Hearthpwn

While I was being frustrated farming my golden Rogue and finding no joy whatsoever with Oil I had to come up with an idea to help me grind out the last 150+wins. Desperetaly trying to make control rogue work in the past, because of how awesome Trade Prince Gallywix is, I gave it another shot, while thinking what makes it so hard for the rogue. The answer I found was that the rogue class cards while offering very efficient board control have a little bit of a delay or setup attached to them. All the time I was pidgeonholed in including Deadly Poison, Blade Flurry and double SI:7 Agent, but using these cards to their fullest effect leaves the rogue vulnerable and taking damage, which would prompt inclusion of healing and taunts. In comparison the control version of warrior and druid focuses on keeping them healthy while clearing the board with just their class cards.

So here is my compromise, go with a Full on control build that emphasises the use of minions, but what minions would those be? Rogue loves spellpower, so we obviously kick in Bloodmage Thalnos, and 2 of Azure Drake, toss in a Malygos because we can. What helps us board control? Value minions - so Zombie Chow check! Since we are already running a few dragons, why not include the best 3drop(arguably) in the game Blackwing Technician , and toss in a singlish Twilight Drake for the dragon synergy as well as rogue's tendency to have a healthy handsize. Then we just need to fill out our endgame beasts, attendance Emperor Thaurissan, Trade Prince Gallywix, Dr. Boom, Ysera.

The rest I just kind of filled up to my preference. I really don't like Antique Healbot In rogue and I generally despise Sludge Belcher, So instead I decided to go with Double Defender of Argus. With the minions being really beefy I felt gaining much more effective hp thanks to the active use of taunt, rather than popping down a belcher, which to me seems mediocre on pressure and doesn't help immensely when behind on board. Big Game Hunter and Deathlord are tech options I decided to include due to weaknesses this matchup has, particularily aggro in case of deathlord, you find yourself needing those extra 2 turns in the early game sometimes if you fail to find a technician or your chows, to roll into your midgame dragons. Then Lastly I felt like Shadowstep was a very nice fit. Although in terms of battlecries this deck is lackluster, since you are rocking big stuff like malygos and ysera and even gallywix, they are prone to silences, yet surviving, that's where shadowstep comes really in handy. Also you do have the useful battlecries of big game and argus aswell incase you find the need, but overall, shadowstep just has very great utility. 

The fodder cards I hope i don't have to go in detail too much
2x Shiv, 2x Fan of Knives Cycle + synergy with malygos
2x Backstab. 2x Eviscerate your bread and butter removal + synergy with malygos
and then there's 2x Preparation, and a single Sprint. Prep helps with malygos turns aswell as doing those great tempo plays early in the game. It's not too bad if you have to prep shiv on turn 3, if it gains you an advantage its completely feasible. The 1 sprint gives the deck that little bit of push and extra options, also helps with getting a dragon for technician, but I don't find myself struggling with that too much.

I've played around 20 games with this deck before posting it like this here and it seems I have a very good matchup against Zoo and Demonzoo, Evenish with Mechmage and Tempomage, Struggling against facehunter(but haven't played one since I added the 2nd argus) and Really struggling versus Druid. Haven't had the chance to play warrior and played a single shaman and priest deck which I crushed.

Continuing to try this out and ploshing further, any feedback is appreciated!

16.04.
Played some games till I hit rank 3 and then I decided to record some 50ish games

Here's the record 20w 28l with some missing

11 warlock games 3-8

 

9 Mage games 3-6

 

9 Hunter games 4-5

 

6 Druid games 2-4

 

3 Rogue games 2-1

4 warrior games 2-2

2 Paladin games 2-0

2 Shaman games 2-0

2 Priest games 0-2

My verdict for the first day. Having a minion based opening is so crucial in every matchup, when the games end close, and you had a bad start its mostly due to the residue pressure. Bad hands were the death of me, so my question is - how can I make the deck more consistent even with all the cycling cards already in there, and what are the weak links? Any advice is appreciated.

17.04-18.04
-Bloodmage Thalnos
-Dr.Boom
-Shiv
-Deathlord
+SI:7 Agent
+Edvin Vancleef
+Antique Healbot
+Rend Blackhand
Made some minor changes to the deck, since those stats were clearly ominous. I decided to toss my disregard for Healbot aside for the time being and subbed him in for Sylvanas, which was too slow most of the time. The improvement was fairly obvious against freeze mage atleast, which netted me 4 out of 4 wins. As cycling was not an apparent problem I traded 1 shiv for the agent that I previously removed. Inclusion of Rend at the expense of Boom was pretty ridiculous, but in all honesty, I think he does well for what is troublesome in this deck. So the idea of this switch in brainless - you still have only one bgh target, which is also stat wise clearly worse and it has the same mana cost, but hey, dragons, am I rite? But seriously, Rend solves alot of problems rogue has, if you don't run hard removal. Since I am pretty stubborn about not running silence here, I had an apparent weakness to sylvanas, Rend mildly helps with that. Handlock matchup is still a pain today as well though (stupid epic giants). Yeah, I also subbed in Vancleef, to give myself that little bit of push against more aggressive decks, by being able to slam a big threat down early and turn their guns against them. Helped me alot in the Zoo and mage matchups. Todays winrate was improved to a staggering 56% and I'm aiming higher, cheers!

