Murloc Mage Mage Deck List Guide – Boomsday – November 2018

Murloc Mage Mulligan Strategy & Guide

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

• Murloc Tidecaller – Hands-down the best card in the deck to get in mulligan. You do want to open with a 1-drop, and Tidecaller is the best 1-drop in this deck.
• Murloc Raider – While not as good as Tidecaller, it’s still better to have it than to have nothing on T1. Don’t keep if you already have Tidecaller.
• Rockpool Hunter – Amazing 2-drop, especially if you have dropped a 1 mana Murloc on T1. 2/3 body, Murloc tag AND +1/+1 buff goes a long way when it comes to snowballing the game.
• Murloc Tidehunter – Basically the same story as above, it’s worse than Rockpool Hunter, but you still want to have a T2 play, so you keep it if you don’t have Rockpool Hunter.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

• Murloc Warleader – With a 1-drop and a 2-drop. While a 3/3 body on T3 is not that great, if you play it after curving out, it can either give you some great trades in faster matchups or a lot of pressure in slower matchups.
• Aluneth – Vs slow decks; the refill is insane, you can flood the board anew every turn, or just draw your burn cards if your opponent is low enough.

Murloc Mage Play Strategy

Murloc Mage is a minion-based Aggro deck. A lot of your turns will be very straightforward – you want to play the best minion every turn (2+ if possible) and hit your opponent’s face to kill them. That’s the simplest game plan, and it actually sometimes works. The deck can snowball like crazy – getting a good 1-2-3-4 curve versus a guy who had a slow start is nearly a guaranteed win. You just kill them before they can do anything. Still, in most of the games, it gets a bit more complicated.

Let’s start with your game plan vs other aggressive decks. Those are actually your worst matchups. Aggro mirrors are all about board control, and your deck actually doesn’t have a great board control capabilities. Murlocs are incredibly synergistic, but they are also weak individually. If you face a faster deck, which can drop minions, removals, weapons etc. in the early game to answer your Murlocs one by one, your deck will be useless. In those matchups, you want to mulligan aggressively for the best curve possible – Murloc Tidecaller into Rockpool Hunter is the best way to win against them. Generally, try to get your most resilient minions. 1 health guys are weak, because they will just die to 1-drops, often without doing anything. For example, Murloc Raider doesn’t trade favorably with popular 1-drops like Dire Mole, Fire Fly, Argent Squire or Voidwalker. While Tidecaller also doesn’t trade against those right away, it doesn’t die to a single hit, meaning that there’s a high chance that you will be able to at least buff its attack by playing more Murlocs and trade 1 for 1. Similarly, Rockpool Hunter is solid because of its 2/3 body, even if you won’t land a buff. For example, Murloc Tidehunter just dies to one Hero Power from Odd Paladin, Rockpool does not. 3-drops are the same story – Nightmare Amalgam is good vs Aggro, because of its solid 3/4 body. Primalfin Lookout not only comes with a weaker body, but it requires another Murloc on the board to activate its effect. Same goes for Coldlight Seer or even Murloc Warleader. Those are good once you stabilize and get ahead, but they are bad at actually getting there.

Against Aggro, you need to try your best to keep the board control. The way to win the game is to stack a few Murlocs on the board and then play your snowball cards, such as Murloc Warleader, Coldlight Seer or Gentle Megasaur. Play for the tempo, going for “value” plays like drawing cards is not necessary. You will end up with a bunch of cards in your hand and a lost game, because you couldn’t take back the board control. DON’T go for face damage when you can trade, otherwise you can get punished by buffs and such. If you take the board control and start snowballing, you will eventually be able to turn the game around and kill your opponent in 2-3 turns. Until then, dealing face damage is nearly pointless, though (do it only if you have no trade you can make). Remember, Aggro matchups ARE bad – especially Odd Paladin and Odd Rogue matchups – and you can’t do much about it. The game heavily depends on the first few turns, so your opening hand and mulligan are incredibly important – don’t keep cards that are “okay”, try to hard mulligan for the best plays.

Luckily for you, you won’t be playing against Aggro all the time. Where Murloc Mage starts to shine are slower matchups, decks that can’t control the board that easily during the first few turns and allow your Murlocs to run out of control. Like I’ve mentioned, Murlocs are bad individually, but they get insane when you put many of them on the board. Let’s say that you have three Murlocs on the board and you drop Murloc Warleader – on top of a 3/3 body, it adds 6 damage to the board, and it your opponent can’t answer it, you can drop Gentle Megasaur next turn. Rolling +3 Attack or Windfury is most likely lethal at this point. Yes, Turn 4 wins are not out of question with this deck. And that’s basically your main game plan vs control – play on the curve, stack minions to the board and try to snowball everything.

