VanCleef didn't work out for me either, unless there's an Auctioneer on the field the previous turn, I found it frustrating to play many low mana spells just to boost him up to 8/8 or 10/10 and then just to have VanCleef get removed the next turn. I prefer Questind Adventurer over him.

Mana Addict is another decent alternative.

Maybe you're accustomed to playing Murlocs, Druids are entirely different and takes time and patience to develop your board, with that being said, druids are fairly strong in the lower ranks, so perhaps you should just make better decisions with your cards.

Thanks, I didn't notice the replace Cenarius section, I already have TBK and Cairne, so I guess I'm fine for now. :)

I don't have Cenarius yet, I have started to enjoy playing a druid deck and have decent success with it, is Cenarius worth the dust to craft?

I ran into this deck a couple of times today, at first I didn't understand why I saw that much Hunter all of a sudden....then I saw this deck on here and was like no wonder... I think I read a post somewhere on here that mentions this deck lacks finishing power, and I would have to agree. By having said that, it is decent at board control, but a major concern is that in all the matches I played against this deck, it ran out of steam around turns 10-12 and the opponents would all be forced to top deck.

Will make Harvest and Cairne even more of a pain to remove.

Times up, let's do this.

I beg to differ. While I admit that zoo can be dominant against particular match ups, and especially against opponents who have terrible hands/starts (i.e. no field presence early-mid game to trade off minions). I applaud those that can take zoo to legend ranks, but zoo is pretty much a one trick pony with no real field removal. Any deck that survives against zoo by keeping the small mana drop minions from overwhelming them and taking zoo to 6-7+ turns is almost guaranteed a win barring a huge brainfart, especially with druids and their mana boost spells and big taunts. Have fun ramming your 2 drop minions into the ancients and big taunts late game.

I don't think Argent Squire is the best 1 drop here, because it doesn't really interact with the rest of the early game. I think you'd be better off with a Leper Gnome for the Undertaker proc, or Abusive Sergeant to get the egg to swing in to something.

It wouldn't be a bad replacement if you like. But this deck is already heavy on 2 mana cards and needs more mid game cards. I will be posting a 2nd version of this deck which has more 3 and 4 mana cards to make it flow with the curve better :).

The black knight is a unique card and there is no real replacement for him.  If you have cairne i'd sub him in.  Or maybe a starfall to get some removal

One of my favorite looking cards in all of Hearthstone, so that's cool.

Hello everyone, Gobz0rnator here.Thought I should give a short review of a nubs attempt to play this deck.
I planned on playing 5 games to see how it would end out. Only change I made was Ragnaros the Firelord into a Temple Enforcer.
Please note I am not a professional player, nor do I claim to be above or close to average. Simply trying the deck for it's gameplay that anyone can handle.

ROUND 1:

First match: Victory (Health: 30)
Rank 17 vs. Rogue Murloc deck. Auchenai Soulpriest dominated the game for me, winning it with a stable 30 points left. Couple of Thoughtsteals caught a few murlocs which helped the swarming and control of board.

Second match: Victory (Health:30)
Rank 16 vs. Mage. Again the Auchenai Soulpriest took out everything the mage sent at me. Started with an early Wild Pyromancer that gave me immense control, forcing out both Fireballs on my silenced Ancient Watcher. Ended game with controlling the board with the help of the soulpriest.

Third match: Loss (Health:0)
Rank 16 vs. Warrior. Tougher game. Started 2nd which gave me a coin. Got me early advantage that would have easily won me the game, if not the warrior got a Brawl that had a hell of an RNG luck.
A lot harder to play this game once he cleared out my initial Wild Pyromancer combined with Ancient Watcher and Ironbeak Owl. He eventually buffed up his minions with Rampage which lead to my defeat - even if only a short way from Victory. Circle of Healing and Auchenai Soulpriest almost had enough damage to overwhelm his minions, but only almost.

