Hearthpwn

Youtube version of the guide: https://youtu.be/IdopHFtwFiE

1. I) Deck overview/strategy
2. II) Matchup Guide/Mulligans
3. III) Card Analysis/replacements

Deck Overview/strategy

First I’ll do a brief rundown through the deck and explain a little bit how it works. If you have played or watched this deck before then some of this information might be a bit redundant for you.

Giant Cyclone mage is pretty unique and it’s one of the harder decks to play optimally right now. I don’t see this as a bad thing at all it just makes the deck feel more rewarding to do well with.
The win condition of the deck revolves around two major combos. There’s the Spell combo which is Mana Cyclone + cheap spells and also the Giant Combo Conjurer’s Calling + a giant (Usually on mountain giant since you get either 8/8 or ⅞ Grave horror taunt because those are the only two 12 mana cards in the game). Ideally you pull off both of these combos  in your games but sometimes only one of these lines of play is necessary to win.

Sometimes you can pull off the Spell Combo early on and then follow up with the Giant Conjurer combo afterwards. It’s not always worth it though it can be better to save your spells and go for the giant combo first and use spells for more utility. Generally the giant combo is higher priority than the spells combo. To perform these combos effectively you usually have to save up a lot of cards from early game (for hand size and cyclone spells) so try to resist the urge to play certain cards early for little to no value, for example using mirror image or ray of frost to stop a little bit of early damage without using mana cyclone is usually not good.

The rest of the card choices are mostly just to fill up the turns where you can’t perform these combos such card draw, taunts and weapon removal.

Early Game (Turns 1-3)

This deck usually has slow early game so don’t expect to be aggressive like some of the old mage builds in previous expansions.Turn 1-2 is usually pass or ping and if it’s not rogue then ooze is usually good unless you plan to pass into turn 4 giant on the coin. Sorcerer’s apprentice is not always played on turn 2, if you have a spell heavy hand then you should probably save it, or if it’s vs a high removal class like rogue or warrior. Early apprentices can be good in matchups like priest Mage, hunter.

Turn 3 is often times a ping pass as well but ideally you play arcane intellect or luna. This deck is all about it’s power plays so you really need to get used to playing slow to set up these ‘power plays’ as best as possible. Also keeping your hand size big is usually good as well. Sometimes you play Sorcerer’s apprentice early but it’s completely dependant on the texture of your hand. Here’s an example of a hand where I will ping pass on both turn 2 and 3 so I can play the giant on 4.

Mid Game (Turn 4-7)

This is where want to start pulling off the combos.The earlier we can giants + Conjurers the better so it’s all about setting these up turns. Sometimes you can hold off on the mana cyclone so that you can find more spells and also if your opponent has little to no board it’s good to wait until they have something on board to use your spells more efficiently. You can also sometimes hold off on playing a turn 4/5 giant as well to set up conjurers calling.

Here is an example of a saving the Giant to play Giant + Coin + Conjurer’s calling next turn. Guaranteeing 2 giants in one turn can often snowball the board in your favor because they can usually deal with 1 giant but if the second one lives then you can attack and Conjurer’s calling again with the twinspell. This doesn’t always happen on turn 4 or 5, it’s also relevant going into turn 6 or 7 since you don’t always have a big hand size and a lot of the time your turn 7 will look like 4 mana giant + conjurers calling. However you still need to know when to play Giant without conjurers calling since sometimes you just don’t have the handsize to guarantee a Conjurers calling on giant. This is pretty matchup dependant since some decks have better removals for giant then others. There are situations where baiting removal with giant is good. Sometimes this is effective vs rogue or when you just don’t have conj calling in your hand.

Another mid game play that sometimes happens is Conjurer’s calling on non-giant minions. This doesn’t happen that often but sometimes in matchups where you’re more desperate for a board like against most aggro/token decks or if you’re looking to set up sea giant.

Late Game (Turn 8+)

Late game with this deck is played pretty similar to mid game for the most part except you have more mana to pull off conjurer calling and sea giant turns. Also Antonidas comes into play now so always look out for those turns. Don’t be greedy with Antonidas unless it’s a very slow matchup like control warrior. Often times you will take 1-2 fireball and sometimes even 0 if you think you’re opponent will have a hard time dealing with your board on turn 7.

Matchup and Mulligan Guide:

In This section I’m going to talk about the two most important things to learn, the matchups and the Mulligan. I believe knowing your matchups well is one of the most important things that you could learn in Competitive HS. Knowing what removal your opponent’s deck runs can be crucial.

