Waking Up the Sleeper – Soggoth the Slitherer

Introduction

Today we are experimenting!

I have read an interesting discussion on /r/CompetitiveHS regarding the viability of Soggoth the Slitherer as a top-of-the-curve card in Control Decks.

Basically, the TL;DR version of the discussion revolves around the fact he can not be responded by any of the currently viable top decks, and often trades 3-4 for one.

Now, Soggoth wasn’t viable on a pre-nerf metagame because it was often a hopelessly dead card against yogg-saron-hopes-end decks, because against Aggro you’d just die before turn 9, and against Hunters they’d just deadly-shot Soggoth down because it was likely to be the only card in your board. Another point against the card was abusive-sergeant that could make trades better as well as other buff cards such as flametongue-totem and power-overwhelming.

Post-rotation the metagame became a lot slower, Aggro decks aren’t the top-notch anymore and we are currently living the Midrange dream, which means Soggoth is often a very powerful 9-drop, which might not be a finisher, but it is sure to generate thousands of value against most opponents.

The main reason to run Soggoth in your Control deck is that it has a tremenduos ability to lock-down games when you’re even just slightly ahead, and the auto-concede on-sight is actually a thing:

There are many other strategies that just can’t deal with Soggoth currently, such as Tempo Mage, Control Warrior, Renolock, ANY Shaman Build and so onwards meanwhile the ability to lock down a game is different from any other Legend in the game right now, and the reason why I am doing this article.

Let us take a closer look at three soggoth-the-slitherer brews!

Control Warrior

Control Warrior kind of gained a lot from Soggoth the Slitherer and the post-rotation metagame. Losing execute’s mana cost hurts, but the metagame is so favored towards Control Warrior that the deck, regardless of getting nerfed, is on a much better state right now.

Soggoth the Slitherer helps in Control Warrior because it is a proactive play that can easily lock-down a game.

As for card choices, this deck is tuned to fight off Midrange Shaman more than any other deck in the game right now, as the deck is the most played on the Ladder, has reached Rank 1 Legend today, and tuning the deck towards Midrange Shaman means you get a favored matchup across the metagame as other decks are doing very similar things.

fools-bane is a lot better than gorehowl on today’s metagame, because of the number of small minions. It also happens to allow you to active revenge easier while dropping minions down to Revenge range, and lastly the Weapon is also very good with soggoth-the-slitherer because you can easily stay behind Soggoth while clearing the board.

Control Warrior is the most common Soggoth list. The reddit user that started this discussion played a similar list up to top 3 Legend.

Ramp Druid

A deck that I have been working on this week was Ramp Druid. The fact Malygos Druid seemed to be so proactive made me still want to have the tons and tons of Defensive mechanisms in Token Druid that I had in Malygos Druid but I just couldn’t because I needed to support my Token strategy. With Ramp Druid, however, I can run all the defensive and healing mechanisms as I did back in Malygos Druid, in fact I can run even more, while still having an absurd late game.

The main difference between this list and Yogg Druid is that it doesn’t rely on Yogg-Saron to win games, so much that we don’t even need to run Yogg anymore, that became a liability post-nerf.

This list is a lot heavier on Taunts than the other Druid lists, and this happens because the loss of Yogg – you need ways to deal with the opposing board, and dropping big taunts can often do that. Meanwhile you can Ramp so much and play so proactively that the deck can easily support cards like arcane-giant for big Tempo swings and free board presence.

Back into the defensive mechanisms, the double moonglade-portal is possible because of the double ancient-of-war we have in our list, which also happens to make our list a lot better against aggressive decks trying to push face. The most important fact about running double Moonglade portal in today’s metagame is that people expect a maximum of one portal and one feral-rage, which can destroy their pre-planned line of play, giving you a huge edge in the game without hurting your deck building process.

And lastly I would like to explain ysera here – We have a lot of big taunts, we have a lot of heals, meaning we can play a late-game bomb that can win the game by itself but does nothing when it is played because it is completely unexpected (no one will save removal for her).

All this combined with Druid’s spell heavy deck base easily makes up for a very powerful deck, summing up consistency and a strong, oppressive and reliable late game, which ends up in the deck you guys now see.

Renolock

The last deck I choose to make, and the most complex one to build, was Renolock.

Adding Soggoth the Slitherer to Renolock is tricky, because Renolock itself is super hard to build and requires a lot of different-but-redundant cards to be good, but I strongly believe that adding Soggoth to Renolock can make the deck much better, and is why I am adding the deck to this list.

Firstly, I decided to take on StrifeCro’s suggestion of adding possessed-villager to my Renolock build. This happens because it makes the Leeroy Combo we almost always want to add to our Renolock less of a liability against Aggro decks, because we can simply buff the Villager with power-overwhelming early in the game to trade with bigger minions.

Then, the rest of the build revolves around the most consistent plays possible. As most of you already know I always loved consistency, and we also need to make up for running the leeroy-jenkins combo.

This means stuff like sunfury-protector based cards are out of question, and we would much rather run senjin-shieldmasta instead. This also cuts mountain-giant out of the equation because we want to be able to respond our opponent’s plays before turn 4, since we are not always going to be playing against Control decks.

I have to admit I am still quite reluctant with Renolock, not because of Soggoth but because of the deck’s consistency in general and how much it relies on drawing Reno against Aggro. What makes me want to play Renolock though is that the number of Aggro decks we are facing is very low right now, given the metagame we are facing.

Back to Soggoth, it feels like the best card to curve after twisting-nether, once again locking down the game. The card is also awesome to have either alexstrasza or lord-jaraxxus behind.

Closing

Soggoth the Slitherer is one of many sleepers that might become metagame staples with time, and the builds posted here kind of prove that – We can add Soggoth to a great many types of Control decks, while always being a tech and not a must-have card.

I hope you guys enjoyed this article, don’t forget to let me know your thoughts about it in the comments as I am thinking that maybe we can look for other sleepers in the game later on!

Now, I’ll just go back to the Ladder and play some more of my Soggoth Druid list, bye bye!

Much love,

Nuba

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