Hearthstone Players!

Anyone take a stab at the heroics? Like the mine cart from the last one, they could only make the chess one so hard while still making it possible. The other two weren't too bad either, really.

The time I beat the Mirror was pretty hilarious though.



For the Beauty and the Beast one...



I'm curious to read some other takes on these bosses.

I'm so crap at deckbuilding to beat the Heroic bosses. Before my excuse was that I didn't have good cards, now I have no excuse - other than being crap at piloting the traditionally strong-against-Heroic-bosses deck archetypes (Freeze Mage, Mill) - so I just netdeck. The chess one is annoying while the one against the Demon where you get the "All your spells cost (0) this turn" card is fun as hell once you get your combos going.

I beat the Silverware Golem and the Magic Mirror last night. For the Golem I used a Mill Rogue that worked well as long as my removal aligned with his threats. Eventually he ran out of everything but plates and once I was able to Gang Up a Deathlord and play a second one it was over. I used a Mill Druid for the Magic Mirror. It aims to leverage Cult Masters and Gadgetzans to mill with a bunch of removal and Brewmaster and Coldlight as secondary mill options. I milled most of his deck with a mirrored Cult Master and killed him with fatigue within one turn of dying.

I saw a cool Mirror deck on Reddit where someone filled the Mirror's board with Eerie Statues, Ancient Watchers and Argent Watchmans. It looked fun.

SebastianBludd wrote: I'm so crap at deckbuilding to beat the Heroic bosses. Before my excuse was that I didn't have good cards, now I have no excuse - other than being crap at piloting the traditionally strong-against-Heroic-bosses deck archetypes (Freeze Mage, Mill) - so I just netdeck. The chess one is annoying while the one against the Demon where you get the "All your spells cost (0) this turn" card is fun as hell once you get your combos going.

It takes me a few iterations usually to figure out the moments that really matter and set up for them. I love these, they are like puzzles. I beat that intro one on the first try though, it just took forever. You have to set up multiple turns of free spells, spell damage, and the recycler dude(s) to keep it all going.

What do you guys think about the Deadly Fork for Rogue?

I had it in my first post-adventure arena run and got 9 wins. I also had 2x Eviscerate and 2x Journey Below, so those certainly helped. A 3-mana 3/2 that basically reads "Deathrattle: Add Deadly Poison to your hand" is pretty decent right? I'm not sure if it's constructed playable... maybe it could be used in a N'Zoth rogue list? I guess when you put it up against Tomb Pillager for just one more mana it's not.

Everyone thinks the Deadly Fork is over-costed crap, so of course that makes me want to try and make it work in a deck out of spite. I had an old Kripp Rogue N'Zoth C'thun deck that I dusted off and tweaked to accommodate Deadly Fork this morning. Results were mixed. I got a dream opening against a Zoolock so of course my router decided that would be the perfect time to reset itself and by the time it reconnected I was hopelessly behind. Then I lost against a slow Paladin deck that was running a lot of the new cards (I was close to winning a few times but he kept getting opportune heals and I never drew my best stuff), and finally, I played against this weird Rogue deck I've never faced before.

It was a Reno deck that was running Elise, and the win condition was to make sure you have a full hand by the continual play of Brann and Shadowcaster. Play Shadowcaster, play Brann, play a 1/1 Shadowcaster, play a 1/1 Brann, etc. During the game I'd cast C'thun twice (only 10/10, thanks for not showing up, Blades of C'thun...) and N'Zoth once, I used the Fork's weapon several times and my opponent played Reno twice. We both went to fatigue and my opponent managed to play the Golden Monkey before playing Eadric on my four minions (really?!), followed by Dreadscale (REALLY?!), otherwise it wouldn't have been as close as it was. I managed to steal his Rafaam with my Sylvanus, and on my following turn I hit his newly played Tirion with my Southsea Squidface to buff my weapon and pop the shield, killed Tirion with Rafaam, and then my Azure Drake, another minion and my 3 attack dagger were enough to insure that fatigue killed her on my next turn.

