Decks to Play – Is Standard out yet?

Introduction

Hello and welcome to yet another Decks to Play. Everybody is ultra excited for Standard and the number of things I had to talk (and still have) Standard were so big last week that I ended up missing a Decks to Play article.

There are still a lot of things to discuss about Standard, but i’ll do that later. Today I am back with the weekly series we all know and love!

For you guys not familiar with these series, here we not only discuss the metagame, talk about decks getting better and decks getting worse, decks being played more and decks being played less, we also give you readers a number of different and good suggestions for you to play during the week.

So, enough with the introductions, let’s jump to business!

The Metagame

The Metagame is reacting to Druid’s total dominance over it and decks that weren’t played so much lately are now being played a lot more. Druids dominance on the metagame over Secret Paladin is happening because the deck is a lot more consistent than Secret Paladin and arguably as easy to play. Druid Midrange is also good against mostly everything that beats Secret Paladin, while not being so bad against decks that get beaten by Secret Paladin.

If it weren’t for Midrange Druid, the deck to be played this week was going to be Freeze Mage, as the deck is good against all the Metagame decks: Zoo, Tempo Mage, Secret Paladin and (to a lesser extent) Renolock. However, Midrange Druid is very powerful against Freeze Mage, so today’s option is a little more different than what you are used to seeing here on Decks to Play, and it is…….

Orange’s Midrange Patron Warrior

And this is the deck I would recommend everyone to play this week. This deck was played by none other than Orange himself in the latest Dreamhack. Do I even have to mention he was the one that won the tournament? This list is absurdly positioned in today’s metagame and has a positive winrate against literally everything that is top-playable right now.

This deck runs some extra-defensive cards when compared to traditional Patron Warrior decks, this list also contains more Midrange minions than other lists and is a lot more proactive than any other Patron Warrior list you might find out there.

On a metagame so developed as this one and so aggro-oriented, choosing fierce-monkey over frothing-berserker seems like the perfect option, this list also runs Midrange-y options such as piloted-shredder and dr-boom and so on, allowing it to curve a lot better against Aggro while still having enough time to draw into a combo that takes over the board while its aggro opponent has no comeback mechanism.

Because of Druid’s lack of board control tools, and because this list is a lot more proactive than Control Warriors, this list is also favorable against Midrange Druid.

This list is not so powerful against Renolock, however the deck is going down in popularity lately.

Nuba’s Malygos Rogue

As soon as I saw the Standard format announcement, Malygos Rogue struck me as the kind of list I would want to play, so I took my time to develop what I think to be a decent fit for today’s metagame.

This list is decent, but not as powerful as Patron Warrior in today’s metagame. The reason I was to pick Malygos Rogue over Oil Rogue are two: First is that I wanted to playtest something that was going to be very strong post-rotation, and second is that this list has higher odds of beating Midrange Druid than its other option.

When compared to today’s metagame position and how powerful this list can be when compared to others, this list is very similar match-up wise to Patron Warrior, the difference here is that you swap your positive winrate against Secret Paladin and Freeze Mage as Patron Warrior and instead you get a very strong winrate against Reno Lock as Malygos Rogue.

edwin-vancleef wins a couple of games here and there because your opponent is playing some aggro-proactive deck with fewer responses to huge minions played early in the game.

You also get to do Miracle Turns with your gadgetzan-auctioneer, which gets your opponent’s eyes rolling regardless of being important or not.

It is important to note how hard it is to play with decks such as Patron Warrior and Malygos/Oil Rogue, and in case you are not experienced with these decks I believe that you should read a little about how to properly play them. For Malygos Rogue’s case our writer Joseph wrote a pretty nice Premium guide about it, go ahead and check it out in case you didn’t!

Updating Control Priest Once Again

I know there are some of you guys who peek into my articles to see if I ended up updating one of my Control Priest lists because I love experimenting with it and making different changes.

Today, based on what I saw in Dreamhack, I had a couple of nice ideas that ended up making the cut in our Control Priest list.

Acolyte of Pain is a nice way of making sure we win against Freeze Mage, since we’ll be able to draw into our healing spells a lot more constantly than we would without it. It also helps a little in Aggro matchups, giving us a little breathing space while cycling through our deck.

The drop of museum-curator is justifiable this week because of the huge rise in Aggro and the addition of acolyte-of-pain, which is the usual 3-drop we look for with Curator in those matchups.

Other nice substitution was excavated-evil instead of holy-nova. Despite: losing the healing (which can sometimes be important), dealing damage to our own minions (which is something we don’t want to do) and giving our opponent an extra card in their decks (which is definitely something we don’t want to happen in some matchups), the 3 damage text part is a lot more than the 2 damage text part from the Holy Nova. allowing us to kill Shredders, sometimes kill growing Shades, and some other threats that happen to have 3 HP and not 2 is huge.

shadow-word-pain instead of a zombie-chow copy is also important: Another way of killing doomsayer as well as a very good removal against both Aggro (small dudes) and Control (Belchers!) is something we might need to look into.

Conclusion

And this is it for this week’s Decks to Play. I have to admit I just can’t wait for the Standard format to become real in the game, so since I won’t be able to play it at least I should be getting a better player by playing decks that are very hard to play such as Rogues (any Combo-based deck), Patron Warrior, Control Priest, Reno Lock and Freeze Mage. At least this week i’ll be avoiding playing “dumb” decks like Secret Paladin, Midrange Druid, Tempo mage, Face Shaman and Zoo as they seem to be “lowering” my gaming awareness by a lot and whenever I play them for a long period of time the number of misplays I do increase greatly.

I hope you guys liked this week’s Decks to Play, and stay tuned this week for more Standard-talk articles as well as next week for our next Decks to Play article!

Love you all,

Cuddles,

Nuba

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