Editor’s Note: With the new Standard Format in 2016 for Hearthstone, we highly recommend going for cards in the Classic set and Whispers of the Old Gods (Standard Format). Here are budget guides, also from Sheng, to get you started!
- Budget Standard Standard C’Thun Druid
- Budget Standard Midrange Hunter
- Budget Standard C’Thun Mage
- Budget Standard  Aggro Paladin
- Budget Standard C’Thun Priest
- Budget Standard C’Thun Rogue
- Budget Standard Midrange Shaman
- Budget Standard Zoo WarlockÂ
- Budget Standard Combo Warrior
Greetings, I’m Sheng, a Legend rank constructed and 7.5 win-average arena player. I run HearthstoneCoaching.com where our coaches have helped many students achieve the same.
If you are new to Hearthstone or just started your Hearthstone cards collection, this section is the perfect place for you to get started!
Note: Don’t forget to check out our New Player section – featuring Crafting/Disenchanting and Free to Play guides!
Introduction
Two months ago, I released a set of budget deck guides for new players. Each deck costed 1000 dust, and the cards were based from the cards in the single player expansions and the Classic and Goblins vs. Gnomes cardset.
With the release of The Grand Tournament, I decided to revisit these guides and see what I’d be able to do with a slightly higher 1300 budget (allowing me to include cards I’d previously cut to make the meager budget), while including cards from the new card-set where they made sense.
Thus, I’ve written a new series of guides geared towards the same audience of players who have completed the single player expansions, and want to further improve their decks.
Budget Restrictions
In order to emulate the collection of a player who has only played Hearthstone for a little while, I wanted to set a realistic limitation on the cards I could include into each deck. After some though, I came up with this criteria.
- Access to all cards in the Basic, Naxxramas, and Blackrock Mountain card set. The thought process here is that most players would be willing to spend money on the single-player adventures. They’re a really good deal and are not worth grinding for with gold.
- Restricted to only using Commons and Rares (except Warrior) from booster packs, with the total cost of a deck not exceeding 1300 dust.
Guide Breakdown
Now that you know the criterion for building these decks, here’s what each guide includes, for every class.
- Introduction
- Deck Requirements
- Deck Design Principles
- Deck Playstyle (Overview and Strategy)
- Card Choice Breakdown
- Mulligan Guide
- Combos
- Gameplay Video
- Upgrades
- Conclusion
I’ve spent significantly more time on these guides this time around, and recorded and edited myself playing each deck, as I’ve received feedback that this is helpful.
I’ve also brought back the upgrades section in case people want to see what an unhindered version of the deck looks like that may be capable of reaching Legend rank. This time it includes direct substitutions, so you don’t have to wonder about what cards to keep or take out. It’s very clear.
The Guides
- Budget Token Druid is a flexible deck that ramps up early through the mana-acceleration of innervate and daranassus-aspirant. With this extra mana, it generates small tokens from spells like living-roots and power-of-the-wild. These spells all synergize extremely well with violet-teacher. The objective of this deck is to control the board, and finish off opponents with a mid-to-late game savage-roar.
- Midrange Hunter, unlike our previous Budget Face Hunter deck focuses more on tempo and board control than face damage. It’s an extremely fun and flexible deck with many tools at its disposal.
- Early on, you want to establish board dominance with your 2 mana minions, and then by mid to late game, you can relinquish control of the board to race your opponent to lethal.
- The deck is designed to curve into savannah-highmane, a minion that really should be a Legendary. Hunters get to run two copies of this card. Ridiculous!
- Budget TGT Tempo Mage’s goal is to control the board early on with extremely cost-efficient minions that synergize remarkably well with Mage’s cheap class spells.
- Minions like mana-wyrm, sorcerers-apprentice and flamewaker all accelerate or benefit directly from the casting of spells.
- In addition to these three core minions, we also have mad-scientist which brings out mirror-entity, making it very difficult to for opponents to gain a foothold in the game when played early on.
- With this early game lead, Budget Tempo Mage seeks to end games early through the burst provided by fireball and argent-commander.
- Budget TGT Aggro Paladin seeks to claim the board early and never put the foot off the gas. The goal of the deck is to play small cost-efficient minions that benefit from each other and to overwhelm your opponent before they have answers.
- In the early game, you want to establish a board quickly. Unlike Face Hunter, the goal isn’t to do damage as quickly as possible, but rather to control and dominate the board throughout the course of the game.
