Hearthpwn

Just hit legend with this deck! I've been trying to make this deck work ever since we got cat but it's actually suuuuper real with the addition of sing-along buddy. Now, as long as you get both cats out, you can deal 20 damage on 6 with buddy and garrison commander/popular pixie or 30 on 9 with buddy and both pieces. This isn't a combo deck though , we're not holding our pieces until turn 9 to try and kill them. Although, you have to be cautious of wasting buddies and not having enough burst after they drop reno, you can absolutely drop an early commander to threaten their life total and, if done heading into their turn 6 or 5 going second, even potentially put them on a "reno or die" situation. 

Alright, I'll now briefly talk about the matchups I experienced in the meta and what I extrapolated from the data I experienced.

So for aggro there are two types of matchups for us as far as I am considered: decks that go wide and tall early like even shaman, and decks that aim to go really fast in the first few turns and then burn you out of the game like pirate rogue and shadow priest. Into the former we are quite bad thanks to our lack of really solid removal. Occasionally you can win if you draw 2 removal spells in their opener and they don't draw chisel + anchor totem and/or too many 0 costs but it's generally unfavored in my experience (but not unwinnable!). Shadow priest and pirate rogue are actually very favored matchups thanks to the fact that we have just enough small removal to deal with their first couple boards all the while being able to armor up very easily when they are trying to burn us out of the game. And then we end up killing them before they can potentially draw into another push. Vs. less common aggro decks I did pretty well. 2-0 vs holy wrath because we take them off the board pretty decently as well as armoring up so they cant chip us down to 25 all the while threatening to kill THEM from over 20. The last one I played had to blind holy wrath to kill my buddy so I didnt lethal him and he still just lost to second one next turn. And lastly, kingsbane rogue is out tradeable much to my own suprise but you need to get both cats online pretty early. If you get unlucky and dont get both cats by turn 5 then you probably lose but that's pretty unlikely with our draw power + 4 copies of cat.

Control is actually amazing for us (with some outliers). I had a 100% winrate vs. warrior and renolock (which already says a lot) but I also had a positive winrate into reno priest and reno shaman. Much like kingsbane, we just tend to get there eventually. Chewing through reno really isnt a problem since often times they are forced to reno on 6 or 7 or risk dying to 20 damage of burst from hand. And then after reno we can just go for 30 damage since we're often not at a huge risk of dying. The only bad one is reno druid. The armor gain is brutal enough that even with 5 damage very turn and 2 waves of 30 damage we simply won't get there before we die. It doesn't help that they ramp up to super threats at breakneck speed. 

Combo is pretty bad as you might expect but not unwinnable. My fastest goldfish has been turn 5 so that has odds to beat a lot of combo decks if they aren't really interacting with you (especially since we gain armor). The worst are the fast combo decks of the format. Every rogue combo deck, miracle priest, and miracle druid are a nightmare. I didn't win a single game vs. combo rogues (didn't see any combo priests though) and interestingly enough miracle druid does brick sometimes you can kill them on turn 5 or 6 and this will occasionally happen (although less often than not). It's also new enough that I'm unashamed to admit I won more than 2 games from our opponents roping out on the combo turn (not gonna rely on that though). Questline warlock is very beatable because of our high burst and we actually deal with the relatively "late" giants board of the giant version of that deck pretty well. And then quest mage wasn't as bad as you'd expect. I was 3-2 and I imagine this was to owe to the fact that we don't have a board for them to freeze so it's surprisingly harder to stop us and sometimes our turn 6 damage catches them off guard so they may not be privy enough to drop reno or an alibi. 

That's the gist of it. Some brief mullgan advice: Always keep ways to get to cat (but not too many and no more than 1 vs. aggro generally) into aggro keep lunar eclipse and rake and into anything else I was always keeping spread the word (we have pretty solid odds to get it online within the first few turns so it can really help us churn through our deck if we didnt need the slot for removal).

I've seen a few builds of even druid both pre and post workshop and they're usually pretty high on various aggro tools like wickerclaw and, don't get me wrong, I love wickerclaw just as much as the next guy but I wholeheartedly believe that this is the right way to build this deck if you want to see results. Not to get it twisted either, I tested out an aggro build that someone shared with me. The results were that we were a very bad aggro deck vs control and still didnt kill fast enough for combo. Wicker claws and the gang were nice vs even shaman in the early game, but we just didnt have the longevity to keep up with how infrequently you get cats thanks to no gold panner and no living seeds. I lost like 6 or 7 games in casual wild before I decided that this wasn't it (but more power to you if you're a big fan of that playstyle it's probably the most reasonable way to make wickerclaw and savage combatant even remotely viable). It's kind of defeatist too? Like we just got this new tool that does A LOT of damage after you've successfully dug for and played both cats and you're not going to play a build that tries to get them online asap and hit for big numbers? I found that my games where I got both cats online early were among my best. A lot of time with a 5 damage attack is one thing to help us kill with our big burst on 6 but also it turns on our draw and removal without having to get lucky. Sometimes, when I was playing the aforementioned aggro build, I would just be stuck with a spread the word and/or savage striker in hand that did fuck all because I hadn't seen any cats. I even ended up adding in gold panner (in place of solar eclipse) very early on in my climb for this exact reason.

But yeah ok that's enough out of me I really hope you enjoy the first time even druid has truly felt like a viable deck with a unique reason to play it (and, important to note, not just bad questline druid). Any feedback is welcome.