Standout Witchwood Meta Decks After Four Days

Odd Paladin is still one of the most popular, and strongest decks on the ladder. It seems like this is the go-to build if you want an aggressive Paladin deck (“aggressive” not necessarily as in Aggro – the deck leans towards Midrange, but it’s still a pretty aggressive one).

Since it’s the most popular deck on the ladder right now, there are dozens of different lists running around, playing many different 1-drops, with or without Raid Leader (or Stormwind Champion), faster and slower ones. It’s very hard to say which one is the best, so I’m putting the list I’ve been playing with over the weekend. It felt really balanced – enough aggression, enough tempo, enough staying power. You can, of course, make your own tech choices – e.g. Dire Mole or Glacial Shard are pretty popular 1-drops, and if you face lots of Cubes, you might try running the second Ironbeak Owl.

At this point, I’m pretty convinced that Odd Paladin will be one of the top meta decks in The Witchwood. It would be really funny if no one would run broken cards such as Call to Arms or Sunkeeper Tarim anymore, because Odd Paladin would outshine other lists. I don’t think that’s going to happen, because Even Paladin, but also a regular Aggro Paladin are doing just fine.

According to the win rate charts on HSReplay, Even Paladin is doing only slightly worse than its Odd cousin, which still makes it one of the best meta decks right now.

Even though 1 mana Hero Power is not as good as upgraded Hero Power, Even Paladin gets to retain some of  the class’ most powerful tools, like the Call to Arms or Tarim I’ve mentioned above. The fact that you never miss a 1-drop, and that you can put so many extra 1/1 Silver Hand Recruits on the board makes it a really solid choice. Since it retains lots of the Dude Paladin synergies, such as Knife Juggler, Lightfused Stegodon or Tarim, it can often swing the board heavily in its favor.

When it comes to the new additions, The Glass Knight is probably the most interesting one (besides the Genn Greymane, obviously). The 4/3 with Divine Shield is already okay against anything else than heavy token builds (like ugh… Odd Paladin), but the fact that you can restore its shield multiple times makes it fantastic. If your opponent can’t kill it, or at least Silence it, then it’s incredibly sticky. It’s resistant to most of the AoE clears, it can trade up really well, and 4 damage is not something to take lightly – Glass Knight staying on the board for 3-4 turns can deal LOTS of damage to the opponent’s hero. There are two ways you can restore his shield – Vicious Scalehide and Truesilver Champion (four cards in total, but all of them can potentially restore it more than once).

Another interesting part of this specific build would be Avenging Wrath. The idea is to use it as a mix of board clear and a burst finisher – you tend to get a mid game board advantage when playing this deck, and sometimes pumping 8 face damage for just 6 mana might be a great way to finish the game. This is a pretty uncommon choice, but it was working well when I’ve tested it.

While I knew that Spiteful Summoner decks should be rather strong this expansion, I didn’t suspect that Spiteful Druid would turn out to have a higher win rate than Spiteful Priest. It might be only a temporary thing, but the deck sure feels powerful.

The obvious advantage of running Spiteful with only 10 mana cost spells is a pool of cards you can summon. With only five (yes, five) 10 mana minions in Standard right now, the distribution looks like this: 2/5 chance to get an 8/8 (Sea Giant or Emeriss), 1/5 chance to get a 7/14 (Ultrasaur) and 2/5 chance to get a 12/12 (Deathwing, Tyrantus). Which basically means that 8/8 is a low-roll and you’re going to get 12/12 very often. Especially Tyrantus – getting a 12/12 that can’t be targeted is absolutely insane and can win you game on the spot.

The only new card the deck runs is Druid of the Scythe. It performs… fine. It’s not an impressive card, but the Taunt form can be useful in Aggro matchups, while the Rush form can somewhat replace the cheap removals you can’t run.

However, one of the MVP’s of the deck for me has been Mindbreaker. I even think about putting a second one. The card is great against Odd Paladin, for example, as Hero Power is a big part of their early game. Plus it just destroys Odd Face Hunter – if they can’t Silence it, you pretty much win. Even them skipping a single Hero Power is good enough given how important your life is in that matchup.

Yeah, like I’ve said last time, Cube Warlock is still strong. I think that it’s better than Control Warlock right now, as N'Zoth, The Corruptor was a more vital part of the Control build than Cube build.

There are small variations when it comes to the deck lists – the usual Spellbreaker vs Spiritsinger Umbra, Mountain Giants vs no Giants, Doomsayer or no Doomsayer, Prince Taldaram or other 3-drops etc.

