Strategy

Explanation

Conclusion

http://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/1vyhbh/from_rank_5_to_legend_with_reynads_cheapish_burn/

** For Patch 1.0.0.4482

For a while, the druid was not really a viable class to play due to the meta and the class’s reliance on high mana cost cards. That being said, with the shift in the meta and the cards available for the class, playing a Druid has quickly become one of the strongest, most well-rounded classes to play. Due to their hero power and class-specific cards, the most effective way to currently play a Druid is to play a control-oriented deck. One thing to keep in mind is that the deck is extremely expensive and substituting some of the cards isn’t as easy as other decks. This is for players who have a larger collection and are looking to explore more in-depth and involved decks to play when it comes to winning. 

 Strategy

The concept of the deck is to basically stall long enough to get to mid-game where you can start gaining control of the pace of the game and really pull out ahead. The deck is very versatile for several reasons including the following:

• You can use your Hero Power to help maintain board control during the early turns where you may not necessarily be able to do much else.
• An early Innervate can leave the opponent devastated and unable to respond to a card that you can essentially play potentially 2 turns earlier than it’s supposed to be played.
• You can respond to the board with Druid cards that offer 2-for-1 situations (aggressive or defensive). Typically it is better to go the defensive route but having the option to go offensive and taking advantage of the options can really work out in your favor if played right.
• The right mixture of heal, draw, damage, and board clear puts you in the sweet spot for being well-rounded.

Most decks tend to be straight forward in play-style such as the current aggressive Warlock-based decks and Hunter decks but the Druid is a far different play-style from that, leaving you with far more options to pull a victory at the expense of your games typically averaging longer times.

Clearing Cards

• Hero Power
• Claw
• Wrath
• Tinkmaster Overspark
• Swipe
• Keeper of the Grove
• Starfall
• Sylvanas Windrunner
• The Black Knight

Explanation 

This deck has amazing clearing power and heavy hitting cards or alternatively cards that provide an amazing defense while still putting out consistent damage. What really sets the deck a part are the tempo cards that just leave you leaps ahead of your opponent. Innervate is a great example of this as well as Sylvanas Windrunner, Tinkmaster Overspark, The Black Knight, Keeper of the Grove, the Ancient of Lore and Ancient of War, the list goes on.

One thing to keep in mind is that there is no clear-cut way to play the control Druid. You shouldn’t always goes for the face like you would with an aggro deck but you shouldn’t always clear every single minion either. You’ll have to make the conscious decision of which move to make given the situation you are in but one thing to note is that the deck can be very forgiving given the fact that players are given so many options with the cards that are a part of the deck list.

Quick Tips and Combos

• Innervate+ Strong Counter Card to Your Opponent (some examples include Innervate paired with the following):
  • Harvest Golem on Turn 1 against an Aggro Deck
  • Keeper of the Grove on Turn 2 to kill an enemy card (ie. Knife Juggler) while put a 2/4 into play
  • Druid of the Claw on Turn 3 in Bear Form, placing a 4/6 taunt card into play at an early stage
  • Ancient of Lore at Turn 5 for a 2 card draw or 5 health heal (depending on if you are facing a rush deck such as a Mage or if you need the card advantage on your opponent)
  • Ancient of War at Turn 5 for a 5/10 taunt, which many Aggro Decks just cannot deal with at such an early stage without sacrificing much of what they have
• Bloodmage Thalnos + Swipe for a 5 direct damage nuke and 2 damage Area of Effect as opposed to 4/1
• Hold on to The Black Knight for a strong taunt if you suspect the opponent will have one (ie. Against another Druid or against a Paladin with Tirion)
• Almost always draw the 2 cards on Ancient of Lore unless you are facing a rush deck and need your health / armor up in an effort to fend off the rush
• (Aggressive) Tinkmaster Overspark + a weak minion of your own (such as Novice Engineer) in an effort to buff it to a 5/5 Devilsaur
• (Defensive) Tinkmaster Overspark play on an opponent’s strong card (ie. On something like an enemy Ragnaros or Sylvanas Windrunner or a large taunt such as an Ancient of War)

Remember that you have a lot of options, especially with the Druid specific cards that give users more than one option when coming in to play. Try to maintain the pace of the board and stay one step ahead of your opponent as your mid-game to late-game is one of the strongest compared to any other decks in the current meta.

