Introduction
Greetings, dear readers, and welcome to another installment of ”Running Wild” and the last of our 3 part article miniseries where I cover the quest decks in the wild format. We are finally here, at the very end of the road, and I’ve left the worst for last. Yes, some might not consider the hunter quest to be a bad quest but I’ve never really had any trouble against it and neither have I seen many players play it on a high competitive end so I will consider it to be among the worst quests in the game. Regardless, it is my job to make these quests work, despite how awful they might seem, so let’s get ready for some crazy wild quest decks.
Sit back, relax, and let’s dive right into this! 🙂
Final Opinion On Quest Cards
Since this will be the last article about quests in the wild format, at least for the time being, it is only fitting that I give my final opinion on the various quest cards and the quest mechanic. First thing that I want to address is the surprisingly common complaint, coming from free to play part of the community, that if you don’t have a quest in your deck and you’re facing against an opponent who has a quest that you will most likely lose the game. This is complete and utter nonsense, especially when most of the quests aren’t even that good. You don’t need to run a quest deck in order for that deck to work. There are many good decks out there which don’t run quests and they are preforming really well, especially in the wild format.
So, which quests are bad and which quests are good? These are the quests that I would recommend that you craft if you’re interested in playing a quest centric deck. The best quests, at this point in time, and the safest ones to craft are in fact open-the-waygate, awaken-the-makers, the-caverns-below, unite-the-murlocs and, to my huge surprise and utter shock, fire-plumes-heart. Yes, I did just list fire-plumes-heart, the card that I simply can’t stand to look at, and the reason for this is that as someone who writes these articles I find my self obligated to test various decks that I recommend (or to test various single cards). Towards that end I have forced myself to craft fire-plumes-heart and give it a shot and I must say that I’m quite happy with taunt warrior, in both formats, and that the quest seems to be pretty good (at least among the better ones). So, yes, I’ve let my unyielding hatred for taunt warrior cloud my judgment regarding this card. It is among the better quests and you might want to craft it.
This means that the bad quests are jungle-giants, the-marsh-queen, the-last-kaleidosaur and lakkari-sacrifice. Oh, look, 3 out of 3 quests that I’m going to write about today are on this list. What a coincidence! These quests are the absolute worst. I’m greatly disappointed by how bad jungle-giants had turned out to be because I was really excited to play a super powerful ramp druid deck. I think that the biggest disappointment when it comes to quest cards is the-marsh-queen which had turned out to be really bad, but what did the players expect? If you build a deck that is filled with 1 drop minions, like a lot of quest hunters are nowadays, surprisingly, you’re going to lose almost every game because you’re deck is filled with bad minions. Luckily there is a good version of this deck and I will show it soon 🙂
In summary, quest cards are quite good. Not all of them are equally good but a good portion of them are at least decent. I personally love this new quest mechanic and I hope that the developers will keep making more and more cards that will support quest decks. Besides, we’re still a couple of days into the expansion, not even a week, so some of these quests just might turn out to be good after all!
Now, onto the decks!
Hunter Quest Deck
First let’s get the hunter quest out of the way. This deck is based on the standard deck which you can find here and it is the best version of the quest hunter that I’ve found and played up to date. I’m a fan of combo decks and this deck, while not a traditional combo deck, has a very nice combo in it which is quite rewarding when you manage to pull it off.
Who’s the hero, the MVP, of this deck? hemet-jungle-hunter, of course. After years of ridicule, ol’ Hemet had finally came back with a very interesting and very powerful card. Why is hemet-jungle-hunter considered a powerful card? The point of the card is that it thins your deck which makes it easier to get the cards that you currently need. In this deck, hemet-jungle-hunter serves as the most crucial part of the entire combo, one which I will explain shortly.
tundra-rhino is the second part of the combo. Yes, this is a two part combo which makes it quite easy to execute when the right time comes. The whole point of tundra-rhino is to give your beasts charge so that you can proceed to hit face, something that hunters are very good at but have not been doing for the past year. Besides the obvious part which is using tundra-rhino to give your raptors charge, you can also play it with other beasts in your deck if you absolutely have to.
So, how does the combo work? The first thing that you need to do is to complete your quest. This should not be too hard to do because there are a lot of good 1 drop minions in this deck. Once the quest is done, and only once the quest is done, you’re going to play hemet-jungle-hunter to blow your deck into pieces. Now, if you have been paying attention to the decklist, you will notice that there are only four 4 cost or more minions in the entire deck and one of them is hemet-jungle-hunter. This means that after you play hemet-jungle-hunter, you will destroy almost your entire deck. I would personally wait until I have a tundra-rhino in my hand or at least tolvir-warden in my hand to make sure that I don’t draw tolvir-warden once hemet-jungle-hunter thins the deck. That would be bad because you need thundra-rhino ti execute the combo. On your next turn you will play queen-carnassa to fill your deck with raptors and then, on the following turn, you’re going to play tundra-rhino to execute your combo. tundra-rhino gives all your beasts charge, raptors are beasts which draw cards and your deck is, most of the time, only raptors. You get the point 🙂
Warlock Quest Deck
The warlock quest, lakkari-sacrifice, turned out to be a huge disappointment. I was really looking forward to a functioning discard warlock deck, the quest reward had seemed awesome, but all I got was disappointment. There is still too much of a disadvantage that comes with discarding cards from your hand. Sure, you can draw more cards, but what happens too often is than you will either discard other cards that discard cards or you will discard something that you absolutely don’t want to discard. When I first reviewed this card I’ve mentioned how many players, including pro players, have mentioned the idea of fitting lakkari-sacrifice into some sort of a control warlock deck where it could serve as an additional win condition if you just happen to trigger it. I’ve said that this is a bad idea and I was right about it, but the thing that I thought might not be so mad is a midrange discard warlock, mostly because lakkari-felhound had seemed like a very powerful minion for a midrange deck. I was wrong again and the third option, the most obvious one, had turned out to be the best one. A zoo discard deck which runs lakkari-sacrifice. Let’s take a look at the list which is based on a list from Greensheep, for the standard format, which can be found here.
