I Am Not Prepared: The Diary of My Race to 1000 Demon Hunter Wins (Week 7)

Turns out you can give up on Altruis the Outcast and Skull of Gul'dan for the most powerful hero power in the game! I’ve played a slightly different build during my climb with a larger emphasis on – you’ve guessed it – dealing face damage and closing out the game with burn. I haven’t actually seen this build as I put together my own, so I can’t offer like-for-like comparisons, but here are the differences: instead of 2x Crimson Sigil Runner, the second Consume Magic, 2x Happy Ghoul and 2x Priestess of Fury, I’ve got two copies of Fire Fly, 2x Blackwald Pixie, Leeroy Jenkins, one Glacial Shard and the second copy of Mana Burn. It went 6-4 in the mirror in Diamond, so I quite happy to offer it to you as a more SMOrc-y alternative if that’s your cup of tea.

As a minor aside, going back to Bronze 10 certainly made it easier to rack up wins by itself, but I haven’t realized how much of an impact the high Legend queue times and the opponents thinking longer had on my games/hour ratio in Standard. Still, we’re doing just fine based on my original 10 win/day battleplan!

Wild Enthusiasm

So if you’re wondering whether it’s worth trying out Wild even if you don’t have any of the old cards, here’s what I think: the Wild ladder up until Diamond 5 (at least at this fairly late point in the month) is basically what we want a Casual mode to be: wacky homebrews and some truly offbeat ideas with the occasional WTF card and synergy showing up from the game’s past. It was breeze to climb to that point from Bronze 10 (even without a meaningful star bonus), basically using a Standard deck with Fire Fly and Glacial Shard tossed in for most of my playtime: 5-0 in Bronze, 6-1 in Silver, 21-4 in Gold, 21-6 in Platinum and 47-22 in Diamond.

You’ll note the major downswing in winrate (hey, still 66%) once I hit the highest league, even though that was when I made my transition to BAKUGEANCE. Basically, the real Wild ladder experience only begins around Diamond 5 with some truly powerful builds emerging, and I’m not entirely sure whether you could make it to Legend from that point on with a Standard deck, at least in sub-100 games. Here’s what you should watch out for:

The mirror – Baku Demon Hunter is a legit deck. Like with every tempo mirror, fight for the board, and if you’re using my build, you’ll likely have a stronger curve than your opponent.

Quest Mage – You probably heard the horror stories, but these builds are very different from the ones in the past. From what I’ve seen, Time Warp is generally used to get free swings with Arcane Giants and Mana Giants, and Flamewaker is also an important part of the puzzle. They almost never make it against your aggression. Sorcerer's Apprentice and Flamewaker are must-kills, and an early Mana Burn pretty much puts them on the back foot for the whole game.

Secret Mage – This it the other oft-referenced Wild deck on Reddit, and it also struggles against the unrelenting tempo output of Demon Hunter, especially this build. If you are mindful of your health total – try to play the larger minion into Explosive Runes (especially because Mirror Entity isn’t really a thing), avoid getting Eye Beam Counterspelled and keep a copy of Aldrachi Warblades in your mulligan –, you should be able to do well against them.

Discardlock – I always hated this archetype and I’m sad to report it’s pretty damn good against you (though apparently just tier 2 overall in the format) – my record against Warlocks in Diamond is 5-10, though that does include the occasional control matchup as well. Discard, at its core, is a mechanic which values a loss of resources with tempo. Team 5 tried over and over again to turn in into a value mechanic for reasons I never could fully comprehend. Well, they reached critical mass in Wild: twenty-four cards in the deck either discard a card or synergize off of the effect. Malchezaar's Imp, The Soularium, Darkshire Librarian, Felstalker, Tiny Knight of Evil, Fist of Jaraxxus et al coupled with Hand of Gul'dan shenanigans works way too well against your plans of early aggression. Try to slow them down with an early Mana Burn and push as much face damage as possible. Sometimes you’ll get there. Most of the time, your soul will suffer.

Ramp Druid – I never really figured out what their gameplan was because I just killed them before they could utilize their ramp. Sorry!

Rez Priest – You know the drill. Kill them before they put up a wall. Mass Hysteria is their preferred choice of mid-game AoE, which doesn’t always work against your board. Hench-Clan Thug can be a real MVP here. The one copy of Consume Magic I added on the final day of the climb serves especially well against them.

The rest – I played two games each against Hunter, Paladin and Rogue, three against Warrior and four against Shaman. You’re likely looking at a homebrew if you face those classes in the upper echelons of Wild right now (though the VS report pegs Odd Paladin as a sleeper in the format).

I’m also quite happy to report that there are a lot of players in Wild right now. My queue times were perfectly normal, and I hit Legend on May 24^th at 4287 – with a Leeroy Jenkins lethal, which I enjoyed immensely –, suggesting a decent number of players. I will return early in June to test the waters at the beginning of the month as well – armed with a higher star bonus but facing a more dedicated set of opponents, it should be interesting to see how my laddering experience will change along the vines. However, I will return to Standard for the final week of the month – it’d be funny if I finished in the top 200 to try a Masters Tour qualifier after basically maining a single class for the entire expansion. Why oh why did they get rid of Specialist?

My Predictions, for What They’re Worth (And an Overdue Tech Update)

• No new Demon Hunter build will emerge until a new content release or another balance change
• Even more Reddit complaints about Priest
• I won’t clinch top 200 at the end of the month
• I will not have my vengeance
• I will not succeed at reverse psychology

For those of you interested in my computer troubles (thank you for the kind words in last week’s comment section!), I’m happy to report a… partial success. Turns out two of the RAM slots on my motherboard were the main cause of my troubles, which means I can kindasorta run around 1.5 programs right now without a commit charge overflow and a crash. It should tide me over until I sort out a fancy-schmancy brand new machine sometime next week! (I will have pictures on Twitter for those interested in this sort of stuff.) My current PC has served me faithfully for eight years or so, but I think it’s time to move on to something beefier. If I can interface the spare computing power with my brain, I’ll be Legend 1 in both formats in no time!