Alloy's 5 Homeworld Meta Predictions

In no particular order...

1. Fear decks become even more important. All of the new abilities are worthless against fear, and this expansion lacks quick hard hitters. Also quick attack decks which are fear's biggest bane are going to become more rare because of refresh.

2. Strike decks are significantly worse. Refresh absolutely destroys strike decks, not to mention chaos.

3. Salvager decks are better. There are a number of new options for this deck such as Lionheart, Doom Cannon, Tesla Tank, and Mobile Base. This deck is good against all the new skills as you can rally to beat refresh and chaos/cleanse/disease have no effect. Plus the other meta shifts should help because this deck destroys fear and is weak against quick strike and SC.

4. SC decks are nerfed but still decent. Disease may own them, but Elemental+Berzerk are great counters to refresh and SCs will remain the best vector for their delivery. Taloc providing cleanse all will be a strong addition along with maybe one or two high hp refresh cards to counter anti-air or rush decks.

5. Some kind of refresh/disease rainbow combo deck with some quick units for fear becomes the new "ultimate" deck (but GS is still very close to as good). Here is my wild stab at it: Dracorex, Necrogeddon, Kyrios(2), Rotted Mortar, Revered Monk, Ravenous Dredge, Stealthy Niaq, Plasma Field, Elite Diver, Boundless Blight.

Elite Diver + Revolution spam might work pretty well for Imp deck, and together with Wasteland.. As has been said before on Tyrant forums.

I disagree a bit on fear being untouched. Refresh on commander screws fear rushes over hard.

also that new refresh 0 activation wall will hurt fear.

and refresh commander may be useful

It only takes 3 GS or 2 Pathrazors plus an action card to deal 8 damage. On fight or surge this is not usually tough to achieve, especially without any commander abilities like strike/enfeeble to deal with. So I doubt we see him in defensive decks too much.

On the other hand, I may have underestimated initially how useful it could be in a surge deck. With the AI controlling the fear deck, it is not nearly as difficult to keep them under 8 damage per turn. If a faction has a high percentage of fear decks, this might be worth the tradeoff. There would be a pretty major tradeoff though, as you would suffer significantly vs most other decks (draco/atlas make a big difference). I don't see many players wanting to make this tradeoff unless the portion of fear decks in a defense is significantly higher than ours currently is.

As to the refresh wall, 5 damage is very simple for most fear decks to put up in a turn, and this card is otherwise worthless. You could change the 0 wait to 4 and it wouldn't affect this card because it doesn't actually do anything. I don't think this card will see wide adaption.

I probably should have mentioned the refresh commander, you guys are right he will have an effect, but I think this affect will be to lessen the strengthening of fear decks, not to reverse it.