How to win at the current “vanilla” but fast-paced Hearthstone Battlegrounds meta
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The current Hearthstone Battlegrounds metagame — that is, which minions and heroes people are picking to win at the moment — is fast and furious, since this season doesn’t have any extra features (such as Quests, Trinkets, or Buddies) to work as catch-up mechanics. This has led to fast games where players are almost ignoring the early stages of a match and racing to scale up their boards as soon as possible, which means that games can often snowball out of control in favor of whoever gets the luckiest offerings from Bob’s Tavern.
If I’m being perfectly honest, this is not the most fun environment to play the game we’ve ever had — many players have been complaining about the staleness of games currently, and really miss those extra mechanics that would add a healthy dose of spice to the whole thing. But this is what we have for now, and if you want to win, you might want to know what to play — and what to avoid — in the Battlegrounds.
Elementals, Quilboar, and Mechs dominate the battlegrounds currently
Elementals are still the strongest composition in the game, although no longer as dominant as they were a few months ago. Ultraviolet Ascendant is the way to play them now; old staples like Nomi are simply too slow for the current meta. You’ll use the powerful Meteorite Crasher combined with cards like your Ballers to scale up early on, and then cycle through as many Elementals per turn as possible once Ultraviolet is down. It’s relatively easy to play, and yields excellent results.
Quilboar were dominant early in the season, but have since been settled in a nice second place. Your Blood Gems are buffed by Gem Day now, so you’ll be attempting to generate that spell as many times as possible through cards like Gem Rat. You really need to get your Blood Gems up as early (and constantly) as possible, and build a big, beefy board — but keep in mind that you don’t have many ways to use Divine Shield or Reborn, so you’re very much vulnerable to Venomous minions and other “instant-kill” effects. You need to dominate early with raw stats.
Mechs can often become the most powerful comp in a game, and have the versatility of counting on multiple ways to play: both Divine Shields and Magnetics work, though you want to make sure to pick one path and commit to it. Outside of those, Automatons still work very well with specific heroes, like The Great Akazamzarak and Teron Gorefiend, whose hero powers allow you to re-summon your Automatons multiple times per combat.
But Murlocs, Undead, Pirates, and Beasts aren’t that far behind, and can still win games
Murlocs are a force to be reckoned with, having several viable strategies: keywords, Battlecry buffing, and Venomous are all possible ways to build your board. Murlocs simply have a lot of very good minions, such as ‘Loc Prince and Neon Agent, that even non-Murloc compositions can make good use of. But keep in mind that the old tried and true strategy of buffing Murlocs in your hand and summoning them in combat is totally gone right now.
Undead are still good and also have multiple viable ways to work with. One of the most popular ones makes use of Thundering Abomination placed in the back, and minions that summon a ton of other minions like Cadaver Caretaker in the front. Summoning Undead tokens in combat that have low health but very high Attack is the way to win, and abusing your Deathrattle and Reborn effects certainly helps you get there. Undead is not overpowered, but solid enough.
Pirates require some effort to work, though not as much as in previous versions. You’re looking into generating lots of extra gold, and just the act of spending that gold is enough to buff your Pirates now, so things have been a little simplified — you don’t need to cycle through buying and selling as many minions as you did before. Still, it’s not the easiest comp to play, and the effort doesn’t always pay.
Beasts are probably the minion type that has changed the most throughout the years, whether they were getting buffs during combat, summoning other beasts, or just leapfrogging their way to victory. Right now, the name of the game is summoning beetles, and then summoning even bigger beetles, over and over again. There is probably no composition in the game at the moment to which Rivendare isn’t more crucial than Beasts. If you get a good beetle-making engine going, it can be tough to take the win from you — other than an Elemental or Quilboar player with ridiculously high stats, that is.
Dragons, Naga, and Demons can still work, but are certainly lagging behind
Dragons find themselves in a weird place where none of their current strategies — whether it’s Battlecries, End of Turn effects, or Start of Turn effects — seem to scale as quickly as other compositions do, and they still have leftover minions from their previous playstyle, such as Persistent Poet, but their “persistent combat buffs” package doesn’t have enough left to really work anymore. You can make it work sometimes, but it’s going to be a struggle to get there.
Naga have exactly one way to work at the moment, and that’s Groundbreaker, which asks a lot of you: you need to play lots of spells throughout the game, and you need to cycle through a lot of Naga minions after Groundbreaker, a Tier 6 minion, is already on your board. Combine those requirements with undertuned stats, and it’s a difficult composition to make work outside of specific heroes like Queen Azshara.
Demons are definitely the hardest minion type to make work in the game at the moment. Big Brother and Batty Terrorguard are pretty much your only viable way to play. Which means you’ll need to both cast lots of Tavern Spells (to make your Demons consume other minions) and cycle through demons — and the two activities are often awkward to do at the same time. Not to mention, consuming minions used to be a mostly passive thing in the past, but now you have to work hard to get the same results.
Whether we like the current meta or not, this is a brief picture of what the Battlegrounds offer us at the moment. Elementals and Mechs are the safest ways to win games right now, with Quilboars also up there but requiring a little more thought and planning. The crucial factor to determine who ends up at the top seems to be who can scale up their board the quickest, so keep that in mind — and if that’s not to your taste, we can only hope that the next Season will re-add some cool mechanics to the game. I really hope we never get a “vanilla” Season like this again!
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