Funnily enough, most of the successful deck lists look almost identical to the Cube decks we’ve seen before the rotation. Lord Godfrey and Voodoo Doll are the only new card that see common play in the Raven Cube Lock, but I’ve actually seen some lists running ZERO new cards. I’ve also seen Curse of Weakness 2-3 times, and Rotten Applebaum once, but they’re not really common.

Spiteful Priest is still a powerful deck, even after Drakonid Operative has rotated out. The deck still runs a Dragon package – Duskbreaker and the new Dragon synergies (Scaleworm, Wyrmguard) seem to be good enough.

Like I’ve mentioned when talking about Spiteful Druid, the pool of 10 mana minions is incredibly powerful now, and you have basically a 50/50 to hit it. But hitting an 8 mana card is not bad at all – there are still lots of powerful 8-drops (like Charged Devilsaur, Violet Wurm), but you just have a higher chance to low-roll (e.g. Bonemare, Tortollan Primalist). By the way, after some 8 mana cards have rotated out, you have a quite significant chance to hit a Grand Archivist, and that’s basically GG most of the time.

So far, most of the lists are pretty similar. Two biggest deck building choices are: do you run Prince Keleseth (and if you don’t, what 2-drops you play instead)? And do you run Lady in White (and what other slight adjustments you make to fit her in)? I’ve been testing out many different lists, but I didn’t see a huge difference between them – all of them were performing fine. I’m adding the most popular version here, but feel free to make your own changes.

Now onto something new… or rather old with a new twist. Control Dragon Priest was a pretty popular deck before the rotation. Zetalot has popularized a Mind Blast version of the deck. Regular Control build played more value + a way to steal minions from your opponent (e.g. Pint-Size Potion + Cabal Shadow Priest), and that was its main win condition against Warlocks. The Mind Blast build was more combo-oriented, with the usual Control tools still present, but with the Alexstrasza + 2x Mind Blast finisher.

The new decks play a very similar game. It tries to control the board throughout most of the game, and that’s the way you can actually win against Aggro – you don’t need your Mind Blasts if you just clear their board all the time and then overwhelm them with your own minions. However, in some slower matchups, the best way to win the game is through your combo. The combo is simple – you play Alexstrasza on your opponent (sometimes not necessary if you could be aggressive throughout the game), then play three Mind Blasts (you can discover the third one from Shadow Visions) next turn. Alternatively, you can also kill your opponent with a mix of Mind Blasts and your Hero Power once you turn into Shadowreaper Anduin. 3x Hero Power + 2x Mind Blast is 16 damage, which is enough to kill your opponent.

Of course, the combo doesn’t always work if you face a deck that can heal, but the deck can actually sometimes put quite a lot of late game pressure after turning into Anduin.

The deck still runs Dragon package – this time with Scaleworm. It’s not a Drakonid Operative, but it’s a reasonably strong card. Another new card it uses is Divine Hymn, which has two main uses. Against Aggro, you can use it to heal yourself. And against pretty much any deck you can use it to draw lots of cards from Northshire Cleric. Wild Pyromancer + Cleric + a cheap spell + Divine Hymn draws you lots of cards. You could already do the same thing with Circle of Healing, but this also heals your Hero for 6 – that use is really important when you face faster decks.

I was really surprised after seeing that Tempo Mage is still quite popular on the ladder. After all, the deck has lost so many vital pieces. This build seems to be centered around cheaper spells and Vex Crow or possibly even Archmage Antonidas finishers. It still has a light Secret package, because Arcanologist + Kirin Tor Mage combo is powerful even without further synergies. Another win condition is obviously snowballing a Turn 1 Mana Wyrm. Thanks to the 1 mana spells such as Breath of Sindragosa or Mirror Image, you might actually get something like a 1 mana 4/3 very quickly, and that can seal the game when combined with your further burn.

To be honest, Vex Crow felt a bit underwhelming in this deck. Yes, it can win you the game if your opponent can’t answer it (very rare), and it’s great anyway when you’re on the Coin, but it just feels SO SLOW when you go first. Flamewaker could at least be dropped on the curve as a 3 mana 2/4 – not great, but it often survived. 4 mana 3/3 is terrible and whenever I took the risk to drop it on the curve (from the lack of better plays), I got punished. I’ve seen another version running Lifedrinker instead and it does make some sense – it’s 3 immediate damage + 3 points of healing in case you need it vs Aggro, but even that feels underwhelming.

Another common choice in this build is Cinderstorm. The card, just like Arcane Missiles, is not really played for the board control – it’s best used when your opponent’s board is empty and you can deal extra burn damage.

