Hearthpwn

Sent you an application on the site. Hope to play with you guys this saturday!

If they'd figured that buzzard was the problem when they nerfed UTH, we wouldn't be needing this second fix. Now the combo-draw will never happen again and I really can't see anyone playing 5 mana 3/2 when we have stuff like Loatheb flying about.

Quote from Ghost7x »

they have completely fked this game over, i played about 12 zoos in a row earlier, and what makes it worse is that my RNG gave me fucking terrible hands in every single game. then i played one of these little cute new mage decks and died to an unstoppable ethereal arcanist that i magically could not get a silence for for 15 turns in a row... just fucking disgusting what theyve done to this game, literally makes me sick to my stomach because this was literally my favorite game in i cant tell you how many years. i dont know whose bright idea it was to increase the rng and say that randomness should play a huge part in it, but they clearly went that route, thus making the game pretty much skilless at this point. i outplayed everyone i played against today, and half of those zoo players, even that mage, did not even have to try at all. they just threw cards down until they won, and i could only watch in horror as turn after turn i could not draw an answer for any of it. As it is a card game, i expect luck and randomness to factor into it SOME, but this is just complete horseshit and ridiculous at this point. I shouldnt be forced to stoop to the level of these trash players just to win games, and its so bad that you cant even mess around and have fun making decks because even in unranked people use ranked decks and try hard. a simple solution i think would be to make a control only playlist, so that the games last longer and you arent forced to play against these trash ass face decks 90% of the time. And if you dont want to do that blizzard, then force the RNG to deal starting hands that favor board clearing against rush decks. See how hard that was? it literally took me about 3 min to think of both of those ideas, lel. 

TL;DR  made up stats and blaming RNG for personal shortcomings. Also playing a deck is "just throwing down cards" if you play something he doesn't like.

How many of these "stop liking what I don't like"-threads will this forum have to endure? Make this shit bannable already.

I see no stickies in our beloved druid forum, but there are a lot of people asking for help for their deckbuilding,
what cards to get, matchup stats, etc.

Why don't we pool together some stuff so that people will have an easier time finding help? This could also improve the druid
community as players and deckbuilders!


DRUID ARCHETYPES

So, what decks are the ones most viable with druid? There are basically 3 archetypes that I have seen do good:

Ramp:
This is the "control" version of druid decks, using Wild Growth (and sometimes Nourish) to boost out big minions before your opponent is able to.

Ramp usually runs more removal spells than other druid decks, because controlling board presence is your win condition in most games. Ramp has it's prime in mid-late game, it's efficient at stopping aggro and can stand against other
control decks fairly often.

For more ramp-talk, check out Asuryan's Big Ramp:

http://www.hearthpwn.com/forums/class-discussion/druid/8984-legendary-big-ramp

Token:
The druid combo deck that relies on Savage Roar+Force of Nature to end the game.

The combo, however, only does 14 damage, so token decks are usually stacked with an early-game plan to deal damage. There are variations, of course, but usually this means that the deck uses early beaters such as Argent Squire, Harvest Golem or Undertaker to chip the opponent down to 14 as fast as possible. In addition, token decks use token generators such as Violet Teacher, Haunted Creeper and Imp Master (although I haven't seen Imp master since pre-Naxx) in order to set up enough board presence to be lethal or next to lethal with a Savage Roar.

For more info check out Siky's Token Thread. This thread has an extensive guide on how to play the deck, which is more important than the decklist in my opinion.

http://www.hearthpwn.com/forums/class-discussion/druid/10740-legend-token-druid-deck-and-guide

Mill:
Without any numbers, I'd still dare say that mill is the least popular druid deck, which often can leave your opponent with limited knowledge of your deck.

Mill focuses on "milling", meaning to actively try to run your opponent out of cards, forcing them to take fatigue damage. Mill utilizes stuff like Coldlight Oracle, Naturalize, Lorewalker Cho and King Mukla to fill the opponents hand and make him overdraw (If you draw more than 10 cards, they will be discarded).

If you wanna become a windmill, check out yuantobecool's mill deck here: 

http://www.hearthpwn.com/decks/87897-death-by-drawing

There is also a trend for Echoing Ooze decks coming with naxx, but I think some more time is needed before really describing this deck in detail. A quick search will find you some, and you'll probably see them on the ladder soon enough.

That's all I had to time to type today. Feel free to contribute or leave requests in this thread!

Quote from FACEFURYEU »

Will it work with Power Overwhelming ?

It'll work, it's just that they'll both die at the end of the turn. Horribly.

Quality post asuryan. Cool to see you're still testing this deck. If I wasn't busy living in the forest and shit, I'd be kicking ranks with BigRamp now!

Quote from Vedre »

In order:

Anub'Rekhan was easy, beat him with an all trap hunter deck on first attempt.

Faerlina was the most difficult, her damage is rediculous. Had to use one of the suggested decks on front page. Took me 8 attempts.

Maexxna was more annoying than difficult. Took a couple of tries before I realised the best strategy was to let her fill her board with weenies and out heal her till I could finish her with an Alexstraesza play. Beat her on my third try with a Healed to Death deck (Priest).

