Hearthpwn

How to Play

So this deck starts off being a lot like the old school Patron Warrior lists. You spend the early turns drawing cards with cards like Acolyte of Pain, Battle Rage and Gnomish Inventor. After you have typically drawn several Whirlwind effects and Grim Patron, the fun can finally begin. Playing a Grim Patron followed by several Whirlwind effects to get a large board can often overwhelm the opponent. Before you do this, however, there are several minions you can play to strengthen up these turns. Throw in a Frothing Berzerker then turn before and you can often chunk the opponent for a solid 16-24 life, given if the opponent has any minions of his own. The other rare in the deck, Armorsmith, also synergies incredibly well, often able to earn 10 armor or so the turn it's played, even more if you have had a patron stick or an Armorsmith stick.

The main way to win is to just keep up constant pressure with Grim Patron and beat them down with a board state that is difficult to be removed. Once one sticks on the board, it is often very hard for the opponent to be able to clear them and against creature decks, you can often lock the opponent out from playing minions as doing so only feeds into the patrons.

Since this deck contains a lot of Whirlwind effects, do not worry about using some as removal for the enemies creatures. The first plan of the deck is to stay alive to a patron turn so keeping Whirlwind effects for a patron turn only to die before being able to use any is not a great choice.

Match Ups

This deck unsurprisingly does incredibly well against aggressive decks. There is just so much removal in forms of AoEs along with more direct removal like Execute and both weapons that aggro has a hard time sticking any minions. 

As for slower match ups, it depends on how quickly your opponent can clear your board and what type of removal then run. Renolock is one of the worse match ups simply because it has multiple ways of clearing a board infested of patrons while matches against most reno mages tends to be better simply because they only tend to have one big AoE that gets rid of Patrons, this being Flamestrike. Big priest (if you count this as a control deck) also tends to be a difficult match simply because they also have a lot of AoEs that hit patron rather well.

Finally, as for druid, it typically depends on how quickly you can get together a patron combo. If you can generate a lot of armor early on, you can typically survive a lot of the burst from Star Aligner and then just clear the board afterwards, often being able to stabilize. As for Togg Druid, it tends to be harder but depending on when you can take control of the board with Patrons, you can usually shut them out before they can do any real damage.

Mulligan Guide

Against more aggressive decks, keeping Whirlwind, Warpath, Ravaging Ghoul and either weapon tends to be what I try to go for. These cards just are able to shut down a lot of early game aggression. Cards like Slam is also really good against decks such as Odd Rogue who doesn't really have a lot of low health minions in it.

Against control decks and combo decks, typically you want to play the aggressive deck, mulliganing for either card draw in forms of Gnomish Inventor, Acolyte of Pain or look for parts of the combo, specifically Frothing Berserker, which if the opponent doesn't immediately kill it, you can often deal a good half of the deck.

Substitutes

Normally for this area, I put in card substitutes for epics and legendaries, but since this is a budget deck, it's going to be the other way round.

The first thing I did was put in more ways to clear the board as it provides an easier way to beat back big priest and to also help against other aggressive decks.

Another issue the deck faces is not having a reliable way to finish people apart from the slow patron beat down and since we have a lot of whirlwind effects, Grommash Hellscream works really well to help finish out games. In the non-budget deck, I also am running Scourgelord Garrosh as his hero power is literally just Whirlwind. His weapon helps close out games, finishes off aggro, helps clear out Spreading Plague easily, and he just fits well in the deck.

Finally, there is one copy of Dead Man's Hand. At first this card was not in the list because it doesn't try to take games to fatigue, going for a more proactive approach. However, it occurred to me that the worst match ups for the decks are the ones with the most 3+ damage AoE. Because of this, using Dead Man's Hand can help give us a 3rd or even 4th patron turn. 

For the actual changes and full list here you go:

- 2 Inner Rage

- 2 Cruel Taskmaster

- 2 Gnomish Inventor

- 1 Whirlwind

+ 2 Sleep with the Fishes

+ 1 Shield Slam

+ 1 Dead Man's Hand

+ 1 Brawl

+ 1 Grommash Hellscream

+ 1 Scourgelord Garrosh

Final Verdict

This is another deck for wild that I really love because it just brings me so much nostalgia. Grim Patron has always been one of my favorite cards and when I recently went to try it again in wild, I was honestly surprised about how the deck felt. I remembered that when the Warsong nerf first happened, Grim Patron shifted to be a board-centric deck, but it shortly fell off the map completely aftewards. I feel like this deck does a great job against a lot of the meta, only really struggling against the best control decks and druids occasionally when they draw the nuts and we are not able to. I can't really justify telling people to make the deck because it's meta defining deck, because this deck just isn't that. I've had around a 60% winrate over 46 games (winning 28 of them), which I find pretty respectable for a deck like this, but it's not going to get you to legend or anywhere near that frankly. It's just another fun deck that I've made and I think that if you have the cards and want to try something that is different from most decks, I'd recommend trying it out.