Introduction
Hello everyone, week 3 of Naxxramas Launch Event is upon us, and with it, The Military Quarter.
And, although only 2 of the 6 cards released with the pack are of my taste, I do believe it will still be huge because these 2 cards are extremely powerful.
They are:
deathlord: I talked about this card before, I loved it, 2/8 taunt that if silenced, generates even more value for you due to its negative deathrattle. This card is amazing in so many ways and I’ll try to guide you through the value of this card in this guide and the decks.
spectral-knight: The best card in the set, together with the overpowered of loatheb, this dude is going to create a huge mess in the meta: not only it has a very strong body for a 5-drop, it can not be removed by standard removal. This guy is a beast, whenever you already have board control, even if slightly, this guy will be the “I win” button, and at the same time even on an empty board your opponent wont be able to immediately respond it unless with a secret, or a charged king-krush which isn’t even a playable card anyway.
I will not go on as to why I think the other cards are bad, I made a review right before Naxxramas came out classifying individual cards and explaining why I think certain cards were bad or good, if you wish to know more about my review on cards, feel free to read the following articles:
https://hearthstoneplayers.com/nubas-constructed-analysis-of-curse-of-naxxramas-cards-part-1/
https://hearthstoneplayers.com/constructed-analysis-of-curse-of-naxxramas-cards-part-2/
First deck: The Taunt God
The control version of druid is finished today, I believe no other card from Naxxramas will benefit Control Druid anymore. We might see wailing-soul used on midrange versions featuring, once again, deathlord and the good old ancient-watcher, but back to Control Druid, we’re basically set.
This means we can start working heavily on heavy Ramps lists, as known as Control Druid.
Now for the development I decided to create a deck that has only good cards, focused on a strong and oppressive late game while still having an also strong and oppressive early and mid game. This deck is focused on a lot of strong taunt minions, combined with oppressive minions such as keeper-of-the-grove and spectral-knight, all minions of this deck are good by themselves, no minion here requires a certain state of the board to be good, which makes this deck already extremely strong, even if we’re still in the theory board.
Now you will notice this deck has no savage-roar+force-of-nature combo, the reason behind this is that with the meta in its current state of chaos, consistency must be the key to winning games, so rather than having an explosive deck, you should aim for decks that have consistent value regarding strong plays, rather than the potential for strong plays.
Deathlord is particular strong in this build because of how your deck reacts to the plays, you need time early to get your stronger minions on board, which means that against aggro, even after getting killed the damage of the Deathlord will already be done, because by then you will already have ways of dealing with the summoned weenie. Meanwhile, against control, even tho there is a chance of getting 2-for-1’d, keep in mind your opponent will almost always be wasting a hard removal on your Deathlord to try to obtain random value from it, and that will benefit you directly because your big late game drops will be 1 removal “aliver”. I do agree that this will make your game against Paladin Control weaker, due to the fact they run both stampeding-kodo and equality, but that is less than 2% of the meta, so you should be fine until there is a big comeback in the metagame.
Another particular bonus for the Deathlord, is that it is pretty good against decks with a lot of battlecry abilities, keep in mind that the summoned minion will not trigger its battlecry (or, in druid’s case, the “choose one” ability). Strong decks that might not benefit a lot from getting a Deathlord killed on the current meta:
- Druid. (any variation)
- Warlock Zoo.
- Aggro decks in general.
- Miracle Rogue.
- Shamans.
- Mages. (any variation)
Ops, we just said over 90% of the meta game, right there.
You basically should play this deck aiming for board control, try to stay strong behind your huge wall of taunt and finish off opponents with your oppressive board presence against Aggro decks, and/or the finishing potential of all your late game big drops combined. I tried making this deck as strong against deathlord kills as possible, from both sides of the board. naturalize is there due to the fact your late game is so strong, gaining tempo early is the real key to winning games, as well as it works as an excellent big-threat-removal against late game decks, and a way of activating sylvanas-windrunner for 7 mana. Also keep in mind Nourish is an excellent late game draw, but accelerating your huge drops is prime in this strategy as well!
Conclusion
This is the first, out of the 3 decks, that I think you should try this week of Military Quarter, we obviously will see a lot of different decks and not only this one, I will bring in 2 other archetypes that will benefit a lot from these new cards, stay tuned!
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