Monday, December 15, 2014

Hearthstone Kinguin For Charity 2014 Tournament: Paladins return, budget Mech Mage and budget Miracle Rogue (Update another deck-list link)

*New* Deck-lists from Hearthstone Top Deck (Only for the Top 8 players though)

Deck-lists from Kinguin.net in one Image intensive page

Alternate Deck-lists from Hearthstone Top Decks

You can find videos of the matches by searching for 'Kinguin' on YouTube and filtering for the latest entries. I was looking forward to all the Control Priest decks but I think this tournament is all about the return of the Paladin decks. Muster for Battle and Quartermaster really turned the class's power and popularity around. Quartermaster in particular actually buffed Paladin's hero power indirectly as your opponent is now usually pressured to kill the 1-1 tokens as long as you have not played Quartermaster. Muster for Battle also synergies well with the old cards like Equality (board clear when played the turn after Muster with your tokens surviving), Sword of Justice, Knife Juggler and Cult Master. My favourite versions are Tidesoftime's and StrifeCro's; StrifeCro's version makes interesting use of Divine Shield minions and Blood Knight. I'm not a fan of versions trying to use Scarlet Purifier and deathrattle minions as I think it can be situational.

StrifeCro's Mech Mage was the next most outstanding deck in the tournament for me. You would think this is a deck for budget players but it is actually very viable in tournaments and even swept the finals 4-0! Other than The Dr. Boom and Loatheb, the deck only uses 4 rare-s and 0 epic-s. I would consider this the "Zoo" for Mage players. (Edit: To clarify, it is similar in the sense of cost. The play-style is more like Backspace Rogue) Brian Kibler has another Mech Mage deck but that included more Mage cards and Legendaries so is different from this IMO, check it out over at his blog.

Finally, the last deck that stood out for me was Team Archon's Miracle Rogue (Firebat's version). Apparently, it survived the Gagetzan nerf and in this iteration, it is more budget-friendly than ever! I think it still works but probably not as successful as before(?). The only GvG card was Tinker's Sharpsword Oil which IMO is a really powerful spell. Anyway, this new Miracle Rogue along with StrifeCro's Mech Mage are great additions to the growing list of competitive budget decks which only had Zoo and Hunter before GvG. (My favourite GvG Zoo from the tournament was Powder's while there were not really any Hunter decks that caught my eye)