Hearthpwn

Hey I'm thinking about this deck in the upcoming standard format. Do you have any ideas for card replacements or how you would create a warlock deck for it?

Adapting the deck to Standard is a bit tricky since you lose out on so many solid neutrals, just look at what's left after taking out all the Wild cards: Imgur.

Without knowing every Old Gods card, it's difficult to tell how the deck will look simply because there's a notable lack of cards when trying to build it.

One thing you can do though is try to replace the natural midrange synergy with a dragon one. This does change the function of the deck a bit though. Instead of competing for the earlygame, the Warlock tools are mainly used to survive against aggro and go par for par with control decks. Then Renounce Darkness would serve as a tool to eliminate your earlygame cards in midrange and control matchups. A bit less RNG with such a deck, a bit more dust cost, but a similar principle. I've tried theorycrafting such a deck: here.

Despite the name, it's a lot harder to predict how a new card would do in Standard, in that it is the more wild format.

Standard Renounce Darkness

I took a poke at it here^ - it certainly loses some raw power without Boom and Shredders, so I went for a bit more card draw and more Warlock cards

Hm very nice, more spell-oriented but that could be a great thing depending on the meta.

Possessed Villager might be better substituted for Flame Imp for the stat bonus if there's little aggro around, which may be the case considering all the slow and Taunt cards pushed into the Standard set.

It might be a good idea to include Darkshire Librarian in the Standard list. The average card quality is worse so you're more pressured to draw into Renounce early and Librarian cycles well. No net loss of card advantage and 3/2 for 2 contests the board well. It sucks a bit if you discard one of your 5-cost Neutral minions, but the benefit will usually outweigh that downside, and discarding one of the Warlock cards isn't that big a deal.

Suggesting Wrathguard... that card is usually very nice in the early game but sucks majorly in the late game. This way you have an even better early game with your 2 mana 4/3 (basically no drawback) and in the late game, it becomes another card.

Could work for sure, but I do fear that with both Wrathguard and Flame Imp you'll be wishing for health in the mid/lategame, especially against aggro. A Healbot could help in that case, but Healbot is a really debatable inclusion. I also thought about throwing in Mistress of Pain too, I feel like that can work about as well as Wrathguard in securing the earlygame and save you a bit of health.

I'm sure the Warlock cheap minion slots are pretty flexible though; ideally you won't need to play the class cards past turn 6 or so.