Lunk42’s (Standard) Pirate Warrior Deck List Guide (May 2016, Season 26)

Editor’s Note: Lunk42 from Reddit was kind enough to allow us to rehost his very impressive Pirate Warrior Deck Guide! Pirate decks have a long history of being on the outskirts of the meta-game, but Lunk42 found a strong list that can obtain legend if you’re willing to do a bit of swashbuckling.

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As a longtime fan of Pirate Warrior, I was psyched to see a couple new viable cards in WotOG. The loss of Ship's Cannon is painful, but is actually outweighed by an even more significant change: minions, by and large, actually die when you hit them with a weapon now! That’s absolutely huge for your ability to fight for board control. I laddered exclusively with this deck, with some tweaks along the way. This is a little bit more of a midrange approach than most of the other pirate decks I’ve seen since WotOG came out. It’s definitely still aggressive, but in most matchups it seeks to build a solid board while using the bountiful weapon charges to keep your opponent from doing the same before going in for the kill.

Debatable Card Choices

Flame Juggler: I don’t particularly like these. I went back and forth between them and Loot Hoarder, but I’m not sold on either one. I think the deck needs a second 2 drop minion behind Bloodsail Raider, but nothing feels perfect.

King's Defender: Fiery War Axe is the best card in the deck, and this is the closest you can get to a third one. I’ve seriously considered cutting one of the Arcanite Reapers for a second KD; oftentimes having a decent weapon equipped is far more valuable than having a meatier one in hand, allowing you to curve out with things like Cultist and Greenskin instead of putting the brakes on to reequip. The extra charge from taunts isn’t super relevant, but it’s not worthless, either.

Fierce Monkey: Frothing Berserker is the obvious alternative. I found that if my three drop was surviving long enough to do significant face damage I was winning anyway, and thus preferred the monkey’s ability to slow down aggro decks, get in the way of Fiery War Axes, and on rare occasions get an extra swing out of King's Defender. Ravaging Ghoul is also worth considering, particularly against a lot of Zoo.

The Black Knight: Early in my climb, I’d have sworn this was one of the two or three most essential cards in the deck. Lately, I’ve been having a much harder time getting value with it. I’m not ready to cut it, but if the meta continues to shift away from beefy taunts, I’d think long and hard about it.

Skycap'n Kragg: I’m not 100% convinced that this is the best card for this slot, but it’s better than I expected. If I were to replace it, I think I might look to Rag (Skycap’n Rag?) as a similar late-game hybrid of face damage and board presence, especially if I was seeing a lot of Ragnaros, Lightlord, which currently usually means game over. Malkorok is another appealing option.

Mulligans

Almost Always Keep

• N'Zoth's First Mate (but not 2)
• Sir Finley Mrrgglton
• Bloodsail Raider
• Fiery War Axe
• Flame Juggler

Aside from that, I found my mulligan decisions to be highly interdependent. You can consider keeping…

• Fierce Monkey if your two drop is taken care of.
• Southsea Captain if you’ve got an earlier pirate you expect to stick to the board.
• Bloodsail Cultist with both a cheap pirate and a weapon you expect to stick (this usually means First Mate into Coin+Cultist).
• King's Defender without a Fiery War Axe.
• Dread Corsair or Upgrade with a weapon (whether First Mate’s hook counts depends on the matchup; sometimes it’s a great Upgrade target, other times it’s a complete waste).
• Arcanite Reaper with the coin and early game board presence.
• Captain Greenskin with the coin and a weapon you expect to still be up on turn 4.

The Black Knight was worth keeping when I could reliably predict a C'Thun opponent, but at this point it seems like every class has another build that’s at least as prevalent that TBK isn’t nearly as good against. The only things I never really keep are Kor’krons, Leeroy, and Kragg.

Matchups

With the meta still in flux and decks evolving daily I only broke down my results by class rather than trying to fit everything into a specific archetype, but I’ll try to give a general sense of how the deck performs against the most common variations.

Record: 13-7

C’Thun Druid is a very favorable matchup. Your weapons trade well, and you can generally build your board while answering theirs, while they’re forced to choose between playing threats and removal. They have big endgame taunts, but by that point you’re usually far enough ahead on board that you can fight through them even if you haven’t found your The Black Knight.

The more aggressive Beast Druid builds proved to be considerably harder. It’s not hopeless, but things like Druid of the Flame, Mounted Raptor, and stealthed Druid of the Saber are a lot harder to answer efficiently.

Record: 7-0

I’ll be honest, I’m not at all sure what to make of this matchup. I saw very few of them, and of those, many were clearly testing with new cards and builds. I suspect it’s favorable as long as you can keep them from landing a Houndmaster on curve, but I also doubt it’s quite as good as my small sample suggests.

Record: 7-7

Freeze Mage is a good matchup. You can usually get some value out of your early game minions, and after that it becomes very difficult for them to simultaneously address your board, freeze your face, and get the necessary secrets set up.