The best list still needs to be figured out, but the deck has a solid chance to stay in the meta. Probably not as high as it was before, but it might still be viable.

Rogue class is getting carried by the Hench-Clan Thug this expansion. Tempo Rogue, which was nowhere to be found after it has been heavily weakened by the Kobolds & Catacombs wave of nerfs, turned out to be good again thanks to that card.

The deck’s general game plan didn’t change much, but the deck got slightly more aggressive. Dropping the late game cards such as Bonemare or The Lich King means that you can focus on finishing your opponent faster, but it also means that you might be running out of cards much quicker. The deck’s basic premise is that high tempo plays are good, and slowly building the board advantage means that you can get some chip damage here and there, before finishing your opponent with Charge minions, Cold Blood and SI:7 Agent.

Other new card the deck runs is Blink Fox. It’s not particularly powerful in this deck, since there are no synergies with stolen cards, it’s just a solid card in general. 3 mana 3/3 is okay and gaining a random card means that you don’t run out of steam that quickly. Plus it can lead to some really broken combinations. I’ve seen Rogue stealing Glinda Crowskin and then playing 4x Prince Keleseth on the next turn after I couldn’t kill Glinda. It’s rare, but stuff like that might happen.

If you liked the old Tempo Rogue, you’re going to like this one too.

And the Tempo Rogue’s older brother – Miracle Rogue. It feels like this deck will stay in the meta as long as Gadgetzan Auctioneer is in Standard (depending on how this year’s metas will look like, they might consider rotating it out to Hall of Fame).

When it comes to the Miracle, new cards weren’t even needed. While this build does run Hench-Clan Thug, I’ve seen builds without it, and without new cards, doing just fine. Majority of the deck is still Basic/Classic, it’s crazy how little the deck has changed over the last few expansions.

Right now, the deck’s main win condition is still extra tempo from Fal'dorei Strider (not initial tempo, as 4 mana 4/4 is slow, but the tempo boost once you start drawing the 4/4 tokens) and then a Leeroy Jenkins finisher. Those builds go all-in on the cycling, instead of thinking of some extra win conditions, they put more cards that work with their main game plan – cycling.

However, we need to remember that Miracle Rogue is always a good deck in the early expansion metas. It just preys on the unoptimized builds so well, then it disappears and becomes a Tier 3-4 deck that only a handful of Miracle experts take to high Legend ranks. Will it happen again? We’ll see.

Odd Face Hunter is probably not as strong as people have initially believed, but it’s still a solid deck. While it heavily depends on the meta, it absolutely destroys the Cube Warlocks. It’s the matchup where I have nearly 100% win rate – they need to get insanely lucky with their draws in order to beat this deck.

Its main power comes from the Hero Power. 2 mana to deal 3 damage is a solid burn card and the thing is, it doesn’t even use a card. You can do it every turn on top of the burn you already have in your deck. If everything lines up correctly, you can kill your opponent around Turn 4-5. Even if you don’t, you often deal so much damage early that the Hero Power + some burn cards are enough to finish the job later. Your opponent needs to heal A LOT to get out of the range.

The main problem with this deck is that it’s weak against Paladins. Sure, you would be able to kill them quickly, but they usually overwhelm you on the board early and put you on a faster clock than you do. It’s not always the case, and it can be countered to a certain extent by teching in Unleash the Hounds, but this build goes all in on the damage. And it seems to work pretty well, because Londgrem hit #1 Legend on NA and #4 on EU at the same time with this exact list.

Handlock used to be my favorite deck back in the day, and I just love all kinds of slow Warlock deck. While I didn’t have a lot of time to test it, the concept is pretty simple. All of the most important “Handlock” cards are even – you don’t need Possessed Lackey, Doomguard, Voidlord and such, even though those might be nice additions. But why would you want a 1 mana Hero Power in Warlock?

Well, the first reason is that if you can Hero Power on Turn 3. It basically means that a) you can drop a Mountain Giant on turn 3 when on the Coin (which is really strong) and b) you can play something on T3 and still be able to drop a Giant on T4 when going first.

In a normal Warlock deck, like Cube Warlock, T4 Giant is a very slow play, especially when you go first, because you basically need to skip Turn 1-3. With this deck, you can e.g. drop a Doomsayer + Tap on Turn 3 to set up your Turn 4 play. Besides Giants, your Turn 4 Drakes are usually 4/9 or 4/10, since you’ve used every opportunity to draw the cards, and that’s also hard to deal with without Silence.

