If no one is building any decks?
I came back to try HS after some 5 years and omg. Playing for 5 days now, 3 hours a day or so, and I have seen a grand total of 5 decks - Imp Warlock, Skeleton mage, Face hunter, big beast hunter and whelp/denatrius druid. Everyone are playing it because hsreplay says it’s meta. So everyone went, copied deck to clipboard and that’s it. I already know how those decks work, what to do, and what to expect.
Before it was 10x more variety, I still remember playing full season start to finish and still not knowing the combos, win conditions, was still surprised by different decks.
Also what I noticed it’s almost never a close, thought out game. You either get absolutely wrecked, or you absolutely wreck them. I had only one “close” game vs a Druid, where it wasn’t really clear who was gonna win till the end, but I guess that’s because he never drew denatrius.
WTF happened? Stuck @ gold 6-7 btw. Maybe more variety on higher rating?
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If they werent checking hsreplay they would adapt their decks to what was being played and end up with the meta we have now itd just take longer
Just rose tinted glasses, at no point has there been 20+ meta archetypes, let alone 50.
Netdecks are unavoidable in any popular card game. They’ve been there since the beginning.
Tbf even without HSReplay, the decks you mentioned would still be being played. Imp/Skeleton have new legendaries that tell you to use imps/skeletons. Denatrius wants you to go wide. Beast Hunter was already no.1. Finally Face Hunter is probably the least netdeck deck as it’s just what you play every expansion to get cheap wins before players understand how to optimally play the new decks.
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And theres always gonna be a class on top that feels bad to face
maybe, but it wasn’t THAT bad.
There are 5 decks in play right now.
Quest Priest is what I’ve faced the most, but that’s at even lower mmr (I’ve won enough but been fooling around doing achievements).
Maybe it’s because I’ve seen way worse times (TGT launch, 50% secret Paladin, Ashes launch 90% DH, DruidStone where I personally faced 18 out of 20 Druids). But it hasn’t felt particularly strange for a post launch pre nerf period. My mmr being too low to face the implocks is probably helping 
That’s why I wish Hearthstone would be more like Slay the Spire.
Imagine if it would play more like that. Especially redrawing your hand each turn is a big deal since you get faster through your deck, having more options to play any given card. And since it’s always a fresh, new hand you constantly have to think and adapt to the situation which would make it feel much more interesting, with much more variety. Even games against more boring net-decks would feel much more diverse that way.
The only problem is of course that the design is very single player focused. How would you even make a proper multi player game out of it? But that would be amazing: Slay the Spire fused with Hearthstone.
The best you can do right now is to find friends and join groups so that you can play friendly matches with people more like you that also don’t focus on the competitive side too much. Needless to say, I also wish there would be better social functions for that since just an hour or two ago I tried calling out to play friendly games in my group of only 98 other people (maybe 10 or so online) and got - as expected - no response.
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This has felt like the most balanced and varied meta in years imho
Claiming only 5 decks are meta isn’t quite true also. Implock is the one deck I’ve seen being mass played, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t only 5 meta decks.
Besides implock, I’ve come across a fair few curselocks too. Hunter also has 2, beast and face, they are just kinda similar so you’re probably only counting them as 1.
Seeing plenty of pally decks, skele mage as you’ve mentioned. I’ve seen both ramp and deathrattle druids being played. Quest priest is still kinda popular and evolve shaman is doing ok too so that’s at least 9-10 decks archetypes floating around the meta right now.
But, yes, you are also going to come across lots of the same decks at lower rankings because all most players care about at that stage is getting fast wins to climb the ladder as quickly as possible so they naturally gravitate to the decks that give them cheap quick wins. Normally, diamond and above varies a lot more as the better players look for decks that counter the most popular ones to take advantage of them.
I believe evolve shaman semi-counters implock so you may see more of them as you get higher.
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