Hearthstone Druid Rank 5 Deck

Hearthstone Druid Rank 5 Deck by Paul

You may be familiar with my previous deck from last ladder which I placed #89 on the final standings in legendary.

*Note that the title of this thread isn’t fully self-explanatory (limited character number). I’m taking this deck to legendary alongside a couple other of my builds.

I have a number of decks which I’m playing right now, but the metagame changed quite a bit with the newest patch & I wanted to start fresh with something that works well. By “fresh”, I mean really fresh! I went ahead and built a deck that feels like an arena deck on steroids. Sound odd? It is. It took me from rank 8 to rank 5 quickly, and I’m still playing it right now. I’ll be streaming later tonight (it’s 5:30PM as I type this right now, I’ll be on around 7:30-8:00PM Pacific Time on my Twitch channel /PaulWog).

The deck is going to undergo some changes as I play through the ladder. The metagame shifts throughout the day every day, and so I change my decks rapidly. Currently the deck is in its vanilla form and it’s working quite well. The deck isn’t entirely easy to play: You need to know what your opponent is capable of. You need to know when to really hold back, or to go all-in. Sometimes going all-in means you’ll lose to a board wipe, but not going all-in means you’ll lose no matter what; it’s difficult to discern when that’s the case.

Here’s the deck:

2x Innervate
2x Argent Squire
2x Elven Archer
2x Power of the Wild
2x Wrath
2x Faerie Dragon
2x Knife Juggler
1x Loot Hoarder
1x Nat Pagle
2x Savage Roar
2x Harvest Golem
2x Imp Master
2x Soul of the Forest
2x Cult Master
2x Keeper of the Grove
1x Nourish
1x Cenarius

Cards that I may remove from the deck, but also might stay:
Cenarius, Loot Hoarder

Cards that I would like to add to the deck:
Second Nourish, Deathwing OR Ysera

How does the deck work? You have to play extremely careful for starters. If you get the coin, don’t pump out your creatures immediately unless if you’re absolutely certain you want to do that. I almost always save the coin to get soul of the forest or cultmaster out on a turn which I have 2-3 creatures in play already. I almost always prioritize board stabilization before I prioritize damage output or anything else. The deck stabilizes itself if you play well.

Why do I not play cards like big game hunter, ragnaros, or tinkmaster overspark? Easy answer: Because I don’t need to. Big creatures go down easily if you play the deck correctly. With that said, I want to have a larger sample-size of games to make sure the deck plays out correctly. As I mentioned above, the deck is in its vanilla-state. By that, I mean that the deck hasn’t been modified in a way that goes against its own flow in order to throw a wrench in my opponent’s plays. Big Game Hunter is a card worth considering and it’s on the top of my maybe-list.

Why would I want to remove Cenarius? I don’t particularly want to remove him, he’s just under consideration currently. He’s a dead card early-on, but he’s great most of the time. I use both of his abilities equally as much. Loot Hoarder isn’t something I particularly want to remove either; I’m just viewing how the deck draws and seeing if it needs that 2-drop, or if Nourish can take its place.

Why would I want to add Deathwing or Ysera? Ysera is rather obvious: It’s a late-game card. If the deck peters out and the opponent is also in a slow position, it’s a good card to drop on the field. With that said, Ysera doesn’t act immediately, and this deck is about keeping the opponent in a reactive state. Deathwing looks like a promising card that may work well in the deck, but I’m simply looking at when I draw Cenarius and seeing what games I would’ve very much liked to see Deathwing on the field. How can Deathwing work? Well, if I have Soul of the Forest out on a large number of creatures, there’s a combo right there. He’s also excellent against giants decks if the game goes on long, and other decks that don’t have too many kill spells especially into the late game. It’s just a thought anyway at the moment: It’s not something people expect.

Why do I not run late-game cards like 7-drop trees and other good stuff that seems to work alongside the deck? The reason is because I want every card to be accessible to play within the first few turns. If I draw 2 big drops early in the game it’s game over. The deck works because it flows well. That’s why the deck has to really limit itself on large drops. It’s safe to have one Cenarius, or one Deathwing, or one of something, but that’s it; even then, it may be more beneficial to simply not use any of those altogether. That’s all to be determined in the testing phase.

Board wipes: These are tricky. You need to play your hand out carefully. This is why you have to prioritize board stabilization first and foremost, then your hand size, and then damage output third. If you have a bunch of creatures and can deal 25 damage to an opponent who has 27 life, don’t necessarily go for it. Clear out their board entirely, draw up if you can (Cultist), and then get ready to win on the following turns. This deck can play board wipes against the opponent by forcing them to waste a turn of mana to wipe your field, which you simply follow up against with another full field. This takes forethought, intuition, luck, and strategy. I want a second Nourish in the deck to further improve such situations and likely by the end of the night I’ll have determined how I’m doing that.