Hearthpwn

Hey everyone, I'm Gatormatthew. I make educational Hearthstone content, typically featuring new and inventive decks that I come up with myself. Today's guide is on a crazy idea of mine, Clown Priest. This deck includes a lot of cards that have never seen play before in Priest and I legitimately think it has the potential to be better than a standard Priest. Below, I have a quick guide + a 25-minute video where I play a few games with the deck and explain my choices. Hope you enjoy it!

o, clearly, with the sheer novelty of this deck, I have to take some time to explain myself. The first thing we have to ask ourselves is; What is the goal behind running this Clown package? What do we lose to run it and when does it help us? The answer to both of these questions is pretty clear. Carnival Clown allows us to have a legitimate win condition that comes into play at around turn 9/10. By running Dark Inquisitor Xanesh and Carnival Clown as our only minions, Insight always gets us one of our combo pieces in our hand.  Now, when I was originally theorycrafting the deck, I realized how few options Priest has to corrupt the Carnival Clown. The best choice I could come up with was Idol of Y'Shaarj, a sudo-minion that typically creates a 10-10 taunt for 8 mana, while also corrupting our 7 mana Clowns. Idol is the only option to corrupt our Clowns without blocking Insight from drawing our combo pieces.

The main downside of the deck is that we can't run Venomous Scorpid or Wandmaker, two cards that allow you to generate a handful of different cards for every situation. Not having these earlygame minions significantly weakens our earlygame board proactivity, while Clown gives us a boatload of lategame proactivity.

Mulligan wise, keep Insight and Palm Reading into every matchup, keep Holy Smite on the coin versus aggro, and keep Devouring Plague into aggro.