Like many players who spend long nights and early mornings before work/school grinding the Hearthstone ladder, I want to be playing the best deck I can. The fact that there is a new expansion set coming out means it’s going to be extremely difficult for players to gauge how cards will preform in established decks, and if the new cards allow for new decks to appear. Will there be an inspire themed deck where you can abuse your hero power and get a bunch of cards from Nexus-Champion Saraad or deal lethal with an upgraded hero power from Justicar Trueheart? Is there a tier one dragon deck, a midrange hunter deck, or a druid beast deck? Like the old adage states “we wont know until we try,” and I’m going to delve into the best ways to try and test decks before you try and rank up on the ladder.
- Op? New deck?
Play the new tavern brawl.
The new tavern brawl that opened up on Wednesday the will allow you to play with some of the new cards in two preconstructed decks. One of the decks will be heavy on the mechanic “joust,” the other will focus on the “inspire” mechanic. While this might be our first taste of the new cards, I don’t think playing this tavern brawl will do much to help you foresee and create a new deck to play with. The brawl isn’t customizable, so you can’t sub in any decks with the addition of new cards, which limits your ability to test the cards out in real game situations. What the tavern brawl might be useful for is seeing how individual cards interact with each other from the new set. An example would be: Is fallen hero and garrison commander a good enough tempo swing to warrant playing them in a deck like freeze mage?
Play, play and play.
Just grind all day as soon as the expansion comes out, with the gold or dust or pre-ordered packs you have. You could either play ranked with an old but true deck like face hunter or zoolock to see what new decks are out there, or you could try and make your own random inspire themed deck or slightly adjusted control warrior deck. This is the second most preferred option to test out the new cards from The Grand Tournament. The reason that this isn’t the best way or really a good way to test out the new cards boils down to a few reasons. Firstly, you will spend a lot of time playing, more than you really need to, against bad decks or against really bad decks. With new cards everyone gets excited and starts to play with the new cards over old ones even when the old ones are more powerful. So to really test your skills you need to be playing a good deck, and so does your opponent even if you are playing ranked and your just throwing some cards into an old deck, or making a new deck based on the new cards with old filler cards. These are both time consuming and quite possibly disastrous for your ranking on the Hearthstone ladder.
Get some friends/a team together.
This is by far the best way to test the cards from The Grand Tournament. Taking a page from pro Magic the Gathering players, who sometimes rent a cabin in the woods and spend a week or more figuring out how the new cards will work, the best way to test is to play against your friends or with any person you trust (and is good at the game). This method saves you a bunch of time because you get to see what cards are going to be useful in new decks and also you see if new decks are as powerful as you thought they would be. Instead of grinding the ladder early in the month, with random decks that are not on the same level that you are because the ranking system is reset, it is much easier to test with a friend that you know has a tier one deck rather than a random paladin murloc deck or budget “joust” Shaman .
So there you have it, the three ways you can test out the new Hearthstone cards from The Grand Tournament. Are any of them a really good way to test the new cards out though? I believe most people, especially people who casually enjoy the game, will just throw cards together and play online just like people have when Blackrock Mountain and Nax came out. Even people who want to get to legend might not have enough friends to make a team or have a friend who is willing to put in a big time commitment to test out decks so that you get an edge up on the competition. But if you want to find the next big deck, or if you want a slight advantage over the meta by bringing in some new cards to an existing deck, testing with a buddy or team is the way to go.