Taunt Warrior

This week's wild off meta deck will be a quest deck - but not any of the new Stormwind quests. Instead, we are going to go to the original quest based expansion of Un'goro and revisit the warrior quest Fire Plume's Heart, which makes your hero power turn into Ragnaros's. Since the original Taunt Warrior quest decks, many new cards synergize with its gameplan. From Stormwind, we have Encumbered Pack Mule which gives us great value to complete the quest quickly as two taunts in a single card.

Now, let's get into a guide on playing the deck. It's going to go through major overarching strategies to keep in mind, how to mulligan, gameplay tips on key synergies, and card choices.

Strategies

This deck is going to use buffs and cards that benefit extra from buffs to play powerful taunts. It will make use of discovers to get more taunts to complete the quest. Then, we can use the DIE, INSECT! hero power to provide long term pressure. Finally, we have N'Zoth, God of the Deep for a large board finisher.

Buffing - You want to play taunt minions in the early game to start completing the quest, preferably ones that discover or otherwise increase your hand size. You can then play handbuffs to have powerful minions which will fight for and often gain board control. You can control the board and start pushing face damage with them.

Quest - After you completed the quest, you can keep playing minions and use your hero power to provide a lot of potential face damage and destroy enemy minions. Before using the hero power, you want to trade into small enemy minions to give it more high quality targets. You can keep using taunt minions to protect yourself while chipping down the opponent with your quest reward.

N'zoth - Sometimes the game goes to turn 10, and you are in a struggle for the board. N'Zoth, God of the Deep can help you win by generating a large board that give you board control, or at least trade with some enemy minions to give your hero power a higher chance to go face.

This deck is sort of inconsistent, but you can win against any deck if you highroll with buffs early. In general, you don't always need the hero power to win, often having overstatted taunt minions will win you the game by itself.

Mulligans

Keep Fire Plume's Heart, one Into the Fray, Frightened Flunkys, Scrapsmiths, Stonehill Defenders and Ringmaster Whatley.

The early game gameplan is similar for all classes, play the quest turn 1, then start playing taunts and handbuffs, so the mulligan is simple and consistent.

Gameplay

This deck has a simple gameplan - play the quest, then play taunt minions to complete it while utilizing buffs effectively for more powerful taunts. Later, keep using buffs and minions along with the DIE, INSECT! hero power from the quest and N'Zoth, God of the Deep to finish games.

Below are gameplay tips regarding many of the synergies in this deck and how to use them effectively.

Quest Synergy

You always want to play the quest turn 1. Then, you can follow up with an Encumbered Pack Mule or Frightened Flunky. Scrapsmith is a great card as he gives 3 ticks of quest completion (as well as giving 2 extra minions to buff). You should have no issues completing the quest quickly due to all the taunt minions and discovers in the deck.

Handbuff Synergy

Managing when to use your handbuffs is the hardest part of playing this deck well. You want to balance being greedy with Into the Fray and Conditioning (Rank 1), holding to get a large hand size and upgrade Conditioning, with using them early enough to prevent falling behind too much on the board. Since the deck has so many taunts, it's easy to lock up the board and comeback even from low hp.

So in general, you want to try and be on the value maximizing side with your taunts, but if you see the opponent is having some minions that you could value trade with well if your minions were buffed, then it's better to just use the handbuffs earlier to keep up the tempo.

Be careful to avoid playing too many handbuffed minions at once to have waves of refill against decks with board clears.

Use Sword Eater's weapon or the quest reward weapon Sulfuras to activate Mor'shan Elite.

Menagerie Synergy

Keep in mind that Frightened Flunky and Stonehill Defender can discover more tribes for N'Zoth, God of the Deep like elemental or quilboar.

Ringmaster Whatley will draw either Scrap Golem or Zilliax as a mech, Circus Amalgam as a dragon, and Sword Eater as a pirate.

For your beast resurrect from N'zoth, you can try to avoid playing Encumbered Pack Mules if you have other cards to play, have played Armagedillo, and are close to playing N'zoth. This will guarantee that N'zoth resurrects Armagedillo.

In general, you will resurrect any other tribal minions from discovers, an Armagedillo or Encumbered Pack Mule, Circus Amalgams, a Sword Eater, and either a Scrap Golem or Zilliax.

Zilliax can magnetize to Circus Amalgams and Scrap Golems for a lot of heal and armor gain, especially when buffed.

Use Taelan Fordring to draw N'zoth, if he is already in hand he will draw Armagedillo which is another great card.

Card Choices

This section is going to go through the main packages of cards in the deck. Each package has cards that help the deck with a specific goal. When playing the deck, it's useful to know what purposes each card serves and what other cards in the deck have synergy with it or help achieve the same purpose. This section might also be useful if you're interested in the reasoning for why each card was included in the deck.

Quest Synergy

These cards are great for completing the quest quickly as they either discover or add more taunts to your hand. In general though, any taunts in the deck help complete the quest.

Handbuff Synergy

These cards either buff minions in your hand, add cards to your hand to keep large hand sizes for more buffing value, or benefit extra from being buffed. Any discover and card draw in the deck from other packages is great for handbuffs too, as that will keep the hand size high.

Menagerie Package

Having different tribes enables Ringmaster Whatley to draw multiple cards and a powerful lategame board fill from N'Zoth, God of the Deep. Circus Amalgams are key as they are both taunts and count as any tribe. Taelan Fordring is not directly menagerie, but he is part of the package as he will usually draw either N'zoth, God of the Deep or Armagedillo.

This is a midrange deck that uses taunt minions and handbuffs to try and survive to complete the quest and use the powerful Ragnaros hero power. Using the quest might actually be suboptimal in modern taunt warriors due to the inherent slowness, but it's very fun and can definitely win some games. Overall, if you have the quest and enjoy playing with taunt minions or making huge minions with handbuffing give this deck a try. If you have a question or comment, or are wondering about a card substitution, post below.