Bomb Warrior Deck List & Guide – Scholomance Academy – September 2020

Check out alternative versions of this deck on our Bomb Warrior archetype page!

Bomb Warrior Mulligan Strategy & Guide

VS Fast Decks

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

• Ancharrr – Early removal and card draw that fetches your Risky Skipper for some board clears.
• Risky Skipper – Great board-clear tool, especially against aggressive decks.
• Sky Raider – Early minion to contest the board or use with Risky Skipper.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

• Corsair Cache – Great card to tutor your weapons against everything except the most aggressive decks, most notably Aggro Demon Hunter.
• Armorsmith – Great armor generation tool together with Risky Skipper, but worth keeping only against the fastest aggro decks, most notably Aggro Demon Hunter.

VS Slow Decks

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

• Corsair Cache – Great card to tutor your weapons.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

• Brawl and Lord Barov – Keep against Druid to be able to answer some of their powerful ramp plays.
• Wrenchcalibur – Keep if you do not have Corsair Cache and always keep against Paladin to ensure that you can disable their pure synergy cards early.

Bomb Warrior Play Strategy

Correctly identifying your role is the key to succeeding with Bomb Warrior. You have a lot of control tools in the deck, so you can take the control role in many games and simply focus on defending, but you also have a wealth of weapon damage and the ever-threatening bombs available, so if the opponent misses a step, you can easily slip into the beatdown role and be the aggressor. Hearthstone is largely a tempo-based game, so taking the beatdown role whenever possible is a good option.

Weapon use is one of the critical points of playing Bomb Warrior. Ancharrr provides you with card draw and defensive tools whereas Wrenchcalibur is your main threat. If you do not need the pirates, you may opt to not play Ancharrr at all to maximize the time you get to spend with Wrenchcalibur. This is more relevant if your deck includes Hoard Pillager, as you want to control the pool of weapons that you may get from it. Some lists skip Hoard Pillager altogether and focus more on weapon buffs so that they can quickly get Ancharrr out of the way first and then move on with the bombs.

Remember that you can buff the durability of your weapons in multiple ways: Upgrade!, Captain Greenskin, and Doctor Krastinov all help you to get the most out of your weapons and you generally want to try to draw cards to get to them before using up all charges of your Wrenchcalibur. It is rare that you want to buff Ancharrr, but sometimes it can be useful to remove threats from the board and draw more pirates from the deck. Keep count of your remaining pirates so that you know how much value you can get from buffing up Ancharrr.

As you buff your weapon, Cutting Class becomes cheaper, so you often have opportunities to combine buffing your weapon and drawing cards on the same turn.

One of your key cards is Risky Skipper. Skipper can help you clear boards with other small minions and Bloodboil Brute (if included in the deck), wipe big boards with Lord Barov, draw cards with Battle Rage, and gain armor with Armorsmith. It is also strong with Blastmaster Boom, as you can play Skipper into Boom to instantly make all the bombs explode (alternatively, you can use Bladestorm for the same effect, but it requires more mana). On an empty board, five bombs deal an average of 12 damage to the face, and that can often be game-winning. Whether you want to explode your bombs immediately or summon a full board and blow them up later depends on the matchup: especially against Mage’s The Amazing Reno, it is vital to blow up your bombs immediately if Mage has access to 10 mana to prevent them from disappearing without an effect.

As you draw cards, it is useful to prioritize the effects that tutor specific cards from the deck – Ancharrr for pirates and Corsair Cache for weapons – over generic card draw because if you draw all of your pirates and weapons, those cards will become useless.

Bladestorm is an area-of-effect damage spell that may require some setup. It is phenomenal against individual minions or boards where all minions have the same amount of health, so sometimes you want to anticipate potential Bladestorm plays by hitting minions with a different health total with your weapon. This, of course, depends on whether the opponent can buff minions to mess up your setup again.

It is difficult to amass enough armor for big Shield Slam plays with your Hero Power. If you think you will want to Shield Slam something big in the near future, you often want to save a Shield Block or a Risky Skipper and Armorsmith combo to generate armor on demand for your removal needs.

Deathwing, Mad Aspect is a great removal tool. It is even better when it can double up as a threat, so try to set up board states where Deathwing clears everything and survives. Sometimes you need to let it go too though, don’t try to squeeze out too much value from it.

VS Aggro Decks

Against aggressive decks, you are usually the defender. You need a plan on how to remove the upcoming threats. Risky Skipper, for example, is ideally used a little later in the game with multiple minions, especially Armorsmith, and maybe even a Battle Rage, but sometimes you need to play it with just one minion early on to prevent a wide board from snowballing.

You have one of the best toolkits to handle aggression with Risky Skipper, Bladestorm, and Brawl. Selecting the right tool for the job can be difficult though. For example, do you expect a big minion mingled with smaller ones like Edwin VanCleef? That would be a good Brawl target. A lone big minion, on the other hand, can be handled by Bladestorm, and a board of small minions can fall to Risky Skipper. Try to find the best tool for each situation with an eye on what future threats your opponent can play.

VS Control Decks

Against control decks, you generally want to be aggressive. Put a lot of bombs into their deck and generate pressure the best you can to make each one of their draws a risk. If you fail to generate enough pressure, a control player can opt to fill their hand and burn your bombs away through overdraw. This is especially applicable to Priests, who can generate additional minions from Galakrond every turn and play cards while keeping the hand full. The only way to avoid that from happening is to keep up enough pressure to force the control player to use their resources instead of hoarding them.

Against Druid, their card draw can be a disadvantage. Sometimes, the right move is to leave Twilight Runner alive so that Druid will draw more bombs should they choose to attack with it. Sometimes, you want to deny them additional resources and get rid of it, for example with Bladestorm if it is on the board in stealth.

Bomb Warrior Card Substitutions

Bomb Warrior is an expensive deck to build because its core cards, Wrenchcalibur and Blastmaster Boom, are Epic and Legendary cards, and many of the supporting pieces are also Epic or Legendary cards. Most of Warrior’s control cards are simply expensive. However, there are some cheaper alternatives that you can try, most notably Plague of Wrath, Execute, and Coerce. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly how many replacements you can make and still keep the deck viable, but you can fill in at least a couple of slots with cheaper replacements and still play the deck.

• Ancharrr plays a large role in defending against aggression, but it also sometimes gets in the way of putting more bombs in the opponent’s deck. You can try to use a Hoard Pillager instead to maximize the number of Wrenchcalibur hits that you can score.
• Shield Slam is a powerful removal card. Coerce or Execute can get the job done as well.
• Captain Greenskin and Doctor Krastinov buff your weapon, but Hoard Pillager can give you a new one.
• Deathwing, Mad Aspect is a powerful late-game removal card and a threat, but Troublemaker or Bloodboil Brute can help with some aspects of its role.
• Brawl, Lord Barov, and Bladestorm are strong board clear cards. You can try Whirlwind and Plague of Wrath as replacements.