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Hearthstone: Artosis Shaman Control

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This is a deck I ran into one late evening piloted by none other than famous Starcraft caster Artosis! I kept queuing up and played against him repeatedly. My guess is that there wasn’t that many people online at the time playing so I had a little fun trying to alternate decks. I played my Beast Aggro deck, my Murlock deck, and Brewmaster Control but nothing came even close and I was unable to take even one game off of him! I’m sure his deck list has changed since but I managed to put together most of it from memory.

Overview

At the core of it, this deck is designed to control the board. The reason why control decks are called control decks are because you get to have a say on whether the cards your opponent has will stay on the board or not. This isn’t a cheap deck to play though since it has Al’Akir, Ragnaros, Doomhammer, Cairne Bloodhoof, and Sylvanas. It relies on assorted damage spells that usually hit two or more targets for quick controlling efficiency. No other card options? That’s okay as you can make some totems to help! Let’s go through the decklist, shall we?

Deck list

Earth Shock, Forked Lightning, Hex, Lightning Storm: These are your bread and butter removal spells. The Earth Shock is great at shutting down Questing Adventurer, or Twilight Drake or other creatures that have that type of effect (since it silences, then deals damage). Forked Lightning is cheap but has a one turn penalty. You can use it early on if you need to. Keep Hex in reserve against larger threats. Never know when your opponent is going to have a legendary of their own especially in upper divisions. The thing about using Hex is to remember to attack first (assuming your opponent has no taunt cards in play) before playing the Hex. Otherwise you have to waste damage killing it before getting through to your opponent. Lastly, Lightning Storm is your board clear. It’ll do the job against most minions especially if you happen to have an Azure Drake or a Wrath of Air Totem in play.

Rockbiter Weapon: It’s a cheap spell that gives Thrall the ability to clear out any innocuous threats (like a low health Questing Adventurer. Or I can combine it with Doomhammer for a total of 10 damage back to back. Or put it on Al’Akir. Either way, the Rockbiter makes whatever creatures I have on the board just a little stronger to go after minions that might normally be beyond reach.

Feral Spirit: I like the Feral Spirits because it gives you two 2/3 wolves with Taunt. It’s enough to stave off an early rush. The extra 1 toughness lets the wolves walk away from Kobold Geomancers, Ironbeak Owls, and Starving Buzzards.

Defender of Argus: Helps make your totems actually useful. If you happen to have a few of them up, it’ll let totems intercept any attacks coming your way. Sometimes I’ll follow up the Feral Spirits with a Defender and turn them into a 3/4 if I have nothing else on the board.

Sen’jin Shieldmasta: Only included this as a 1 of because of the lone taunt. It’s mainly used to help mitigate any early aggression, just like the Feral Spirit Wolves.

Bloodlust: Great card as it lets you just rush and overwhelming your opponent. If you happen to have a field with totems, it can be a surprise finisher.

Cairne Bloodhoof: Cairne is a basic insurance card against most removal spells. Even if Cairne is killed, Baine will show up to take over from his dear ol’ dad. The only way to really mitigate Cairne is with a Hex or a Polymorph of some sort. You can silence him to remove Baine from showing up, but you still need to deal with the fact that he’s a 4/5 who can go head to head and trade well with other minions.

Sylvanas Windrunner: I’m still not quite sold on Sylvanas yet. I’ve managed to put her Deathrattle effect to great use in maybe 20% of my games. Still, 5 mana for a 5/5 is pretty decent and depending on what my opponent has on the board, it’ll make them think twice before taking her out.

Ragnaros the Firelord: Essentially 8 free damage per turn! If you really need to win the game and focus his efforts, you can Earth Shock your own minions. I’ve played against a number of players who used an Ironbark Owl against Ragnaros to silence him only to realize that instead of the 8 damage getting randomly fired at one of their minions, I can end the game by directing Rag straight to the opponent’s dome.

