Tommy J’s Cheap Heroic Archaedas Shaman

Tommy J generously allowed us to host his decks and guides using (mostly) Basic cards to take down The League of Explorers Heroic bosses. Be sure to check out his YouTube Channel.

For me this was an awesome fight, and I finally got to play something other than Priest or Mage! Basic Shamans have pretty good synergy in this fight in my opinion, and with the addition of a few League of Explorers cards it only gets better. So for this, I constructed a sort of battlecry based deck, in order to buff the statues, allowing the otherwise useless 0/2 bodies on my side of the board to become more than that. Since most buffing cards are battlecries I added Brann Bronzebeard, the new Legendary card from this wing, as well as the Rumbling Elemental. Note that around turn 2-4 Archaedas will likely play Pit Snake, and obviously playing Brann into one of those is a bad idea unless you absolutely have to. Also, Frostwolf Warlords will actually get their +1/1 twice per minion if you have a Brann down, which is awesome! (and even without Brann, that card is great on this fight).

So the Archaedas fight is about ensuring you control the statues on not only your opponents, but your side of the board. Yours will never be attacked and effectively just block you from playing anything, so buffs are required in order to get them out of the way. Essentially, you want to kill as many as you can on both sides so when the boss decides to shatter it doesn’t one shot you (which is actually exactly what happened to me in one of my attempts). If you can manage to stay on top of the statues the fight is actually pretty easy, as the boss has to use 1 mana per turn to use his hero power.

Mulligan

Ideally, you want something to drop on turn 1, and then a Flametongue Totem on turn 2. If you don’t get the Flametongue, it isn’t the biggest deal (I didn’t get one in my kill attempt at all). Also, Brann is incredibly useful in this deck, so if you get him I’d hold onto him.

Card Additions

Cheap minions for early on. I have the Voodoo Doctor/Elven Archer due to their synergy with Brann/Rumbling Elemental, but you may find yourself wanting to add more/stronger ones. Also, any card that will buff your own statues in order to help you remove them, such as Defender of Argus, Abusive Sergeant, Raid Leader, Dire Wolf Alpha, etc. Two great common cards you can add to help with clearing statues are Dust Devil and Whirling Zap-o-matic.

Cards to Remove

The Djinni of Zephyrs is honestly fairly average in this deck – he was added as a sort of “if I get to late game I can windfury him and something else” type minion, but you really don’t need that and it’s not the playstyle you’d want for this fight. Speaking of, the Windfury isn’t really necessary either, so both it and the Windspeaker can also be removed.