With a new expansion on the horizon, it is always a blast to make theorycrafts and playing them day one is easily the best experiences the game has to offer. Scholomance Academy has brought along a ton of unique cards that could easily become deck-defining. While some of the cards are almost certainly overhyped or underhyped, that does not change the fact that Scholomance has brought along so many new archetypes to try out.
With such an interesting set launching, here are some of the decks we are most excited to play day one of Scholomance Academy!
Echo's Day 1 Decks
This deck's main goal is fairly simple, use Lightning Blooms to help cast Kael'thas Sunstrider, and then with the help of us ability, cast Eye of the Storm to make a massive board that is a pain for our opponents to deal with. We have a couple cards to increase the consistency of this combo, such as Diligent Notetaker acting as a second Lightning Bloom if it is already in play, and Runic Carvings being a backup Eye of the Storm, although it is much weaker.
Other combos that exist in the deck are the [Hearthstone Card (Fist of Ra-den) Not Found] + 1 mana spell combo. For those unaware there is currently only 1 legendary minion with a mana cost of 1, that being Reliquary of Souls. This means that we can essentially print out copies of the prime and eventually wall off the opponent with them.
The rest of the deck is designed to slow down the opponent to let one of our two main game plans down, with some of the notable cards being Instructor Fireheart and Groundskeeper, both of which should both do a decent job at slowing the game down.
One of my favorite decks to play back when Kobolds and Catacombs was revealed was Spiteful Priest and so when I saw High Abbess Alura revealed, I immediately wanted to try bringing that old archetype back. This deck functions a lot like it. It focuses on being a tempo deck that is occasionally able to cheat out some larger spells through Alura. In order to do this, we need to generate spells to trigger her spellburst, which is where Wandmaker and Cobalt Spellkin come in. As for the spells we cheat in, we have both Psyche Split and Mind Control, with the former giving us 2 4/8s and the latter just stealing one of the opponent's minions.
The rest of the deck is just a generic tempo deck, the more you can curve out with it the better. Dragonmaw Overseer is able to spiral out of control when played with minions that are already fairly hard to remove, such as Imprisoned Homunculus, or any 1 drop followed by a Kul Tiran Chaplain. On the top end we also have Galakrond, the Unspeakable, because it can just out value most control decks.
One of my favorite things to do in card games is trying to goldfish people, that being steamrolling over someone once every 5-10 games. This deck is designed to do that by swarming the board early on with Gibberling and pumping them up with cards like Power of the Wild and Blessing of the Ancients. To help us do this, we have cards like Nature Studies, Lightning Bloom, and Innervate.
To bring a little bit of consistency to the deck, we have Exotic Mountsellers and Glowfly Swarms to generate more boards, as well as Voracious Readers to refuel our hand after dumping it all early. I'll be honest, I don't see this deck doing well considering it is so focused on doing one thing, but that is not going to stop me from trying to make it work.
ShadowsOfSense's Dragon Quest Fragment Warlock
Alternate Title: Dragon Quest Warlock: Fragments of a Soul Age (& Keli'dan)
I'm gonna be honest, this is me mashing together several of my favourite things and praying they stick together long enough to scrape a few wins.
Your win condition with this deck is to consistently field large boards of minions, hoping your opponent has no way to counteract that. The deck runs a lot of health gain to try and get you through to the endgame, forgoing perhaps better cards for Soul Fragment generators and ignoring the cards which benefit from Soul Fragments, as we want to use them all for healing and draw.
Supreme Archaeology is there to allow you to hopefully pull some of the larger threats at the top end and get them out cheap to keep the board filled. Cards like Plagued Protodrake and Enhanced Dreadlord are included to try and counteract boardwipes, while also handily comboing with Nether Breath and Felosophy respectively.
Drawing so many cards means that I expect Dragonqueen Alexstrasza to be activated more often than not, even with all the tokens you're adding to the deck. Obviously if she doesn't work out you could exchange her for another high-end Dragon (perhaps Ysera?) or even try out Soulciologist Malicia.
Linkblade91's Decks
My favorite deck from the final reveal stream, I think I'm gonna break down and try it (despite what I said in our Survival of the Fittest review).
The plan is straight-forward: use cards like Overgrowth and Lightning Bloom to ramp ourselves up to where we can drop Kael'thas Sunstrider, and go to town with our heavy spells - Overflow and of course Survival of the Fittest. Then it's just a matter of dropping our big beasties on the table and running amok!
I'm not very skilled in these kinds of combo-y decks, so we'll see how this goes. I tried to replicate the stream's deck as best I could, although I imagine there is room for improvement.
The plan is pretty simple: lay down some minions, buff them to high heaven, and hope that's enough lol. We'll tire the enemy out until a big dude sticks, then smash their face in.
High Abbess Alura means we can't run Subdue, but we can still at least use Consecration and Libram of Justice to contend with our enemies.This deck includes the Libram package for handy buffing and the Pure package because...I ran out of space just trying to fit all of the Paladin cards I wanted. Trust me, it was a lot worse when I was building this for Wild; alas there is no 40-card deck option. I've been trying for years to have fun with The Last Kaleidosaur, so I'll continue to tinker with Buffadin until something works out.
Fluxflashor's Exodia / Pew Pew Pew Pew Mage
With Scholomance Academy, we're receiving some serious support for Spell Damage in Mage! This has been one of my all-time favourite mechanics in Hearthstone so to see it really shine the middle of the year, I know we're going to be causing plenty of trouble for the next year and a half in Standard which is plenty of fun.
Our end-game is like any Exodia-style deck to fire off masses of Fireball through Archmage Antonidas and cost reductions via the evergreen Sorcerer's Apprentice. If we can't make that magic happen though, we have fun Spell Damage modifiers that can turn our other spells into unsuspectingly dangerous weapons.
Will this ultimately be competitive? Probably not. Will it be epic? Nah, Legendary! I put together a more extensive "guide", if you can even call it that since its theorycraft, so check it out.
Comments
No Rogue Decks :(
In some ways I want Flux's Exodia Mage idea to work and bring the deck back to life in Standard, but in other ways I think... please no! I wonder though if it's better to just go full on Spell Damage variant? Also, doesn't the Exodia part need a Coin? So you either only pull off the Exodia combo if you are going second, or you add a Quest, or a Sidequest, and the Licensed Adventurer to give yourself a Coin.
The Adventurer package for the guaranteed coin may make the list better, but finding the exact slots to sub out for that is tough. Going to require some experimentation and adaptions to what the meta is doing, but I'm hoping we've got some fun spell nonsense that is here to stay
My guess is that Druid will break the game tomorrow. So much ramp, mana cheating and payoffs...
Echo wrote "I don't see this deck doing well considering it is so focused on doing one thing", but I actually think that the deck that might break the game will be more degenerate than this, focusing entirely on the early turns and not even playing ramp + Mountseller.
In any case, don't disenchant your extra copies of Gibberling and Voracious Reader.
If that's the case, I want all the Druid cards I pull to be golden for those eventual dust refunds! :)
My guess is Rogue is getting an OP aggro deck that it's gonna break the meta for 3-5 days. Then Secret Passage will get nerfed and other stuff will start getting played.