How One Card Made The Best Deck

making a brand new archetype in hearthstone work can be extremely challenging from a developer standpoint not only do you need a interesting idea but the deck has to be good enough to perform in a meta game take lebron paladin for example not only did you need the librarians like liebrem of wisdom and librium of hope you also needed the librem discounters like elder attendant and elder trueseeker but you also needed a big payoff card like lady liadrin and compared to most decks this isn't out of the ordinary like deathrattle demon hunter has the same idea and so does hero power mage all of these cards make a brand new archetype for their class but there are a couple of outliers when it comes down to hearthstone history where one card made a deck all on its own before we get to that i want to talk about one deck in particular that drastically improved with a singular card paladin was a class that always had aggressive style decks back in hearthstone classic with one of them being shocking and as expansions were released a lot of the time piloted would still try an aggressive style deck because paladin had a lot of good tools for early aggression like a venge in competitive spirits and on top of that divine favor was super good about refilling your hand but unlike a lot of other aggressive decks paladin didn't really have a great finisher it always felt like you could do extremely well in the early game but with one aoe or just a huge tempo swing paladin was kind of out of the game paladin also lacked a way to do burst damage from hand because all they really had was true silver champion blessing of kings with a charge minion and avenging wrath that is until the grand tournament was released and paladin arguably got their best finisher we have seen till this day mysterious challenger now if you didn't have the pleasure of playing against mysterious challenger it was a six mana six six palleted minion battlecry pull one of each secret from your deck into the battlefield unlike previous aggro pallet index which consistently had to try to fight and maintain the board to actually win a game secret paladin can cement its dominance on board by simply playing mysterious challenger not only was mysterious challenger a66 but on top of that it would draw secrets from your deck and put them into place so that you would get even more stats than a 66 but it would draw secrets and put them in play for you this was a tempo monster on top of being a finisher in its own right mysterious challenger also helped set up the game ending curve that was mysterious challenger into dr boom into tyrion ring now it's very easy to look at this deck and be like mysterious challenger didn't really make this deck what are you talking about there was already an archetype there but mysterious challenger on its own transitioned the agropaladin from a low-costed minion deck with divine favor into an insane mid-range deck that basically had the best curve at the time and make no mistake this is still a mid-range deck but this is definitely the most aggressive version of mid-range that we probably have ever seen kind of like freeze mage was a combo deck but still kind of a control deck this deck still used a lot of the aggro elements from angro paladin like muster for battle in secret keeper but improved the matchup spread by quite a lot and finally had a card that can win a game for them another minor example of this is tunnel trog for mittering shaman the card on its own did not really make the archetype but it definitely pushed the archetype into a meta deck because they were waiting for this one particular card that was good in the early game that they can build their wing condition off of and we kind of see this a lot more with the more recent expansions and buffs like we saw with wildfire to make hero power mage a better deck and like we saw with the buffs to death rattle demon hunter in order for that deck to become a better archetype and the most extreme version of this was with the undertaker for the death rattle hunter aggro deck that we saw in curse of knox ramus thank god they don't push it to that extent because that was atrocious but there is one card that has single-handedly made a brand new archetype form when it was released at the release of the grand tournament like we just talked about mysterious challenger was kind of doing disgusting things to the meta game but we were patiently waiting for our next release of new content for hearthstone and randomly out of nowhere in november of the same year we got the league of explorers which was a really fun adventure but also had a lot of really powerful cards but one card stood above the rest and literally defined a brand new archetype that we have never seen in hearthstone which was called highlander and that card that single-handedly brought this archetype to existence was reno jackson reno jackson is a six mana four six neutral legendary battlecry if your deck has no duplicates fully heal your hero we have never seen a card that was this powerful that birthed an archetype from the ground up because reno jackson literally made the highlander deck on its own even though the combination of 29 other cards was important this card was the sole reason why you would do this not only was reno making a competitive deck in hearthstone but the aspect of building a deck of one of cards was also extremely enticing and most people did find that a lot of fun and the thing was at the time control decks usually only ran one of cards because while there was only certain situations where you only needed one copy of a specific card and the question often asked with a card like reno jackson is it worth running a handful of sub optimal cards if it enables a single card to do something that is insanely powerful and some might call broken this card was so good that some people even tried putting it into aggro decks so you have a better time against other aggro slash mid-range decks and even though this deck was extremely powerful i think a lot of people really enjoyed reno for the first time because it was like the least consistent deck compared to what the meta game was before it even though when you made a highlander deck the main win condition was always the same due to how inconsistent the deck was it led to a lot more interesting and fun experiences that you've never seen before in hearthstone the other really good thing about building an archetype like this is that as more cards got introduced into the format means the more interesting ways you can build highlander decks and they even added on to this with the mean streets of gadgets and expansion showcasing kazakus inc master solia for mage cruel the unshackled for warlock and raza the chain for priest and because people liked this archetype so much that when all of those cards rotated to wild they brought them back and savers of uldum with the reintroduction of reno but more importantly showing us zephyrus the great and that's the really interesting thing about reno jackson and the rest of the highlander cards is that these cards were so powerful that people were willing to make their deck less consistent for a huge payoff now as awesome as the highlander archetype can be it begs the question of is this a well-designed card or not see the issue is is that you have to put it into a deck that has absolutely no duplicates and if you're putting it into a deck that has no duplicates that means there's less redundancy less card draw potentially and when you actually end up drawing this huge payoff it feels way worse for your opponent than it ever has before but on the plus side it enables a really interesting archetype that allows creative deck building and fine tuning for each meta let me know with a comment down below what you think about highlander decks are they good or bad for hearthstone i hope you ended up enjoying the video and if you did make sure you subscribe and 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Channel: Rarran

Views: 58,063

Keywords: hearthstone, hearthstone gameplay, hs, hs gameplay, best hearthstone deck, hearthstone new, hs new, hearthstone expansion, hearthstone cards, Hearthstone cards you forgot existed, hs cards you forgot existed, hearthstone alterac valley, hearthstone best legendary to craft, hearthstone best cards, hearthstone battlegrounds, hearthstone power creep, zeddy hearthstone, How One Card Can Make An Entire Deck

Id: wcAgbQsAAtk

Length: 8min 4sec (484 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022