Since you tap so much, Hooked Reaver is also a nice option – it’s easy to get yourself down to 15 or less health and it’s another powerful 4-drop.

Remember that this it not a control deck. Even Cube Warlock is not a real control deck, and this is even more proactive. You don’t win the game by getting to the late game and grinding your opponent down. You win by dropping a huge body after huge body in the mid game. The deck’s play style is interesting – while you’re assuming control role vs Aggro (obviously), in most of the slower matchups you’re the beatdown, and if your opponent answers all of your big minions, well, you lose. There are no multiple board refills or the long game plan. And that’s a part of what is fun about this deck – your game plan is to smack your opponent with an 8/8.

If I had to name a class where both Genn and Baku didn’t make much sense to me before the launch, Rogue would definitely be one. However, against all odds, Odd Tempo Rogue is doing quite fine on the ladder right now.

The basic idea behind this deck is that you play a pretty aggressive Tempo Rogue (you could even call it Aggro Rogue, because it’s close), and the upgraded Hero Power gives you both a superior board control and lots of damage. Normally, Rogue’s Hero Power is 2 damage over 2 turns – this one is 4 damage over 2 turns. Which is actually quite a lot – dealing 4 damage for just 2 mana is massive. Yes, the damage is spread over 2 turns, but it basically means that you don’t have to use it every turn, and so your tempo will be higher. For example, after using it on Turn 2 and hitting, you don’t have to replay it on T3 – you can play a 3-drop and then Hero Power and two 1-drops on Turn 4 again.

And the damage does stack up. After all, it’s like a regular Hunter’s Hero Power, which was already good in the aggressive decks. The deck runs a lot of burst damage on top of that, between Deadly Poison, Cold Blood, Leeroy Jenkins etc. it’s very easy to burst your opponents down from half health, unless they put some Taunts in your way.

So far, the normal Tempo Rogue deck is showing a higher win rate on the ladder, but this is an interesting approach that I just had to share.

If you’ve opened a Hadronox back in Knights of the Frozen Throne and haven’t disenchanted it until now – it might be a chance to play it! I don’t think that it’s going to be the next meta-breaker, but it’s a fun deck and it can actually win some games in a spectacular way.

The basic idea is to run a bunch of Ramp and Taunt minions in order to get to the late game. Then, you drop Hadronox (or get it from Master Oakheart if your version uses him) and possibly, if it’s necessary, Naturalize it right away, getting all of those sweet, sweet Taunts back. Then, since you don’t run any other Beast minions, you can resummon Hadronox back for just 3 mana with Witching Hour, and as you can imagine, a 3 mana Hadronox is much better. But if that’s not enough – you can pop it right away with Carnivorous Cube, get a bunch of Taunts again and – once the Cube dies – you get two more copies of Hadronox.

The deck is not perfect and has some counters. E.g. Silence works very well against it – you won’t always have Naturalize for your Hadronox, and then if you Cube it, the Cube can get Silenced. Polymorph or Hex work even better. If your Hadronox gets hit by one of those, it’s game over. But even a big Taunt like Primordial Drake or The Lich King means that a) the Taunt will no longer be in the pool of cards to revive and b) since both Sheep and Frog are Beasts, you now might low-roll the Witching Hour and get one instead.

Still, I like this kind of Ramp-ish Druid deck, so I was having lots of fun playing it, even though my win rate wasn’t impressive.

Slow Mage decks took a massive hit – losing Ice Block means that you no longer have multiple lives – if you die, you die for good. I can’t stress out how many times Ice Block has saved me before the rotation – that one extra turn was often a matter a life and death.

The hardest part is actually stopping the early game minion damage. Once you do that, you can pretty much play a board clear every turn in the mid game, then drop Alexstrasza or, even better, Frost Lich Jaina to stabilize. However, this kind of game plan doesn’t always work. For example, this deck is very bad against Odd Face Hunter. It doesn’t matter if you clear their board every turn if they hit you with weapons, chargers and obviously Hero Power. Then, the deck also sucks against Combo decks – it’s just too slow. Like, Shudderwock Shaman can usually get their full combo easily before you put enough pressure on them.

However, since the amount of Face Hunters and Shudderwock Shamans has gone down a bit in the last few days, it makes sense to dust off your Big Spells Mage deck and try it out again. It has a surprisingly solid win rate against Paladins, and even Cube Locks are an even matchup (heavily depends on how fast you get your Polymorphs and whether you draw DK Hero or not).

I don’t have much to say about the new version of Combo Dragon Priest, because I haven’t played or faced it much yet, but I’ve seen some players getting to high ranks pretty successfully.