Fourth match: Loss (Health: 0)
Rank 16 vs. Mage. Started first with a Northshire Cleric which gave me good control over the board vs. mage (One of the best cards due to it's 3 health, hard for mage to ping it).
Followed by the a Wild Pyromancer and Power Word: Shield. Auchenai Soulpriest took control over the game. As the scrub I am, I used Lesser Heal (that now does 2 damage) on my own Wild Pyromancer, effieciently killing it and giving up my heads start.
The mage follows up later with an Archmage Antonidas and gaining free Fireball every turn. Unluck with RNG and unable to killing it within three rounds makes this game my second loss.

Fifth game: Victory: (Health: 28)
Rank 17 vs. Shaman. Northshire Cleric followed by Ancient Watcher. Coin out a Spellbreaker and took control over the game.
That two mana beast of a guardian of priests is amazing. Definitely one of the best cards in the game (if you can get a silence/taunt on it)
Due to shamans high amount of control and strong minions in the form of Feral Spirit and other spells, this match could have been one of the hardest. A lot of battling between the control of the board and a lot of heals caused this match to end up in the favor of the priest (who could stay alive long enough to crack out that Holy Nova) and row the boat to victory.

Pros:
Very high control of board
Easy clear with multiple combos
High health minions such as Injured Blademaster together with heal to easily trade minions
Very high chance of winning if you don't make big mistakes
Thoughtsteal makes sure you never run out of cards, you can always max that mana usage every turn

Cons:
RNG can screw up your game (card draw, that is)
Games very rarely goes on above round 15, making many of your cards unused (such as Mind Control)
Summary:

With 3 wins and 2 losses, this deck doesn't look that good. But looks can deceive, and so can this deck.
Only reason you will loose is because of RNG or a major fuckup(latin:fuckis upus). Don't kill your own minions with Auchenai Soulpriest and you're all set!
It might not be the best deck in the world, but it's definitely one of the most fun priest decks I have played. And you know that fun increases win rate! Wait.. it doesn't? Hm, guess I will have to prove you wrong.

Round 2 in spoilers below for those that want to see more games.

60% win in Round 1. (5 matches)
70% win in Round 2. (10 matches)
Loss due to RNG. Approximate win chance if played right: 70-80%

Please note this is just my attempts to show how good this deck is when played by a mediocre player.
I do hope it will be of help to someone reading.
Note it's also on high rank and cannot be compared to top rank decks.

Quote from Lux_EU »

Sounds fun running from PC To PC to make a move.

Hearthstone is actually all just a ploy by Blizzard to first get interest from their WoW players by using Warcraft lore. Then coming up with this Fireside Gathering to make them be sociable. But if that doesn't work, force them to exercise by running from one PC to the next for the achievement. Thus their socialized and exercised player base wont die out from playing WoW for 72 hours straight without getting up to go to the bathroom and having their bladders explode.

Did I think too far into this?

-nttArc

One of my favorite cards, just love it and it's got one of the best attack sound bites.

Certain analogies can be drawn between chess and Hearthstone.  In chess, each player starts with an identical set of pieces.  In Hearthstone, most cards are relatively balanced in terms of strength.  That means that, while players may be able to synergize their cards in a more effective way than their opponent, the individual “pieces” (i.e. the cards) are going to be roughly equally strong for each player. 

For this reason, in both chess and Hearthstone, victories are often initiated by gaining the smallest of advantages over an opponent.  In a chess game between two equal opponents, the capturing of a single free pawn in chess can result in a win, even though this is only a tiny portion of the starting board.  This occurs for two potential reasons.  First, if one players forces equal trades amongst the pieces, eventually the board will reach a state where that single pawn is a massive advantage (for example, if the remaining boards are 2 pawns for one player and 1 pawn for the other).  Second, the extra piece acts as an extra tool on the board, improving that player’s board position and potentially allowing him to force uneven trading of the pieces.  The first reason closely resembles the concept of card advantage in Hearthstone, and the second reason closely resembles the concept of tempo, which will be focuses of this article.