I’ll write a mini mulligan guide for each matchup giving you an idea of what cards you want to keep. This will only give you an idea, but it won’t be perfect because I can’t go into all the synergy-mulligans. For example cards like Ray of Frost, Magic trick, or Sorcerer’s apprentice are a lot better if you have mana Cyclone in your hand I’m only going to include matchups for the most common ladder decks at the time of writing the guide.

This Mulligan might feel awkward with this deck but that’s just the nature of the deck. It’s because you have very few early game cards and almost everything is a synergy card.

General Mulligan Tips

• Keep Elemental Evocation if you can also keep Mana Cyclone. Same logic with Ray of Frost, or mirror image but this is more relevant against an aggro class like Rogue, or Hunter and not warrior.
• Sandbinder is pretty much always kept going first since you don’t usually have many good turn 4 plays, whereas with coin you can just play giant on 4.
• Arcane Intellect is pretty much always a keep in every matchup, only situation where I wouldn’t keep it is if I had 2. This deck lacks turn 3 plays so AI usually is the best play to draw towards your combos
• In general keeping Mountain giant is A LOT better on coin since you can always pass early on into a turn 4 giant or even giant coin conjurers calling on turn 5 or 6. Mountain giant is always a better keep with Arcane Intellect or conjurers calling.

Token Druid

This matchup shouldn’t be difficult. You don’t have great removal for token druid boards but that’s usually not a big deal since cards like Sea giant, Rabble bouncer and both the spell and giant combo are very effective vs druid. Token druid lacks good removal so often times you can protect your minions to set these turns up. For example if you play mountain giant and Mirror image or ray of frost, Druid will have a very tough time effectively killing the giant. Random spells can also be good vs token decks like druid since there’s a lot of board clear spells so try to get a big Cyclone turn if possible.

Mulligan: Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Mana Cyclone, Rabble Bouncer, Arcane Intellect, Luna, Sea Giant

Tempo/Aggro Rogue

This matchup is pretty close since Rogue is such a powerful deck right now. Like most matchups it’s all about getting all the combos. A typical rogue game will usually look like this: Turn 1-3 pass/intellect/Luna. Turn 4-6 ooze the pick/sandbinder or mana cyclone combo if you have enough spells. Usually generation more than 3 spells is good. If you’re on the coin then Giant + Coin Conjurer’s calling can also happen often. If you’re still alive by turn 7 you’re probably ahead on board at this point you should probably be trying to counter the rogue Burst with taunts (unless you have high HP).

Mulligan: Mana Cyclone, Ooze, Arcane Intellect, Ray of Frost, Mountain Giant (w/ synergy), Mirror image (w/ Synergy)

Mech Hunter 3:06

This matchup feels close but it can be tough sometimes because of cards like Spider bomb and Venomizer to remove giants. Cards like Sea giant and Rabble Bouncer can be really effective in this matchup. Ray of frost can be great to stall magnetic minions. Here’s an example of beating hunter with almost only sea giant ray of frost and conjurers calling:

Zilliax can also be game changing vs the hunter. Another thing to remember is that you can always Conjurer Calling any Mech. So if you’re opponent magnetizes a 1 mana goblin bomb for example it might be worth considering conjurer’s calling it to make 2 1 drops instead.

Mulligan: Mana Cyclone, Ray of frost, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Rabble Bouncer, Arcane Intellect, ray of frost

Zoo Warlock

Not much to say about this matchup, it should be pretty easy just play similarly to how you would against  token druid. Removing minions is important but not as important because Zoo lock doesn’t have a lot of burst like Druid does. Zoo doesn’t have strong removal so as long as you don’t get rushed down you should be fine. If you protect a minion like sorc’s apprentice with mirror images zoo will have a hard time killing it.

Murloc Shaman: similar to token druid/zoo lock just watch out for poison murloc and bloodlust.

Dragon Conjurer Mage

This matchup is all about the Giants. Our deck has spells like ray of frosts which can help a lot but the dragon mage has strong cards for the matchup like Book of Specters (for early giant), Mctech to steal our threats after Conj calling turns, and voodoo doll to hard remove the giants on turn 5. This matchup is pretty volatile since whoever can giant conj calling first wins making coin very important and draw rng. That being said there’s still things you can do to help win, playing around Mctech and rabble bouncer is relevant. A common scenario that sometimes happens against giant mage decks is when you make a 7-8 grave horror on the board with conj calling and they have an 8-8 giant on their side of the board, it can be very important to put the enemy giant at 7 or less hp so that they can’t trade and then conjurer’s calling a 1hp giant.

