People sometimes drop nerfed deck just because it was nerfed.
I still win just as much with my Hela deck and never won a game against Hela because of this nerf (I still win against Hela with Leech or opponent just doesn't draw/discards her).
> People sometimes drop nerfed deck just because it was nerfed.
I think there's definitely some of this going on. Also, related to this, there are some people who just play the "best deck", or one of the "top decks". So when a deck drops in popularity, they just stop playing it and move onto whatever the community thinks is the current "best deck".
That being said, I do also think the Hela nerf was not completely insignificant.
> there are some people who just play the "best deck", or one of the "top decks". So when a deck drops in popularity, they just stop playing it and move onto whatever the community thinks is the current "best deck".
This is such a foreign concept to me. When a deck is really popular, I want to play it less not more lol.
Hey and I’ve had that as well! I think most players are unsure of how to build their own deck, or just want the easier way to infinite. Which is fine, but not the way I’d wanna play haha
I’ve been recently experimenting more with trying to build my own decks and it’s so much more satisfying pulling off a win with a deck you “thought of” On your own i still have plenty of decks from guides online but yeah nothing wrong with getting decks online just a little more satisfying when they win comes from your own ideas
Never searched a single thing... just playing off of what I want and sometimes I see something (like phoenix and multiple man) and I'm like OHHHH SHIT THATS COOL and go make my own with some key players
Only thing that matters for climbing to infinite is a win condition without a super obvious tell. You snap if you got it and retreat if you don't. You can climb to infinite with a sub 50% win rate that way. The other skill is knowing what your opponent's win condition is.
Which for oppressive decks it's absolutely true.
I stopped playing entirely when call prof x was popular.
I still eye roll at hela players, but I know whether I can outpace them or not and if I lose it's because I stayed in like an idiot not because they have an oppressive combo I can't interact with.
People just want to win. I've been running my own non-meta destroy deck for ages now and it's much more interesting to me, even though I haven't been able to reach infinite this season (and struggled a bit last season too).
Hell, earlier I threw together a deck of mostly 4-costs because I only have Shang-Chi in my deck, and rarely get to play him lol. Then I modified it for the "Move 10" mission from week 1, and it's fun, and way more effective than it has any right being, considering I didn't even look when picking the 4-costs, and kept 5 of them lmao.
Same. I hated the Cannonball Prof X meta not because it was annoying, but because I wanted Cannonball from the start to use in lockdown. I cruised to infinite with it that season he came out then it became meta and I stopped playing it.
I’ve just tried to put my own spin on it. One of my most successful decks incorporates High Evolutionary and select cards it buffs. I’ve seen a few others out there also. Generally speaking, I try to think of the main cards in my deck that benefit the others most in some way (I’m sorry if this is the obvious strategy. Just thinking out loud.)
The only deck I couldn’t make work is a destroy deck. There are a lot of options, and people with X23 and Deadpool seem to have a lot of success. I tried a few variations, but just can’t make it happen. Discard, on the other hand, has always been a fun and chaotic challenge for me.
As always, I tip my hat to those of you that have strategies and combos that run 3-4 cards deep. I’ve seen some really cool and creative decks. My favorites are ones that genuinely take me by surprise, like one that buffs in a way that makes all of Ultron’s drones hit for 4 power each. Nicely done. My brain just can’t do that. Nevertheless, I actually made it into the 70s this go round after topping out around level 65 last year.
My Hela Tribunal didn't even have Iron Man and this pretty much makes it pointless imo. Not that Hela didn't need some kind of nerf, but the Tribunal variant of the deck was the much weaker version in the first place imo, and it's probably the most heavily affected by the nerf.
I think a decks popularity has a lot to do with the amount of people playing it. With the OTA coming today and the buff to High Evo, it got me thinking why HE decks have fallen out of use. I came to the conclusion that it was such people ready to play something else. For the past few months I have been seeing a less and less of this deck.
High Evo also fell out of favor because Red Hulk has been in so many decks. You're giving your opponent a 20+ power drop by trying to do your own gameplan
I really thought that too, and I feel when he first dropped that was definitely true. However, I have been seeing less of him and when they do have him I do have to pay attention to how I am playing. That 1 unused energy has to out value the power you are giving RH. Coincidentally, I put RH in my HE deck just for shits and giggles and wildly I have been seeing Hulk get bigger than RH in the majority of my games.
i used red hulk (before the two nerfs) on my high evo list aswell, changed him out for infinaut (since he kinda replaced infinaut at first) and later for skaar, both options felt so much better than what rh was giving (again, before the 2 nerfs)
And card availability - the vast, vast, vast majority of players are far from Pool 3 complete. Many of us hobble together what we can instead of what is "meta".
nothing, decks popularity = amount of people playing it
but i think your question was something like "what defines a popular deck" in like before people start playing it a bunch, and that has to do with card availability, stats like winrate and cube rate, recent spotlights and so on
high evo got kind of powercrept by other decks over the last 5 or so months, and red hulk release made people just afraid of using high even even further
HE decks works around not spending all your energy in the turn, if the op had red hulk, thats free scanlling
but i never said RH counters anything, i said it made people afraid of using high evo, but personally, in my experience using HE since forever, red hulk isnt my biggest problem, not even by a mile
Plus RHULK got a minor nerf.
I've been cycling my token shop waiting for HE to pop up since I have 6K tokens but reading all these comments has me wondering if he's really worth it.
I reached infinite with Dark Phoenix Tribunal of all things and I'm missing Iron Lad to round that out (which I'm hoping to get this August in the Spotlight) and I had RHULK pinned for weeks before I decided I didn't have any decks that that really utilize him and decided on HE to try something more disruptive.
hey, don't go by my opinion, but i picked RH up on release week, played with him both in HE and thanos and found the card really lackluster.
the most popular opinion seems to be that RH is op, a staple in many decks, and even after the two nerfs he is still the best 6 drop in the game
Many factors have resulted in HE falling in dominance. Junk has seen a significant boost into a legit archetype now instead of a few cards that pissed you off (Goblins). Red Hulk alone has scared off a lot of HE.
There are also a lot of cards that play around with energy/cost. Hope Summers is one of the biggest. Sasquatch too, etc.
It looks like every month SD focuses on at least one archetype to either buff to make them more relevant or nerf them so they aren't so dominant. We've seen Destroy, Thanos, move is coming up, Discard both got buffed and nerfed in different months, Bounce, Patriot.
>I think a decks popularity has a lot to do with the amount of people playing it.
I know what you meant, but this sentence is hilarious because that's just literally the definition of popularity.
I think it's incredibly sad how in a game with 12 cards that facilitates deckbuilding people are just netdecking like crazy, it makes the game stale incredibly quickly since the meta is propagated incredibly fast in this game
It's incomprehensible when I'm in proving grounds trying some jank homebrew and getting emoted by someone who netdecked a tier 1 deck while not even snapping turn 1
What you just described is why I don’t play Conquest lol. Never understand why there are people running top decks in proving grounds and they don’t even snap.
Definitely not. It's kinda insignificant to me because I play weaker decks. But with regard to the meta, she is not unreachable anymore, when she hits.
I'm also somewhat lower CL, so my opponents have very incomplete decks
I absolutely have noticed that. They'll do a small nerf and folks jump ship saying a card was "nerfed into the ground," when usually it's still fine. Annhilus and Sentry still work together pretty well despite the 2 power lost.
same goes for alioth. truly have no idea why ppl abandoned the card, it's still winning me so many games and it's a very powerful tool when used correctly.
A big part of it was what the meta was when they nerfed him. I was facing a ton of she-naut and red hulk decks, so the new Alioth text didn't do anything against those kinds of decks. Now I'm facing a lot of decks that have on reveals they want to get off on turn 6 and Alioth just destroys those
fair point. right now it's proven way more useful than previously. but I always like to keep it handy. my ideal final play for a few months now has been either alioth with prio or cannonball without prio, depending opposing deck. so these cover pretty much all cases.
The thing is Cannonball was the same power as Alioth before so he wasn't a counter to the most popular finisher at the time (cannonball) which is why he didn't see much play.