The analogy between chess and Hearthstone can only be taken so far, however.  While the “pieces” in a deck are of roughly similar strength, they aren’t identical, meaning that even extremely similar cards can be used differently.  Second, while you control the cards in your deck, you can’t completely control which cards you draw and when you draw them, meaning that the options available to you at any given time will likely be different almost every game.  Of course, the same will be happening with your opponent.  As such, learning strategy in Hearthstone is much different than in chess.  In chess, a perfect player could theoretically predict every move that the opponent might do, prevent it, and never lose; there is nothing “hidden” to the player in chess.  

In Hearthstone, you do not know what plays your opponent has available, only the moves that they MIGHT have available.  As such, good plays in Hearthstone become more of a statistical matter.  You cannot make plays that are guaranteed to be the right moves; you can only make plays that are statistically likely to be the right moves.  You won’t come out ahead of every such play; whenever statistics are involved, sometimes you will win, and sometimes you will lose.  However, if you play the odds correctly on every move, more often than not, in totality, you will come out ahead.  As such, playing Hearthstone well is somewhat different than many genres of game, where you can see an action and be told to respond with a specific action.

The Three Competing Resources

In the long run, the goal of these articles will be to teach Hearthstone strategies.  But due to the wide variety of options, we need to first start with the basics of tempo, card advantage, and the heroes’ life points.  These are the three primary resources within the game, and often, advancing one tends to occur at the expense of at least one other.  Understanding these trade-offs is necessary for understanding more complicated strategy elements.  As a summary, these three resources are:

Tempo: References the rate at which you can spend mana in order to put minions on the board or remove enemy minions.
Card advantage: References the number of cards each player has on the board and in hand.
Hero life: The remaining life the hero has; when it hits zero, you lose.

Tempo

Tempo is a reference to how quickly you can spend your mana in order to gain position on the board.  Note that many card game players will also include the health of the enemy hero when it comes to tempo, defining it as the pace at which the game can be brought to an end.  While this is a reasonable definition, for the purposes of this article, tempo will reference the rate at which you utilize your mana to have lasting effects on your board; this is largely done so that the hero’s life can be thought of as a separate resource.

Position on the board accounts for the number of minions you have on the board, the strength of those minions, and if applicable, any special effects the minions might have which will affect who can control the board.  For example, a large minion and multiple small minions can have roughly equal amounts of tempo.  At its most simplistic point of view, if player 1 is able to use what they currently have on the board to kill everything player 2 has on the board, and player 1 still maintains some minions after this is done, then player 1 has a tempo advantage.  

Some cards may have weak stats in exchange for abilities which affect the board.  For example, compare Demolisher to Kirin Tor Mage, which have the same mana cost.  The Demolisher has weaker stats but its effect has the ability to damage enemy minions on the board without taking any damage itself.  This ability will do damage every turn as long as the Demolisher stays alive.  So Demolisher trades tempo in the form of stats in exchange for tempo in the form of its special ability.  Which card is more effective depends on the situation.

Finally, the first player to generate tempo tends to have an advantage.  It is often said that the best defense is a good offense; this true moreso in Hearthstone than other games, largely due to the ability of the attacker to choose which targets they wish to attack in an advantageous way.  For example, look at the board below.  Each player starts with an identical board.  But because Player 1 chooses which minions attack which, the net result is a board position which greatly favors Player 1; since the boards started equal, if Player 2 had been the one attacking, the result would have been in Player 2’s favor.  As such, it must always be remembered that tempo will tend to favor the player who plays minions first (or more specifically, the player who gets to choose the attacks).

In this article, tempo will reference the rate at which a player manages to spend their full mana bar in order to gain minions which are purely focused on gaining control of the board.  Some minions may have effects which don’t affect the board position; such minions will generally have lower stats relative to their cost to compensate for this, which causes them to be a tempo loss compared to other minions of similar cost.  As a simple example of this, consider the 6-cost minion, Priestess of Elune.  By comparison to Chillwind Yeti, we can see that Priestess of Elune has comparable tempo to a 4-cost minion; and we can see her stats are several points below a basic 6-cost minion such as Boulderfist Ogre.  Unlike the other two minions, Priestess of Elune heals the hero for 4 health when she enters play.  As such, Priestess of Elune is a card which trades tempo in exchange for healing the hero.

