I typically reroll this one because there aren't any Questline decks I'm excited about playing right now. But if I had to do it, I'd probably do Demon Hunter Questline in Wild. It's super easy to complete there, and I don't care at all about my Wild ranking so it's a great space for achievements and quests whose decks would be tedious/weak on Standard ladder.
I completely agree that the Switcheroo Priest is a tilting, highrolly deck, but the data on HSReplay (which is certainly only preliminary since the expansion just launched) suggests that it's generally pretty bad in Standard. In theory that should be enough to fix the problem on its own, but here are some of my thoughts on the cards in question:
If the mana cost of Switcheroo were to increase, it would only serve to make the card exclusively relevant to high-roll decks (because it would be too expensive as draw elsewhere). That seems bad.
I actually think it's good to have a limited number of cards like Twin-fin Fin Twin that summon a "copy" rather than "another" version of the card. This incentivizes handbuffing strategies, which I think is valuable. Without that copying, it's on par with Spring Rocket in terms of its power level, which seems a little wrong since it's a rare compared to a common.
Stonetusk Boar seems to see play in Wild exclusively as part of a degenerate combo deck, but I wouldn't love seeing it removed because a lot of those degenerate combos require assembling lots of cards
With all that in mind, I think the best fix is to ban Switcheroo in Wild and remove Rush from Twin-fin Fin Twin. The former solves the Wild problem completely, and the latter should make Switcheroo Priest even more vulnerable to aggressive strategies, driving down the win rate for Standard Switcheroo Priest so low that no one will want to play it. (You could consider upping the base stats of the Twin-fin a bit to account for the change.)
With these changes, Switcheroo can still be a relevant card in Silence Priest or Miracle Priest strategies, and Twin-fin Fin Twin can still be relevant to handbuff decks where it was clearly intended to be relevant. Switcheroo Priest will still be intact enough for people to play it if they really love that high-rolling nonsense, but it will be slow enough that it won't become a major part of the meta ecosystem.
While it's certainly possible they'd do something differently, the Core Set is intended to be tied to a Hearthstone Year, and the April Expansion always kicks off a new year, so both ought to drop on the same day.
The other reason using Echo is compelling for SN1P-SN4P is that it's not a spell. "Repeatable this turn" is clear and succinct for a spell, but meaningless for a minion. To make it really consistent with other cards without Echo, they'd have to change "Echo" to something like "Battlecry: Add a 2/3 SN1P-SN4P to your hand. Discard it at the end of your turn." It's just way too much text.
Today's Questline Hunter probably wouldn't use this because of how few slots they have for minions (most lists just run Barak Kodobane, Multicaster, and Wandmaker - 5 minions that all draw or generate more spells).
That said, rotation could change the deck a lot, so I think it's worth reserving judgement a bit. Specifically, Overwhelm and Bola Shot are rotating out, while many of the other cards key come from the Core Set (Arcane Shot, Tracking, Explosive Trap, Quick Shot). Depending on what sticks around in the new Core Set 2022, this deck could actually want more spell-synergy minions.
Yeah, the reason I think it could see play in as a dragon synergy is because a) those decks often want more dragons in hand and b) the "fail state" for the card is a reasonable vanilla minion for a deck that will mostly have expensive cards. So a Control Dragon deck can use this for late game value in a control mirror, or early game tempo in an aggro match.
A lot of the Standard dragons will be rotating out, and I doubt we'll see a ton of new dragons in a Sunken City/Naga themed set. The most of any neutral minion type in today's Core Set is 8 (i.e. there are 8 beasts and 8 dragons, and everything else is lower), so it's probably fair to guess there won't be more than ~8 dragons in the new core set. Assuming the Aspects will still be in the Core Set after rotation, the majority of dragons in Standard will be Aspects or cards from the Alterac Valley Miniset.
Side note - a limited dragon pool after rotation could mean Lady Prestor's value increases significantly, which should make for some pretty wacky games.
The overhaul to sets seems welcome and overdue - the idea that only some regions get a meaningful number of cards in each release was bizarre and less fun than a traditional release structure.
