Over-Lord Shaman

I’ve been using a Bloodlust-based Shaman deck on the ladder for a while, but with the rotation of some important Elemental cards, it’s time to reimagine the deck. The deck has three different forms of payoff cards, but luckily all of them revolve around building a wide board and being aggressive.

Bloodlust is the quickest way to achieve your goal of counting down from 30, and luckily it’s simple to drop as many small-to-mid size creatures as you can and then unload it.

Frostwolf Warlord is kind of an inverse Bloodlust, allowing you to go tall rather than wide. It’s not an immediate payoff like Bloodlust, and it’s entirely possible that it won’t be good in the new meta, but it’s worth a try. 

Unbound Elemental and Thunderhead are your other synergy cards, triggering off of Overload. Because cards like Voltaic Burst  and Feral Spirit already feed into our gameplan of going wide quickly, and key low-cost removal spells like Zap! and Lightning Bolt trigger them quickly and reliably, there isn’t much opportunity cost to employing this synergy in our deck.

Sludge Slurper is a new addition to the deck but looks like a good replacement for the all-important Firefly. EVIL Cable Rat is similar, giving you more bodies to put on the board. 

Waterboy is a card I never even considered using before, but it gives you two bodies immediately when used with Shaman’s hero power, so how bad can it be? 

Hench-Clan Hogsteed looks like a pretty decent card, but I’m not sure if it’s right for this deck. I like the idea that it leaves a body behind, but this deck usually doesn’t want to trade minions if it doesn’t have to, preferring to keep as many minions on it’s side of the board as it can at all costs. Rush encourages you to immediately trade off the Hogsteed, which is sometimes necessary but will sometimes be a waste of a Rush minion when you choose not to attack. 

I chose not to include Electra Stormsurge because I was dropping the Elemental synergies. Since the only spell in the deck that Electra combos with nicely is Bloodlust, it seemed too marginal to include. While a turn 8 Electra-Bloodlust has won me plenty of games when my opponent didn’t expect it, it’s a bit of a Christmasland dream and otherwise doesn’t fit in the deck.  Plus, cutting it from our list makes this kind of a budget deck – no Legendaries and only one set of Epics.