Secret Mage Theorycraft Deck List – Saviors of Uldum – August 2019

It may be tempting to try and go slower with a dedicated Secret deck considering the Saviors of Uldum cards provide a lot of damage (Arcane Flakmage, Flame Ward and Cloud Prince), but that wouldn’t work well with this particular class. Mage secrets are the most expensive in the game and therefore they mean the biggest tempo hit if you play them out from hand. Their impact is also massively reduced in the late-game as part of their value comes from the opponent making suboptimal plays as they try to figure out which one you’ve cast – this is much more relevant where they have four or five mana at most than later in the game.

As such, we’ve gone for a more aggressive build, similar to the old Secret Mage lists. Since Mage can’t replicate the sort of huge boards that Mysterious Challenger Secret Paladin or Secret Hunter could off the back of the Lesser Emerald Spellstone, this version prioritizes early minion damage, quasi-stall via the new minion AoE cards and copious amounts of burn to finish off the game. Perhaps the most contentious decision is cutting one Flame Ward, but the other secrets take priority with this strategy. To support early aggression, we’ve shoehorned in two copies of Saronite Taskmaster, especially because this deck is uniquely suited to dealing with the Taunt that gets spawned upon its death.

Normally you might want to try adding Sunreaver Spy to your Secret deck, but in this case I don’t think that’s a good fit. Because Mage Secrets cost 3 mana, you will never get it out buffed on a curve (unlike in Paladin), so lots of the time you would get him out around Turn 4-5, where his 3/4 stats are no longer that impactful.

Since you’re on an aggressive gameplan – don’t forget that Cloud Prince’s Battlecry can hit face! –, your opponents will prioritize trading over hitting face to begin with, plus Arcane Flakmage can basically turn any secret into an instantaneous Flame Ward as it is. Arguably, you could swap a Mirror Entity for a Splitting Image: there’s value in having many different secrets so you can always cast them if needed, not to mention the better draw potential with Subject 9.

With so many ultra-powerful cards arriving in Saviors of Uldum, Mage’s Secret package may not turn out to be strong enough to carry an entire archetype of its own, but it’s one of the more ready-made builds to experiment with in the early days of the expansion – and fairly cheap to boot!