Jhin, and the whole concept of Runeterra Champions, seems like a repeat of the Bandle City problem. The whole point of regions is to have a focused identity with strengths and weaknesses around which you can balance your game. Bandle City really broke that by giving you access to a lot of strengths from across all regions, thus crowding out a lot of regions. Jhin's problem might not be as bad (because Jhin is limited to skill cards), but the concept of Runeterra Champions that span all regions is a balance landmine.
+1 to a a lot of what AngryShuckie is saying. When discussing an MTG card that seemed to violate some rules, a friend of mine quipped that the text on each MTG card basically reads "here's how I break the rules." Creatures don't get to attack the turn they're summoned, except when their text includes Haste, for example. It's easy to point to new card designs and see them as breaking rules, but a lot of times the point of a card is to do something novel, and the fundamental rules aren't violated.
I think a lot of the original red lines here aren't really red lines that the game has crossed, as they were in the original game:
Felguard destroyed a mana crystal in Classic Hearthstone
The existence of armor made having a health total that exceeded 30 possible for multiple classes in Classic Hearthstone
Tech cards like Mana Wraith could impact the cost of key cards for your opponent in Classic Hearthstone. Not as strong as Loatheb by a mile, but it's still there
There were no rules that said you couldn't restrict your deck to singleton, or evens only, or only shadow spells, etc., in Hearthstone ever - they just didn't make sense without payoffs
On a related note, there are some newer effects here that have reasonable precursors:
Sigils are similar to Secrets
Objectives are similar to end-of-turn triggers on minions
Dual class cards operate in some strange middle space between neutral and class cards, and focus on shared identity of those classes (i.e. we're not seeing massive card draw added to Priest via Mage/Priest class cards - there's more commonality than that)
I think there are some real rule breaks here - like being able to gain up to 20 mana, or hold up to 12 cards, or having a card that always shows up in your opening hand - but mostly these are examples of effects which have been tuned up and down over the history of Hearthstone, not red lines that have been crossed.
I think the most egregious examples of rule breaks are breaks to constants (e.g. your starting hand is random, you only have 90 seconds to take your turn). Rule breaks on varying systems (e.g. how many cards can you have, how much mana can you have) is generally much more manageable because those are resources that are designed to change over the course of the game, so there are already cards that interact with them, making balance easier to judge. This is why Guff works (there have been lots of mana cheat tools in Druid, so Blizzard has some sense of how OP that would be and took out Maly before releasing this), and Valdris was never interesting (12 cards isn't that many more than 10, and you want to play cards, so you'll rarely get there), but Quests and especially Open the Waygate have made very problematic metas (while the OG Nozdormu was a pain for randomly generated effects).
Honestly, I don't think I'd want to see most of the other core rules of the game crossed. The balance on these things is just too hard. But I could imagine seeing more examples of Sigil-like or Objective-like spells added to the game, and maybe even secrets. One kind of wild thing I'd love to see would be a Core set with secrets for every class plus an expansion with secrets for every class released all at once at the start of a rotation. That would add enough secrets to make them work for any class, it would equalize that "I do stuff on your turn" feature that some classes have but other don't, and it would eventually rotate out so as not to become a permanent feature of the game.
I just tried out an Untapped Potential Druid in Wild to get Boomkin progress, and didn't get any progress at all despite dealing damage. Notably, that damage was dealt after I got the "Choose One cards do both" effect from my quest, so there may be a bug there.
Edit: After another game (in which I dealt 8 damage with Boomkins) I saw a jump of 15. So now I'm thinking maybe the progress display is what's bugged, not the Untapped Potential synergy.
Are other folks seeing the DH and Rogue ones as totally missing? I see no new achievements for those in the game client when I open up FiAV achievements.
I've enjoyed messing around with Kazakusan Priest, and even climbed a bit with it. If Questline Hunter becomes a top tier meta deck in the next week or so, I could see it being a serious tier 2 deck because of how much healing it has. But unlike Deathrattle Priest it has no armor gain and puts on very little pressure, so it will take a pretty serious beating if any OTK deck survives the mini set meta changes.
