Guide of tanking up with C’Thun Warrior

Introduction

Hi guys, anothersy here. I am Hearthstone Player who has been playing Hearthstone even since Closed beta. After a few months of grinding the arena, I started to play ranked and playing competitively.

It has been a long time since I wrote stuff, finally had the time and motivation to comeback and write again, Hope you guys will enjoy this guide of mine.

So.. It’s been a while since The Whisper of the Old Gods expansion has been around, and one of the most iconic cards of the set is cthun and I’m here to show one of strongest C’Thun deck in my opinion, C’Thun Warrior.

C’Thun Warrior is a blend between the basic assets of Control Warrior and adding cthun as its main finisher. ancient-shieldbearer is a substitution of shieldmaiden that needs some cthun requirements. The main reason this Warrior deck wins almost every Control Warrior matchups, it can gain massive armor from the brann-bronzebeard and ancient-shieldbearer combo which other Control Warrior type do not possess, making them winning in fatigue.

The deck has abundant amount of mid-game/early-game cards, topped with Warrior’s best removal cards execute , shield-slam and brawl making the deck a strong and consistent choice for both laddering and playing competitively.

Deck Sample

This decklist I have taken from sjow when he reached #1 Legend on North America server, he also reached rank #1 Legend on Europe server as well. My personal success with the deck is reaching legend rank this season and climbed all the way to Top 100 on North America Server too. This deck is quite the standard C’Thun Warrior list that most people are playing, you might see an occasion doomcaller or harrison-jones or even a grommash-hellscream played too.

Pros and Cons

Pros/Strengths

• C’Thun Warrior is probably the highest armor a Warrior deck can possibly produce, making them winning in fatigue stages vs. most decks
• Can deal with most decks in the meta
• You can go greedy as much as you want, thanks to healing and brawl

Cons/Weakness

• Sometimes inconsistent in getting cthun to 10 attack before turn 7, making your 7 mana minions pretty trash.
• Suffer against board swarming decks, you only have 2 brawls.
• Require us to curving out by dropping early game minions to be effective.

General Strategy

The general strategy of this deck is pretty simple, you do everything to survive the early game, and occasionally dropping cthun minions like cthuns-chosen , disciple-of-cthun which builds up to your 7 mana drops such as ancient-shieldbearer and twin-emperor-veklor and end the game with cthun.

Card Details

Fiery War Axe 

• Your main early removal for most matchups, this card is a MUST keep for most games you play.

execute and shield-slam

• The Bread and Butter cheap yet strong removal spells for Warrior. Use to eliminate a threat that is out of hand, Use with caution.

beckoner-of-evil

• A meat fodder and C’Thun activator
• An interesting point of having her is she makes sure our C’Thun if buffed up to 10 attack before turn 7. (Lifecoach consider running a double copy of her.)

slam

• An additional cycle to our heavy minion deck, used conjunction with fiery-war-axe and even disciple-of-cthun to deal with 4-5 health minions.

brann-bronzebeard

• His main purpose here is to combo with ancient-shieldbearer for a 20 armor boost, very essential when playing vs. Other Control Warriors making you winning in the fatigue stages.
• Combos well with disciple-of-cthun and twin-emperor-veklor as well.
• Doesn’t happen often, but him + cthun is pretty good too.

ravaging-ghoul

• Main mulligan when vs. Zoo Warlock, also acts as a activator for execute and acolyte-of-pain draws too.
• When vs. Zoo, if possible, try holding as long as possible until they play forbidden-ritual usually seals the game out.

acolyte-of-pain

• Our main drawing engine, try drawing at least 2 cards from him in the non-mirror match and you’d be fine

Elise Starseeker 

• In control matchups, we’ll have cards that are consider dead cards, she makes sure they are changed to some useful legendaries. (Maybe not useful sometimes.)
• An additional 4 mana minion, her 3/5 body makes a nice meat shield in the early game.

disciple-of-cthun

• A C’Thun activator and a bash in a minion version, helps dealing with pesky 2 health minions.
• A main keep in most of our mulligans too

cthuns-chosen

• A very annoying card to deal with for certain classes (Especially Druids), also another C’Thun activator.

