Remember 1 yearish ago?

General Discussion
1

about 1 year ago the naga sea witch deck was considered game breaking and it played at turn 6 a 5/5 and an average of 3 giants
Today conjurer mage does the same and is considered normal and dodged a nerf.

Consider that the combo can be done earlier with the 0 mana discount card and that the deck from 1 year ago would actually use cards from his hands to do it, while the current one does it and still has almost full hand.

The game was rock paper scissor, a weird kind of balance but still balanced,
now you nerfed the scissor and ofc it destroyed everything.

Please don’t wait for the buffs to then wait again to nerf this just to keep the game “fresh”, its so disgusting to face this.

I know you should nerf warrior too but this to me seems such a priority I don’t even want to mention other classes, and its even funny 'couse i know that conjurer at 4 mana will still be an amazing card, but at least it won’t be discovered by magic trick.

2

Naga sea witch was a little more powerfull then conjure´s calling.
what is the best early turn for a mage ? burp out a giant on turn 4 and turn 5 apply a conjurers calling ?
naga could fill a board with giants on turn 4 without a second turn needed.

For mage to pull of this combo it needs to skip the first few turns and conjures mages only work with 8-10 cards in his hand and the cards picked for this deck reflect this.

if you mean elemental evocation , that card seems terrible for a conjurer’s mage deck, if someone runs it he is only chasing for the combo you are adressing here.

though i can see that it can be problematic since in standard there are now way less cards that can answer a big board but in 2 months the next expansion will arrive with maybe more consistent AOE or single target removal.

i have not played against that deck so much but from the past i know it could be managed, the most times i found it more problematic if they got 4 argent commanders.

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3

It’s a bad comparison as Naga sea witch let you play stuff and was potentially way more powerful.

How do you get more than 2 giants on turn 6? If you including a set up turn then that’s even worse of a comparison as Naga sea witch took no set up.

Plenty of versions do run elemental evocation because it also synergizes with mana cyclone, but it does only give you a 1 mana cheat on the giant as you have 1 less card in hand if you play it.

4

there are multiple clips where you go elemental evocation, giant, coin conjurer on turn 5.
it may be less powerfull but its less expensive and more versatile too.
You can go more than 2 giants turn 6 with double 0 mana spell, giant, coin khadgar, conjurer.

You can conjurer everything in the game and it will still be good, in grandmasters they conjurer 3 drops for pressure against warrior and it still works, its not an all in or 2 ins strategy like naga sea witch decks were.

You can do worse than naga sea witch with the darkest hour warlock, but no one is complaining about that 'couse its not a versatile deck, its just highroll,
while mage its a versatile deck with highroll potential too.

I know the deck its fun to play and all, and that is important, but it destroys every mid range deck immaginable in the game, doesn’t get stomped by aggro, and to win against it as control you have to tech only for him or just have a lot of pressure (bomb warrior, or warrior with 2 S.C. , 2 BGH).

And worse of all the deck has a lot of card generation, you have to face 3 conjurers (whole, so its 6) per match (average) and as soon as you don’t have an answer with spells or battlecrys you are dead 'couse of the absurd number of freezes they have access to.

So yes, the deck has an highroll much worse than the naga sea witch one, but its more versatile and for sure has more resiliance, 2 brawls were enough against sea witch, aren’t enough against conjurer’s mage.

Its not true that they don’t have to play anything for 4 turns, they can do the tricks with mana cyclones sorcerer and the 1 mana twinspell and still be full hand, and with the help of banana baffoon or whatever the name is they can actually play cards.

5

I just checked some stats.

HSReplay has Conjurer/Spell Mage at 49.2% overall and Vicioussyndicate has it at 49.8%.

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6

Meh 14/14 Edwin on turn 2 beats that, seeing as we live in high roll fantasy land.

Oh and just for the record, in another post on this topic, I liked the suggested change of making it so the targeted minion only counted as the cost it was played at. No idea how they could do that, considering that goes against all other like interactions, but seemed like a good change, that didn’t destroy the card. Whilst currently, it’s my bias against high roll cards that fuels that argument, I can see it becoming a genuine problem at some point during it’s cycle in standard.

However your comparison of an interaction that broke the wild meta to one that has made a ripple in standard is way off, in terms of magnitude at the very least.