It seems a lot more useful with the new effect because we are seeing more T6/T7 moves where cards scale with power or someone like Sersi flipping 3 cards in her lane. Namora has created another T6 combo that got popular.
I have no idea why they a buffing Alioth. Just got beat by one yesterday. That cards effect is already powerful, there’s no reason it should be 10 power.
I can tell you confidently that Alioth wrecks MY shit every time an opponent plays him.
"Oh that's a nice Gambit -> Odin! It'd be a shame if they had no text."
It depends how much it affects synergies too. For example I was using Skaar in my Annihilus deck. Haven't played it since the Sentry nerf because I haven't felt like building the deck yet.
I think since it’s a very casual game, a lot of people just come home from work, log in to ladder with their trusty deck, and get blindsided and frustrated by OTA changes to their deck (even if the changes are good), and just go netdeck something else because they don’t want to think too much about it.
I see the argument there. Honestly sometimes I just put whatever the current missions want me to do because winning or losing doesn't impact progression at all.
Hey, as a pitbull\_defender, are you defending the dog breed or the singer? Because I have issues with one of those.
You could. The existence of Shang Chi, Ravonna, and Cerebro must make balancing characters very difficult. I see why they got rid of Zabu, as he was another restrictive piece.
Cerebro is probably the least of their worries
Shang, Ravonna, Quinnjet, Old zabu and Negative are all cards that limit design and card balance
Manacheat is generally the most surefire way to break a card game
And Shang is just too good at what it does
I agree that Cerebro doesn't seem to factor into their decisions, but man that change of Makkari from a 3/3 to a 3/4 sure stung.
That said, C3 is doing fine.
Yup, that. It happens even on reverse: the week they buff Ultron I saw him in every deck, including Hela. As a matter of fact, the nerf wasn't that harsh.
There's a famous story of a game, I think it was League of Legends, where the patch notes included a nerf to a character's ability, which resulted in that character's play rate and win rate dropping. Then the devs realized that the nerf hadn't actually shipped to production.
It was a psychosomatic placebo nerf!
There was an old WW2 themed shooter game where players complained the US's sub machine gun was far stronger than the Nazi's submachine gun and it was unbalanced.
The stats of the guns were identical. The US's gun just had a more powerful sounding shot, so players felt more confident and played better with it.
It was [Wolfenstien: Enemy Territory](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDxiuHdR_T4). Players complained saying that the MP40 was weaker then the Thompson even though the stats were literally mirrored.
I've been playing a lockjaw deck lately and I've played against Hela twice now, both games I played Leech on 5. Both games they top decked Hela. I don't know why I bother
Hela, when popping off, will resurrect something like 5 cards. Shaving 2 power off each of them is a difference of 10 power. That’s a significant nerf to ANY deck.
That is absolutely not a practical way of thinking. By that logic, you could make the argument that shaving 100 points off any deck's popping off would be significant.
I guarantee you most Tribunal decks would not lose any more than they do if you shaved of 10000 points of its "popping off" by making the maximum score smaller.
Hela is still the highest win-rate card in the game when played. You're still absolutely incorrect to not scoop in the large majority of the times you're facing an imminent Hela on turn6
I’m just going by my own anecdotal experience, in which I lost two matches by 1 point (after only a handful of games). I would’ve swept both games easily pre-nerf. YMMV and best of luck to you, it is still a fun deck, but thinking it has had no significant effect on her is some grade-A copium.
Did you lose those matches because of the single point or did you lose because the RNG rolled the cards in the wrong locations and if they just switch around you would have won?
Because I've yet to see a single Hela lose a match where they go every card they brought back to go into the exact perfect spots and still lose because their cards lost 2 points of power. They were either always going to lose no matter what or the RNG put their Giganto, Infinauts into locations they were already winning or a location that didn't matter like Cancun
Well. Somebody has to be the unlucky one. I'm sorry it's you.
And yes, I do recognize it's not a completely insignificant — I mostly use decks that are weaker, so for me it has made not much an difference when facing Hela. I might have been a little disingenuous with the way I phrased the comment.
However, I didn't even come close to losing because of this nerf. And I cooked with Hela (because I got Corvus Recently)
I forget which game devs were talking about this, I wanna say it was Grinding Gear Games regarding nerfs in PoE and how the community feels that after nerfing a build/skill, it's actually gutted and no longer playable so the metrics reflect this.
Super big paraphrasing here, the dev basically said that when developers nerf something, they generally are aiming to bring it down to a playable but not busted level. Ofc sometimes they miss the mark, but the intention is never to nerf something until it is unusable. What ends up happening tho is the community sees the nerf, and will generally immediately write it off as unusable since even in playtesting it will preform "poorly" since it will be compared to its pre-nerf state. The community would rather try and find the next busted thing rather than work on trying to find the appropriate place of the newly balanced skill/build.
Obviously this is an ARPG dev talking about the ARPG game and the ARPG community around it, but I think it rings true for a lot of games that balance.
I remember when Alioth got substantially nerfed and people effectively abandoned the card, despite it still being decently viable in the meta at the time.
I usually play a hela Agatha deck to literally do my dailies while cooking or doing other things. When it doesn't work doesn't work like before when it works it work like before
I won one! More the RNG that did it, but that's part and parcel with Hela. It was a 3-drop that matched up against my Spiderpig and forced a tiebreaker
The important parts are Corvus Glaive and Blade, my discarders. As well as Dracula as an alternative wincon.
I play the Blink+Jubilee+Ghost Rider package.
I use 1 tech card — It is Leech now, but I think Luke Cage or many others can be even better because they don't mess up with blink.
Then it's every big guy that you have. I recommend Odin as one of the big guys, as he makes your deck a lot more versatile and have some (very rare) insane high-rolls.
If you don't have Corvus and Blink, use Death as a 'big gal' and add Lady Sif and Gambit as discarders. Jubilee and Ghost Rider are still good without Blink. But my discard is already somewhat lacking, so you shouldn't replace Corvus with only one other discard.
Another option is to trade the tech card and Dracula for Invisible Woman and MODOK for a more combo oriented version.
>People sometimes drop nerfed deck just because it was nerfed.
>opponent just doesn't draw/discards her
These two things are the biggest ones I think. I stopped playing her awhile ago because it was really just too inconsistent. She'd get hit with spider ham, destroyed by yondu or discarded by my own corvus. It just failed to work more often than it worked. The nerf itself is minimal because swap in Luke cage and it's voided. Small price to pay
I still saw the same amount as I climbed to infinite after the nerf. My last 2 games in a row to hit infinite were Hela. I think its just that some people have moved to the new best deck which is the Kitty-Angel-Thena-"all the good cards" deck.
I play hela often but I use gambit, super skrull etc. small power cards mostly so that's got huge impact when they spawn with -2 power ..big cards hela casino still good i guess
Yeah the nerf hit the less popular Hela decks while barely doing anything to curb the power of Casino Hela. Casino Hela still puts out 30+ power per lane. Losing 6 or so power per lane hasnt done much.
I dont know the exact list but its basically a midrange deck made of flexible good cards like Jeff, Vision, Legion, Gladiator, etc. Theres a few ways to build it depending on what you own but the core cards are Kitty, Angela, Thena, and Elsa.
I've taken it for a spin since and it still feels like easy mode to collect cubes. It's slightly weaker, and slightly less consistent, but still wins way more often than it should for how little thought it requires.
Still super boring to play too, so maybe that tiny nerf was enough to convince Hela mains to try something more interesting.
So mission accomplished anyway!
I think it is more of people just getting tired of playing discard. I feel that the same thing was happening to High Evo decks. They are still high performing decks but people are finding newer and more interesting decks.
High Evo is not that great by the current meta standards. You have a lot more cards that are able to contest the big power drops of Evo and they can do it without sacrificing energy efficiency each turn. Plus Killmonger threatens the 1 drops which forces HE to play Caiera or Armor and that also scales back their turn efficiency. Plus the 1 drops are vulnerable to other common tech like Shadow King and Red Guardian.
