Hearthstone Druid Legendary Ranked Deck

Hearthstone Druid Legendary Ranked Deck by Paul

http://www.twitch.tv/paulwog

This is my (currently) sort-of one-of-a-kind druid spell deck. Playing it at legendary status now.

Cards that might be replaceable: Faerie Dragon, Dalaran Mage, Nat Pagle

Cards that might be worth replacing the above with: Healing Touch, Keeper of the Grove, Earthen Ring Farseer (although currently I don’t feel like changing the deck… every change has repercussions).

The Deck:

http://i39.tinypic.com/34irdxc.png
(The additional two cards at the bottom of the linked picture are listed below on the list I typed out. Malygos and Ysera.)

CURRENT MOST UP-TO-DATE LIST (01/27/2014):
2x Innervate
2x Moonfire
2x Claw
1x Wild Growth
2x Wrath
1x Bloodmage Thalnos
1x Nat Pagle
1x Healing Touch
2x Earthen Ring Farseer
2x Bite
2x Swipe
2x Defender of Argus
2x Keeper of the Grove
1x Starfall
1x Druid of the Claw
2x Gadgetzan Auctioneer
1x Ragnaros the Firelord
1x Malygos
2x Molten Giant

(LAST SEASON FINALIZED):
2x Innervate
2x Moonfire
2x Claw
2x Wrath
1x Bloodmage Thalnos
1x Naturalize
2x Healing Touch
1x Tinkmaster Overspark
2x Keeper of the Grove
2x Bite
2x Swipe
2x Starfall
1x Druid of the Claw
2x Gadgetzan Auctioneer
1x Sylvanas Windrunner
1x Ancient of War
1x Ragnaros the Firelord
1x Alexstrasza
1x Malygos
1x Ysera
(considerations on current iteration of the deck: May reduce Keeper of the Grove to 1x in favour of a faerie dragon to have an additional 1-2 drop card to increase starting hand statistics against rush decks — May reduce the Druid of the Claw to 0x in favour of a sooner drop as well, but might not… depends on if warlock with silence becomes more common)

Original Deck (while I was around rank 4 before legendary):
2x Innervate
2x Moonfire
2x Claw
2x Wild Growth
2x Wrath
1x Bloodmage Thalnos
1x Faerie Dragon
1x Nat Pagle
1x Dalaran Mage
1x Tinkmaster Overspark
2x Bite
2x Swipe
2x Starfall
1x Azure Drake
1x Druid of the Claw
2x Gadgetzian Auctioneer
1x Sylvanas Windrunner
1x Ancient of War
1x Ragnaros the Firelord
1x Malygos
1x Ysera

A little run-down on each card decision so you can modify the deck to however you like it:

First 2 Turns Defence

All of these cards are categorized in the same spot because they do the same thing: They slow the opponent down. Nat Pagle tends to absorb an average of about 5 damage, and he usually draws at least 1 card. If he’s left on the board, it doesn’t matter if you took damage to the face since you’ll win pretty fast with card advantage. With that said, Nat Pagle is very replaceable with a second Faerie Dragon, or whatever else helps shift the game in the first 2 turns.

1. Claw
2. Wrath
3. Faerie Dragon
4. Nat Pagle

How to Play the Deck

In your beginning hand, always keep your first 2 turn defence cards if you get them. Otherwise, mulligan ANYTHING ELSE that you get. The only situation where you should *NOT* mulligan is if you get a swipe versus a mage or a warlock, or if you get an Ancient of War versus a warrior.

Make sure that you play very carefully. For example, wasting innervates = a sure-fire way to lose. If you’re defensively firing off innervate to desperately play a single card, you’re playing incorrectly, or you’re losing. Innervating to clear the board is fine. Never innervate or coin to play wild growth on turn 1. Remember a card like Dalaran Mage can be used as fodder: If your opponent has 3/2’s on the board, or 3/3’s, and you play Dalaran Mage, he’ll likely have to hit it with two creatures to kill it (this is a common scenario). Yes, you just lost a 1/4 that cost 3. Yes, you didn’t get to take advantage of the spell damage enhancement. However, now your swipes and starfalls are within reach of one-shot kills. If he goes ignored, you get the same result.

