Hearthpwn

This deck is a pretty fun control deck, heavily leaning on secrets and the three legendaries and their synergy. It is no mystery why feugen, stalach and duplicate are a winning trio. The archmage himself however also combines very well with duplicate and any secret really, given that you can play him and immediately get value from playing a secret. However, there is more to this deck than these five cardslots.

The early defense is in the shape of reliable 2 drops with the mad scientist, the snowchugger, the frost bolt and the explosive sheep. These are also the cards to mulligan towards. The midgame package are a couple of very annoying ethereal arcanists and water elementals. These are also excellent duplicate targets. As this deck is comfortable in the late game, I've included 4 sweepers on top of the explosive sheep to hinder the aggro decks. The removal package includes the bog standard fireballs and the vaporizes, which has great synergy with our deck already, though they are lackluster against rush decks. Again a reason why this deck loves its sweepers. To round the deck out, I've included a couple of other secrets that mess up sequences and keeps the opponent guessing, as well as the ice block because we never want to play a naked ethereal arcanist. Recent inclusions are the illuminator, the acolyte of pain and the miser Big Game hunter. These three are for specific matchups. The illuminator is already good against aggro, but if you manage to make him stick or duplicate her she will buy you more than enough time . The acolyte of pain is there to be a body on turn 3 and draw 1-2 cards. It is also excellent against rush decks because he'll casually drag a guy with him plus a fireblast. The big game hunter is anti-legendaries. I keep running into many of them and he seems just better than the first polymorph, because he is a warm body, and we are low on those.

When playing the deck I mulligan for the 2-drops. Specifically the mad scientist, because we don't really want to draw the secrets with the amount of three drops that we have. We do not want a glut of two drops either. The ideal hand would probably be a 2-drop minion, a 4-drop minion and the third card should be a card that is fine in the match-up or a 3-drop for curving purposes.

Against aggro I am willing to trade pretty aggressively with most creatures. The four-drops and the illuminator usually also demand an answer by them or they will lose tempo very quickly. Against a dedicated control deck it is important to realize that we are faster than they are and can finish them off with burn. Our endgame is also pretty good against the most common strategies. We can usually grind them out of their removal spells by playing the arcanists, the feugen/stalag duo and the archmage. And God forbid if they waste one of their spells on a water elemental.

The weakness of the deck is that it can get run over by hunters and their deathrattling creatures, as many of their creatures tend to leave a body behind after kicking the bucket. That is very annoying against our sweepers.  The second weakness is that we aren't running many pro-active cards at three mana. The current loadout with the acolyte of pain, the illuminator and the big game hunter should however give us a pro-active turn three play frequently enough. A different weakness is  that we can be soft against a couple of very common legendaries like ysera or to a lesser degree ragnaros. The strategy here is that we want to be way ahead on the board with the early threats before they can really take advantage of those, or at the very least trade a fireball and a critter for one. A final weakness is our creature density. The deck plays only 16 creatures, and two of those are explosive sheep. We do have ways to prevent us from running dry between the acolyte of pain and the duplicates, but even then there is a real possibility that we run out of creatures. Not playing too many of our threats into their sweeper should however be good enough.

Ah, and yes, the two anti-secret cards out there can get us good. Fortunately flare has fallen out of favor and the secret stealer is a rare sight on the ladder.

Feel free to adapt the deck to your liking. I think this could work with a mech shell instead. You can also play it with Kirin Tor Mages instead, though I didn't feel they were pulling their weight in this version. The one thing I wouldn't touch are the feugen/stalach, the archmage, the two duplicates and scientists.

EDIT: It looks like Kevan Mystic is starting to catch on, though we are still able to win through them. As it turns out the secrets are there for disruption, but it is not critical that each of them is able to fire. Losing one or two is fine.

New addition is a spellbender for a counterspell. While counterspell is pretty nice, the spellbender does everything counterspell does, but more reliably. We want to keep our big guys alive and the spellbender is much more efficient at that.