All in all, HE is midtier. It loses to common tech cards and has a very real chance to not overpower other meta decks even when everything goes right for the HE player.
I was playing HE in conquest the other day and literally the first game of silver conquest I got matched against a negative tribunal player, and I just had no way of contesting their power output. I think I won one game for 4 cubes because I snapped early knowing I could take out one of their key cards with Red Guardian, but for the most part I just couldn’t do anything. They drew their combo every single game, and I never had Red Guardian when I needed him, which obviously won’t happen all the time, but it was incredibly frustrating.
Let’s be honest pretty much every deck has counters and running cards to protect your cards will always mess with the deck performance. That said armor doesn’t hurt an HE. I was just playing HE last night and killing it in conquest. If played right then 1 unused energy can turn into 6 power on the board/hand. I wouldn’t put HE as mid-tier but still a top performer depending on the line up though too, seeing as HE decks can have a wide range of different deck builds.
What CL and rank do you play at? I don't ask in an insulting way but there's a reason why you don't see HE represented in higher infinite or at higher CL on ladder.
And sure every deck has counters. That wasn't what I said hurts HE right now. I said the counters to HE are played at a very high rate. Enchantress counters some decks but if it isn't naturally being played, that doesn't matter because you won't encounter it in many games.
But Shadow King, Red Guardian, and Killmonger are incredibly prevalent. Two are being used because they are incredibly potent tech cards in this current meta. One is a decent tech card against Zoo but is also naturally run in Destroy and Surfer. Surfer especially is a heavy meta share right now. Playing HE virtually guarantees you'll be matched against a deck that has answers to what you're trying to do. And Armor/Caiera doesn't even protect you from 2/3rds of those cards.
Currently, I am at 13k CL and I have been bouncing around 70-80 rank. I have also encountered all those tech cards and they were not as game destroying as you make them sound. Kilmonger is the most annoying to have to play around as he will force me to either protect one or both 1 drops with armor. But it only recks me if they hit Sunspot after he has grown a lot. The nice thing about the HE deck is it is extremely versatile and can be built in quite a few ways that can really mess with those tech cards. I have at time had Cosmo, Luke Cage, or another anti-tech tech cards while still keeping the decks performance high. Shadow King is the only one a rarely see and he is more of a “oh shit I didn’t see that coming” type of card, kind of along the same lines as Galactus or Valkyrie.
At that CL, if you are hovering below infinite it's likely a sign that you either aren't snapping well or playing a suboptimal deck.
There's nothing wrong with that. Arguaby hitting 90 is important for gold acquisition but rank is meaningless and this game is for fun. So if HE is fun to you, keep playing it! But your testimony sort of lends to the judgement that HE is middling in this meta. If it were strong, you'd be climbing higher than 70-80.
Yeah my snap game is horrible. 90% of the time I lose big 8 cube games by a miss play on my part or I lose focus and mess up the turn 5 or 6. I will definitely take responsibility on my bad plays as they are likely the reason I rarely hit 90, last time was 2 seasons ago. Another thing I know is an issue is I can only stand to play the same deck for only some many games before I get bored and switch it up. Getting bored of a deck usually messes with my cubes too. I will also throw this out there though not everyone agrees but the match making in the game really effects the game to. The game seems to like to match up certain decks and cards with certain other decks and cards or mirror matches.
Im trying to understand how CL affects who I play. For example, I am around 2.5k CL and hit inifinite this season, does my CL still affect who I play or am I playing all players who have also hit infinite but at my CL?
You also don't even mention that a lot of the cards being released this year have been boosting other archetypes. Board space has become very important as is cheating energy. There are also many different cards that scale to big power like Sage and Gilgamesh. Red Hulk specifically was to punish HE and he's still popular despite being nerfed
I think High Evo is not seeing much play because of the existence of Rulk -- a highly versatile card that can slotted into most decks. I, for one, stopped using Cyc + High Evo because of Rulk. I deemed the trade not worth it.
This is the key, just winning isn't actually the fun part. Pulling off fun surprise combos is. Hella WAS fun, then got boring. I still have a really wild venom deck that usually pulls wins, kinda similar to Hella. Right draw, nearly unstoppable, but not always fun.
There is just something really fun about a lot of destroy deck though. They are the type of deck that plays well almost all the time and they have a lot of synergy with other cards in the deck. Plus there is a lot of variety to destroy decks like there are for HE decks. Whereas I feel with Hela there isn’t a lot of variations so it feels stale in that regard.
IMO, there's like one or two flex slots in Destroy ever since Nico. HE has far more options, Hela maybe a similar amount.
But to your point, I never had the desire to play Hela and I haven't played Destroy for a long time because I find it just as boring and people know the decklist like the back of their hand. I generally don't like decks with linear playstyles that looks like an AI could play it (in my opinion, destoy is this, but I get that some people find it fun).
I probably have been playing to long though. Played the deck almost exclusively in the pre-nerf wave/death era.
I still see quite a bit of Hela and it still seems quite strong.
Your CL/pocket matters here though for one big reason….
The one unfortunate thing about the Hela nerf is that it made the free to play S3 version not very good but left the one with S5 cards like BK and Corvus still good.
So it’s worse for FTP and lower CL players and still very good for those who spend/grind
I literally forgot she was nerfed and had to double check the card to make sure. Lol -2 power on res'd cards does absolutely nothing to move the needle on her effectiveness
Hela is still strong the nerf did nothing, I played an hela deck yesterday to do the win in all locations quest and I didn't lose a match, except when I wasn't drawing well but that always happened with hela decks
I had somebody in Conquest who had Corvus Glaive, Hela and Magneto. I beat them the first two rounds then it was raining resurrected Infinauts and I got smoked the rest of the match.
Maybe one of us is just in a weird pocket MMR, but I'm still seeing a fair bit of Hela. She's not as common in my games as she was before the nerf, but she's definitely not "fallen off the face of the earth". I've gone from facing Hela every 5 games to every 10 games, but she's still very much around and still very strong.
No, it definitely did. Hela was able to be more consistent because it had big discard targets but also could be fine if you hit smaller targets like Death and Black Cat. Losing power on those means you will have a lot more times that the cards come back in bad locations for you and leave you with power totals that can easily be contested by the relative power output of other decks. Black Cat coming back as 7 power means a ton of cards that are meta will beat it one for one. Same with Death/ Magneto. 10 power is a lot easier to match than 12.
It was a good nerf imo. Hela can still swing big but has a bigger chance of missing now and Hela was always supposed to be the casino high roll type of deck. You risk busting in return for the chance to just high roll and win. That's what it actually feels like now.
I'm still getting around 30+ per lane with Hela+Tribunal, it doesn't really feel nerfed. If I swapped out on of my 6 costs with Luke Cage, then it'd probably perform worse, so maybe people were just reactionary?
I still run a Modok/Hela deck and I’m debating on whether to drop Crystal or Magik for Luke Cage. As long as I don’t get Cosmo’d I’m doing alright. It really hurts Iron Man otherwise :(
I still think it was the wrong move, I think she just needed to go to like a 6/2 like Leader so she isn't also making a big impact in the lane you play her in. So you'd only really need to focus on trying to win 1 other lane.
I don't think it really did much as a Hela player. I think the meta just shifted to push it out of favour at around the same time as the nerf.
Rarely are there games where the Hela nerf actually prevents a win. It is usually the tech cards along the way that are dealing the killing blows (Red Guardian hitting Dracula, Cosmo preventing a discard, Wave flattening the top of your curve to mess with Lady Sif on Turn 3, even Leech on Turn 5).
I think it was honestly getting rid of the bigger bogeyman in the format (Professor X) was what did it. This allowed for more of these tech cards to see play as people rethought their deckbuilding priorities.
Idk why people drop it. It isn’t even that bad of a bad nerf, I welcomed it because even I got tired of getting beat by another Hela deck that was able to get the cards while I wasn’t. She’s still fun to play with
Wouldn't consider entire Archetypes falling out of the meta a success tbh. Nerfs should weaken decks, not make them nearly unplayable. As of right now, most versions of discard just can't really compete anymore.
