N’Zoth Reno Mage

Deck currently sitting at rank 5, looking to go further

Reno mage and freeze mage have fallen a bit behind mostly due to the rising popularity of Midrange Hunter and any Warrior deck, but after tinkering around a bit I found this deck seems to be doing fairly well against those decks and still well in a lot of other popular matchups.  

It’s largely a Reno Mage shell, but substituting some of the spells like Forbidden Flame and Cabalist’s Tome out for high impact deathrattle minions such as Sylvanas, Cairne, and of course N’Zoth.

Because the deck runs more minions, it can chip away at Warrior’s armor much better.  It also allows the deck to control the board at pivotal points in the game, such as after a board wipe or before a big C’thun turn and things like that.

1 week ago: “More to come if the deck is noticed enough!”

Well +5 is good enough for me!

How to play this deck:

Like many Reno decks, the objective of the early game is to keep the board under reasonable control while looting through the deck for board wipes and heals.  Mage excels at survival and keeping the board under control, while also being fairly good at looting through the deck.  On top of that, they have crazy valuable minions in the form of Water Elemental and Faceless Summoner, which are both reasonably hard to deal with, especially on curve.  

Against aggro, you’re going to want to take out as many small minions as you can with spells and minions.  Don’t prioritize face damage ever, nearly all the time you are going to want to trade.  If they’re aggro or even midrange, your deck will outvalue theirs, so just survive.  When it comes to whether it’s a better idea to drop strong minion on curve or play a spell, you almost always want to drop the minion unless they can kill it very easily on board.  Spells are very valuable and get past taunts, minions save you health and present board presence.  Against control in the early game, you’re going to want to loot through as much of your deck as you can and also drop minions on curve.  Some differences in these two early games include playing a Acolyte on turn 3 vs aggro is fine, but you’re going to wait until you can ping it and get more cards out of it vs control.  Also, you’re going to want to try to use some combos the deck has vs control to outvalue them, such as holding onto Faceless Summoner until you can pair it with Brann.  On an empty board, this can often eat a brawl vs a Warrior, which is great since you want to get rid of Brawls for your N’Zoth.

Around mid-game, the game plan is the same for both aggro and control.  You’re going to need to start using board wipes to maintain the board and start using more of your healing. Often you’ll be a bit behind on tempo during this and have to take trades that aren’t to great, such as throwing two things into a single enemy minion, but again this will all be worth it soon.

Finally, end-game, where this deck is really sweet.  Drop your huge dudes and watch the opponent hover over all their cards wondering what the hell to do.  And you see that Rhonin? He’ll get you 3 Fireballs with Archmage Antonidas AND come back with N’Zoth.  Can somebody say VALUE?  Just be careful of overcommitting, it’s easy to when you can keep dropping big minions.  You will win, often even against Golden Monkey just because your huge minions synergizes better than whatever that Monkey gets.