How Viper Broke the Mold with Peanut Shaman
Viper spoke with Blizzard about his Peanut Shaman deck that secured his spot in the upcoming HCT Winter Championship. Read on!
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Quote from BlizzardTorben "Viper" Wahl was one of just four players who did not bring a Hunter or Paladin deck to the HCT Winter Playoffs–Europe. As it happens, he also was one of just four players who qualified for the HCT Winter Championship by the end of the tournament.
This was thanks in part to a homebrew Shaman deck he cooked up with Felix "kolmari" Baum. “It's essentially control Shaman,” Viper said. “I think you can compare it the most to Odd Warrior. Odd Warrior doesn't die and just removes everything the other guy plays and at some point the Odd Warrior has cards and the other guy doesn't have cards anymore. This Shaman kind of comes down to the same thing.”
There are some wild interactions and synergies available in Peanut Shaman. You can Haunting Visions into Kragwa, the Frog. You can Zola the Gorgon your Elise the Trailblazer to shuffle more cards into your deck, before playing Shudderwock to shuffle even more—or use Zola the Gorgon on the Kragwa before Shudderwock-ing for massive frog value.
With a total of nine legendary minions (at least one from each set in Standard currently), Peanut Shaman is not a budget deck. According to Viper, there are some alternative cards that substitute well. “All of the Shaman legendaries are very unique cards, so you can’t play many second options for them,” Viper said. “You could replace Zola, Elise, Kelseth, and Ziliax with two Firetree Witchdoctors and two Twilight Drakes. That is likely the best option.”
Peanut Shaman will likely lose to decks that kill you in one turn such as Mecha’thun, OTK Paladin, APM Priest, and so on. Against aggro decks, things become much easier, as your enemy will run out of cards before you will. Against aggro, Viper would agree that the most defensive play with a deck like Peanut Shaman is often the best play on nearly every turn.
Piloting this deck successfully requires a bit of pre-mulligan meditation. “You should make up your mind at the start going into matchups with these fatigue or control decks versus these other non-aggro decks,” Viper said. “Like, ‘I think I should use this card on this card’ or ‘I should use Volcano for that, I should save Hex for this.’ Sometimes you have to deviate, but thinking about it from the beginning helps, because sometimes 70 seconds is not enough time to think through a turn.”
The success of Peanut Shaman during the HCT Winter Playoffs just goes to show, play what you think is good and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. “I’m always very nervous, but it’s been getting better,” Viper said. “Especially if I’m bringing decks like this Shaman where everyone is going to look at it and say it’s a bad deck. I think I’m just OK with myself if I bring whatever I think is the best and I’m not afraid of people calling me out. If I have success with it, I don't really mind what people think at first.”
Three players brought versions of Viper’s Peanut Shaman deck to the Americas Playoffs last weekend, but failed to find success. Only Jihwan “DacMalza” Hwang is championing it at the APAC Playoffs this weekend. Will it come through for him as it did for Viper? Find out when the broadcast goes live at twitch.tv/playhearthstonethis Friday, January 25, at 5:45 p.m. PST.
peanut shaman , more like OVER GREEDY VALUE SHAMAN but yeah sure you win with a super late deck like this against even lock/even pala/secret hunter (80% of EU players decks ) sad there weren't that many odd rouges and other early aggressive decks against it in the tournament. Its also terrible against OTK decks like priest/mechanthun/exodia mage .
Definetly not a ladder deck unless its all control-midrange meta
R.I.P. Shaman forever
Met one of these on ladder yesterday - based on that game, it looks like a deck that is either super hard to master or can just low-roll horribly. It did NOT look ladder viable...
I can ensure you that this is not how the deck got his name.
People who know Viper, are aware that he is not something you would call " enthusiastic ".
He just made a anti-aggro deck with his friend Kolmari. When sending his decklist in the Blizzard admin ( ristinHS) asked him ; What should we call that deck? So our enthusiastic Viper answered ; Call it whatever you like, i don’t care.
RistinHS ( Christina is quite a character ^^ ) responds: We could call it Peanut? Viper; Yeah whatever,call it PeanutShaman.
And that’s the whole story. No one called it this way because they thought it’s the nuts...
( Btw. My twitch name is Gotrix2, I know Viper for roughly 2 and a half years,and I’m mod in his channel.)
Interesting, so the name is even more arbitrary then I thought :D
Yeah, a lot of times there isn't too much thought put into naming conventions. For example, Ike popularized his more midrange take on Shudderwock Shaman several months back. He simply called it "Good Shaman" in reference to him putting the best/his favorite cards into the deck.
As a side note, it bothers me a bit when people cram too many words into a deck's name. For example, you'll see a name like Paladin DK x Shirvallah Exodia OTK.
yeah I guess that's a fair enough reason. I was looking at the card names for some kind of clue! :D
Nah, he didn't have ha name so he asked a friend what to call it. Friend said: Peanuts.
So he just called it that.
To the best of my knowledge, it's called Peanut Shaman because the players testing it considered the deck to be "the nuts". The nuts meaning "crazy good or broken".
why on earth is it called "peanut" though?
i've played the deck a fair amount. it is actually good. It's like odd warrior except you get to actually use your brain. In fact, you have to use it a lot because the deck can't stack armor and resources have to be very carefully used and balanced around overloads, hand space, etc. It's quite fun to play too because it makes great use of Hagatha/Shudderwock which are such fun cards. Since Shudderwock deck died nothing uses Hagatha well.
There were so many games where i'd play a hunter with rexxar on curve and i'd stay in control all the way to fatigue but then get smeshed because I took one line instead of another and used a resource I would need. So it's basically odd warrior but you play for the board a lot more and it has a much higher skill cap.
It does auto lose to OTK decks barring some unlikely shenanigans. It did well in EU because there wasn't a lot of combo. Some people brought this to NA last week and it didn't do well at all because there was a lot of combo.
Nice try, Blizzard. Trying to make us think Shaman is viable right now. It isn't. This deck gets steamrolled.
he rolled very nicely with this deck in his final game, it is a pig to play sometimes
Wow... this deck would take a lot of experience to get it down.
As for the vulnerability to OTK decks... can't you ban one deck that your opponent has?
awesome stuff Mr Viper
is zentimo really needed for this deck?
Cool deck, at least something new. But I'd run 2 Firetree Witchdoctor rather than Keleseth and maybe Lone Champion
Isn't this Kibler's evolve deck but without the evolve? or did Kibler copy this deck and added evolve?
Yeah, it is similar for sure - but tbf, Kibler does gain influence from other people's decks, as well as others looking at him - so i'm not sure who was "first". Kiblers first version actually wasn't elemental/dragon based, but rather focused on Prince Keleseth. His current version also uses Crowd Roaster and Scaleworm. So they are substantially different enough.
I guess its reasonable they came up with the decks independently after trying to think how to get Shudderwock involved in a control Shaman. There is only so many iterations of "good battlecry" cards that you would want to include.
He did mention in his stream that he took the deck and added evolves for the lols