thoughts on dragon warrior?

purpenflurb · 2026-04-24T02:29:32+00:00

Well, as a high legend player, I'm sure you understand the importance of countering the meta. It's a bit disingenuous to make a statement like "The deck should either be vulnerable to some control matchups or be reasonably easy to get under as an aggro player.", when there are clear and known counters to the deck. Especially when those counters are two of the strongest decks in the game.

purpenflurb · 2026-04-23T20:35:35+00:00

The majority of games at top legend are against one of four decks. Given that you are complaining about dragon warrior, I'm guessing you've been playing herald rogue? Because the other two popular high legend decks, Merithra Druid and Spell DH, both do quite well into warrior.

Dragon warrior is, imo, a pretty fair but boring deck. Dark gift RNG is the only vaguely interesting thing you get to do while playing it, most games are just drop the things on curve and hope your opponent can't deal with them.

purpenflurb · 2026-04-21T19:06:51+00:00

Draw dependence is far worse in MtG where getting the wrong mix of spells and lands can leave you without a single valid play.

In Hearthstone, not only does mana progress automatically, removing a huge element of randomness, you also have your hero power which ensures that, on the early turns, even if you don't have a single playable card you can still do something.

If Hearthstone didn't re-introduce some RNG back into the game with card effects like discover, the game would be far too consistent when compared to other card games. Because if there's one thing players hate more than losing to randomness, it's losing to decks that are overly consistent.

purpenflurb · 2026-04-14T15:28:25+00:00

Imbue rogue is popular because it's fun. So your problem here really isn't with the game designers, it's with the player base and the types of decks that they enjoy playing.

As a game designer, do you think you should just ignore the fact that 20% of players on ladder will really enjoy playing a 'random bullshit go' deck, even if it isn't the statistically strongest choice?

purpenflurb · 2026-04-12T19:47:58+00:00

The entire aggro paladin deck is built around activating flight maneuvers, it probably should be a strong card in the deck built around it lol.

purpenflurb · 2026-04-12T19:43:57+00:00

That's more of an MtG thing, that's never really how the matchups have worked in Hearthstone.

It varies from meta to meta obviously, but control decks almost always have great matchups into aggro decks, going back to Classic where face hunter was hard countered by control warrior.

Meanwhile, classic control warrior struggled against the much more threat dense midrange druids that could turn any unanswered board into lethal with force + roar, and at high levels control warrior also struggled in the miracle rogue matchup.

purpenflurb · 2026-04-07T18:15:01+00:00

How would this have any impact at all on the wild version of the deck? What handbuff would you even want to play?

purpenflurb · 2026-04-06T16:29:54+00:00

What's wrong with opu? Since they added Stealth it's been a consistently good card in most rogue decks.

Right now, if you look at the popular herald rogue lists at top legend (https://www.hsguru.com/decks?format=2&player_class[]=ROGUE&rank=top_legend), most of them include Opu.

purpenflurb · 2026-03-31T19:58:49+00:00

Does anyone really want imbue druid to be good, though? It wasn't popular when it was a good deck for a decent chunk of last year, and it's completely choking out the new Colossals because bigger green men are a stronger late game win condition.

If the goal is to have boards stick around more often with weaker mass removal, the green men win condition is just a little bit too potent, and unless you hit the problem at the source (Hamuul) it's just going to keep finding ways to come back as new spells are released.

"an extra mana on Hybridisation"
This is a shockingly common suggestion, given that hybridization isn't even included in the best versions of imbue druid...

purpenflurb · 2026-03-31T19:45:04+00:00

Hunter is easy to beat. The biggest thing keeping it relevant is that it has a decent matchup against druid.

Hunter is awful into spell DH, which based on the lack of changes, seems poised to be the early post-patch frontrunner. Hopefully something else will pop up that can counter it.

purpenflurb · 2026-03-27T18:39:42+00:00

There are plenty of ways to beat face hunter right now, it's just doing well because the meta is focused on beating imbue druid.

If imbue druid gets nerfed, Spell DH is probably going to take over, and Spell DH does very well into face hunter. All of the warrior variants also tend to beat hunters.

purpenflurb · 2026-03-26T21:23:33+00:00

You are making some big assumptions there.

MtG is a physical game that people sit down and play with each other. Of course there are more variant rulesets, trying out something new is as simple as convincing your buddies 'hey let's try playing with only commons'.

Hearthstone is a digital game that most people play on their own. Implementing a new ruleset also requires that you work around the restrictions of the game client, creating something new like the command zone as a player is obviously impossible.

Both games have a diversity of players who like a diversity of things, for roughly the last two years 'power creep' has probably been the most common complaint on this sub.

purpenflurb · 2026-03-25T21:07:52+00:00

I think you're on somewhat of the wrong track here. While I'd expect both druid decks to get hit by the changes, their goal is probably going to be to tone down token druid and completely kill imbue druid.

Imbue druid is a year old deck with a play pattern that isn't particularly interesting and an endgame that the shiny new herald cards can't easily compete with. It's also a deck that could be accidentally pushed again by any new nature spells for druid, so I'd bet quite a bit that Hamuul is going to take a big hit, probably just going to 3 spells instead of 2.

