Hearthpwn

Introduction

Much like my deck "Ancient Omlets" I was playing around with my new Ancient of War cards trying to find out what decks they worked well in. Generally the answer was a deck that drains out most of your opponents removal by the time you drop Ancient of War. We do that here by dropping a lot of sticky cheap and mid range minions leading up to a nice 7 drop.

How it works

Mulligan for the cheap minions, especially the eggs. The only 3 or 4 cost cards to keep are Piloted Shredder (if you have Innervate or Coin) and Harvest Golem. If you get one or two you can also keep activators like Sunfury Protector, Power of the Wild or Dire Wolf Alpha.

Run out the cheap sticky minions on curve or close to it. Your opponent will either start chewing on them or will simply ignore them and go face on you. You generally want to be making trades when you can, but its worth taking early face shots when you can. Control decks will sometimes foolishly just ignore the spiders and eggs which Power of the Wild can turn into some pretty decent damage early on.

Innervate in this deck is not here to launch out early threats, though a second turn Piloted Shredder is not a bad plan. Its real job is to play midgame into one of the 4 potent 7 drops in the deck. Often your opponent will be working hard to clean up all your deathrattle minions and now has a big boy to worry about as well. Sea Giant also fills this roll typically without needing Innervate to drop it.

The coup-de-grace is of course good old Savage Roar. The early minions tend to do a good job getting an opponent in mid range health and between the taunts and deathrattles it can be very hard for an opponent to board clear you. Because you don't have combo, sometimes you will want to run out Savage Roar short of lethal. You really want to run it when you think your board size is about at its likely peak and just get the maximum value from it.

The Taunts in the deck from Sunfury Protector and Defender of Argus are partly to help blunt rush decks and partly to force activation of the eggs. This build is a pretty good balance between dealing with aggro and control so depending on what your face you may want to nudge it one way or the other.

Effectiveness

I give it a rating of Functional (4 of 5 stars).  I've mostly won on the ladder with it but it's not a top tier deck having a bit of a weakness to hunter, handlock and some other heavy hitters. Its a great deck against midrange and seems to work wonders against various flavors of warrior. Its also pretty fun and easy to play.