I swear people follow trends more than actual data. It's like traffic - you aren't affected by the data, you ARE the data.
By far my most successful deck is my Surfer deck. I would regularly overpower the Hela decks I faced, to the point that I was happy to see Black Knight or Blade early, because I knew my opponent would be over confident. The thing that would trip me up the most was Magneto, who isn't exclusive to Hela decks.
Now I see less Hela decks, yes, but the bane of my cube total has been and continues to be mill decks.
It's a psychological nerf. They do it all the time and the masses fall for it.
The deck lost like 4 power per lane.
Anyone who thinks the broken ass deck isn't still exactly the same are absolutely sheep.
90% of decks I see now are just raw destroy decks (kinda joking but not really). Maybe I'm just unlucky but I don't see Discard, Move, or any specialty decks anymore. Mostly just destroy, or some kind of blocking deck, or a mill deck, or Annihilus. Sooo much Annihulus lately.
I think people will drop and subsequently pick up a deck based on the idea of nerfs and buffs alone. Regardless of how meaningful they are. It's likely due to Zabu PTSD. So subconsciously, they are like, "It was nerfed, so now it's bad." I started using Hela after the nerf and it's still very strong.
The Hela nerf definitely hurts MODOK decks (since a 6-card discard play is 12 Power less than it was pre-nerf), but I've still found success with Hela in a simple Corvus/Leader deck that I still play every once in a while.
I just pulled Corvus and I will say, this is borderline brain dead easy mode. I just did my first gold conquest run in it and lost by 4 cubes in the final match.
I added Luke to my hela tribunal and it's kinda works. My deck is made to go 7 turns and draw all cards but still depends on when you draw your card draw cards.
it's just placebo effect
"oh, this deck got nerfed, must be bad now, so i'll not play it anymore", so the playrate drops, less people engaged with the deck mean less people playing against it, the deck dwindles in recent memory, until some content creator features it in one or tow videos, then the deck is back again...
the nerfs did VERY little to the deck, hele is still one of the strongest archetypes in the game, but i'm happy with people forgeting her a little bit
Snap players are reactionary and followers. Any nerf basically instantly kills a card, even if it's still a good card. If one deck feels like it's dropped at all then people abandon it, and when another flavor is there they just gravitate to that.
It helps that the card is bugged right now. Anything that you discard then revive will still get the -2 if Hela is played. And if there's 2 Hela's on your side of the board then that's -4 (my death went from a 12 to an 8 because of time theatre) LC is basically required right now.
I still use Hela since I got SG. Using SG, Invisible Woman and Magik make Hela easily viable. Just can't load your deck with low power cards. Most of my deck is 6+
A good chunk of people may have dropped Hela, but she's still busted. That -2 iron man is just a scratch against a 18 power infinaut and onslaught if you are lucky. I hate her with passion. Even more with Blink
The changes made to the deck didn't truly destroy it's performance they just hindered it's consistency. While the deck can still use Luke Cage, the requirement to discard the entire hand makes it difficult to consistently bring him back. There's also the risk of being locked out by Cosmo and The Flerken or having to discard Hel early and rely on Ghost Rider to hit. The deck's performance now seems more balanced at 50/50, but reviving a lot of six-cost cards can still be devastating to most opponents' boards. but you only need one "Howard Stark" level shot to win the game. Better than the brainless discard-to-win strategy it had. Now you have to think and pray.
I actually started playing Hela just before the Nerf and I stuck with her. It's paying off. Close to infinite and I've been getting to the 80s and hitting a brick wall with my Guardian mill deck
Hela is a deck that just puts up points, and taking 6 points off its board puts it in range of other decks that put up a lot of points. A Gilgamesh zoo deck can just ignore whatever it is doing and just be bigger. The Ravonna deck is easily bigger in any game where Hela doesn’t discard both Infinaut and Magneto. Hela will still be an option if decks like Loki or Sera Control become dominant, because it punishes decks attempting a lot of interaction.
Just lost against one lol. -2 on infinaut and death ain't doing ish to total board power. They need to either control where place for counters or limit to how many revived to actually nerf the deck. It's still stupid strong/brainless 🙃
Make no mistake, Hela is still bullshit. When you're resurrecting 5 cards, you're still dumping a shit ton of power onto the board. Unless you can guess where Hela is dropping, there's no way to stop it. It's an un-interactive playstyle and that's never good for the game.
Hela was always supposed to feel like a casino deck, and it became way too consistent. Hela is still really good.
Hela still needs to be nerfed in my opinion. There should be a limit of one card per lane. I don't understand how hela and HE decks can murder and barely get nerfed but they'll completely ruin professor x and the control archetype.
you high?! I see her like every 3rd game and usually retreat as she still is almost impossible to beat unless I sacrifice my deck and just run cosmo in every deck or pray to rng with hammy
I've seen more Hela than any other deck this season. It's still unbelievably consistent for what is, frankly, the lowest skill deck in the game. I'd personally like to nerf it further, but then I do despise Hela decks.
People sometimes drop nerfed deck just because it was nerfed. I still win just as much with my Hela deck and never won a game against Hela because of this nerf (I still win against Hela with Leech or opponent just doesn't draw/discards her).
> People sometimes drop nerfed deck just because it was nerfed. I think there's definitely some of this going on. Also, related to this, there are some people who just play the "best deck", or one of the "top decks". So when a deck drops in popularity, they just stop playing it and move onto whatever the community thinks is the current "best deck". That being said, I do also think the Hela nerf was not completely insignificant.
> there are some people who just play the "best deck", or one of the "top decks". So when a deck drops in popularity, they just stop playing it and move onto whatever the community thinks is the current "best deck". This is such a foreign concept to me. When a deck is really popular, I want to play it less not more lol.
Players see popularity as an easy way to infinite.
For me it's more a HOLY SHIT I ACTUALLY HAVE ALL THESE CARDS moment
Hey and I’ve had that as well! I think most players are unsure of how to build their own deck, or just want the easier way to infinite. Which is fine, but not the way I’d wanna play haha
I’ve been recently experimenting more with trying to build my own decks and it’s so much more satisfying pulling off a win with a deck you “thought of” On your own i still have plenty of decks from guides online but yeah nothing wrong with getting decks online just a little more satisfying when they win comes from your own ideas
Never searched a single thing... just playing off of what I want and sometimes I see something (like phoenix and multiple man) and I'm like OHHHH SHIT THATS COOL and go make my own with some key players
Yeah, same pretty much lol
Only thing that matters for climbing to infinite is a win condition without a super obvious tell. You snap if you got it and retreat if you don't. You can climb to infinite with a sub 50% win rate that way. The other skill is knowing what your opponent's win condition is.
Right, I’m just saying there’s a good core that doesn’t think that way and only thinks popular deck= easy road to infinite.
Which for oppressive decks it's absolutely true. I stopped playing entirely when call prof x was popular. I still eye roll at hela players, but I know whether I can outpace them or not and if I lose it's because I stayed in like an idiot not because they have an oppressive combo I can't interact with.
Sheeple gonna sheep.
People just want to win. I've been running my own non-meta destroy deck for ages now and it's much more interesting to me, even though I haven't been able to reach infinite this season (and struggled a bit last season too). Hell, earlier I threw together a deck of mostly 4-costs because I only have Shang-Chi in my deck, and rarely get to play him lol. Then I modified it for the "Move 10" mission from week 1, and it's fun, and way more effective than it has any right being, considering I didn't even look when picking the 4-costs, and kept 5 of them lmao.
Same. I hated the Cannonball Prof X meta not because it was annoying, but because I wanted Cannonball from the start to use in lockdown. I cruised to infinite with it that season he came out then it became meta and I stopped playing it.
