The first Fractured in Alterac Valley balance patch opened up the meta to several new decks. With combo decks slowed down, multiple new strategies became viable. However, not all classes benefited equally from these new opportunities. In particular, Priest and Mage have been left wondering what they are supposed to do to succeed in this expansion.
In this article, I’ll take a look at the best decks available to these two classes and how far they can take you on the ladder!
Mozaki OTK Mage
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Any discussion of Mage decks has to mention Mozaki Mage. The only fast combo deck that was deemed harmless enough to escape a nerf, Mozaki Mage instantly became the best fast combo deck because everyone else was hit. Mozaki Mage is also somewhat popular in high Legend, even though its win rate is mediocre at best.
As a fast-paced deck that you need to make rapid decisions with and play cards quickly, it can often feel like losses could be avoided by just playing the deck a little better. To some extent, this is true. However, there is limited room to do better with Mozaki Mage, even if it feels like you can. For example, the median and average turn to pull off the combo with Mozaki Mage is turn 8. This is the same in Bronze and in high Legend. Legend players are able to pull off more turn 7 combos and are less likely to need to wait until turn 10 to start blasting, but the difference is only a couple of percentage points in each case, and there is no notable difference between a high-Legend player and your average Legend player in combo timing. You can be slightly more efficient with your combo and a fair bit better at surviving with good piloting, but there are no Garrote Rogue levels of differences between players here.
Mozaki Mage is the best-performing Mage deck right now. If you’re good with the deck, you can expect an above-50% win rate and can climb with it. The deck is also extremely polarized in that it loses to aggro and beats up slower decks, and there is limited room for player skill to change this. Thief Rogue and Libram Paladin are some of the evenest matchups for the deck, where your decisions carry the greatest weight. If all of this sounds fun to you, Mozaki Mage can be worth a try.
Ping Mage / Big Spell Mage
But wait, Mage got multiple buffs in the balance patch, what happened to all of those?
They had an effect, in that Mage decks built around the Mage Hero Power are now viable! There are two approaches to building this Hero Power Mage, and they are both rocking a fairly steady 51% win rate with their best lists, putting them right below Mozaki Mage, and within the realm of viable decks as they can win more than half of their games.
The first list that was built is the Big Spell Mage:
- 1Shivering Sorceress2
- 1Wildfire2
- 2Amplified Snowflurry2
- 2Arcanologist2
- 3Ice Barrier2
- 4Deepwater Evoker2
- 4Fire Sale1
- 4Reckless Apprentice2
- 4Varden Dawngrasp1
- 5Arcane Overflow2
- 6Grey Sage Parrot2
- 7Clumsy Courier1
- 7Magister Dawngrasp1
- 7Mask of C’Thun2
- 7Mass Polymorph1
- 8Mordresh Fire Eye1
- 9Rune of the Archmage2
This version of the deck includes the core cards of all Hero Power Mages at the moment: Wildfire, Reckless Apprentice, and Mordresh Fire Eye for the Hero Power synergies and Magister Dawngrasp and Mask of C'Thun for some more Hero Power goodness mixed with recasting some key spells.
This Big Spell style also includes Rune of the Archmage for some surprising turns, especially as it can be cast early with Clumsy Courier or recast with Grey Sage Parrot. Grey Sage Parrot can also keep casting Mask of C'Thun, so sometimes you end up with games where you cast Mask of C'Thun from hand and then recast it with both Magister Dawngrasp and Grey Sage Parrot. That’s a lot of damage.
Then, there is a faster alternative that runs a cheaper spell package:
This version has a more heavy focus on early survivability with Flurry (Rank 1), Brain Freeze, and Devolving Missiles, and it does not include any of the big spell synergy cards.
Instead, the deck draws cards faster thanks to Multicaster and aims to end the game with Mask of C'Thun, Magister Dawngrasp, and Mordresh Fire Eye.
This style is stronger against aggressive Hunters, but weaker at ending games against more defensive decks like Libram Paladin.
Quest Mage
Yeah, I know this list is two months old. It’s still the main Quest Mage list that sees play today, and it’s not completely hopeless. In fact, it competes evenly with the Hero Power Mage decks and is heavily favored in the Mage mirror against them.
Completing the Questline for a Spell Damage bonus, drawing quickly with the help of Multicaster, and blasting away with Fireball and Ignite is still a sound strategy. The key card to run in the deck is Multicaster: that additional draw really makes a difference, and I would not recommend playing Quest Mage without it.
Quest Priest
Questlines have been in the limelight since they were introduced in United in Stormwind, but Seek Guidance has not had quite the same shine as most of the others. Interestingly enough, the Fractured in Alterac Valley balance patch slowed the game down enough so that you can actually win games with the Priest Questline nowadays!
