Hearthpwn

A lovely little aggro priest guide

Hi everyone my name is Rens better known as Sezoklo and I am a Hearthstone streamer on Twitch where I play mostly around top 200 aiming for top 16 finishes each and every month trying to figure out which decks are the best. You can watch me on www.twitch.tv/sezoklo and stay up to date on www.twitter.com/sezoklo I appreciate your time for reading my guide.

I decided to write a guide about the well-known aggro priest deck, the deck that seems easy to play but there are a lot of little things I see people do wrong, this is mainly the 'when to trade/when to go face' and the mulligan(which has never been more important in Hearthstone than in the current meta). 

In this guide I will try to make it as clear as possible what is wrong and what is good to keep and hopefully this will clear things up and improve playstyle and increase your winrate. I will try to keep it clear and simple. Please let me know if there's something you think I should mention and also if you have any questions I will try to answer them in the comments below.


The aggro priest guide all you need to know

To keep, to never keep and to sometimes keep; 

KEEP: Frazzled Freshman, Imprisoned Homunculus, Voidtouched Attendant & Disciplinarian Gandling  are ALWAYS keeps, the 1 drops are always keeps because it's important to play stuff, spend your mana, you don't want to float mana you always want to play minions since we're playing an aggro deck and we're super boardbased. Disciplinarian Gandling  is 1 of your most expensive cards but it's certainly a keep in almost every match up because you can create the biggest boards out of nowhere with this card, it can checkmate your opponent the same way Illucia can checkmate your opponent, more about Illucia in a bit.

NEVER KEEP: Darkbishop Benedictus, Voracious Reader, Traveling Merchant these cards are in each and every situation NEVER EVER keeps.

SOMETIMES KEEP: This is probably the 'hardest' part about the deck, the cards you keep sometimes. These depend on match ups, going first, going second, what to toss, what to keep together, a few small things that can change the outcome of the results a lot. 

As I mentioned above at the 'KEEP' part I wrote to keep the Disciplinarian Gandling if you have the 3-6 in your opening hand and you get offered 0 mana 1-1's(Desk Imp & Murloc Tinyfin) as well you might as well keep them, they are gonna be 4-4's on turn 3 or 4 depending on having the coin or not.
Let's say your starting hand is Disciplinarian Gandling, a 0 mana 1-1 and a Raise Dead I would even consider keeping the raise dead because the 0 mana cards die when u play them in combination with the 3-6 so you can play the 1-1 after u play the 3-6 > raise dead and get back the 0 mana 1-1's for even more 4-4's which is a huge tempo swing most of the time. This combination of cards is really unlikely but it happens so I just wanted to mention that. 

Wriggling Horror is nice example of a card that you almost NEVER want to keep but there are rare situations where you do want to keep it, for example; you're on coin and you have 2x Frazzled Freshman in hand(or 1 mana 1-3) + wriggling and you know 100% sure your opponent will never be able to deal with 1 of the minions (so both stick 100%), a rare situation but also a clear situation to justify keeping the card.
The same idea kinda goes with the 2-3's(Twilight Deceptor & Disciplinarian Gandling). these cards only work if you know for sure you have something that's going to stick, you don't want to play a card on turn 1 that could get deleted and keep the Disciplinarian Gandling  on the side to have nothing to buff. Same goes for Twilight Deceptor, you can keep it but you need to be sure you can HIT face and activate it without losing the board for not being able to make a value trade in case needed, these cards are just always wrong to keep if you can't get the value out of it quickly.

Tour Guide is a keep when u face the mirror and you don't have any other 1 drops in hand yet and you have to mulligan for it so you decide to keep it to be sure you have at least a play and a 0 mana hero power for turn 2, or later in case you curve out. It's rarely a keep but sometimes really good since it's way better than not having a play. 

Cult Neophyte is a keep vs druid(assuming it's NOT aggro druid) and mage and sometimes vs other decks as well if they have the coin and you have illucia as well + a 1 drop. So you go; 1 drop, hope they don't play coin. Neophyte on 2(so they can't use the coin) and then the turn after you empty your hand as well as you can and play Illucia, play their coin and give your opponent a shitty hand, this is most of the time a checkmate. 

About Guardian Augmerchant I don't have much to say, it seems to not be a keep but then in certain match ups and especially the mirror it can shine big time and it can be super useful also in an offensive way(using the battlecry 1 dmg on opponent minions to finish them off). 

Mindrender Illucia the witch, the card that everyone loves so much, 1 of the most overpowered cards ever created and people would love to see dissapear from the game, this card is played aggresively always in this deck like every other card, set up lethal with her, you can steal coins with her, this card is on a different level and may seem to be hard to play with at first but as soon as you played her a few times you'll get the hang of it. You can keep her in match ups where the opponent has the coin, if you're lucky you get to steal coin which means a lot of tempo. You can also keep her vs decks that discount cards a lot like rogue, warlock and demonhunter. The only match ups where you don't keep Illucia is against hunter, paladin and another priest. Against aggro druid you also don't keep her but you never know when you're playing ladder what you're facing so I would definetely keep Illucia vs druid too. There's more information about Illucia below.

I think this is the most important information when it comes to playing this deck, the mulligan is just super important and it's rewarding to get better at it. We're playing an aggro deck so ALWAYS try to play on curve, try to NOT float mana and in tempo matchups play minions, minions, minions instead of hero power unless you can get too much value out of a hero power which can be the case of course. Learn how to play different matchups, and play around opponents cards. Play around the Soul Rend of a warlock, try to steal coins with Illucia if you can, play Illucia after opponent played skull of Gul'dan or Octobot or just setup lethal with Illucia by filling the board with minions and end with Illucia to buy yourself another turn to finish off your opponent. Illucia is a problematic card, insanely OP and it will win you a lot of games but it's not the core of the deck, this deck easily wins games without her.

If you look at the decks that people are playing currently on ladder priest seems like a really good pick, the games are fast and you learn a lot from playing aggro since you have to be sure to make the best plays possible the first 5-6 turns since games will be over before you know it so every turn matters a lot, make the most optimized play every time!
Try to dodge shaman, perpetual flame is your biggest weakness, your board will just never stick vs Shaman so try to play around that card as well as possible. 

Thank you for reading my little Aggro Priest Guide, please let me know what you think in the comments below, if you have any advice or questions hit me up as well and I will be posting more of this of other decks in the future too.