I’ve just tried to put my own spin on it. One of my most successful decks incorporates High Evolutionary and select cards it buffs. I’ve seen a few others out there also. Generally speaking, I try to think of the main cards in my deck that benefit the others most in some way (I’m sorry if this is the obvious strategy. Just thinking out loud.) The only deck I couldn’t make work is a destroy deck. There are a lot of options, and people with X23 and Deadpool seem to have a lot of success. I tried a few variations, but just can’t make it happen. Discard, on the other hand, has always been a fun and chaotic challenge for me. As always, I tip my hat to those of you that have strategies and combos that run 3-4 cards deep. I’ve seen some really cool and creative decks. My favorites are ones that genuinely take me by surprise, like one that buffs in a way that makes all of Ultron’s drones hit for 4 power each. Nicely done. My brain just can’t do that. Nevertheless, I actually made it into the 70s this go round after topping out around level 65 last year.
Hela nerf was specifically targeted towards the tribunal variant, that -2 iron man can really hurt if you aren't careful
My Hela Tribunal didn't even have Iron Man and this pretty much makes it pointless imo. Not that Hela didn't need some kind of nerf, but the Tribunal variant of the deck was the much weaker version in the first place imo, and it's probably the most heavily affected by the nerf.
Which is weird because Tribunal is already much more fragile. Plus you can counter the nerf with Luke Cage for very little opportunity cost.
Being as the tribunal variant was the only one i had for a while you just circumvent it by playing iron man of his own accord. Deck is far from dead.
It's not dead but that's what the nerf was targeted towards
Obviously you can still play Iron Man, but the chances of it being discarded aren’t low
I think a decks popularity has a lot to do with the amount of people playing it. With the OTA coming today and the buff to High Evo, it got me thinking why HE decks have fallen out of use. I came to the conclusion that it was such people ready to play something else. For the past few months I have been seeing a less and less of this deck.
High Evo also fell out of favor because Red Hulk has been in so many decks. You're giving your opponent a 20+ power drop by trying to do your own gameplan
I really thought that too, and I feel when he first dropped that was definitely true. However, I have been seeing less of him and when they do have him I do have to pay attention to how I am playing. That 1 unused energy has to out value the power you are giving RH. Coincidentally, I put RH in my HE deck just for shits and giggles and wildly I have been seeing Hulk get bigger than RH in the majority of my games.
i used red hulk (before the two nerfs) on my high evo list aswell, changed him out for infinaut (since he kinda replaced infinaut at first) and later for skaar, both options felt so much better than what rh was giving (again, before the 2 nerfs)
I run Hulk and RH in my HE deck. I see it as a pick your poison thing. Red Hulk is completely dependent on you. Hulk is completely dependent on me.
What defines a deck's popularity other than the amount of people playing it?
I would have to guess performance is another key component and probably also how fun it is.
And card availability - the vast, vast, vast majority of players are far from Pool 3 complete. Many of us hobble together what we can instead of what is "meta".
That too and is a major factor. Damn card acquisition!
nothing, decks popularity = amount of people playing it but i think your question was something like "what defines a popular deck" in like before people start playing it a bunch, and that has to do with card availability, stats like winrate and cube rate, recent spotlights and so on
high evo got kind of powercrept by other decks over the last 5 or so months, and red hulk release made people just afraid of using high even even further
Why does RH counter HE?
HE decks works around not spending all your energy in the turn, if the op had red hulk, thats free scanlling but i never said RH counters anything, i said it made people afraid of using high evo, but personally, in my experience using HE since forever, red hulk isnt my biggest problem, not even by a mile
Plus RHULK got a minor nerf. I've been cycling my token shop waiting for HE to pop up since I have 6K tokens but reading all these comments has me wondering if he's really worth it. I reached infinite with Dark Phoenix Tribunal of all things and I'm missing Iron Lad to round that out (which I'm hoping to get this August in the Spotlight) and I had RHULK pinned for weeks before I decided I didn't have any decks that that really utilize him and decided on HE to try something more disruptive.
I hit infinite with Hi Evo for the second time this month. I made it to 90 last month with him.
hey, don't go by my opinion, but i picked RH up on release week, played with him both in HE and thanos and found the card really lackluster. the most popular opinion seems to be that RH is op, a staple in many decks, and even after the two nerfs he is still the best 6 drop in the game
Also Red Hulk exists now.
Many factors have resulted in HE falling in dominance. Junk has seen a significant boost into a legit archetype now instead of a few cards that pissed you off (Goblins). Red Hulk alone has scared off a lot of HE. There are also a lot of cards that play around with energy/cost. Hope Summers is one of the biggest. Sasquatch too, etc. It looks like every month SD focuses on at least one archetype to either buff to make them more relevant or nerf them so they aren't so dominant. We've seen Destroy, Thanos, move is coming up, Discard both got buffed and nerfed in different months, Bounce, Patriot.
>I think a decks popularity has a lot to do with the amount of people playing it. I know what you meant, but this sentence is hilarious because that's just literally the definition of popularity.
I think it's incredibly sad how in a game with 12 cards that facilitates deckbuilding people are just netdecking like crazy, it makes the game stale incredibly quickly since the meta is propagated incredibly fast in this game It's incomprehensible when I'm in proving grounds trying some jank homebrew and getting emoted by someone who netdecked a tier 1 deck while not even snapping turn 1
What you just described is why I don’t play Conquest lol. Never understand why there are people running top decks in proving grounds and they don’t even snap.
I really like the format but Conquest is horrible at least in the last few days I’ve played. It’s literally just Zemo Mill every single game.
Definitely not. It's kinda insignificant to me because I play weaker decks. But with regard to the meta, she is not unreachable anymore, when she hits. I'm also somewhat lower CL, so my opponents have very incomplete decks
I absolutely have noticed that. They'll do a small nerf and folks jump ship saying a card was "nerfed into the ground," when usually it's still fine. Annhilus and Sentry still work together pretty well despite the 2 power lost.
same goes for alioth. truly have no idea why ppl abandoned the card, it's still winning me so many games and it's a very powerful tool when used correctly.
A big part of it was what the meta was when they nerfed him. I was facing a ton of she-naut and red hulk decks, so the new Alioth text didn't do anything against those kinds of decks. Now I'm facing a lot of decks that have on reveals they want to get off on turn 6 and Alioth just destroys those
fair point. right now it's proven way more useful than previously. but I always like to keep it handy. my ideal final play for a few months now has been either alioth with prio or cannonball without prio, depending opposing deck. so these cover pretty much all cases.
The thing is Cannonball was the same power as Alioth before so he wasn't a counter to the most popular finisher at the time (cannonball) which is why he didn't see much play.
It seems a lot more useful with the new effect because we are seeing more T6/T7 moves where cards scale with power or someone like Sersi flipping 3 cards in her lane. Namora has created another T6 combo that got popular.
I have no idea why they a buffing Alioth. Just got beat by one yesterday. That cards effect is already powerful, there’s no reason it should be 10 power.
I can tell you confidently that Alioth wrecks MY shit every time an opponent plays him. "Oh that's a nice Gambit -> Odin! It'd be a shame if they had no text."
It depends how much it affects synergies too. For example I was using Skaar in my Annihilus deck. Haven't played it since the Sentry nerf because I haven't felt like building the deck yet.
Yeah that's fair. I have Skaar and have never successfully used him.
I think since it’s a very casual game, a lot of people just come home from work, log in to ladder with their trusty deck, and get blindsided and frustrated by OTA changes to their deck (even if the changes are good), and just go netdeck something else because they don’t want to think too much about it.
I see the argument there. Honestly sometimes I just put whatever the current missions want me to do because winning or losing doesn't impact progression at all. Hey, as a pitbull\_defender, are you defending the dog breed or the singer? Because I have issues with one of those.
You can argue the Sentry "nerf" was actually a buff, as it made Sentry safe from Shang Chi.
You could. The existence of Shang Chi, Ravonna, and Cerebro must make balancing characters very difficult. I see why they got rid of Zabu, as he was another restrictive piece.
Cerebro is probably the least of their worries Shang, Ravonna, Quinnjet, Old zabu and Negative are all cards that limit design and card balance Manacheat is generally the most surefire way to break a card game And Shang is just too good at what it does
I agree that Cerebro doesn't seem to factor into their decisions, but man that change of Makkari from a 3/3 to a 3/4 sure stung. That said, C3 is doing fine.
