Decks to Play – Americas Prelims Edition

Introduction

So we are finally into the Americas Prelims! I love seeing the americas Prelims lists because they’re always a counter-reaction to the Europe’s Prelims results.

So, while in Europe we had quite a lot of Control decks, mainly a reproduction of what we saw in Dreamhack, in Americas we are seeing quite a lot of Aggro and Midrange Strategies.

This happens because greedy Control decks are often punished by faster and consistent decks, that don’t rely on taking its time to play, and instead they play around consistently having a decent start and snowballing from there, closing games quicker than Control can respond while being able to fight Aggro’s powerful start.

In case you are interesting seeing all the America’s Prelims lists, you can find them all here:

http://www.hearthpwn.com/news/1463-notable-player-decks-for-the-americas-spring

Now, let’s discuss a few of the lists and their choices, shall we?

Team Archon’s N’Zoth Paladin

The most intriguing fact about the Americas Prelims has to be the total lack of Paladin lists. Almost no one picked the Paladin class, and instead everyone decided to go for different, and more aggressive, approaches.

But not team Archon, no. Team Archon decided to go against the tide and bring their own version of N’Zoth Paladin, which is the one you guys can see here.

This list has some minor differences when compared to other N’Zoth Paladin lists, mainly it has a corrupted-healbot, has one less humility and has a pair of keeper-of-uldaman (which, after testing Chakki’s list a lot, I can’t quite tell why on earth he ditched the card during Dreamhack). The list also has rallying-blade, which I believe is the main differential of this list. Rallying Blade is a fiery-war-axe that costs one more in this deck, but I have to say there is no problem with that, at all. It helps the deck making it more consistent and gives it a slightly better early game.

As a personal note, I have to say I am completely sceptical about this deck and how it’ll perform in the America’s qualifier. I really want it to work, but I have to say N’Zoth Paladin is far from being a consistent deck, and the more people refine it, more they drop the Draws in order to make the list more greedy, and that has been making the deck a lot more inconsistent when fighting both Midrange and Aggro, which is exactly what this list is going to be facing this weekend.

Chakki and ThatsAdmirable Aggressive Lineup

So Chakki chose to go back to his original signature and play Aggressive decks. Meanwhile, ThatsAdmirable seems to be following Chakki in this campaign of getting the best aggressive lists and picked some interesting decks for this weekend.

I don’t know at this very moment if Admirable is in Chakki’s team, but they both teamed up and made these lists, I am sure of it as they are running the exact 120/120 cards, the full lineup can be seen on the hearthpwn link I gave you.

Now, to the lists, I liked what they did to Beast Druid – They tried making the deck more consistent while keeping its aggressiveness, ragnaros-the-firelord is indeed an interesting choice, and since we don’t have big-game-hunter being played on every deck anymore we can say it is, as of right now, a good option to run in a lot of decks.

The Shaman list also surprised me a little, nerubian-prophet and master-of-evolution are there to try and make the deck’s Mid game less dependant on the start. I don’t know if that choice will pay off, as you actually have to drop part of your consistency to grab these cards, but I sure as hell want to see how it works out.

The last two lists aren’t anything new – Pirate Warrior and Zoo are already known to us with these exact forms to be the current best and most well-shaped lists of their respective archetypes.

Tidesoftime N’Zoth Shaman

So, a particular interesting list is Tide’s Control Shaman list.

This list is completely different from every single Shaman build we saw until now, if you were to ask me for opinion regarding it, I wouldn’t be able to bring a precise opinion, rather just personal changes I would make in a initial playtesting build.

I would be using jeweled-scarab instead of both rockbiter-weapon and ancestral-knowledge, but that is just me looking at the list for the first time.

I also don’t really know about elise-starseeker, if you really want to be into totems, maybe thunderbluff-valiant could be a decent win-condition, probably a lot less conditional than Elise. Also, who on its right mind would bring yogg-saron-hopes-end to a World Qualifier??

Well, I have to say Tidesoftime has balls!

My version of this list would run: -1 rockbiter-weapon, -1ancestral-knowledge and -1yogg-saron-hopes-end and +2jeweled-scarab and +1doomsayer – I would be keeping the Elise because I would be adding Doomsayer to the list, giving the late game some useless cards.

Tidesoftime’s Tempo Dragon Warrior

And the latest interesting list is Tides’ Dragon Warrior list.

The list tries to incorporate the full capacity of Tempo Warrior into the Dragon Shell, and once again it feels a lot… different, than what we have seen so far. Tidesoftime is indeed playing very different and innovative lists, the thing about them, just like the Shaman one, is that we can’t quite tell if they’ll work or not until we have actually seen them in action.

The thing I like about this list is that it starts curving out a lot earlier than standard Tempo Warrior, so you have more chances of snowballing when the game starts, however you are likely to have less chances to come back from games where you’re too far behind.

This deck runs a lot less draws than Standard Tempo Warrior too, so we can assume it is all about curving and snowballing rather than fighting for board control and such.

I have to say I am quite intrigued by Tides’ deck choices, can’t wait to watch the Prelims games.

Closing

There are a lot of other notable Deck lists, but the ones I wanted to talk the most have been talked up.

I hope you guys have a great time looking at these lists and getting your own versions out of it, the speed in which the metagame is powering up in the past two weeks is absurd, and it has been an honor to be updating you guys with these amazing lists all the time!

Hope to see you all again soon,

Nuba

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