Hitting Legend - Teching against the Meta

I’ve always told myself that one month I’d sit down and make the grind to legend in Hearthstone. This month marked the release of Journey to Un’Goro and I ended up playing a bunch of Hearthstone, to the expense of homework, and ended up hitting legend. I’ve really enjoyed the post-release meta this month, from the experimental phase to the meta finally stabilizing a little. The meta’s diverse and that gives the game a feeling of additional complexity, even if none of the core mechanics have changed very much.

I played Hunter from rank 5 to legend. This was because of a lot of reasons. I don’t have a complete collection of cards, especially newer legendaries and epics. Hunter games are fast, making the grind less time intense. Finally, Hunter gave me the unique ability to tech incredibly hard against the rank 5-1 meta. When I started the grind a week ago, the top 5 ranks were supposedly dominated by Paladin and Mage. This led DisguisedToast to play a very entertaining-to-watch Hunter deck with Hungry Crab and Eater of Secrets. It had a surprisingly high win rate, even when he conceded every game not against Paladin and Mage. I started running a similar list to DisguisedToast.

On the day I made the final push to legend, I checked the live stats reported by Data Reaper. It showed that the top classes being played were Paladin, Warrior (both pirate and taunt), Rogue, Hunter, and Mage. I knew that the Rogue matchup was in my favor. Given DisguisedToast’s success, I figured that I could tech a Hunter against the other matchups to swing them in my favor. I came up with the following list, partly inspired by DisguisedToast and partly inspired by Nishikun’s list.

I call it Hate Hunter because of all the hate cards it runs. 2 Hungry Crabs and Tol’vir Warden to tech against the Paladin matchup. 2 Golakka Crawlers to tech against the pirate Warrior matchup. Stampeding Kodo and Deadly Shot to tech against the taunt Warrior matchup and kill any Finja’s. I figured with this suite of tech cards, I would be able to be slightly favored in each of these matchups, which should be enough to push me over if I draw well. And it certainly did help.

Now that I’ve hit legend, I can cross off one more requirement towards getting hired by Blizzard^^.