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Hearthstone9 years agoGosu "GosuGamers" Gamers

Interview: Dtwo talks strategy at the Hearthstone World Championship

 

 

 

The room was hyped after Dtwo had just finished winning his first match against Tom60229. Admist the shoutcasters, the fans, and the players, a lot of people were talking about the last match. We managed to catch Dtwo before heading back to the player area and ask him a few questions about the match and the Hearthstone World Championship.

Nick "Dorazion" Dorazio: That was a close set, you got two great games off with your hunter. First question: what was your thought process behind banning warlock? Is that something you are going to be doing for the rest of the tournament or what?

Daniel "DTwo" Ikuta You have to set up your decks a certain way. The two elephants in the room are hunter and warlock. You basically have to set up your decks to ban hunter or warlock. You can’t really have a set of decks that deal with both, or that deal with both effectively with a ban. Because maybe they ban your counter, or they ban one of your counters and you are left with 1 deck and if that loses you lose 3-0. How I set my decks up was to ban warlock. You are basically banning two archetypes with in one. Those two archetypes are obviously extremely powerful. Handlock causes almost as many, if not more problems for the hunter, because you have to have a specific way to kill it, and sometimes it can still beat hunter anyway.

Nick: Your opponent (tom60229) had a similar strategy: he wanted to ban warlock and kinda what you said happened. He lost the first match vs hunter and didn’t have a deck that could deal with that. After you won the first close game vs his warrior, did you think you had it in the bag?

Dtwo: Well actually both warrior and priest are pretty good against hunter. If you tech your priest correctly and know how to play it. In the beginning, control priest struggled against hunter but once people started figuring out the matchup and figuring out what cards to play... like one of the big things was you didn’t know when to play Northshire Cleric and now everyone knows to just throw it out on turn 1: it just causes so many problems.

That was a bit of an issue I had. I had to deal with the priest as well so I wasn’t out of the woods yet and I basically had to play that match up as smart as I could. I didn’t know what their answers were, but fortunately for me he didn’t have the greatest of answers. He had to use his best answers early: holyftre is a great tool because you can take out a big guy and heal your self back up, and he had to use that pretty early which was very fortunate for me. Once I beat the priest I was like, I’m pretty sure I got this.

Unfortunately my hunter lost to a shaman even though I feel like the hunter I run is slightly favored against shaman.

Nick: Is that any particular card you use that isn’t standard in hunter?

Dtwo: Not really, I think, well even having the 1 unleash, people sometimes run two, is really good against shaman. The hunter decks that are good against aggro are also good against shaman because you basically have stuff that counters the fact that they flood the board a lot with totems. Mine wasn’t particularly geared against shaman, but having played that matchup a lot, and having played from the shaman side a lot, I know how to take advantage of what they shaman decks can do.

And also, as you can see he was playing Lava Burst. I didn’t know he was playing that, but I figured he might be playing the double Lava Burst double Doom hammer deck which is a little bit weak because you can burst someone down, but you are kinda stuck looking for answers in the beginning because you have all of these superfluous cards.

Nick: That’s interesting, that is kinda what took place (in your match). Quick question: is the Acidic swamp ooze in your Priest deck standard or a meta game call?

Dtwo: It’s definently a meta-game call. I mean people play a lot of weapons and I’m not banning hunter at the moment, I mean I might ban hunter later, you never know. There are a lot of warriors a lot of hunter obviously and potentially rogue, although I wouldn’t rely on my priest to beat that.

Essentially what it was is I needed some early game in order to survive the match-up against hunter, and one of the options there was Smite, but I felt that sometimes it can be way to weak in control matches, and even in aggro matchups sometimes things are just really resilient and it doesn’t really do much unless you have a Wild Pyromancer. So I felt like if I replace Smite with ooze it was the way to go. Especially because there are so many powerful options in Priest decks as far as 5 drops and 6 drops: you have Sludge belcher, you have Loatheb, you have cabal shadow priest, so I felt like I didn’t want to make that too heavy and choose between Harrison Jones and other things, so the ooze fit nicely.

Nick: Last question: Who are you least looking forward to playing, and what do you think is the most powerful deck in this particular meta?

Dtwo: As far for people I am looking to avoid, I would say it’s more about the decks that those players are going to be running. You really have to point your decks in a certain directions towards what you are trying to accomplish. Some people, luck of the draw, will just counter your decks. That means they don’t counter others, but sometimes it just happens that way. I need to look at the deck list and see which players have decks that counter mine. Those are the players i’m looking to avoid.

As far as skill is concerned, obviously Kolento is really good, StrifeCro is really good. There are a lot of good players in this tournament. This is a kinda boring answer, but there are so many good players in this tournament. People I think overlook the chinese players, but I think they are stronger than people think. Players like Runninggun and tiddlercelestial are really good. Even the Koreans are really good. I beat a taiwanese player but he had a pretty solid lineup and frozenice is really good as well. Everyone is really strong, you have the famous players yes, but everyone is really good.

As for the decks, the meta is in a really interesting place right now. It’s like a circle basically: there is no dominant deck at the moment. Hunter is really powerful, handlock is really powerful, zoo is really powerful but they can all be countered in different ways. My default is to go with those three, but then they’re decks like Warrior that if you tech into big game hunter for instance, it can pretty much beat anything. Warrior is like the new Druid kinda because it’s evenly matched against most things, and it has favorable matchup and unfavorable matchups but they are in 45/55 range, so it’s kinda like the new druid in that way. Druid has kinda fallen off and warrior has taken it’s place. I don’t know, it’s hard to answer. Rogue is really powerful too, but again, it just dies to Handlock sometimes they die to hunter.

Nick: So it’s really just a very counter-based meta- all the decks are kinda viable but it’s up to the players intuition of what to choose.

Dtwo: Definently.

Nick: Is there anything you want to say to your fans? You have been on quite the hotstreak lately.

Dtwo: Thanks to everyone for cheering to me, Go checkout Ihearthu.com my new team!

Dtwo is an American Hearthstone player who currently lives in Japan. He will continuing competing this weekend at the Hearthstone World Championships at BlizzCon 2014.

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