Al’Akir the Windlord: Great card! The Divine Shield means it’ll survive first contact with most minions. The Windfury allows it to strike twice for six damage off the bat coupled with the Charge. Or you can keep it there as a defender until the next turn when you play something even more dangerous since the Divine Shield basically means it’ll soak the first bit of incoming damage for free. Only real way to deal with Al’Akir is a silence or an outright polymorph type spell.

Twilight Drake: If you can get this out turn 4, great. If you can whip out the Drake earlier in turn 3 with a coin, even better. This forces your opponent to react to a minion that’s at least going to be 4/4 or more. In the later parts of the match, remember to play it first before your other cards to take advantage of the Battlecry effect.

Azure Drake: Cycles for a card and is a 4/4. The Spell Power effect will help buff up your Earth Shock, Forked Lightning, and Lightning Storm spells. Plus, y’know, dragon.

Mana Tide Totem and Gadgetzan Auctioneer: Both of these cards should be played in the middle or late game. You might not need cards early on but as you approach the later stages, you still want that card advantage over your opponent so you can draw into more threats or removal. Ideally, by that stage, if you have a few taunt minions up, you can protect them long enough for them to supply you with a few more cards.

Doomhammer and Stormforged Axe: Both of these turn Thrall into another source of damage. You can use him to clear out any annoying taunts or aim them straight at your opponent’s face. Doomhammer alone represents 16 possible points of damage and has Windfury meaning you can clear out minions. Yes Thrall will take damage the other way, but sometimes it’s worth it to take early damage back in order to prevent taking massive damage later.

Playing the deck

Much of your early game is going to be spent controlling the board. It’s not uncommon to pass the first turn and generate a totem on the second turn. Ideally, you want to set up for Drakes between turns 4 – 6 as they provide a nice threat and allow you to start setting up your attacks. It’ll also draw removal spells towards them as you slowly migrate to the end game and start getting in range of dropping your legendary bombs. Keep making totems if you can afford to. Bloodlust is your ace and you might have the opportunity to finish a game by attacking with all totems. Don’t drop a Mana Tide or an Auctioneer until you can protect them with a few taunts like your Frost Wolves or totems buffed by Defender of Argus. Your weapons should be used to help maintain board control or to go after your opponent.

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Playing with Confidence

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I know, it’s been a while since the last update. We’re up 8 bosses into Siege. I’m hoping to rack up at least one or two more on Monday. I’m not sure what happened between Throne of Thunder and SIege of Orgrimmar, but the raid has been playing much tighter and more disciplined. It wasn’t uncommon for us to take down a progression boss and then just wipe on trash successively. I mean, it still happens from time to time but not as often. We have a tendency in making our own hard modes, that’s for sure. Dark Shaman definitely a pain in the backside for us and I was worried we’d hit another road block but managed to punch through it. Nazgrim took but a few shots for us before we buried him into the ground. That was an enjoyable encounter with the amount of control and restraint we had to exercise throughout the encounter.

Another team composition adjustment that was made is that we’re now regularly running five healers instead of our standard six. Running an 18 DPS lineup means we can simply apply brute force to bosses and negate some of the tighter enrage checks. The only exception was Dark Shaman where I switched from Shadow to Holy to help heal. Having the opportunity to both heal and DPS these fights means I get to enjoy the challenges from two different roles.

Maybe the Flex raid wings are helping along with the preparation. By being exposed to some of the later bosses in a slightly tiered down version, it adds extra familiarity when we tackle these encounters in normal. Whatever it is, the raid train is humming along nicely. This just might end up being an easier tier compared to Throne of Thunder.

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Day 1: Siege of Orgrimmar

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My glyphs! They’ve been changed! Ever since Dark Binding went baseline, I had to make some changes to my shadow glyphs! Now I’m using Glyph of Fade, Glyph of Mind Flay, and Glyph of Vampiric Embrace

For healing, I removed my Glyph of Lightwell (so that Lightspring is now baseline). I switched back to using Glyph of Renew and kept Glyph of Mending along with Glyph of Circle of Healing.

