WoW TCG Scrub

In James Rex’s NACC report, he challenged me to write a “rush is broken” article outlining why I felt that rush is broken and that he would refute it with the opposite.  Well, Mr. Rex, challenge accepted, sounds like fun.  Here we go.

Let me start by making clear that I don’t believe rush is squarely broken, in fact I believe that word is used far too often to describe things that are far from it.  I do, however, believe that the burden of deckbuilding precision and play are overwhelmingly on the control player.

“Well that’s the nature of control”, some of you might be saying, “that’s how control always works.”  While I do agree that control is usually the archetype that requires the most tuning and skill to play, I believe that rush has a slightly unfair advantage in the WoW TCG specifically, by taking that point and pushing it to the a level that teases the border between rush completely being dominant and simply effective.

Traditionally, in Trading Card Games, rush/beatdown strategies trade sustainability and power off for speed and tempo/pressure.  While we can see this interaction in the WoW TCG to some degree, I believe, for the most part, that the rules have been changed a bit.

Rush strategies in WoW are given incredible tools that seem to reward them for accomplishing states that should intrinsically be a weakness.  Cards like Orders from Lady Vashj reward you for dumping your hand and compensate you for playing hap-hazardly it seems.  Cards like that can take what should have been a mistake and turn it into a blessing.  Other cards like Twig of the World Tree are custom-built to praise rush decks with immense power with the drawback being something that beatdown decks agree to happily (few resources).

Shifting to see the control equivalents, many cards that are considered control-exclusive don’t reward you for accomplishing the main goals of the deck without some extra skill and work.  Take a card like Information Gathering for example.  Information Gathering is a great quest, no debate there.  It is powerful in that it digs deep into the deck and allows the pilot to choose his destiny.  So where’s the problem?  It can only be completed on your turn – a major flaw and the reason many people choose not to use it.  Why does this work against control strategies?  Typically, control is a reactive form of a deck.  It responds to threats as they come, it interrupts cards, and weaves and shifts to remain relevant at all parts of the game.  The turns where control sorely needs answers through digging and require consistency through the high-cost cards they play are stymied by that one portion, “during your turn”.  If this quest was instant, it would be more on par with what rush gets as far as rewarding natural strategies.  It would still, most likely, be a control exclusive card as most rush decks won’t leave 3 open at the end of the turn and it would allow control decks a bit of fluidity in how they play.  I think a Form of the Serpent is coming so I will leave 3 open for Arcane Torrent- oh, he didn’t play Form and instead played an ally to which I need to find an answer – end of turn complete, answer found, let’s roll.

While this all sounds a little bias (and I admit that my natural inclination to control is seeping through something fierce), I still believe it a valid point.  With rush decks able to push out upwards of 12 damage a turn easily and usually without prior board presence, control should be compensated in kind by being able to stop at least half of that just as easily.  Currently, it seems that control is given more anti-control tools than anti-rush tools.

But what about Doshura, Niyore, Tatulla, Ras’fari, and the like that all seem to provide quick answers while shoring up board position?  Don’t those fly at your argument to the contrary?  Well, somewhat, yes.  While those answers are good cards and do what they do well, they all feel and play a bit too late.  Currently, our only truly fast early game answers (turns 1-3 answers) are Vexmaster and – oh wait, that’s the only one.  Granted class abilities help this a bit, most are one shots that leave the control player needing cards faster than he can refill his hand.  Protectors are nice also, but they usually get taken out with ease while the rush player continues his quest for domination (there’s a reason you aren’t seeing as much Xanata or 1K Battles anymore).  Element’s Fury will just end Xanata, shoot the opposing hero for three, and allow whatever allies were already in play to commence with the insanity.  With the speed, efficiency, and constant threat system that rush currently employs, it is brutally hard to find the time to draw cards, which beckons back to the Information Gathering talk, while in the mean time, rush is drawing off of quests like mad with the likes of Marksman Glous, Orders, Falling to Corruption, you name it, all the while accomplishing their goal.  An early ally like Doshura would be an excellent addition and a step in the right direction.

So, silly Linus, why did a control deck win the NACC?  Good point, and I’ll give it to you, Control Warlock did win the biggest tournament of the year.  This really all goes back to what I said at the outset – the best players in any TCG usually gravitate toward control decks.  To explain why this resulted in a Continental Champion control deck, you also have to accept that the best players in the game can usually take a deck that is slightly less potent and destroy their competition.  Notice that I said usually.  I was sitting next to Matt Markoff in round 5, I believe, when he got beat by a Kil’zin deck.  Matt has been honing and perfecting Warlock for ages it seems, and still, due to alot of the stuff I’ve been talking about today, Kil’zin won that game.  If rush wasn’t slightly better, given Markoff’s incredibly high level of skill, that should never have happened.

Now I understand why rush is given a slight edge, while at the same time not agreeing with it.  I understand that the players that have the least amount of time to test and tweak usually choose rush decks as they are easier straight out of the box and can tone down the wide open meta better than a control deck can with little practice.  Is that right?  Well, from a “building confidence and selling product” perspective, you betcha, but from a strictly competitive standpoint I think it could use some work.

This topic is highly debatable and hotly argued by many.  I understand that you may not agree with me and I welcome your constructive criticism and counter-arguments.  As I’ve said many times before, I am not even close to being as competitive as a good many players out there, but I enjoy writing about what is on my mind, how I see the game, my opinions, and the state of the game.  I hope you enjoy reading them (or get something out of them) as much as I enjoy writing them -

King’s Knight to f3 – your move, James Rex.

Until next time, keep those rush decks at bay…

- Adam “Linus” Misner