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Potential Swaps:
- 1 x (2) Holy Light
- 1 x (2) Ironbeak Owl
- 1 x (3) Big Game Hunter
- 1 x (3) Earthen Ring Farseer
- 1 x (3) Sword of Justice
- 1 x (6) Sylvanas Windrunner
- 1 x (6) The Black Knight
Notes:
- (1) Elven Archer gives us a convenient way to deal 1 damage which can come in handy since Paladin lacks a hero power ping. You can also cheaply combo it with (2) Equality to remove a big enemy minion in a pinch. VS aggro lists you can efficiently remove many common early game drops with (1) EA. You can also run (3) Sword of Justice for a more value oriented way to deal 1 damage, but you take face damage, get hurt badly by weapon removal (though you could argue that you’re just protecting your future weapons from removal), it’s very slow and can interfere with our ability to efficiently play out (4) Truesilver Champion, that sort of thing. You can also stack the damage from (1) Elven Archer with your weapons whereas you cannot do this with (3) SoJ. Still, especially in longer/slower games (3) SoJ is worth consideration.
- (2) Holy Light was run commonly in many OG Control Paladin lists as a 1-of, but my issue with it is the card really doesn’t provide all that much healing for its cost and it does nothing in long control matchups but trigger (2) Wild Pyro. Still, it helps a lot VS aggro or Freeze Mage matchups and being able to cheaply trigger Pyro is nice. An alternative to this might be (3) Earthen Ring Farseer — you get a non-trivial body alongside a bit of healing though the amount of healing is lower and you cannot trigger Pyro with (3) ERF.
- (1) Humility + (3) Aldor Peacekeeper can be combo’d with (5) Stampeding Kodo for removal. (1) Humility can also very cheaply trigger (2) Wild Pyro.
Cool deck. I gave it a good, honest shot in top 50 legend.
Very close to being a great deck, but I don’t think it can fully hack it in the current meta. It does the same thing a warrior does (remove and heal) but it lacks card draw. Holy Light may be cheaper than Shield Slam and give 1 more hp but it doesn’t cycle a card. Other than Wild Pyromancer we don’t have anything that can help trigger multiple draws for an Acolyte of Pain, which is a standard card draw choice for control decks in classic HS.
It does some attractive things that other decks don’t, but still doesn’t have a strong enough finish to win its good matchups convincingly. For example, against Rogue we can play Truesilver on 4 to clear a 3/3 and their Azure Drake on the next turn. Then we cast Pyro -> Coin -> Consecration, Pyro -> Equality, Equality -> Consecration to clear Gadgetzan. Even though this is tough for rogue to deal with, they can still patiently wait for our taunts to be removed or sapped and then just OTK us with Leeroy — since our taunts cost so much it’s hard to play enough in a turn to not lose.
Against zoolock (which our deck counters) we can still lose to t1 Priestess, especially if it gets a Harvest Golem to 5 hp, outside of our removal range. Even if we handle our opponent’s board early we don’t necessarily win because they can still have card advantage due to us not drawing cards.
Also I think Holy Light belongs in the list. It’s too tough to stabilize our hp total against aggressive decks like hunter or zoo without it (we’re taking damage for turns 1-4).
Still a nice list.
Also should mention that I think Earthen Ring Farseer is better than Harvest Golem for this list. Good enough board control early, has an actual effect later in the game, and since we don’t play BoK we can’t take advantage of our opponent ignoring our 3 drop.
I used this exactly list this month (Season 91) to power me from Diamond 3 to Legend in Classic for the first time. I found it to be a strong counter to Warlock (Handlock and Zoo) and Control Warrior. Here are my stats:
Overall winrate: 76% (13-4)
Druid: 2-2
Priest: 1-0
Rogue: 1-0
Warlock: 6-1
Warrior: 3-1
My favorite play with the deck was killing a concealed Gadgetzan Auctioneer with a Wild Pyromancer + Consecration + Humility on my own minion play on turn 7. I considered some of the potential swaps you suggested, but this list has a great balance against the current meta.
Thanks to Blindbison for the list and the notes that helped me make sense of it!