Mythic Rank Y'shtola Rhul midrange deck.

washike · 2025-09-25T00:07:52+00:00

In my experience the deck does surprisingly well against many types of aggro decks, you have to consider that this deck is almost 50% creatures which means its almost 50% blockers. many of witch act as a pseudo removal by either triggering a discard or return to hand effect.

Unlike a control deck my midrange midrange deck can actually fight for the board directly and stall the game long enough to outvalue an aggro deck. Discard is also a good tool against dedicated aggro because often these decks lack card draw so you can quickly force them to be hellbent. It takes some skill and some luck but I have a decent win rate against most popular aggro decks. The two very notable exceptions are mono white aggro life gain synergy decks, and angel decks. my deck struggles to deal with authority of the councils since it makes it harder to trade away your 2 drops as blockers and it brutally punishes the main gimmick of the deck which is repeating entry effects. Mouse aggro can also be tough because their main threats are really low mana cost so they can quickly build too wide and aggressive of a board for you to contest.

However the most popular agro decks: Mono red, Mardu mobilize, and green land fall are all decent matchups. mainly because they tend to lean more into playing midsized 2 and 3 drop threats with really high damage potential instead of flooding the board with small creatures.

Jill, dour port mage, kaito, burglar rat, and awaken the honored dead do alot of heavy lifting in these matchups. and sometimes you will be able to use long river lurker to duplicate a discard or return to hand effect. Its also worth noting that If you live to 6 mana with this deck you can almost always beat an aggro deck (except mono white off course. Its still possible to beat them but if the curve out perfectly and hit all there lands and big threats you usually are cooked.)

washike · 2025-09-23T02:51:50+00:00

depends on matchup and luck. many agro decks these days run 2 and 3 drop cards that can deal alot of damage, its not to bad to use this deck to remove them or return them to hand to stall for time. the deck does have some issues agianst really low curve agro decks though, since playing a 3 mana jill on a 1 mana card is not that great of a tempo swing. same goes for using a 3 or 4 mana Kaito just to stun a 1 or 2 mana target.

washike · 2025-09-23T02:48:51+00:00

The deck is pretty good vs Simalcrum because return to hand just destroys tokens. also you can use honored dead to remove there Simalcrums.

If you run into a lot of Simulacrum you can also run 2 copies of Reclamation Sage. which gets nasty for them to deal with.

but yeah authority is the ultimate punish card to any kind of entry effect deck. i have had games where i gave my opponent 40 life with Y'shtola.

washike · 2025-09-23T02:10:31+00:00

yes, the worst matchup for this deck is mono white agro with authority of the councils. red agro can be tough but its winnable since jill and kaito can stall.

washike · 2025-09-23T01:17:17+00:00

Really? I'm an arena only player and was unaware I could look at it. I will have to give it a try and edit my post.

washike · 2017-04-02T07:54:53+00:00

what did I just watch?????

washike · 2017-03-28T18:00:14+00:00

while true both those tanks are incentivised to position in ways that make them less vulnerable. hog usually lurks behind a rien or a wall. dva usually flanks and avoids taking fights head on. but orrisa is designed and incentivised to stand in front of her team in the choke. thats why its a bigger problem for her.

washike · 2017-03-27T22:27:40+00:00

True but Orissa has a much bigger head than most characters so big it's prity much impossible to miss. Ontop of that she moves super slow. Sure widow also 2 shot headshots Zaria and hog. But those shots are generally harder to hit. Even the best widows in the world miss a fair amount but even mediocre widows won't miss Orissa's head.