Below is my deck and I can't decide if it needs an Earthen Ring Farseer due to how many swings I'm taking with the Sharp Fork, but whatever, it's my first version. I also don't have Thalnos, so that's why he's not in there:

Backstab x2
Buccaneer x2
Journey Below x2
Sap x1
Brann xL
Deadly Fork x2
Disciple of C'thun x2
Fan of Knives x2
Shadow Strike x2
Defender of Argus x1
Southsea Squidface x2
Xaril xL
Azure Drake x2
Cult Apothecary x2
Cairne xL
Sylvanus xL
Blade of C'thun x2
C'thun xL
N'Zoth xL

Deadly Fork is a difficult card. I won't say "overcosted crap" because I haven't played with it, but you're paying too much for a 3/2, which is an easily removed minion as all 3/2s are these days and then you don't even get the weapon equipped. What you get is the Sharp Fork in your hand, which is an overcosted Fiery War Axe. So it feels like you're paying too much twice and don't even get the combo benefit of Deadly Poison, since you're paying 3 mana in the midgame instead of 1 and not even taking advantage of your hero power which may already be in place; hence, "difficult". So, yeah, I don't have a very high opinion of it. It certainly could be a solid Arena pick because of the greater options it presents to Rogue in that mode. But it's not like Rogue really needed help in Arena (cue Firelands Portal rant...)

The Shadowcaster thing is the latest attempt at a Rogue combo deck. Trump (Not That Trump) was playing it the other day on his stream and not having much luck with it. There's too much dicking around with the Shadowcasters for my liking and a lot of time it seems like you're doing tricks while the opponent waits and asks: "OK, but what's your win condition?" And you're like: "But... but... look! Three Shadowcasters!"

I did a little experimentation with some versions of a Priest of the Feast deck and I'm just not convinced it's as all that as Kibler and others like to think. First off, everyone knows that PotF is the key element to the deck, so when you play it, you better have a board capable of defending it because the opponent will spare no effort to take it out. And, as with so many Priest cards, it's passive. Yes, it's great that you can knock off a couple of those minions charging at your head over a couple turns and it will take longer to kill you, but what about the 5 minions that you can't proactively deal with? Oh. Right. Feast feels like it would be a great card in a tempo/control meta that routinely leads to fatigue, but the current environment is very much tempo/aggro and it just doesn't give Priest answers. Like most healing effects, it just delays the questions.

Played Purify for the first and last time in the class challenge, though. Took out the golem with a silenced Eerie Statue. Yay. Fun.

Jackwraith wrote: Deadly Fork is a difficult card. I won't say "overcosted crap" because I haven't played with it, but you're paying too much for a 3/2, which is an easily removed minion as all 3/2s are these days and then you don't even get the weapon equipped. What you get is the Sharp Fork in your hand, which is an overcosted Fiery War Axe. So it feels like you're paying too much twice and don't even get the combo benefit of Deadly Poison, since you're paying 3 mana in the midgame instead of 1 and not even taking advantage of your hero power which may already be in place; hence, "difficult". So, yeah, I don't have a very high opinion of it. It certainly could be a solid Arena pick because of the greater options it presents to Rogue in that mode. But it's not like Rogue really needed help in Arena (cue Firelands Portal rant...)

Well, most weapons don't look great next to Fiery War Axe and I consider that weapon borderline OP. Anyway, I chose my old Kripp deck particularly because it was an attempt to mitigate Deadly Fork's shortcomings because A) There's no combo in the deck and It runs Squidface (for dual N'Zoth and Sharp Fork value). I added the Buccaneer as a Sharp Fork buff for when I inevitable top-deck Buccaneer on Turn 8. I think I'll try this deck without Disciple of C'thun or C'thun and replace them with a couple SI:7 Agents and a Shadowcaster, or drop a Blade of C'thun and run 2x Shadowcasters.

