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Matthew

I love weather; Sun for days
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What's your Priest deck?

EDIT:

Just opened a Gold Harrison Jones today *insert whip noises*
 

His Eminence Lord Poppington II

proverb:the fish who eats most dies still too
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I dont see how you can't consider miracle a solid deck when it has been so dominant throughout this season and last season. It's "luck based" in the sense that if you get Gadgetzan + Coin + Conceal turn 5 you've pretty much won, but the deck in it's current form doesnt require that to happen in order to win. I've seen a lot of Miracle Rogues win without ever even playing Gadgetzan, such is the power of the deck. Every deck in a game like Hearthstone depends on your mulligan and the cards you topdeck. If you're playing Shaman vs Zoo and you don't draw into your Lightning Storms at the right time then good luck.
I have destroyed many a concealed gadgetzan with sylvanas naturalise teeheeheee. it stays concealed until your next turn, too.
 

Lavos

Banned deucer.
the hearthstone twitter account posted something a few days back along the lines of "when we release naxxramas, we're going to celebrate by eating this!" coupled with a picture of a huge gummy bear. national gummy bear day is july 15th. coincidence?

hopefully i'll get legend before then because this new meta is gonna be crazy
 

Django

Started from the bottom...
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Yeah lots of people have been touting the 15th as the release date. I think everyone is gonna have the same idea (me included) though, so the competition will be stupidly high. Might be a better idea to wait and then abuse some new combo before people figure out how to deal with it
 

Acklow

I am always tired. Don't bother me.
What's your Priest deck?

EDIT:

Just opened a Gold Harrison Jones today *insert whip noises*

Oh it's just an assortment of rag-tag cards I put together that I use if I ever need to pathetically attempt at obtaining the quest of the day. I ended up scrapping gold Vancleef to craft Leeroy, since I don't have him yet.

I'm still new to HS so I don't have a large quantity of good cards to draw from and I want more options for myself...

Also in case you haven't added me, my username is Acklow#1224
 
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Soul Fly

IMMA TEACH YOU WHAT SPLASHIN' MEANS
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How would you feel if you had a solid end-game in hand, and your opponent's last major card Ragnaros is down to 2 hp and is definitely dying next turn, and they throw a master of disguise at it. And then Stealth breaks with that random 8 damage. Rogue Quits

Fuck Rogues. LOL yeah.
 

Enguarde

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Before this i've actually already been getting a lot of good priest cards in packs such as multiple shadow madness, aunchai soulpriests, and a cabal shadow priest so I'm very tempted to try and experiment with an aggressive priest deck now. Only really used zoo in constructed since it was cheap to craft completely so this should be fun.
 

His Eminence Lord Poppington II

proverb:the fish who eats most dies still too
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How would you feel if you had a solid end-game in hand, and your opponent's last major card Ragnaros is down to 2 hp and is definitely dying next turn, and they throw a master of disguise at it. And then Stealth breaks with that random 8 damage. Rogue Quits

Fuck Rogues. LOL yeah.
Yea, the way stealth works is that a minion is immediately un-stealthed as soon as it deals damage. This applies to Knife Juggler, as well.
 

LonelyNess

Makin' PK Love
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Wanted the rainbow cardback so I played ranked all day today. Pretty happy with where I ended up eventually.



Gotta love da zoo.
 

Matthew

I love weather; Sun for days
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Zoo confuses me as a deck. There are people like Trump who say it is control then there are people like Forsen who use it just to go to the face. I understand "Zoo" comes from MTG where it's just a deck full of optimal cards but I can't say whether it is one or the other. It lacks the control I love in the early game and it doesn't have the huge pressure (say Shockadin) of the early game.

In that same regard it isn't hand-vomit as Mr.E has said, it is a thoughtful placement and attacking of creatures. It's a very confusing deck to play and I really do enjoy playing it.

However I don't understand why in this meta (aside from the restart) that you'd consider playing Zoo. Handlocks, Ramp, control Warriors, even burn Mage. It's just asking for a loss at a certain point (though I believe hand is 50/50)
 

LonelyNess

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I guess it's "control" if you mean that you have to maintain board control 100% of the time or you lose, but I don't see how Handlock / Control Warrior / Burn Mage constitutes auto loss.