Brawl 

• Our only reset button when things gets out of hand, very important card when playing against Nzoth Decks.

justicar-trueheart

• Since every Control Warrior is running her, we have to include her too to catch up with the tank up battle.

sylvanas-windrunner

• A staple card for most control decks now, as she is always an annoying minion to deal with, since most decks do not possess a silence.
• You her to slow the board of your opponents, or steal a key minion from your opponent.

twin-emperor-veklor

• The only taunt of our deck and cthun must be at 10 attack for this guy to get his twin brother.
• With brann-bronzebeard he can get triplets.

ancient-shieldbearer

• Currently one of the highest healing minions with standard stats.
• Most of the time used to combo with brann-bronzebeard for a 20 armor boost.

gorehowl

• Best weapon card for a high armor deck, you gain so much value from it, killing everything.
• Try saving its attack at 5 or 6 rather than hitting everything in sight. It causes difficulty for you opponent to play minions.

cthun

• Main finisher of the deck, he’ll hit roughly 14-16 when you are ready to play him.
• Pay attention of his 10 attack sweet spot, where he activates your 7 mana minions
• Rarely happens, but he combos crazily with brann-bronzebeard

Interesting Card Choices

emperor-thaurissan

• A strong choice, he’s usually included with doomcaller to do brann-bronzebeard + doomcaller combo to shuffling another cthun into your deck instead of only one, he also makes you allocate your mana more efficiently.

doomcaller 

• Mostly included with emperor-thaurissan to enable double cthun resurrection.
• A very large minion to remove for some classes.

harrison-jones

• Highly reccommended  when you are facing weapon classes meta.

Matchups and Mulligan

Zoo Warlock

Difficulty: Easy to Moderate

Mulligans: fiery-war-axe , ravaging-ghoul , disciple-of-cthun

Situational keeps:

• beckoner-of-evil is a good keep if you cannot get fiery-war-axe
• If you have the coin, you could keep brawl if your hand is abysmal.

General Advice:

• Getting a fiery-war-axe early makes you heavily favoured to win this matchup. However, if you do not get it, try your best to maintain their pressure.
• Try saving ravaging-ghoul to play after your opponent plays forbidden-ritual.
• A difficult a matchup for the zoo player, he has to pressure us high in the early turns, then play around brawl after turn 5. We usually easy win the game if he fails to pressure us early.
• When you have stablized the board, be careful of those leeroy-jenkins + power-overwhelming or soulfire or any combination that could possibly kill you.

C’Thun Druid

Difficulty: Moderate to Difficult

Mulligans: fiery-war-axe , slam ,cthuns-chosen , execute

Situational keeps:

• Execute deserves a special mention here, keep it if your expecting a crazy inervate opening.
• cthuns-chosen is an annoying minion for Druids to deal with, keep it mostly all the time
• elise-starseeker just for an annoying body for the Druid to deal with.
• shield-block and shield-slam could keep both if they come up together. Do not keep any and hoping the other would come up.

General Advice

• This matchup difficulty depends on how your opponent curves out, sometimes they go with wild-growth and drops big threats consecutively making our life difficult.
• Sometimes we easily beat them by swarming the board too.
• Try to swarm the board with minions as much as possible, Druids do not possess a good comeback mechanic, being ahead in the board is always a key to win when playing with Druids.
• Most of the time, is a race on who drops cthun first.

Tempo Mage

Difficulty: Easy to Moderate

Mullgans: fiery-war-axe , slam , disciple-of-cthun

Situational keeps:

• Shield Block and Shield slam is a nice cycle and removal at the same time, keep them both if you have fiery war axe.

General Advice

• Tempo Mages are very aggressive decks with small minions such as mana-wyrm , sorcerers-apprentice and cult-sorcerer. They use mirror-image to protect their fragile minions so we might require slam or disciple-of-cthun to get rid of their pesky minions.
• yogg-saron-hopes-end are usually included in a list that runs forgotten-torch and acolyte-of-pain , which could possibly steal some unwinnable games from them, so keeping yourself at high health with some answers to get ready for those crazy Yogg turns.
• The new hotform Tempo Mage has less threats than the normal Tempo Mage so executing a flamewaker to minimize damage is good too.

