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Fireside Duels Live - A Look at the Warrior vs Paladin Duel

A couple of weeks ago, Ben Brode (Technical Game Designer) and Eric Dodds (Lead Game Designer) livestreamed four duels for the community. The first few games did not go well for our heroes but their last game is worth talking about.

The duel between the Warrior and Paladin showed us two different styles of building a deck. The Warrior was more interested in a stronger late-game by dedicating a third of his deck to medium mana cost cards. By giving himself some early board clearing ability through the use of Brawl, the Warrior can get himself out of a sticky situation where the Paladin outnumbers him. Our Paladin friend on the other hand was more dedicated to the early game by getting out as many minions as he possibly could to outnumber his opponent. The Paladin also had a board clearing card, Consecration and while it may not be as good as Brawl, it helped him get rid of the Warrior's minions early on so he could start attacking the enemy hero with everything he had.

We're going to take a look at the mana curves of each deck by using the mana curve analysis tool. The mana curve analysis tool is not perfect as it makes some very broad assumptions:

• The higher the mana cost of the card, the more powerful it is.
• The player will always play cards if he has the mana to do so.

If decks were made of only minions, this tool would be an excellent way to determine the power of a deck as a minions power is equal to mana cost. Ability cards on the other hand, they are situational tools which can drastically change the game and they can truly make or break your deck. The Warlock's Corruption card is a fine example of an incredibly powerful, low mana cost card that players will want to save for the late game to destroy the more powerful minions of their opponent to give themselves an advantage. Onto the graphs! Blue represents the current power level of the deck, Purple is the average power and Grey is when the players hand empties.

Warrior Deck

Paladin Deck
 

Warrior's Power Advantage

We can see that the Paladin has a slight edge early on due to his low cost minions, but as the duel progresses, the Warrior always has a slight advantage. In the case of the Warrior vs Paladin duel, this is fairly accurate as the Warrior was always ahead of the Paladin in health and the Warrior had the means to deal with the insanity that is the Paladin's Hero Ability to summon a Silver Hand Recruit for 2 mana every turn. The Paladin though was able to stay in the game because of his access to Consecration, Blessing of Kings, and Hammer of Wrath, which helped keep the Warrior from outnumbering him. Ben and Eric were incredibly lucky that The Black Knight showed up to get rid of the Silver Hand Recruit with Taunt. No one could have asked for a better ending.

Which kind of deck are planning to create? We'd love to see what decks you plan on creating when the Beta comes out. Show everyone your deck in the comments by using our deckbuilder and be sure to let us know what strategy you plan to use. If you'd like to edit the decks that were shown in today's duel, you can edit them in our deckbuilder with the following links:

   

The Duel

The Decks