So, why does tempo matter?  Well, tempo in general results in damage to the hero.  If you constantly have minions on the board, and are playing them faster than your opponent, you will be able to start attacking the enemy hero with those minions every turn.  For example, imagine you saw the following cards being played by each player each turn.  It’s hard to imagine that Player 2 would be able to survive much past turn 5, even if Player 2 were to constantly keep healing themselves.  So in essence, consistently having much higher tempo than your opponent will tend to result in a win.

Card Advantage

At its most simplistic level, card advantage is simply the number of cards you have on the table plus your hand.  At the more complex level, partially used cards on the table may not count as full cards anymore.  For example, a large minions which has been substantially damaged may no longer have the value of a full card anymore.  Consider a Boulderfist Ogre damaged to 1 health; it is now nowhere near as valuable as a Boulderfist Ogre at full health due to the fact that it might be easily killed.  Another aspect of this is cards who generate much of their value from their Battlecry.  Consider, for example, the card Ironbeak Owl.  The card, while a 2-cost card, has substantially weaker stats than most 2-drop cards because it has a battecry which silences a minion.  As a result, once it’s on the board, some of its value has been “used up”, and to a degree, it can be thought of a card which only now has a fraction of its value remaining.

Card advantage matters for two reasons.  The first reason is that card advantage is a source of tempo.  For example, when you have 10 mana, if you only have a single card in your hand, you are unlikely to be able to spend that full mana in a turn.  This leads to a loss of tempo, and as mentioned previously, a consistent loss of tempo to your opponent will usually result in a loss.  The second reason card advantage matters is options.  If you only have one card in your hand, even if it’s an extremely expensive card, such that you can play it without tempo loss, that card is your only option; you either play it or you don’t.  On the other hand, if you have an extremely large hand, you have options, and can play the cards that are most beneficial to the situation. 

By default, a player draws one card per turn.  If the game lasts long enough, players will eventually have 10 mana to spend per turn.  Most cards in your deck will cost well less than 10 mana, so if the player only uses the default drawing mechanism, cards are likely to be consumed faster than they are drawn by default.  Thus, in a long game, if a player relies solely on the single card draw per turn, they can expect to eventually run out of cards and reach what is known as the “top-decking” phase, where you essentially draw a card and then have to play it that turn in order to keep up with your opponent, regardless of what the card is. 

Hero Life

Hero life is probably the simplest of the three resources to understand; you start with 30, and if you hit zero, you lose the game.  So in some ways, hero life could be considered to be the most important resource, much in the way that the King is the most important piece in chess.  However, in practice, a player should learn to think of their life as another resource.  Until your hero’s health hits zero, you haven’t lost; it doesn’t matter how much damage your hero takes as long as the enemy hero’s health hits zero first.

 As was mentioned before, tempo tends to lead to consistent damage to the enemy hero every turn, and in a long game, card advantage tends to lead to tempo.  Thus, particularly in the early game, it can often be beneficial to trade a small amount of hero life in order to gain tempo and card advantage, with the goal being for this to result in a large advantage in hero life later in the game.

The Three Resources: How Much Do They Matter?

All three resources have at least some effect on the game.  Basically, in a nut shell, the goal is to reduce the hero’s life to zero.  However, until it hits zero, it does not matter how low it is; bringing the enemy hero’s health to zero while yours is at one is still a win.  In general, the enemy hero’s health can repetitively be brought lower each turn by generating greater tempo than the opponent.  Consistently generating tempo requires having both enough cards to play and the right cards to play, which requires card advantage over your opponent.  You will often have the opportunity to sacrifice your hero’s health to generate additional tempo and/or card advantage, or sacrificing these things to add to hero health. This is the interaction of these three resources amongst each other.

