Playing Hearthstone with no Legendaries

Overview

Ever since its debut from closed beta, Hearthstone has grown steadily in popularity as both a casual game and as an e-sport. For instance, on the release of Blizzard’s Ipad app for Hearthstone, it quickly became the most downloaded app on the app store in over 30 countries, including the United States. In addition with its rising number of popularity on twitch.tv, as an esport and as a casually viewed game, it has become clear that Blizzard finally released their biggest impact game since Starcraft 2.

The biggest problem with Hearthstone though, despite being completely free to play, Hearthstone requires a massive time requirement to be even remotely competitive if you’re not willing to pay money for arena runs or card packs. Many try to counter this by talking about “infinite arena runs” where if you average 6 arena run you’ll be able to have enough gold to do arena forever and eventually get all the cards you need. However, you can’t really rely on arena, and 50% of all arena runs end in 3 wins or less, it's impossible for us all to average such a high win rate.

So what’s the solution? Budget decks were the savior. Back in the early days of Hearthstone, popular streamer Trump used a budget mage deck with only basic and common cards to reach Legendary, and it was used to show the amount of skill involved in the game and how a full tournament quality deck isn’t needed to reach the upper levels of Hearthstone. However, as the game evolved, these budget decks became less and less powerful, especially once the metagame evolved into mostly decks that were dependent on legendaries such as Miracle rogue, completely dependent on Leeroy Jenkins, or Freeze mage and Control Warrior which needs Alexstrasza. As Hearthstone became more and more fleshed out, budget decks became less and less viable.

However, two events have since happened: The release of the Zoo deck, and the release of Naxxramas. With the release of Zoo we saw the first deck that was actually consistently played in tournaments and high ranked that didn’t even run a single "epic" card, but all rares and commons. With the release of Zoo, we actually saw a huge surge on the ladder of players who were stuck in higher ranks in previous seasons, mainly due to how dust efficient the deck is for new players. Second, we see Naxxramas. Although all five quarters did end up costing quite a bit of gold, the cards made it worth it, and they became the first non-basic cards that everyone is pretty much guaranteed to have. With these cards, the playing fields of hearthstone became much more balanced, and more decks have come out that don’t need legendaries, or only utilize legendaries that Naxx gives us for much cheaper than other legendaries.

So what really are the effects of legendaries in ranking up the ladder? Well thanks to these recent developments, there are at least two tournament quality decks, Zoolock and Hunter. Both of these decks are still incredibly powerful in the current meta for Hearthstone, and Hunter is actually one of the strongest. So without further ado, here are the decks:

Zoolock

The entire point of Zoo is actually rather simple and clever if you think about it, flooding the board with low cost, mana efficient creatures that are used to guarantee board control throughout the game. The great part about Zoo is that because of the number of buffs that the deck provides makes it so you’re constantly able to trade up with other creatures in terms of mana cost. Although introduced before Naxx and strong enough without it, this deck really took off with the addition of several Naxxramas cards, mainly Haunted Creeper, zombie chow, and Nerubian egg. Some pros have even thrown in echoing ooze because of how easy it is to buff with Defender of Argus and Shattered Sun Cleric. Other adaptations have also arisen with Zoolock, including a deck that runs Power Overwhelming and Void Terror in order to activate death rattles easier. However, there are many adaptations to every deck, and the next new great things are always discovered by someone. However, Zoo is probably the best deck for getting out of high ranks in legendary due to how fast the games with it are and its very high winrate against non-meta decks. Once you go higher up into the ladder with the single digits the number of decks like Ramp druid and control warrior that are being used to counter Hunter are also good at countering Zoo.

Hunter

Several versions of Hunter exist right now, mainly between Secret Hunter and Midrange. Secrets Hunter costs more dust since Flair and Eaglehorn bow are both rares, but really, Hunter is one of the best decks in the game right now, and most versions of it are all rare and under. No legendaries go into it, and unless you’re running Snake Trap in a secrets deck, you only need Savannah Highmane to really make this deck go. Really, it can’t be stressed how good this deck is for the current meta. Unleash the Hounds is an incredibly effective card against Zoo and Token Druid, while Deadly shot makes any decks that focus on high cost minions like Ramp Druid wish they hadn’t. Really, this deck is just so good right now, and it's one of the only decks that is actually at the top of the meta while not having high cost cards.

Conclusion: As steep as the dust curve for Hearthstone seems, it really isn’t as bad as it appears at first glance. Two of the current strongest decks right now can be formed through just crafting commons and rares and just a few wings of Naxxramas. Obviously the number of Legendaries and the usefulness of all of them may be an important part of the games development, but for now we luckily can make great decks for very cheap.

Jason Mulchay