Vs. Handlock you just go for the face, the only situation where that results in a loss is when they have Molten Giant + Sunfury Protector, but you should have board control for basically the whole game unless you've done something horribly wrong. Control Warrior generally only plays a single copy of Whirlwind, the only card of note that is worrisome for Zoo. If he wants to control the board with weapons I'm more than OK with him taking more and more damage to the face to do it. Burn Mage is pretty good vs. Zoo, but I find that a lot of players see an opportunity to gain meaningless card advantage by taking out minions with the hero power which loses precious precious tempo / usually leaves them without minions on the board, which you can NOT afford to do against Zoo. You have to be matching their tempo by at the very least matching their board size, or having a big taunt.

Ramp, or really any type of druid is most definitely an auto loss, though.... so are most non-bloodlust shaman matchups. But at least you can laugh to the bank getting free wins vs. basically any type of Priest!
 
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Well, with the season coming to the end, I'll post the extremely budget control Paladin deck that I've been running since I opened Tirion. I haven't spent any money on packs so I've been slowly crafting it over the course of the month. It got me up to rank 9.

Screen Shot 2014-07-01 at 1.22.26 AM.png
 

His Eminence Lord Poppington II

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I'm flying out to London tonight, but in the week leading up to I played ladder harder than I ever had previously (last season peak, rank 9). So this season I peaked rank 1, 3 stars. Zoo has a lot of small changes that you can make to gear it more towards aggro / control. Shadowflame / Hellfire / Leeroy + Power Overwhelming / Elven Archers / Mortal Coils, are all cards that can be swapped in and out. I think of zoo generally as an aggro deck that plays as control. This is the case because Zoo is THE benchmark for a deck being prepared against aggro.

Has anyone else seen the recent King of the Hill? Xixo's Lorewalker Cho Zoo, man.

LonelyNess I don't know about some of your matchup analyses... Control Warrior actually generally plays two copies of Whirlwind, especially with the addition of double Azure Drake to the build. The cards you see Control Warriors run a single copy of are either Slam, Armoursmith, Cleave, or Wild Pyromancer. The last two additions are recent, in order to accommodate aggro (mostly zoo), some variants also run Taz'dingos over Kor'kron Elites. Basically, Control Warrior should eat zoo alive. That deck is designed to beat aggro (which is pretty much synonymous with zoo).

Burn Mage doesn't contest the board by having big Taunt minions OR an equal board size??? It contests the board with AoE / Freeze / Doomsayers / (SOMETIMES GIANTS, that aren't taunted). You can count Mirror Image as 'Taunts' but they achieve nothing vs. Zoo, anyway. I'm not too familiar with this matchup, so I won't say anymore.

Handlock can go either way, but I believe Zoo is favoured. It depends not only on their draws, but whether or not they pack double copies of tech cards. Early Watch + Sunfury can really mess you up. As can double copies of Hellfire, or even single copies. I see newer generation handlocks running Taz'dingos, too. If you hit face and they can only clear your board once before Taunted Giants hit the field, you're in okay condition. If they clear your board twice, that's when you're probably screwed.

Priest has some of the best AoE in the game, provided you're using Wild Pyromancers. Auchenai + Circle / Holy Nova / Pyromancer combos is more than enough to clear Zoo's board over, and over again. Priest also has the sustain to take it late vs. Zoo, where the latter automatically loses. Of course, Priests are notoriously unreliable and can lose to anything on any day. However, to say that Priest is a free win, or even that Zoo is a bad matchup for Priest, is a stretch.

Finally, ramp Druid has a very, very good fighting chance against zoo. A lot of board clear, strong taunt minions, and a way to accelerate curve. The Millacle druid, which I've played between ranks 1-5 successfully, auto-loses to zoo, unfortunately. Token druid, probably the only other variant (discounting subset versions, etc) of Druid, also has very strong potential to do well against zoo.
 