I did a Hunter Flood deck with more or less every minion having battlecry and costing 3 or less. The idea was to get knife juggler and just spam guys that would get bounced in order to get board control. It worked on second attempt and felt a bit too easy.

Quote from chendu1993 »

Quote from user_318366 »

Quote from chendu1993 »

Druid actually has a really good matchup against Miracle (speaking from a Miracle point of view). Just throw up big taunts and most of the time Miracle players can't do much. Also turn 1 Yeti is almost auto win unless Miracle gets the Sap.

Then they mulligan for sap, sap your innervated Druid of the Claw and bam you "almost autolost"

Cool, you have the out to whatever I play. You deserve to win then. You can't just speak hypothetically like that.

I personally take this from experience playing against rogues. They usually really want that sap (they don't get it every game, but they do fairly often, and sometimes that deck draws some cards too!). It is, however, funny that you seem able to assume where information comes from.

Quote from chendu1993 »

Druid actually has a really good matchup against Miracle (speaking from a Miracle point of view). Just throw up big taunts and most of the time Miracle players can't do much. Also turn 1 Yeti is almost auto win unless Miracle gets the Sap.

Then they mulligan for sap, sap your innervated Druid of the Claw and bam you "almost autolost"

Quote from Babbidibubbi »

Untrue, there are some scenarios where coin wild growth is the right play, you just need a 3 drop or if your able to foresee the curve like coin wild growth into innervate druid of the claw vs aggro or again something like this:

Yesterday i was against a zoo, he was first and played a flame imp, i had wrath coin and wild growth, flame imp was not necessarely the biggest value out of my wrath and i knew it, so i coin wild growth and the turn after i could wrath his freshly played juggler into a 4 turn yeti.

Agree with this line of thought, it is similar to my habit of turn 1 coin -> Shapeshift a 2/1 (leper gnomecomes to mind) -> Wild Growth Turn 2. The last play you mentioned is definitely the right play because otherwise, you'd have to choose between WG or wrathing Knife Juggler, which is a pretty lame gamestate to be in.

Quote from ZaPanda »

How you fellow FattyRamps doing?

I have for myself played around the past days, dropping ranks like a stone , but Now i am focusing on my "sunwell paladin" deck really.

BigRamp feels just to slow in the current meta.

Above are my recorded games form rank 10 onwards this season. Some are from before UtH nerf (did anyone try playing hunter and feel it wasn't really nerfed enough to justify the drop in popularity btw?), but I find the matchup pretty much the same after. After I dropped 50% winrate, I tried some Token druid and I find it suits the current meta better than bigramp by a long shot (currently 70% win, but only 45 games sample size). My only noteable achievements this season is beating Gaara playing Hunter Aggro pre-nerf and Duckwingface's Warlock Aggro variant (Runs Raging Worgen and Power Overwhelming combo. Scary stuff!)

In summary I'd say Big Ramp didn't perform too well this season, but it did get my to rank 4 two or three times, so it's not completely obsolete, it just has more unfavorable matchups than it used to. Minion Rogue, Miracle Rogue, Handlocks and Token Druid seem to be pretty tough with a Big Ramp style deck, at least to me.

Quote from Asuryan »

Quote from LordAenarion »

How you thought about implementing the FoN+SR combo in your ramp deck ? I'm considering it, but unsure if it will work because you will rarely have a big number of minions on the board.

That's exactly the problem.  The combo does a decent amount of damage if you get both pieces, but each piece is pretty bad on its own, because it doesn't have any synergy with this deck type.  The FoN+SR combo works really well in Token Druid, or even Small Ramp / Tempo Ramp, but this deck just isn't built to use it well.  I think Tempo Ramp would be more suited to the current metagame; play some smaller guys, like Harvest Golem etc, and just throw in the combo.   But, if you want to play a Tempo / Burst deck, then I don't think Druid is really the class best suited to that.  That's where Rogue excels.

Personally, I'm not interested in dropping the Big Ramp concept.  Big Ramp suits my playstyle, so I think I'll just wait a week and see how the meta develops.  Meanwhile, I'm playing a lot of Arena, and dominating casuals with my Murloc Druid deck.  :)  With a bit more testing and tweaking, I might even try the Murloc Druid in ranked.  It's surprisingly solid, and catches people off guard, but obviously it lacks the card draw that Warlocks have.  Mrlgrlrlgllrl!

I actually tried running 1 roar for a while last season and it isn't half bad, really. If you have 2+ minions, it does pack a rather nasty punch that people won't necessarily expect.

Yeah, I use them as cats for beatdown, it really helps tempo for me anyway. That way, it's usually 4 damage to the face and something that must be dealt with rather than a free siphon soul target. If he has giants already, then it sucks either way as you said.

50% on Giants is pretty good imo. I hardly ever get them unless I draw something favorable for the matchup like 2 DotC and preferably a keeper or 2.

I don't have Cenarius. Would you rather go Leeroy or Ragnaros? Using Ragnaros atm, and he does fine in the right situation, but hardly feels like he fits the theme of the deck.