Crueldwarf;n8806130 said:
Yep, casual is kinda frustrating now. I'm slightly above level 10 and 70-80% of games are against three deck archetypes - Nilfgaard John Calveit with spy/deck thinning sheneningans and this 25-str Gold guy as a finisher, Skellige Queensgard resurrection and for some reason Eridin wild hunt/frost deck. I don't see any experementation in here.
The reason these decks are played so much is because they are flat out the best 3 cheap decks you can make (although Skellige is rather expensive, so I'm a bit surprised at that). If you're starting out your collection Monsters is flat out the best deck to use because all of the other decks require key combo cards you don't have. NG is the best deck that requires minimal crafting to get it to work. I don't think there's another deck in the game that is as cheap and effective as NG. Monsters is better in the budget department, but not as strong.
The main problem doesn't seem to be that these decks are flat out broken (maybe NG a bit). It seems it's more to do with there being no other viable options for 95% of the player-base, and all the good counter decks are impossible for most people to create as well.
This gets into why people play these decks in casual. One reason might be they are testing a deck out before they take it to ranked. But, I think the main reason is most people don't have complete decks and are grinding to get a complete deck before going into ranked. The deck I mainly play now looks similar to the popular NG deck, but I'm missing golds and silvers that really tie the deck together. It's still good, but I don't feel that it's good enough that I can take it into ranked and win consistently. So I, like many others I'm sure, am in the long process of grinding out kegs so I can actually play ranked.
I'd happily play other factions, but they're all just too expensive to make good decks for. I'd love to play the good NR deck out there, or the special card ST deck, but I can't afford to sink a thousand+ scraps into them. NG and Monsters are the only viable options for me because I simply can't afford anything else. This is coming from someone who got 20 free kegs + scraps from closed beta and spent $20 on the game. I imagine it's a ton tougher for people who are just starting out.