Nuba’s Corner – Opera Brews

Introduction

It is time to make some more amazing brews everyone!

Last week we were quite accurate with the starting playtesting brews and our expectations of the results, which is something that makes me quite happy.

The builds we started last week are evolving, getting better, and we still have more decks to show with last week’s cards.

Luckily (for me, the writer) there aren’t as many playable cards to playtest this week as there were last week.

Another interesting thing is that arcane-anomaly is actually a playable card, which is something we didn’t quite believed when we saw it first time.

Anyway, this week we are going to have only a few playable cards, but since it’s our job to make due with all the cards, we’ll try to scrap the best possible starting brews for the cards we even think have a chance of seeing play – in addition, i’ll be posting some more brews from last week since we have some extra room this week.

Midrange Hunter

So this is the real Midrange Deck that you should be playing. We discussed last week a possible spell-heavy version of Hunter which ultimately didn’t work – it was fun, cute, but nothing nearly as strong as Midrange Hunter.

This week, however, the Standard Midrange Hunter gets a huge upgrade – kindly-grandmother and barnes. These are the two cards holding hands making Midrange Hunter so much better with the expansion.

The fact Hunter is getting its own private Standard-legal haunted-creeper says a lot about Blizzard’s worries with Zoo’s popularity and how stronger it would get with the kindly-grandmother, so it tells me a lot about how strong the card was in their internal playtesting.

With that said, barnes complements the card’s power just too much to be even real: The dude will be getting us a free minion from our deck, and we can easily tailor our deck so it becomes stronger because of this card.

Anyway, the deck has to undergo some major changes to support these cards, including the Hybrid playstyle adaptation that we should make to support a card such as the Grandmother, but we just can’t forget the need to also adapt the deck to Barnes.

So we came up with this build, that has tons of strong outcomes for barnes’ battlecry while only having one bad outcome (abusive-sergeant).

What makes me so optimistic about this list is that shaping the deck to fit barnes isn’t damaging at all for the deck’s nature, on the contrary: it only makes the deck better!

Let’s talk outcomes:

• abusive-sergeant is a bad outcome.
• argent-squire and dire-wolf-alpha are “ok” outcomes, you should probably always position Barnes to take advantage of the Wolf’s bonus on the right.
• knife-juggler is also an ok card, as you can combo Barnes with unleash-the-hounds and Barnes itself procs the Juggler’s knife (the Juggler comes into play first).
• From that on: kindly-grandmother, argent-horserider, infested-wolf and savannah-highmane are extremely powerful procs that are bound to put you in an advantageous position.

After tons of adaptations and analysis, this is the final theoretical Brew I came up with, and is the ideal starting ground for your playtestings.

Tempo Rogue

Not liking swashburglar doesn’t mean I can’t admit it’s potential – it exists. The card has some implications that we just can’t forget regarding Tempo Rogue – The deck might become existent simply because of Arcane Anomaly (which we didn’t notice before) and this card, which are good 1-drops.

Last week we playtested tons of Tempo Deathrattle Rogue, which is the list we posted in our Premium article, and the deck was actually pretty powerful – It reminded a lot of Tempo Mage but a lot more consistent.

This week, we have Swashburglar that could ultimately make the Aggro-ish version of Tempo Rogue better than the Deathrattle one. Sure, we can’t quite tell with certainty, but we have to playtest to know!

This list also runs deadly-fork, a card from last week that actually passed on the playtesting results as a good card – The self-replacing factor the card has even managed to make it so we ultimately cut the solo gadgetzan-auctioneer from our Tempo deck!

This list had no other deck as base and is a pure Brew, so in the end we might still have to make a lot of changes in the list, but I’m happy with what we came up with.

So, this is the theoretical version we ended up coming up with, and the one we believe you should be playtesting!

Resurrect Control Priest

Last week Zetalot actually managed to make some amazing list revolving around resurrect and priest-of-the-feast, a build to make the best use out of the new Priest 4-drop.

Onyx Bishop seems to be the perfect addition to the list, and there is no reason we shouldn’t actually be playtesting the card.

I have to admit I don’t have such high hopes for onyx-bishop – it looks a lot like an Arena card. BUT Zetalot actually managed to top 50 Legend using this list without Onyx Bishop, and I just don’t see how this list can’t only get better with the Bishop.

Therefore, we ultimately came up with the conclusion that this list deserves a top spot in our playtesting table, and is the list I bring to you guys this week!

PS: Just as an explanation, I noticed Zetalot’s list actually became too heavy on self heals after the Priest of the Feast’s addition, so I felt like it was just obvious to replace darkshire-alchemist for Onyx Bishop for our initial playtesting.

Closing

And I think this covers the three builds I wanted to discuss the most this week.

I am traveling right now, so it feels rather uncomfortable to write so much in a chair in the middle of the airport, but I’ll be getting home by wednesday, and then i’ll start working on some more brews for you guys!

These brews, however, are the ones I think you should be playtesting first, mostly because they seem to have so much potential on their own.

I hope you guys enjoyed this article, and we’ll be seeing each other again soon!

Love you guys, see you next article!

Nuba

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