Hearthpwn

Deck has changed recently, but same general strategies apply. Now you finish with crocolisk to the face instead of fatigue (the deck can still win with fatigue anyway)

Overview:

   This is a fun lockout deck based on the interaction of Tortollan Pilgrim and Potion of Illusion. Essentially, the goal of this deck is to end a turn with a 1 mana 1/1 tort in hand. From there, you can freeze the board indefinitely and make 1 mana 1/1 copies of whatever cards in your deck you want. This deck can win by making a board and pushing face while your opponents's minions are all frozen, but more often it wins in fatigue when your opponent concedes. This deck was extremely tricky to learn; I threw away probably a dozen games that I could have won until I got a handle on how the deck is supposed to be played.

Strategy:

   Lorekeeper Polkelt is probably the hardest, most high-concept, and skill testing card in Hearthstone. You need to be thinking about 10 turns ahead before you play this card. The immediate effect is that you draw both torts. This is good and bad. Torts are the single most important card in your deck, but you probably wont have 8 mana for the two turns after you play lorekeeper, so you need to ask yourself if you can survive the next two turns with only the cards in your hand. the next 4 cards after the torts are two copies each of Blizzard [/card]and [card]Khartut Defender. You will draw one of these in random order since they are the same cost. Both are excellent for stalling until you have enough mana to play the torts. However there is a problem; while you only need one tort for the combo, you also need 10 mana to both duplicate it and freeze the board. You can play blizzard on 6 and 7, then one tort on 8--but that only gets you to 9 mana. You need to either survive a turn playing only a khartut defender, or ramp mana with either coin or Escaped Manasaber. After you successfully copy a 1/1 tort into your hand without dying, there are still some tough plays to make. You now have to carefully manage your hand, deck, and board to make sure you can keep playing torts every turn. Managing hand size and board are typically not too complicated. A good tip is to remember that potion of illusion adds cards to your hand in the order that they were player or summoned.

   Managing your deck is something that is a bit more unique to this deck. Eventually you will draw both potions of illusion from your deck, and your torts will no longer be able to duplicate themselves. You will need to survive until you draw an Educated Ellekk to shuffle the potion back in. The worst case scenario is that both copies of Frost Nova and manasaber are still in your deck, and you draw both copies of potion of illusion before the manasabers AND both copies of frost nova before the an ellek. In this situation your torts will not be able to copy themselves for a total of 5 turns, and also wont be able to freeze the board for 1 turn. You may burn 1 potion copying torts manually, and you may burn 1 frost nova freezing the board manually, but the last remaining copy of each spell must be saved for the ellek to shuffle back into your deck. In order to prepare for this, you will need to ensure that you have no less than 4 copies of tort, and either 1 Animated Broomstick(risky), two copies of broomstick(safe), or 3 copies of waste warden(safest) prior to drawing your last copy of potion of illusion. You then must play only one tort every turn to freeze the board leading up to your nova draws. you must manually copy your last tort so that can continue the combo after the ellek shuffles spells back into your deck. This gives you a total of 4 freeze turns from your torts, and you can burn one frost nova after that. This sets you up for the big ellek turn. At this point you ideally have a way to kill off your own ellek. The two copies of broomstick and one copy of waste warden are included in the deck for exactly this purpose. Even with a broomstick in hand you must take caution: ellek - nova - potion - broomstick requires 11 mana. Hopefully one of your manasabers from the previous turns survived and lets you pull this off. If not, you will have to split the spell shuffling into two turns. The first turn you must play ellek, frost nova, and something to kill your ellek. If you generated a Fireball, Frostbolt, or Brain Freeze from Wand Thief or Wandmaker you may use one of those spells now to kill off your ellek (the extra spell shuffled in will not disrupt the tort combo). If you are unlcky enough to draw frost nova immediately after shuffling it back into your deck, then you must now survive a turn without freeze while you wait to draw your other ellek. Otherwise, you will now draw your second ellek. This time, you must shuffle potion of illusion back into your deck, and freeze the board with a tort. Playing ellek - tort - potion requires 8 mana on its own, leaving you with only 2 mana to kill off your second ellek. Only broomstick or double waste warden with work in this situation, but at least you don't need any extra mana. If you do not have any way to kill off your own elleks, then your best bet is to ellek - nova - potion and hope your opponent doesnt have an answer. They may shuffle unwanted spells into your deck, or silence the ellek--either is devastating.

   Sphere of Sapience makes post-lorekeeper play much MUCH easier to manage. The ability to skip ahead in the draw order, and the ability to shuffle spell draws back into the deck are both extremely valuable.

Matchups:

   This deck has a ton of anti-aggro tools, so we generally about equal or slightly unfavored versus aggro. hunter is especially difficult, but by no means unwinnable. Paladin can be tricky, but we are generally favored. Druid is massively unfavored. It is almost impossible for priest or warrior to beat this deck.