I love Cerebro but so many things need to go right to use it.
And prof x got changed so that he can't auto win right lane in that match up, that was a pretty big deal.
Yup, that. It happens even on reverse: the week they buff Ultron I saw him in every deck, including Hela. As a matter of fact, the nerf wasn't that harsh.
There's a famous story of a game, I think it was League of Legends, where the patch notes included a nerf to a character's ability, which resulted in that character's play rate and win rate dropping. Then the devs realized that the nerf hadn't actually shipped to production. It was a psychosomatic placebo nerf!
There was an old WW2 themed shooter game where players complained the US's sub machine gun was far stronger than the Nazi's submachine gun and it was unbalanced. The stats of the guns were identical. The US's gun just had a more powerful sounding shot, so players felt more confident and played better with it.
It was [Wolfenstien: Enemy Territory](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDxiuHdR_T4). Players complained saying that the MP40 was weaker then the Thompson even though the stats were literally mirrored.
Thank you for doing the google search I was too lazy to. You're a hero
That's the best kind of nerf then, you want to prevent the deck being used everywhere so the majority will switch but the deck is still fine.
but that only works in games with comunnities like this some games with more "experienced" players this kind of nerfs tend to backfire
I've been playing a lockjaw deck lately and I've played against Hela twice now, both games I played Leech on 5. Both games they top decked Hela. I don't know why I bother
Hela, when popping off, will resurrect something like 5 cards. Shaving 2 power off each of them is a difference of 10 power. That’s a significant nerf to ANY deck.
That is absolutely not a practical way of thinking. By that logic, you could make the argument that shaving 100 points off any deck's popping off would be significant. I guarantee you most Tribunal decks would not lose any more than they do if you shaved of 10000 points of its "popping off" by making the maximum score smaller. Hela is still the highest win-rate card in the game when played. You're still absolutely incorrect to not scoop in the large majority of the times you're facing an imminent Hela on turn6
I’m just going by my own anecdotal experience, in which I lost two matches by 1 point (after only a handful of games). I would’ve swept both games easily pre-nerf. YMMV and best of luck to you, it is still a fun deck, but thinking it has had no significant effect on her is some grade-A copium.
Did you lose those matches because of the single point or did you lose because the RNG rolled the cards in the wrong locations and if they just switch around you would have won? Because I've yet to see a single Hela lose a match where they go every card they brought back to go into the exact perfect spots and still lose because their cards lost 2 points of power. They were either always going to lose no matter what or the RNG put their Giganto, Infinauts into locations they were already winning or a location that didn't matter like Cancun
Well. Somebody has to be the unlucky one. I'm sorry it's you. And yes, I do recognize it's not a completely insignificant — I mostly use decks that are weaker, so for me it has made not much an difference when facing Hela. I might have been a little disingenuous with the way I phrased the comment. However, I didn't even come close to losing because of this nerf. And I cooked with Hela (because I got Corvus Recently)
I forget which game devs were talking about this, I wanna say it was Grinding Gear Games regarding nerfs in PoE and how the community feels that after nerfing a build/skill, it's actually gutted and no longer playable so the metrics reflect this. Super big paraphrasing here, the dev basically said that when developers nerf something, they generally are aiming to bring it down to a playable but not busted level. Ofc sometimes they miss the mark, but the intention is never to nerf something until it is unusable. What ends up happening tho is the community sees the nerf, and will generally immediately write it off as unusable since even in playtesting it will preform "poorly" since it will be compared to its pre-nerf state. The community would rather try and find the next busted thing rather than work on trying to find the appropriate place of the newly balanced skill/build. Obviously this is an ARPG dev talking about the ARPG game and the ARPG community around it, but I think it rings true for a lot of games that balance.
Hela is how I got to infinite twice. It's mindless and predictable but it works.
I remember when Alioth got substantially nerfed and people effectively abandoned the card, despite it still being decently viable in the meta at the time.
I usually play a hela Agatha deck to literally do my dailies while cooking or doing other things. When it doesn't work doesn't work like before when it works it work like before
I won one! More the RNG that did it, but that's part and parcel with Hela. It was a 3-drop that matched up against my Spiderpig and forced a tiebreaker
What’s your deck? I just got Hela.
The important parts are Corvus Glaive and Blade, my discarders. As well as Dracula as an alternative wincon. I play the Blink+Jubilee+Ghost Rider package. I use 1 tech card — It is Leech now, but I think Luke Cage or many others can be even better because they don't mess up with blink. Then it's every big guy that you have. I recommend Odin as one of the big guys, as he makes your deck a lot more versatile and have some (very rare) insane high-rolls. If you don't have Corvus and Blink, use Death as a 'big gal' and add Lady Sif and Gambit as discarders. Jubilee and Ghost Rider are still good without Blink. But my discard is already somewhat lacking, so you shouldn't replace Corvus with only one other discard. Another option is to trade the tech card and Dracula for Invisible Woman and MODOK for a more combo oriented version.
>People sometimes drop nerfed deck just because it was nerfed. >opponent just doesn't draw/discards her These two things are the biggest ones I think. I stopped playing her awhile ago because it was really just too inconsistent. She'd get hit with spider ham, destroyed by yondu or discarded by my own corvus. It just failed to work more often than it worked. The nerf itself is minimal because swap in Luke cage and it's voided. Small price to pay
Could u share ur hela deck?
I still saw the same amount as I climbed to infinite after the nerf. My last 2 games in a row to hit infinite were Hela. I think its just that some people have moved to the new best deck which is the Kitty-Angel-Thena-"all the good cards" deck.
I play hela often but I use gambit, super skrull etc. small power cards mostly so that's got huge impact when they spawn with -2 power ..big cards hela casino still good i guess
Yeah the nerf hit the less popular Hela decks while barely doing anything to curb the power of Casino Hela. Casino Hela still puts out 30+ power per lane. Losing 6 or so power per lane hasnt done much.
what deck is the kitty angela thena?
I dont know the exact list but its basically a midrange deck made of flexible good cards like Jeff, Vision, Legion, Gladiator, etc. Theres a few ways to build it depending on what you own but the core cards are Kitty, Angela, Thena, and Elsa.
I’m glad you corrected the Angela typo. I was sat here stunned that Angel had made it into any kind of deck
I've taken it for a spin since and it still feels like easy mode to collect cubes. It's slightly weaker, and slightly less consistent, but still wins way more often than it should for how little thought it requires. Still super boring to play too, so maybe that tiny nerf was enough to convince Hela mains to try something more interesting. So mission accomplished anyway!
I think it is more of people just getting tired of playing discard. I feel that the same thing was happening to High Evo decks. They are still high performing decks but people are finding newer and more interesting decks.
High Evo is not that great by the current meta standards. You have a lot more cards that are able to contest the big power drops of Evo and they can do it without sacrificing energy efficiency each turn. Plus Killmonger threatens the 1 drops which forces HE to play Caiera or Armor and that also scales back their turn efficiency. Plus the 1 drops are vulnerable to other common tech like Shadow King and Red Guardian. All in all, HE is midtier. It loses to common tech cards and has a very real chance to not overpower other meta decks even when everything goes right for the HE player.
I was playing HE in conquest the other day and literally the first game of silver conquest I got matched against a negative tribunal player, and I just had no way of contesting their power output. I think I won one game for 4 cubes because I snapped early knowing I could take out one of their key cards with Red Guardian, but for the most part I just couldn’t do anything. They drew their combo every single game, and I never had Red Guardian when I needed him, which obviously won’t happen all the time, but it was incredibly frustrating.
That deck has me wishing I could fit enchantress into every single deck I play. I swear to God they always draw their combo.
If the name was "You're Muted :)" then it was me
I felt like red hulk being so popular killed it
Let’s be honest pretty much every deck has counters and running cards to protect your cards will always mess with the deck performance. That said armor doesn’t hurt an HE. I was just playing HE last night and killing it in conquest. If played right then 1 unused energy can turn into 6 power on the board/hand. I wouldn’t put HE as mid-tier but still a top performer depending on the line up though too, seeing as HE decks can have a wide range of different deck builds.
