It’s me! Fireflyer! And I’m here to tell you about my tales in Hearthstone! This month I’m trying a fun challenge I saw on Reddit involving the new Welcome Bundle. For those that aren’t familiar with it yet, the Welcome Bundle is a 5 dollar package that everyone can buy once per account and it gives you a free classic random-class Legendary as well as 10 packs. Now I have heard before of people doing “New Account” or “Free to Play” challenges to show new players that it’s still possible to reach high ranks with a new account and no cards. With the addition of the Welcome Bundle, I feel like new players should have no trouble at all getting into the game and at least making one decent competitive deck to get them started.
First, let’s go over the rules of my “Welcome Bundle” challenge.
Welcome Bundle Challenge Rules
Rule #1: No money purchases except for the Welcome Bundle.
Rule #2: 1 month to try and reach Legend.
Rule #3: Have fun!
I allowed myself a lot of wiggle room when it came to the rules. At first I was going to force myself to use the class Legendary that I received but if I’m honestly trying to reach Legend then I’m probably not going to do it with a deck that is running King Krush. 😛
Even though you’re not allowed to purchase anything, I’m still allowing myself to buy packs/arenas/adventures with gold I earn in the game. In the beginning I was going to grind out a lot of Arena to give myself a bit of a boost in gold/dust/cards but I figured a new player probably wouldn’t be able to get 7 wins as consistently as I could, so I’m suspending my Arena plays for the time being to show that just doing quests and buying adventures/packs can get you into competitive Hearthstone.
Now that we have the rules established, let’s see how I did in my packs.
Welcome Bundle Pack Opening
Legendary: King Krush
At first I was excited about opening King Krush because he was actually one of my favorite cards back when Hearthstone was just Classic. I used to play a pretty typical Face Hunter style deck so I thought about recreating that sort of deck for my initial matches. Once I took a good look at all of the cards I opened though, I went with a different class instead and put King Krush off to the side.
Pack 1: Mortal Strike, Blessed Champion, Frost Elemental, Noble Sacrifice, Silence
Pack 2:Mortal Strike, Shieldbearer, Dire Wolf Alpha, Dire Wolf Alpha, Demonfire
Pack 3: Shadowflame, Ancestral Spirit, Wrath, Stormforged Axe, Faerie Dragon
Pack 4: Angry Chicken, Argent Squire, Inner Rage, Shieldbearer, Spiteful Smith
Pack 5: Misdirection, Lightning Bolt, Ice Lance, Argent Squire, Redemption
Pack 6: Starfall, Cruel Taskmaster, Coldlight Oracle, Dark Iron Dwarf, Power of the Wild
Pack 7: Southsea Captain, Savannah Highmane, Wrath, Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Argent Protector
Pack 8: Twilight Drake, Arathi Weaponsmith, Sense Demons, Mana Wyrm, Abusive Sergeant
Pack 9: Mana Addict, Demonfire, Silver Hand Knight, Faerie Dragon, Argent Protector
Pack 10: Felguard, Eviscerate, Fen Creeper, Forked Lightning, Venture Co. Mercenary
Right off the bat in our first two packs we got double Mortal Strike. As someone who played a bit of Aggro Dragon Weapon Warrior a few months ago, I was a fan of Mortal Strike and wanted to use them immediately. I started to put together a pretty simple Aggro Mortal Strike themed deck.
Into Deck: 2x Fiery War Axe, 2x Mortal Strike, 2x Arathi Weaponsmith, 2x Argent Squire, 1x Abusive Sergeant, 2x Dire Wolf Alpha, 2x Faerie Dragon, 1x Inner Rage, 2x Execute, 1x Cruel Taskmaster, 2x Heroic Strike, 1x Armorsmith.
I was trying to think of ways to fill out the rest of my deck and that’s when I realized I had an Angry Chicken. One of the popular decks right now is called “Worgen OTK” which stands for Raging Worgen One Turn Kill. It involves using Raging Worgen, Charge, and pump effects like Inner Rage to try and get a one turn kill using its Windfury. I also remembered a version that would troll people by killing them with Angry Chicken after it had been pumped up with something like Shattered Sun Cleric and then Inner Rage.
Knowing my deck eventually had to become semi-competitive, I started heading towards the Raging Worgen deck while also keeping Angry Chicken just for shits and giggles. I didn’t have any Raging Worgens and I was down one Angry Chicken so I disenchanted the Southsea Captain I received in my packs to have enough dust to craft the rest of the deck.
