Decks to Play – What Tempo Are We In?

Introduction

Hello and welcome back everyone to another Decks to Play!

Nothing new showed up this week, however a lot of adjustments are still being done to the decks as other decks are getting better and the metagame starts to go into a deep shifting state.

Just as a small introduction, for those who aren’t familiar with these series, Decks to Play is a weekly series of articles that talks all about the weekly metagame, powerful decks that showed up and everything that is happening at the high end of the ladder.

As the lower ends of the ladder tend to mimic the high end, the information posted here is mostly precise and tend to spread around the whole ladder. The decks posted here are usually the best and/or most innovative decks to be played during the article’s week.

The Metagame

The name of the deck, last week, was Midrange Druid. The rise in Renolock made it so Midrange Druid became the most played deck, since it is one of the most consistent decks in the game and gets mostly an automatic win against Renolock.

Secret Paladin, however, is still at the very top of the metagame – Nothing is stronger than Secret Paladin, and although some decks can easily defeat Secret Paladin (such as Freeze Mage, a deck that has very little chances of losing against Secret when played right) the deck is easy enough to pilot and powerful enough that nothing will be able to bring so many players to the Legendary rank as this strategy for a long time.

Preying on the huge rise of Midrange Druid, Tempo Mage, Zoo and Midrange Hunter’s popularity also went up. Zoo in particular is a deck that is strong enough against both Midrange Druid and Secret Paladin but weak against everything else that showed up after League of Explorers as good decks, meanwhile Tempo Mage seems to be performing quite well, as many players that reached the top 10 Legend this season are playing the deck.

Back to Renolock, because they’re being haunted by Midrange Druid, a lot of silly Renolock players decided to add a Combo strategy to Reno Lock’s mix instead of swapping to a less vulnerable strategy. Renolock, even with a Combo piece is still consistently strong against Aggro than other decks, and I don’t believe that is going to change anytime soon, however I am still not 100% sold on removing part of Renolock’s consistency only to “lose less” against Midrange Druid (that is still going to be defeating you most of the times, regardless your version of the deck).

Reno “Combo” Jackson

This is my version of VLPS’ Combo Renolock, which uses all the consistent Renolock’s tools with a Combo mechanism. Vlps’ version uses leeroy-jenkins instead of arcane-golem, making the combo dependant on emperor-thaurissan. However, you don’t always need faceless-manipulator to pull off combos, and a simple Leeroy+2x Buffs (remember you can always get power-overwhelming or abusive-sergeant from dark-peddler) can win you games, while Arcane Golem would do you less.

There are some discussions between Arcane golem and Leeroy Jenkins users, but overall I will believe that Leeroy Jenkins might prove itself to be better than the Golem.

However I disagree with alexstrasza over lord-jaraxxus here, which is Vlps’ choice, and would rather have the card that wins me the Control matchup than having the consistency of Alexstrasza in the other matchups.

This deck runs all the other anti-aggro tools standard Renolock runs, so in case you are still facing a lot of Aggro decks, this is the list you should be trying this week!

Tempo Mage

A deck that quickly rose in popularity this week was Tempo Mage. A lot of people have been reaching high Legend ranks with this deck and a few respectable versions have been popping up, this is my personal Tempo Mage version which is based upon Fr0g’s version, with a small twist of including water-elemental on it over piloted-shredder, which makes a lot of sense and is the change I recommended him doing (which, ultimately, he did).

This deck, curiously, runs no dr-boom, but has a mind-control-tech included on it.

This happens because MCT(short for Mind Control Tech) is a beast on a metagame filled with opposing dr-boom and muster-for-battle, and you’re likely to always be getting value out of it against Paladins, while not being a bad card on an Aggro metagame as the one we’re living nowadays. Casting MCT is being more powerful than casting Dr. Boom, since the Tempo swing and card’s versatility seems to be more helpful for Tempo Mage than Dr. Boom, and on today’s metagame, by the time you casted Dr. Boom as a Tempo Mage you already either won or lost the game.

Before changing the cards in this list, I urge you to play it as it is – This is the deck of choice for me this week.

Fibonacci’s Anti-Aggro Control Warrior

*Meta checks* Is everyone playing Aggro? Yes? Well, then I think it is time to play a fully anti-aggro Control deck. That is what Fibonacci thought when he made this deck that finished last season in Rank 1.

There isn’t much to say about this deck as simply glancing at it makes you understand all the “why”s except for deathwing.

What is the explanation behind Deathwing? Why would you use such a…. strange card??? Well, fact is the majority of these Aggro decks nowadays runs very little Deathrattle cards and are very vulnerable to sweepers. Deathwing is an “emergency button” that Fibonacci added to his deck in case everything else fails.

Final Thoughts

I had to dig deep to get a couple of these deck lists, as most of the already dominant Decks were seen before and there isn’t anything new other than the lists posted here.

Decks like Face Shaman, Standard Reno Warlock Control, Midrange Druid, Zoo and Secret Paladin are still dominating the Ladder and I don’t see that changing very much, but I won’t be posting these lists here because I have already posted them before multiple times and you are all already very familiar with these lists.

Conclusion

And this is it for this week’s Decks to Play!

I hope you guys have been obtaining success on the ladder with the decks I have been posting weekly, and that I keep being able to help you guys obtain your dreamed ranks!

Papa Nuba loves you all, and in case you have any questions or comments, feel free to post everything you want to say in the comments section below!

Cuddles,

Nuba

---