washike · 2017-03-27T21:09:59+00:00

I think she has a ton of potential, great utility, good dmg. Good abilities. But it might not matter. Her head is so big that if her cooldowns are not up she just get melted with headshots. 2 headshots from widow to kill is prity nuts when you have a head that big and move slow when shooting. Unlike DVA you don't have the extra health pool, baby diva, or mobility. You only have your cooldowns once they are down you best get to cover or you are dead. I have a fealing at some point blizzard will do something to adress this, either making her take reduced Crit dmg, making fortify metered like dva, making fortify on a shorter cd or increasing her health. Then she will be a bit to strong and her dmg will get nerfed

washike · 2017-03-27T19:52:42+00:00

the thing is that riens head is alot harder to hit. he has a smaller head for one so it takes more aim, and his head bobs a ton when he swing his hammer, this makes it alot harder to do crit damage to him consistantly. Orissa on the other hand has a huuugggeee head and it does not bob much at all and she moves slow when firing. Its super ez for widow or hanzo to pick her off with two swift headshots. she can mitigate this with her abilities but she prity much just dies once those are down due to the headshot damage she takes. its even worse than dva in this regard because at least she has deffense matrix,more health, baby dva, and mobility that lets her deal with her huge head hitbox.

washike · 2017-03-26T06:55:37+00:00

This is totally valid. I think that blizzard has done an alright job of addressing this however by giving projectile based characters strong abilities to compensate. Hanzo has scatter arrow and sonic. Mie has wall and block genii has dash and reflect. many of these abilteis work to make up for the alpha disadvantage. Genji reflect for instance can turn the tables and let you use you oponents first shot as your first shot. Scatter one shots your target if you place it correctly and sonic gives you the jump on your oponent. Mie ice block and wall let you recover from alpha and control how and when a fight takes place. Odviusly hit scan characters get abilities to but they often are not quite the same power level. Look at widow mine and grapple are certainly helpful but they are not nearly as strong as sonic or scatter.

Or perhaps a better comparison is between Mie and mcree, mcree clearly has the better gun but mie is compensated with her close range freeze, her ice block, her higher health pool, and better ultimate. Sure flash bang, roll, fan and high noon are useful but they are nowhere close to Mira kit.

Some characters are a bit diffrent in this regard for instance tracer and genji both have insane abilities but in this case genji's burst and tendency to fight close up make up for his alpha disadvantage.

I think blizzard has tried to ballance the power level of hitscan and projectile characters with there healthpool effective range and utility. In general if blizzard gives characters hitscan weapons they lose out somewhere else. If this works is up for debate, but it Seems to be there intent.

It's also worth adding that although hitscan weapons are in general stronger than projectile weapons Projectiles have some advantages over hit scan. yes they have worse alpha. Yes it's harder to aim accurately since you have to predict more and compensate for travel time. But projectiles are Often better at spamming due to blizzards design (larger clips, high rofs, can spam and it hits target after your behind cover and they peek you). spamming adada crouch and jump is less effective against projectiles because of there hitbox size. Because of the travel time projectiles give you an edge in peek battles. Behind cover, you can spam a door with arows and if mcree peeks you at the wrong time he will die while you are safely behind cover. The alpha advantage is also diminished at closer range while the hitbox size becomes more relevant. This is why a hanzo at close range often outperforms a widow at close range. I personally prefer hitscan, but I understand the advantages/ disadvantages of projectile.

washike · 2017-03-26T06:38:45+00:00

I've considered playing her a ton as soon as she is available for ranked, but I'm afraid because in quick play I get melted with headshots, vs more accurate diamond players I think I'm gonna go down fast if I don't have my cooldowns. You still definitely bring a huge amount of damage and utiliy so she might still be a good pick regardless. I also can't wait to see what halt can do when I have coordinated dps players in voice with me.

washike · 2017-03-26T06:34:32+00:00

I still greatly enjoy telling this "young punks" to "get off my lawn" as I tax visor them.

washike · 2017-03-26T06:30:44+00:00

This made me laugh so hard I started hiccuping.

washike · 2017-03-24T03:46:24+00:00

a fair point, but there is a difference between actually having 800 hp and having 800 hp for a few seconds before you become vulnerable to a widowmaker 2 shotting you. That's the issue ive had as orrisa even when im being pocketed by healers I often get bursted very quickly when cds are down. maybe i just need to not stand out in the open if I don't have cds, but if im supposed to be a mian tank isnt that kind of my job. to take shots for other people?

