Hearthpwn

Hi all!, this deck bought me most of the way to legend this season. Hope you enjoy playing it as much as your opponents may end un hating it... :-)

Legend proof:

The ultimate survival HS guide!

So what you have here is just another twist of the control attrition decks (a.k.a. Grinder mage) that people has been playing for since Duplicate was released. I' ve never been a big fan of this deck before, however with the release of LoE I think it has become a real contestant.

Your game plan

The plan of the deck is to last long enough by establishing a war of attrition with your opponent and end up winning by "over-valuing" him/her. No big combos, no final burst, nothing that fancy, you just have to play the value game and this is what the deck does the best.

Value, in hearthstone, is a semi-broad concept.

On the one hand it means that you make the most of your resources this has to do with the way you play the game, and is a skill that can be trained by playing. A clear example of this is making efficient trades, extracting tempo from your plays whenever is possible (but not focusing on that), ...

On the other hand, value comes in the form of card advantage. There are plenty of card advantage sources in the deck: Arcane Intellect, Duplicate, Jeweled Scarab, Ethereal Conjurer, all the AoE (such as Explosive Sheep, Blizzard and Flamestrike), ...

In order to win this attrition war with the opponent you need to survive. Every turn that you survive will make the difference in value between you and your opponent bigger. In order to achieve this you have several surviving engines in for of taunters (Deathlord, Sludge Belcher), healers (Antique Healbot) and the amazing Animated Armor. Imagine for a moment the typical scenario where the opponent has burnt all their resources and the only way he/she has to kill you is by bursting you over your belches, but unfortunately for your opponent besides your belcher you have an Animated Armor and both of them backed-up by a Duplicate. Well, as you play the deck you'll see this scenario is not as unlikely as you may think, and more often that not they are Game wins.

On top of this, you have a special guest from LoE: Brann Bronzebeard. This guy is simply amazing in this context. He turns Antique Healbot into Reno Jackson, he can turn Jeweled Scarab and Ethereal Conjurer into the ultimate card drawing engine, and some more shenanigans that you will discover as you play the deck.

Weaknesses

The worst pairing for this decks are midrange decks. in particular combo Druid is one of the hardest match ups you may find. Why is that? We'll simply because the pressure level they put is quite high since the beginning and the value pf each card they game is high enough in order not to run out of steam very fast.

Contrariwise, aggro decks are not as difficult because they run out of steam a lot faster so is easier to stabilize the game and start dominating once you've done it. 

The control match up, is a tricky one. You will very often go fatigue in the control match ups, this is why you need to be very aware of how many cards you (and your opponent) have left in the deck and take that into account always as a win condition (do not play Arcane Intellect unless your opponent is clearly ahead in card advantage or you need it to survive). If you take this into account and maximize your resources you should be able to win every control deck out there, being Priest control the most difficult as they have some nice fatigue tools (Entomb and Deathlord).

You can check my other legend decks here:

• S18 Secretless tempo mage
• S19 Fel Hybrid
• S22 Demon Zoo