Gaming
Just when you think all deck options have been expended in Hearthstone, a new Warlock deck has been gaining traction. Where did Meatlock come from, what is it and will it break into competitive play?
Everyone loves a good meme deck. For a while they’re a silly break from the tiresome repetitiveness of a locked-in meta. They’re something you dabble with for a few funny games and then discard once you need to bump up your Hearthstone win rate again. But, what happens when one of these apparently dumb ideas starts to pick up traction?
We’ve already seen a fair number of crazy Hearthstone decks that were so out there they actually found success. We’ve seen Exodia Mage help players achieve victory in tournament play, while others have scaled to high ranks with Echo/Giants Mage. Now, this late in the Knights of the Frozen Throne meta, can there really be a new deck promising similar results?
Perhaps, thanks to a new Warlock deck by Robert 'Nostam' Matson. Dubbed Meatlock, it throws together a few disregarded and ignored cards from fresh and ancient sets to create something strangely effective. In fact, Nostam almost made Legend with the deck in a recent ranked season.
The two centrepieces of the deck are Meat Wagon and Summoning Portal. The former is a four mana 1/4 with a Deathrattle that summons a minion from your deck with less attack than itself. The latter is a classic card many will have probably forgotten – a four mana 0/4 that reduces the cost of all your minions by two while it’s in play. You can already start to see where this is going, right?
The concept is to get both Summoning Portals pulled onto the board (or at least one) by killing off Meat Wagon to set up a huge tempo swing and flood the board with minions for far less than their actual mana cost. Cards like Arcane Giant, Sea Giant, Ysera, The Lich King and Abyssal Enforcer are all included as targets for mana reduction to set up a dominating board state early in the game.
Jeremy 'Disguised Toast' Wang demonstrates exactly how the deck works right here. That’s two Despicable Dreadlords, a Corpsetaker, a Sea Giant and a Tar Lurker all on turn six for just four mana. Quite some value. It also presents his opponent with a problem that’s completely impossible to solve. From there, Toast simply runs over whatever is played with his army of minions.
So, there you can see its strengths. Thanks to some untapped card synergy and the raw power of high cost minions, Meatlock is a deck that can challenge in the current meta. And even outside of the massive tempo swing you have big finishers in Ysera and Bloodreaver Gul’dan to see off opponents. There’s even a multitude of board clears from cards such as Defile and Abyssal Enforcer; meanwhile Hellfire can serve the same purpose or offer that last chunk of damage to empty an opponent’s life pool.
Past its best-before date?
Before rushing off to dust some old legendaries to craft a pair of Meat Wagons, though, it’s important to know that Meatlock does have some undeniable weaknesses. Firstly, as it relies so heavily on finding two specific cards to get the perfect set-up, there'll be so many times when it completely whiffs. Everyone has been in the situation where the vital piece to get their deck to work just refuses to show up and it can be especially punishing with the limited win conditions in Meatlock.
Something like this isn’t a problem for Exodia Mage where freeze effects, armour generation and other delaying cards can give you the time to draw what you need. By comparison, Warlock has none of these options – or at least not enough that are equally as effective. There are, however, a number of different deck lists out there that try to mitigate potential problems.
The inclusion of Corpsetaker and Bloodworm try to offer sustain with Lifesteal, while elemental taunt minions try to put up a defensive wall, but they can struggle to hold off many more refined decks. It’s a similar reason why old school Handlock has struggled to resurface after the loss of Antique Healbot many cycles ago.
Furthermore, if you fail to get the combo going early, your opponent’s big minions then become the problem. There’s an argument to tech in some removal with cards such as Syphon Soul or Black Knight, but in most cases these refinements won’t have much of an impact. It’s just hard to see Meatlock as a deck that’s crying out to be perfectly optimised and even harder to imagine it radicalising competitive play.
In its current state, or even after a few tweaks, it’s ultimately just a fun, new and interesting experimental deck. Sometimes, though, that’s what Hearthstone needs every now and then. Balance changes can swing the power levels of certain decks to give the meta a shot in the arm, as we’ve seen recently, but it’s rare to see anything quite as drastic as a new deck archetype emerge.
Can we expect to see Meatlock or any variant of Meat Wagon decks at an upcoming tournament or next year’s World Championships? It’s unlikely, unless a few more card synergies can be exploited from cards in the final set of this year. We should have some ideas about that in the coming weeks.
If anything, Meatlock is a positive sign that even when you think all viable decks in a cycle have been discovered, established and refined, a spark of inspiration can create something unique in Hearthstone.
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