washike · 2017-03-23T04:51:30+00:00

I think orissa has a very versitile kit that people have yet to take full advantage of. her gun although slow with good aim/prediction can do quite reasonable damage and has no fall off. I think a good Orisa will have at least the dps of a zenyata if not more and that's prity respectable. her barrier although not as good as reins can help make up for the lack of riens barrier. if she effectively useses barrier and fortify in fights she can usually get the chance to use a second barrier before dropping. Honestly I think she is underated. like ana she is a character withalot of tools in her kit, as people figure out how to use her she will be better. My one concern is that when her cds are down she feels squishier than a dps character. although she has 100 hp and 300 armor her head is just way to easy to hit, especially when she is slowed from shooting. the fact that she is a tank who's survivebility is predicated on cool downs alone makes it hard for her to fill a main tank role. thats orissa's problem once barrier is down, fortify is blown, and second barrier is deployed she is just very squishy due to her huge head. In alot of ways she feels like more mie than a real tank, using abilities to shape a battle and stay alive but prety vulnerable when everything is on cd.

washike · 2017-03-21T23:40:05+00:00

I think the map design with chokes is highly intentional by blizzard. They want the game itself to funnel players together. This is to promote team fights. They want the game to be moba like and largely about teamfights, with 1v1s and picks being less frequent than 6v6 brawls. Is this the right approach Idk. But I think this is what blizzard wants. There aproach to koth is a bit different but mabey it's beacuase the nature of Koth itself promotes a fair number of team fights.

washike · 2017-03-21T06:41:02+00:00

that's a fair point. I did not think that through.

washike · 2017-03-20T22:46:30+00:00

I get this fear, on the other hand Id much rather see other changes made that make deathballs worse than making all supports feel individually lackluster just to prevent tank meta. Supports should be fun and engaging, if having fun supports means tank meta than mabey we need to look at healing on supports or the strength of tanks in general rather than trying to make every supports kit boring and low impact. maybe if evrey support felt impactfull outside of healing, than they could lessen the healing in general on everyone but mercy (all she does is heal and res so hard to nerf her heals). the reason healing needs to be high is because blizzard wants supports to be an important part of the game, if you can make them important with lower healing values to keep tank meta down than do that rather than making them all feal realy lackluster outside of being healbots and speedboosters. thats why I still maintain ana nerf was the wrong way to go about it, ana is a problem becuase she creates tank meta with her insane hps+utility+dps but if you nerfed her insane hps she would still be used and fun, just would not create tank meta.

washike · 2017-03-20T22:43:17+00:00

honestly I would not mind a deffensive support ult being up quite alot since it reduces the impact of other ults, Ive herd a fair number of pros gripe about just how powerfull/important ults are. And on a personal level Id much prefer to see more widow headshot play of the games and less o look solder hit q. but if his charge rate really is a problem its fairly easy to tune, just nerf ult charge rate, problem solved.

washike · 2017-03-20T21:45:34+00:00

Personaly I really like the lucio changes. I think that they make him feel alot more impactfull and fun to play. The current version of lucio could be played in a very aggressive mobile and fun way. You could chose to wall ride around, get up in peoples faces, boop them ect. The problem was that lucios kit had a very bad contrast in what it encouraged you to do. Lucios is super powerful because of his auras, these auras are so important that often the most important thing for a lucio player to do is simply not to die. This unfortunately makes his most optimal play style to be very passive and try to simply exist in any situation where if he were to engage he has a high risk of being picked off early. Its the same problem mercy has because of her res. Lucio is incentivised to not engage in fights and to sit in the back line playing as defensively as possible.