You should not expect too much from it: this list is hovering around a 50% win rate, but that is more than what the archetype has been capable of previously.
Xyrella, the Devout plays a strong role in repeating your Deathrattles, but the deck is still built around the Questline first and foremost. There is no Amulet of Undying here because the goal is to win with the Questline, not with big minions. While both Questline Priest and Big Priest share their love for Xyrella, the Devout, the way they actually win games is different.
Going their separate ways instead of trying to cram both win conditions in the same deck has improved the success of each style and allowed Questline Priest to focus more on Discovering cards of the right mana cost to advance the Questline.
Big Priest
Big Priest lacks the inevitability of Quest Priest, but it does not have to worry about playing cards of specific mana costs, so it is more flexible on its path to victory. Because it is perfectly happy to play cards for cheap, it can make good use of Vanndar Stormpike to get its big threats on the board early. Amulet of Undying gets traded a lot in the early game, and can then bring the Deathrattle boards back again and again together with N'Zoth, God of the Deep.
Slow Questlines and Old Gods? Yeah, the meta has indeed slowed down enough to make them playable. Not great, mind you. Over large sample sizes, we’re still talking about slightly above 50% win rates. I used this Big Priest at the final stages of my Legend climb this season and managed to roll really well with it, but over hundreds of games, the expected value is not quite as high.
Miracle Priest
There are two varieties of Miracle Priest: Drek'Thar and Malygos the Spellweaver. Both of them will ultimately buff up a Nazmani Bloodweaver and Bless it for some big damage, but there are also significant differences between the two styles.
The Drek'Thar and Rally! version can generate tons of random resources with Sethekk Veilweaver. Pulling Sethekk Veilweaver and Nazmani Bloodweaver from the deck with Drek'Thar and resurrecting them with Rally! can result in cycle after cycle of generated resources, which might just win the game on their own.
If they don’t, there’s always Elekk Mount, Power Word: Fortitude, Power Word: Feast, and Bless to build a huge minion.
The Malygos the Spellweaver version works a little differently. The only minions in the deck are Malygos, Xyrella, and Nazmani Bloodweaver, and they can be tutored with Insight. The deck has a lower mana curve and can cast huge numbers of spells with a Nazmani on the board, and buff up and copy its minions to create a formidable board out of nowhere.
Neither version is particularly impressive, to be honest. The Drek'Thar list is hovering at around a 50% win rate, while the Malygos list is generally slightly below that. That is still enough to make this archetype one of the better Priest decks.
Aggro Shadow Priest
- 0Raise Dead2
- 1Guardian Augmerchant2
- 1Peasant2
- 1Tour Guide2
- 2Cult Neophyte2
- 2Wriggling Horror2
- 3Mankrik1
- 7Mr. Smite1
One of the more interesting developments since the balance patch is the return of Aggro Shadow Priest!
Shadow Priest lost its way after the Mindrender Illucia nerf and has struggled to become a meta contender since. Now, the deck has found a suitable replacement in Najak Hexxen: while you cannot force your opponent to skip a turn anymore, you can loan one of their minions, and getting it back alive can be surprisingly difficult. Having Mr. Smite around for some Charge damage also helps.
The deck largely lives or dies on drawing Voidtouched Attendant – preferably in the mulligan – to speed up its damage and it is far from a stable performer, but it can challenge that 50% win rate barrier again even over large sample sizes.
Even the Worst Classes Are Ok?
In every meta, someone will be at the top. It’s inevitable. Mage and Priest do not have any top-tier decks at the moment, but even they have a surprising number of viable decks – with viable defined as capable of at least a 50% win rate.
Mozaki OTK Mage is the strongest Mage deck, but you can also find success with Big Spell Mage, Ping Mage, and Quest Mage.
Priest is slightly weaker and its best decks are barely afloat. Nonetheless, Aggro Shadow Priest, Quest Priest, and Big Priest can all be used for climbing. I did a major part of my own Legend climb this season with Quest Priest and Big Priest.
So far, the post-balance patch meta has proven to include a surprising amount of variety. Even if Thief Rogue is the talk of the town, there are lots of decks hovering around that 50% win rate and capable of climbing in dedicated hands.
Old Guardian
Ville "Old Guardian" Kilkku is a writer and video creator focused on analytic, educational Hearthstone, and building innovative Standard format decks. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/OldGuardian Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/old_guardian
Not the right place for it but wanted to ask. I was looking over the achievements and I’ve recorded 0 prevented dmg for Paly’s immovable object.
I play librham so this is clearly a glitch. Anyone else?