Potential Cards

There isn’t a lot of wiggle room with this deck and it definitely is more expensive to craft but that doesn’t mean you need to have the same exact deck list. Cards you may want to consider in the deck:

• Replace Nat Pagle with another card with draw potential such as Loot Hoarder or Acolyte of Pain
• Replace a Swipe with a Bite if you keep running into aggro decks and are still having trouble keeping up. The card is nowhere near as good as Swipe but the extra armor can save lives (particularly yours in this case)
• If you keep running into opponents who keep utilizing Big Game Hunter, take out Ragnaros and replace him with another card such as Cairne Bloodhoof (Cairne can’t be targeted by cards such as Big Game Hunter or by cards such as Shadow Worth: Death)
• If you don’t have Bloodmage Thalnos your alternatives are Kobold Geomancer if you are looking for the spell damage or a Loot Hoarder if you are looking for card draw (based on your play style)

Conclusion

Try out the deck and let us know what you think! Keep in mind that this deck is definitely much harder to play and understand. It will take a lot of practice to get a good sense of how to play against different matchups, specifically against decks with Giants. That and facing a mirror deck will be extremely frustrating (more so than others)!

Credit for this deck goes to MayhemGaming who posted about this on Reddit.

** For Patch 1.0.0.4217

The mage rush down is always a fun deck to play and quite a bit of Hearthstone players have hit the legendary rank with it. Although some cards in the deck vary depending on your personal play-style, the core of the deck remains focused and effective in many cases (not all). Furthermore, since Hunters aren’t that popular right now, one of your hardest counters is one you won’t run into very often (if at all).

Strategy

The concept of the deck is to smash your opponents face repeatedly and nuke him every chance you get. Since spells aren’t affected by taunt cards, you can use your minions to help damage the opponent’s health when possible but always have the opportunity to nuke them, even if they put taunts up. As you can imagine, this whole concept may seem high risk high reward as the opponent can get you low as well but that is exactly where the mage secret, Ice Block, comes in handy as it can not only save your life but stall the game long enough for you to end theirs.

Core Mage Rush Cards

• Ice Lance
• Frostbolt (Direct Damage)
• Ice Block
• Fireball (Direct Damage)
• Pyroblast (Direct Damage)

Explanation

The main idea here is to try and get the opponents health below 20 health by turn 5. If you manage to do this, you will be in seemingly good shape as you can start pumping out Fireball for 6 damage and Pyroblast for 10 damage. Since Pyroblast costs 8 mana, you need to continually get your health low enough with your Hero Power, minions, and lower mana cost nukes so hopefully by turn 8 you can draw and utilize Pyroblast for the finish. The Ice Block is there to help you survive just to make it that far, given that you aren’t controlling the board all that much and instead focusing on damaging the opponent directly. There are many variants to this type of deck and I would recommend playing them and picking one based on your play-style and preference. The differences between the two variants can be found below:

Contest/Burn

The concept of the deck is to force the opponent to spend time attacking and controlling the board or alternatively controlling the board for a little while yourself while building up the cards you need for your finisher. When it comes to the early game in this deck, you want to play it as if you are playing a normal deck (one not focused on burning the enemies health as soon as possible). This means you will try to mulligan for Mana Wyrm and try to control/clear the board a bit as well as get damage in on the opponent. You have some draw power with the Novice Engineer but you mainly want to control the pace of the game with Arcane Missiles, Argent Squire, Mana Wyrm, Faerie Dragon, Harvest Golem, Shattered Sun Cleric. You can use your Water Elemental to serve multiple purposes here as well with one to control strong cards and prevent yourself from taking too much damage (until you draw Ice Block) or alternatively to play offensive and combo with Ice Lance, allowing you to be less reliant on Frostbolt for the freeze nuke combo. The deck has Leeroy Jenkins for a finisher or hard hitting cost-efficient damage minion and Argent Commander to do the same or alternatively help clear the board a bit in your favor (if needed). Last but not least, you have the Flamestrike to help with some board clear if things are getting abit too hairy in terms of board control.

Draw/Burn

This variation of the deck relies more on doing direct damage and providing more draw power – I’d recommend it to those who enjoy quicker games and enjoy playing with extra risk. The key differences are that this deck is more straight forward in terms of opponent face smashing. You don’t have to sit there and think about trading damage and trying to maintain early game board control, instead you mainly just go straight for the opponent’s face every chance you get. The deck has seemingly more draw power through the use of Nat Pagle, Loot Hoarder, Novice Engineer, and Arcane Intellect. It also has more direct damage oriented elements through the use of cards such as Leper Gnome, Elven Archer, and Nightblade. The Mirror Image in the deck helps you dish out the same type of damage by protecting your low cost minions (allowing them to survive long enough to dish out some damage) while also buffing Mana Wyrm further (since the ability counts as a spell). This deck utilizes Frost Nova for a more cost-efficient aggro control (since the minions can’t attack a whole turn, you by yourself extra time). The main concept remains the same with the end result in you blissfully nuking the crap out of your opponent.