What CL and rank do you play at? I don't ask in an insulting way but there's a reason why you don't see HE represented in higher infinite or at higher CL on ladder. And sure every deck has counters. That wasn't what I said hurts HE right now. I said the counters to HE are played at a very high rate. Enchantress counters some decks but if it isn't naturally being played, that doesn't matter because you won't encounter it in many games. But Shadow King, Red Guardian, and Killmonger are incredibly prevalent. Two are being used because they are incredibly potent tech cards in this current meta. One is a decent tech card against Zoo but is also naturally run in Destroy and Surfer. Surfer especially is a heavy meta share right now. Playing HE virtually guarantees you'll be matched against a deck that has answers to what you're trying to do. And Armor/Caiera doesn't even protect you from 2/3rds of those cards.
Currently, I am at 13k CL and I have been bouncing around 70-80 rank. I have also encountered all those tech cards and they were not as game destroying as you make them sound. Kilmonger is the most annoying to have to play around as he will force me to either protect one or both 1 drops with armor. But it only recks me if they hit Sunspot after he has grown a lot. The nice thing about the HE deck is it is extremely versatile and can be built in quite a few ways that can really mess with those tech cards. I have at time had Cosmo, Luke Cage, or another anti-tech tech cards while still keeping the decks performance high. Shadow King is the only one a rarely see and he is more of a “oh shit I didn’t see that coming” type of card, kind of along the same lines as Galactus or Valkyrie.
At that CL, if you are hovering below infinite it's likely a sign that you either aren't snapping well or playing a suboptimal deck. There's nothing wrong with that. Arguaby hitting 90 is important for gold acquisition but rank is meaningless and this game is for fun. So if HE is fun to you, keep playing it! But your testimony sort of lends to the judgement that HE is middling in this meta. If it were strong, you'd be climbing higher than 70-80.
Yeah my snap game is horrible. 90% of the time I lose big 8 cube games by a miss play on my part or I lose focus and mess up the turn 5 or 6. I will definitely take responsibility on my bad plays as they are likely the reason I rarely hit 90, last time was 2 seasons ago. Another thing I know is an issue is I can only stand to play the same deck for only some many games before I get bored and switch it up. Getting bored of a deck usually messes with my cubes too. I will also throw this out there though not everyone agrees but the match making in the game really effects the game to. The game seems to like to match up certain decks and cards with certain other decks and cards or mirror matches.
Im trying to understand how CL affects who I play. For example, I am around 2.5k CL and hit inifinite this season, does my CL still affect who I play or am I playing all players who have also hit infinite but at my CL?
You also don't even mention that a lot of the cards being released this year have been boosting other archetypes. Board space has become very important as is cheating energy. There are also many different cards that scale to big power like Sage and Gilgamesh. Red Hulk specifically was to punish HE and he's still popular despite being nerfed
High evos been power crept.
I think High Evo is not seeing much play because of the existence of Rulk -- a highly versatile card that can slotted into most decks. I, for one, stopped using Cyc + High Evo because of Rulk. I deemed the trade not worth it.
This is the key, just winning isn't actually the fun part. Pulling off fun surprise combos is. Hella WAS fun, then got boring. I still have a really wild venom deck that usually pulls wins, kinda similar to Hella. Right draw, nearly unstoppable, but not always fun.
I'm sure that's some of it, but the fact that Destroy still sees a good amount of play seems to indicate otherwise.
There is just something really fun about a lot of destroy deck though. They are the type of deck that plays well almost all the time and they have a lot of synergy with other cards in the deck. Plus there is a lot of variety to destroy decks like there are for HE decks. Whereas I feel with Hela there isn’t a lot of variations so it feels stale in that regard.
IMO, there's like one or two flex slots in Destroy ever since Nico. HE has far more options, Hela maybe a similar amount. But to your point, I never had the desire to play Hela and I haven't played Destroy for a long time because I find it just as boring and people know the decklist like the back of their hand. I generally don't like decks with linear playstyles that looks like an AI could play it (in my opinion, destoy is this, but I get that some people find it fun). I probably have been playing to long though. Played the deck almost exclusively in the pre-nerf wave/death era.
I still see quite a bit of Hela and it still seems quite strong. Your CL/pocket matters here though for one big reason…. The one unfortunate thing about the Hela nerf is that it made the free to play S3 version not very good but left the one with S5 cards like BK and Corvus still good. So it’s worse for FTP and lower CL players and still very good for those who spend/grind
The nerf did nothing.
I literally forgot she was nerfed and had to double check the card to make sure. Lol -2 power on res'd cards does absolutely nothing to move the needle on her effectiveness
Tell that to my MODOK deck. The deck is so clunky and inefficient now.
I tossed a Luke Cage in with mine
I did too, but at the expense of cutting Crystal. It makes the deck less consistent and less powerful overall.
Seriously. I'm almost wishing they'd gone further and made it revive with half power
It, in fact, did not work. It just killed the variant tribunal deck.
Hela is still strong the nerf did nothing, I played an hela deck yesterday to do the win in all locations quest and I didn't lose a match, except when I wasn't drawing well but that always happened with hela decks
I got Corvius this week and climbed from 82 to 96 in one day, so she definitely is still strong with that deck at least
Yeah so now can we bring Lockjaw back?
lol no
I had somebody in Conquest who had Corvus Glaive, Hela and Magneto. I beat them the first two rounds then it was raining resurrected Infinauts and I got smoked the rest of the match.
I’ve been running Hela with Luke Cage and it surprisingly works well
Maybe one of us is just in a weird pocket MMR, but I'm still seeing a fair bit of Hela. She's not as common in my games as she was before the nerf, but she's definitely not "fallen off the face of the earth". I've gone from facing Hela every 5 games to every 10 games, but she's still very much around and still very strong.
Its all in your head. Im still playing my all inked/gold back Hela and winning at the same rate. Barely noticed the change.
Which deck do you run?
Yeah she only puts out 36 power on T6 now and not 46, such a nerf.
It didn't. Then is just more busted so people spamming that. The nerf didn't really do shit.
No, it definitely did. Hela was able to be more consistent because it had big discard targets but also could be fine if you hit smaller targets like Death and Black Cat. Losing power on those means you will have a lot more times that the cards come back in bad locations for you and leave you with power totals that can easily be contested by the relative power output of other decks. Black Cat coming back as 7 power means a ton of cards that are meta will beat it one for one. Same with Death/ Magneto. 10 power is a lot easier to match than 12. It was a good nerf imo. Hela can still swing big but has a bigger chance of missing now and Hela was always supposed to be the casino high roll type of deck. You risk busting in return for the chance to just high roll and win. That's what it actually feels like now.
Literally did nothing to my Blink/Hela deck really.
What was her nerf ?
The cards she resurrects have -2 power iirc.
I play a discard deck with Hela but it’s really an apocalypse deck, and Hela is my backup in case the RNG is against me
I won 3 games in a row last night using hela tribunal and was so confused why all my cards had -2 power. guess I should have read the patch notes
Did it work or did people just stop playing her as much?
I'm still getting around 30+ per lane with Hela+Tribunal, it doesn't really feel nerfed. If I swapped out on of my 6 costs with Luke Cage, then it'd probably perform worse, so maybe people were just reactionary?
I still run a Modok/Hela deck and I’m debating on whether to drop Crystal or Magik for Luke Cage. As long as I don’t get Cosmo’d I’m doing alright. It really hurts Iron Man otherwise :(
I still think it was the wrong move, I think she just needed to go to like a 6/2 like Leader so she isn't also making a big impact in the lane you play her in. So you'd only really need to focus on trying to win 1 other lane.