I guess it all depends on how you define "going into the expansion," but Riot has explicitly said they'll be doing balance adjustments when they launch the new cards. Here's the relevant excerpt:
"This patch, we’re focusing on bug fixes to prepare for our next expansion coming in patch 3.2.0 on February 16! In addition to the new cards coming in that patch, we’ll also be doing a few balance adjustments to existing cards based on performance data & feedback we’ve received since our last batch of adjustments in patch 3.0.0."
Anyway as much as I have been enjoying this discussion, I have the feeling that we have said all that could be said on this subject ( or at very least I did) and that we are kinda just repeating ourselves at this point so this probably going to be my last post here. Plus there are other subjects that I would like to discuses.
Haha, yeah, that seems right. Thanks for the discussion!
Saying that Demacia lack of good finisher is design choice to me is like saying the region isn't supposed to win with it's own champions/follower which not something that I consider to be a healthy design choice. Especially since no other region in game have this weakness and Demacia already plenty of weakness to begin with including poor card draw removal that require you to already have unit's on the board etc.
I'm not saying that the region isn't supposed to win with it's own champions and followers. I'm saying that you're constructing a very narrow view of what winning with your champions and followers means. In effect, you're arguing that if your champ or follower isn't the thing that blows up the enemy Nexus, then it's not how you won.
But that's way too narrow a view. As I said, the majority of aggro and midrange decks that include a Demacian package run Fleetfeather Tracker and Brightsteel Protector precisely because of how powerful that pair can be in the early game. These decks rely on winning the board in the early game so that in the mid game they can finish off the opponent (with Ionian elusives, or with a buffed Pantheon, etc.). Those followers don't close out games, but they're just as instrumental in winning games because they create the space to leverage those powerful units. It's also common to splash Vanguard Sergeant to get For Demacia! and take advantage of a wide board to win.
I think it's worth thinking about the height of Demacian relevance back in 2020 (pre Grizzled Ranger nerf) when Mono-Demancian Bannerman was one of the best decks in the game. It was the perfect illustration of what Demacia is built to do, and it still didn't run more than 1x of any high cost Demacia card because it was built to win in the mid game without flashy finishers. It achieved that victory by snowballing an early board lead with exactly the same early game Demacian cards that still show up in decks today, and to the extent that it had "finishers" at all, they were things like Vanguard Sergeant into For Demacia! which also see play today (albeit more limited).
The same core aspects of Demacia that made Bannerman powerful are still alive and well, but the meta is no longer "fair enough" to let a "purist midrange" strategy like Bannerman succeed. That's not great design on the part of Riot, but it speaks more to powercreep than it does to some design flaw unique to Demacia.
This is not the issue with Demacia or the issue that I was trying to highlight. Champion requiring specific synergies to function is not Demacia's problem.
To illustrate my point let's compare some follower, for an 8 drop finisher Demacia has Tianna Crownguard she has tough which makes her good at trading but she can't finish the opponent by herself for Tianna to be useful you need to already have a board of unit, attack clear the your opponent's board with trades then play Tianna to rally and win. that a lot set up and Tianna just end up being a win more card but the worst part is that your opponent can counter you easily with just a chump blocker like Spiderling
Compare that to Noxus 8 drop finisher Captain Farron, he doesn't care about you having or no having a board with 8 overwhelm damage and another 8 burn damage he is more than capable of finishing the opponent all by himself and the opponent can't just survive with a mere Spiderling.
Rally is supposed to be Demacia way of finishing the game but because Demacia has no may to deal damage directly to the nexus the mechanic end up being just decent in Demacia and completely broken in any region that has Elusive or overwhelm, even scouts one the only few "real" Demacian deck use Miss Fortune to compensate for that weakness.
As far as I'm concerned, what you're describing isn't a design flaw, it's just a design choice. Regions are not going to excel at the same things, this is intentionally not a strength of Demacia.