18.04-19.04
went exactly 25-25 Most successes versus mage, druid and warrior. Noticed that paladin is an excruciating matchup where I won 1 out of 6 and that I have almost 0 chance against midrange hunter. Tinkering with the idea of slipping in a Wild Pyromancer but can't decide what to cut. Sludge Belcher was tested and found not viable, the main issue is still consistency and insuring early game presence, any ideas?

20.04
-SI:7 Agent
-Twilight Drake
+Ironbeak Owl
+Alexstraza

Today I went 20-26. Abysmal stats in the Hunter and warlock matchups which I mostly played today - them being 4-9 and 5-9 respectively, on the good side, I finally found a win against a midrange paladin after a 8-loss streak in this matchup. So I didn't change alot in the deck, but somehow today the Zoo matchup felt very very skewed, and I didn't see particularily alot of change in their decks, save for sea giant which seemingly increased in popularity, I wanna say it was quite rngish on average - very unlucky implosions for me and topdeck war-wise heavily zoo favored, but well, that's still a thing - this deck certainly lacks consistency. So, the 2 big changes are not so much about what is removed, but what's added. Thanks to this lil' guy I finally had a chance in the paladin matchup - Ironbeak Owl For a short while she completely replaced bgh and I was running 2 shiv again to improve consistency for the card draw, but it didn't do enough, so I quickly tossed big game back in for the shiv. Anyway, that card does help slightly in most matchups, but excels in the paladin matchup, oh and by the way - freeze mage? Yes sir, 7 consecutive wins. The second change? Alexstraza finds a place in the crew. Wipmie tossed the idea to me and I was hesitant, but desperate enough to give it a try, so I replaced Ysera for her. Since the deck is so passive that actually dealing damage to the other hero is a real chore, often times you find yourself pummeling on 30hp once you finally get boardcontrol. Alex gives you the chance to reduce the clock of the enemy timer by a significant amount and also can save you in some matchups when you are in a pinch. The loss of Ysera weighed heavily on me though and I decided to toss out a charachter that didn't perform all too well - poor Twilight Drake. The card just didn't seem to do enough most of the time, and sitting on the 4 mana slot, it was very awkward to fit her into your turns very well, a significant amout of times it got silenced and it felt very clunky in the end, so it had to go.

On a side note, I am 20 wins away from my golden Rogue, so I will probably abandon the deck for a little while, since it doesn't quite seem to work out in the meta yet. Zoo and Hunter are such a coin toss that it's just frustrating queueing in that matchup. I will however optimise this concept more once the other BRM wings are released. Tommorow Last update and random banter I might plop out! Cheers!

21.04

It's done!! And what an exruciating last day it was. I don't have the heart to look at my stats, but it was loss after loss after loss (as can be seen by my rank, I plummeted down to 9 from 5). I was trying out different setups with Bladeflurries, a Perditions blade, put back Thalnos, it was a mess. Then I took a break and went back to yesterdays build and I found it's the most consistent by far.

My final thoughts? I'll go back to this deck once the full BRM expansion is released, right now it's just not good enough, I do however think it's completely tournament viable, it wrecks Control Warrior and to some extent grim patron warrior if you manage to hold on long enough, since the addition of owl, the paladin matchup is fairly doable, very good against any mage deck and thanks to the arguses can keep up with druid. Oil rogue is a fair matchup, that gets completely skewed if you can drop Gallywix on them.

Zoo, facehunter and to a lesser extent handlock are quite the coin flip with the other side having the advantage, if against hunter you can't find your early drops to taunt up or make a really big cleef at the start, it's tough. Against Zoo you need your early drops, as with the advent of imp gang boss their board just becomes too tough to handle, if you manage to dodge a value doomguard you're doing well. 

Midrange hunter is the absolute nightmare of this deck. You get rekd by Freezing traps and if they curve out perfectly you are just donezo.

And then there's shaman and priest... *chuckles*

It was a blast playing this deck, and I'll be working on it further. Thanks for the support.