Crafted: 2x Raging Worgen, 1x Angry Chicken.
Into Deck: 2x Raging Worgen, 1x Angry Chicken, 2x Shattered Sun Cleric, 2x Stormwind Champion, 2x Charge
With my deck put together, I figured my first stop would be to hit up some of the new account quests you can complete for some easy packs.
Newbie Quests
Here is the list of quests you can complete with a new account for quick packs to help develop your decks.
Unlock Every Hero: 100 gold
You do this by beating each hero once in Practice mode.
Win 5 Practice Games: Classic Pack
Play against the computer a few times to unlock heroes and you’ll get this.
Complete a game in Play Mode: Classic Pack
Play one game and you get a free pack.
Play 3 games in Play Mode: 100 gold
You’ll eventually get this just by playing.
Get any class to level 10: Classic Pack
You’ll more than likely pick one class to play as and it’ll be easy to hit level 10.
The first time you disenchant a card you will get an extra 95 dust for free, so that will help you craft a few cards if you’re missing some that you want in your deck.
You also get a free Arena by going into the Arena section so go ahead and play it out, get your free Whispers of the Old Gods pack and some free dust. Once you get your Whispers of the Old Gods pack, you should also get a free C’thun (that you can’t disenchant).
That’s pretty much all the quests you’ll need to know about when making a new account so let’s get into my first week of my Welcome Bundle challenge.
Week 1: Angry Chicken, not so good
First off, let’s get this out of the way. My account wasn’t completely new when I started this quest. I had an extra account that I used in order to get myself the Morgl the Oracle Shaman Hero. This involves referring a friend and having that friend get to level 20. That means my account had a level 4 Mage, and level 2 of every other class. I had already unlocked all the heroes and had the extra gold sitting on my account.
After I had constructed my deck, I went through a few of the newbie quests in order to get some more cards. I played a few practice games against the computer and started leveling up my warrior. In one of the early levels you unlock Kor’kron Elites which are great for aggro decks. Because of that, I made a quick change to the deck.
Deck Change: -2 Arathi Weaponsmith, +2 Kor’kron Elite.
I received my “Win 5 Practice Games” pack and opened up: Twilight Drake, Circle of Healing, Inner Rage, Stormforged Axe and a Raging Worgen which I had already crafted. Opening up my 2nd Inner Rage, I knew I had to throw it in immediately.
Deck Change: -1 Armorsmith, +1 Inner Rage
Thinking I was ready for a real match, I queued up in Play mode and waited for my match. Match #1, Priest. I was still getting used to my deck so I ended up losing but the loss at least gave me a pack for playing a game in Play mode. “1 Game in Play Mode” pack gave me: Mountain Giant, Knife Juggler, Slam, Eye for an Eye, and Amani Berserker. Knowing Slam is a good card for Warrior, I threw it in.
Deck Change: -1 Heroic Strike, +1 Slam
After 3 more games in Play Mode, I opened up another pack. “3 Games in Play Mode” pack gave me: Auchenai Soulpriest, Ice Barrier, Stranglethorn Tiger, Power of the Wild, and Earthen Ring Farseer. Nothing to help out my warrior deck. However, one or two more matches after that pack got me another pack for getting my Warrior to level 10. This pack changed everything…
“Get a class to level 10” pack: Holy Fire, Ice Lance, Wisp, Cult Master and….
Alexstrasza!
Alexstrasza isn’t part of the regular Worgen OTK deck but it’s such a good card and lots of fun to play so I had to make room for her.
-1 Stormwind Champion, +1 Alexstrasza
It was at this point that I realized if I wanted to get serious about this account and get competitive, I have to streamline my deck. The quickest and easiest way to streamline a deck, arcane dust.
Crafting: Dust your stuff!
The first thing you need to do when you’re making a competitive deck is to see which cards are good. For me, I just looked up the current OTK Worgen decklist and looked for the cards that I wouldn’t be opening in Classic packs. When you’re doing this step, it’s important to find a deck that isn’t out of your price range. Find something that is viable/good but also is fairly easy to make. Lucky for me, I was already on the OTK Worgen bandwagon and it turns out it’s quite a cheap deck to make!
The only things I was really missing outside of Classic were a few cards in Whispers of the Old Gods. 2x Ravaging Ghoul and 2x Blood to Ichor. Those cards are so amazing that I knew I would need them but I didn’t have the dust. So where did I find the dust?