Jackwraith wrote: The Shadowcaster thing is the latest attempt at a Rogue combo deck. Trump (Not That Trump) was playing it the other day on his stream and not having much luck with it. There's too much dicking around with the Shadowcasters for my liking and a lot of time it seems like you're doing tricks while the opponent waits and asks: "OK, but what's your win condition?" And you're like: "But... but... look! Three Shadowcasters!"

Ugh, yes, dicking around is what it seems like it's doing 95% of the time. My opponent's turns took forever and I'm certain our game lasted for at least 25 min. It was brutal.

So I still haven't really embraced the new Priest, mostly because I've been playing Heroes but also because there are certain restraints on the card selection that just make it incredibly annoying. As noted before, the base set for Priest is largely trash when compared to basically every other class (think Shaman, Rogue, Mage, Druid... and then think about Priest.) In complete contrast, a couple cards seem to be absolutely essential to every Priest deck; specifically, Auchenai Soulpriest. How irritating is it that you need a 2-card combo to do a proper board clear when most other classes can use one? But what really galls is still the lack of viable early minions that might make Auchenai somewhat less of a requirement. How many times have you played a Priest deck and spent turns 2 AND 3 healing your undamaged opponent while suffering a beatdown from 1- and 2-drops? I figured I'd dig into a bit of TGT to try to take advantage(?) of that while still leaning on the two new minions to try to make something viable.

www.hearthpwn.com/decks/617907-giants

Obviously, the conceit is trying to use only minions that when Resurrected or Bishoped can actually serve a purpose. No, you don't want to bring back a Sunfury or even a Pyro unless you have a handful of spells, but from the games I've seen, you also don't want to bring back an Auchenai when you really want to heal shit, including yourself. That, in and of itself, makes continuing to use Circle kind of problematic, but you can still do nice weenie clears with Circle-Pyro (two card combo, again!) and Blademaster-Circle is still a great play. However, ETS is present to use Circle with and try to gain some board control for a single turn. The downside with the Arcanes and Feasts is that there's only 13 spells in the deck (one of the other reasons ETS is included.) The upside is that it still seems to play slowly enough (I've only tried a couple games with it) that you can still cast enough spells to make Feast work for you and I detest the problem of having to play subpar cards like Mind Vision in order to make Feast competitive. One other hitch is that I only have one Frost Giant, which I didn't draw in either game, so I don't know how useful that actually is. I'm replacing one with a Mountain Giant at the moment. I'd like to fit the other Alchemist in there, if only because her fat ass makes a good Resurrect/Bishop and Sunfury target, but I also don't want to reduce the number of spells.

Also, the reason that Handlock worked so well is that Life Tap perfectly fit the two giants that it was aiming for: you were damaging yourself and filling your hand, so Molten/Mountain worked fine and you could conceivably do the midgame giant-Sunfury play. Both Arcanes and Frosts will require circumstances in which they'll almost inevitably be late-game plays but hopefully scenarios in which you'll be able to drop both one (or two) of them and do other things. Dunno. It might lack focus.

I am trying to make Control Priest work--it's more viable now than before Karahzan, but not by much. The issue for me is that it has no Good Matchups. You can lose to literally every deck being played. In the olden tymes, there were matches that heavily favored you. But now, not so much--the top end of every one's game is so chaotic you can't count on ever having "control." One good Yogg and any deck can turn around the worst situation. not to mention all the OTK (One Turn Kill--from an empty board they deal 25+ damage) decks that can take you out once you are in charge.

My build is using the traditional Control Priest suite:
Early Clears
Wild Pyro + Circle + Coin + PWS, &c.
Auchenai + Circle

Mid Clears
Excavating Evil

Card Draw
PWS
Northshire Cleric

Threat Management
Shadow Word Death
Entomb

After this is the flavor. Jackwraith went with Giants, and that's a style I don't think will work--they come too late and they are removal targets. The "high-end" of Control Priest cards tend to be 4/7, 4/12, or 4/5 or your opponent's Emperor Thaurissan and Sylvanas. Laying out even a cheap Giant gives them something to do with their Hex or whatever. If you want to go heavy with the Bishop/Resurrect strategy, I think a better tack would be high-cost impact minions (Ragnaros, Ysera, &c) and Barnes. He will make one of them (ideally) in the mid-game and then you can rez it back at full strength a couple of times. I'll try this out.