Card Combos to Keep in Mind

These may seem very basic but can often separate the skilled Hearthstone players from the average ones:

• Mana Wyrm + Any Spell = Helps buff your minion to dish out the early game damage you need to push out for your harder nukes to be able to finish the opponents.
• Frostbolt + Ice Lance = 3 Mana for a Freeze + 7 Damage
• Water Elemental + Ice Lance = Freeze + 7 Damage

Counters

Control decks seem to be hard counters to the Ice Block Mage Rush decks as they tend to have healing involved and this may leave you unable to nuke the opponent before they can finish you off. Since you rely a lot on your Fireballs and Pyroblasts to help you stay on the offensive, there aren’t many defenses. If the opponent heals through your sporadic bursts, you may be unable to counter their attacks when they decide to go on the offensive. The Ice Block will definitely help out but don’t get too comfortable as sometimes, stalling one turn doesn’t really do much other than prolong your death. If you are seeing a lot of control-based Paladin and Druid decks at the tiem you are playing this deck, I would advise swapping until your opponents change.

The Molten Giant OTK Warrior deck will also be a nightmare and these are pretty popular right now. Much like dealing with the Druid and Paladin heals is a pain in the butt, so is dealing with the armor a warrior can stack. The game isn’t completely loss but unless you get the right cards in your hand, the warrior may be able to fend off long enough to screw you over. This matchup is not in your favor.

Hunters using Flare and other Mages using Counterspell will also demolish your deck, thankfully decks with these cards are not found very often in the current meta-game.

Conclusion

Try out the deck and let us know what you think! Keep in mind that the deck is very fun to play and games are usually fairly quick but the deck has several counters so if you are running into matchups that aren’t in your favor, try swapping decks! If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, drop a comment!

There have been several people who have been running decks such as this one including several well-known players such as Veev, Reynad and Vingumminr9. For additional info and discussion check out this Reddit post and Reynad’s stream.

Many people have labeled the hunter and the warrior as the weaker classes this patch but that isn’t turning out to be the case at all. After cycling through some older deck ideas and brainstorming new ones, a hearthstone player by the name of Razor created a warrior deck which will leave many people flipping tables. The deck takes advantage of several different combos that use a variety of different cards.

 Strategy

The concept of the deck is to mainly clear the board with weapons and spells until you get roughly around 10 health, at which point you will stack armor and nuke hard (with a potential One-Turn-Kill combo). That being said, the whole deck idea isn’t a one trick pony. With the ability to control the board quite well, you may just be able to play normally (without focusing your effort on maintaining roughly 10 health) and just winning without much thought and effort. It should be noted though that this deck is definitely one of the harder decks to master using and wins won’t come easy but if you master it, you should be in very good shape in the current patch.

Combos to Keep in Mind

The general concept of the deck revolves around the following cards:

• Inner Rage
• Youthful Brewmaster
• Raging Worgen
• Warsong Commander
• Gadgetzan Auctioneer + the abundance of low-cost spells
• Molten Giant

Some of the combos you have to try to utilize include the following:

• Inner Rage + Spellpower = 2 damage removal for 0 mana
• Inner Rage one of the enemy creatures to lower its life and smash it with a weapon in hand to get your health low for your Molten Giant combo
• Warsong Commander + Molten Giant + Molten Giant = 16 Damage
• Warsong Commander + Molten Giant + Youthful Brewmaster = 19 Damage
• Warsong Commander + Molten Giant + Molten Giant + Youthful Brewmaster = 27 Damage
• Warsong Commander + Molten Giant + Youthful Brewmaster + Raging Worgen + Inner Rage = 31 Damage
• Warsong Commander + Molten Giant + Youthful Brewmaster + Youthful Brewmaster = 30 Damage

Clearly there are several combos in addition to this but these are some of the more notable ones you will want to try to keep in mind to get used to the deck.

Explanation

The thing that makes this deck successful is because several of the hard counters for the deck have essentially disappeared with the departure of Ice Block mages and changes to Unleash the Hounds causing the death of One-Turn-Kill (OTK) Hunters. The early game for the deck tends to be fairly consistent as you have several options when it comes to dealing with most kinds of rush decks. Cards for this include but aren’t limited to:

• Cleave
• Whirlwind
• Fiery War Axe
• Arathi Weaponsmith

With these cards, you can wrestle for board control and potentially even become the aggressor against aggro decks. When it comes to facing control decks, the same cards will help you keep up with the pace of the game and transition to mid-late game where you’ll have opportunities to pull off some of your combos.