Our day 1 in Siege of Orgrimmar was a blast! Immerseus was two-shotted and the Protectors of the Vale was taken down in one shot (even with a third of the raid dead). Ran into a wall with Norushen but after multiple attempts and hitting the enrage timer with about 10% left, I think he’s well within range for a kill on Thursday. Just have to stack the deck a little bit more in terms of who gets sent to the other side.

How did your day 1 go?

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Where we kill Heroic Tortos and Iron Qon

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Two weeks ago on a Monday night, the biggest (and most annoying) turtle since Firelands went down on heroic mode. Took us over 70 attempts before we were finally able to kill the oversized shell. It’s the same thing for about 6 minutes non-stop and it demands an unbelievable amount of focus from really key players. If even one person stops thinking or loses sight, it’s an automatic wipe. I probably caused maybe 20% of the wipes due to bad calls, mis-kicks or other stuff. The DBM option which automarks turtles is a god send.

I had three total kickers including myself and my job was to tell the kickers which shell to kick for breaths and for debuffs. In addition, I had to direct ranged DPS traffic. We were consistently getting him low to around 25 to 30% but we kept losing our kite tank (we used a Death Knight for this as we didn’t have a tanking Monk available). What’s funny is that ont he final attempt of the night, I errantly forgot to refresh my shield (or it was taken out by a rock fall or a turtle spinning and I didn’t see it). At that moment, my duties were absolved of all kicking and I was able to instantly focus on directing traffic and set up a specific order on which shells would be used when.

Maybe I should die more often.

This is indeed a fight where the fate of the many rest on the shoulders of the few.

Things that can go wrong

  • Your kite tank dying
  • Your main tank dying
  • Your main tank pulling bat aggro somehow
  • Your misdirectors unable to misdirect bats
  • Your kickers not kicking
  • Your kickers missing
  • Your shields not being refreshed on people

The lockout was subsequently extended and we made a large push towards Iron Qon. We actually were able to pick up where we left off since we last worked on him about two months ago. We hit phase 4 a few times, jockeyed around with the DPS order. Turns out killing Fire Quillen guy first might not be the best idea since the shields from the Ice Quillen caused us to miss a whole bunch. We switched our targets, delayed our Heroism into that phase and unloaded everything. This was one of the few attempts where we had just about everyone alive and managed to stay stable throughout it.

Thank goodness. That put us to 6/13. Now we have two more days to make it 7. I feel like we’ve made a really strong push at the end of the tier and helped make up for lost time. I just hope that it’s enough momentum to really get us going into Siege. Rumors are that other Alliance guilds are either switching servers or switching factions. A shame really. Our server’s going to slowly shift towards faction imbalance if it does go through.

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Hearthstone: Paladin Brewmaster Control

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This is a deck that I’ve put together that has a ton of synergy and card draw. There’s many different ways to win. First, let’s go over the notable cards. The point of this deck is to make every minion count when it comes into plays. It’s also not a cheap deck to build as it has no less than three legendaries and other epics.

The deck

On WoW Head
On Hearthpwn

 The cards

Brewmasters: This deck aims to control the board with correct usage of Brewmasters. Use it to bring back any creature in play back to your hand so you can reuse the Battlecry effect. You can say that this is the main engine. During early game, I’ll try to use my Youthfuls on my Novice Engineers or Cold Light Oracles to continue drawing cards. Or I can use it on Owls to silence any annoying minions. I once took out two Molten Giants by dropping Big Game Hunter, bouncing it back to my hand, and re-casting it. There’s lots of tricks you can do here.

Leeroy Jenkins: Honestly, he’s not really in there for the consistent damage. He’s in there because his 4 mana allows you to instantly get rid of a 6 health minion with taunt that’s in the way of your miniature army. Not to mention there’s no other removal spell that Paladins have access to which I can use. Sure the trade off is that your opponent gets two 1/1 whelps. But that’s not so bad.