Demacia isn't a region that's about big finishers - they're about skilled, disciplined armies winning in a fair fight through superior strategy and strength. They're good at getting value trades and building board advantage over time thanks to Challenger, Barrier, and Tough keywords. (44% of cards with Challenger, 50% of cards with Barrier, and 50% of cards with Tough are Demacian.) They've also got Dragons whose Fury keyword emphasizes value trading, and their removal tools are mostly based on striking. As a result, their big payoff cards aren't about directly blowing up the enemy, they're about capitalizing on what Demacia does best - build and maintain a board over a series of turns. This is well-emphasized by For The Fallen and Reinforcements whose payoffs come from building and trading an Elite army, but all of their 8+ cost followers do this too - their value scales directly with how wide your board is when you play them.
In many ways, I think you could actually argue quite the opposite of your original point - that Demacia is a fairly healthy region. It has three competitive decks that feature its Champs, all of which have varying playing styles (Laser Gate Control, Pantheon Dragon Midrange that focuses on buffing single units, and Scouts Midrange that focuses on going frequent attacks with wide boards). Even in decks that feature Demacia in a limited support capacity, you see key elements like Fleetfeather Tracker and Brightsteel Protector, a combo which is fundamental to what Demacia is good at, as well as splashes of Vanguard Sergeant to capitalize on a wide board or Ranger's Resolve to out-value your opponent on board.
Obviously (from what I've said previously), I don't think it's a completely healthy region. I think it's correct to criticize the design of a number of Champs in Demacia. Their lack of synergy frequently makes them irrelevant because of how powerful synergy is in LoR. I consider that a broad design flaw in the game because powerful synergies regularly crowd out more traditional board-based decks, and that almost certainly hampers Demacia to a greater extent than the other regions. It's also true that expensive Demacia cards don't see much play, but I see that as a biproduct of this central synergy design flaw. When your plan comes down to hypersynergistic, linear play, the best thing you can do is turbo through your deck and that keeps your opponent from getting to the late game. That further hinders the slow-and-steady, board-based approach of Demacia, but it diminishes cards in other regions as well. (I think it's pretty telling that the Mobalytics tier list has zero S-Tier decks that include a 7+ cost card, and only three from A- and B-Tiers contain more than one 7+ drop card. Expensive cards in LoR are outclassed by early game synergy across the board, whether or not they're big, impressive finishers.)
At the end of the day, you're talking about a game where decks are (almost always) made up of cards from two regions. The whole point is that you can pair regions to shore up weaknesses, and I think it's a pretty reasonable design choice to make direct nexus damage a weakness for Demacia so that you have to think about how it pairs with other regions to deal with chumps.
I think it's worth challenging the premise that Demacia is only used as a support region. If you trust the Mobalytics tier list, then there are two competitive decks that feature Demacian Champs: Pantheon Dragons at S Tier with Shyvana and Laser Gate at A Tier with Lux. While it's certainly true that other meta decks use Demacia as pure support, and it's true that you could build a Pantheon deck and a Jayce deck without those champs, it's not fair to say that Demacia is strictly support.
What's interesting about these decks, and perhaps what's at the core of your criticism, is that these Demacian Champs aren't really the stars of the show - they end up in the deck because of the obvious synergies they share with the important cards. It makes a lot of sense to include Wounded Whiteflame and the Demacia support package in a Pantheon deck, at which point it probably makes sense to also run Dragon's Clutch to fetch your dragon and/or give it Overwhelm, and at some point you hit a critical mass of dragon synergy that leads to including Shyvana. Similarly the payoffs of Jayce and Albus Ferros are compelling enough that you end up including a lot of 6-drop spells, which leads to including Lux (and maybe some Mageseekers) in the deck.
Compare these relevant Champs to the other Demacian Champs and you see that the others are generically pretty strong but don't have meaningful synergies with any particular strategy; it's just a lot of "I've struck" or "Allies blocked" or "You've attacked." They can fit in all kinds of decks that run Demacia, and in certain metagames they might be very relevant, but they're also generic enough that any highly synergist deck is likely to pass over them in favor of doubling down on its synergies.
