Odd Dragon Warrior Deck List Guide – Rastakhan’s Rumble – December 2018

Check out alternative versions of this deck on our Odd Warrior archetype page!

Odd Dragon Warrior Win Rates

Winrate stats are currently unavailable for this deck at the moment!

Odd Dragon Warrior Mulligan Strategy & Guide

VS Fast Decks

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

• Reckless Flurry – Thanks to the four-armor Hero Power, Reckless Flurry is the best early board clear available to Odd Warrior.
• Brawl – Strong against multiple bigger minions as well as a large token board.
• Supercollider – Strong weapon that enables you to rapidly stabilize the board.
• Stonehill Defender – Your best defensive minion.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

• Dragonmaw Scorcher – Keep against token decks, such as Odd Paladin.
• Gluttonous Ooze – Keep against weapon classes.

VS Slow Decks

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

• Dr. Boom, Mad Genius – Your main value engine. Not always played if the matchup can be won through armor alone, but can add some pressure when you need that.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

• Shield Slam – Keep against Even Warlock or Cubelock to answer Mountain Giant.
• Gluttonous Ooze – Keep against Druid to counter Twig of the World Tree.
• Direhorn Hatchling – Keep against Mage and Warrior to more likely get the value before silence or transformation cards are drawn.

Odd Dragon Warrior Play Strategy

It may be useful to think of Odd Warrior as mostly consisting of various card packages for different purposes. The extent that these packages are included in any particular build has an effect on the overall plan of that deck.

Fatigue package was prevalent in Odd Warrior before Rastakhan’s Rumble. It comprises Direhorn Hatchling, Elise the Trailblazer, and optionally Zola the Gorgon. The goal of this package is to provide both value and additional cards to the deck, resulting in additional resources and an advantageous position if the game goes to fatigue. In early Rastakhan’s Rumble meta, fatigue is rarely a viable win condition, and therefore this package is often cut in part or in whole. Keeping some elements may still be useful, because the Hunter matchups can be won in fatigue sometimes – instead of with Dr. Boom, Mad Genius – but they tend to be close there if the Hunter plays well and does not draw additional cards.

Mech package provides the deck with additional removal and value. Its centerpiece is Dr. Boom, Mad Genius, followed by Zilliax, two copies of Dyn-o-matic, and two copies of Omega Assembly. It is focused on allowing Boom to create as much value as possible and serve as a non-fatigue win condition.

Dragon package is the new addition from Rastakhan’s Rumble. It mostly consists of a number of removal cards – Smolderthorn Lancer, Dragonmaw Scorcher, and Crowd Roaster – as well as the additional armor card Emberscale Drake. Some versions of the deck include Ysera for more consistent activation of dragon synergies and as an additional value card.

The rest of the deck consists of the general defense and removal cards, any tech cards, and of course Baku the Mooneater as a mandatory inclusion in an Odd deck.

The early days in Rastakhan’s Rumble have been all about fitting these various packages together and seeking the fundamental core pieces of each. The dominant way to build the deck in early Rastakhan’s Rumble has been to cut the fatigue package and tech cards in order to fit in the dragon package. As time has went on, we have seen the return of some fatigue cards and tech cards as the deck is being fine-tuned.

There are practical consequences. The smaller the fatigue package, the less you can rely on fatigue as a win condition: opponents such as Hunters and Even Warlocks are much more comfortable in taking the game all the way to fatigue, if the Warrior does not shuffle three or four additional cards to the deck. At the same time, the dragon package provides much more targeted board control and enables you to build a board that can attack, which you could not do with Reckless Flurry and Brawl alone, as those wipe out your own minions too. Therefore, while Odd Dragon Warrior can still win fatigue games, it has moved slightly towards winning with minions while removing the opponent’s minions in a targeted way.

VS Aggro Decks

When facing aggressive decks, your win condition is to remove all of their threats. Sometimes, your dragons enable you to turn the tide and counterattack, but the main plan is to simply run the opponent out of resources.

Because almost the entire deck has some removal properties, this is largely a matter of answering threats in correct proportion to the risk they represent, and you should have enough pieces to win.

The most vital aspect is managing your health and armor. You gain four armor from each use of your Hero Power, so you have plenty of buffer to take hits. This is what makes Supercollider so effective: you can often afford to tank the damage to remove two threats at once.

You need to constantly evaluate how much damage you are taking and how the opponent may improve their board: can they use Fungalmancer, maybe? If they do, can you take the hits and then clear or will some minions get out of reach? Will your health total go so low that the opponent may have enough reach to win the game?

Hero Power + Reckless Flurry deals four damage to all minions for mere five mana, and it is your most effective mass removal tool. There is a lot of finesse involved with using Reckless Flurry though. Maybe you can set up a board state that preserves some of your armor with Stonehill Defender and get to a position where you tank up after the Flurry and not before. Sometimes you want to use Shield Block to enable a slightly bigger Reckless Flurry. Sometimes you hit something first or Shield Slam something first. Sometimes you hold on to Shield Block to enable these Reckless Flurry or Shield Slam turns later.

While Reckless Flurry usually clears the entire board, Brawl leaves something standing. Good or bad Brawl rolls make for nice highlight reels, but in actual use it is all math. How do you set up a good enough probability that the key minions are destroyed? Sometimes you play a minion before Brawl or hit something before it, sometimes you roll the dice first and make other moves afterwards.

