Most Interesting Combos From The Witchwood

When the new expansion lands, some players are looking for the best meta decks. Others simply try to find something they will have fun with. And then, there are players who look for the craziest combos possible. Combos that rarely make it to the meta, often don’t work as well as they would want them to, but are very interesting and feel great to pull off at least once.

In this article, I will showcase some of the combos activates by the Witchwood cards. It means that those combo were NOT possible before the latest expansion, at least not in this form. If you know some other combos, be sure to share them in the comment section!

P.S. I won’t include the Shudderwock OTK combo, because everyone knows about it and people are still getting stressed just from watching it.

King Togwaggle Druid

One of my favorite combos activated by The Witchwood. While some people have attempted to make Togwaggle Druid in Kobolds & Catacombs, when the card first launched, it took another expansion to really make it work. The thing is – before Azalina Soulthief was released, you could swap with your opponent, but they could just swap back.

The idea is to give your opponent your nearly empty (or even empty) deck and take theirs instead – they will pretty much just have whatever they have in their hand to win the game. However, under normal circumstances, they could just switch back for 5 mana and your mischievous plan didn’t work. In order to prevent that, you had to force them to burn the ransom card, which wasn’t that easy. Sure, against slow Warlock you could often just Naturalize + King Togwaggle and everything was fine, but against decks with lower hand sizes, it was much harder to pull off.

However, Azalina came to the rescue. Now you don’t have to burn the ransom – you can just… copy it! Exactly. If you copy their whole hand after playing Togwaggle, that includes the ransom card. So now if they play it, well, you play it and switch decks again. The only way to counter that is when they have Azalina of their own, but that’s not very common. However, packing two high cost Legendaries into a single turn is not easy.

The combo works best in Wild, thanks to the Aviana + Kun the Forgotten King. You can play the entire combo in a single turn, with no way for your opponent to interrupt. In Standard, however, you have to rely on Twig of the World Tree‘s mana refill for it to work, which means that the combo can be stopped by a well-timed weapon removal. Of course, you still have “burn the ransom” backup plan, but like I’ve said before, it doesn’t always work. It’s still a pretty fun deck, and the combo is a really great win condition, when it does work at least.

Witching Hour Devilsaur Combo

Charged Devilsaur + Carnivorous Cube Druid was a sort of off-meta deck already in Kobolds & Catacombs. Come to think about it, Cube has activated lots of really fun combos. This one in particular got a new, huge piece in The Witchwood – Witching Hour.

It’s really simple. Devilsaur is a Beast, the only Beast in your deck. Since the “can’t attack heroes this turn” part is a Battlecry, if you SUMMON it, it doesn’t work, since Battlecries trigger only when you play the card from your hand. So after your Devilsaur dies, you get a 3 mana 7/7 Charge with Witching Hour. Now, you can do a few things with it.

The most impressive combo is definitely OTK with Alexstrasza and Twig of the World Tree. You play Alex with a single Twig charge left, attack with Twig after putting your opponent to 14 health, then play 2x Witching Hour for exact lethal. However, since it requires Twig, it might be countered by your opponent. It’s also countered by the Armor – although you’re still left with 3 huge bodies on the board, so you’re in a great position even if you don’t immediately kill your opponent.

However, there are lots of smaller combos available too, especially if you add Cube to the mix. For example, Witching Hour + Cube + Naturalize is 21 damage in total, with 3 cards, and it leaves 2x 7/7 on the board. And since you run two copies of each of those cards, you can perform the same combo TWICE throughout the game, if that’s necessary.

You can also add Faceless Manipulator to your deck, which means that you will be able to perform two-cards 14 damage combos twice.

Velen + Vivid Nightmare

A deck that got pretty popular early in The Witchwood is nowhere to be seen right now, mostly because the Mind Blast version of Control Priest is just more reliable. But this one is definitely more flashy, and if you want to feel the oldschool Velen Combo Priest vibes, it should be a great deck to try out.

The general idea here is that a single Velen combos really well with Mind Blast, so how about two? Or possibly even three? Yeah, exactly. With this deck, you might be pulling off 40 damage Mind Blasts – a single one is enough to win most of the matchups. But how exactly can you fit all of that into a single turn?

First of all, you need to build your deck correctly. You need to not run too many minions to not interfere with your combo – 4 different minions max, two of which are Radiant Elemental and Prophet Velen. The other two should probably be some sort of card draw. The combo is based around Lesser Diamond Spellstone – or rather its final upgrade, which resurrects 4 different minions.

Once at least one Radiant Elemental and Velen have died, your basic combo is Spellstone (7 mana) + Vivid Nightmare on Radiant + second Vivid Nightmare on Velen + 2x Mind Blast, 20 damage each. 24 damage each if one of the minions you revived was a Bloodmage Thalnos. That’s enough to win most of the matchups. But wait, it can get even better!

