Hearthpwn

That has always been a challenge for control paladin. If you have Uther DK, you can go for the OTK deck, though I found that it worked better in the variant without those cards.

If you want an unusual win condition, I was also pretty happy with the performance of this deck:

### Zombie Paladin
# 2x (2) Crystology
# 2x (2) Equality
# 2x (2) Immortal Prelate
# 2x (2) Sound the Bells!
# 1x (2) Vicious Scalehide
# 2x (2) Wild Pyromancer
# 1x (3) Acolyte of Pain
# 2x (3) Stonehill Defender
# 1x (3) Time Out!
# 1x (3) Zola the Gorgon
# 2x (4) Blessing of Kings
# 2x (4) Consecration
# 2x (4) Truesilver Champion
# 1x (5) Mechano-Egg
# 1x (5) Zilliax
# 2x (6) Spikeridged Steed
# 1x (6) Sunkeeper Tarim
# 1x (7) Lynessa Sunsorrow
# 1x (8) The Lich King
# 1x (9) Uther of the Ebon Blade

Uther, Lich King, Sunkeeper and Zilliax are added power but not core to the deck. The real finisher is that you have 2 immortal prelates that just keep coming back really strong and prevent you from ever dying to fatigue. I built this with lots of anti-aggro and it can grind out most control decks surprisingly well, but has bad matchups against combo though it can play pretty aggressively.

The key is that you have more silence targets than your opponent can deal with. Ideally you can eat up a silence or two with Lich kind and a generic buffed minion, but 2 Immortal Prelates + Lynessa + Zola for another Lynessa gives you tons of fuel even if they spend their silences pretty wisely.

I'd be careful with High Priest Thekal and Shirvallah, the Tiger. I've played tons of control paladin and eagerly included both of them in all my deck variations as soon as the expansion was out. In every case, I wound up dropping both of them though and my decks were stronger for it.

They have potential, but not at all certain that we'll be seeing them in top tier decks once the meta settles. The other 4 are all way safer crafts.

Good points, but Frost Lich Jaina is so strong that frost mage absolutely would want to run it as well. Great survival and wins entire matchups on its own.

Are my draws just unusually bad or is this deck wildly inconsistent at what it's trying to do? It's only about 70% of games that I ever get a single buffed minion on the board, and about 30% of games where I do so within the first 5 turns. Went 1-7 with this deck (1-2 against aggro), and normally do 50-70% winrate when I try out a new deck at these ranks for 10-20 games.

Control decks mostly just run me right over, because I can play a bunch of health sticks but nothing with an attack value to contest the board. I've spent more than one matchup digging through 10+ cards before finding anything with attack to play. 2/3 of my games, I was dead before reaching turn 9.

I had some horrible luck to be sure, but most of these games weren't even close calls. I'm starting to think that Thijs had a luck streak with this deck, or that I'm missing some fundamental insight to how it's supposed to work.

I've seen the gameplay videos and I've gone legend with a taunt deck in the past, so I'm not really sure what I could be missing, that should make such a huge difference.

How are people coping with Jade Druids with this deck? They are about 40% of the EU ladder atm and they feel like a hard counter to this deck.

To fire the combo, you need Raza, Spawn of Shadows and Garrison Commander + 1-2 additional combo pieces. This means at least one essential combo pieces will nearly always be close to the bottom of your deck, but the jade druids run more draw power, so even against the slowest jade draws I lose my board control and health advantage when I have 5-10 cards left.

I love the concept, but this deck gets completely crushed by all the jade druids out there. I'm trying to race them down, but the deck just seems significantly too slow unless you both get lucky with draws and they get bad luck.

Also, Axe Flinger seems useless? I never found a use for him, so replaced him with Brass Knuckles.

Thanks, that seems to have some useful links. =)

Fixed URL is Hearthstonecalendar.com in case that's not apparent to all readers.

Thanks, that site seems useful. Currently it links to a tournament from late December, but hoping it'll update soon.

I had trouble finding some. Any chance you could help me out and point me in the direction of some open cash prize events for EU accounts?

Great initiative. Any plans/schedules to add European tournaments?

Quote from dismal79 »

As most druid decks work now, you want to filter to get combo pieces, not to get Malorne again.

I don't understand how the roaring tree combo came to be the norm in most ramp druids again. It's great in aggro-midrange but for control, I feel like I'm giving up way too much control and long-term power by going for that approach. This means I'm giving up burst potential which does suck against handlock (among a few others), but that a bit of burst is far from enough to make the matchup favored anyhow and the more greedy approach is squishing most mainstream ramp druids I run into these days.

I'm running an unusually greedy ramp build (~rank 3 this season, went legendary in the past with more dedicated play) and would love to have Malorne to experiment with in my deck - possibly even over Dr. Boom.

I have enough ramp, taunts and heal that many games go to long periods of relative stability (each side playing/countering/waiting to draw threats in turn) - occasionally even peaking out at fatigue against other control decks (often with me on the losing side with 4 Ancient of Lore draws - particularly if I counter their draw power (e.g. control warrior acolytes) well). My strategy to have enough big threats to simply blow through their removal and still keep going has become more difficult since GvG though. For these reasons, I suspect Malorne would perform very well in my deck. There is bit of tempo loss, but he is a completely expendable way to test/force removal or take out a giant. He is a scaling control card (the slower the game, the more big threats I am able to drop) and this single added card also provides my deck with fatigue insurance, forcing my opponent to play beatdown, no matter how ill-suited his deck is to the task.

You can of course lose most of these advantages by the opponent silencing him before death, but aside from mind control shennenigans, this means that your expendable card suddenly pulled 2 removals and that your opponent wasted whatever tempo advantage you might have given him.

I am not hugely concerned with his tempo loss against aggro. I have plenty of other cards to make me favored in a zoo or hunter matchup and they are bad enough at dealing with big bodies that even a slow play like Sylvanas often makes for a very defining board presence. My main concern is against midrange tempo decks, such as mech mage and some paladins, but I think this would be small enough compared to the massive benefit vs. control (particularly warriors).

There used to be a massive lack of good 5 mana minions. Their addition with Naxx has both given increased competition at roughly Argent Commander's place in the curve, as well as reducing the number of ideal targets by making the curve more even all the way up, rather than peaking unproportionally at 4 mana (and typically 4 hp).

This, coupled with a faster rate of play and more players having access to some great 6 mana legendaries these days all means that, while he's not a bad card, he's seeing a lot less play than when meta and general circumstances used to be ideal for him.

I think I may have a the champion screenshot of this topic. =P

Had a crazy draft (starting consecration, truesilver champion, consecration) and after grabbing the first 3 consecrations I picked the the last 2 for the hell of it since the alternatives offered were mediocre. Always mulliganning every consecration in my starting hand because I'd get them soon enough, this is what I started out with:

http://imageshack.com/a/img208/2216/wj1d.png

That was already pretty spectacular. Here is my turn 4:

http://imageshack.com/a/img20/413/n763.png