Not the same luck for Hunter and Paladin, though.
The 2016 Gold Series Winter Championship is streaming live now over the next few days. The tournament which will qualify four players into the HCT Winter Championship and to the CN vs. NA Challenge to represent China is also the first look at what the region’s metagame tendencies in major tournaments are.
Reddit user Czhihong took the liberty to collect all 40 deck archetypes the eight players brought, and few oddities are notable. Unlike the pre-Gadgetzan meta, there is no deck or class that universally chosen, although Warlock and Rogue have come pretty close, present in seven of the line-ups. A handful of power cards are, of course, responsible for this surge of popularity, namely [card]kazakus[/card] for RenoLocks and the pirate package for Miracle.
Interestingly enough, Mage is the third most popular class in the Gold Series meta, which wasn’t at all the case in the early tournaments in the west where the class was barely played. Naturally, highlander is the archetype of choice for Mage, though the Chinese players are showing unusual preference towards [card]Coldlight Oracle[/card] for their draw engine – a tech which western players do not consider.
Where some classes thrive, other struggled. If the evolution of the Gadgetzan meta has been kind to the previously unused Mage, tides haven’t changed for Paladin and Hunter. No single player put his faith into Rexxar, the class struggling to withstand the aggressive tendencies of the meta, and the only Paladin is an Anyfin Combo played by none other than Zhuo “Hamster” Wang – the Blizzcon quarter finalist who played both Paladin and Priest in a meta very hostile to both.
The archetype distribution of the decks can be seen below, with the lists themselves to be published on GosuGamers later today.