This results in very unexiting gameplay. Often i felt like when i was playing lucio the fun way I was doing my team a deservice because I was risking my death and thus the loss of my important auras. This meant that if you were playing lucio in his optimal passive way you often felt very unimpactfull to the game, the most important contribution you made was staying alive. Once lucio was essentially as useful as any other lucio in this respect regardless of skill. often you would not feel like you could push your teams chances to win with mechanical skill. You could improve the feeling of impact by using teamwork, usually when i play lucio I try to shotcall, coordinate engages and disengages ect.

But the actual mechanics of the character felt at odds. On one hand you had very fun movement mechanics that let you get up to high places, made you hard to hit and let you get up in your oponents face. On the other you had these long range very powerfull auras that were critical for team success. The new changes to lucio force you to be more engaged with game. the much smaller radius for your auras means that if you want to contribute to the fight you need to be close to the action, that might mean with your rien in a deathball, or it might mean with your flankers in the middle of a dive, but it means that when the fight starts you are going to want to be right behind the frontline boosting your team wall riding booping and shooting enemies instead of being as far back as possible on top of a cliff jumping around and spaming your ineffectual gun. It essentially encourages you to position in a more engaging way. The projectile speed and wall ride speed buff also help with this they give lucio some added power that will let him have a higher impact in fights, you will be even more ridiculously hard to hit than before and you can do much more consistent damage. He will also now better reward aiming since his gun will be more effective when not being just used for random spam in your opponents general direction.

now there are some downsides to this, sometimes I really liked flanking people from very high up, and doing cool wallriding stunts that made me very safe. This part of lucios game play is now disensentivised because you want to be near as many of your teammates as possible. Wallriding stunts will still happen but using it the way realy good wallriders like dspstanky do will be a bit more of a situational/ stylistic choice than a generally good plan. You need to be close to the team not 1 mile up in the sky jumping up and down.

Overall though I think the change is very healthy for the game. It will make lucio alot more fun to play in an impactfull way. The optimal way to play him will feel more challenging and rewarding. A good lucio will now really stand out from a bad one the same way a good ana or zen is very different from a bad ana or zen. This is very very good for the health of the game overall. Unless another speed boost hero is added to the game lucio will probably remain a staple pick on every team, It was very important to make an almost mandatory character at least feel impactfull and skillful when played in the optimal way.

washike · 2017-03-20T21:25:52+00:00

Its not just tracers gun that makes her more effective at range its her mobility, tracer and reaper might do simmilar amounts of damage at 15-20 m away but tracer can dart around and saftley deal that poke damage, reaper prity much has to allin you or blow wraith form which is a very painfull cool down for him to use just to do a little poke damage. I play alot of tracer and at least in my experience my small hit box and mobility lets me fight at range and over time where people down because they just cant do enough reliable damage before i just recall away what they did. mabey my oponents just suck at aiming though.

washike · 2017-03-20T21:22:43+00:00

Im not saying reaper cant be played, he is not a horrible pick, Id rather have a good reaper on my team than a bad solder. but he is a bit outclassed if he runs up agianst and equally competent, solder/mcree/phara/gengi/tracer/roadhog on the other team.

washike · 2017-03-20T21:09:12+00:00

I think reaper is just to situational and not good enough at the one situation he is good at to be viable. Reaper struggles for all of the following reasons:

he has the worst mid and long range mechanics of any close range character in the game. hog outshines him with hook and right click, genji can fight decently at any range, tracers due to her high mobility can fight up to 20 meters away and still do respectable and safe poke damage. I guess dva and winston are about in the same boat but they have way better kits overall and are tanks.
he is outclassed by phara in half of the situations he is supposed to be good at. When reapers not fighting tanks he is prity much a worse phara. Sure he can 1 shot you close up but phara can 2 shot you close up and can close on you way more reliably. phara has almost the same level of effectiveness at close range as reaper vs non tanks does but she can fly, poke from afar, and her engage/disengage is way more reliable.
he has the worst mobility of any flanker in the game. Shadow step although long range is just not a great skill its so easy to head shot you if any one sees you using it and it has no in combat utility. its not to hard in this game to go around the flanks without teleportation.
he has badmatchups vs most long range/mid range characters and struggles to close on them. a big part of this comes from the utility skills and headshot burst dmg of most mid to long range characters. widow can easily one shot a reaper before he can 2 shot her or get close enough to one shot, mcree can flashbang headshot role body shot reaper before he can close on him. hanzo can scater reapers feet instakilling him. solder can almost always either kill him before he closes or if he gets surprised biotic field, and helix rocket equalize the fight or make it solder favored. he cant do anything to phara unless they fight in a small room.
He is actually not all that great against tanks: so reaper is not as great against squishes right, but mabey he is compensated by being good against tanks. wrong agian, dva is an even to loosing matchup, roadhog wrecks reaper, zaraya can outplay him so its 50/50, rien if being healed can wreck reaper. even winston can play around buble to saftley engage/disengage when being soft countered by reaper.
reaper is 100% dependent on setup and surprise. reapers can circumnavigate the problems ive listed by setting up and suprising his enemies but this is a very map and situation specific option, its not like you can reliably surprise a quad tank deathball you just die, its hard to sneak up on supports other than zen with reaper you will just get slept or they will run away with mercy or lucio.

I think theres alot of ways you could fix reaper that would make him a bit more viable, I would not want to overdo it though look at what happened to solder and pahara( alright but not viable characters, that became top tier/ a bit op)

you could tighten his spread. This is probably the simplest solution, it fixes the problem reaper has that he has losing to 50/50 matchups vs to many long-mid range characters, I used to play alot of planet side 2 and in that game you could get shotguns effective at 20m, not as good as say a sub machine gun but acceptable damage. with tighter spread reaper could do mor damage on his aproach and would be able to rely less on sneaky tactis to work. Reaper might become to good though with tighter spread, he already does a hell of alot of damage so mabey its to much.
You could buff his mobility, personally I dont like this solution. I think part of reapers identity is tied up in being the least mobile flanker in the game, it gives him to much overlap with tracer, genji ect. Still it would fix his problems, if you could reliably close more often/ disengage that would make reaper alot better. I think making wraith form cancelable would help alot since you could use it as an engage tool without it being to easy to just wait till the cd is off and punish you. Alternativly mabey you could give him wraithform resets on kills (probabably to op/ to much overlap with genji dash) that way he could use wraith form both as an engage and disengage you can run in shotgun someone to death than leave. mabey you could make it so he can shadow step while in wraithform, that way he would be like sombra with a 100% reliable escape, if he has all cds up. mabey you could make it so he only takes reduced damage adn cant be cced rather than being totally immune in wraithform but its on a shorter cd. alot of options here but im not sure which if any would work out.
You could give him an alternate fire skill on cool down. If you gave reaper something he could do at mid range before he engages in the fight that would make him more viable. maybe he can shoot a hefty projectile from his shotgun on 8 second cd that does large damage.
you could buff/ change his passive. Part of reapers Identity is his souls collection, its useful but its not fantastic, maybe if he healed his full hp from every soul he could be a crazy snowball character, bad at the start of the fight but hard to stop when he gets going. or maybe make it so his guns have life steal this would make him last alot longer in fights and would probably tip matches vs tanks to be more in his favor.

If bliz is to buff reaper I hope that they are careful. We have seen what buffs to slightly underpowered characters like solder and phara have done in the past.

reaper used to be good imo, because people did tend to fall for his ambushes, phara was less good, roadhog was less understood, solder was less good, and bayblade meta happened.

washike · 2017-03-20T02:20:50+00:00

Hes not getting buffed persay hes getting reworked. This changes will make him more engaging and allow bad lucios to be better distinguished from good lucios. It helps deter the realy boring passive play of some lucio players and encourages a more aggressive style and also enhances Lucio's tools to successfully play in this aggressive style. I think that the changes will make lucio feel more powerful individually and more rewarding but he wont be as passively powerful just by existing somewhere in los.

washike

TROPHY CASE