Differences in hero life and card advantage tend to be less important when they are high.  For example, if Player 1 has 8 cards in hand and Player 2 has 7, while it is true that Player 1 has a card advantage, the difference at the moment is negligible.  Both players are likely to have plenty of options available to them to spend their full mana bar.  On the other hand, if Player 1 has 2 cards and Player 2 has 1 card, then the same different in card advantage has now become extremely relevant.  Of course, that doesn’t mean card advantage should be completely neglected with a large hand; if the players are forced into trading cards 1:1 with each other, which can often happen, then the 8-7 card advantage will likely eventually become a 2-1 card advantage over time if nothing is done to reverse the situation.  Similarly, hero life becomes far more important as it falls low.  You don’t lose until your health hits zero, and that needs to be remembered.  Thus, taking a few points of damage when a hero has full health is almost irrelevant, especially in comparison to tempo and card advantage.  On the other hand, by the time the hero’s health is down to only a few life, that few points of damage becomes much more relevant.

Unlike card advantage and hero life, small differences in tempo can be very significant, even if the individual tempo of each player is large.  Tempo is far more easily traded between the players, meaning that a player can often easily force a large board with only a small difference in tempo into being a small board with the same difference in tempo.  Beyond that, however, a small advantage in tempo tends to give a player far greater options for clearing the enemy’s board.  Once this starts happening, that player can gain solid control of the board, and begin forcing trades that are in their benefit.  In this way, the tempo tends to snowball out of control, where a small advantage in tempo becomes and increasingly larger and larger increase in tempo every turn due to the winning player losing small amounts of their tempo to remove large amounts of the enemy’s tempo.  As such, gaining early board presence can be extremely important in Hearthstone, even if the minions are weak.

Basic Two-Phase Game

A player can expect a standard game to go through two main phases.  The first phase involves the players jockeying for board position, often trading tempo and getting in free hits on the enemy hero when it does not result in a loss of tempo.  At some point, one player may begin to ignore tempo and begin attempting to simply kill the enemy hero, particularly if they can follow up on later turns with spells or weapons (which tend to do large and immediate damage).  Any advantages in terms of the hero’s lives will give them an advantage once the race to burn the enemy hero begins.  Different decks will tend to use different combinations of these two phases.

For example, a rush deck has the goal of trying to kill the enemy hero as quickly as possible.  Such decks will often completely neglect enemy minions unless then are a uniquely large tempo advantage, and will focus almost entirely on doing as much damage to the enemy hero as possible.  Such decks recognize that over a long amount of time they are likely to fall behind on tempo, in part because they are usually allowing the enemy to choose how the minions will attack each other; however, the goal of such a deck is to do so much damage to the enemy hero before this happens that they cannot recover.

On the other hand, a control deck may do completely the opposite of a rush deck.  Such decks will almost never focus on attacking the enemy hero directly unless there are no enemy minions to neutralize.  So for example, such a decks would often attack an enemy’s 1/1 minion using their own 7/7 minion, despite the fact this is a large loss of hero damage, and will only ignore enemy minion’s if they can kill the enemy hero no that turn.

A good example of a deck that has a noticeable blend to these two phases is a version of the Mage deck.  In the early game, such a Mage deck will attempt to quickly drop a limited number of low-drop minions.  They then proceed to kill off any minions with direct-damage spells, hide their minions behind minions with taunt, or freeze enemy minions to prevent them from attacking (or some combination of these tactics).  The goal is not to simply pick at the enemy hero’s life for several turns, trying to reduce them to roughly half health.  Around turn 7 or so, the Mage will often lose their board control, but the goal up to this point was simply to damage the enemy hero to roughly half health.  At this point, the Mage will take advantage of the fact that they have several spells that can do large damage to the enemy hero to kill the hero, even though they have lost tempo by this point.  Recognize that the point of this description is not to say that all Mage decks will play like this; rather, this was presented to demonstrate how a deck will start by utilizing tempo to attack the enemy hero’s life then use the advantage gained from this to finish the game.

...Watch for Part 2 Next Wednesday where Sar dives into more common situations with the three resources and how you can make the best choices given the circumstances! 

essential card in warlock deck