Mulligan: Arcane Intellect, Luna, Mountain Giant, Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Sandbinder (if going first), Conurer’s calling,

Giant Cyclone Mirror

This is a similar to the other mage Matchup but a little bit harder to play. If you go first it’s tough to get first giant conjurer’s calling so I usually go with a more tempo line, so I’ll sometimes play minions like sorc’s apprentice to try to get them to play cards slowing their giant turns down. It’s very important that you don’t play into sea giant if possible. Sometimes it’s unavoidable but like the other mage matchup only play mirror image if it’s really worth it since it will improve their rabble/sea giant turns.

Control Warrior

I’m pretty comfortable with calling this matchup mage favored (but not by a lot). This one’s all about the giant combos, and Archmage antonidas really gets to shines here as well. The mana cyclone combo isn’t as effective against control warrior since random spells won’t really win you the game the way it does against aggro/midrange decks. Try to keep your hand size large to get the giant combo as soon as you can. Playing around removal like Shield Slam, Dynomatic, and Brawl is extremely important.

If you have giants on board don’t play more minions for no reason if you don’t need to. If you have two CC in hand you can sometimes play into the brawl with 3 or 4 giants since this gives a   giant a higher chance of surviving and then you should still have at least 1 or 2 more CC casts.

Later on in the game when the Warrior is at 10 mana you sometimes have go wider on the board and play more threats than normal to try and play around Omega Devastator.

Antonidas + apprentice  + cheap spells is a great way to finish the game up if the warrior was able to deal with all the giants. This combo can easily generate 5+ fireballs so if you have antonidas in your hand try to save as many spells as you can. Apprentice will usually be saved for this combo if possible. Don’t focus too much on the antonidas turn, sometimes you have a really slow hand with no cheap spells and you can sometimes use it to force removal.

Mulligan: Arcane Intellect, Mountain giant, Sandbinder, Archmage Antonidas, Luna,  Conjurer’s calling with good cards like Giant or AI.

Bomb warrior:

Very similar to control warrior but with less removal and more threats. I prefer this matchup to control since they usually don’t have enough pressure to kill you with bombs and they don’t have as much removal. Blastmaster Boom can be countered by cards like Rabble bouncer and sea giant and ray of frost on the 7-7.

Card Analysis/budget replacement

In this section I’ll talk about some of the non-core card choices and suggest some budget replacements or tech alternatives. If I don’t mention a card in this section it means it’s irreplaceable and core to the deck. For this reason I will be skipping over every spell since they’re all very important to the deck.

This deck has lots of room to change cards around so I’ll talk about the ones that you can replace.
Here’s a list of some cards that aren’t included in the deck that could fit if you need to replace anything. Acolyte of Pain, Banana Buffoon x2, Mind Control Tech, Vex Crow, Frostbolt, Q uesting Adventurer (greedy)

Acidic Swamp Ooze: This is just a response to all the rogues on ladder since it can be game winning in that matchup. You can replace with any of the suggested replacement cards

Khadgar: You can play the deck without Khadgar but if you enjoy the deck and just mage in general I would recommend crafting him. Can set up powerful turns with Conjurer’s Calling and even things like mirror image + sea giant.

You can replace with any of the suggested replacement cards

Stargazer Luna: Luna is one of my favorite mage cards since she can make for some really strong card draw turns, often combined with Sorcerer’s Apprentice to make 0 Mana spells. You can replace with any of the suggested replacement cards

Sandbinder: I just started playing this card recently but I already really like it in the deck. The two Combos that I mentioned above revolve around Giant and Cyclone so guaranteeing a draw on either can be very helpful. Sometimes you draw the wrong one but those cards are so powerful that you can usually make them work. The only downside is that 4 mana 2-4 is kind of weak on board but you usually don’t have a lot to do on turn 4 anyways.

You can replace with any of the suggested replacement cards

Zilliax: As you probably know Zilliax is a great card in most decks right now. You can replace with any of the suggested replacements cards

Archmage Antonidas: Some people cut this card from the list but I think it’s good. It’s not the best card vs aggro decks like Mech hunter or Aggro Rogue but I think it’s power against decks like Warrior, Conjurer Mage, Nomi priest or any control/slow deck makes it worth it. It still can sometimes win games vs anything since it’s so powerful with cards like Mirror Image or ray of Frost. Against decks like Control Warrior you can often generate around 7+ fireballs if you have Antonidas + Sorcerer's apprentice and a few cheap spells. I’ll talk about this more in the matchup section. You can replace antonidas with Vex Crow, or Questing Adventurer.

Sea Giant: I didn’t like this card in the deck for a while but I decided to test more games with it in a slightly different list and I’ve come to like it more. It’s not as consistent and strong as Mountain Giant but some matchups it can be stronger. This is the case against decks like Token Druid, Zoo and Mech hunter. It’s not core to the deck and it can be replaced with value cards like questing.

Mountain Giant: Sorry can’t cut this one :(

Thanks for reading!