I pride myself on my knowledge of playing control warrior and zoo warlock, with zoo warlock admittedly being a deck that I’m better with, so taking the previously linked list and modifying it to fit the wild format was a pleasure to do. As you have probably noticed, there are several key differences because the wild format allows us to use some of the more powerful minions from the very early days of Hearthstone. I’ve also modified it a bit to be able to win you games even if you don’t manage to get the lakkari-sacrifice going.
First and foremost let’s see what discard cards do we have and how many cards can we discard with them? We have two copies of soulfire, two copies of darkshire-librarian, two copies of doomguard and a single copy of lakkari-felhound for good measure. With all those cards we can discard up to 10 cards from our hand and we need to discard only 6 cards which gives us quite reasonable odds of completing the quest. After the quest is complete we will have a very high chance of winning the game, but that is not our greatest concern here. Our greatest concern is what to do if we can’t finish the quest in time. Putting all of your eggs in one basket has never been a good idea and that is why, when playing this deck, you’re going for winning without the quest as your primary objective while completing the quest and winning with it should be your secondary objective.
Towards this end, we’re running the standard zoo package with some new additions. power-overwhelming my be gone from standard but it is still, and will forever be, an all star in the wild format. imp-losion is by far the best single target removal spell that a zoo warlock can have. The newest addition to the deck is ravenous-pterrodax which has been the absolute MVP of my not quest oriented zoo warlock deck (which I will show you in my next article). This minions is simply amazing. You can destroy a minion on which you’ve cast power-overwhelming because it is going to die anyway or you can destroy something like nerubian-egg to get your 4/4 minion early. You can even destroy a 1/1 imp that you get from imp-losion or the 3/2 imp that you get from the nether-portal.
In summary, this is the best wild discard zoo warlock deck that I have for you. It has a strong focus on winning without completing the quest while, at the same time, it is almost equally focused on completing the quest and winning through it. It is the best of both worlds and I hope that you find success with it, but if you’re looking for a non quest wild zoo warlock than swing by tomorrow when I will have a real treat for you 🙂
Paladin Quest Deck
Oh, boy…to be completely honest with you, I didn’t even want to do this one and I’ve been considering just leaving it out because it is so bad but I’ve promised that I will make it so here goes nothing. This is the worst quest in the game, even worse than the hunter one, because you really need to cripple yourself in order to make this deck work and sometimes, especially in the standard format, you don’t get stealth or immunity to spells and your quest reward, the one that you’ve worked so hard to get, gets removed by spells or by minions. There is only one way of making sure that this doesn’t happen and it can be achieved exclusively in the wild format. With all that out of the way, feast you eyes on my newest creation!
Ok, this is the best that I came up with. The biggest problem of this deck is not that you need to cast spells on your minions but that you need to cast six of those spells and most of them are just bad so you need to find a way to work around that. There are eight spells in this deck that target minions, and believe it or not, those are almost all spells which target minions that paladin has. I really dislike this quest so I will get to the point very fast because I don’t think that there is much need for either of us to torture ourselves with this disastrous deck.
First and foremost, you need to stall the game and stay alive until you get to complete your quest. This is the trickiest part when playing this deck because you need to draw six out of eight minion targeting spells which means that you really need to big deep into your deck and get the cards that you need. In order to do so, and instead of acolyte-of-pain, I’ve decided to put in two copies of blessing-of-wisdom is because they are, you’ve guessed it, spell which can target your minions. Amazing! Now we’ve got two spells out of the way and they will help us dig for the rest of them 🙂
Ok, here’s the general idea of the deck. In order to, hopefully flawlessly, execute the TTK (two turn kill) combo you will need the following four cards in your hand; brann-bronzebeard, Galvadon, equality and consecration. The idea is that because sometimes you can’t get stealth or immunity to spells with adapting 5 times then you might just get one, or both, when adapting 10 times. You’re going to play brann-bronzebeard and galvadon first. What you’re looking for are the following: stealth, divine shield, windfury and attack buffs. Only those 4 are necessary in order to execute the two turn kill combo. Next, all you need to do is to pray to whatever you believe in that your opponent doesn’t have a sludge-belcher. You play equality and consecration to clear any taunt minions that might be on the board and you swing for lethal with your galvadon. Done, no need to come back to this quest ever again 😀
Conclusion
That is it! We’re done with going over the quests in the wild format and we most likely won’t be revisiting this topic until the next expansion comes along and gives us new toys to play with! All in all, I like quest cards in both format, but as I’ve mentioned before, not all of them are equally good. If you’re like me than you might craft them in order to complete your collection but I wouldn’t expect to hit legend any time soon with most quest decks. Hopefully, in distant future, we might get better quest deck 🙂
Which quest is your favorite? Did you manage to get the paladin quest to work? Leave your feedback in the comment section below 🙂 Next time I’m going to show you how can you improve your existing wild decks with the newest cards. As always  if you’ve liked this article do consider following me on twitter https://twitter.com/Eternal_HS. There you can ask me all sorts of Hearthstone questions (unrelated to this article) and I’ll gladly answer them as best as I can!
Published: Apr 13, 2017 10:18 am