Problem Statement
For the past two weeks, my Pyramid Wardens have felt like a hindrance in weekend ranked. The two most common decks you'll face (Aggro War and Big Beast Nature) are able to trade well and get good creatures back. War kills their blitz creatures only to get them back when the Pyramid Warden dies and punish you with them on the same turn. Nature's big stats means that the Warden doesn't survive long - and the punishment is giving back those big creatures.
This has me thinking about Pyramid Wardens in the current meta.
When are PWs Good?
Pyramid Wardens are fantastic against decks trying to get wide early with cheap creatures that do little damage. When the Warden dies, you give back a cheap creature. You also trade 2- or 3-to-1 with it. Wardens are also great in buff metas and were single-handedly winning games in the Flourish meta before the nerf. This is also back when shield bearers were staples in decks and could quickly get you a 3/7 warden.
When are PWs Bad?
Well, in short, this meta. No one is getting wide (except zombies). Nature is building tall. Mid game Pangolins come out and 1-shot your Wardens and they get back a Rhino or some other BS creature (BS = "big started" of course). You basically can't play them if they aren't in your opening hand. Even early game, Wardens trade awkwardly with Black Jags, Skeleton Heavies, and Axewomen are sacked first to come back later.
War is in all-out blitz mode. Tavern Brawlers trade with 1 HP left making prime Out of It's Misery targets. When Brawlers, Axewomen, and Longships come back, they come back with blitz. This often swings games from W's to L's.
Deception and Magic make quick work of Pyramid Wardens with the auto-include spells they will always have. Magic creatures are generally weak, so giving them back an Assistant Alchemist isn't the end of the world, though.
2-mana is already crowded
Check my post here for more details, but we are already brimming with great 2-mana cards. Trading Pyramid Wardens for something in the 3- or 4- mana slot would improve our curve.
Can game data tell us anything?
Well, what are we likely to face? If you remember from my previous post on GU tools, let's check godsunchainedrightnow.com:
Ouch! Chances are, you are going to face one of the bad situations mentioned above. (Also, Jesus! Look at that 73% win rate for War in Mythic!)
I also thought to take a look at the top Nature decks in Mythic so far this weekend to see if there was anything we could glean from them.
I went through each looking for Pyramid Wardens. Here's a sample:
EDIT: the actual markdown table with live links caused this post to load really slowly. Replacing with an image.
In total, only 3 of the decks in that list have a Pyramid Warden. But Wait! Fans of Thomas Bayes are screaming right now, "Yea, but not many people have Pyramid Wardens to begin with!" First of all, down with the frequentists. Second of all, you're quite right. With such an unsophisticated analysis, it's impossible to conclude that Pyramid Wardens are a hindrance. I don't feel like firing up R, learning the GU API, and t-testing nature win rates with and without Wardens (if any fellow nerds do feel like it, I'll add your results).
Instead, I'm satisfied with the conclusion we can make. If we saw Pyramid Wardens dominating this list, we would easily conclude that they were the key to success. We don't see that, so nothing here disproves my theory that maybe I should pull out the Pyramid Wardens.
Conclusion
I'm halfway done with my weekend ranked games. I'm not going to test this theory on the fly in games that count, but next week, I'll be testing my deck sans PW.
I know some people who think PW is a bad card and I have punished opponents by killing their PW. But overall, it's still one of the best opening cards in the game. Maybe in the case of nature, they have the best 2 drop in the game with Underbrush boar making PW not an optimal choice.
This is my thinking. I'm not expecting a collapse in the price of Pyramid Wardens any time soon, but this specific meta + god match-up might be unique. Pyramid Wardens are all about stats-per-mana spent. The Nature archetype is this exact same thing, but without the downside of giving creatures back.
Interesting, I do see very few PWs running around lately probably for the reasons you mentioned. The only times I really felt PW was a hindrance was when it was played on T1 and I only have low-attack creatures at my disposal. It's good that the +2 health and frontline has its drawbacks for sure.
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