@c0v3rt: I also had high hopes for shaman. But sadly shaman appears to be at the bottom once again. There's not much refinement like the secrets paladin and I'm not seeing it much on ladder as i used to.

Recently Tempostorm just ranked it as a tier 4 deck after ranking it as a tier 2 deck when TGT was released. It's a damn shame since shaman had some interesting cards. But I think the shaman cards are a bit too fair and punish the shaman for playing them even if they don't have overload (The Mistcaller = loss tempo).

Face Hunter is now about 40% of the ladder once again. Freeze Mage still crushes almost everything.

@acura_max: I think slower, controlish Shaman decks got some nice tools. Ancestral Knowledge is vastly preferable to Mana Tide Totem, which (outside of a Totem deck) you only really feel safe playing if you're already so far ahead you were probably going to win anyway. Healing Wave is fun, and I gladly subbed out Antique Healbot because I don't really need the 3/3 that much, and much prefer gaining a hilarious amount of life for very little mana.

But yeah, there was such a huge Totem push, and Mistcaller is just...not amazing, so outside of a couple solid utility commons and rares, I'm not crazy about the new Shaman cards or Shaman deck archtypes that have arisen so far.

I think a lot of actually good mid-range decks (shaman included) are just struggling because Paladin is so prevalent. While Paladin doesn't have the best early game removal it's almost impossible to beat the value they get out of minibot and muster. The only tech card I can think of that might straight up beat it is Pyromancer, but it's such a specific situation to tech for and the card is useless/detrimental in almost all other situations.

I've been playing a "token" Paladin deck recently, and it's sorta silly how easy it is to re-establish a board full of minions. I've played games against warriors where they've brawled a full board twice (and had WW and ghoul) and it's still not even close to stopping the flood. It's sorta the same thing I've talked about regarding arena, the game just keeps getting more and more "multi-minion" cards while the ability to efficiently aoe is either staying the same or declining.

I know everyone has been pretty down on Rogue, but Oil deals with ChristmasTreeadin pretty easily.

This week was Rogue week for me. It was by far my least played class by a good amount. I've always admired people who can play it well. A lot was made about the class not getting anything good in TGT which is accurate. I took the week to learn Oil Rogue. It's surprisingly strong in the current meta. I managed to climb to Rank 7 with a record of 36-24 (60%). It's a bit deceiving given the first two days was still learning the deck.

FWIW, I tried Aggro Rogue which does use a few TGT cards. It has the potential to end games by turn 5, but more often than not drew dead and ran out of steam for me.