Egg / Tempo Warrior Deck List Guide – Ashes of Outland – May 2020

Find more versions of this deck type on our Egg Warrior archetype page!

Mulligan Guide and Strategy

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

• Corsair Cache and Ancharrr – You really want to fish out the legendary weapon as soon and as often as possible so you can pick up the Risky Skippers at the earliest possible opportunity. Since it’s a combo/board clear tool, you don’t want it in your opening hand and you definitely won’t ever use it as a tempo 1/3 – however, any sort of a weapon setup which keeps adding 1-mana playable minions to your hand does wonders to your gameplan.
• Sky Raider – A 1 mana 1/2 that replaces itself. Obvious auto-keep in a tempo deck like this one.
• Serpent Egg – A Teron Gorefiend follow-up or a variety of Bloodsworn Mercenary shenanigans can win you the game as early as turn three. Even if you don’t have those cards, the threat is often strong enough that your opponent will just clear the first body for you, making it a Totem Golem without Overload in those scenarios. Well worth having around in your opening hand regardless of the matchup.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

• Armorsmith – You don’t want to pass your first two turns against aggressive opponents, and if you’ve blanked on your other cards in the mulligan, it’s worth keeping this around as an early quasi-taunt.
• Bomb Wrangler or Warmaul Challenger – Depending on whether you expect a must-kill threat like a Satyr Overseer or plan to contest the board aggressively, one of these can be a strong part of your early-game plan.
• Risky Skipper – Though you’d rather draw into this card rather than have it sit in your hand for the first couple of turns, it’s not a bad keep if your hand is otherwise awful and you expect to play from behind without any strong (re)draw opportunities.

General Playstyle and Strategy

Vs Aggro

Eventually, you’ll have a monster turn with Risky Skipper and double Armorsmith, gain somewhere in the region of 15 armor while clearing their board, and you will inevitably go on to win the game from there. Your mission is to stay alive until you can set all this up, knowing you can’t rely on Taunt minions to block damage. Don’t be afraid to commit an Inner Rage to kill a one-health minion that would otherwise hit you in the face once or twice.

The usual control deck tenets apply here: keep clearing your opponent’s board, protect your health total and brutalize them once your setup is ready. Don’t prioritize face damage early on: your Armorsmith output is good enough to close out the game. Instead, leverage as much tempo as possible. Warmaul Challenger is an excellent early-game play (sssshhh: don’t tell the Demon Hunter players but dropping a naked Warmaul Challenger into their turn seven play is pretty good too), and so is Serpent Egg provided you have any sort of relevant follow-up. Your weapons (and by the same token, Corsair Cache) are also crucial here. Use every tool at your disposal to maintain board parity until you’ve got a Risky Skipper and an Armorsmith ready, then start preparing for the game-winning board clear setup. Bloodsworn Mercenary works as a pretty good alternative of the second Armorsmith in these situations. Bloodboil Brute also serves as a strong removal tool that you can splice in during the Risky Skipper turns to deal with your opponent’s biggest threat.

If you feel like you’re struggling in these matchups, try Injured Tol'vir in the deck – you can check out some other suggestions in the Card Replacements section of this guide below.

Vs Control

This is a tempo deck at heart, but the many finicky options available to you can make it somewhat challenging to play on curve and put out sustained pressure. Since these decks are good at clearing your board, you need to prioritize early face damage and look for alternative methods to deal the rest from that point on. Luckily, you have a multitude of options to achieve this goal.

Your next sneaky source of face damage in the mid-game comes from the interaction between Bomb Wrangler and Risky Skipper. You can potentially trigger two Boom Bots on an empty board and set up a third, with a potential for even more if you commit a Bloodsworn Mercenary or Teron Gorefiend to the setup. This can get you across the line by itself if you had a strong enough early game.

If that isn’t enough, you still have some burn damage setups to work with. The deck’s finisher of choice – apart from the weapons – is a combination of Kor'kron Elite, Inner Rage and Bloodsworn Mercenary. This makes twelve the magic number for both you and your opponent, and you should try to hold these cards back if at all possible, unless you expect the tempo generated from their use to net more damage than six. (What I’m trying to say is that you have my blessing to use Bloodsworn Mercenary on a damaged Serpent Egg or a Rampage-buffed Warmaul Challenger.) If you’re expecting the game to pan out like this, use Risky Skipper to set up as large a Battle Rage redraw as possible to find your finishers and extend the game as long as possible.

Card Replacements

Though the featured build seems pretty much set in stone and it’s a fairly inexpensive deck to put together, there are nevertheless a few alternatives you can consider. Unfortunately you’re pretty much out of luck if you haven’t yet unlocked the Galakrond’s Awakening cards: Risky Skipper is core to this deck and cannot be adequately replaced. That said, there are a few tech options available to you: alternative builds run Injured Tol'vir for added defense against Demon Hunter plus further Bloodsworn Mercenary shenanigans. Imprisoned Vilefiend and Frothing Berserker are also worth considering if you don’t have a copy of Teron Gorefiend.