Decks to Play – Evolutionary Leap

Introduction

Not to confuse this week’s article title with MTG card Evolutionary Leap, this week’s article is about how the decks are being updated in current metagame to be either more powerful (meaning a direct update on them) or to fight the new more-powerful decks that are showing up.

We are still within the first week of Ranked play for the new season, a lot of people are updating their decks and most played strategy with hopes of not becoming obsolete or to keep up the fight with currently existing new decks.

Here I will be showing you a couple updated lists that I believe should be the ones you should play this week as well as talk a little about the Ladder situation, let us start?

A Metagame Update

Aggro Shaman died. Not a literal death, it is still the strongest Face Deck in the game, but the Face strategy just can’t compete with so many Reno Jackson decks running around, and the deck is inconsistent to a point people would rather play Secret Paladin, since it has better matchups against decks Face Shaman fail to fight against.

Secret Paladin is also more consistent, meaning it is a natural choice to Ladder with in this early weeks of this season. Ragnaros’ version died out a little, instead the old version of Secret Paladin with a copy of Divine Favor and more early game became once again the list of choice for most players.

Control decks are all aiming at the “anti aggro” strategy this week, since you’re bound to face a lot of not-so-experienced players during your grind to Legend, and these players tend to play Aggro a lot more than other strategies, even if that strategy isn’t as powerful.

Because of its strong matchup against Secret Paladin and decentness against other decks, Zoo was the one deck that got more people into the top 100s in the last hours of ladder grind.

Egg Druid got Rank 1 Legend in EU hours before the season ended and was the strongest deck to grind to Legend in the later hours of the Legendary grind, the thing about it is that the deck is only good against Zoo and Secret Paladin decks, which was almost 70% of the decks played on the top 300s of the Ladder, meaning the deck isn’t strong enough to be used in the ladder as a whole. A lot of people tried using Egg Druid after the season ended and were just smashed by ladder’s unpredictableness, Egg Druid is not a deck I would recommend you playing right now.

Egg Druid

I can’t help myself, I have to post this list here, after all it is the one list that shined in the “last hours of season”  metagame.

This list isn’t very special: it has a lot of gimmick combos that allows you to take advantage of board trade, has a combo portion that gives you tremendous reach, and does very well against decks focused on running lots of weenies to make trades and snowball on the board.

Everything about this list is gimmick, but the trick is that Zoo won’t just trade into your Eggs, or Creepers (most of the times at least), so you have enough turns (usually 3-4 free turns) to establish a board presence that Zoo and Secret Paladins can’t get rid of.

Raptor Rogue

I took the liberty to update Raptor Rogue a little.

This list seems to be doing exceptionally good in the ladder, since the wave of anti-aggro Control decks can’t punish Raptor Rogue, this deck is one of the finest choices for your Legendary Grind this week, and for sure the choice of mine.

The few changes I made to this deck is to make its curve look the most like Midrange Hunter’s curve, meaning it has smoother plays and regardless of having no draws, by the time you run out of cards you either lost the game or won it already. Since this list runs a lot more Persistent stuff than standard Midrange Hunter, and a lot less gimmicky stuff, this list is much stronger than our usual Midrange Hunter and the one I believe ya’ll should be playing on the ladder.

In case you are wondering, Sir Finley is there to make Control Matchups smoother, either giving you Steady Shot or Life Tap. There is also a plethora of choices you can pick in order to play other matchups, such as getting Totems vs Druids and Fireblast vs Paladins, but overall the 2 best options are Life Tap and Steady Shot.

Control Priest

Well, I will be posting a couple of MUA for Control Priest once I am done with the Reno Lock tier-2 MUAs, so I might as well post the Priest list right here for you guys.

Control Priest underwent a couple of changes after the metagame shifted away from Face Shaman.

Board Controlling Aggro decks became a thing once again, and zombie-chow is the finest card to deal with that type of Aggressiveness.

To keep the Control Matchup good enough, Control Priest now runs thoughtsteal, which makes the Control Matchup better but doesn’t hurt the Aggro matchup as much as running bombs (which, let us remember, Control Priest doesn’t need).

The addition of Zombie Chow to the deck made the anti-aggro 5-drops slightly unnecessary, so they were the ones who suffered the cut in order to have Chows added. You can still make swaps between harrison-jones, voljin, holy-novas and sludge-belchers depending on your metagame, but this is the version I found to be the best right now.

Some Explanations might be needed, so here they are:

• voljin and thoughtsteal are the anti-Renolock arsenal (and overall anti-control), these cards can make the matchup go from very-unfavorable to evenly-matched.
• zombie-chow and sludge-belcher are enough anti-aggro tools that do well enough versus Control (Chows can be good even in the Control Matchup with Auchenai Soulpriest, the right combo can deal up to 24 damage in one turn on an empty board). Remember Control Priest is already good enough against Aggro and those cards are just the nail in the coffin, to make the matchup desperately in your favor, since it is the one you’ll be facing the most.

Secret Paladin

The addition of zombie-chow also made it to Paladin Secret, making the deck much stronger against lists that had the upper hand against it in the last hours of Season Grind.

Keep in mind how Secret Paladin was suffering from being countered by so many decks, and how even Reno Lock adapted to fight off the Ragnaros version of Secret Paladin in the last hours of Season Grind. Because of that, Zombie Chow Paladin lists were the most favorable ones to grind the ladder, since it had both Divine Favor as well as a much better early game fight with Zombie Chows.

The Zombie Chow version of Secret Paladin is proving itself to be the strongest version out there right now to fight off all the Board Control aggressiveness of decks built to destroy the previously posted version of Secret Paladin, example of these decks are: Tempo Mage and Zoolock.

Being able to drop your Hand twice as fast also made the Renolock matchup better with the comeback of divine-favor (since it now can be used even against Aggro), so I believe this to be the Secret Paladin list for you to play this weekend.

Playing against a lot of Control Decks? Suggestion: Swap a copy of blessing-of-kings for a second keeper-of-uldaman, but keep in mind Blessing of Kings is a lot more versatile than Keeper and can help you in more situations, it is not a change you should do lightly.

Conclusion

And this is it for today’s Decks to Play.

Today’s decks were simply updated version of previously posted lists, but those decks seems to be doing much better in today’s metagame than the ones previously posted, so I highly recommend you updating your lists with the ones posted here.

I  hope you guys have been enjoying the Decks to Play series, I will keep on doing my best to provide y’all with the best possible playable lists for you to play every week, so never forget to give Hearthstoneplayers a weekly check!

Love you all, see ya around!

Cuddles,

Nuba

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