Guardian Animals (& Malygos) Druid Deck List & Guide – Scholomance Academy – September 2020

Check out alternative versions of this deck on our Guardian Animals Druid archetype page!

Guardian Animals Druid Mulligan Strategy & Guide

VS Fast Decks

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

• Overgrowth, Wild Growth, Breath of Dreams – Whatever your specific ramp card package is, you want them in every matchup.
• Guardian Animals – The defining card of the deck, summoning a powerful board for you early in the game, if all goes well.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

• Lightning Bloom – Keep with Guardian Animals

VS Slow Decks

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

• Overgrowth, Wild Growth, Breath of Dreams – Whatever your specific ramp card package is, you want them in every matchup.
• Guardian Animals – The defining card of the deck, summoning a powerful board for you early in the game, if all goes well.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

• Lightning Bloom – Keep with Guardian Animals

Guardian Animals Druid Play Strategy

Your main strategy is rather simple. Get ahead of your opponent in mana, play big cards, especially Guardian Animals, and win the game.

The devil is in the details, of course, and there are lots of things you can do around this main strategy.

Twilight Runner is one of your key minions. When it is summoned from Guardian Animals, it can attack immediately and draw you some cards. When you have a Twilight Runner on the board, remember that it will always draw some cards when attacking, so you need to manage your hand size accordingly and sometimes even skip an attack if you cannot hold more cards. You also often want to prioritize attacking with Twilight Runner to get those cards before you decide what else you want to do on your turn. Because of its stealth ability, you can often also play Twilight Runner from hand for five mana and trust that it survives to attack on the following turn, depending on whether your opponent can remove stealth minions.

Lake Thresher is a powerful defensive tool against aggressive decks. When you get it from Guardian Animals, it can attack immediately, but it is very difficult to make it survive for a turn if played from hand. Many lists have opted to include Animated Broomstick to give your minions rush and help the Thresher as well as any dragons from Ysera, Unleashed portals to connect immediately. When playing against Hunter, you want to attack with the Animated Broomstick first to check for Freezing Trap.

Ysera, Unleashed remains one of the late-game threats in Guardian Animals Druid. Generally, the earlier you can play Ysera, the better because then you will have more time to draw portals from your deck to summon random Dragons. If given the choice between drawing cards and playing Ysera, you should generally prioritize Ysera, so that your card draw has the additional chance to summon Dragons.

Speaker Gidra can act as removal and as a major threat. Gidra gains stats based on the cost of your next spell – note that it is the actual casting cost, so discounted spells do little if anything – and can become a huge powerhouse with Windfury on top. For example, at ten mana you can play Gidra into Overflow or Guardian Animals to summon it as an 8/11. If you try to get to those stats early, remember to cast Lightning Bloom or Innervate before playing Gidra, unless you want to give Gidra +0/+0.

Kael'thas Sunstrider has been nerfed multiple times, but it is still a powerful card for Druid. You can play your spells already before playing Kael’thas, so Innervate + Lightning Bloom + Kael'thas Sunstrider works and makes the following spell cost one. This allows you to cheat out Guardian Animals or Survival of the Fittest very early in the game. After the nerf, it is much more difficult to chain multiple discounted spells with Kael’thas in a single turn, but sometimes you can still pull that off with Innervate and Lightning Bloom. In some occasions, you need to take a chance with Kael’thas and Overflow and try to find the missing pieces to stitch together a huge swing turn. Note that Bogbeam and Ironbark cost zero only when you have seven permanent mana crystals: you can ramp into them on the same turn, but you cannot discount them with Innervate or Lightning Bloom.

Remember that Survival of the Fittest buffs every minion you have anywhere. After playing it, Guardian Animals summons some beefy bodies. Any minions you play from hand, including Anubisath Defender, will be a lot bigger. You can also use it as a Savage Roar effect when you have a board to push for lethal damage. The portals from Ysera, Unleashed are not buffed because they are spells while in the deck, but once they are Dragons on the board, you can play Survival of the Fittest to buff them up.

