Huge Balance Update - Spirit Of Blossom

The big take away from this update has been the consistent effort on the part of Riot to stop decks who essentially have un-fun play patterns from being dominant...

1. Aggro Nox's overpowered 2 mana slot has been gutted , this is good for the health of the game there was literally 12 auto includes in the slot

2. Exclusives have been nerfed with will of ionia, Heimer, solitary monk last patch, and shadow assassin

3. Discard decks buffed substantially, this is good for jinx, and gives Draven a home outside of aggro

4. Frejord champs tweaked, very necessary and healthy

So we should be heading to a midrange meta, as long as Ezreal control isn't oppressive, and there is a pretty serious chance of that

If you want a list of strong decks going forward here are a few likely options...

1. Any variant of bilgewater/Dem bannerman, scout or aggro focused doesn't matter

2. They who endure, the deck never went anywhere, but it should be relatively better now

3. Deep is similarly positioned to do well

4. Ezreal control variants, yep nuff said

5. Ash decks, usually with noxious splash

6. Unknown aggro elusive list, just using the cards that haven't been nerfed along with a splash

Precious Pet is still problematic in my opinion. 

I haven't tested out many other decks post-balance, but I'm having reasonable success with my Deep deck.  As the meta slows down, the early turns become less important and if, as a Deep deck, you can survive until turn 5 or 6, you have a reasonable shot at winning by default, unless all three Maoki's are in your bottom 3 cards. 

Yeah the noxious 1 drop slot is largely untouched, but that should be fine. The big issue arose from having each of the noxious 2 drops combined representing around 8 damage of uninteractive burn (demolition (2), grenadier (2), crimson (4)) Now it represents 5 damage.

Quote From sinti

Quote From kaladin

Precious Pet is still problematic in my opinion. 

I haven't tested out many other decks post-balance, but I'm having reasonable success with my Deep deck.  As the meta slows down, the early turns become less important and if, as a Deep deck, you can survive until turn 5 or 6, you have a reasonable shot at winning by default, unless all three Maoki's are in your bottom 3 cards. 

That isnt exactly ok either, given the topic of the conversation :)

Fair point!  I wonder if they have the upgraded Maoki effect in their balance sights...a 4-turn 'guaranteed win' clock IS a little ridiculous, and given the synergy, it's not a total wildcard win condition either.

I'm unsure about deep. Its really easy to play around. Just have an answer for Nautilus and it slows them way down. It would be interesting to see if someone could make a deep deck that doesn't use Nautilus to remove that weakness.

Really interesting you should say that, because Swim just brought a Deep deck without Nautilus to a Twitch Rivals tournament and placed first. I thought a Deep deck w/o Nautilus sounded absolutely crazy, but turns out it does pretty okay, at least in a tournament format.

His decklist:
https://lor.mobalytics.gg/decks/bs7m9j9la4s47chtlg7g

Although a caveat being that the Deep deck he recommends for ladder does include 2x Nautilus.

Swim said that not running Nautilus was really bad and was a reason that he could've lost and to be honest the deck he played was more SI control than anything, as he said it himself. If you're running Deep, you probably want Nautilus in the deck regardless because Nautilus kinda just carries the entire archetype on his humongous 13/13 body.

Nautilus body is ok and all... but his true strenght is lessening all sea creatures by 4, which creates a huge tempo swing that most combo/control decks cannot deal with.

I really liked those changes btw, Riot did a great job on this patch

Niftty finally made a quality post, good job this time.

Agree with most of your statements, i believe many of those predictions will turn out right.

Simply put, i think any deck that can abuse Relentless Pursuit will be top tier after this patch.

I've largely just done what I've always done outline balance changes...the main difference being is that these changes are positive so everyone can get behind them.

As opposed to when Freijord, Noxious and Ionia were OP, now we should be looking at an incredibly diverse meta with very few auto includes.

You can actually play discard now and its not terrible, so the game must be heading in a possitive direction.

Quote From Lazerbeans

Really interesting you should say that, because Swim just brought a Deep deck without Nautilus to a Twitch Rivals tournament and placed first. I thought a Deep deck w/o Nautilus sounded absolutely crazy, but turns out it does pretty okay, at least in a tournament format.

His decklist:
https://lor.mobalytics.gg/decks/bs7m9j9la4s47chtlg7g

Although a caveat being that the Deep deck he recommends for ladder does include 2x Nautilus.

Ugg...  3x Thresh, 3x Maokai.  Take this with a grain of salt because I haven't actually played or seen it, but that just sounds ugly to me.  Thresh's ability will always pull Maokai, and attacking with Maokai usually gets him insta-killed.  It only makes sense to me if you are ready to flip Maokai but don't have him on-board or in-hand, or that just sounds like such a niche condition unworthy of dedicating so much of your deck...

Agreed. The list looked absolutely ridiculous to me too.

This is nice and all, but when do we get Regeneration as a buff card?