Tempo-ish/Yogg Mage is rough. They can fight for early board control just as well as you can, and after that Water Elemental and Mirror Image are major roadblocks.

Record: 7-8

Aggressive Paladins are good news, where even your 1/3 Rusty Hook and Upgrade! axes can put in a lot of work.

N’Zoth/Control Paladin, on the other hand, is awful. If you can dodge early Doomsayer and Equality clears you’ve got a chance, but usually you’ll come close somewhere around turn 5 or 6 and then run out of gas and they’ll heal way out of range.

Record: 11-0

Unlike what I said about hunter, I think this matchup is almost as favorable as the perfect record suggests. Your weapons line up very nicely with their minions, and even if you don’t find any, your minions trade up, too. They basically need Auchenai Soulpriest + Circle on turn 4 to have a chance, and even then they’re probably already nice and squishy and you can just go face. I’m not exaggerating when I say every single game I played against any form of Priest was a one-sided rout.

Record: 22-4

The vast majority of rogues I saw were modern variations on Miracle, and the only way to lose that is if you can’t either find or assemble a decent weapon. Even then, they need a good draw to answer your minions and tempo you out of the game before you find enough face damage. You definitely want to play this more aggressively than usual.

I only saw a few deathrattle/raptor/N’Zoth builds. My initial impression was that it was a lot less lopsided due in large part to Argus, but still by no means a bad matchup.

Record: 23-18

Mostly a tossup. I fared better against pure aggro versions where I could take board control and then race with taunts and hero power to fall back on. Against more midrange decks that curved up to stuff like Thing from Below and Fire Elemental, it was usually a grind that came down to one of two turning points: if they played a Flamewreathed Faceless, I could usually ignore it and use the fact that they just used that turn and a significant part of the next one to play a minion with no immediate impact that would probably only kill one of my two- or three-drops before the game ended. On the other hand, Feral Spirit coming down late after we’d slugged it out for a while was usually backbreaking, requiring multiple weapon swings to clear and doing a crapload of damage in the meantime.

Record: 25-18

Zoo is a pretty even matchup that often turns into a long, value-based slog. Playing too aggressively will usually come back to bite you in the ass as you find your board cleared and a Voidwalker or a couple of Argus’ed dudes sitting in the way of Leeroy Jenkins and Reapers. One other point to keep in mind: Bloodsail Corsair from Dark Peddler. There’s nothing you can do to prevent it, but it happened often enough that I started to factor it in when deciding how to curve out, making a little bit more of an attempt to upgrade my weapons before they got down to their final charge.

I didn’t see enough Renolock to draw meaningful conclusions, but the small handful of games I did play seemed to be entirely dependent on Reno Jackson himself; those that had it on turn 6 stabilized and pulled out of range, and those that didn’t fell too far behind to catch up.

Record: 21-24

Warrior seemed to be the least defined class, with a lot of fluidity between midrange and control builds. To oversimplify it, I’ll say that I felt pretty good about my chances against decks running things like Fierce Monkey and Frothing Berserker, and massively unfavored against those that leaned more on things like Justicar Trueheart, Bash, double Brawl, or Ancient Shieldbearer.

Other Random Thoughts

This deck curves out really, really well. Even if you mulligan into a nightmare hand like Kragg, Leeroy, and Reaper, that means there’s very little left that’s not a playable topdeck.

There’s a ton of value in having a weapon equipped. Say you play a Fiery War Axe on turn 2 and kill something with it. On turn 3, you play a Fierce Monkey or a Southsea Captain. You can use the last charge of the Axe to protect it, but you might be much better off letting them take the trade to set up a big swing turn with Southsea Deckhand, Cultist, Corsair, a coined Greenskin, etc.

Just because Dread Corsair is free doesn’t mean you should play it. Holding it for a turn can guarantee that you can smoothly curve out with an active Cultist, or if a warrior has a War Axe up you may want to wait and play it with a Captain to buff it out of range or a Corsair to protect the more threatening minion for a turn.

Don’t overvalue N'Zoth's First Mate. It can be downright unplayable at times, so if you have an opening where it won’t destroy a better weapon, you should probably just slam it down even if you fully intend to overwrite the hook without getting much use out of it.

Don’t overlook the Rogue hero power when you play Finley. It’s easy to think it’s bad because it’s incompatible with like half your deck… but it’s pretty damn good with the other half. It’s highly situational and often the worst possible choice, but it’s been hugely important in a number of wins for me, too.

This is highly subjective and your mileage may very, but I find the deck really rewarding to play in that I can very often trace the outcome of a game to specific decisions I made. Even if I lose, I like to know that I could have done something to change that and you get that a lot with this deck, whether it’s maximizing the value from your weapons or carefully considering every possible out you have left.

I’m far from a perfect player, and even farther from a perfect deck builder, so there’s probably plenty of room for improving the deck and results.

Last and certainly least: for god’s sake, don’t use the pirate cardback! As any true pirate knows, you don’t fly the Jolly Roger until it’s too late for your victim to change course.