Introduction
Welcome, dear readers, to another installment of ”Running Wild”, the weekly article series where I cover things regarding the wild format. Yesterday I’ve briefly talked about budget Journey to Un’Goro decks. Today I’m going to talk a bit more about the influence that Journey to Un’Goro had on the wild format, specifically on the more obscure and forgotten wild decks. As always, I’ve selected three different decks to present to you and talk about today. The decks that I’m going to mention today are decks for existing archetypes, though rarely seen today, which can be improved by at least a bit with a few or more new cards. One of the three will look familiar while the other two are a bit more obscure and old. Today I’m presenting you with thief rogue, silver hand paladin and token druid! Let’s see how we can improve these decks with the newest cards. shall we?
Sit back, relax, and let’s dive right into this! 🙂
Defining Obscurity
The first thing that I’ve needed to do before writing this article is to define which decks are considered obscure and which aren’t. If we go by the very basic definition of obscurity then I would have to talk about extremely rare and extremely weird decks such as, for example, mech priest, a deck that hasn’t really seen play since Goblins vs Gnomes. There are a ton of obscure decks out there, weird decks that come out of nowhere and catch you off guard, but I’m not sure how would you respond if I’ve made an article where I’ve talked about how to play mech priest when it isn’t even a good deck to begin with. That is why I’ve decided to pay additional attention to the other part of the definition which is ”extremely rare”.
There really are a lot of Hearthstone decks out there that were preforming decently in their time but that has been so long ago and they haven’t seen play in such a long time that they’ve fallen into obscurity. While thief rogue is a newer deck. from some point in the last year, token druid, the not egg druid deck but somewhat similar to it, hasn’t really seen play ever since force-of-nature was nerfed last year just when the first standard rotation came out. On the same note, silver hand paladin is a deck that never really took off but always had somewhat of a potential and we can clearly see the developers trying to push the deck even now with the newest paladin cards (although the standard version of the deck is nowhere near as powerful as the wild version is).
In summary, you might as well just call this article ”Upgrading obscure and ancient decks”. As I’ve mentioned before, there are a ton of obscure and forgotten decks in Hearthstone, especially in the wild format, but a problem is that you can’t upgrade all of them with Journey to Un’Goro cards so they won’t really fit into this article. If you want to I can make an article about those obscure and forgotten wild decks somewhere in the near future. If that is something that might interest you do let me know in the comment section below 🙂 Your feedback is always appreciated and it does help me decide what will I write about next.
I’ve talk about this for too long. Time to dive in and check some obscure wild decks and how can we upgrade them with Joureny to Un’Goro cards 😀
What’s Yours Is Mine
Thief rogue is the first deck that I’m going to talk about, mostly because I’m not very pleased with it. It is not that this is a very bad deck, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m really not a fan of how rogue as a class. The class just doesn’t interest me that much, just like mage, so I try to avoid it as much as I can and playing it is a total pain to me. However, this deck is a bit more fun to play so there is that, if anything. The only time that I’ve seriously played rogue was on a climb to legend with mech rogue deck all the way back in Goblins Vs Gnomes but I’ve found this…hmmm…I would call it a casino rogue deck, to be a lot of fun but mostly because of the very strong RNG factor which brings a lot of unpredictability with it.
Thief rogue, or burgle rogue, is not a new creation, not by any stretch of the imagination, but the deck did get one good card from the Journey to Un’Goro expansion so I’m going to talk about a bit. No, the card is not obsidian-shard because I haven’t been able to make that weapon work. It is just completely bad. No, I’m talking about hallucination, the best ”burgle” mechanic card that rogue has. hallucination is amazing! Getting a random card from your opponent’s class is always a somewhat of an advantage because your opponent doesn’t know what did you get and needs to play around it, even by a very small degree, but there is always the problem of you getting a useless card like shield-slam. What is good, however, is discovering a card from your opponent’s class. Now that is something that is going to make your opponent nervous. Now you have somewhat of a control over what you’re going to get and your opponent will know that you’ve picked the best option so he or she will have to try to play around it without knowing what the card really is. Now that puts you in advantage!
The rest of the decks plays just like you would expect from a miracle rogue to play. I’ve played with different directions for this decks, trying to make it something like a ”extremely cheap opponent’s cards” deck and a tempo deck but none of that really worked for me. Miracle rogue with a burgle mechanic really did turn out to be the best course of action. You have the advantage of unpredictability combined with the standard miracle rogue package. If you want to play a miracle rogue deck that I would strongly advise you to play the normal version of the deck but if you’re looking to make the best out of the burgle mechanic that this just might be the best deck for you. Alternatively you can always drop the gadgetzan-auctioneer and put a ethereal-peddler in to make a ”extremely cheap opponent’s cards” deck though I still believe that the miracle version is far superior.
To Battle!
