Hearthstone Combo Warlock Guide

Hearthstone Combo Warlock Guide by zalaehs

This is the best hearthstone deck I’ve ever played with.

Mortal Coil x 2
Power Overwhelming x 2
Zombie Chow x 2
Bloodmage Thalnos x1
Darkbomb x 2
Ironbeak Owl x 2
Arcane Golem x 1
Big Game Hunter x 2
Earthen Ring Farseer x 2
Hellfire x 2
Imp-losion x 2
Twilight Drake x 2
Antique Healbot x 2
Faceless Manipulator x 1
Sludge Belcher x 2
Siphon Soul x 2
The Black Knight x 1

To adapt this deck for today’s ladder I suggest -1 Thalnos -1 Big Game Hunter +1 Loatheb +1 Sylvanas. This change should give you a little extra pressure to help put people in combo range now that more people are aware of this deck and are attempting to defend themselves from the combo.

I say this deck is the best because it has been winning with some extreme consistency. It won me the ESL. It won me a 120player hearthstoneopen.com event earlier the same week. My deck tracker has it at 75%win. When I grind with a solid normal deck I usually win 65% and finish top100 legend. 75% is unsustainably high. Things will change and the deck will get worse because no metagame tolerates a beating like that over long periods of time.

Idea behind the deck

The idea for this deck came from getting my butt kicked by Darkwonyx in a previous ESL. I really liked the idea of building a Warlock built around the combo Arcane Golem + 2 Power Overwhelming + Faceless Manipulator = attack you for 24. It looks gimmicky but I learned first hand that it’s surprisingly difficult to stop even when you know it’s coming and you’re playing a Warrior that can go way above 30 health. Staying above 24 or having a taunt out every turn is actually very difficult when your opponent has drawn several more cards than you. I didn’t agree with some of Darkwonyx’s card choices so I got to work on my own version.

How to play the deck

The gameplan in 3 easy steps is
1) get ahead on board
2) draw cards
3) combo kill.

This being Hearthstone your first priority is usually board presence or tempo or whatever you want to call it. When you’re ahead you get to make favorable trades and sometimes punch your opponent in the face for free damage. Those are good things. When you’re not ahead the opposite happens and that is bad. In most matchups the 4 combo pieces sit in your hand until the turn you win the game. This makes them all easy mulligans in every matchup. Drawing cards and denying your opponent draws are always good things because unlike other decks, fatigue on your opponent is almost never a part of your plan. You should be spending most of your mana every turn because you have a lot of things to be doing with that mana, like lifetapping and playing cards so you can lifetap more. If you pass the turn with more than 1 unspent mana there’s a good chance you misplayed that turn.

Cards not in the deck

*Handlock staples such as Giants/Watcher/Sunfury/Shadowflame because these cards play well together and once you cut one from the list it starts a chain reaction and you end up cutting them all.
*Big Game Hunter Targets because I’d rather hunt than be hunted.
*Explosive Sheep / Fel Cannon because they’re situational and often conflict with my other minions. They don’t contribute enough to pressuring the opponent down to combo range
*Alextrasza because you don’t need the battlecry to kill control decks with your combo, and it gives BGH a target
*Jaraxxus because it doesn’t fit with the deck’s plan
*Kezan Mystic because not enough people are playing Ice Block

Matchup specific info

*Ice block is a 1 card counter to this strategy and any deck that includes it is probably a bad matchup.
*Druids running double combo may be the only effective offense against this deck.
*Everything else seems to be a good matchup
*VS Warrior Mulligan for cards that can apply pressure and avoid cards that get stuck in your hand. In your opener you want Zombie Chow and you do not want Big Game Hunter. Ahead on board and drawing cards = their armor won’t stack up = you win
*VS Hunter/Zoo/Aggro you can use combo pieces for board control since you won’t need the combo to win the game.
*The rest of this will be really obvious like Hellfire is good against Zoo.
*Owl/Darkbomb are good against Undertaker.
*Mortal Coil is good against various Gnomes and Spiders and Owls.
*4mana 4/10s are good against everything that isn’t a silence.