Hearthpwn

Warning: Outdated Article!
Guide from: http://ihearthu.com/ramping-druid-guide/

Today we will be talking about something that has happened to the meta game lately: druids going Wild Growth.

When the changes to Nat Pagle and Tinkmaster Overspark happened, I thought to myself it would be time to start experimenting, so I decided to go back to the first strategy I ever used on Ranked Hearthstone play: The ramp.

The term “ramp”, comes from a MTG (magic: the gathering) card called Rampant Growth, that was a mana acceleration card, that would give you one extra land, making it so your big drops would come faster than usual, after some decks started to show up with this strategy in MTG, a new strategy name was born, and it was called “ramp”, even today we have decks that use similar cards, but these decks are still called ramp decks. Basically the strategy of ramp decks is to accelerate your mana in order to get your big drops earlier, the idea is to sacrifice early game to get to late game faster.

In Hearthstone, we have a similar card, as said before: Wild Growth. Before decks like mine started to show up, a lot of people would just go ahead and call Wild Growth a horrible card. Little did they know the potential that card had was just hidden in the shadows of the soon-to-be-nerfed super power of Nat Pagle’s card advantage.

Without any more delay, here is the deck list itself:

As I said before, this deck focus on sacrificing the early turns in order to get to the late game quicker, but it also has very strong early game defenses such as Wrath, Keeper of the Grove,Swipe. All of these are tools standard druids have to use in order to survive.

There are some different tools used in this deck that other druid lists don’t use (besides the obvious Wild Growth), these cards are:

• Mark of the Wild: A card that can combo with some of the other cards from this deck to make them more effective. This cards value isn’t just to give a minion taunt, it opens the door to a huge number of possibilities and combos that can be beneficial situationally such as:
• Mark an enemy minion and kill it with The Black Knight (usually what you intend to do in a match versus control warrior)
• Mark an enemy minion into Big Game Hunter’s range.
• Mark an enemy minion into Big Game Hunter’s range, copy it with Faceless ManipulatorAND kill it with BGH.
• Mark an allied minion and copy it with Faceless Manipulator.
• Mark that Ysera after she got silenced in the opponent’s turn.
• Mark that Ysera after she got silenced in the opponent’s turn and then copy it withFaceless Manipulator, making it two 6/14 taunts on the table.

You see the number of possibilities here are just huge, which gives substantial cause to auto add at least one in this kind of deck.

Starfall:This card is controversial. Many Druid players say Starfall is bad but in this deck it fits the mana curve better than Force of Nature. Force of Nature in this deck would be used more often to clear the board of opposing minions than to actually deal damage to an enemy player.

The reason this deck does not use the Force of Nature + Savage Roar combo is that besides the obvious fact that the cards themselves take up precious slots in the decklist, relying on a combo that you might not even be able to cast in order to win a game is just too risky. When you take into consideration the fact that we are already sacrificing slots for the mana acceleration (which is the main theme for this deck) the value of Starfallincreases.

Sunwalker: The explanation here is pretty simple: it has taunt. The meta nowadays has seen a rise in aggro decks which tend to have very little removal and a lot of creatures in order to obtain consistency. This trend makes it so that Sunwalker becomes a “3 for 1″ in a lot of situations which can turn the tide against an aggro deck. That is why I’ve decided to replace Cairne in favor of Sunwalker instead.

Ancient of War: Given that The Black Knight is utilized less in the current meta and the proliferation of Warrior+Aggro decks,Ancient of War has become a beast. I can not imagine myself playing without it.

Acidic Swamp Ooze: I decided to put this minion in because he fits the mana curve really good, and is a huge strike in the heart of more than half of the meta currently, while still being a strong 2-drop in other situations.

Now this deck is a really hard deck to play, and your mistakes really count here, so if you are not experienced in Hearthstone this deck can help you to get better and improve your skill. Mulligans are very important here in this deck so always pay attention to what you are playing against. Matches vs. Warlock are really tricky because they can either be playing Giants or Zoo, making it more important to pay attention to their mulligan before you actually do your own (the more cards they mulligan, the bigger the chances they are playing Giants).

Here is a small gameplay video, which I did days before I got to legendary rank, I don’t actually speak english in these videos because I was streaming for some friends from my country, nonetheless you have very detailed gameplay here, versus a lot of different decks:

Watch live video from BudaBudie on TwitchTV

 

I got to Legendary Rank with this deck in Test Season 4, hope you all liked this, and if you want to see more games, or just hang out with me, don’t be shy and follow me on twitch: www.twitch.tv/budabudie

Hope you liked this article, I loved writing it,
Nuba.