- Try to empty your hand before playing divine-favor to maximize the amount of cards you’ll be able to draw.
- Utilize equality and muster-for-battle or ironbeak-owl to deal or bypass your opponent’s bigger threats and taunts.
- Budget Control Priest is a deck that utilizes Priest’s ability to heal as an offensive and defensive weapon. The two key minions in our deck are northshire-cleric, which serves as a card draw engine and auchenai-soulpriest which allows us to use circle-of-healing, zombie-chow, and our hero power offensively.
- In the early game, control the board with zombie-chow and combo spells like power-word-shield with wild-pyromancer to clear the board.
- In the mid game, utilize combos with northshire-cleric and auchenai-soulpriest to clear your opponent’s board to draw multiple cards to gain card advantage.
- In the late game, you can steal your opponent’s cards using thoughtsteal to play against them, or steal their Legendaries with mind-control.
- Budget TGT Tempo Rogue’s goal is to control the pace of the game by dominating the early game with cheap spells and minions with battlecries that affect the board. In the late game, spells like eviscerate provide reach to finish the game.
- Budget TGT Totem Shaman’s goal is to establish control of the board early and snowball that lead to a strong midgame. In the late game, the goal is to finish the opponent off with bloodlust or minions buffed by thunder-bluff-valiant.
- Most of the cards in the deck are designed to synergize with each other. The inclusion of multiple deathrattle minions mean we’ll almost always have a minion stick on the board for flametongue-totem or defender-of-argus to buff.
- While cards like totem-golem can be extremely strong when played on curve, the overload the following turn can make your turn 3 quite weak, especially if you’re forced to use your hero power.
- It’s important to mulligan for your first four turns with this deck, taking overload into account.
- Budget Zoo Warlock is an aggressive deck that relies on the synergies between its many small minions. In addition, cards like imp-losion simultaneously help build board for you while eliminating opponent’s threats.
- In the early game you want to get onto the board early with cards like flame-imp and voidwalker.
- In the mid game, after establishing an early board, try to setup a turn where you can trigger knife-juggler with imp-losion to eliminate your opponent’s minions while building up your own board.
- By late game, you can bring out doomguard or a large frostwolf-warlord to kill your opponent.
- With the nerf of Patron Warrior, readers have asked me to write a guide on another viable Warrior deck that doesn’t require a tremendous amount of dust to craft.
- This deck is based on Tincho’s Mech Warrior. Tincho was able to reach Rank 2 Legend with it during Season 18.
- The goal of Mech Warrior is to get onto the board early, and immediately pressure an opponent’s life total. It plays very similar to Face Hunter, in that you won’t be doing very much trading on the board unless you’re forced to.
- At almost all points in the game, you should be thinking about how to maximize your damage over the remainder of the game.
- Cards like heroic-strike can be saved until you reach 12 health or below. Most players who haven’t encountered this deck before won’t expect it, so you can bait them into bringing you to a lower life total to deal an additional 2 damage.
- This deck’s primary weakness is against decks that run many taunts. A deck like Dragon Priest with a good opening curve can really shut us down if they can play taunt after taunt. In addition, a deck like Mech Mage with snowchugger and annoy-o-tron can really slow us down as well.
- Managing your weapons is pretty key to playing this deck successfully. You need to plan ahead so you won’t be stuck with multiple weapons in your hand at the same time. This means in your mulligan, you should almost always throw away your weapons, unless it’s fiery-war-axe.
Don’t have 1300 Dust or Single Player Expansions?
Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. Check out my previous Starter deck series that don’t require any dust to build.
- Decks with Basic Cards Only
- Decks with Basic + Naxxramas Cards Only
- Decks with Basic + Naxxramas + Blackrock Mountain Cards Only
Conclusion
Deck construction was one of the hardest things for me to learn when I first picked up this game, so I hope this will help you newer players bridge that gap faster than I did. As always, I’d love to answer your questions on this thread or on the guides themselves. Enjoy!
Editor’s Note: Be sure to check out the New Players section, other Beginner and Budget Decks, and our most popular section – Monthly Top Meta Decks.
Coaching Lessons
If you’re interested in reaching Legend rank, or earning unlimited gold from arena, my team at HearthstoneCoaching.com would love to help! We’ve provided over a thousand hours of excellent coaching to students around the world. 
Want to Become Better at Other Games?
I also run RankOneCoaching.com, where our top coaches will develop a personal plan for you to achieve your dreams in other games. Personal lessons are an in-depth experience and most students improve significantly after just one full session!
