Yellow rush kills you so fast that only top tier decks can win against it. It really hurts variety in ranked mode, since you have to play the few top tier decks to not lose against yellow rush all the time.
I’ve made a lot of original decks and only two of them win against yellow rush. One of those was specifically made to counter rush and it still only wins half the time.
So many decks are unplayable just because they always lose against yellow rush. I won 7 out of 9 matches against other decks with the most recent deck I made, then lost all 3 matches against yellow rush with it. Many of my other decks similarly win a decent amount of time against other decks, but always lose to yellow rush.
Since so many people play yellow rush in ranked, I can’t use any of my own decks there unless I want to lose all the time. So basically, I need to play the same few boring netdecks there all the time. It’s no wonder there’s so little deck variety in ranked, since yellow rush makes so many decks unviable.
So because of that, I’ve mostly been playing unranked. Unfortunately, unranked is flawed too. It consists mostly of newbies that I win against too easily. Some people also play yellow rush there, which causes me to lose the same way I would in ranked. It’s very hard to have any close matches when I play my own decks, since unranked is too easy and ranked is too hard because of all the rush decks.
I can completely emphasize with what you’re saying in your post. It’s frustrating to come up with new innovative decks, only to find that they’re not viable due to that one aggressive deck that everyone seem to be running. All that work involved coming up with new intricate ways to play, yet facing defeat time and time again against aggro-decks that seem to be able to play on auto-pilot.
Still, it’s actually quite beneficiary that the game allows for aggressive decks to flourish – as long as they in turn have bad match-ups against other certain type of decks. Aggression tend to keep “unfair” decks in check, such as combo or fatigue-control, forcing them to at least play some interactive cards.
Lest aggro decks wasn’t playable in competitive game play, you’d soon have apex predators or probably worse one-turn-kill decks dominating the meta. And whilst it might feel as if that would be a more ideal scenario, it really isn’t … long grinding games where one player is unable to do anything is what really kills the mood. Against aggro you still have that feeling that if you’re only able to stall for a bit more tempo or time, you’ll eventually gain the upper hand.
Finally, there might be some cards which are slightly better than they might need to be, in order for yellow rush to still be a tier1 deck … but that’s a wholly different discussion.
Now that the meta has shifted and people play less rush decks, I’ve been able to easily climb the ladder by playing my own fun decks. Rush really isn’t balanced at all in this game, when you consider how much worse my winrate is against rush decks.
It shouldn’t be a case of me playing badly either. I’ve read guides on how to play against rush and watched how top players play against it, yet I still struggle to win against rush. There’s only around 6 decks I can use and regularly win against rush, and 3 of those decks are also rush decks. Anything multicolor is really inconsistent, since rush rarely gives you enough time to make lands.
Rush really is the fun killer in this game. You’ll constantly lose unless you play a select few decks when there’s a rush meta going on. It would be great if rush was redesigned, to allow a bigger variety of decks to be played.
