The two most popular decks in Hearthstone are Secret Paladin and Mid-Range Druid. The meta hasn’t shifted much since League of Explorers came out, and we won’t see much change until Standard comes out. These two decks are easy to play, with very well-defined win conditions. Paladin needs to play Mysterious Challenger turn six (or turn five with coin) and Druid needs to set up just enough board by turn nine to kill you with their combo of Savage Roar and Force of Nature. There are other top tier decks like Zoo Lock that can win, but they aren’t played nearly as much as Druid or Paladin.
Tell me if this has happened to you before. Its turn nine and you have lethal in hand. You can practically taste the victory. Then you see the only two cards that can snatch victory away, Force of Nature and Savage Roar. You see those Treants charge at you with 4 attack apiece, while the Druid spams the “well played” emote. A game that was rightfully yours was snatched away by a dumb two-card combo that does 14 damage.
If you do manage to survive the combo, the Druid has plenty of other cards to do damage or clear your board. Swipe, Wrath, Keeper of the Grove and Living Roots all do straight damage to either your hero or minions. Combined with an Azure Drake, they can do even more damage to win the game.
Druids have always been a powerful class, with great cards like Ancient of Lore and Druid of The Claw. Gaining mana is one of the Druid’s specialties, with cards like Innervate and Wild Growth increasing your curve. With two Innervates and The Coin, Dr. Boom can be played on turn three. When The Grand Tournament came out, Druids got even better. The deck was filled with high mana cards that could potentially destroy your opening hand. Darnassus Aspirant (2 mana) and Living Roots (1 mana) gave more cards the Druid could mulligan for.
Simon ‘Sottle’ Welch wrote an article for PC Gamer that summed up why Druid and Paladin decks are being solely played this meta. Hearthstone has always been a game about tempo and predicting your opponent’s plays, even before they think of them. Decks like Freeze Mage and Oil Rogue “offer so many intricacies and matchup specific concerns that very few—possibly even zero—top level players would claim to have mastery of all of them.” Do you Frost Nova your opponents’ fields to try and stall the game, or do you go aggressive with Ice Lances and fireballs? Each game is different, and Sottle argues that this is what makes Hearthstone a great game. RNG is an important factor (like all card games) but skill still has a huge influence.
The Curse Trials were held last weekend and used the Standard format, even though it hasn’t been released “officially” yet. The games were fun and exciting, and weird cards, like Norzdomu, were played competitively. It gave me hope for the future, because right now this game is getting stale. Hopefully, Blizzard reworks the Force of Nature/Savage Roar combo, because for a game that was made only two years ago, this is getting old.