Overall, it is a straightforward plan: put some stuff on the way, remove key threats, conserve your removal cards for the right moments, and tank up a lot. The devil is in the details: you need to know what your opponent is capable of in order to make good decisions. Do you Brawl a board of tokens or wait for them to get buffed first? It depends on how low your health will go if you take the hits and how much your opponent can buff the board. This will change with the meta, but most aggressive decks run at least Fungalmancer, for which you should be prepared, and Odd Paladin also adds Level Up! to the mix. You need to try to line up your removal to the threats: wiping the token board with Dragonmaw Scorcher is an obvious choice, but using or holding on to Brawl is a more difficult one.

VS Control Decks

When facing slow decks, the right strategy depends on the win condition of the opponent.

• Against decks with a damage-based win condition (Malygos Druid, Mind Blast Priest), you want to use your Hero Power as much as possible and simply get out of reach. Do not play Dr. Boom, Mad Genius in these matchups unless you desperately need that immediate seven armor.
• Against decks with a fatigue-based win condition (Big Spell Mage, Odd Warrior), you want to refrain from drawing cards and beat them in fatigue. You can also use Dr. Boom, Mad Genius to pressure them and make them run out of resources, especially if you draw it early in the game. The fewer fatigue package pieces you have in your deck, the more attractive the Boom strategy becomes.
• Against decks with a non-damage-based or unlimited-damage combo win condition (Mill Druid, OTK Paladin, Shudderwock Shaman), you need to try to pressure them, preferably with Dr. Boom, Mad Genius and your new dragons. However, you will most likely fail, because Odd Dragon Warrior is really, really bad against such combo decks.

Your most important card in slow matchups is Dr. Boom, Mad Genius. Getting an early Boom means that you get from ten to twenty uses of its powerful Hero Power, and that alone can outvalue most decks. While in some matchups you can simply armor yourself out of reach, the Boom plan is often the more reliable one in all other matchups, even though some of them can be won in fatigue as well. Frost Lich Jaina is a rare exception where there is a risk that Jaina can benefit from anything you may play and simply tanking up can starve her of Water Elementals. Even there, it depends on how early you draw Boom and how early the Mage draws Jaina.

Your new dragons can also enable you to maintain pressure. Smolderthorn Lancer, Dragonmaw Scorcher, and Crowd Roaster all provide removal that does not wipe the entire board, and as such you can have minions on the board going face while these cards deal with any threats the opponent may play. Use them when you want to build or protect your own board, and the wide board clears when you do not.

When facing slow decks, you should keep in mind the possibility of a Skulking Geist. When you play against decks that are likely to include Skulking Geist, such as Even Warlock and Big Spell Mage, you should not value your Shield Slam and Omega Assembly too highly: it is often a good idea to use at least some of them before Geist can be played in order to ensure value from them. Note that as Skulking Geist is an even-cost card, you never have to worry about it when playing against Odd decks.

When you play a slow matchup where both players wait a lot, pay attention to your hand size. If you know that some of your cards are not important for the matchup, try to get rid of them early as long as you can get some value from them. Brawling just a minion or two is perfectly fine in a matchup where Brawl is not really needed – it can be a difficult card to get rid of, too, as it can only be cast when there are at least two minions on the board. The same applies to Reckless Flurry: if you will build up a lot of armor in the matchup, Reckless Flurry becomes almost impossible to use, as you would effectively deal tens of points of damage to yourself. In such matchups, it is better to use it early, if at all, and then start building up that armor.

A waiting game where one player has a hand full of removal usually means that the opponent will simply wait and force that player to waste cards. If you have some extra space in your hand and your opponent’s hand is full, you can choose when to act while your opponent is forced to act every turn or burn cards. If your hand is too full, you are also not able to use cards that generate more cards, such as Stonehill Defender and Omega Assembly.

A Druid opponent may mill you with Naturalize if your hand is too full, so it is important to maintain some empty space to play around that – unless there is an imminent threat of Hakkar, the Soulflayer combo, in which case you specifically want to fill your hand in order to burn any Corrupted Bloods. Omega Assembly is a good card to fill your hand on demand in such case.

Odd Dragon Warrior Card Substitutions

All varieties of Control Warrior are expensive to build, because the majority of their removal cards – which are the whole point of the archetype – are Epics, and there are no lower rarity substitutes for them.

• Shield Slam, Reckless Flurry, Smolderthorn Lancer, Brawl, and Supercollider are all Epics, and they form the majority of your removal package. There are no effective replacements.
• Crowd Roaster is yet another Epic removal card, but it is less important than the others and can be replaced with another dragon to maintain the synergies, even though there are no great dragons that fit the archetype. The best fit is Ysera, but it is a Legendary minion. Your only other somewhat decent options are Cobalt Scalebane and Nightmare Amalgam, another Epic.
• Baku the Mooneater cannot be replaced, as then you no longer have any reason to play an Odd deck.
• Zilliax is a great card that benefits from the other Mechs in the deck. Its replacement does not have to be a Mech though. Amani War Bear, Direhorn Hatchling, and Faceless Manipulator are some of the options.
• Dr. Boom, Mad Genius is your main value engine. There are no viable non-legendary replacements. You could use Elise the Trailblazer or Ysera to get some more value into the deck.