Stonekeep’s Highlander Paladin – Doom in the Tomb

Highlander Paladin got surprisingly popular on the ladder lately – and the popularity is backed up by some solid results. Zephrys the Great is carrying the deck, while Sir Finley of the Sands adds some extra value too, especially if you manage to get him early in the game. When talking about Paladin in the upcoming Doom in the Tomb event, most of players are looking towards Secret Paladin, since it got much more support (Avenge + Mysterious Challenger), but Highlander Paladin might be a dark horse here. While the deck does not use the new Paladin cards, it relies heavily on N'Zoth, The Corruptor, which might work really well in the current Paladin archetype.

When it comes to the curve, it’s a classic Midrange deck, a little faster than the ones we currently see on the ladder. That’s because it wants to draw out games for a bit longer to leverage the huge swing from N’Zoth. But which minion you can get back, exactly? Starting with small stuff – Mecharoo, Loot Hoarder, Harvest Golem, SN1P-SN4P and Replicating Menace. Those are not really powerful, but they will be a good filler on top of a few bigger minions. One of the strengths of the small Deathrattle Mechs is that even if the board gets cleared, you still get a bunch of small tokens back – technically even reviving those minions would be good enough of a board flood. But that’s obviously not all. Mechano-Egg, Khartut Defender, Mechanical Whelp, Sylvanas Windrunner and Tirion Fordring are the big stuff. Again, very powerful options that have amazing anti-AoE properties. When you drop a full board like that, your opponent HAS to play something like Brawl, which gets much weaker because he still has a second board (+a 5/3 weapon) to clear.

In theory, we might have too many small Deathrattle minions, especially with SN1P-SN4P counting as up to three. It might mean that N’Zoth will bring back them instead of the big guns. The issue, however is somewhat resolved by Magnetize – if you Magnetize SN1P-SN4P or Replicating Menace into something, you will no longer get them back from N’Zoth, since they count as a buff. So depending on your matchup, hand and situation you can decide to play them as minions, or Magnetize to remove them from the pool of Deathrattles. Those small Mechs, however, are the reason why I didn’t want to play Kangor's Endless Army. With so many 1/1 tokens from them, it will be very easy to miss and not get back the big Mechs you want to revive.

Of course, the deck can be made a bit faster or slower depending on the meta. Tech cards can also be adjusted. The only tech I’ve decided to add right now is Spellbreaker – I believe that Silence will be very strong in the upcoming meta, possibly to the point of adding another Silence card (such as Ironbeak Owl).