Introduction
And we are back with our final Brews to Play article before the expansion finally hits!
This time, I am bringing you guys a couple of powerful Control builds. One that is literally the same build Loyan played to top 100 when League of Explorers came out, simply pumped up with new WOG cards and the other is a personal build of mine that I was holding on to the expansion release date.
After that, I would like to discuss another build that I have been preparing for the top 100 fights, one that is sure to be very powerful and dominant, as people won’t be playing around it anyway.
So are you ready for the final batch of Brews for you to play?? 😀
Control Shaman
So this build is something most people haven’t been thinking about. Truth is: it works. It might not be the most updated list, or the one that uses the most WOG cards, but it works.
This build was played in a very powerful metagame and was still successful, which leads me to believe it’ll be extremely powerful once the expansion comes out.
So, how does this build works?
Here we are aiming to take the most advantage out of our AOE effects: be it from hallazeal-the-ascended extreme healing capability, or volcanic-drake massive tempo swing.
doomsayer is also a very powerful removal for solo minions early in the game that can also activate volcanic-drake, meaning there are just a lot of ways for you to generate tempo while playing a Full Control deck, filled with board removal and very little draw mechanisms (because the cards are just too powerful and you don’t need to play more than one per turn).
There are multiple techs that can be incorporated to this build, one of them is evolve to combo with onyxia in order to obtain a full board of 2-cost minions with just two cards, lava-shock is still fighting for its slot with eternal-sentinel since we can’t tell right now which one fits the playstyle more.
Other doable techs are the big taunts soggoth-the-slitherer and bog-creeper, also consider deathwing (the old one, not the new one) as a surprise finisher.
Remember that the build posted as-is is the one confirmed to be true, but this doesn’t mean you can’t experiment!
Control Paladin
Just like the previous deck, this build has very little WOG cards, but the ones that it has can make it count. Control Paladin is a deck that has incorporated the Murloc Shell some time ago, playing anyfin-can-happen and tons of extra card draw. However, the deck is losing old-murk-eye and the combo possibility just diminished greatly. So what should we do with the whole control deck base thing?
Well, just like the Shaman deck, this one can easily incorporate the Dragon Shell and also take tons of advantage from cards that gets the cost reduced by death count.
volcanic-drake gets a new ally in the form of solemn-vigil, and the deck becomes a lot more consistent because of WOG’s healing power.
You not only get a powerful healing burst with ragnaros-lightlord, you also get a huge threat on the board, meanwhile forbidden-healing can almost always bring you back to full life after you’ve done one of the many things that you can do to wipe your opponent’s whole board.
Besides all this, you have responses to pretty much anything, while storing powerful heals in case you need. I believe this deck to be one of the powerful ones post-rotation that people haven’t been thinking about lately.
Just to make sure you’ll want to try this build, I played a very similar build on a Standard-only invitational tournament that was hosted last week and won a lot of games with it, which leads me to believe this build only gets stronger with WOG.
Midrange Token Druid
And here we are with the threat to everything that stands for a balanced metagame: The Midrange Token Druid.
I added this deck here in the Control section instead of the Midrange section because there was already a deck in the Midranges, and also because this deck’s existence can mean the non-existence of many other decks, and is something you should be looking at the second the rotation comes.
fandral-staghelm is a monster, we all know that by now, but what very few people noticed is how strong it is with power-of-the-wild in addition to cards like violet-teacher that also have a very powerful interaction with the card.
All of this, combined with the fact Token Druid never needed to run more than one copy of force-of-nature (that can easily be replaced by leeroy-jenkins, mind you!) can lead me to believe this deck can actually be the next best thing in Hearthstone.
The biggest threat to this deck, however, are the Taunts. The huge ones that happened to have appeared in WOG, which means the-black-knight makes a comeback to the deck’s core.
There are thousands of cards to consider, but I believe most of them have already been tested before (meaning they are not from WOG). i’ll say a few names: cenarius, ragnaros-the-firelord, ancient-of-war and even naturalize is something we can consider here (to make up for the lack of removal).
So, are you looking for a bold choice to use later this season? Token Druid might as well be that choice!
Closing
And here we come to the end of the Brewing series you guys asked so much! Making all these decks was a blast, and despite them not being as WOG-ish as you guys wanted, they’re the safest bets you guys can make in order to obtain the highest number of wins during the first few days of WOG.
Brewing for this new expansion, different from every other expansion after GvG, is a complete shot in the dark, meaning people will be totally lost once the rotation comes. We’ll probably be seeing lots of Face Shaman, simply because the deck will still exist, but I believe that sooner or later the deck will become obsolete because better strategies will soon come up that are also bound to counter Face Shaman, and that one strategy can be one of those posted here!
I hope I was able to deliver the expected for you guys, and that you all enjoyed all these brews, I also hope to see you again the next articles to come during this crowded week of expansion release!
A new metagame awaits us!
Love you all,
Nuba