Illidan: Procs off any card played. Secrets, spells, minions, whatever. You get a free 2/1. This will help cement your board advantage. With 5 health, he’ll survive nicely against most smaller minions.

Ironbeak Owl: My favourite card in the game that’s a two drop. Shuts down any minions with scaling health and attack effects. Use it to bypass a taunt. Shut down any special utility creatures like Questing Adventurer.

Tinkmaster Overspark: You might think that the 50% chance to generate a 5/5 is a bad idea. But is there a Molten Giant in play? Or a Ragnaros? Or an Onyxia? Or a buffed 8/8 Questing Adventurer? All of a sudden, a 5/5 Devilsaur doesn’t seem so bad. 3 mana to shut down abilities of stronger creatures is something I’ll take. Save Tinkmaster to neutralize any legendaries.

Big Game Hunter: This will punch through any serious threats. Large demons. Massive beasts. A really buffed creature. You name it, BGH will sharpshoot it down free of charge without having to trade.

Mogu’shan Warden: It’s a 1/7 wall that can stop most things and buy you a turn. Brewmaster it to keep regenerating the the taunt shield alive long enough until you draw more permanent solutions. Combines well with the Crazed Alchemist as a surprise attack.

Acidic Swamp Ooze: Specifically targets warriors, Eaglehorn bow hunters, and really buff rogues. Otherwise, it’s a 3/2 drop for 2 mana.

Earthen Ring Farseer and Guardian of Kings: If you need to buy yourself time, Brewmaster these two for extra life. It should allow you more time to get setup and find more threats.

Sea Giant: Finisher. Towards mid to late game, there will be enough minions on the board to make it cheap to cast. If you plan to Equalize/Consecrate, Equalize first, drop the Sea Giant, then Consecration. 

Crazed Alchemist: Can be used for both defensive and offensive purposes. Opponent has an 0/5 Lightwell? Target it and watch as it becomes a 5/0 and instantly dies. Use it to bypass a Mogu’shan Warden. Turn the 1/7 taunter into a 7/1 and send your Silver Hand Recruit after it to open the way for the rest of your army. Alternatively, that buffed 6/1 Dust Devil that the Shaman has which is going to 2 shot you next turn? Use the Alchemst  on it and watch as it becomes a 1/6 that will attack twice for a measly two damage combined. You don’t always have to kill creatures to neutralize. Sometimes dropping them down to 1 attack renders them a non-threat. Just make sure you have the health for it.

Aldor Peacekeeper: Same concept as the alchemist above except it’s purely for defensive purposes. Opponent has a pair of Ironbark Protectors on the board? Drop a Peacekeeper, Brewmaster it back, drop it again. Those two 8/8s have now become 1/8s and are nothing but ticklish walls.

Equality and Consecration: The best board clearing combination. Levels your opponents field unless their minions have a Divine Shield presence up. Can easily be used on turn 5 with a coin or turn 6 in case things aren’t looking so good. Personally, I’ll wait a little later until I can do it to either finish the game or neutralize my opponent’s advantage. Remember that it costs 6 mana combined to cast. If the board is full. Cast Equality first, then drop a Brewmaster to return something or Leeroy (or a Sea Giant if there’s enough), before nuking their side with Consecration.

This deck has solutions for just about most situations. If not, Equality/Consecration will reset the board for you in your favor. Your card draw should let you fish them out fairly quick. Expect to go the distance with this deck and it’s not uncommon to get to a point where you’re running out of cards in your deck.

Video with commentary

Vs Warlock – With Warlocks, you have to be careful. Their key board clears are Hellfire and Twisting Nether. Brewmasters will help against any of your own minions that have been targeted with Corruption. This Warlock deck will have some spellpower minions to power up Drain Life or Soul Fire or other damage spells. Use Black Knight to punch through Booty Bay Bodyguards. Warlock players tend to hold onto their cards. Depending on the situation, you might be able to cast Coldlight Oracle and remove cards from their deck (do this only if they have 8 or more cards during your turn).

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