This week, I played against StrifeCro, who I learned at BlizzCon this year was actually a member of my old World of Warcraft guild years ago after I stopped playing regularly. His guest for the event was actually another old member of my guild, and one of my arena team members for a while back when I still played. Hi Rigg!

Before my match with Strifecro, I was experimenting with a varierty of different decks over the past week, including various aggressive builds of Paladin as well as Zalae’s ConTroll Warrior deck and Hotform’s Bloodlust Shaman list, but I wasn’t really having very much success with any of them.

Being a public figure in a TCG community is kind of funny. There are some fans who will be unhappy with you if you lose, and others who will be unhappy with you if you aren’t constantly playing new decks. I’m trying new decks all the time on my stream, but prefer to play decks that I feel like have a good shot of winning when I’m really playing competitively. Right now, the Hearthstone metagame is pretty set and feels fairly stale. Goblins vs Gnomes has been well explored, and I haven’t really had much success with my recent experiments trying to build new decks, so I’m defaulting to those decks I feel are strong and with which I am comfortable for the Kinguin Pro League.

I’m looking forward to Blackrock Mountain, both because new content is always great, but also because I think the week-by-week release of the new cards will be particularly fun in the Kinguin Pro League format, and will result in significant metagame shifts on a regular basis. Collectible games are much more fun when things are shifting and unpredictable. Compared to Magic, I feel like the Hearthstone metagame gets stagnant faster, in large part because the potential combinations of cards you can play in any given deck are much smaller due to class restrictions compared to Magic’s more freeform deckbuilding with opportunity costs for playing more colors.

For now, though, here are the lists I played this week in KPL. My Mage and Druid lists are identical to those I played last week, while my Hunter list is the one Firebat used at GFiniti. I’m not 100% sold on wanting all of the weapons, since drawing too many of them is a very easy way to lose, but overall I really like the list, especially the unusual decisions like one Animal Companion and one Tracking. Companion is frequently a low impact draw late in the game, and you can only afford to have so many cards in your deck that don’t represent immediate damage so you can be assured to get value out of them in the mid to late game. The one change I made to Firebat’s list was to replace the Snake Trap with a second Ironbeak Owl. Snake Trap performed reasonably well for me when I was using it on ladder, but it’s weaker if your opponents expect it (which I thought Strifecro might, since I played Firebat’s exact list on stream earlier in the week). Additionally, last week Strifecro played both Paladin and Handlock, both of which are decks that rely on big taunts to prevent a lot of your damage, and Owl is quite strong against each.

Due to some confusion between Strifecro and the tourney admins, he wasn’t available during the original intended broadcast time for our match, so our games were recorded last week and then broadcast earlier today. I’d actually been waiting all week to watch them myself, because they were some really great and interesting games. I highly suggest checking out the VODs when they’re available. In the end, Strifecro came out on top 3-2, as I failed to find a win with my Druid deck despite an epic game against his Warlock with the biggest Shade of Naxxramas I’ve ever seen.