The deck isn’t too hard to play, but it’s easy to mis-play and misjudge the deck (is what I’m thinking). I’ve developed the deck over quite a long time… it has only become a serious deck due to the metagame making it strong.

Just remember… the deck isn’t 100% straight-forward, and if you don’t think forward by 2-4 turns, and take into consideration your future card draw possibilities, you will likely make misplays (and if you make those misplays, you might not even notice them — making the deck overall worse for you).

Win Con

Deal damage… wipe your opponent’s board. The reason why Malygos, Ysera, and Ragnaros are all in there is to increase your win con cards. The deck can dry out otherwise. There’s a lot of control decks out there that absolutely whither away your win cons and you lose. With the meta, you need to balance out stall cards with win con cards as a result… going all out defensive just means you’ll lose pretty hard to a paladin.

Update

To those who have followed this thread/deck and haven’t heard from me lately: Sorry, I haven’t been playing this deck all of this season. The metagame was in too much of a state of change, and 75% of the time my deck just didn’t fit into the metagame for climbing ladder. I didn’t want to post saying “the deck is dead”: No viable deck is dead necessarily (just possibly not good when the meta is one way or another).

The deck is back in, and here’s my new list. It’s still in a bit of a state of change… I haven’t completely finalized this season’s list. Here it is:

2x Innervate
2x Moonfire
2x Claw
1x Wild Growth
2x Wrath
1x Bloodmage Thalnos
1x Nat Pagle
1x Healing Touch
2x Earthen Ring Farseer
2x Bite
2x Swipe
2x Defender of Argus
2x Keeper of the Grove
1x Starfall
1x Druid of the Claw
2x Gadgetzan Auctioneer
1x Ragnaros the Firelord
1x Malygos
2x Molten Giant

So how does the deck play now? How is it different? I’m still running the same core combinations: Moonfire, Malygos, Gadgetzan Auctioneer, Bite, Claw, etc…

Where was the deck stale? Well, there aren’t as many slow decks. Druid Roar decks are in, rush decks of all types are in, midrange decks of all sorts are in. Slow mage decks aren’t as common, for example. Alexstrasza just isn’t a viable option anymore. Ysera is arguably pretty difficult to play, though still viable in other decks that offer more taunt-per-turn options.

So what did I decide to do? I decided to pick out my deck’s biggest weakness, and make that a bonus. What’s the biggest weakness? I can get gunned down too fast. How do I make that a benefit? Molten Giant & Defender of Argus! How do these cards interact with the rest of the deck you ask? Excellently. Here’s why:
The deck has excellent drawing power in the mid & late game. The chances of drawing into a Defender of Argus as well as a Molten Giant are high. If I draw into only one, that’s fine: I have healing cards, I have some other taunt cards, I can make it work. If I have creatures, I can put defender on them. If I have no defender of Argus but I have molten giant, I can drop him down & heal up. The two additions still work just fine on their own & alongside my deck.

So why does this addition of 2x Defender & 2x Molten Giant help the deck? In what way does it function differently than in say… Warlock Giants, or Druid decks with Defender of Argus? Here’s my answer to that:

1) Warlock Giants focuses primarily on defending up, clearing the board, and getting big drops out that are hard to deal with & difficult to get around. This deck doesn’t focus around Molten Giant: It’s just an option, just like every other card can be played in different ways in this deck. So this deck doesn’t require defender, nor does it require Molten Giant to win. The deck doesn’t stall for those cards, nor is it seeking to draw them out of the deck necessarily; not unless the game heads in that direction. It’s a play option, not a game-plan for turn number one.

2) Other Druid decks incorporate Defender of Argus to work alongside Roar, or to play a midrange game. This deck uses Defender of Argus in a similar way sometimes (buff up that 0/4 and 3/3 to make them both a lot more relevant & keep my life from being torn to shreds). However, in combination with Malygos (a card that, if silenced, becomes a little bit clumsy… put defender back on it & it’s a fair bit more useful), or the giants, Defender of Argus becomes a lot better. And, no one expects giants in a Druid deck!! They’ll run your life down like mad & not realize *that* is going to come down on the field. With that said, they usually do expect big defender creatures… so don’t expect one giant with defender is going to equal a win.