Out of all the archetypes that Blizzard has made throughout the years, one of the most mocked ones is none other than Totem Shaman, and for good reason too. The cards are either overpriced, do too little, or are dead draws even when you have a board full of totems. However, the day of reckoning has come for Totem Shaman, well rather it came in Savior's of Ul'dum, but then shifts in the wild meta have brought this deck into a decent spot.

The Gameplan

If you know anything about how I like to play cardgames, I like to not do anything for the first couple of turns, then spew out half my deck in a turn and win. This deck follows that playstyle very similarly, with the main engines that make the deck work being Wicked Witchdoctor and Spirit of the Frog. While the frog is amazing at letting you just draw a boatload of cards at a given point, the Witchdoctor is the MVP as it creates a board presence incredibly easy to either feed into Bloodlust or Primal Fusion, which despite what it reads, it is essentially a 1 mana Blessing of Kings, if not better. Because both the frog and the witchdoctor are so vital, it is recommended to mulligan for one of them every time, only keeping cards if you know they are strong in the matchup, such as Maelstrom Portal against paladin.

Matchups

As mentioned earlier, the deck has a fairly strong matchup against most of the meta right now, which for me at least consists of the Tempo Quest Mage (not sure if that is the right name, but that's what I'm rolling with). In a lot of my matches, my opponents are able to heal for 25-29 health yet I'm still able to kill them via just smacking them senseless with a bunch of long sticks. The deck also has a decent time against aggro, given the amount of cheap interaction we run in the form of Zap!, Lightning Bolt, and Totemic Smash.

This leaves two types of decks left, control and the unfair kind. Control is always a hard matchup because even after spamming the board with totems, they all still have 1-2 health. Because of that, the deck either needs to high roll or just beat down the opponents early enough with massive minions. As for unfair decks, there are two that I can think of, for the most part, Big Priest and Darkest Hour Warlock. Big Priest is a joke most of the time because Devolve makes short work of any massive creatures they play while Darkest Hour Warlock mainly depends on how early they can summon their deck. As a side note, Warlock as a class is the bane to this deck because Defile absolutely destroys any chance of having totems stick on the board.

Substitutions/Tech Spots

Considering the cost of some wild decks, this one is fairly cheap considering its strengths. That being said the two epics and the legendary can still be swapped out if you don't have them and don't want to craft them.

The Storm Bringer is in sort of a weird area as I'm already thinking of cutting it from the deck entirely. It can work well as a fallback for when Bloodlust isn't enough to finish someone off, but oftentimes it is and so you draw it off the frog and just kill someone with it, making it essentially worthless. If you want to swap it for something else, a second copy of Devolve or even a Totemic Might can be useful as it gives an extra totem and draws a 1 cost spell.

The two epics, two copies of Haunting Visions is harder to replace as it plays an important part, not only does it provide a bridge to 4, but it also lets you start curving spells from 0 again, drawing more cards and creating more totems. If we were to replace it, we'd need to swap in another 3 cost spell as the bridge to 4 is pretty important to get Bloodlust more consistently. Lava Burst is decent if you want more burn in the deck and Healing Rain is better when there is more aggro, as well as not overloading you which can be fairly important in a lot of scenarios. It's up to you to decide which you'd want to put in as both are there to basically just bridge the gap from 2 to 4.

Unlike any of the decks I have written in the past, this one isn't super streamlined and because of that, you can run tech cards in it. The issue is mainly that the tech card right now is in the same spot that Jade Lightning is in right now, meaning that we would need another spell to bridge from 3 to 4. However, there are plenty of good 4 cost spells, such as Hex, Tidal Surge, and [Hearthstone Card (Avalance) Not Found]. Hex is strong against big priest if you want to further strengthen the matchup against them, while TIdal Surge and Avalanche are strong against aggro decks. Personally I've stuck with Jade Lightning because I am a fan of the face damage, as well as the body it creates, but the options to swap out for other cards are very nice.

Another tech spot is in the form of Devolve and Maelstrom Portal. While I would recommend running both these cards as they are strong and help support the main idea of the deck, that being flood the board and go face, there are other cards that can do just as good in this spot. The main two ones that come to mind are Crackle and Ancestral Knowledge, with Crackle being strong for the extra burst and Ancestral Knowledge being strong against slower decks to become more explosive.

Why Play this Deck?

It should be fairly obvious as to why to play the deck, but if you need me to spell it out, it's because you get to click on totems and send them into the opponents face AND win, two things that were previously unheard of for the most part.

Jokes aside, the deck does surprisingly well against the meta right now, it's fun to pilot, and it has a decent number of tech spots you can replace with other stuff if you find yourself running into a lot of one deck and want to counter them.