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Mulligans
Aggro Mulligans
Against Aggro Decks, you need the Sheep to control the board early on, along with the Doomsayer and Frost Nova for a quick clear. Mad Scientist is always a good pick for a body on the board and to get Duplicate or Ice Block up.
Midrange Mulligans
Like against aggressive decks, your goal is to survive the early game and not focus on the combo, although keepinf Thaurissan might not be the worst decision.
Combo Mulligans
Like control, you keep the standard hand of draw power and prepare a turn 5 or 6 Thaurissan with duplicate.
Control Mulligans
Control is just the standard picks. You want to keep Thaurissan and you are hoping to get a Duplicate from the Scientist or draw into one before turn 6 (or turn 5 if you have the coin).
My take on Echo Mage or Giants Mage; this deck is inspired by Strifecro’s Exodia Deck and Neviilz’s Echo Mage.
There are two win conditions:
1. The typical Giants Mage win: 2x Molten Giant+ Alexstrasza your opponent and swing for 16 damage. The Giants Mage win condition involves swarming the board with Molten Giants thanks to Echo of Medivh and overpowering your opponent. This strategy relies heavily on having Ice Block up so you can safely drop to 10 health or less in order to play free Moltens. Using Sunfury Protector with 2 Moltens and 1 Echo can allow you to have 4 taunted Moltens in a single turn for 8 mana (assuming your health is <10.
2. The Exodia win: 4xSorcerer's Apprentice+Archmage Antonidas=Infinite Fireballs. More specifically, you need to use Emperor Thaurissan to reduce the cost of the “combo” pieces and use Echo of Medivh in order to get 4 Apprentices. This combo is very dependent on Thaurissan and getting the reductions to land on very specific cards. Let’s look at some specific examples where your board is empty (since you cannot rely on any minions surviving on board), but you have the win:
x1 Echo, Antonidas, 2x Sorcerer’s is all you need for the combo, but the issue is after playing Antonidas(7) and an Apprentice(2), you are left with 1/10 mana and you cannot play the second Apprentice, let alone the Echo and two more afterwards. After reducing all four combo pieces by one, you can play Antonidas(6), x2 Apprentice(2), and an Echo(1- remember, the Apprentice’s reduce your Echo as well). You still have 1/10 mana, but you cannot play the two other Apprentices.
Two reductions is the right amount: Antonidas(5), x2 Sorcerer’s(0), Echo(0), and x2 Sorcerer’s (4) leaves you with one mana left over and a fireball from Antonidas (thanks to the Echo) which now costs 0 mana. So this combo with two reductions can be done on turn 9 or 10. This means you need to duplicate Thaurissan for this to be an unstoppable OTK. By that, I mean without relying on minions surviving a turn on the board. Since on turn 10 you have one mana left over, you can miss one reduction on one card alone.
So the actual combo is Emperor Thaurissan, (most likely) x1 Duplicate, x1 Archmage Antonidas, x2 Sorcerer's Apprentice, x1 Echo of Medivh. This win condition is much harder to pull off than the Giants win considering how specific the cards in your hand need to be.
The weaknesses of both win conditions are what inspired me to combine both into one deck. If you play correctly, your opponent should not know that you are playing any kind of Echo Mage variant of Freeze Mage and he/she won’t play around the Giants. Unlike Neviilz’s list, the x2 Sludge Belcher, x1 Big Game Hunter, x1 Polymorph, x1 Loatheb, and the x1 Sylvannas Windrunner are not standard Freeze Mage cards and are giveaways. Instead of his minion based stall cards or control/tempo minions, I chose to run the x2 Blizzard that Freeze Mage runs. The decision to not run more minions is simple: my Echos and Duplicates are not being used on any minion. They are reserved for particular minions. In Strifecro’s Exodia Mage, he ran x2 Antique Healbot and x2 Ice Barrier for stall. I believe that his list still fell short when he just couldn’t draw the entire combo- the deck soley revolved around the “Exodia”.
Often times, I use the x2 Molten Giant, Alexstrasza, and Sunfury Protector to keep aggro and midrange from killing me while I try to draw the Exodia combo. In that senario, either I echo/duplicate my giants and have board presence, or I’m able to draw the combo.
The hardest part of this list is knowing when or when not to play Thaurissan. In my opinion, you need at least two of the four cards in your hand, you have no intention on playing Echo of Medivh, and you have a Duplicate up and ready. I still prefer to have at least 3/4 pieces.
Duplicate Targets in order of importance:
