Combo Priest Deck List Guide – Saviors of Uldum – August 2019

Check out alternative versions of this deck on our Combo Priest archetype page!

Combo Priest Mulligan Strategy & Guide

VS Fast Decks

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

• Northshire Cleric – Phenomenal one-drop for the deck, as you have lots of minions to heal and draw from. Can also be a major threat on its own with Extra Arms follow-up.
• Lightwarden – Potentially snowballing early minion.
• Injured Tol'vir – Powerful two-drop that you can heal or resurrect as a bigger minion later.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

• Wild Pyromancer  – Keep against Murloc Paladin.
• Power Word: Shield – Keep if you already have early-game minions.
• Extra Arms – Keep if you already have early-game minions.

VS Slow Decks

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

• Northshire Cleric – Phenomenal one-drop for the deck, as you have lots of minions to heal and draw from. Can also be a major threat on its own with Extra Arms follow-up.
• Lightwarden – Potentially snowballing early minion.
• Injured Tol'vir – Powerful two-drop that you can heal or resurrect as a bigger minion later.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

• Power Word: Shield – Keep if you already have early-game minions.
• Extra Arms – Keep if you already have early-game minions.
• High Priest Amet  – Keep with an early-game minion against decks that cannot deal with multiple high-health minions, such as Druid.

Combo Priest Play Strategy

If you have played previous iterations of Combo Priest, get ready to re-learn the deck a little. The deck is superficially very similar to its old iterations, all the key pieces are still there. There’s the Divine Spirit + Inner Fire combo to deal a quadrillion damage in a single hit. There’s the good old Northshire Cleric + Circle of Healing for card draw. There’s Acolyte of Pain + Wild Pyromancer that can be used with spells to draw tons of cards and deal lots of area-of-effect damage.

However, the soul of the deck has changed. It is no longer a deck that holds back, tries to get a minion to stick, cycles through the deck in search of the combo pieces, and finished the game with the combo. It kind of still does that, but it is now far more aggressive. It is a deck that hits you in the face, and while you struggle to stop it, it also threatens to combo you down if any of its minions survive.

The major change when playing the deck is in the mulligan. You are an aggro deck now. You mulligan for your first two turns. Get those early minions, snowball out of control, win the game. An Acolyte of Pain is now too slow for Combo Priest to keep in the mulligan. You’re not looking to set up big draw turns with the Acolyte and Wild Pyromancer. Sometimes you may still do that, but it is now a rare mid-game consideration that is not part of your main game plan.

The way to snowball with Combo Priest is to get a Northshire Cleric or Lightwarden on the board at the start, follow that up with Injured Tol'vir or buffs (Power Word: Shield or Extra Arms), and proceed to use your healing effects to buff the Lightwarden or draw cards with Northshire Cleric. Injured Blademaster is another self-harming minion you can get on the board in the early game, and then Circle of Healing or Neferset Ritualist makes your board insanely powerful.

If you get a strong start, games often end with the opponent unable to do anything. Any minions they play will be traded away and your subsequent healing gives you even more cards and power, so they just make things worse for themselves by playing cards. This is not your grandfather’s Combo Priest we are talking about here.

That’s not even all Combo Priest has up its sleeve. If for some inexplicable reason your initial board is dealt with, it is time to slam down Psychopomp to bring one of your minions back, this time with Reborn to boot. Injured Tol'vir and Injured Blademaster are particularly good targets, not to mention High Priest Amet.

Oh yeah, High Priest Amet. That’s another huge power play available to you. Opponent’s tend to go crazy when they see Amet, and use a ton of resources to kill it off. You can use this to force your opponent into awkward plays, or if they fail to answer Amet, all your minions will get big very quickly. If your initial hand is bad, High Priest Amet followed by Psychopomp can be an express ticket back into the game.

VS Aggro Decks

Against aggressive decks, you want to snowball faster than they do. The current Combo Priest has very limited defensive resources with Injured Tol'vir being your only Taunt minion and Wild Pyromancer providing the only removal outside of minion trades. There are no spells that heal your Hero either, so falling behind can be devastating.

If you do not find your one-drops, Injured Tol'vir followed up by Psychopomp can give you a fairly big wall to stabilize with. Sometimes you can also stabilize with Wild Pyromancer and spells, especially Power Word: Shield and Extra Arms to increase the health of the Pyromancer to enable it do deal with bigger boards. Nonetheless, the main strategy remains to be faster to the board and control it with your high-health minions and healing.

Do not hesitate to use your buffs for board control. Divine Spirit and Inner Fire are expendable to get the snowball going. Topsy Turvy can be used on an opponent’s minion to render it smaller or on one of your own low-attack minions to buff it up for a trade.

VS Control Decks

Against control decks, your main worry is to maintain pressure. You want the fast start with your one-drops as always, and sometimes that just carries you throughout the game.

Even against control decks, Divine Spirit + Inner Fire is not only a finisher. For example, there are often positions against Warrior where you have one minion on the board and not much left in the hand, and you can make that minion huge: then you make a huge minion and hit them in the face, hopefully setting up lethal for next turn if it goes unanswered. Small minions would be harmful in a position like that, because they would make it easier for the Warrior to Brawl your big threat away.

Especially against Mage, you need to be fast, because Luna's Pocket Galaxy is coming and the game can swing around very quickly in the mid-game. Meanwhile, Mage lacks tools to challenge early boards, with Flame Ward and Doomsayer being the only ones. Flame Ward can be played around by buffing up your minions and then hitting with any minion at three or less health first to get that damage in. Doomsayer can be answered with either Silence or Topsy Turvy.

The game against Warrior is a little different. Here, you do not have to worry about them racing you down, only about whether you have any minions left to finish the job. Play around their removal pieces as well as you can. Warpath can deal area-of-effect damage, but you should be able to maintain high enough health on most of your minions to render it ineffective in the early game. Rush minions are another threat, and you need to play around the three, five, and six health damage potential from Restless Mummy and Militia Commander. For example, it is often possible to buff up Injured Tol'vir to survive the hits from Rush minions. Other threats include Supercollider and Brawl: positioning is important, as is holding some resources back to be able to come back after a Brawl.

Overall, you need to know the types of removal available to the control decks and play around them. Commit fully on the board if they have no tools to clear it, or hold something back if they have unconditional board clears such as Brawl.

Combo Priest Card Substitutions

Combo Priest is currently the cheapest top tier deck in the game. There are only two Epic cards and one Legendary card in the deck. Replacing them is possible, even though it takes away a lot of power from the deck, especially from its ability to turn games around. You can still snowball to the win without them, but any hiccups along the way will be more difficult to recover from.

• Psychopomp can be replaced with Hench-Clan Shadequill. You need big minions in the deck to maintain tempo and present a threat with Divine Spirit + Inner Fire. Shadequill’s seven health goes a long way into establishing that threat.
• High Priest Amet can also be replaced with a Hench-Clan Shadequill. If you already put in two to replace Psychopomps, you may look into Twilight Drake or Faceless Rager.