Other Control Warrior

Difficulty: Moderate to Difficult

Mullgans: fiery-war-axe , justicar-trueheart , cthuns-chosen

Situational keeps:

• elise-starseeker just for its body.
• gorehowl to gain 1-2 kills when you hit your 7 mana turn, you wouldn’t want it be your last card.

General Advice

• It is important to identify what list you are dealing with, is it a mirror C’Thun Warrior, Old-school Warrior or a Nzoth Warrior.
• A difficult matchup if you’re not familiar with it, very high skill and understanding the factors of winning increases the chance of winning.
• General gameplay is dropping a threat/minion for your opponent to deal with, never have more than 2 minions on board to playaround brawl.
• Beware of cthun being stolen by sylvanas-windrunner when dropping into a empty board, try baiting her out first.
• Generally, you would want to do the ancient-shieldbearer + brann-bronzebeard combo in this matchup, due to the game usually takes it to fatigue stages.
• If your opponent plays elise-starseeker. Save cthun , this forbids him for playing golden-monkey. Because C’Thun is such a big minion (usually 14-16 health and attack at that stage) he requires removals such as execute or shieldslam to be dealt with, if your opponent plays Golden Monkey, he’ll have only legendaries with no removal. So his outs when vs our C’Thun is rend-blackhand tinkmaster-overspark or deathwing which is a gamble. If he doesn’t play anything you can simply wait until the fatigue damage + C’Thun will kill him.

 Midrange Shaman

Difficulty: Moderate to Difficult

Mullgans: fiery-war-axe , ravaging-ghoul ,slam , cthuns-chosen ,disciple-of-cthun

Situational keeps:

• elise-starseeker if you have a good starting hand with fiery war axe and you need a body.
• execute if you have a nice starting hand to deal with flamewreathed-faceless
• Keep both shield-block and shield-slam if you do not have other plays.

General Advice

• Another matchup that fiery-war-axe is crucially strong in the early game.
• There are several lists of midrange shaman in the ladder right now, ranging from super aggressive shaman to a more midrangy shaman with azure-drakes and fire-elementals. The aggro version is more easy to deal with, as they tend to run out of cards fast, but requires a good starting hand to be dealt with efficiently.
• While the more midrangy shaman is much difficult to deal with, as they can easily swarm the board even after a brawl has been played.
• Upside is both do not possess good card draw abilities, so we can outlast both of them, by keeping the board in control, and brawling only when they put threats like thing-from-below or flamewreathed-faceless.
• thunder-bluff-valiant is also and annoying threat to deal with, always kill it at first sight.
• Overall, we need to deny all their threats, and pumping a lot of armor, the game sometimes takes it even to fatigue stages where the shaman just dies from fatigue, unable to penetrate our high health.

Special Section

As I was finalizing my first draft of C’Thun Warrior, Lifecoach (a famous Germany Hearthstone Player) suddenly swarmed the ladder with his taste of C’Thun Warrior, his list adds in both emperor-thaurissan and doomcaller. I’ll conclude some Pros/Con that he has comparing to our list.

Pros

• Doomcaller + Brann combo usually ends the game for the mirror match
• More consistent at getting C’Thun to 10 attack before turn 7 with double beckoner-of-evil.
• Higher C’Thun maximum attack and you get to play 3 C’Thuns in one game.
• emperor-thaurissan makes them more efficient with mana.

Cons

• Highly relies on cthun in the late game stages, he cannot be polymorph’ed or even stolen by sylvanas-windrunner or our Doomcaller combo will be useless.
• Lesser card draw mechanics. (-1 acolyte-of-pain)
• No Gorehowl

Feel free trying both decks, I have tried both list and they both work pretty good.

Final Thoughts

I hope you enjoy my share of C’Thun Warrior, I will be writing some in-depth MUAs in certain matchups in the future and will include them in this guide too. Feel free to comment and ask questions for things that are shady for you, I’ll do my best to answer them. Have a good time tanking up!!!

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