Best Friends Demon Hunter, Heroest Power Mage, & Big Burgle Rogue - Memes and Dreams #23

Hearthstone at its core is a game that people should have fun with, but that can get bogged down in the pursuit of competitive meta strategies. Thus, I humbly present Memes and Dreams, a series on Out of Cards looking to bring some good ol' memey fun into people's Hearthstone experiences. Each week we will do a deep dive on different 'for fun' decks, discussing the basic ideas of the decks, what makes them  tick, and roughly how to pilot them. This time we look at Best Friends Demon Hunter, Hero-est Power Mage, and Humongous Heist Rogue!

A Tricky Treaty

The first deck we're covering this time is a deck I call 'Best Friends Demon Hunter' as it features Drek'Thar and Vanndar Stormpike coming together to work with one another thanks to the new card, Abyssal Depths. Depths will guarantee both Drek'thar and Vanndar are in your hand, allowing you to play Vanndar for discounts on the rest of your deck while following up with Drek'thar to summon the newly discounted 5-6 cost minions. If that all sounds agonizingly slow and convoluted, that's because it is. There is a lot of emphasis on surviving the early game to get to your 3-turn set up and pop-off, which isn't even that big by modern standards. While tricky and arguably not worth it, the sheer silliness of its capability makes it worth trying for meme's sake.

The minions available to the deck are pretty tight. All minions that are not Drek'thar or Vanndar must cost 5-6 mana, otherwise they muck up the combo. You can pick any minions you think could work within that range, but it's pretty tight as it currently stands. The rest of the deck can be changed to however you think Demon Hunter can best survive the early game or close out later stages of the game. I considered using a draw package with Final Showdown, but opted for more survivability. This is a deck that gets "better" over the year no matter what since new Demon Hunter spells and workable minions are guaranteed to be printed, so consider coming back to this if it doesn't fit your fancy at the moment.

The Power of the Sun in the Palm of my Hand

This next deck is all about juicing up your hero power to immense levels of damage utilizing Wildfire and plenty of cards that either generate it like Venomous Scorpid, Vulpera Scoundrel, or Commander Sivara. Since it's the start of rotation, the Standard spell pool is the smallest it's going to be for the next year, meaning the chance to generate Wildfire is currently the highest it's going to be for the next year. The deck is supplemented with a small Naga package since we want to have as few spells as possible to maximize Wildfires we get back from Commander Sivara. The secret spice from the deck comes from Sir Finley Mrrgglton and other hero powers interacting with Reckless Apprentice. Since not every hero power in the game can be used on minions, Apprentice will simply trigger your hero power for each enemy on the board. This means Steady Shot will fire at the enemy hero a ton of times, you Shapeshift a bunch, or enter full "Yes" mode with Life Tap. We ideally hit Steady Shot since it can very easily burst down the enemy hero with enough buffs and targets on the board.

The main thing to consider when iterating on this deck is that you want the number of spells to be as few as possible so that Commander Sivara generates as many Wildfires as possible. You could definitely rework this deck to have more emphasis on the Naga package with cards like Spitelash Siren or Crushclaw Enforcer, enabling some turns with huge board pop-offs in exchange for some of the spell generating cards. The main 'issue' is that Nagas want more spells, so you'd be incentivized to play things like First Flame and Ignite. You could also opt to take away the Naga synergy in favor of something like a Mech package. You don't need to go full Mechs with Mecha-Shark shenanigans, but Mechs as an archetype require very little in the way of spells and help distill a more pure-Wildfire pool for Sivara. 

I Crave Colossals

Our final deck for this article is an exciting take on Burgle Rogue, now that the undisputed queen of Burgle, Tess Greymane, has been added to the Core set. Tess works best when replaying big spells or big minions that don't rely on Battlecries (since she does not trigger the Battlecries of cards). Thankfully, each class received a shiny Colossal minion that typically has a proactive board effect, and only a few of them rely on Battlecries to be effective. Even better is that there are a few ways to play said Colossal minions quite easily in the form of Ambassador Faelin and Queen Azshara's Horn of Ancients. That way when you play Tess or Contraband Stash, you'll only need a few Colossal minions to fill your board up with threats. Be mindful of the Colossals you play though, minions like Glugg the Gulper and Xhilag of the Abyss leave a lot less space than Gigafin or The Leviathan. Most of the other burgle cards we run, with the exception of Reconnaissance, create spells and won't muck up the hopefully Colossal boards you generate with Tess and Stash. Queen Azshara's other treasures are also pretty handy if you have a satisfactory burgled minion collection, with Ring of Tides duplicating Smuggler's Cache and Tidestone of Golganneth creating even more spells to burgle.

The primary way to iterate this deck would be to adjust the level and kind of Pirate synergy within it. Cutlass Courier is a strong card in its own right, even with minimal Pirates, but paves the way for much deeper synergies. Pirate Admiral Hooktusk is the obvious greedy answer, being the truest burgle card to exist, but requires much heavier Pirate synergy to be included. A more minimalistic Pirate inclusion would be the infamous Pufferfist and Plague Scientist combo to help deal with large board threats. A very spicy tech would be Swiftscale Trickster. Trickster doesn't syenrgize much with the deck without a heavy spell or two, but could cheat out some huge spell you burgle with one of your other cards.

What is your meme deck of choice? Do you try different ones for each expansion or do you try to evolve old ones with new cards? Do you have any meme dream stories? Tell us in the comments below!