Introduction
Well hello cuties! Today I want to introduce you guys to the deck I got to Legend this season: Shaman Dragon Control.
When I was researching about Week 1 Decklists, I bumped on Loyan’s Shaman list and took a look at it. At first, the list looked horrible and clunky, but since it had so many upvotes and everyone was talking good about it I decided to test the list 30/30.
Wow, just wow, how good the list was! It was a list capable of beating literally everything, and constantly! Unless your opponent is very lucky, this list just felt too overpowered to be true, and guess what was the reason of such a list becoming playable? The little jeweled-scarab!! The card nobody thought to be good is actually a powerhouse in Shaman! And why is that, you ask me? Well, Shaman’s 3-drops are just too good, there is literally a response for anything and a card for every single situation in Shaman’s 3-drop list, which makes this card a multi-task bomb.
The other card in this deck are just very sinergic and nearly all of them are capable of 2-for-1-ing the opponent while you don’t even need to draw any cards at all.
This deck is capable of beating everything, is very strong against all the tier 1 strategies as well as consistent and capable of beating any chaotic deck, and is this week’s Deck Tech choice!
The Deck
This deck already existed before the Scarab but wasn’t as good as it is today, so nobody ever talked about it. Being a Shaman Deck adds a lot of randomness to the deck that is implied in the class that we need to avoid, and adding jeweled-scarab to the deck makes sure we always have a response to anything our opponent does, regardless of what that might be. Another thing that is implied in this deck being a Shaman deck is that despite how good it is, people will avoid even looking at it simply because it is a Shaman deck, so you should feel safe to run this and roll over your opponents without them even knowing what they are playing against.
There are quite a few awesome synergies this deck has, being a Dragon deck is one of them: The deck is fully Dragon-Synergic. Other nice synergies are: The sweepers synergy with volcanic-drake, the ability you have to timewalk with doomsayer, doomsayer “proccing” volcanic-drake‘s cost reduction ability, the fact we only run Doomsayers and Scarab as minions that cost less than 4 making healing-wave consistently heal you for 14, amongst other synergies.
With this deck, Loyan aka 11point5ft was able to reach a very high rank in the Legendary ladder, and multiple other players were also able to reach the Legendary rank with it, so feel free to run it as this is the best possible deck for this week.
Keep in mind that despite having a lot of situational cards, this Control deck isn’t meta dependant, and you won’t have any trouble grinding with it, regardless of what rank you are in!
Gameplan
This deck’s gameplan is to last longer than your opponent. By generating a lot of single value from the cards, surviving for a very long time and constantly clearing the opposing board.
doomsayer should usually be used to both Timewalk as well as killing one or two medium/small targets. You shouldn’t play Doomsayer as some kind of heal, use your Doomsayers wisely, usually when your opponent only has ways of dealing 4-6 damage to it, forcing them to either waste their resources to deal with your Doomsayer (giving you card advantage) or giving you a free turn the next turn.
Dropping Doomsayers to deal with things like a single knife-juggler against Hunters or a single darnassus-aspirant against Druids is fine. There are thousands of other situations of course, but with these basic examples you should be able to tell whenever playing a Doomsayer is good or not.
Other than that, manage your resources(*) and play around not dying rather than winning. This deck, like any other Control deck, is a very Grindy deck and should be played as such – I haven’t lost to a single fatigue deck yet.
(*) – I could write a whole guide about managing your resources, but that would take around 4 to 5 thousand words and that is not the main focus of this article, which is showing you guys the deck. This is not an easy deck to play, but I believe that knowing how to properly manage your resources (regardless of what deck you are playing) will help you a lot in getting to know how to play this deck. In other words: Play a lot of games and improve!
Mulligan Guide
I believe the only cards you’ll always want to see in your starting hand are jeweled-scarab and doomsayer.
The other cards should all be mulliganed according to which opponent you might be facing:
- Paladins – earth-shock, lightning-storm and lightning-bolt, maybe lava-shock depending on the rest of the hand.
- Hunters – earth-shock, lightning-storm, healing-wave, lava-shock and lightning-bolt.
- Druids and Priests – hex.
- Warriors – twilight-guardian.
- Rogues – hex and lightning-bolt.
- Mages – earth-shock and lightning-bolt.
- Shamans – lightning-storm.
- Warlocks – earth-shock and hex.
Other cards that can be kept, regardless of matchup:
- elemental-destruction if you are not playing against a Warrior and your hand already has 1 or 2 of the cards you want.
- twilight-guardian if your hand already has 1 or 2 of the cards you want.
Conclusion
So, this is the best deck you can possibly play this week! I hope you found it as interesting as I did! Do not feel afraid by how the deck looks (because I also know it looks very odd, haha!) because it is indeed a Jewelry!
I would like to express my appreciation to Loyan for creating this deck. This is possibly Shaman’s first shot at being a Top tier deck since Naxxramas, and i’ll take it! I have been playing this deck this whole day and loving it even more the more time I spend playing it!
Hope you guys enjoy playing this awesome deck as much as I did, see you around!
In case you guys want a full guide on how to play the match-ups with this deck, feel free to ask me in the comments and I might write a whole gameplay guide later this week!
Cuddles,
Nuba