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7

same as patreon warrior had the first weeks, lol not an argument really when a deck its hard to play.
And cyclone mage its a hard deck, with everybody running counter cards for it.
If it was bad no one would bring it to tournaments blindly, but it would be brought as a counter pick, and that doesn’t happen.

14/14 edwin its stopped by any silence in the game or simply by a bomb hunter, its 1 body, If 1 body was enough handlock would still be good LOL

there are only few things (warrior easily and hunter very rarely and priest) that can deal with 2 giants on 4 or 5, and not even talking about the highroll on 6 and things like that.

You say 4 mana conjuring would kill mage, but pros such as Dog say it would be fine so I guess you know better than grandmasters and I live in highroll fantasy.

And I wouldn’t even care about conjuring, on normal minion its strong but not game-breaking, its the mountain giant/conjuring that its a problem.
With sea giant its ok, with rubble bouncer its ok, you can play around that a bit.

And yes, you are right, it isn’t as good as naga sea witch in terms of magnitude,
but I remember crearly when you went turn 6 naga sea witch and 2 giants was still considered game winning, I guess you could go 4 or 5 with perfect hand, but 2 was still very good.

8

Naga sea witch was turn 5 or 4 going 2nd, it was a 5 mana 5/5.

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9

Although I don’t know how the Mage archetype plays out, I tend to agree with Ixnay on this one. It’s important to note that Naga decks in Wild would have lethal on board on turns 4 or 5 and following, and for most classes and archetypes, there was nothing you could do about it. Even if you could something to avoid death, you’d be delaying the inevitable next turn where another board with lethal would be built.

Keep in mind that these decks were basically tier 3, yet, their impact in the Wild Meta was brutal. In a way, they were Wild equivalent of Crystal Rogue in Standard just some months before, the archetypical bad matchup where you aren’t the beatdown nor the control.

So unless you are dead on board to this deck on turns 4 and/or 5 and/or 6 about 45% of the time, you can’t really compare it to a Naga deck. From what I’m reading this mage archetype is a good all round deck with high roll potential that doesn’t even need to be used and in fact isn’t in some matchups. Naga decks were, almost exclusively dependent of draw high roll.

10

I will, yet again, repeat what I’ve been saying about this deck every time somebody makes this argument………this deck is inconsistent as hell! Try playing it yourself and see how many times you pull off that combo on turn 5.

Not only is it a low probability of you drawing this combo by turn 5, the fact that you do nothing for 4 turns (if you are even lucky enough to pull a giant by then) leaves you massively open to aggro decks. Zoo lock annihilates this deck because its just too fast for it, token druid with half decent draw can beat it fairly easily and secret hunter absolutely destroys it.

And yet people still complain because it has an, admittedly, very strong combo, completely forgetting that it’s also an extremely hit and miss combo. Yes, it feels extremely strong when they pull it off, but they only pull it off probably 1 in 5 games on average…hardly game breaking

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11

so inconsistent its the most rapresented deck in this week of grandmasters.

I’m ok admitting i’m slighly wrong with the naga sea witch comparison, but when a guy with mediv’s avatar comes and says the deck its inconsistent I just don’t even know what to think.

12

My least played class by far is shaman…

13

And yet it has a <50% winrate….so yes, it’s inconsistent, if it was consistent with that kind of a power combo it’s win rate would be MUCH higher.

I have also played several iterations of this mage deck and I know how inconsistent it can be, it’s a slave to bad card draw and gets smashed by fast decks

14

Is it a counter for a strong archetype? If yes, it’s a great reason to be most represented deck. We’ve seen this happen many times: Crystal Rogue, Big Mage, Renolock all countered specific powerful archetypes or archetype families and were used with some success in tournaments.

It’s representation in tournaments is not correlated with it’s power or representation on the ladder. From interviews I saw, there are two schools of tournament line-up: bring the top decks + tech cards or; counter the strongest line-up of decks. Some of the top players go through huge analysis to predict the tournament meta knowing it is different from the ladder meta. This makes some decks and archetypes rise in popularity during the tournaments.

Fun fact: if bad decks that are great counters perform well in tournaments, they tend to appear more on the ladder in the week after. Ask Thijs and his Anyfin Paladin.