How to Beat Control Warrior

Introduction

Warrior Control is the next guide to be updated on this CFWS updating series!

It is one of the oldest Hearthstone Decks, and because of how much it got updated in the past expansions, the deck is still a high-tier on the playable deck lists, as well as one of the decks most people aim in playing at least once in their life.

Because you are always bound to find a Warrior Control deck at some point your ladder play

Explaining the Deck

Control Warrior is probably the oldest Hearthstone Archetype to still remain playable together with Midrange Druid. The deck exists due to Warrior’s arsenal of super-defensive cards such as armorsmith and shield-block and good removal such as Weapons, execute and shield-slam.

The Deck’s gameplan is simple: Outlive your opponent, remove his threats, then drop big Legendaries that are capable of generating tons of value and winning the game by themselves.

The deck has 4 obvious different department of cards, let’s break down those departments: Defenses, removal, utility, and finishers.

• Defenses – Cards that are supposed to keep you alive longer: Armorsmith, Shield Block, Sludge Belcher, and Shieldmaiden.
• Removal – Self-explanatory: Execute,Shield Slam, Fiery War Axe, Big Game Hunter, Death’s Bite, and Brawl.
• Utility – Cards that aren’t good by themselves but provide great value when combined with other cards: Whirlwind, slam, Cruel Taskmaster, Acolyte of Pain, and Harrison Jones.
• Finishers – The big threats that tend to take over the game:Sylvanas Windrunner, Dr. Boom, Baron Geddon, Ragnaros the Firelord, Grommash Hellscream, Alexstrasza and so on.

The cards listed above are the most popular in standard Control Warrior lists. However, there are lists that differ a little on these choices by utilizing non-standard cards.

The Deck’s Strengths

Warrior is one of the few decks that primarily stray away from cards with the word “random” in them. With respect to these series, we still need to understand how to beat Control Warrior. As said multiple times in past articles, understanding how a deck works, its strengths, and its weaknesses allows us to properly learn how play and beat that particular deck.

Here are some of Control Warrior’s strengths:

1. Early-Game Defenses – The deck has a very large arsenal of early-game removal spells and weapons. Combined with the healing efficiency of the hero power, aggro decks have a really tough time beating this deck.
2. Longevity – Overall, the multiple ways of stacking armor combined with cheap removal makes Control Warrior a big favorite against combo strategies such as Oil Rogue and Freeze Mage. Some would even argue that the matchup is nearly impossible for those decks to win (around 80/20 in favor of Warrior).
3. Consistency – The removal suite has built in redundancy (1 mana removal spells and weapons). These efficient cards allows the deck to absorb the early assault before the deck’s late-game threats kick in.
4. Late-Game Inevitability – Warrior is usually able to win the Fatigue war. Having very little draw and cycling mechanisms compared to other control decks, the Warrior player will outlive the great majority of his opponents.

It’s a known misconception that Warriors have lots of card draw. Moreover, despite usually being efficient, Warrior’s main draw card of acolyte-of-pain is situational (requires activators). A good suggestion for newer Warrior players would be to hold onto Acolyte of Pain if it is drawn later in the game. This allows one to navigate carefully through the Fatigue war.

The Deck’s Weakness

Usually Control Warrior’s weaknesses lies in the fact the deck is built to fight either late game Control decks or early game aggressive decks. The deck usually fails in fighting Midrange decks such as Midrange Hunter, Midrange Paladin and Midrange Druid because it lacks ways of removing efficient Midrange minions 1-for-1.

Given Warrior’s lack of Card draw, combined with Midrange’s both real and figurative card advantage(be it with an arsenal of Persistent Minions or real card draw mechanisms like Ancient of Lore and Lay on Hands), the Warrior will usually fall behind, eventually losing the game.

There isn’t much to say about Warrior Control’s weakness, because despite being very consistent (which makes it good against what it is supposed to be good) it will fall behind decks that are good against it.

How to Fight Against it!

Fighting Control Warrior, Archetype-wise, has already been discussed in the last section, so i’ll limit this section to protips on how to properly play against Control Warrior whenever you are in the actual game:

• Silence those acolyte-of-pain whenever you can. They can easily generate value from it and draw cards that they could be not drawing into just because you let them, and that is bad. But if they already got some value out of it (i.e. already drawn cards) it might be a good idea to save the Silence to use it into something later on.
• If they have Sylvanas in play, do not leave it there, deal with it! Sylvanas into Brawl is devastating and usually game-winning. However, if you have ways to rush the Warrior down despite of Brawl, do so. It usually comes down to being able to tell whenever you should, or should not, deal with the Warrior’s board overall.
• Kill the Armorsmith, even as a Face Hunter. it will(eventually) generate so much value you will have to deal a lot more damage to his face than you would have to deal to his Armorsmith.
• Manage your resources. Having the Warrior stay safe behind his armor wall can be dangerous if he still has more resources than you. Don’t mindlessly throw your cards away.
• Run harrison-jones in your deck whenever the metagame starts being Weapon-oriented. Jones can be a pretty strong tool against Warriors too.

Other tips such as “run persistent minions” is redundant and unnecessary since they are prominent to what type of deck you are playing, and usually those cards are part of the deck’s core.

Conclusion

And this is it. Countering Control Warrior is pretty simple and requires less attention to deck building (outside of the “run Jones” part) and more to deck archetype. The deck itself is very consistent, so you’ll always be able to see it here and there, therefore knowing how it works is a crucial part of your ladder grinding.

I hope learning all of this was helpful, and in case you want to learn more about the deck, playing it a little helps tons in that matter. If you have any questions don’t forget to post them in the comments section below.

Love you guys,

Nuba