After my finals appearance in the ESL Legendary Series a few weeks ago, I got invited back to play this week after I had to miss last week’s event due to a conflicting Magic tournament. With the metagame shifts in GvG, I was excited to see how the field would shape up.

The ESL Legendary Series uses a format that I much prefer to the more common Last Hero Standing tournaments, in which players bring three decks and play them in a pre-set order for the first three games of a best of five series, and then play blind pick for the following two games. This prevents the highly polarized matchups that exist in the Last Hero Standing format, and means that your decks need to be more well rounded and generally strong rather than targeted counters. A huge benefit of this is that it makes the event much more similar to ladder play, so both the experience itself and the decks that result from the event are more relevant and relatable to the average player. I’m going to be writing more in depth about my thoughts on Hearthstone tournament formats, but in the meantime, I hope to see more organizers experimenting with different formats like ESL is doing.

While I lost my first match to Darkwonyx, it was extremely close and very entertaining, and I highly recommend checking out the VODs when they’re available. I know I’ll be reviewing the games to see what I might have done differently.

My lineup was pretty much just the decks that I have felt comfortable with and have had success with on the ladder this season. Priest is the class I’ve played the most overall, and after a lot of tinkering I finally found a version I feel comfortable with in the current metagame. I’ll be writing more at length about the deck soon, but wanted to share all of my lists here first. My Mage deck was just the MechMage deck that I was working on at the very beginning of the GvG metagame, updated with the Azure Drakes that Strifecro played in his version at the Kinguin tournament since they help the deck out with running out of gas in the midgame. The Druid deck was the one that I was the least comfortable with overall, but I didn’t have a third list that I was super happy with going into the event, and it felt like a reliable fallback.

Anyway, here are the decks I played, and remember that thanks to the tournament format, these are totally ladder ready. Enjoy!