Introduction
When I first saw the expansion I didn’t thought they would release ? of the best cards in one single week. But that ended up happening, and as we get closer to the second week, I better start brewing those awesome builds right now otherwise I won’t have enough time to playtest this huge plethora of cards League of Explorers is giving us!
This week we are going to be able to play with the following (good) cards:
- ethereal-conjurer.
- unearthed-raptor.
- fierce-monkey.
- mounted-raptor.
- keeper-of-uldaman.
- brann-bronzebeard.
- tunnel-trogg.
Yeah I believe you just noticed we only have three possibly bad cards this week, which are excavated-evil, tomb-spider and reliquary-seeker, and even there the cards aren’t ultra-mega-hyper-terrible level and people will (and should!) still try those cards out.
Brewing is something wonderful, last week we were able to predict dark-peddler’s big impact on the Warlock Class and how it might end up pushing Warlock to the top tiers once again, this week there are quite a lot of predictions we can make, but let’s leave all this talk about what might happen to their respective sections and jump right into the action otherwise we’ll just take a lot of space here!
Ethereal Conjurer
The first deck that came to mind when thinking about Ethereal Conjurer was Tempo Mage. The card seems good enough to be playable, and we can compare this card with Azure Drake a lot of times, because despite having a much fragile body this card has a Discover Mechanic, which will allow us to pick a card rather than drawing a random card from our deck, and as was proven last week Discover is a much stronger ability in this game than most previously thought.
Because of this, the Midrange and Control decks can take a much greater advantage of such a card, since responses to specific board state and threats are a must in those decks, which can sometimes not really be the case in Aggro decks.
Since we are talking about spells, I figured that Tempo Mage should be the ideal starting point for having such a card, because even though you can fit Tempo Mage in the Aggro strategy (meaning it might not take as much advantage of Discover as a Control/Midrange deck), the deck seems to be the most well rounded possible, and we can actually see the card working there and how better it should be when compared to azure-drake, which is this card’s main opponent in the playtests.
Unearth Raptor
Blizzard gave us Unearth Raptor as a possible additional Rogue strategy that we can end up creating. As of right now, a lot of people have been brainstorming with this card and failing, but I believe this is happening because we simply are “overthinking” the deck building overall idea around this card, which is: be simple.
Play a bunch of Deathrattle cards, on a Zoo-like deck, with good cards that happen to have Deathrattle. Similar to the old undertaker Zoo decks, this strategy should be playable as long as you have a good hand, which might be a problem in the end.
We will still have to playtest a lot, change cards all around and this deck might end up needing cards from future expansions to be playable, but I believe that changing Rogue’s focus out of the Combo zone is a good way of stopping the class from being either too OP or too bad, as it is right now.
There are quite a lot of things we have to think about this Card and how to make the best interactions, and the deck still might need tons of changes, so i’ll leave the initial playtesting list with you guys!
Oh, Another great thing about this card is that it might end up making anubisath-sentinel playable.
Fierce Monkey
Taunt Warrior!!
There are quite a lot of thoughts about Taunt Warrior and this little Fella. I have thought a lot about every possible list, and ended up with this Taunt-Fatigue Warrior mix. This list is a Full Control list that aims to win either with a wall of Huge taunts hitting for a lot with bolster, or to outlive your opponent with tons of Armor, Removal and (Of course) Taunts!
Fierce Monkey is a cool card that. together with already existing Taunt cards, might help us making Full Control decks viable, because it is yet another tool for us to live longer, and on top of that it combos well with bolster and other Taunt cards that although not good enough by themselves, together and buffed by Bolster can end up making a big difference.
Make no mistake, this IS a fatigue list, that sometimes can alternatively win by pushing damage with its minions after it obtained board control.
PS: Still not quite sure about the executes in this deck over crush, since this deck doesn’t have Execute activators like slam and cruel-taskmaster.
Well, It still has deaths-bite not sure if enough though.
Mounted Raptor
Druids got yet another cool beast card in the form of mounted-raptor, and I think this card is exactly what Beast Druid needed to finally be more popular than our standard Midrange Druid. There are some other amazing Beast-synergy Druid cards such as wildwalker that didn’t see much play because other cards such as piloted-shredder seemed to be just better while there weren’t quite the right number of good beasts, or better beasts for that matter. With Mounted Raptor around, we can get the curve down a bit, while adding some cards that are as good as already existing Druid cards and all that while making the deck more proactive.
I also think that Mounted Raptor is slightly better than shade-of-naxxramas for multiple reasons, and while we miss the Stealth minion as a bonus for the savage-roar+force-of-nature combo, we gain another Stealth minion in the form of druid-of-the-saber that costs 1 less mana and has the bonus of being versatile. Overall the deck might need some adjustments, but this is the initial build that came to mind, this is possibly the strongest build we’ll have to playtest this week, so if you are a Druid lover like I am, this is the build I suggest you testing!
This deck should be able to apply as much pressure as Aggro Druid, but with all the Midrange Druid’s consistency powerhouses, keep in mind sylvanas-windrunner can be played over emperor-thaurissan in case he underperforms during the Playtest.
Closing
I don’t want to make a big mess, so i’ll divide this article in 2 parts, so everything gets easier to read!
Hope you guys have been enjoying the lists I have been posting so far, the Part 2 of the LoE Week 2 Brewing article is coming up next, stay tuned!
Love you cuties :3
Nuba
