Small rant about aggro always prevailing the meta

I think two factors play into Control players thinking that Control decks are superior:

  1. Getting zerged down by a "brainless deck" feels bad, especially when the plays appear so straightforward.

  2. Longer games with more cards in hand leaves more options available as a whole, which means you're relying more on decision making than luck-of-the-draw.

There are problems with this line of thinking, however. First, reactive cards in your hand that have nothing to react to are not really options at all. Second, you don't get to see what the other side looks like when it is in a mirror match-up, you only see what Aggro does to you as the Control player.

And let's make no mistake. Aggro vs Control is not a brainless player versus a skilled player. It's two brainless sides, because each side knows exactly what they need to do to win as soon as they know what their opponent's deck is doing. Control has to survive, Aggro has to kill. And your decisions always funnel down to doing those things to the best of your ability.

Make it a Control mirror match-up and often Freeze Mage players are using Blizzards on empty boards just so they have space in their hand for their next card draw. And let's not get into how pissed off people were with Archivist Elysiana because games would go on for so ridiculously long, and because the match boiled down to if you ran the Baleful Banker or not.

Compared to something like Zoolock mirror matches? The situation changes every turn, you're constantly vying for the board, and each draw is crucially important. There are constantly genuine choices to make for whether you take the hard aggression approach and let them make the trades, or if you continue to try and maintain board presence.

Aggro decks are much more fun to play for me because they are proactive, and because they have many more match-ups that are genuinely interesting. When playing against a Control player I can at least try to play around or against a Control player's removal to an extent - while it's not exactly "high skill" of them to just, well, have that removal. And again, unlike Control mirrors, the aggro mirror match-up is generally exciting.

Generally speaking though it's laughable if anyone tries to ride a high horse on which deck type is more skilled in Hearthstone. Hearthstone as an eSport is not as difficult as MTG appears to be, and it certainly isn't compared to just about any other video game genre out there that sees play. Congratulations if you think you're more skilled than an Aggro player, /r/starcraft, /r/overwatch, /r/leagueoflegends, and /r/csgo would love to hear about how good you are.

That may sound harsh, but that is what it is. I love the content that lots of players put out there for Hearthstone, and I love the game itself. But I'm not going to delude myself into thinking it's a particularly difficult video game.

/r/hearthstone Thread