Opening Moves Week Day 2 - Filling a Deck
Blizzard is holding "Opening Moves Week" across all their Esports titles to celebrate the start of the new competitive year. Each day, a small blog post is going to be made which will talk about a different part of a competitive match. Today's topic is Filling a Deck and tomorrow they'll be talking about the mulligan phase.
What cards would you surround your win condition with?
Quote from Kevin HovdestadNow that you’ve identified your win condition, it’s time to finish building your competitive deck.
While finding that cool combination that will end the game in style is great, the real skill to building a deck isn’t figuring that out—it’s finding the cards to surround them with that will allow you to pull it off! Each class has slightly different tools to manage this, so understanding what your chosen class can and can’t do is important. If you’re looking to build a Hunter deck and have chosen a handful of Hunter spells as your way to finish off your opponent, you’ll quickly discover that there aren’t many reliable ways for Hunters to draw additional cards—so you can’t guarantee you’ll be able to find those spells after all. Back to the drawing board!
Finishing Your DeckFigure out what plan your deck has—the task of the specific deck. When you play a bunch of games, if a card doesn't work, you replace it. Think about how another card would fit into that spot in the deck.
The cards you are using for your win condition will determine how you round out the rest of your deck. If you want to play aggressively and win with multiple minions on the board, there’s no time to waste drawing cards—if you run out of gas (cards) in the tank (your hand), your win condition didn’t work out that time. If you’re looking to stall for a fatal combo or just hold the line to deny your opponent’s win condition, you’ll be looking for spells to clear the board, or ways to heal yourself or armor up. Exactly what you end up using to diffuse situations like these will depend on your class.
As an example, let’s say that your free Death Knight from Knights of the Frozen Throne was Uther of the Ebon Blade. The win condition is built in: If you have all four Horsemen (summoned one at a time by your Hero Power), you win the game automatically. Cool! But how are you going to survive until you draw Uther of the Ebon Blade, play him, and manage to use your Hero Power four (or more!) times?
You might decide that you want to try and pull off multiple Hero Power uses in a single turn and add Auctionmaster Beardo—that’s a good start. You’re going to need cheap spells to activate Auctionmaster Beardo’s effect, too, so cards like Burgly Bully or Hydrologist look good. None of these cards can be played until you’re ready to end the game, though, so you still need to fill in that space. Paladin doesn’t have much in the way of card draw, so you’re probably looking for a mixture of the things Paladins do best—putting down powerful Taunt minions and using a variety of heals to stay afloat! With cards like Forbidden Healing, Wickerflame Burnbristle, Spikeridged Steed, Sunkeeper Tarim, or Ragnaros, Lightlord, you’ve suddenly got a mixture of tools that might just do the trick.
Tomorrow we’ll queue up against an opponent with our killer new deck, and make our first game-time decision—what to keep in the mulligan!
Just netdeck LUL.
ill have to bookmark this :P
Really useful guide
"Paladin doesn't have much in the way of card draw"
This statement couldn't be further from the truth. Paladin actually has more ways to draw than most classes. In fact, provided the game lasts the maximum 30 turns Paladin has the capability to draw 30 cards (JUST FROM ONE CARD), 1 card per turn OR 60 cards (2 cards per turn) , in fact paladin can even draw cards equal to the cards in opponents hand. Paladin can also use spells that act as card draws. Paladin can give a minion divine shield and then draw a card. Paladin can buff same said minion with a card that allows it to draw when it attacks. Paladin also has many joust cards.
Paladin is better than most classes , and arguably the best class next to warlock (maybe even better than lock since they don't kill themselves drawing) Paladin can even heal themselves every time a minion attacks and draws a card and heals their hero. Paladin is literally the "handbuffing" class.
get your facts straight please. thanks
Easy Peezee: 10 damage spell. Ty & good night. Peace.
WSP
Blizzard really don't do themselves any favours sometimes...
Blizzard: "Hearthstone doesn't have to be expensive, here: have a free death Knight!"
Also Blizzard: "Oh you got Uther, great! Now just add beardo, burnbristle, Tarim, lightlord, and you might have a barely viable meme deck! For just 10k dust!"
I like the idea of these tutorial posts, but the execution is a bit thoughtless.
People always joke about HS not requiring any skill at all, yet those who are top legend always get to top legend, while people who cant even break rank 5 always get stopped there, and the people who cant break 10 blame their cards, so on and so on. Im not saying HS is chess, but nobody ever stops and considers that they might not be a strong player...There are tons of videos of players hitting legend with brand new f2p accounts, or hitting legend with meme decks. sometimes its as simple as: bad players yield bad results, good players yield good results.
a large portion of hearthstone is just playing. People get to legend because they have a deck that is 50+% winrate and just play enough to eventually hit legend. Those pros dont just win every game.
My opening move is as clear as everyones: First I coin, then I push options and finally I push that highlighted red and brand new „Concede“ button. Because there‘s literally nothing I can do when people play aggressive out-curving patches decks. I mean we are living in a world where priests exist that play patches
And that's exactly it: If you build your deck well enough, patches is still a great card, but you won't lose to it every time.
The world championship might have included a huge percentage of games when patches was drawn, but some games were lost even when not.
Even after Pavel's luck we knew it xD
Anyone else notice that picture used for this topic looks like he is making a heart emolji with his tentacles? Forbidden heals after all.
What good card draw does Pala have? And now please don't say "Divine Favor", because this is only a good card draw against control and is often enough a nearly or even complete dead card against aggro. A card draw which is in some matches absolutly useless (3 Mana do nothing) is no "good" card draw for me.
Call to arms or every recruit are basically draw and play a minion
I also had a bit of luck using Blessing of Wisdom when I was running another Paladin aggro deck with Young Dragonhawk because most people wouldn't recognize it as a concern. While it rarely stuck beyond that turn where the Blessing hit, when it did, hilarity ensued.
Filling your deck lol.. More like find a tier 1 deck on hearthpwn, press "Copy deck", go into Hearthstone and the rest is magic
When will we get the updated Rexxar Deathstalker as promised?
Let's hope this post's deck example was not targeted towards new players. I've been playing since beta and am missing most of the cards mentioned (almost all legendary!)