Your first few turns should be really easy, because you rarely have more than 1 play to make (if you can pick between one of the two 1-drops or 2-drops, pick the strongest one – simple). But it starts getting a bit more complicated in the mid game. First of all – playing around AoE. The general rule is that if your board is already powerful enough to put your opponent on a rather quick clock (e.g. 2-3 turns), then you do not want to play more. However, there are some exceptions from that rule. First of all – Coldlight Seer. You often want to play him into the AoE, as long as he will make your board resistant to that AoE. Let’s say that you play against Warlock and have 1, 2 and 3 health Murlocs in play. Playing Seer here is definitely correct – not only it plays around Defile, but also puts two of your minions out of Hellfire range. Similarly, Gentle Megasaur is also a good “overextend” play, because if you have a bunch of Murlocs in play already, you want to capitalize on your board. And so, no matter if you roll an aggressive play (+3 Attack, Windfury) to deal a lot of immediate damage and possibly put your opponent in the burn range, or you pick a defensive play (Divine Shield, Health, Deathrattle) to make your board resistant to AoE, Megasaur is a solid play. On top of those, you can also drop Primalfin Lookout, since it cycles itself anyway – it adds to the board while not removing resources from your hand.

Card draw is an important part of the slow matchups. Sometimes you will get a perfect hand and win on Turn 4, but more often than not you will meet some resistance – single target removals, AoEs, Taunts etc. that will get rid of your Murlocs. This deck runs out of steam insanely quickly – given that half of your deck costs 1-2 mana, you will run out of stuff to play in the mid game quite often. And because of that, you play three different sources of card draw – Book of Specters, Stargazer Luna and Aluneth. Book of Specters will usually draw 2 or 3 cards for just 2 mana – the deck is really low on non-minion cards, meaning that Book is a really consistent way to get more steam. Luna is great in a deck with low curve – while you rarely want to drop her on T3, if you play her in the mid game, you will often immediately play a bunch of topdecks. But the best way of refill is obviously Aluneth. Even though you will run out of cards quite quickly, it gives you a high tempo turn after a high tempo turn. Since you don’t have to worry about playing around AoE (because you have refills every turn), you end up flooding the board until your opponent runs out of ways to clear your minions (or he destroys the weapon, which is kind of unfortunate). All three fit this kind of deck really well, and are a great way to go for a slightly longer game if your hyper-Aggro game plan fails.

And finally, even if you get your opponent down pretty low with your minions and then he clears your board repeatedly, or puts a big Taunt you can’t pass through, don’t worry, the game is not completely over yet. The deck runs some burn cards that you can use to close out the game. Between 2x Frostbolt and 2x Fireball, you can deal 18 damage to your opponent – if you draw them, of course. Don’t underestimate your Hero Power too – pinging your opponent every turn is a nice way to accumulate some damage over time. Additionally, if you don’t face any Taunts, you can use Bluegill Warrior to deal some extra damage too. You can even combo him with one of your Murloc buffs to either make him more durable (and hopefully hit with it for a second time), or at least deal some more damage immediately.

Murloc Mage Card Substitutions

Murloc Mage is a relatively cheap deck, given that it’s Aggro and lots of the cards are Basic/Common. Still, it runs a fair share of Epic & Legendary cards – some of them are replaceable, but others are simply necessary to run the deck. I’ll go through them below and try to offer substitutions where it’s possible.

• Stargazer Luna – A solid mid game hand refill, but she’s definitely not necessary. You can replace her with Vicious Fledgling or Spellbreaker.
• Aluneth – Can’t be replaced. The deck runs into heavy card draw issues in the mid game, and without Aluneth you will have to completely rely on the early explosive start to win the games, which will decrease your win rate by quite a lot.
• Book of Specters – I’d say that Aluneth is a bit more important to win those longer games in slow matchups, but Book of Specters is also great. If you really want to play the deck without it, you want to make it a bit slower by adding cards like Spellbreaker or Fungalmancer – otherwise you will run out of cards too quickly.
• Murloc Warleader – Warleader is absolutely necessary if you want to play any Murloc deck, you can’t replace him.
• Nightmare Amalgam – It’s played as a vanilla 3-drop Murloc. Given that we don’t have THAT many Murlocs in Standard right now, and Mage has no class Murlocs to run, the card is quite important. But if you don’t have it, I guess that you could replace it. You could try a Void Ripper tech if you have it, and if you don’t, go for something like Vicious Fledgling.
• Gentle Megasaur – Just like Warleader, Megasaur is 100% necessary in any Murloc deck. Those two are your main snowball tools.