This is sort of the double-edged sword of Champ design in LoR - many of Demacia's Champs are well-designed from a traditional CCG standpoint, but that often renders them less compelling because of how synergy focused LoR is. They fit the regional identity very well, and offer powerful effects that exceed follower cards (persistent bonus Rally's, persistent free Barriers or challenger units to make for high value trades, etc), but the high-synergy champs end up being more relevant precisely because they'll find a home when any part of their synergistic deck is strong. When synergy is the primary driver for deck building, you end up with more narrow deck-building options and linear game plans, so there's just no room for a generically strong midrange Champ like Garen because he doesn't do enough to progress your main strategy. For what it's worth, I don't think this is strictly a problem for Demacia, but it may be true that it's a bigger problem for Demacia than other regions because the region is built for board-based, midrange playstyles.
We have seen a massive number of decks drop to a barely playable winrate like 51%
So I'll list only the decks that are currently 53% and higher, yes the list is kinda scuffed.
....
Oh wow I was 1 percent off the top of my head and thats an aggregate I probably saw a list specific score.
I don't mean to nitpick, but in this case I think it matters that you weren't 1% off, you were 2% off. That puts Plunder Midrange at the cutoff you set out in your original post for decks that remain relevant.
It's certainly not the best aggregate win rate you'll see on Mobalytics, but in any healthy metagame you wouldn't expect to see aggregate win rates exceeding around 55% or so anyway, so it's perfectly respectable.
Setting aside the fact that an aggregate 51% win rate across players of all skill levels is really not bad, I'm not seeing 51% for Plunder Midrange, I'm seeing 53.3%. Not the highest win rate, but perfectly respectable (again, particularly true when you consider that this is an aggregate across players whose skill levels vary). The "Archetypes" view on Mobalytics has a slightly lower win rate (52.9%), but still respectable and above 51%
This page is just speculation. The official changes aren't announced yet.
I typically reroll this one because there aren't any Questline decks I'm excited about playing right now. But if I had to do it, I'd probably do Demon Hunter Questline in Wild. It's super easy to complete there, and I don't care at all about my Wild ranking so it's a great space for achievements and quests whose decks would be tedious/weak on Standard ladder.
I completely agree that the Switcheroo Priest is a tilting, highrolly deck, but the data on HSReplay (which is certainly only preliminary since the expansion just launched) suggests that it's generally pretty bad in Standard. In theory that should be enough to fix the problem on its own, but here are some of my thoughts on the cards in question:
With all that in mind, I think the best fix is to ban Switcheroo in Wild and remove Rush from Twin-fin Fin Twin. The former solves the Wild problem completely, and the latter should make Switcheroo Priest even more vulnerable to aggressive strategies, driving down the win rate for Standard Switcheroo Priest so low that no one will want to play it. (You could consider upping the base stats of the Twin-fin a bit to account for the change.)
With these changes, Switcheroo can still be a relevant card in Silence Priest or Miracle Priest strategies, and Twin-fin Fin Twin can still be relevant to handbuff decks where it was clearly intended to be relevant. Switcheroo Priest will still be intact enough for people to play it if they really love that high-rolling nonsense, but it will be slow enough that it won't become a major part of the meta ecosystem.
While it's certainly possible they'd do something differently, the Core Set is intended to be tied to a Hearthstone Year, and the April Expansion always kicks off a new year, so both ought to drop on the same day.
The other reason using Echo is compelling for SN1P-SN4P is that it's not a spell. "Repeatable this turn" is clear and succinct for a spell, but meaningless for a minion. To make it really consistent with other cards without Echo, they'd have to change "Echo" to something like "Battlecry: Add a 2/3 SN1P-SN4P to your hand. Discard it at the end of your turn." It's just way too much text.
Today's Questline Hunter probably wouldn't use this because of how few slots they have for minions (most lists just run Barak Kodobane, Multicaster, and Wandmaker - 5 minions that all draw or generate more spells).
That said, rotation could change the deck a lot, so I think it's worth reserving judgement a bit. Specifically, Overwhelm and Bola Shot are rotating out, while many of the other cards key come from the Core Set (Arcane Shot, Tracking, Explosive Trap, Quick Shot). Depending on what sticks around in the new Core Set 2022, this deck could actually want more spell-synergy minions.