Matthew

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I still believe the best deck to ladder with is Handlock. Though gookie's analysis of LN's horrible metagame experience is fairly good so I won't touch on that.
 

Soul Fly

IMMA TEACH YOU WHAT SPLASHIN' MEANS
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Well, with the season coming to the end, I'll post the extremely budget control Paladin deck that I've been running since I opened Tirion. I haven't spent any money on packs so I've been slowly crafting it over the course of the month. It got me up to rank 9.

View attachment 15975
What was you W/L ratio with that deck? ran a very similar build after I got a Tirion fairly recently.
It was.... frustrating tbh, since most of the time I was just stemming damage from the opposition.
 

Joeyboy

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Control Warrior has a notoriously bad matchup against Zoo, it essentially comes down to whether or not you got Fiery Axe or not. Warrior has a ton of great single target spot removal but they have a hard time with the "spam the board" mentality of Zoo. If the warlock player has a decent starting hand and the Warrior didn't at least mulligan into an Axe and also dosen't have Brawl or Geddon waiting in the wings then the warlock should stomp him. Zoo is not aggro; Warrior eats aggro alive, meaning Face Hunter and Face Mage; Standard Zoo is an aggressive control deck utilizing cheap efficient minions that wins by establishing strong board control and snowballing a win. When Forsen says Zoo isn't aggro he isn't talking about "standard zoo" look at his deck from deck wars some weeks back, it looks similar to zoo but he even named the deck "This Isn't Zoo." Also a decent handlock player should have an inherent advantage against an equally skilled zoolock player. Also of course Zoo is a bad matchup for Priest.. thats why people recommend you don't play Priest on ladder.

I actually agree with Matthew that Handlock should be the best deck to ladder with(good matchups against all the most popular decks)but the deck has become too stale for me recently though. The standard decklist hasn't changed since like season 1, maybe earlier, so your opponent should just about know your deck card for card(which I personally don't like). I might try the new age Frozen Giants deck this season considering it was probably my favorite deck in the beta :)
 
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ryan

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Honestly in the Handlock vs. Zoo matchup, the winner is usually just whoever draws better. That's kind of true for a lot of zoo matchups to be honest, but what I like about the deck is that you rarely draw just straight up badly (unless you're me, and then you get both doomguards and an argus after the mulligan) because there are so many one-drop minions in it.

Zoo is kind of just an aggressive control deck, if that makes any sense? You have to understand when it's better to go face and when you need to take out their minions. Most of the time until you snowball into late-game, it's better to take efficient trades, and you have a lot of opportunities to do so with shit like Abusive Sergeant, Dark-Iron Dwarf, Shattered Sun, Argus, etc. In that sense, it's sort of pseudo-control where you're maintaining your board and keeping theirs manageable.

Also, miracle best ladder deck. :^) So easy to cheese out wins you shouldn't get by controlling the board just enough until you burst them down out of no where.
 
What was you W/L ratio with that deck? ran a very similar build after I got a Tirion fairly recently.
It was.... frustrating tbh, since most of the time I was just stemming damage from the opposition.
I didn't keep track of my W/L, but the match up wasn't too bad against most aggro decks. Against Zoolock, you just need to try to mulligan into Consecration or Pyromancer + Equality, and while you get out of the first 5 turns pretty low on health, you should be able to clear their board and have a big card advantage, and then you can start laying down late-game healing like Guardian of Kings, Tirion, and Lay On Hands. Of course, sometimes you just draw shittily and they swarm you and you can't do shit. It's more of a midrange Paladin than anything, because it doesn't have the legendary power to contest the late game of, say, Ramp Druid.
 

Soul Fly

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Oh ramp druid also bothered me till I dropped in an ogre and a yeti in my deck. Ramp druid has a substandard late-game if you survive the mid-game ramping and they really struggle to remove big minions without something like big game hunter. Guardian of kings is usually your strongest minion on the board which is cool for control and recovery with his battlecry but mediocre for board presence.

Ysera is also a good choice if you have it, though I haven't personally tried it since I don't.
 

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