In the meantime, my build is using Resurrect and Onyx Bishop tricks, along with extra lifegain from Priest of the Feast, Flash Heal, and Darkshire Cleric. Injured Blademaster is the early pressure and Sylvanas tops things out at the high end. I'll steal your stuff with Thoughtsteal, Sylvanas and Cabal Shadow Priest. Pretty tame. But, like I said, it can lose to anything. I need early game to beat Zoo and Pirates, I need lategame to beat Control Warrior or Druid, but it might not matter because Yogg cast Call of the Wild twice.

My current project is trying to tune a Evolve deck for Shaman. You want the deceptively costed creatures like Nerubian Prophet and Thing From Below. They cost 6, but you never pay 6 for them. They still Evolve into 7-costed creatures though, so you can have some pretty intense early turns if you had the Prophets on the draw. I am playing Barnes here too--again, you get a 1/1 copy, but it still has its "real" cost for Evolve purposes. I am using Ancestral Spirit on those 1/1's if they are good enough to keep around beyond the Evolve step. The rest is very hodge-podge right now, I'll post when I firm things up.

Every deck is Barnes Druid, and every one of them gets Emperor Thaurissan. Three fucking goddamned piece of shit games in a row.

...

Time has passed. I just beat three Shamans in a row with YoggPriest. Priest of the Feast is the real deal.

1x Forbidden Shaping
2x Holy Smite
2x PW:S
2x Resurrect
2x SW:P
1x SW:D
2x Priest of the Feast
1x Shadow Madness (remember Shadow Madness!?)
2x Excavated Evil
2x Entomb
1x Holy Fire (Fire, the 5 damage + Heal 5 one)

2x Loot Hoarder
2x Wild Pyromancer
1x Injured Blademaster
Lx Elise Starseeker
Lx Harrison Jones
Lx Justicar Trueheart
Lx Sylvanas Windrunner
Lx PRAISE HIS ULULATING MOUTHS


....nevermind, this is Kibler's deck. Just watch his streams. I think he plays 2x Shaping instead of an Injured Blademaster. Also found out my Shaman Evolve deck is like two cards off Thijs's recent attempts on that front. At least I'm onto the zeitgeist!

Played against a non-Barnes Druid! I lost:
I was at 20 life with a 4/6 taunt, 2/1, and a 5/3 Taunt. Opponent has a 2/1 and a 4/2 with Divine Shield. They attack some stuff, then Brann, Coin, Innervate, 16/16 C'Thun to kill everything and me with 32 plips. Fun and interactive.

What are the 2 mysterious cards you didn't list in that priest deck? After getting overrun by zooLock types, I've developed a deep and abiding love for SW: Horror and its "Orkin Man" effect on all those ankle biters that pile up so quickly.

2x Thoughtsteal, apologies. ("My apologies.") SW: H is too slow. It costs a lot and deals with the wrong creatures at that point. It's like that 6-mana Murloc that deals two to other stuff--I need to deal 4 or 5 at that point.

You manage Zoo with the Wild Pyros and spells, repeatedly killing their stuff. They struggle to manage your board AND lower your life-total once Priest of the Feast hits and you start comboing things. You also pack Shadow Madness and Holy Smite, which they should be walking right into given how rare those are on the Ladder at the moment.

Trying out The Curator (Legendary; 4/6 Taunt for 7; put a Dragon, Beast and Murloc from your deck into your hand) in Reno Hunter. But it works in Reno anything, really. Bluegill is a fine include as a ping, Azure Drake is one of the best cards in the game, and Stampeding Kodo is a solid Beast. It thins your deck, draws decent cards, and is a big Taunt. If you are a Reno Mage, I would use Mukla, Tyrant of the Vale as a target Beast. That puts even more cards in your hand and you can use them to fuel Yogg and/or Flamewaker.

