The main plan is simple. Steal the opponent’s hand and deck by playing multiple copies of Pirate Admiral Hooktusk. As Rafaam says, “I like your deck, I think I will take it!”

!DISCLAIMER WARNING! This deck is currently experimental and highly UNoptimized. I’m posting this so I can show that I was the first person to play this fun and stupid combo, and so I can share the deck list with people who ask me what I’m playing. Only play this if you want to live the meme. It’s a great meme. Highlights include stealing the Mage quest and watching them instantly concede, and stealing an entire Mill druid’s hand and deck so they would die to fatigue. Look at me, I’m the Jade Druid now. Other silly moments include a spell slinging competition against big spell mage, burning my combo to board nuke a Mech Pally with multiple huge mechs on turn 4, having two people friend me afterwards to talk about fun meme decks, and constantly milling my cards and dying to fatigue. So far, the best review was an opponent who said “was not expecting things to be stolen”.

This deck is an aggro deck that uses a powerful draw engine to play a pseudo-OTK combo. You must control the board at all times in order to survive against most wild decks. This deck is not as powerful as other wild decks, so it’s important to know your matchups and play your possible outs. This is not a mindless deck. That means you don’t play the full combo sometimes, and you often need take risky draws to top deck answers. It’s a fun deck to pilot, but it can be rage inducing when you don’t draw Toy Boat for multiple matchups in a row, or still lose in spite of stealing 80% of the opponent’s hand and deck. If you like that kind of thing, try this deck out.

The general game plan is to hard mulligan for Toy Boat or power draw cards like Gear Shift or Gone Fishin', and play pirates to draw lots of cards and fight for the board. This deck dies without Toy Boat, since that’s the core of the draw engine. Therefore, it’s important to know when to save pirates in your hand for a huge draw turn, and when to play them without Toy Boat just to keep board control. Sometimes you kill the opponent because you win on board, and other times you fall behind and have to play combo pieces separately to survive against more aggressive decks. But you must maintain board control to survive. Cheap enablers like Counterfeit Coin and Shadowstep together with aggressive pirates like Prize Plunderer or Jolly Roger allow you to burn resources to stay ahead on board to survive to either exhaust aggressive decks of their resources, or stay alive long enough to steal your opponent’s deck.

The main idea of the combo is to use Sonya Waterdancer to create 0 mana copies of Spirit of the Shark and Pirate Admiral Hooktusk so you can play Hooktusk multiple times, stealing everything your opponent has. Hooktusk can pick 3 different things to steal from your opponent. Steal their largest minion, steal 2 cards from their hand, or 5 cards from their deck. It’s possible to steal 8 cards from their hand or 20 cards from their deck on your first combo turn. You will not be able to hold all the cards you steal. Accept it. Milling the opponent’s entire deck on turn 7 is still incredibly valuable, and almost a guaranteed win against many decks. Some people just concede after you steal their deck, even if they still have a chance of winning. Some decks instantly lose if you steal a combo piece they need to win.

The ideal setup is to play Sandbox Scoundrel on an earlier turn, so you have the Mini Scoundrel in hand to combo on turn 7, although coins and the Scoundrel discount give you options for comboing earlier or later. The combo turn is mostly controlled by how lucky you are at drawing everything you need.

Start the combo turn by playing Sonya Waterdancer, then the Mini Scoundrel. You get a 0 mana copy of the Mini Scoundrel. Next, play Spirit of the Shark costing 1 with the discount, giving you a 0 mana copy. Play any remaining coins now to open up more hand space. You’ll need it. Play the 0 mana Mini Scoundrel, which gives your next card a 6 mana discount because of Spirit of the Shark. Finally, play Pirate Admiral Hooktusk for 1 mana, plundering twice from your opponent, and getting a 0 mana copy afterwards. Note that picking multiple Hooktusk options takes a lot of animation time, so play your combo turn as soon as the turn starts.

After the basic combo, there are a lot of options to extend your combo. You can play the second Hooktusk if you need to mill their deck, because your hand is probably already full from the basic combo. You can shadowstep Sonya for extra value, or Breakdance Hooktusk and get a 0 mana copy for even more combo extensions. If you Breakdance or Shadowstep Hooktusk, the next turn you can steal 20 cards from your opponent’s deck in addition to whatever you stole on the combo turn, which probably ends the game on the spot.

The combo is fairly quirky, so here are a few things to remember. Playing coins after Sandbox Scoundrel is the same as prep coin concede, so calculate your discounts and make sure you play coins before playing Scoundrel. The combo is order sensitive, and all cards except Sonya must be at their original cost to play the combo. You cannot play combo pieces earlier and use the discount from Shadowstep, unless you’re giving up on the full combo and fighting for the board instead. Sonya gives you copies *after* you play the card and the battlecry finishes, so stealing 10 cards from your opponent’s deck guarantees that your hand fills up and you don’t get the 0 mana copy of Hooktusk. It’s usually better to pick the “steal a minion” option on an empty board and get an extra free Hooktusk than it is to only play Hooktusk a single time and lose your free copy.

E.T.C.’S BAND (SIDEBOARD):

• Reno Jackson
• Reno, Lone Ranger
• Zephrys the Great

The ETC band is all reno cards for good reason. Playing the combo doesn’t guarantee you instantly win, so you sometimes need to pivot to a control gameplan, where Reno Lone Ranger is king. You end up drawing through your entire deck really fast, and you can copy ETC or return him to hand to get all your reno cards, so they provide very good value. Academic Espionage is there for similar reasons, to keep you from losing in a very long control matchup where you can’t steal their entire deck, but you’re at fatigue because Toy Boat is a crazy good draw engine. I haven’t tested it a lot, because I just put it in to keep me from dying to fatigue again.

I’m still swapping out cards like crazy, so I’m not going to do a detailed writeup of the card choices since the deck is likely going to change a lot. Right now I just want to post the combo for the rest of the internet. Besides the combo pieces, you want Toy Boat, lots of pirates, and lots of cheap spells. If you don’t have a card, it’s probably fine to replace it with something else. This deck isn’t optimized, (Just look at Academic Espionage) so feel free to make lots of substitutions. Just make sure you have Dig for Treasure and Counterfeit Coin. Having a bunch of coins allows you to make incredible power plays very early on, which is the only reason this deck is able to pull off wins against incredibly aggressive decks like Even Shaman. Replacing some of the spells with Prep and Swindle is probably good, but I found Prep was generally worse than coins because Prep doesn’t help power up your Toy Boat turns, which are the backbone of this deck’s success. If you don’t have more expensive spells to use with Prep, coins are better because you can coin minions. I think Watercannon is the best-in-slot weapon, but it can probably be substituted for whatever reasonably priced weapons you have, as long as you have at least 1 Raiding Party and at least 2 weapons for the draw potential and board control. If you include two copies of Raiding Party, you should probably have at least 3 weapons.

If the legendries are too expensive, Toy Boat, Raiding Party, Sandbox Scoundrel, some weapons, small pirates, and one or two copies of Cannon Barrage make a great aggro pirate deck that plays very similarly to this deck, except you try to kill your opponent from hand by filling the board with pirates and then playing Mini Scoundrel into Cannon Barrage for a max of 24 damage from hand. Add a Talented Arcanist, and you’ve got a very lethal deck with no legendries. I’ve got a much more refined Cannon Barrage deck list I’ll post later.