Dynamic meta: Hearthstone's Priest deck needs overhaul

One thing collectible/trading card games require over the long haul is a sense of change. Once the most powerful interactions and combinations in a particular set of cards have been studied and refined over weeks or months, the competitive environment becomes increasingly stale and repetitive. Blizzard's latest expansion pack, One Night in Karazhan, will shake up the meta in still-unknown ways, but while the shape of the heap remains unknown, the class that appears to remain at the bottom of it is Priest. The weakest class in Hearthstone at the moment, Priest is in need of a major overhaul, one that is more necessary than any class at any time in the game's brief history.

Yes, this time is different

By the peculiar demands of logic, one class has to be the worst. It's a metaphysical impossibility for every class to be above average, but what makes Priest so different this time? In the past, there have been weak classes, such as Shaman prior to League of Explorers, Rogue in those initial dark, confusing days after the Gadgetzan Auctioneer nerf, or Hunter before everyone figured out that a mediocre class became a solid one when you have Call of the Wild in the deck.

What made those situations different is that those classes had wide-enough design spaces that the spirit of experimentation never got completely drained from the pros and the hardcore players. Shaman was in a rut, but one that still encouraged testing and refining of Mech Shaman or Malygos Shaman or Murloc Shaman. Lock and Load Hunter and Mech Rogue turned out not to be competitive -- at least not at the initial stages for the former -- but you at least had to try out some of these archetypes and there was some surprise value at times.

Priest, however, essentially plays like a weaker version of Priest from two years ago. I've reviewed the deck lists for about a hundred players for this weekend's Hearthstone Championship Tour European Summer preliminaries and there's not a Priest to be seen, a common situation since the Old Gods meta solidified in May.

Dawid "Zetalot" Skalski, very possibly the Hearthstone pro that has played the most Priest games and is known for varied Priest builds on ladder, spent much of July just trying to get to legend. When you've lost Anduin-fan Jason "Amaz" Chan, you know Priest is in a weak place.

Blizzard's Team 5, the gang behind Hearthstone, are not unaware of the straits the class finds itself in. "I think one of the messages to get across is that we love Priest and we want to see Priest succeed as much as the Priest players do," said Dean Ayala, talking to ESPN.com in a phone interview. "A lot of people are playing Dragon Priest and that deck isn't necessarily all the way there, but we're trying add more pieces like Book Wyrm to increase the power level of that deck."

Karazhan can't save priest

With the opportunity a new cardset brings, Priest did not get any tools that can flip this script. Priest of the Feast, looked at in isolation, is a very solid card, a 3/6 with an effect for four-mana. But Priest has a lot of four-mana cards, with interesting effects, but none have been cards to build a deck around, simply because none of them get Priest out of the rut of falling behind early, struggling to stay on board during the mid-game, and either running out of removal when the opponent's big threats come into play or getting crushed by burst damage.

Priest's offerings were so weak that one of the three new class cards, the much-panned Purify, was actually removed from Arena, the first time a card has ever been shut out of the Arena format simply for being weak (C'Thun cards are also not in Arena, but because of the synergy with the C'Thun card that you wouldn't be able to reliably draft).

Priest is a reactive class in a tempo world

When discussing Hearthstone and many other similar types of games, the concept of tempo, or time, is very important. While Hearthstone doesn't have an actual clock, time is still a key factor in the sense that mana resources are limited and you want to get your plan in motion before the opponent gets theirs. What made Secret Paladin such an imposing deck pre-Standard was the ability to play powerful card after powerful card with efficient mana use and the Mysterious Challenger and the secrets forcing the opponent off the initiative.

Priest's card set doesn't allow any deck archetypes that can do similar. Museum Curator, a two-mana 1/2 that allows you to Discover a Deathrattle card, is a source of value, but it puts you at an instant board disadvantage against most of the popular two-drops in the game. Shifting Shade serves as pseudo-card draw, but its 4/3 body is easily removed by most classes, including many two-mana cards. The Darkshire Alchemist's five-health Battlecry has utility, but it's 4/5 body is quite weak for the five mana it costs; even four-mana 4/5s only really see constructed play if they have a significant effect above-and-beyond their statline.

Ayala feels that Priest being a reactive class doesn't necessarily restrict the design potential. "We don't have a problem giving Priest proactive cards. I think a lot of their kit right now, such as Cabal Shadow Priest, Shadow Madness, and Holy Nova, you could say those are reactive cards. A lot of those pieces are really cool and fit Priest's flavor but I don't think this really restricts us. We're not thinking when we're sitting around that we can only make reactive cards. The Priest's core is reactive, but the meta will define whether that is strong or not."

Priest's comeback cards are extremely situational

Priest does have removal cards, an absolute necessity when frequently playing-from-behind, but they're generally extremely situational, many with quite onerous demands to trigger. Cards like Shadow Word: Pain and Shadow Word: Death, need the target to have specific attack ranges, Shadow Word: Horror only removes minions with 2 or less attack, and Excavated Evil requires you to destroy your own board as well. Other combinations, like Auchenai Soulpriest/Circle of Healing, require a very specific card combo. Priest does have Entomb for six mana, but by that point, it's very often too little, too late.

Now compare these to the removal of the other classes that tend towards control-builds. Warrior has a one-mana Execute that works on any damaged minion. Mage has multiple spells that attack all minions. Paladin's Consecration is useful against aggro decks and with Equality, against control decks, no conditions attached.

A class that usually plays from behind and doesn't have a lot of burst needs powerful, versatile comeback mechanisms. Priest doesn't.

The standard format makes priest's problems long-term

By using the Basic/Classic set as the set of cards that will persist rather than a tailored set of "core" cards that work for a wide variety of archetypes means that even if you fix Priest in this expansion or the next one and make it into a top-tier class, as soon as those cards rotate out of the format, Priest's structural problems remain. What this means is that if Blizzard manages to fix the Priest issues, Blizzard essentially has to fix them again every few expansions because once the powerful cards rotate out, Priest goes right back to being a reactive class with underpowered cards.

The loss of the Goblins vs. Gnomes card highlight this effect. What was keeping the Priest control decks relevant prior to the card rotation was an array of cards like Zombie Chow, Dark Cultist, Velen's Chosen, and Lightbomb, that all furthered Priest's win condition: getting a foothold on the board so that the late game cards actually mattered. And when Priest lost those cards, nothing replaced their role. Other classes lost key cards as well, but all of them got new cards that either served as worthy successors or opened up the class in a new direction.

Ayala shared an optimistic note on this issue, noting that many times, it's only taken a few cards to change the trajectory on a class. "You'd be very surprised, in terms of how very few cards it takes. Usually you can put a couple of cards in the right places in a particular class and they turn out to be just fine, in terms of win rate," said Ayala.

"In terms of the deck being fun and people actually wanting to play them is a different and more difficult challenge. But for Priest right now, I enjoy playing the class and don't feel too design-restricted in terms of being able to give them certain cards."