Hearthpwn

Trying to be innovative and come up with my own idea for a control mage deck. Not saying it hasn't been done before but I did put it together on my own so if it has, I don't know about it. Basically the deck has about 10 cards providing card advantage, so we will do a lot of drawing/collecting answers. Then when we have card advantage and the board is non-threatening, It's our turn to drop bombs.

Against the aggro matchup we have board wipes, Arcane Explosion + Bloodmage Thalnos/Azure Drake is devastating to a board full of creatures, whereas Flamestrike will almost always be a saving grace. Frostbolt and Arcane Missles should clean up early game threats (Sometimes lategame too) and then Fireball and Polymorph will take care of troublesome creatures that simply cannot stick. Then we just seal the deal with an Archmage/Ragnaros/Ysera when the board state is non-threatening.

I've found other control decks to struggle against me as the deck has so many threats that they struggle to answer them all and gain their own favorable board state. Shamans can only hex two of our guys, and basically none of our creatures can stick as they are too threatening from Thalnos to Pagle to Azure Drake all the way up to Ysera. Even Mana Wyrm can eat up removal if he gets up to a 3/3 or even 4/3 I got him to once.

In an opening hand we are hoping for things that cost 4 mana or less, preferably not polymorph/fireball as by turn 4 it will hopefully be too early to have to resort to such powerful removal. I like seeing Arcane Intellect if I suspect it to be a slow game, but strong cards in the opening hand are basically anything you'd be able to play soon. I've started with some garbage hands though and came out okay thanks to the plethora of card advantage. I've found no significant advantage/disadvantage to going first or second. Thanks to our wonderful hero ability going first is okay, since we can kill almost any 1 drop that somone who isn't a warlock would play, and we have a pretty solid 1 drop ourselves. Going second is fine too, because a turn 6 Flamestrike can be a godsend.

As far as playing the deck out goes you just have to react to what the opponent does, if he drops threats, remove them, if he doesn't drop threats, cast arcane intellect, drop Acolyte of Pain and Fireblast him, drop Nat Pagle, Drop your own threat, if it's lategame drop Antonidas/Rag/Ysera. You pretty much can't do anything wrong as long as you are properly reacting to your opponent.

tl:dr I am only rank 14 so this deck probably sucks but I've been winning with it pretty consistently at that rank, so I figured I'd post it up for any other mages who are struggling to win as the arguably underpowered mage class (I'm not arguing about whether it is or is not, but from some stats I've seen, Mage has the second lowest winrate in tournament level play, barely beating the priest).