or “have a non-interactive finisher like Purified Shard” are the ways to go for control decks, neither of which lean into the archetype’s traditional strong point: shutting down early aggression in an efficient manner and being able to deny them board control on a consistent basis. Later on, the ubiquity of card draw and their comparatively lower price has rendered combo decks more powerful than they used to be. Originally, it was because of the massive initiative edge offered to the attackers by their ability to sequence the attacks unlike in a game like Magic. This classic dichotomy was always a little out of whack in Hearthstone. Traditionally, control decks are meant to be effective against aggro archetypes while struggling against combo-oriented strategies. Now, with five weeks and a nerf cycle gone since the release of the year’s final set (and another round of card changes right around the horizon), perhaps we can gauge how this goal has panned out. Celestalon? #ABetterABK? December 2, 2021 While we don’t want to micromanage exactly which cards are/aren’t allowed to succeed, any changes we make will have that goal for balance softly in mind. In terms of framing expectations, one of the balance goals of Alterac Valley is to make slower strategies more viable. Flanked by decks like Alignment Druid from one end and Garrote Rogue from another, slow strategies were entirely boxed out from the metagame, so much so that the World Championship finals featured almost exclusively combo lineups across the sixteen-player field.Įnter Celestalon on December 2, promising different times to come:

United in Stormwind was all about those Questlines, with Mage, Warlock and Shaman all getting nerfs to these strategies, directly hitting the Questline cards.

With the second batch of nerfs slated to arrive on January 25, how has it gone so far? A Whole New World

After the dominance of Questline decks in United in Stormwind and the lack of viable slow and control-oriented archetypes, Team 5 member Celestalon has gone on record in a Twitter post stating that the design team’s explicit goal was to “make slower strategies viable” in the new set.

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