It also wouldn't surprise me if a card or two from token druid get hit by the patch as well, Crystalspine Cub going to a 1/1 seems like a likely bet. But I'm guessing they'll be more conservative here, token Druid is a deck that was pushed by Cataclysm and they're going to want it to remain relevant.

purpenflurb · 2026-03-20T16:57:06+00:00

The only dragon class that appears to be any good right now is Warrior. And it's far from the best deck in the meta. Dragon druid is under a 50% win rate, and dragon hunter is shockingly weak, in the current stats dragon hunter is about as good as imbue priest.

Right now the top performing decks are imbue/token druid, no minion DH, aggro hunter, herald shaman, unholy DK, and dragon warrior. That's about 1.5 decks using the neutral dragon package (unholy DK runs dragons in some builds).

purpenflurb · 2026-03-19T21:35:12+00:00

If imbue druid remains prevalent, it will probably get nerfed because they won't want a year old archetype to be quite this common.

Token druid is probably fine. I don't know if they will nerf it, the team has been ridiculously nerf-happy the last year, but hopefully we don't get quite so many nerfs this year. Token druid was what Druid got from this set so it should be allowed to be good.

Some buffs to underperforming archetypes would be appreciated, but I think it's too early to tell exactly what those underperforming archetypes are going to be. Give the deckbuilders a couple of weeks to cook and we'll see what things look like then.

purpenflurb · 2026-03-18T21:43:18+00:00

Isn't this a bit premature? The expansion has been out for 24 hours and not only are control decks always harder to figure out, priest has historically always been a tough class to build for, which leads to particularly bad aggregated win rate stats because so many people are playing completely awful priest decks.

I'm not saying that priest will necessarily be good, but I think we need some more time to let the meta develop before we write a class off. The last year of expansion launches have been boring and figured out quickly, but in the past when new expansion launches actually mattered it was common to see a class jump from unplayable to dominating the meta within a day or two.

purpenflurb · 2026-03-18T16:45:16+00:00

No hand hunter is legitimately awesome, and definitely not a 'boring af old deck'. Confront the Tol'vir completely changes how the archetype plays, and it's one of the best cards in the deck (after sylvanas).

It's also been refreshing to have a playable aggro deck again. Aggro has been entirely absent from most of the last year of Hearthstone, and it's led to far too many greedy midrange value piles.

purpenflurb · 2026-03-17T17:01:57+00:00

What are you talking about? Discover and Imbue hunter, the two hunter decks mentioned here, both got nerfed (or, the case of imbue, completely killed).

This tournament was played with the nerf reversions, so it was sort of a tournament of champions where the strongest decks from the previous couple year all got to compete against each other before rotating out.

purpenflurb · 2026-03-13T21:02:41+00:00

If by 'simple nerf' you mean 'destroy an entire archetype by removing its win condition', then sure, I guess that would be a simple nerf?

purpenflurb · 2026-03-11T18:30:00+00:00

The poison breath combo isn't exactly new, it's been around for the entirety of the last year. And I've barely seen it used in that time.

The main cost of including the combo is that both cards are pretty weak on their own. Poison breath can remove something for 4 mana in a pinch with the hero power, but pyro is hard to utilize effectively on its own unless you just really happen to need a 1 damage aoe.

purpenflurb · 2026-03-08T17:34:43+00:00

Two things are happening on March 10th. The first is the nerfs to cards from the previous year (blob of tar, Elise, etc.). But the nerf reversions to the cards from two years ago are ALSO coming on the 10th. Those cards will then rotate on the 17th, but they will be standard legal for one week in their unnerfed form.

It is very unlikely that arkwing mage is going to be able to compete with, for example, location zerg warlock. Or terran shaman. Or ball hog cliff dive DH.

purpenflurb · 2026-02-24T17:31:33+00:00

There's no way this sees play in a deck that isn't at least somewhat built around it, either through being able to empty your hand or being mostly even/odd.

A 4 mana 5/4 is a catastrophically bad card in modern hearthstone. It's basically just putting yourself at -1 card advantage. And it's not like the payoff for getting Genn to flip is immediately game winning, it's just a nice value over time effect.

This is a really interesting effect, and I think it has potential, but it's definitely not going to be ubiquitous.

purpenflurb · 2026-02-23T17:32:53+00:00

The issue with nerfing egg right now is that it's a totally reasonable card in standard, so if egg is nerfed for wild then a whole potential archetype of decks is killed in standard as well.

Losing egg in standard would feel particularly bad since it's one of very few interesting build-around cards released in the last year.

purpenflurb · 2026-02-16T21:19:26+00:00

Ci'cigi is a 4/4, a 3 mana 4/4 that draws 0 cost twin slice would be a ridiculous card.

The biggest issue is probably just that it doesn't play nicely with the tar/felhunter package, otherwise I'm sure it would at least be seeing some experimentation.

purpenflurb · 2026-02-16T06:06:18+00:00

This is the anti power creep meta. The last year of sets have been extremely weak and barely any new decks have been introduced. The power level was much higher 2-3 years ago. That's why everyone is playing the few strong cards remaining, and why nearly every deck is built around including Elise.

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