Divine Spirit + Inner Fire combo is still there, so that’s that. However, losing Potion of Madness and Kabal Talonpriest was a pretty significant hit.

And so, Combo Priest players are testing out many different approaches right now. This one, for example, is a more Midrange version, with Divine Spirit + Inner Fire combo being more of a finisher than the deck’s main win condition. For example, if your Wyrmguard survives a turn, you can easily combo down your opponent on the next one.

On the other hand, I’ve seen Combo Priests running a non-Dragon version with Injured Blademaster and Quartz Elemental. I’ve even seen a much faster version, ending the curve at Lyra the Sunshard, with lots of cheap spells and kind of a “Miracle Priest” feel to it. Which version is best? Will the deck even be viable? Hard to say at this point, but if you liked the deck before, you definitely have some options to try out.

Quest Warrior, or Taunt Warrior, was very popular when the Quests first got out in Un’Goro, and then… nothing. After the initial 2-3 months, the deck was getting worse and worse, to a point that no one played it anymore during Knights of the Frozen Throne.

Right now the deck sees a comeback, thanks to the new Odd/Even mechanics. Control Warrior used to be the best deck to put Justicar Trueheart into – 4 Armor per turn is very powerful, especially in faster matchups, and the fact that you get an upgraded Hero Power right away means that you can start stacking Armor from Turn 2.

Good thing about this build is that you actually don’t have to sacrifice that much. You can run the Quests, lots of good Taunt cards and even the removals/board clears. Fiery War Axe‘s nerf to 3 mana was actually a buff to this deck – if not for that, it wouldn’t be able to run any early/mid game weapons (as Blood Razor is even costed). Between Whirlwind, Reckless Flurry and Brawl, the deck has enough of board clears. Taunts work fine in fast matchups, while the Quest gives a win condition in the slower ones – throwing 8 damage Hero Powers is very strong. You can even use a Blackwald Pixie to either get 4 extra Armor before you change your Hero Power, or 8 extra damage after – this build doesn’t run the card, but it’s a viable option.

All in all, it might not be a comeback of the Control Warrior a lot of people were hoping for (the deck’s win rates are on the lower side, to be honest), but it means that the deck has some base to build upon in the upcoming expansions.

When you think about it, Spell Hunter didn’t really lose much in the rotation. It lost Cat Trick, which was a good Secret, but it wasn’t irreplaceable. And then, well, the Barnes + Y'Shaarj, Rage Unbound combo, which was one of the main reasons why the deck was so powerful last expansion.

But not the only reason, as it seems. Replacing those with To My Side!, one of the most controversial cards of 2017, might not be optimal, but it works. When it comes to the new cards, both Rat Trap and Wing Blast are being tested. My initial thoughts are that those are both okay, but not very impressive. An older card I like in the current meta, though, is Grievous Bite – with so many Odd Paladins running around, this card can win you lots of games.

I don’t think that the deck will be Tier 1, like it was during the last month or so of K&C, but it should stay in the meta.

When doing my own theorycrafts, I’ve tried to build an Even Shaman. And in the end, after putting ~20 cards in the deck, I just had no idea what else can I run. Most of the options seemed bad and I gave up. However, it looks like burr0 was able to finish the build and make it work, at least to a certain extent. He hit top 50 Legend with it himself, I didn’t have as much luck (or maybe skill) to duplicate his record, but it’s an interesting deck.

1 mana Hero Power in Shaman is pretty much as good, or maybe even better than 1 mana Hero Power in Paladin. While you obviously can’t combo it with Bloodlust, cards like Dire Wolf Alpha or Flametongue Totem alone make it a juicy option. You can spam the totems like there was no tomorrow, and your opponent still has to respect them – it often leads to the scenarios where each totem gets much more value than it normally should.

From my limited playtesting, I can clearly say that Corpsetaker looks like a massive MVP. You often get a 3/3 with Taunt, Divine Shield, Lifesteal AND Windfury on Turn 4 – and that’s great in any matchup. Another card that wins games is Sea Giant – especially when you face something like an Odd Paladin. I was able to consistently drop it down for 0-2 mana around Turn 4.

On the other hand, one thing I really dislike about this deck is that once it loses the board control, you pretty much lose the game. It can be said about something like Odd Paladin too, but Odd Paladin has a harder time losing the board control than this deck. Sometimes one big board clear, or a Voidlord in your way when you have no Hex available can completely ruin the match for you. So, again, I don’t think that this deck will become a way to break the meta, but it’s an interesting deck you can play if you like Shaman or just want to try out something different.