If you save one Radiant Elemental and play it before Spellstone, you can copy Velen TWICE and then play 2x 40 (or 48 with Thalnos) damage Mind Blasts. Of course, you can make it even higher if you discover more Mind Blasts with Shadow Visions throughout the game, but that would be an overkill.

Boars + Dire Frenzy + Emeriss

I’ve read a lot of theorycrafts about different types of this one, and it was a fun mental exercise, but it was pretty obvious that it won’t work. This combo, for example, requires multiple turns of set-up in order to work, which is obviously a lot of work, and Hunter doesn’t have enough control tools to keep most of the opponents at bay for that long.

The idea here is simple. You play Stonetusk Boar and 2x Dire Frenzy to shuffle multiple copies of 4/4 version into your deck. Now, you either wait until you draw a few of them, or you play Tol'vir Warden to fish for them. After you get a few of them in your hand (3-4 is usually enough), you play Emeriss to double their stats. Now, you have a bunch of 1 mana 8/8 Beasts with Charge in your hand. With 4 of them, assuming nothing stands in your way, you should be able to deal 32 damage and kill your opponent. Since Dire Frenzy shuffled 3 copies each, you can have up to 6 of them – so 48 damage in total. Add in Hero Power for the round 50 damage. Of course, with 6 of them in your hand, you might not even need to play Emeriss, but drawing all of them is very difficult in Hunter.

The combo, or any Dire Frenzy combo, would be much more reliable if cards discovered from Stitched Tracker kept their buffed stats, but they don’t. So, in the end, it’s a pretty fun combo, but it’s really hard to pull it off in the actual match.

Clockwork Automaton Hunter

Clockwork Automaton was theorycrafted to work very well in Odd Hunter. It doubles the damage from Hero Power – from 3 to 6. However, if it sticks for a single turn and you play the second one, the damage is doubled again to 12 – usually enough to kill your opponent at that point. However, what if instead of going Aggro, we build a combo deck around it?

This combo again is built around Carnivorous Cube. Unlike some of the other classes, Hunter has a very easy to way to “pop” it – Play Dead. It’s even better than something like Dark Pact as this job, simply because the original Cube is still there, and it can get popped naturally again. In this case, however, it’s not necessary.

So, the set up looks like that – with 10 mana available, you play Clockwork Automaton and eat it with Carnivorous Cube, then you pass a turn. During that turn, a lot of things can go badly – any transform effect, or even a simple Silence can ruin your plan. However, if it sticks, you play 2x Play Dead and end up with four Automatons on the board. So your Hero Power deal 3 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 = 48 damage. Since you lots of leftover mana, you can even throw another Automaton from your hand, for 96 damage in total.

Alternatively, sticking Automaton on the board one turn, then playing Cube + 2x Play Dead + Hero Power on the next one is also possible. It dodges silence, but at 4/4 minion is usually very easy to remove.

That’s why the combo is not really a meta thing, it doesn’t work most of the time. A single Silence or removal can stop it. But when it does, shooting your opponent with a 48 (96) damage Hero Power feels great.

Ratcatcher + Wrathguard

This is far, far from the best combo I’ve seen. It’s complicated, hard to pull off, requires many pieces, discounts and such. You could easily combo down your opponent with half of that setup. But I just love it and applaud the creator’s ingenuity. I would seriously never come up with something like that.

I usually start explaining the combo by saying that it’s “simple”, but I won’t this time… because it’s not. You play Summoning Portal, Brann Bronzebeard and Glinda Crowskin. Then you either need to have a minion on the board already or play one (any minion will do, but the higher base stats it has, the better it is). Then you drop Ratcatcher and eat that minion. Since you have Brann on the board, it will “eat” it twice, gaining its stats two times. Then, thanks to the Glinda, your Ratcatcher gets Echo, so you can play it again to eat the original Ratcatcher and gain its stats twice, which doubles the stats (and gives +2/+2 thanks to the Ratcatcher’s base stats). Then, after stacking your minion’s attack, you play Wrathguard and donate it to your opponent with Treachery, then hit it with your Ratcatcher to deal LOTS of damage to your opponent.

Yeah. Between 7 combo pieces and some Emperor Thaurissan discounts necessary (because Portal + Brann + Glinda already cost you 9 mana), the combo is very difficult to pull off in the actual game. Of course, it would be much easier to pull off an OTK with some kind of Leeroy Jenkins or Malygos combo, but where’s fun in that?

Good thing about the combo is that each Ratcatcher gets Rush, and since it grows really quickly, you should be able to get through a few Taunts if necessary. But yeah, that’s probably the only good thing about it. Still, if you have the necessary cards and enough time, I really recommend trying it out. Finally pulling it off after X games feels amazing!