Resurrect Priest Deck List Guide – Uldum Doom – October 2019

Resurrect Priest Mulligan Strategy & Guide

VS Fast Decks

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

• Shadow Word: Pain and Penance – By far your best early-game removal tools in a deck with little to do over the first few turns: limiting your opponent’s damage output in the first few turns is crucial to your success against aggro decks.
• Mass Hysteria – This will often serve as the point where you truly turn your tables on your opponent, clearing the board they’ve established early in the game before you begin dropping taunt after taunt after taunt. Lightbomb is both slower and less reliable against aggro, so it isn’t a viable mulligan alternative.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

• Bone Wraith – Though it’s a very effective stall tool, the statline of the minion means that most aggro decks will be able to value-trade through it, forcing you to use different tools as well to clear up the rest of your opponent’s board. As such, you can’t just rely on this Taunt to carry you through the early game.
• Zilliax and Khartut Defender – If you have a stable gameplan lined up for the first four or five turns, you want to keep these around as logical follow-ups. However, much like Bone Wraith, they aren’t enough on their own to stabilize.
• Forbidden Words – Though you’d prefer the removal options listed above in the early game against aggro, it’s certainly better than nothing and worth keeping if you’re missing the rest.

VS Slow Decks

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

• Forbidden Words – The most flexible of removal options, since you won’t be doing anything significant for the first few turns you want to have some answer in case your opponent drops a high priority target.
• Sylvanas Windrunner – Not only is it great to match a high-value minion with it, Sylvanas is also a minion you’d love to add to your Resurrect pool as soon as possible.
• Convincing Infiltrator – Think of it as a budget Sylvanas of sorts with a similar impact on your gameplay.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

• Ragnaros the Firelord – The logic is same as with Sylvanas: you want to juice up your Resurrection pool as much as possible if you can.
• Mass Resurrection or Zerek's Cloning Gallery – If it’s a really, really slow matchup, it’s your first bomb out of many.
• Shadow Word: Pain and Shadow Word: Death – Ideally, you want your minions’ Deathrattle effects to take care of your opponents’ big threats, therefore you should only keep these if you expect crucial early-game targets for them in specific matchups.

Resurrect Priest Play Strategy

VS Aggro Decks

Resurrect Priest has inevitability against basically every aggro deck in the meta, able to block off their minion damage by a wall of Taunts with the added capability of huge heals via Khartut Defenders, Zilliax and the hero power. As such, it’s a question of staying alive until the finish line.

You need to carefully ration out your early-game removal tools. Eventually, you will need a Mass Hysteria or another AoE to take care of the opponent’s accumulated board, and you should choose your targets carefully on the way there. For instance, it’s not worth using a Penance or a Shadow Word: Pain on a vanilla 2/3 like Questing Explorer minion whose damage output you can fully mitigate with Lesser Heal, at no cost of using a card. However, the same can’t be said of a Sorcerer's Apprentice or an EVIL Totem.

Speaking of which, special mention needs to be given to the Shaman matchups, because it’s tough to categorize them based on aggression itself. It’s a tough nut to crack and one of the main things which keep this deck down in the charts. Though it may seem like a value-based approach, the real danger playing against Quest-based builds is their ability to deal massive amounts of damage to you from their hand, so you will need to prioritize resurrecting Khartut Defenders against them when possible. However, when you play against a pure token/Evolve-oriented aggressive build, they almost exclusively rely on minion damage to take you down, and therefore, as counter-intuitive as it may seem at first, Convincing Infiltrator becomes the one you want to stack.

This dynamic is important in other aggro matchups as well: you want to pay close attention to their main damage source and prioritize minion development accordingly. In fact, manipulating the resurrection odds is one of the most crucial aspects of this deck regardless of opposition.

VS Control Decks

Whew. Relax. Take a deep breath. Grab a cup of coffee or something. You’ve got all the time in the world. It’s going to be a long one. This means you’ll have at least a bit of a chance to manipulate your Resurrection pool. You’d prefer to play N'Zoth, The Corruptor later down the line expecting to bring back half a dozen copies of Sylvanas Windrunner over six Khartut Defenders in this case.

Since this deck runs absolutely no card draw and has no reach to work with other than Ragnaros the Firelord, it will generally be your opponent who has to assume the beatdown role. These are fairly old-school matchups with finite value to work with: you want’t to give as little as possible to force out a board clear, and you want to be as greedy as possible before committing a card like Plague of Death. There is little no point in pushing for damage in these matchups (unless your opponent can drown you in value, like a Control Warrior player, a truly miserable experience which was thankfully made quite rare by the Shaman decks on the ladder): since you play so many massive and impactful minions, you only need one board to stick at any point to solidify your advantage. Calculate with four big turns: the two copies of Mass Resurrection, your N'Zoth, The Corruptor and (to a lesser extent) Catrina Muerte. Otherwise, play out your threats one by one to force out a response and focus on gaining value whenever you can. Since these games will often go all the way to fatigue – especially the mirror matches! – please don’t forget about that cup of coffee we’ve mentioned above.

Resurrect Priest Card Substitutions

Though we’ve featured Furyhunter’s #1 Legend deck, we’ve also had some success early in the expansion with a slightly different build which had a greater emphasis on interacting with your own minions on the board. Since it is a slightly cheaper alternative (featuring only Zilliax as a Legendary which you don’t necessarily have access to as part of the Doom in the Tomb event), we’ve decided to list it in full for you below:

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