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Mulligans
General Mulligans
Going first you typically want to have a one drop. Consider whether your opponent is likely to play a 1 attack minion on their turn one (especially if you're on the draw), and choose your one drop accordingly. Keep Waste Remover on the draw; and generally on the play, but not with other slow drops. You have a good chance to hit a one drop if you mull aggressively since we run 7. Double Baritone Imps can also be quite a difficult opening to deal with.
As an addendum: if you're facing a lot of DK, you can just play Sludge on Wheels against them on turn 2 or 3 and their AOE can't clear it, so it protects your board. It might also be reasonable to keep Pop'gar on the coin against DK or Warrior. I think you still just want to go all in on tempo against Druid because they lack removal and have much more trouble dealing with pressure.
If Treants or Aggro Paladin in the meta, we'll likely want to tech Defial in and keep it on the coin against them.
This is an updated version of the list I used to climb to Legend earlier in the season, including some new cards from the mini set that I believe improve the deck. I’ve modified the guide slightly to reflect the updates, and added my opinion on Disciple of Sargeras as well:
I realized that the power of the Sludge Beatdown list lies in its insane early game tempo. There are many slower, greedy decks in the meta at the moment. However, this deck is also pretty good against Treants (as the adage goes, you either want to be slightly slower than your opponent, or much faster). There is not much in the meta that can remove a single big beatstick like Waste Remover early in the game. Getting to clear 2-3 cards for free with Sludges when you drop him is tremendous.
Monstrous Form and Forge of Wills do not take advantage of this strength the deck has. They often amount to win more cards, they are not the most mana efficient, and they can be quite dead in the hand if you don’t already have a good board presence. Forge of Wills->pass is not an acceptable turn 3.
I dropped the Mech/Excavate package from the old version, added a Furnace Fuel, and a pair each of Trogg Gemtossers and Chaos Creations. These cards are both great for keeping up tempo and adding some reach that the deck really appreciates (perhaps even more now with the new tools Druid and Priest also received in the mini set). It’s nice to have a real alternative 3 drop to play to improve our average curve.
I wanted to minimize the number of dead cards you can draw so you can keep the pressure up and finish off the opponent with burn spells. Tour Guide is nice, despite being a 1/1, to weave in Lifetap when possible. In many games, you’ll see most of the cards in your deck by turn 7 or 8, between milling and drawing.
Some cards to consider running are Astalor, a Felstring Harp, Defile, or perhaps slightly greedier cards like Symphony of Sin, Rafaam, or Drathir.
I strongly recommend against using Steamcleaner, as it has anti-synergy with Waste Remover. What you want to ideally do most games is keep Remover on the board while pushing more Sludges to the bottom of your deck with Disposal Assistant and Sludge on Wheels on subsequent turns, so you don’t have to trade and can keep tagging face for 7+ damage. You’ll never be able to get value off of Steamcleaner if you’re curving out properly, and in practice Steamcleaner will rarely ever be that blowout/comeback card with 7 Sludges or something just sitting in your deck. If your early game ends up taking more advantage of your fatigue package (which is not necessarily bad either), Steamcleaner is also just a dead draw.
Disciple of Sargeras is another card I’m not a huge fan of, which makes running a bigger Imp package a bit hard. You don’t want to play Disciple unforged, but you also don’t want to spend 2 mana to forge her. Her discard requirement unnecessarily compounds the potential awkwardness of the deck’s plays for an upside that’s not really as good as Trolley Problem. We don’t ever want to forge this only to discard a Crescendo for instance, but if you play the Crescendo instead of forging you could end up with a vanilla 3/3. Trolley Problem is good enough if you have to discard something useful, and better if you don’t.
Crescendos and Defile are good against Treants and Paladin dudes, or even against Dragon Golems. Gemtosser can also be quite decent against Paladin. These cards have great synergy with the Sludge package because they keep low health minions off the board. Crescendo has obvious synergy with Pop’gar as an AOE Fel spell.
To reiterate, you really want to pressure the opponent early game with relentless board presence and free Sludge damage; and if necessary, finish them off with Crescendos, Creations and Sludges from hand on turns 6-8. I think this list replaces all cards that muck up that strategy with more appropriate ones, although there is still certainly room for improvement. Hopefully the deck gets more to work with in the mini set! (it did!)