Generally, against aggro decks you’ll want to utilize everything at your disposal, even pieces to the OTK combos and you’ll tend to come out on top. Against players who play around Molten Giant, you can potentially punish them with Brawl or surprise them with your Raging Worgen and Inner Rage combo instead. For control decks, keep in mind to save your Executes for the really beefy taunt cards instead of using them early.

Conclusion

Try out the deck and let us know what you think! Keep in mind that this deck is definitely much harder to play and understand. It will take a lot of practice to get a good sense of how to play against different matchups, specifically against control decks. That and facing a mirror deck will be extremely frustrating (more so than others)!

Credit for this deck goes to Razor who posted about this on Reddit.

** For Patch 1.0.0.4217

This past week an increasingly popular trend has been running aggro decks since the freeze on Mages was nerfed. There is no better class to play for an aggressive deck than playing a Warlock due to their Hero Power which allows you to draw cards. After doing a lot of research and messing around with decks myself, below is a deck list that has brought me much success and caused my opponents a ton of frustration.

 Strategy

The concept of the deck is to just zerg your opponent down with several low cost card combos. Games are very quick – win or loss – with many people being unable to respond quick enough to do much. Those of you looking for some basic strategy behind the deck should keep reading!

Health Buffers

• Blood Imp
• Young Priestess
• Coldlight Seer
• Murloc Warleader

Murloc Cards

• Grimscale Oracle
• Murloc Raider
• Murloc Tidecaller
• Murloc Tidehunter
• Bluegill Warrior
• Old Murk-Eye (Legendary)

Additional Important Warlock Cards

• Void Walker
• Flame Imp
• Soulfire

Important Neutral Creatures

• Leeroy Jenkins (Legendary)
• Leper Gnome
• Abusive Sergeant
• Knife Juggler

Explanation

As mentioned before the concept is to zerg your opponent down hard and fast. Only clear minions when its important to do so and if not, keep slamming directly into the enemy player. The concept behind the deck is to take advantage of low cost card combos that murlocs offer and use health buffers to keep them alive vs other low cost cards and direct damage spells. If you take a look at the murloc cards, you’ll notice every murloc aside from the Murloc Raider offers a useful ability. The Grimscale Oracle brings +1 attack to other murlocs, the Murloc Tidehunter summons an additional murloc, the Murloc Tidecaller gains +1 attack for each murloc that is played, the Bluegill Warrior has Charge and Old Murk-Eye is the murloc equivalent of Argent Commander (sans the Divine Shield). When coupled together, you get high health and high dps cards for very low cost. The neutral creates in the deck help amplify the damage that you dish out with the Knife Juggler dishing out 1 damage for each minion played (which should be a lot since the murlocs are low mana cost) and the Leper Gnome dishes out a free 2 damage no matter what due to his Deathrattle ability (deal 2 damage upon dying). Leeroy Jenkins works great as a finisher in this deck as its a 6/2 with Charge but if you don’t have him, I’d replace him with another Leper Gnome. There is 1 Soulfire in the deck and it is there to help dish out direct damage to the opponent or to help you clear a minion that is causing you some trouble (for example a high health taunt). Last but not least the Abusive Sergeants are there to help buff the damage you are dishing out directly to the opponent or alternatively to help you clear a minion that you don’t quite want to sacrifice several minions for. Basic things to keep in mind include not playing your Abusive Sergeant or Young Priestess if you don’t have another minion out, since you don’t want their extra abilities to be wasted for no reason (this is very situaitonal so you’ll have to make the judgement call).

Potential Cards

One of the potential cards to drop in the deck would be Hungry Crab. You may be wondering why you would want a card that destroys a murloc but think of it this way – if you know he will die anyway and he isn’t buffed, you may as well destroy it and get a 3/4 card for 1 mana (very cost-efficient). Alternatively, if you run into a sucker who is trying to run a murloc deck as well – just destroy one of his murlocs instead – win/win.

Also, for those of you who don’t own Leeroy Jenkins and are still working your way towards one, you can substitute him for an Arcane Golem. The card isn’t as good as having Leeroy but is one of the only close replacements. It should be noted that Leeroy fits in many aggressive decks and is probably one of the most important legendary cards to have (aside from Old Murk-Eye in this murloc deck of course).

Conclusion

Try out the deck and let us know what you think! Keep in mind that the meta changes very often so if you aren’t experiencing success with the deck, it’s likely that the meta has shifted away from aggro decks to mid-range or control decks. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, drop a comment!

Credit for this deck goes to Cloak! You can check out the official forum post here and his stream here: http://www.twitch.tv/cloakndagger505

** For Patch 1.0.0.4217