I thought that might have been at least 1 of the cards. I went with 1 thoughtsteal and 1 of those cheap little "discover a deathrattle" cards, which had better success than I expected. That said, your deck requires enormous nerve if you mulligan and draw into the top half the deck, as has happened to me better than half the (limited, admittedly) time. There's a lot of staring at the other guy as he starts *doing* things and you just kind of sit, nursing a Priest and using your removals to stay within "healthy" range and load up Yogg.

Edit: Specifically, I meant that I drew into the top half of the deck and stayed there. 3 times the pyros and a chunk of low-mana spells were in my last 5-7 cards... Very nervy...

Dogmatix wrote: I thought that might have been at least 1 of the cards. I went with 1 thoughtsteal and 1 of those cheap little "discover a deathrattle" cards, which had better success than I expected. That said, your deck requires enormous nerve if you mulligan and draw into the top half the deck, as has happened to me better than half the (limited, admittedly) time. There's a lot of staring at the other guy as he starts *doing* things and you just kind of sit, nursing a Priest and using your removals to stay within "healthy" range and load up Yogg.

This is how Control Priest always plays. A lot of the game is spent thinking about "Can they kill me next turn?" Once you turn that tide though, it opens up and you inexorably squeeze them down under a cons--oops shit their Yogg cast Call of the Wild twice and you died.

HEARTHSTONE!

jeb wrote: Trying out The Curator (Legendary; 4/6 Taunt for 7; put a Dragon, Beast and Murloc from your deck into your hand) in Reno Hunter. But it works in Reno anything, really. Bluegill is a fine include as a ping, Azure Drake is one of the best cards in the game, and Stampeding Kodo is a solid Beast. It thins your deck, draws decent cards, and is a big Taunt.

That's actually a great idea regarding which cards to include with The Curator, so I tried it out in my home-brewed Beast Druid deck. As you mentioned, the Bluegill is a useful ping, but Azure Drake synergizes nicely with Druid removal (especially since any spell damage is useful considering that fucking Mulch is currently the class' best hard removal) and any Beast pull is good in a deck running Mark of Y'Shaarj and Menagerie Warden.

Here's my current version:

Innervate x2
Enchanted Raven x2
Naturalize x2
Bluegill Warrior x1
Mark of Y'Shaarj x2
Power of the Wild x2
Wrath x2
Feral Rage x2
Mounted Raptor x2
Savage Combatant x2
Swipe x2
Azure Drake x1
Druid of the Claw x2
Starfall x1
Stranglethorn Tiger x2
Menagerie Warden x2
The Curator xL

Listen, I know what you're thinking, but Naturalize is really my only choice for hard removal since I don't have Mulch and I can't bring myself to spend the 800 dust on a deck archetype I'm not certain I'm going to stick with. I might still drop it altogether - since there were several times I just held onto it because I didn't want to give my opponent the extra cards - but I have no idea what I would replace it with. I'm not sure about Innervate, either.

Menagerie Warden is bonkers, it's seems like it's the card that Princess Huhuran wishes she was. In one of my first games I got screwed with a bad early draw of 2x Stranglethorn and 2x MW, but once I survived to Turn 5 it was: Tiger, MW into second Tiger, into second MW and third Tiger on the next turn. In a later game I even pulled off a DotC 4/6 Taunt + MW on Turn 10 to stabilize against a Mage for the win. Even MW plus Enchanted Raven or Raptor isn't bad; in fact you could consider MW and Raven to be a mini Dr. Boom. It's a really fun card.

And the draw from Curator is really helpful at Turn 7 and beyond, especially when I'm burning a bunch of cards for removal and trading as a Druid. The Drake's spell power (and card draw) and the Bluegill ping have already helped me seal the deal in a couple of Druid matchups. Even if I have the Drake or Bluegill in hand it's still a 4/6 Taunt, draw two, for seven mana. It's easy to fixate on The Curator's tribal restrictions - as I did - and overlook the fact that it doesn't take much to make the most of his card draw and how much it can swing a game when your hand is thin.