Yeah, the reason I think it could see play in as a dragon synergy is because a) those decks often want more dragons in hand and b) the "fail state" for the card is a reasonable vanilla minion for a deck that will mostly have expensive cards. So a Control Dragon deck can use this for late game value in a control mirror, or early game tempo in an aggro match.
A lot of the Standard dragons will be rotating out, and I doubt we'll see a ton of new dragons in a Sunken City/Naga themed set. The most of any neutral minion type in today's Core Set is 8 (i.e. there are 8 beasts and 8 dragons, and everything else is lower), so it's probably fair to guess there won't be more than ~8 dragons in the new core set. Assuming the Aspects will still be in the Core Set after rotation, the majority of dragons in Standard will be Aspects or cards from the Alterac Valley Miniset.
So this discover could end up being a tool to fetch bonus copies of high impact dragons like Lightmaw Netherdrake or Onyxian Drake or Kazakusan.
Side note - a limited dragon pool after rotation could mean Lady Prestor's value increases significantly, which should make for some pretty wacky games.
The overhaul to sets seems welcome and overdue - the idea that only some regions get a meaningful number of cards in each release was bizarre and less fun than a traditional release structure.
Jhin, and the whole concept of Runeterra Champions, seems like a repeat of the Bandle City problem. The whole point of regions is to have a focused identity with strengths and weaknesses around which you can balance your game. Bandle City really broke that by giving you access to a lot of strengths from across all regions, thus crowding out a lot of regions. Jhin's problem might not be as bad (because Jhin is limited to skill cards), but the concept of Runeterra Champions that span all regions is a balance landmine.
+1 to a a lot of what AngryShuckie is saying. When discussing an MTG card that seemed to violate some rules, a friend of mine quipped that the text on each MTG card basically reads "here's how I break the rules." Creatures don't get to attack the turn they're summoned, except when their text includes Haste, for example. It's easy to point to new card designs and see them as breaking rules, but a lot of times the point of a card is to do something novel, and the fundamental rules aren't violated.
I think a lot of the original red lines here aren't really red lines that the game has crossed, as they were in the original game:
On a related note, there are some newer effects here that have reasonable precursors:
I think there are some real rule breaks here - like being able to gain up to 20 mana, or hold up to 12 cards, or having a card that always shows up in your opening hand - but mostly these are examples of effects which have been tuned up and down over the history of Hearthstone, not red lines that have been crossed.
I think the most egregious examples of rule breaks are breaks to constants (e.g. your starting hand is random, you only have 90 seconds to take your turn). Rule breaks on varying systems (e.g. how many cards can you have, how much mana can you have) is generally much more manageable because those are resources that are designed to change over the course of the game, so there are already cards that interact with them, making balance easier to judge. This is why Guff works (there have been lots of mana cheat tools in Druid, so Blizzard has some sense of how OP that would be and took out Maly before releasing this), and Valdris was never interesting (12 cards isn't that many more than 10, and you want to play cards, so you'll rarely get there), but Quests and especially Open the Waygate have made very problematic metas (while the OG Nozdormu was a pain for randomly generated effects).
Honestly, I don't think I'd want to see most of the other core rules of the game crossed. The balance on these things is just too hard. But I could imagine seeing more examples of Sigil-like or Objective-like spells added to the game, and maybe even secrets. One kind of wild thing I'd love to see would be a Core set with secrets for every class plus an expansion with secrets for every class released all at once at the start of a rotation. That would add enough secrets to make them work for any class, it would equalize that "I do stuff on your turn" feature that some classes have but other don't, and it would eventually rotate out so as not to become a permanent feature of the game.
I just tried out an Untapped Potential Druid in Wild to get Boomkin progress, and didn't get any progress at all despite dealing damage. Notably, that damage was dealt after I got the "Choose One cards do both" effect from my quest, so there may be a bug there.
Edit: After another game (in which I dealt 8 damage with Boomkins) I saw a jump of 15. So now I'm thinking maybe the progress display is what's bugged, not the Untapped Potential synergy.
Are other folks seeing the DH and Rogue ones as totally missing? I see no new achievements for those in the game client when I open up FiAV achievements.
