Spell Priest Deck List Guide (Kobolds and Catacombs, KAC) – December 2017

Our Spell Priest deck list guide will go through the ins-and-outs of the potentially viable deck from the Kobolds and Catacombs Expansion! This guide will teach you how to mulligan, pilot, and substitute cards for this archetype! For now the deck guide is theorycraft, but as soon as the expansion goes live we will start updating it right away!

Introduction to Spell Priest

This new variation of Priest is based on abusing powerful cards that care about spells being or having been played by combining them with Priest’s almost unmatched arsenal of cheap and powerful spells, ranging from board control tools to value generators, all costing less than 2 mana! The list provided here is a very streamlined example of how this deck could look like in order to showcase what it does, however as we will examine below, there can be variations that stress on different aspects of the deck.

Spell Priest Mulligan Strategy & Guide

The mulligan section will be divided into two parts – against fast decks and against slow decks. Fast decks are generally the Aggro decks (e.g. Pirate Warrior) or high tempo Midrange decks (e.g. Midrange Hunter). Slow decks are slower Midrange and Control decks. Some general advice is to always keep Dragon Soul, since it is your main spell payoff, as well as Shadow Visions and Northshire Cleric, which you almost always want to play on Turn 1.

VS FAST DECKS

Against Aggro your goal is to use your supreme early game removal do kill enemy threats and stall until you can develop your own later on. Staying alive is the priority and you have plenty of tools to do so.

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

• Potion of Madness – Your best and most efficient board control too, it can often times trade 1 for 2 and stop early aggression dead in its tracks.
• Shadow Word: Pain – Can kill the vast majority of minions played in the early game unconditionally and is definitely worth keeping.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

• Spirit Lash – While this card is excellent at killing tokens, keep in mind that most things are going to have more than 1 health. It becomes very good with other cards, such as if you have Northshite and Circle, or with Acolyte of Pain, but it is otherwise a support for your other removal.
• Wild Pyromancer – Is great when you can combine him with other very cheap spells, especially Circle of Healing and Power Word: Shield, but since he needs to be comboed you should keep him when you have either an earlier play or something already there to combine him with.

VS SLOW DECKS

Against control you can keep pretty much whatever you want because you won’t be under immediate pressure, but still some keeps are better than others. You are looking for value-oriented effects and to go wide with your spells, potentially setting up the Radiant Elemental/Shadow Visions combo and creating a big board that’s hard to answer.

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

• Dragon Soul – although it’s never a bad keep, it is especially good against slow decks where you have time to setup for a massive army of dragons.
• Acolyte of Pain – no amount of card draw is ever enough, especially since you are looking to close out the game once you can establish a big board and not grind out into fatigue.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

• Gadgetzan Auctioneer – no amount of draw is ev… you’ve heard this before. The point is that against control decks you can safely afford to keep Auctioneer and rely on him for a lot of draw.
• Lyra the Sunshard – what’s true for Auctioneer is also true for Lyra. You don’t always have to go out of your way to get as many spells as humanly possible, but you are likely to need the extra resources and you will have time to develop her, so there is little reason not to keep her.

Spell Priest General Game Plan and Strategy

The idea of this deck is to utilize the overabundance of cheap and efficient Priest spells and combine them with cards that work off of them, from the newly introduced Dragon Soul, value and card advantage generators like Lyra the Sunshard and Gadgetzan Auctioneer, to generating threats such as Arcane Giant. The deck features a very high spell density and the biggest reason it works is that Priest now has multiple tools that allow it to continue generating resources while expending them. This is the reason that spells like Mind Vision and Psionic Probe are some of the most important in the deck – they enable all the spell synergies while also keeping your hand stocked up with cards. It is hard to escape the Miracle-esque feel of the deck, especially when going off with Gadgetzan Auctioneer, however unlike Miracle Rogue, this deck actually shines at keeping aggro at bay in the early game. Strong defensive tools like Potion of Madness and Shadow Word: Pain ensure a relatively safe transition into the midgame, where you can utilize one of the multiple ways to capitalize on casting cheap spells in quick succession.

Building a large board is relatively easy due to the combination of Arcane Giants, Dragon Soul and being naturally able to generate lots of extra threats through your card advantage spells. Although the deck is relative light on the number of actual threats in it, finding them consistently is rather easy because this configurations features multiple ways to draw lots and lots of cards. Northshire Cleric in combination with Circle of Healing is a time-tested way for Priests to fatigue themselves and comboes even further with Wild Pyromancer. The latter and Spirit Lash also work very well with Acolyte of Pain. There is also, of course, Gadgetzan Auctioneer, who can make good use of all those spells to quickly dig through the deck.

Radiant Elemental is particularly important at enabling most of the larger plays that this deck can make. With a whopping 10 spells costing 1 or less, you only one Radiant to go nuts casting 0-cost spells and churning through extra cards. Things get really insane when you are able to cycle through enough of your deck to find two of them, because at that point you can play the bigger part of your deck all in one turn. A noteworthy combo to be aware of is that with one Shadow Visions drawn and the other one still in the deck, you can create an infinite loop of spell-matters triggers.

Of course, what we’ve shown so far is only one very streamlined configuration of the deck that actually cuts some powerful cards in order to fit the 16 spells, most of which cost 1 mana or less. Below are a couple of examples of how this deck can be built differently, with more resiliency in mind:

Here we see how a list can be changed to serve different purposes. In the example to the left, we have created a deck with many more threats in the face of two Red Mana Wyrms and a Diamond Spellstone, which when fully upgraded can bring back a very significant board. As a counterpoint on the right we see a very resilient version that has more lifegain and more control tools, as well as a hail mary play in Yogg-Saron, Hope's End who can pull you out of lost games. Of course, these are not the only ways to build this deck and there are plenty of cards that can be played and multiple strategies it can be adapted to, but this will depend on the meta and how you would want to go about fighting it.

Don’t forget to tech your deck with the appropriate cards when you find yourself having trouble – Rummaging Kobold can recycle your weapon when facing weapon hate (which you will, at least at the start) and there are plenty off Oozes to pick from if you find yourself needing weapon hate, though Harrison Jones draws the most cards.

Have fun with Kobolds and Catacombs!