King Krush. Now this is an important lesson for someone who is just starting out and wants to get into Hearthstone. Don’t get attached to your cards. King Krush is a fun card, it has a great animation and I LOVE dinosaurs. However, dusting King Krush will give me enough dust to create a shit ton of commons that I need for the deck. So even though I love the card, I ended up disenchanting it in order to fill out my deck a little more. On top of the Whispers of the Old Gods cards, I also needed 2x Acolyte of Pain since they help me draw cards by abusing the damage from Ravaging Ghoul and Inner Rage.
Disenchanted: King Krush
Created: 2x Ravaging Ghoul, 2x Blood to Ichor, 2x Acolyte of Pain
I compared my decklist to the OTK Worgen decklist and made these changes after.
Deck Change: -1 Heroic Strike, -1 Stormwind Champion, -2 Shattered Sun Cleric, -2 Kor’kron Elite, -2 Angry Chicken, -1 Dire Wolf Alpha, +1 Rampage, +2 Ravaging Ghoul, +2 Blood to Ichor, +2 Acolyte of Pain, +2 Shield Block
The new version of the deck was more streamlined to be an OTK Worgen deck rather than a fun Angry Chicken deck. I would have kept the Angry Chickens around longer but every game I tried to use them, they were shut down and it made me sad.
My deck was still far from complete but I was out of dust, so I looked for other things I could get rid of.
Epics are the best things to disenchant for dust since they give you the most and I was not going to need my Mountain Giant anytime soon. The same goes for golden cards. One of the rares I opened up was a golden Starfall and since I’m not a druid I knew I wouldn’t need it. After getting the dust from those two cards I was able to create the rest of my deck.
Disenchanted: Mountain Giant, Gold Starfall
Created: Rampage, 2x Battle Rage, Slam, Cruel Taskmaster
Deck Change: -1 Dire Wolf Alpha, -2 Faerie Dragon, +1 Rampage, +1 Slam, +1 Cruel Taskmaster
Week 2: Missing a Vital Card
With all my crafting done, my completed deck was ready to start grinding quests and matches. In only a day or two, I was able to get up to Rank 18 and ensure I got the card back for the month.
But the problem I was running into was that my deck is missing a very important card, Emperor Thaurissan.
At first I wanted to run the deck without him and just accept the fact that he’s in Blackrock Mountain and I don’t have the gold to buy the adventure yet. But as I played the deck some more, I found out that he’s pretty important if you really want the combo to work. The real Worgen OTK combo involves using Raging Worgen, Charge, Inner Rage and Faceless Manipulator. Without Emperor Thaurissan, the combo doesn’t work because it costs too much mana. You need at least those 4 cards together in order to do 32 damage in one turn but without Emperor Thaurissan the cards cost 11 mana.
Right now the deck functions okay as an aggressive deck that attacks and finishes with a small worgen but if I want to get to the top, I need to pilot the deck correctly. I did the research and found out that Emperor Thaurissan is in the FIRST adventure for Blackrock Mountain. That means for 700 gold I can get the piece I’m missing! So for the rest of Week 2 instead of grinding out more Ranked matches with a half-functioning deck, I decided to grind my quests and wait until I have the 700 gold to purchase Emperor Thaurissan’s adventure.
Week 2 is now coming to an end and I’m halfway there. I have 400 gold which means I’m 8-10 quests away from finishing the deck so in another week or so I will have my complete deck built.
Conclusion: Part 1
This brings me to the end of Part 1! In 2 weeks I was able to grind most of my quests, create a basic outline of a deck I want to try and take to Legend, and at least burn through the first few ranks in order to secure my card back for the month.
Join me two weeks from now for Part 2 of my Welcome Bundle challenge and find out: Does he ever get Emperor Thaurissan? Does the combo work for him? How many times will he surprise someone with Alexstrasza in his deck? How far can a Welcome Bundle take you in the ranks as a new player?
Find out all of this and more, next time, on Fireflyer Z!
Hope you enjoyed hearing about my adventure and as always, you can either join me on my new Twitch channel at Twitch.tv/ItsFireflyer or follow me on Twitter to hear about my Hearthstone antics @HS_Fireflyer. Leave me some love below and tell me if you’re going to try out the Welcome Bundle challenge for yourself OR let me know if you opened up anything interesting in your bundle for your main account.
I’ll see you in two weeks for Part 2!
(Quick Edit: I just saw the upcoming changes/nerfs happening and apparently this OTK Worgen deck is going to be nerfed. Hopefully I can have some fun with it on this account before the updates hit!)