Now that I’ve got the rogue out of the way it is time to talk about more enjoyable decks and one of those decks, and a really obscure one, is the silver hand recruit deck. The idea of a silver hand recruit deck was first experimented with in Goblins vs Gnomes expansion where we’ve received quartermaster and muster-for-battle. Although those two cards weren’t enough to push an entire deck archetype revolving around you spamming the hero power button as much as humanly possible, they did make a very strong impact on the metagame back then and for a very long time midrange paladin was one of the best decks in the game. Another expansion, The Grand Tournament, was also a step in the right direction with justicar-trueheart and garrison-commander but by that point we’ve already had the secret paladin deck which was simply better than anything else in the game so a lot of players didn’t really see any point in trying out a silver hand deck. The deck archetype did receive some attention in Journey to Un’Goro but without the key cards from the previous expansions I honestly doubt that we’re going to see a silver hand deck being played in standard…ever. Luckily we have the wild format where we can play obscure decks like this one so today we’re going to take a look at what I’ve came up with for a wild silver hand paladin deck 🙂
The silver hand deck is called the way it is because what you want to do with this deck is to get the most value from your silver hand recruits. Basically what you want to be doing is hitting that hero power button as often as possible and slowly build up your 1/1 silver hand recruit army. However, that alone won’t get you do victory. Those of you who have been around way back during the Goblins vs Gnomes era might recognize the basic structure of this deck because it is indeed built like the old midrange paladin. The main reason for this is because although we currently have a lot of cards that do stuff with silver hand recruits we still don’t have enough to create a deck that is solely based around summoning the recruits and buffing them (but I believe that we’re slowly getting there) so I’ve taken the next best thing and that is midrange paladin 😛
First we need token generators because the hero power alone won’t be enough to carry this deck to victory. This is why we’re playing two copies of muster-for-battle and lost-in-the-jungle along with a single copy of justicar-trueheart. We want to get the ball rolling as soon as possible so it is vital to fill your board with silver hand recruits as often as possible. justicar-trueheart is the true MVP when it comes to that. This card has won me hundreds of games with a midrange paladin deck. Don’t underestimate the power of creating two 1/1 minions for 2 mana, let alone two 1/1 minions for 2 mana in a deck that is focused around getting the most out of those two 1/1 minions.  You will always have silver hand recruits to buff and you will always win the fatigue war (if it comes to that. I’ve won countless fatigue wars because of the constant token generation). garrison-commander is here to make things spiral out of control even more once justicar-trueheart upgrades your hero power. Do not expect garrison-commander to survive for more than a single turn but if you can make four 1/1 minions in  a single turn than the card has done its job.
Next we’re going to take a look at buffs for your silver hand recruits. quartermaster is the absolute MVP when it comes to buffing your silver hand recruits. +2/+2 on multiple minions along with a 2/5 body for 5 mana is nothing to ignore, but in case that you simply can’t draw your quartermaster there is sunkeeper-tarim as a panic button when you really need to buff your silver hand recruits. The last recruit buffing card that we’re running in this deck is lightfused-stegodon. Honestly, if you have a bunch of recruits on your side of the field the only adaptation that is useless is stealth. You will most likely find a use for anything else.
In summary, the deck is not all that bad. It is a very good deck that I believe will keep on getting buffs as time goes by because it seems like the developers really like the idea of paladin having a strong interaction with its hero power.
Pay Attention!
The last deck that we’re going to talk about today is the token druid deck. Yesterday I’ve talked to somewhat of an extent about the egg druid deck and this deck is fairly similar to that one in the sense that it also revolves around buffing your minions. For those of you who are relatively new to the game, token druid was one of the go to druid decks for many years, out shinned only by the much superior combo druid deck (but that deck is dead and forever gone so we won’t be talking about it) up until, just like the combo deck, it lost the combo that made it truly explode and it fell into obscurity. There always were some variations of the deck roaming around but those are far more similar to the egg druid that I’ve shown yesterday.
So, what does a token druid do? The idea of the deck is to generate tokens and then to buff them. It is in fact quite similar to the previously mentioned silver hand paladin, at least in the buffing aspect. How do you generate tokens in a druid deck? Well, there is only one true option and that is violet-teacher. Now, for those who have never played this deck before it might seem like the teacher is a bit slow to have an entire deck built around it but you would be surprised how quickly and how easily this card can spiral out of control. Whenever you cast a spell you create a single 1/1 token. The kicker here is that if you cast a spell like mark-of-the-lotus, one that buffs your entire filed, you will first create a token and then the spell would resolve, giving you a 2/2 token instead.
The rest of the deck is filled with spells that will generate your tokens and buff them. Once you’ve got your ball rolling and a full board of tokens it is almost impossible for your opponent to stop you. Your win condition is savage-roar, an amazing buff card, and if I could place any other card in this deck than that would be soul-of-the-forest because that card completely negates your opponent’s board clear. All in all this is the token druid the way I remember it. adapting-spores is a very decent card in this deck and I can’t really find a very bad adaptation for it other than stealth and no matter what you choose you will, most of the time, get a 1/1 token with the chosen adaptation so that is always good.
Conclusion
We’ve reached the end of yet another ”Running Wild” article. This was a nice journey down the memory lane. I’ve honestly completely forgot about token druid until recently when I was going through my wild collection of cards and trying to come up with an idea for the article. I’ll probably explore some more obscure wild decks, regardless of the new cards, for those of you who are relatively new to the game. Another thing that comes out next week is the wild meta report! Yes, an entire month of playtesting is behind us and there is no better time than the start of the next month to gather all the data and create our very first Journey to Un’Goro wild meta report so be sure to check back on the 4th of May for the meta report 😀
Are there any older decks that you would improve with the newest cards? Have you tried any of these decks before? Are there any obscure wild decks that you would want me to cover in the near future? If you come up with something I might test it out and put it into the next article, the one after the meta report, so be sure to let me know 🙂 Leave your opinions and feedback in the comment section below and I will respond as soon as I can. 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!
