Actually the problem of rush decks everywhere is a hard problem to tackle, as there is
always a deck with better electrum/min gain, even if all the cards are balanced.
Thank you for the responses. I really don't want to argue, but I thought I'd need to point some things out.
Yes, rushes are often vulnerable to CC. This doesn't help much with many cases. It's pretty difficult to pull off CC when one has no pillars (Shrieker Rush, Gravity or Darkness), draws no new cards (Ghostmare) or if the opponent's creatures are immortal (Aether).
Just for the record, the deck I usually use has plenty of creature control; it's actually focused around that, kind of. But creature control - be it an Otyugh or a fine Rain of Fire - is cold comfort when it rests in the player's hand due to the absence of sufficient quanta to play.
Again - the main problem is that for Arena decks complete lockdown has become so quick and easy that ordinary players often have no means to respond other than luck. Like someone mentioned here earlier - a Ghostmare with twelve Steals and Rewinds is a good example. Good luck for managing to keep anything on the field.
Well, you're not talking about rush decks then. 12 steals and 12 rewinds are examples of control decks aim to shut down the opponent while beating them down slowly. GoTPs are moderately powerful creatures stat-wise. It is by no means a rush, but it is the innate advantage that the arena gives the deck to enable it to rush. Can you imagine ghostmares forced to power steals with an excessive amount of time pendulums because they lack a triple
mark?
Think of rush/stall/control as a spectrum. Monoaether, ghostmare and shriekers are stall with rush (yeah SoWs hurt), control with rush and rush with control respectively, with the first element being the greater one. It is not the problem of rushes; it is the fact that these decks can FULLY UTILISE the advantages arena points give them (most notably triple mark and double draw). Arena is meant to be daunting at the very first place.
It is normal if only a few deck types work against the arena. It is the metagame of arena. If your deck doesn't work against the arena, it doesn't mean that it is bad; it just does not belong to the arena. By playing arena you are fighting the arena, not other things else. If you know what to expect in arena, when you construct your arena killer (NOT necessarily a grinder), you should aim to defeat the prevailing decks in arena.
On a side note, arena grinders usually aim to exploit the weaker decks present in arena and forgo the stronger ones... just like how you skip FGs if you grinder cannot take them down (e.g. skip Dark Matter if you are a rainbow).
However I would not claim that "rushes" (whatever they are called!) are imbalanced, as balancing of cards has a ceteris paribus basis, which is demonstrated only in pvp matches. Good luck stealing all 6 of the sanctuaries of a stall with your ghostmare in PVP2. Grinder decks are not necessarily better than an innovative deck in PVP. But they are engineered to perform well enough in normal circumstances, and too well with the extra advantages.
