Aggro Secret Paladin Theorycraft Deck List – Rise of Shadows – April 2019

But as you can see above, the deck looks nothing like the Secret Paladins of old. The thing is, TGT/LoE builds were Midrange, and this is Aggro. Why? Because we don’t have all of those amazing on-curve plays, nor Mysterious Challenger. Right now, the best Secret synergy cards are cheap. They can snowball early game, but they also fall off in the mid/late game. That’s why in order to take full advantage of Secret strategy, you need to go fast.

And they pay-off looks really promising. We have three new cards in total – two Paladin and one Neutral. Starting with the Neutral one, as long as you Control a Secret, Sunreaver Spy is a 2 mana 3/4. That’s a Totem Golem without Overload. And Controlling a Secret in this deck is not really that difficult, given how many you run and pull out of your deck all the time. Good thing about this card is that it’s playable even if you don’t trigger it – a 2 mana 2/3 on Turn 2 is definitely better than just passing in an Aggro deck. It can also lead to amazing snowball, like Turn 1 Secretkeeper, Turn 2 Secret + Coin + Spy. You end up with a 2/3, 3/4 and a Secret on the board on Turn 2 – very difficult board to deal with (it’s even better than an old Tunnel Trogg into Totem Golem opening, but you need a Coin). The second pay-off card is Mysterious Blade, which refers to our favorite 6-drop in name. And this is basically a pre-nerf Fiery War Axe that was turned into a balanced card. Normally it’s a 2 mana 2/2, a bad weapon. But if you Control a Secret, it’s 2 mana 3/2, basically the best 2 mana weapon stat-line you can have. You can either use it to deal 6 damage to the opponent (for just 2 mana!) or control the board early in faster matchups. 3 attack is important, because a lot of the popular 2 and 3-drops have 3 health.

But probably the most interesting one is Commander Rhyssa, a new Paladin Legendary. With an aggressive, vanilla stat-line and a powerful effect on top of that, she can really push that deck forward. She can give you a lot of tempo – like revive a minion twice with Redemption, summon two 2/1’s from Noble Sacrifice, draw 4 cards with Hidden Wisdom or even give your entire board +4 Health thanks to Never Surrender!. While she does not affect Autodefense Matrix or Repentance, the other four are enough. If your opponent can’t kill Rhyssa on the board and you have Never Surrender up, then she turns into a 4/7, making her a nightmare to remove so early.

Other, older Secret synergies are Masked Contender – a cool 3-drop in Secret decks, Bellringer Sentry – which is basically a mini-Mysterious Challenger (not that powerful, but it comes down on T4, which is nice) and Subject 9 – a good mid game refill. Those three are the main reason why you run 9 Secrets in total. You see, 9 Secrets might seem like a huge overkill, because they don’t scale that well into the late game. But the thing is, you won’t likely have them in your deck anymore by the late game. With all of those cards pulling them from your deck, you shouldn’t run into a problem of getting flooded by the Secret top decks later in the game.

Since the deck is rather aggressive, I’ve decided to put King Mukla in a 3-drop slot. It’s proven to be working well in fast Paladin decks. Slower decks rarely have a great way to use Bananas in the mid game (since they’re focused on removing your board instead of developing) and a tempo you get from a 3 mana 5/5 off-sets the issue in faster matchups. Even if they use two bananas on their 2-drop or even better a 3-drop to kill your Mukla, it’s still a tempo win for you (since they have to pay mana for them). For a similar reason, the deck runs Leeroy Jenkins, which is meant to be a finisher. Between weapons and Leeroy, you should be able to close out some games when your opponent is at 10+ health even if they no longer let you stick any minions.

And final matter – card draw. Normally I would slam AT LEAST one copy of Divine Favor into it, probably even two. But it’s no longer possible in Standard, since the card will rotate to Hall of Fame. The deck will run out of steam very fast, so it might need some sort or refill to stay in the game. Hidden Wisdom and Subject 9, which I’ve already talked about before, are solid at giving you some more steam, but Hidden Wisdom depends on your opponent to trigger it, and Subject 9 only draws Secrets. That’s why I’ve decided to add two copies of Loot Hoarders as extra 2-drops. I thought about Knife Jugglers, but to be honest, Jugglers don’t have a lot of synergy in this build (you’d need to also add something like Hench-Clan Hag). Hoarders have really good synergy with Redemption too. But if they won’t turn out to be necessary, I’d probably replace them with a higher tempo 2-drops. Depending on the meta, Amani Berserker or even Upgradeable Framebot (in a meta with lots of 1 health minions in the early game) might be decent options.

Overall, whether the deck will work or not will obviously be a meta call, but from what I’ve seen during the pre-release games, it can REALLY snowball hard during the first turns, but it falls off in the mid/late game. But maybe if an aggressive build won’t work, there will be a way to build it a bit slower. We’ll have to wait until the expansion hits to playtest everything, but for now, I’m happy with how this deck looks.