Some versions of the deck opt to go for Exotic Mountseller as a means to generate minions on the board. It is most effective to use the Mountseller when you reach seven mana crystals and have the discounted Bogbeam and Ironbark available, but sometimes you can also go in early with Innervate and Lightning Bloom. Especially if you’re up against an aggro deck, getting bodies on the board early can be more valuable than getting more of them later, when you’re dead.

There is also a Malygos combo variant of the deck. Much of the above discussion applies to that deck as well because it also uses Guardian Animals and Ysera, Unleashed, but it cuts some corners elsewhere to include a one-turn-kill combo in the deck. The full combo is as follows:

• Play Forest Warden Omu when you have ten mana crystals.
• Play Germination on Forest Warden Omu. You now have all of your mana back and a fresh copy of Omu on the board.
• Play Malygos.
• Play Moonfire. You now get all of your mana back again from the copy of Omu.
• Play Swipe, Swipe, and Moonfire. All of this deals exactly 30 damage.

Some Malygos decks include Jepetto Joybuzz that can discount Malygos and enable multiple variations of the combo, including ones that use Germination on Malygos for even more spell damage.

Your early-game is identical regardless of the variant you play but it affects your mid-game decisions: Exotic Mountseller decks without Survival of the Fittest seek to overwhelm the opponent with a wide board, whereas Survival of the Fittest decks seek to buff up their few minions to some big stats, and Malygos decks defend and deal some chip damage with Guardian Animals while assembling lethal burst damage into the hand.

VS Aggro Decks

Against aggressive decks, you are always the control deck. Generally, you want to go for tempo over value: playing a Bogbeam that costs three mana is perfectly acceptable to reduce incoming damage, and using all of your mana generation to get Guardian Animals out there early with no follow-up is completely fine as well. A small Speaker Gidra that removes a key minion early to stall the game is another fine move in these matchups. The less damage you take early on, the more time you have to pull off some real power plays later in the game.

Keep an eye out for a powerful swing turn, and if you can afford to take some damage, you can go for it, but if you don’t already have all you need for it in hand, play for immediate tempo.

VS Control Decks

Against control decks, you are the beatdown. It is your task to defeat the opponent before they can stabilize and comfortably answer your threats. Ramping up is absolutely crucial, as you want to play back-to-back threats that are too much for the opponent to handle with the mana they have available.

Be aware of the types of removal your opponents have. For example, Bomb Warriors have Bladestorm and Brawl, so you want to avoid having all of your minions at the same health total and you also want to avoid building too wide of a board. The sweet spot is around three minions at different health totals and just enough pressure to force the Warrior to respond while holding back a little so that you can ask them to answer again if they manage to wipe your first board.

Against Priest, you want high health on your minions so that Soul Mirror becomes ineffective, and you also want to avoid having all of your minions at five attack or more to play around Shadow Word: Ruin. Sometimes it is better not to buff Ysera, Unleashed with Ironbark to not give Priest an easier time to answer it.

Guardian Animals Druid Card Substitutions

There are only a limited number of card substitutions available to Guardian Animals Druid because some of the core cards are expensive ones, such as the deck’s namesake Guardian Animals. However, you can make some changes by moving from one variant to another.

• Survival of the Fittest is not used in the Malygos combo version of the deck but that requires its own set of expensive cards with Malygos and Forest Warden Omu. It is also possible to play an Exotic Mountseller version of the deck without Survival of the Fittest. If you cut Survival of the Fittest, you should also cut Kael'thas Sunstrider, as you no longer have enough payoff cards in the deck for it.
• Speaker Gidra is a great, flexible tool, but it can be replaced with something else: another five-cost Beast or a Wild Growth, for example.
• Ysera, Unleashed cannot effectively be replaced. Your best chance is Exotic Mountseller.
• Anubisath Defender can be a nice defensive tool, but Exotic Mountseller or another five-mana Beast can do as well.