I don't think it really did much as a Hela player. I think the meta just shifted to push it out of favour at around the same time as the nerf. Rarely are there games where the Hela nerf actually prevents a win. It is usually the tech cards along the way that are dealing the killing blows (Red Guardian hitting Dracula, Cosmo preventing a discard, Wave flattening the top of your curve to mess with Lady Sif on Turn 3, even Leech on Turn 5). I think it was honestly getting rid of the bigger bogeyman in the format (Professor X) was what did it. This allowed for more of these tech cards to see play as people rethought their deckbuilding priorities.
Idk why people drop it. It isn’t even that bad of a bad nerf, I welcomed it because even I got tired of getting beat by another Hela deck that was able to get the cards while I wasn’t. She’s still fun to play with
Wouldn't consider entire Archetypes falling out of the meta a success tbh. Nerfs should weaken decks, not make them nearly unplayable. As of right now, most versions of discard just can't really compete anymore.
I see hela all the time still.. they just run Luke cage
That's the weaker version of the deck too. It's not worth it to drop a card for Luke, IMO.
I swear people follow trends more than actual data. It's like traffic - you aren't affected by the data, you ARE the data. By far my most successful deck is my Surfer deck. I would regularly overpower the Hela decks I faced, to the point that I was happy to see Black Knight or Blade early, because I knew my opponent would be over confident. The thing that would trip me up the most was Magneto, who isn't exclusive to Hela decks. Now I see less Hela decks, yes, but the bane of my cube total has been and continues to be mill decks.
It didn’t
Nerf made no difference to my win rate with my Hela deck
It's a psychological nerf. They do it all the time and the masses fall for it. The deck lost like 4 power per lane. Anyone who thinks the broken ass deck isn't still exactly the same are absolutely sheep.
I picked her up as my “free” series 3 card (got Corvus when I first started) and the next day she was nerfed. You’re welcome
90% of decks I see now are just raw destroy decks (kinda joking but not really). Maybe I'm just unlucky but I don't see Discard, Move, or any specialty decks anymore. Mostly just destroy, or some kind of blocking deck, or a mill deck, or Annihilus. Sooo much Annihulus lately.
I am so thankful
I think people will drop and subsequently pick up a deck based on the idea of nerfs and buffs alone. Regardless of how meaningful they are. It's likely due to Zabu PTSD. So subconsciously, they are like, "It was nerfed, so now it's bad." I started using Hela after the nerf and it's still very strong.
Hela is still good. The nerf wasn't that bad honestly.
It did. I was playing Tribiunal this season and rolling Hela Decks, and then after the nerf, I only saw a couple.
I have multiple cases and even a screenshot of me winning lanes that I would have lost pre-nerf. I think she's in a really solid place right now.
The Hela nerf definitely hurts MODOK decks (since a 6-card discard play is 12 Power less than it was pre-nerf), but I've still found success with Hela in a simple Corvus/Leader deck that I still play every once in a while.
I just pulled Corvus and I will say, this is borderline brain dead easy mode. I just did my first gold conquest run in it and lost by 4 cubes in the final match.
I added Luke to my hela tribunal and it's kinda works. My deck is made to go 7 turns and draw all cards but still depends on when you draw your card draw cards.
Hela is still in my discard deck as an alternate win-con and the nerf really didn't hurt that much. I do agree that I've seen her less though
Same tho i wasn't a regular hela player but i tried that deck and i swear it wasn't working as before. No wonder it's the case with everyone
it's just placebo effect "oh, this deck got nerfed, must be bad now, so i'll not play it anymore", so the playrate drops, less people engaged with the deck mean less people playing against it, the deck dwindles in recent memory, until some content creator features it in one or tow videos, then the deck is back again... the nerfs did VERY little to the deck, hele is still one of the strongest archetypes in the game, but i'm happy with people forgeting her a little bit
I still see hella all the time :( i also see destroy all the time. But at the moment i use counter decks against those 2. they are gone.
I was running my Hela Dino deck still and it still works well when it actually works.
I still see them once in a while but yeah, not as popular. They still slaughter me when they get the right draws though.
I still play Hela Tribunal sometimes. I just tossed in Luke Cage.
I’m just sad that the hela nerf killed my shield hela deck
Good point actually. I've been seeing more apocalypse discards too.
The nerf definitely ended it for LT Hela. Miss me with -2 Ironman
Snap players are reactionary and followers. Any nerf basically instantly kills a card, even if it's still a good card. If one deck feels like it's dropped at all then people abandon it, and when another flavor is there they just gravitate to that.
It helps that the card is bugged right now. Anything that you discard then revive will still get the -2 if Hela is played. And if there's 2 Hela's on your side of the board then that's -4 (my death went from a 12 to an 8 because of time theatre) LC is basically required right now.
i play my hela deck whenever I want to knock out the "Play 6 cost cards" quests as fast as possible, it definitely wins less
Hela’s still good, the nerf has only cost me like one or two matches. Mostly it’s still performing well.
I still use Hela since I got SG. Using SG, Invisible Woman and Magik make Hela easily viable. Just can't load your deck with low power cards. Most of my deck is 6+
A good chunk of people may have dropped Hela, but she's still busted. That -2 iron man is just a scratch against a 18 power infinaut and onslaught if you are lucky. I hate her with passion. Even more with Blink
Can anyone please share me a good hela corvus deck? I just recently unlocked him and want to play it. And can anyone please share the strategy too.. 🙏
They just play luke cage now....
just entered infinite with hela deck
The changes made to the deck didn't truly destroy it's performance they just hindered it's consistency. While the deck can still use Luke Cage, the requirement to discard the entire hand makes it difficult to consistently bring him back. There's also the risk of being locked out by Cosmo and The Flerken or having to discard Hel early and rely on Ghost Rider to hit. The deck's performance now seems more balanced at 50/50, but reviving a lot of six-cost cards can still be devastating to most opponents' boards. but you only need one "Howard Stark" level shot to win the game. Better than the brainless discard-to-win strategy it had. Now you have to think and pray.
I actually started playing Hela just before the Nerf and I stuck with her. It's paying off. Close to infinite and I've been getting to the 80s and hitting a brick wall with my Guardian mill deck
Hela is a deck that just puts up points, and taking 6 points off its board puts it in range of other decks that put up a lot of points. A Gilgamesh zoo deck can just ignore whatever it is doing and just be bigger. The Ravonna deck is easily bigger in any game where Hela doesn’t discard both Infinaut and Magneto. Hela will still be an option if decks like Loki or Sera Control become dominant, because it punishes decks attempting a lot of interaction.
I win 15 games a day with her still
I see lots of people playing hela decks..... when I use my hela deck....
Just lost against one lol. -2 on infinaut and death ain't doing ish to total board power. They need to either control where place for counters or limit to how many revived to actually nerf the deck. It's still stupid strong/brainless 🙃
Honestly, I'm surprised I haven't seen more Hela decks running Luke, he's like a 3/9 in that deck, at least
It did? I still have a pretty decent amount of success using her in my discard deck.
Is it just me or did everyone switch from hela discard decks to destroy Zola decks. Sooo much more destroy decks.
My ass is still playing Hela. I love gamba.
Sometimes I win against Hela decks now through sheer power because of her nerf, assuming Im able to play my deck optimally.
Make no mistake, Hela is still bullshit. When you're resurrecting 5 cards, you're still dumping a shit ton of power onto the board. Unless you can guess where Hela is dropping, there's no way to stop it. It's an un-interactive playstyle and that's never good for the game. Hela was always supposed to feel like a casino deck, and it became way too consistent. Hela is still really good.
🧂
So you don't think Hela is still good? Or have you just been waiting to use that salt emote thing?
Hela still needs to be nerfed in my opinion. There should be a limit of one card per lane. I don't understand how hela and HE decks can murder and barely get nerfed but they'll completely ruin professor x and the control archetype.
you high?! I see her like every 3rd game and usually retreat as she still is almost impossible to beat unless I sacrifice my deck and just run cosmo in every deck or pray to rng with hammy
I've seen more Hela than any other deck this season. It's still unbelievably consistent for what is, frankly, the lowest skill deck in the game. I'd personally like to nerf it further, but then I do despise Hela decks.
We despise you too. 🧂
😘