Yes, the achievement is still bugged. I hope it gets fixed in the next patch.
Must of missed that this was known. Thank you!
No worries! It’s hard to keep track of all of that 🙂
Weakest hmm? probably right. I’ve yet to face more than one player playing Mage at this point.
I myself am pretty lucky to avoid opening any Mage legendary cards.
But if Mutanus still around, I would guess no one really dares to play Mozaki anymore.
Weird that you would call them the two weakest classes in the game. According to the latest VS report released today, Mozaki Mage has a 49% winrate at top 1k Legend while Warrior’s best deck, Quest Warrior, has a 46.7% winrate. In the hands of good players at least, the two weakest classes in the game are Warrior and Priest, and Mage is doing much better.
You’re technically correct that Warrior is worse at the Top Legend ranks. But for 99.9% of the ladder, Questline Warrior is strong deck, much stronger than Mozaki Mage.
Top Legend meta is always its own bubble – mostly because of skill level differences, but also tech choices or matchup spread. In case of Questline Warrior, I would probably blame it on skill ceiling. The deck is very easy to play optimally and that’s why it’s so strong against lower skill players – but once you reach that ceiling, there’s not much you can improve in your gameplay while other decks (including Mozaki Mage) still have a lot of room to showcase player’s skill.
Sometimes it’s fun to look at Top Legend (just like it’s fun to look a tournament meta), but when I write articles, I generally tend to use Diamond-Legend stats – they are more “competitive” (unlike something like Bronze, where people might genuinely not know how X or Y deck function), but also more relatable to a wider audience. Of course this particular article is not mine, but I would assume that OG does a similar thing.
Folks like zombie69 here are so fixated on the less than 1% base that they fail to see the general purpose of an article and need an explanation. It is somewhat brainless of them.
The reason high legend stats are the most relevant in general is partly because they usually tell what will happen a week or two later at lower ranks, as deck improvements start there and eventually trickle down. There are exceptions of course, with some decks being simply easier to play and never doing anywhere near as well against good players. Quest Warrior is one such exception.
Still, saying that mage is a weak class when it’s everywhere right now in tournaments, while Warrior is by far the weakest class in the game in the hands of good players, is misleading. Mage isn’t intrinsically weak, it’s just not being played very well by most players.
Also, nerfs tend to be geared more towards high level play and how good decks are in the hands of good players, again with some exceptions with regards to cards that just feel bad to play against.
For all those reasons, high legend is usually the best starting point, certainly to discuss a deck’s strength at least. I know that’s not what this website is geared towards and I think that’s a shame, and that’s why I only visit it once in a while to find out about recent news I might have missed.
WOW – it is just an exception if it goes against your preset mindset. Quite mature of you. Again, brainless of you to think like this. Warrior is much stronger for 99% of ladder – the intended reader base. But hey, it is an exception right? After all, you need explanations and data for anything you do and cannot comprehend / make up your mind without those.
No, it’s an exception if it happens in a small minority of cases, which it does. For the most part, high skill cap and low skill ceiling are memes not based on facts. Vicious Syndicate evaluates the learning curve on decks and most are very similar. Recent exceptions include Garrote Rogue (difficult to play well) and Pirate Warrior (very easy to master, not much room for good players to show their skill).
But if you want to keep on ignoring the data and just spew insults, be my guest. Makes you look far worst than the person you’re trying to insult.
No one here ever argued or denied the data. You just lack the capacity to understand beyond data.
How is it possible for somebody to look at a population. And then go, hey what will work well for that 1% people.
I’m sorry, but no. Mage and Priest have been the biggest, cheeseiest decks in the game. Quest mage last season was awful to play against with any minion deck and Priest is always scum ever since it’s redesign. Priest has board clear, top tier spell discovery, heals on top of cheap heals, minion destruction, card steal, and early game advantage in every season. Mage is just toxic and zero fun to play against. Why they gave damage increase to hero power to Mage is beyond me.
Is there a way that I track the performance of a custom-built deck? I want to compare the performance of my variation of quest mage to the standard list
All deck-tracking addons, like Hearthstone Deck Tracker and Firestone, save your own statistics, but you’d need to play hundreds of games with the deck to get a meaningful sample size.
Thanks for the reply! I currently use HS Deck Tracker but only know about the overlay that tracks which cards you’ve drawn/remain in your deck. How do I access my stats? Is that a premium feature?
Just kidding I figured it out. For anyone wondering, there is an app that opens up outside of HS. It may be easier on Windows, but for Mac you have to click on “Deck Manager” within HS tracker. Thanks again, Old Guardian – I really appreciate the work you put in!