Are You a Master Duelist? December's Challenge is Here! Episode 5: The Battle For Alterac

Greetings, and welcome to the fifth episode of an Out Of Cards exclusive community challenge. This series focuses on creative deck building in Hearthstone Duels and we aim to give the game mode love it deserves.

Roughly every three weeks, we will create a new Duels challenge, consisting in building a starting deck with a certain restriction - be it mana cost, keywords, including certain build-arounds and so on. Every player will be invited to join and build a deck with said restriction: we'll even provide some samples ourselves, so that you won't be forced to go to the blank drawing board.

Those who'll be able to provide worthy results will be awarded with a reward!

The Battle For Alterac

This one's going to be the first Master Duelist challenge since the release of Fractured in Alterac Valley, so what about an expansion-related theme?

• You have to build a starting deck containing at least 6 Fractured in Alterac Valley cards.

Class cards, Neutral cards: you can pick the ones you prefer the most. If we were to give you an advice, we'd love to see Alterac archetypes being experimented in Duels, but whatever list you come up with is fine, as long as you respect the restriction set in bold.

Challenge's Information and Rewards

This challenge will begin today, December 10th, and will end on December 31st. During this window of time, you'll have to start a Duels run with a starting deck including at least 6 Fractured in Alterac Valley cards.

Everyone who posts proof of a 7+ wins run in the dedicated submission forum thread will be awarded with a different amount of Gold, an on-site currency you'll be able to earn from different activities and that will be used to purchase cosmetics in our on-site shop. Remember that, in order for your run to count towards the challenge, you'll have to provide an appropriate proof of your feat; otherwise, your result won't count.

Here's a quick breakdown explaining the rewards you'll receive based on your performance:

These are the criteria we'll use to determine the winner in case of identical scores:

• A Heroic run will be considered more difficult than a Casual one, therefore Heroic players will have the priority.
  • If you get the best score overall with a 10-wins run in Casual and somebody else gets a 10-wins run in Heroic, the latter will be the winner of the challenge.
• In case of more people getting the same score in the same mode, the winner will be decided by the submission time.
  • The quickest person to a Heroic run with a 12-0 will be the ultimate victor.
  • If more players will get to 12 wins, losses will count as well: a 12-0 will be considered better than a 12-2 or a 12-1.

The winner will be contacted through Direct Messages after the submission time has ended.

If you want to submit your score, follow the instructions in the forum thread.

Suggested Starting Decks

As much as we encourage our participants to put their deck building skills to use, we do not want to cut out those who may want to give this challenge a try, but do not want to build a 15 deck from scratch. Therefore, here are some starting decks you may want to take inspiration from and use them to slice through the competition!

Beast Token Druid

Not a deck you probably saw coming, but Token Druid received some pretty neat tools in Alterac Valley, which push both Token and Beast Druid. We tried to merge the two archetypes together, and this is a very rough draft of what we came up with.

As usual, Harvest Time! wants you to go wide rather than tall, and then burst down your opponent with your many AoE buffs. two cards that seem to be very good in this starting deck and Clawfury Adept (half Savage Roar for one less mana, while being a 2/3 and a Beast) and Frostwolf Kennels: Stealth units are pretty annoying to deal with, and therefore your buffs will almost always be guaranteed to hit!

Elemental Frost Shaman

Hands down one of the most awaited Alterac archetypes. Frost Shock and Glacial Shard are two incredibly good tools in this deck, as they provide cheap and targetable Freeze effects to immobilize your opponent or to burst it down with Cheaty Snobold. We probably went a bit too greedy with the top end, but this is a brand new deck for us, so you can show us how you would build it!

Fel Soul Warlock

Soul Fragments in the early game to stabilize the game; Fel Rifts in the mid-late game to kill your opponent. We may as well call it "Shuffle Warlock", but the Fel package seems very solid in Soul Warlock. We still think this archetype deserves some better reward tools (maybe the mini-set will help), but in the meantime we can start by getting aquatinted with the new toys!

Now that you know everything you need, grab your deck: it's time to D-D-D-D-Duels! Good luck to everyone!