I've enjoyed messing around with Kazakusan Priest, and even climbed a bit with it. If Questline Hunter becomes a top tier meta deck in the next week or so, I could see it being a serious tier 2 deck because of how much healing it has. But unlike Deathrattle Priest it has no armor gain and puts on very little pressure, so it will take a pretty serious beating if any OTK deck survives the mini set meta changes.
I guess it all depends on how you define "going into the expansion," but Riot has explicitly said they'll be doing balance adjustments when they launch the new cards. Here's the relevant excerpt:
"This patch, we’re focusing on bug fixes to prepare for our next expansion coming in patch 3.2.0 on February 16! In addition to the new cards coming in that patch, we’ll also be doing a few balance adjustments to existing cards based on performance data & feedback we’ve received since our last batch of adjustments in patch 3.0.0."
Haha, yeah, that seems right. Thanks for the discussion!
I'm not saying that the region isn't supposed to win with it's own champions and followers. I'm saying that you're constructing a very narrow view of what winning with your champions and followers means. In effect, you're arguing that if your champ or follower isn't the thing that blows up the enemy Nexus, then it's not how you won.
But that's way too narrow a view. As I said, the majority of aggro and midrange decks that include a Demacian package run Fleetfeather Tracker and Brightsteel Protector precisely because of how powerful that pair can be in the early game. These decks rely on winning the board in the early game so that in the mid game they can finish off the opponent (with Ionian elusives, or with a buffed Pantheon, etc.). Those followers don't close out games, but they're just as instrumental in winning games because they create the space to leverage those powerful units. It's also common to splash Vanguard Sergeant to get For Demacia! and take advantage of a wide board to win.
I think it's worth thinking about the height of Demacian relevance back in 2020 (pre Grizzled Ranger nerf) when Mono-Demancian Bannerman was one of the best decks in the game. It was the perfect illustration of what Demacia is built to do, and it still didn't run more than 1x of any high cost Demacia card because it was built to win in the mid game without flashy finishers. It achieved that victory by snowballing an early board lead with exactly the same early game Demacian cards that still show up in decks today, and to the extent that it had "finishers" at all, they were things like Vanguard Sergeant into For Demacia! which also see play today (albeit more limited).
The same core aspects of Demacia that made Bannerman powerful are still alive and well, but the meta is no longer "fair enough" to let a "purist midrange" strategy like Bannerman succeed. That's not great design on the part of Riot, but it speaks more to powercreep than it does to some design flaw unique to Demacia.
As far as I'm concerned, what you're describing isn't a design flaw, it's just a design choice. Regions are not going to excel at the same things, this is intentionally not a strength of Demacia.
Demacia isn't a region that's about big finishers - they're about skilled, disciplined armies winning in a fair fight through superior strategy and strength. They're good at getting value trades and building board advantage over time thanks to Challenger, Barrier, and Tough keywords. (44% of cards with Challenger, 50% of cards with Barrier, and 50% of cards with Tough are Demacian.) They've also got Dragons whose Fury keyword emphasizes value trading, and their removal tools are mostly based on striking. As a result, their big payoff cards aren't about directly blowing up the enemy, they're about capitalizing on what Demacia does best - build and maintain a board over a series of turns. This is well-emphasized by For The Fallen and Reinforcements whose payoffs come from building and trading an Elite army, but all of their 8+ cost followers do this too - their value scales directly with how wide your board is when you play them.
In many ways, I think you could actually argue quite the opposite of your original point - that Demacia is a fairly healthy region. It has three competitive decks that feature its Champs, all of which have varying playing styles (Laser Gate Control, Pantheon Dragon Midrange that focuses on buffing single units, and Scouts Midrange that focuses on going frequent attacks with wide boards). Even in decks that feature Demacia in a limited support capacity, you see key elements like Fleetfeather Tracker and Brightsteel Protector, a combo which is fundamental to what Demacia is good at, as well as splashes of Vanguard Sergeant to capitalize on a wide board or Ranger's Resolve to out-value your opponent on board.
