Introduction
Hello and welcome to another Decks to Play.
I know I know you guys haven’t seen one of these this weekend, fact is: I was busy!
I sowy about that ):
But today here we are, and this day’s Decks to Play is pretty amazing, because here we’ll have the most powerful decks to be played, the ones we are sure to be powerful and strong!
Hearthstone got resurrected by this new Standard game mode, and also Whispers of the Old Gods brought us a lot of cool tools to play with and make different and awesome decks!
Alright, no more chitchat, let’s get right into the action with…
Nuba’s Midrange Shaman
Oh, this build! Yeah, I haven’t posted a Shaman build in our last article, so we might as well post one right now! 😀
This one build was inspired in Loyan’s Rank 1 Legend Totem Shaman build, but I made a lot of changes on it to match what I believe to be a more refined deck building.
Thousands and thousands of different Shaman builds showed up last week, and I have to say I tested quite a lot of them. Tons and tons of deck lists were playtested until I found the one that I liked the most, and strangely it wasn’t Loyan’s build – it was my own!
I have to say I am quite the Loyan fan, the guy is the only person I know that has played more Shaman than I did, and mind you: I played quite a lot of Shaman. I have what? 1000 wins? 1500 Shaman wins? But this Loyan guy has only played Shaman his entire life, even when the class was complete garbage (ok I did too, but not exclusively shaman) and that is quite the achievement if you ask me.
Alright, the Loyan guy is a Shaman genius, and he brought us a pretty good list, but – as everything else made in the first week – the list still could use some refinement, and I started doing the changes I liked:
cult-master sucks big time. I can’t understand why you would put a card like that on a deck that wanted to have the biggest board presence ever to then combo with bloodlust, that made no sense at all to me and was the first thing I cut after it failed in the first 10 games of my playtesting.
azure-drake??? Sure, this is a nice card to draw mid-game, but if you don’t need the extra draw often times (I will get to that later) you’re a lot better off with fire-elemental, also the Drake is usually overshadowed by flamewreathed-faceless and we usually want to play that on curve, leaving… turn 6 free for Fire Ele!
I always loved ancestral-knowledge so I added it to the deck as well instead of the inconsistent Mana Tide Totem and that Cult master I disliked so much, this also fix this deck’s draw problems while having some minor interaction with tunnel-trogg.
I missed the lightning-bolts quite a lot, and let’s be honest we all want to use rockbiter-weapon with that doomhammer, so I brought back both Bolts instead of “SomethingIDontEvenRecall”.
I never really liked bloodlust as a card. It sure can feel awesome sometimes, but overall I always feel like the card makes your deck less consistent and your hands more poopy. To be honest, I hate bloodlust. So I had to take it out of the deck. Truth is: I watched Loyan’s stream here, did no playtest, and after watching him lose 4 games because he had Bloodlust in his hand instead of something useful made me sure the card needed to be swapped for something better, like a Lightning Bolt for example 😀
So, this is my build! Midrange Shaman is still one of the top decks to be played and I hope you guys have a lot of success with it!
Nuba’s Midrange Hunter
Aaaand here we are with what I believe to be the final version of Midrange Hunter (at least for this week that is), this is what I ended up coming up with after tons and tons of Midrange Hunter playtest.
I have to say this build quite surprised me. I was always jumping around trying to keep a drop-5 in my list, but I always had some issues with it and ultimately I end up cutting all the defenses for aggressiveness. Some strategist used to say that “Attack is the best defense” and I have to say that in this case they’re completely right.
knife-juggler ultimately came back to the deck, as the card’s interaction with unleash-the-hounds is still one to be feared by many and a very powerful comeback mechanism.
huge-toad ended up being slightly better than kings-elekk, simply because you would much rather run more low drops in your deck so you can curve better and have more chances of maintaining board presence, which means you’ll have much weaker Jousts.
desert-camel was the last card I added to the mix together with explosive-trap. Truth is: everyone is playing Aggro, and Desert Camel do makes your Aggro matchup a little worse (while making your Control matchup absurdly better), so the trap is kind of a way to make up for it while adding yet another counter to the huge wave of Zoo that is swarming the ladder lately.
And this is it. This build is a lot more Zoo-ish than the one I posted last week, and a lot more refined as well. And in case you want a powerful Hunter deck to play this week, this is the one you should be giving a try!
Boarcontrol’s Midrange Warrior
Woah woah woah woah!! This build is AMAZING! Boarcontrol actually managed to get that pre-Standard Midrange Warrior list and completely adapt it to Standard mode, and it quite provided!
I believe a lot has been said about this list on previous articles, but let’s just recall how this list works and it’s power:
This is a list that takes that Patron Warrior fully recursive shell, and removes the “One trick Pony” part of it. Basically, you’ll have a fully recursive deck that won’t be completely devastated and esc+concede in the first sight of hellfire, no! This list runs a lot of powerful Midrange cards, that are good on their own instead of all the grim-patron gibberish you guys have been seeing last week, and it does all that quite well.
This is obviously a varian-wrynn deck, meaning most minions have some sort of immediate impact on the board, be it with Charge or Taunt, at the same time this list runs thousands of anti-aggro tools for you to stop that pesky Aggro dudes from slamming your face early on in the game.
In the end this is a well rounded list, that might require some tuning in the long run, but you should feel safe enough running this list as-is right now, as it feels like it is good enough.
Closing
And this is it for the lists I wanted to show you guys.
We have some other lists that are playable, like the Miracle Rogue, the Dragon Priest and some others, but truth is you already know the lists and it would feel tiring to post them here right now, maybe we’ll see more refined versions of them in the following articles?
I hope you guys have been enjoying all this Decks to Play spam I have been doing, because I for sure won’t be stopping any time soon! 😀
Oh, oh! I have something very cool stored for you, so be sure to check Hearthstoneplayers tomorrow for a cool read!
I love you all, been seeing you next article,
Cuddles,
Nuba
