Tess Copy Rogue

Tess Greymane was the free legendary card I received from the Witchwood expansion, and I found it so random and easy to abuse I had to build a deck around it. I found the beauty of the card in that every card from a different class you play during the course of a game essentially gets a second life through her battlecry. So, here’s my take on Tess Copy Rogue.

The deck’s core strategy is to create a smaller set of cards of the opposing hero’s class to be abused later in the game by dropping one or multiple Tess Greymane (assuming you’re not facing another rogue). Using an ideal turn 1 Hallucination starts the process by giving you the choice of how you want the “mini deck” to be constructed. Against cubelock, for instance, grabbing a Voidlord, Twisting Nether, or Defile can help beatdown the onslaught of taunt minions you’re bound to come across and turn the board in your favor as they now have to deal with your threats again once Tess hits the field. From there, you manage your curve into the midgame with Blink Fox  or Hench-Clan Thug to add to your second class card pool or set up to destroy your opponent’s minions as they hit the field. As the opportunity arises, Elven Minstrel provides reliable search for the missing pieces of the Tess Greymane puzzle that you may need or supplementary ways to delay your opponent.

Three cards I find essential to maximizing the profit of playing a fun deck like this are Shadowstep, Cheat Death, and Zola the Gorgon. These cards take up five slots in the overall list because they provide so much utility and allow for multiple Tess drops if you feel like snowballing even more. I often find myself using Shadowstep into Blink Fox or SI:7 Agent in early game to fil out my curve or get a cheap 1-drop to combo into Elven Minstrel or Vilespine Slayer and in midgame to pick off big taunts or heavy hitting minions the deck can’t inherently deal with using 3-cost Vilespine Slayer. Cheat Death provides excellent early game support as it’s essentially two more Shadowsteps that activate when your opponent destroys one of your minions and aids in the creation off combos in the midgame or doing more disruption with Blink Fox and SI:7 Agent. The last of these cards is Zola the Gorgon which gives a second or third copy of any card in your deck including minions you’ve played from other classes which now are played twice by Tess. Zola provides every situational minion support possible in just 3 mana, so it’s inclusion in this list was a necessity. 

That’s basically the deck, but I did want to share one interesting story as well as some other details about how this deck performs. This Tess list loves facing cubelocks any day of the week it seems. With all the removal available in Sap and Vilespine Slayer as well as the numerous ways to play these cards again, cubelocks often have a difficult time getting a Voidlord or Possessed Lackey to stick. Not to mention you can always play Twisting Nether to destroy their board and replay it later with Tess after they resummons with Bloodreaver Gul'dan. Once I faced a cubelock deck and drew a Voidlord off a Blink Fox and copied it with Zola the Gorgon to create my own wall of hate and you’d better believe I used Tess Greymane to put two more down later that game. I even used Shadowstep to replay Tess and get out two more Voidlords. This deck can get very crazy given the right setup and matchup as you can see, so I hope some of you find some fun with this list like I do.