Hearthpwn

Zilliax is perfect and ticking

Hit standard legend with this 2 months ago and decided to be consistent and go for wild legend with the deck as well (especially since some of the cards rotated recently). I also thought that this meta specifically would be an amazing time for the deck because there are a couple key matchups that helya INSTANTLY wins like fruit druid and non-mine rogue and we also maintain a good matchup into most aggro decks. On the flipside, I underestimated how popular quest mage was gonna be this meta. It's not the *worst* matchup in the world; I ended up having a slightly positive winrate even out of sheer luck, but it's still pretty bad. The only saving grace is you can pop their block and potentially kill them during their next few turns of draws as they go for the kill (and you also shut off their renos so they can't easily heal out of range).

Not gonna talk about all the matchups this time because it's pretty simple: We beat fast combo with helya (and sometimes frost plagues are enough), we beat aggro with our small removal and tomb traitor(but zarimi can do zarimi things of course), and we beat control by turning off reno and pressuring them (although often we'll still lose to greedy control especially because of renathal). Of course the game doesn't always go exactly as I need it to and I don't draw helya or even removal every game but we have outs to beat most things. Overall on pc I managed a 61% winrate (I play a handful of games on mobile each day during the week) so pretty good. 

Now for a quick mulligan guide. In general, keep staff of the primus, helya, and down with the ship. Into aggro, keep plague strike, miracle salesman, and mining casualties. Into control keep distressed kvaldir and miracle salesman. Into combo, you can consider mulliganing away down with the ships to look harder for helya depending on the the specific combo deck you're facing. Just consider that I've won on 2 seperate times vs. fruit druid without helya just because they weren't prepared to draw frost plagues when they did.

To discuss my card selection briefly: frozen over is run pretty much for exactly the questline warlock matchup. The fact that plagues count as self damage for them means that we have no inevitability at all HOWEVER they do tend to burn through their deck quite quickly. So if we can get helya out and then play frozen over they could easily take 20+ damage and explode. I didn't see a ton of ql warlock though to be fair (the least I've seen in a while actually) but I still needed some sort of efficient card draw. Feel free to play something like defrost or gold panner here if they tickle your fancy. Other than that the rest is pretty core? I'm up on plague strike compared to what standard versions of the deck have played because of the more powerful aggro decks in our format and I'm off of burrow buster because it's quite slow. Like yes we get our legendary reward slower as a result but if you're taking turn 5 on such a low power play then you may not even get to cast your reward. I ended up replacing it with chillfallen baron pretty early because I really needed more draw. In that same vein I swapped in miracle salesman because I really needed the extra draw and it actually worked wonders. Prior to that I was playing the recently runeless noxious cadaver which was FIIIIINE but not what I needed. I found that even in aggro matchups sometimes I would clear with plague strike and have 1 extra mana and a cadaver in hand just collecting dust. Obviously I would use it eventually but instead i can get miracle salesman out on the board to threaten things better and save me face damage (plus the oil). The primus may seem slow to you but I found we needed one BIG drop once we got to 8. Really helped me cement a lot of victories in various ways and the combination of healing and card advantage was also really beneficial to our gameplan.

So yeah, enjoy. Just keep in mind depending on your personal micro meta this may not be great. Especially below diamond 5 (with the bar raising as you get later in the season) you will encounter a lot of greedy reno piles with steam cleaner in the etc. It's very hard for us to keep up with them with no threat of plagues in deck especially if they can either drop their reno that turn (like in druid with more than 10 mana) or we just don't draw a plague card. My personal micro meta featured a fair amount of aggro rogues and even shaman bots though and the deck is pretty sufficient vs. those.

Edit: Just added the Zilliax modules.