The Lich King Boss Adventure – Deathrattle Rogue Deck List Guide

It’s a rare sight to behold, seeing a Rogue deck without any spells, but Lich King’s The Price of Power would destroy them anyway. Instead, this deck does things the old fashioned way – by curving into increasingly stronger minions until it overwhelms even the lord of undeath himself. The early game consists of cheap cards that allow you to get on the board early and stay relevant throughout the first few turns, with a strong emphasis on the 3-drop slot. Later in the game these cards will serve as activators for things like Vilespine Slayer and Bonemare. We also cheat a few coins into the deck in the form of Tomb Pillager. The overarching theme of deathrattle recursion allows for strong, on-curve plays throughout the later turns, leading up to a devastating N'Zoth, The Corruptor.

MULLIGANS

The primary card that you’d want to look for in the opening hand is Prince Keleseth, the only 2-drop in the deck. The reason to play him is that he will make all of your mid and late game minions have more than 5 health, which allows them to survive the Frostmourne attack. Look for your burgling cards since they always give you coins, which will help you ramp into your bigger threats ahead of the curve, especially Shaku, the Collector – it’s easy to protect him in the early turns and it won’t be long before you get more than an Innervate‘s worth out of him.

THE LICH KING PLAY STRATEGY

In the early game you want to fight for the board and get the upper hand with efficient cards like Buccaneer, which will let your weapon deal with the 2/2 Ghouls. Trade aggressively with your smaller minions and weapons and try to set up a clean turn for Vicious Fledgling early on because it can snowball the entire game by itself. Later you want to transition through the midgame with tempo plays based around generating value from your deathrattle cards and using the leftover cheap minions as combo activators. Alternatively, they can be cleared with Hemet, Jungle Hunter in order to provide significantly better topdecks and make sure you don’t fall behind.

Turn 7 is when the Lich King will play Frostmourne , removing his board and filling it with 2/6 minions. Luckily, that’s where this deck is at it’s strongest, considering none of his minions can trade favourably with any of yours. The primary blowout card here is Bonemare, which won’t die to the weapon thanks to Prince Keleseth and will pull another minion out of range as well. Another noteworthy interaction is Harrison Jones – you won’t destroy the weapon, but you will still draw cards off of the effect, which will refuel your nearly exhausted hand to continue applying pressure.

Once he loses Frostmourne, the king will resummon any minions he previously had on the board, which will give you the opportunity to use your bigger and more efficient minions to value trade and snowball the game into a clean victory. AoE removal is scarce and should not be played around too much, but try to only use the N’Zoth follow up play only  if you absolutely have to. At this point, you will be on a clock to finish out the game thanks to the Lich King’s new hero power – “Deal X damage to the enemy hero. +1 Damage each time”. As a Rogue you have lost health due to trading with weapons, but you should have a much stronger board at that stage which will allow you to finish him off.

Your entire strategy revolves around playing the best possible minion on-curve throughout most of the game, supplementing it with a little bit of removal and some additional value, so try to go for plays that put the most stats on the board as quickly as possible and you will snowball the game through value trading and efficiency!

Addendum: After the final wing was unlocked in EU, I went ahead and used the exact same decklist to take down the Lich King on the first try and this time I took pictures of the key moments as a proof of concept, which you can find in this imgur album.