Obviously (from what I've said previously), I don't think it's a completely healthy region. I think it's correct to criticize the design of a number of Champs in Demacia. Their lack of synergy frequently makes them irrelevant because of how powerful synergy is in LoR. I consider that a broad design flaw in the game because powerful synergies regularly crowd out more traditional board-based decks, and that almost certainly hampers Demacia to a greater extent than the other regions. It's also true that expensive Demacia cards don't see much play, but I see that as a biproduct of this central synergy design flaw. When your plan comes down to hypersynergistic, linear play, the best thing you can do is turbo through your deck and that keeps your opponent from getting to the late game. That further hinders the slow-and-steady, board-based approach of Demacia, but it diminishes cards in other regions as well. (I think it's pretty telling that the Mobalytics tier list has zero S-Tier decks that include a 7+ cost card, and only three from A- and B-Tiers contain more than one 7+ drop card. Expensive cards in LoR are outclassed by early game synergy across the board, whether or not they're big, impressive finishers.)
At the end of the day, you're talking about a game where decks are (almost always) made up of cards from two regions. The whole point is that you can pair regions to shore up weaknesses, and I think it's a pretty reasonable design choice to make direct nexus damage a weakness for Demacia so that you have to think about how it pairs with other regions to deal with chumps.
I think it's worth challenging the premise that Demacia is only used as a support region. If you trust the Mobalytics tier list, then there are two competitive decks that feature Demacian Champs: Pantheon Dragons at S Tier with Shyvana and Laser Gate at A Tier with Lux. While it's certainly true that other meta decks use Demacia as pure support, and it's true that you could build a Pantheon deck and a Jayce deck without those champs, it's not fair to say that Demacia is strictly support.
What's interesting about these decks, and perhaps what's at the core of your criticism, is that these Demacian Champs aren't really the stars of the show - they end up in the deck because of the obvious synergies they share with the important cards. It makes a lot of sense to include Wounded Whiteflame and the Demacia support package in a Pantheon deck, at which point it probably makes sense to also run Dragon's Clutch to fetch your dragon and/or give it Overwhelm, and at some point you hit a critical mass of dragon synergy that leads to including Shyvana. Similarly the payoffs of Jayce and Albus Ferros are compelling enough that you end up including a lot of 6-drop spells, which leads to including Lux (and maybe some Mageseekers) in the deck.
Compare these relevant Champs to the other Demacian Champs and you see that the others are generically pretty strong but don't have meaningful synergies with any particular strategy; it's just a lot of "I've struck" or "Allies blocked" or "You've attacked." They can fit in all kinds of decks that run Demacia, and in certain metagames they might be very relevant, but they're also generic enough that any highly synergist deck is likely to pass over them in favor of doubling down on its synergies.
This is sort of the double-edged sword of Champ design in LoR - many of Demacia's Champs are well-designed from a traditional CCG standpoint, but that often renders them less compelling because of how synergy focused LoR is. They fit the regional identity very well, and offer powerful effects that exceed follower cards (persistent bonus Rally's, persistent free Barriers or challenger units to make for high value trades, etc), but the high-synergy champs end up being more relevant precisely because they'll find a home when any part of their synergistic deck is strong. When synergy is the primary driver for deck building, you end up with more narrow deck-building options and linear game plans, so there's just no room for a generically strong midrange Champ like Garen because he doesn't do enough to progress your main strategy. For what it's worth, I don't think this is strictly a problem for Demacia, but it may be true that it's a bigger problem for Demacia than other regions because the region is built for board-based, midrange playstyles.
I don't mean to nitpick, but in this case I think it matters that you weren't 1% off, you were 2% off. That puts Plunder Midrange at the cutoff you set out in your original post for decks that remain relevant.
It's certainly not the best aggregate win rate you'll see on Mobalytics, but in any healthy metagame you wouldn't expect to see aggregate win rates exceeding around 55% or so anyway, so it's perfectly respectable.
Setting aside the fact that an aggregate 51% win rate across players of all skill levels is really not bad, I'm not seeing 51% for Plunder Midrange, I'm seeing 53.3%. Not the highest win rate, but perfectly respectable (again, particularly true when you consider that this is an aggregate across players whose skill levels vary). The "Archetypes" view on Mobalytics has a slightly lower win rate (52.9%), but still respectable and above 51%