The best HoTS players in the world can pull out a win with nearly any combination of heroes, so the cheese strategies you sometimes see in quick match and the lower rungs of ranked play aren’t typically used by them. Fortunately, this article isn’t written for the best players in the world - it’s written for you, and hopefully four other people you can coordinate with in voice chat to wreak some havoc.

As we begin, it’s important to understand your goal as a full-force cheese group; maybe you want to focus on a single hero and ruin their evening, perhaps you want to go full wombo and dunk on the entire enemy team in one fell swoop. We’re not here to judge, the world of cheese comps is vast and wide, and it’s important that you pick one that you’re comfortable with.

Vanilla Wombo Combo

For the purposes of this initial discussion, we’re going to be looking at a group-n-dunk comp that will let you stack the enemy team and burn them down. Let’s take a high level look at who we’re going to pick here - Ragnaros, Zarya, Falstad, Jaina, and Malfurion. Understand that this is going to be an awfully tough comp to get in a draft scenario with Ragnaros and Malfurion being popular first pick/ban choices, so your best bet for true cheese fun is certainly going to be quick match.

The key to this comp is Falstad, who will be providing your team with the enemy space manipulation via Gust, Zarya can obviously use Graviton Surge to hold enemies in place, but this becomes much easier if they can be corralled into one spot first. Naturally, once the enemy team is suspended in the air with Graviton Surge, you’ll want to immediately drop Sulfuras Smash and Blizzard - and maybe a delayed Roots spell to trap any survivors for extermination.

Isolate and ExplodeLet’s build on this a bit though, anyone can put together a wombo team and rain hellfire down on a helpless enemy. For our more maliciously inclined readers, this more nuanced approach will focus on absolutely ruining a single opposing player’s evening. In this instance, we’re going to pull together a group of Artanis, Stitches, Chromie, Malfurion and Medivh - remember the objective isn’t just to win, it’s to break your enemy's will, while also winning.

An ideal assault - and one that you should look to repeat on the same target as often as possible - will be a Blade Dash augmented Phase Prism to swap the target back as far as possible; rolling immediately into a Hook and Gorge from Stitches. At this point a well-timed Chromie combo of Sandblast and Dragon’s Breath, with some auto attack attention from the rest of the team, should make short work of whichever hero you’ve selected for deletion. For added fun, and to remove any possibility of a rescue, a well-placed Ley Lines from Medivh will totally isolate the target hero before the assault even really begins.

Artisan Cheese – Building Your Own Compositions

Remember, these are just a few of the cheese possibilities that exist - the heart and soul of the cheese comp is throwing strategy and sense to the wind and creating a team with a singular purpose. There's no rule out there saying you can't run a global insta-delete comp with Illidan, Falstad, Dehaka, Artanis and Nova to remote murder a single enemy, it just might not work out once you get into the later phases of the game. Truly unique cheese is created by adding your own spice and twist – try bringing in a Murky with Octo-Grab to maximize 5v1 effectiveness in an isolation comp, or adding an AoE Isolation Dehaka and embrace the chaos.

An especially interesting strategy is to create an empowered monster through the use of support heroes - Zul’Jin works particularly well here with his Berserker heroic ability, which boosts his damage and attack speed. Adding an Abathur with Pressurized Glands, Adrenal Overload, Needle Spine, Soma Transference, and Envenomed Spikes means that your frontline Zul’Jin will be tossing axes as fast as possible, and the added damage from his Abathur hat will be considerable. Fill out the rest of the team with Zarya and Tyrael for additional soak, damage, and their unrivaled utility – shields, movement speed and invulnerability. Finally, add a Morales to keep everyone upright and provide Zul’Jin with a Stim and suddenly we’re well on our way to earning some rage quits – Taz’Dingo indeed.

Unique heroes offer unique opportunities for cheese, be willing to combine skills and ultimate abilities to create new ways of frustrating and consternating your opponent’s; a Leoric Entomb combined with a Tassadar Force Wall creates an inescapable room that you can dump all of your abilities into. Lava Wave from Ragnaros combined with a Graviton Surge is just as entertaining as dropping a hogtied NPC on the train tracks in Red Dead Redemption – and for all the same reasons. These strategies rely on taking advantage of your enemies inability or unwillingness to counter pick or otherwise interrupt your draft selections, you’re essentially learning to zig when common sense and decency says you should zag.

On the Other Side, When the Wheel gets Turnt

This section could easily become its own article on not getting tilted, and indeed there are several articles from Team Dignitas on that very subject, but I think it’s worth taking some time to discuss cheese related tilt. Let’s first remember that frustration has its place in video games, without frustration you become complacent and after that there’s no improving – essentially, there’s a healthy level of frustration and discontent that pushes you forward as a player and sets a fire underneath you so you continue to climb the ladder. Cheese frustration is not that – losing to a cheese comp teaches you nothing, other than maybe learning not to group around an enemy that has Graviton Surge, Sulfuras Smash, and Blizzard at their disposal.

You might feel that you’ve wasted 20 or more minutes of your life, getting objectively annihilated by a team that will never appear in a ranked match with a competent banner. This is normal – especially if you happened to play the squishy assassin that was always targeted for instant deletion – for that, Time has a list of easy breathing exercises that you might want to reference after a particularly sound thrashing. Just remember that getting tilted accomplishes nothing, all caps-ing at your warrior or that first pick Nova won’t change what has already happened.

The best advice that I can give is to treat this as a learning experience, as the late Senator James E. Watson said in 1932, “If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.” So maybe the next time you queue up for quick match, you’ll ready up five deep with a team so far outside the meta and totally custom built to mercilessly punish anyone who picked a squishy assassin.

I wish you the best of luck, my fellow Campeones del Queso.

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