Budget Legend Evolve Shaman

Hey all, first time poster, long time lurker.

I managed to hit legend for the first time this season using this evolve shaman list and thought I'd share.

EDIT 04/20: I've been encountering far more priest and warlock and less DH lately. As such I have cut both Lightning Bolt and Squallhunter and replaced them with 2x Dread Corsair 1x Mutate 1x Mogu Fleshshaper.

The deck performs particularly well in the current meta but may need refinement once the second round of demon hunter nerfs hit. You have plenty of tools to shut down DH's early game while also excelling against other popular ladder decks.

Against aggro cards like Invocation of Frost, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Breath, and Serpentshrine Portal are great as well as your other invokes. Squallhunter on turn 4 is hard for DH's to deal with.

Boggspine Knuckles is at the core of the deck and can snowball pretty quickly, especially when combined with Desert Hare, Hoard Pillager and Corrupt Elementalist. This weapon is the reason for all the card draw and you should hard mulligan for it in all match-ups except perhaps DH (even then I'd often keep it if I also had early removal).

A perfect mid-game looks like:

Turn 5- Boggspine Knuckles, attack (if you have any minion up)

Turn 6- Corrupt Elementalist or Evasive Wyrm, attack

Turn 7- Hoard Pillager, Desert Hare, attack

It's obviously not great playing Boggspine Knuckles on an empty board but sometimes it's more important just to get it online so you can use it on future turns, especially if you're holding a Hoard Pillager. Also be mindful of your overloads, particularly between turns 2-6.

Against control you can save Lightning Bolt and Serpentshrine Portal to use with Squallhunter as a finisher.

Try to avoid playing Mana Tide Totem and Squallhunter before you attack with Boggspine Knuckles.

Other notes:

I originally had Mutate, Mogu Fleshshaper, and Dread Corsair in the deck when I climbed from Diamond 5 to Diamond 2-3 but then bobbled around there and couldn't compete with demon hunters. I decided I needed more early game so opted for more early removal and a light dragon package to use Lightning Breath, which is still fine to use without the dragon upgrade but very powerful if you meet the condition.

Not sure if Mana Tide Totem is better than Far Sight but the former is better again control and even against aggro its a 3 mana, draw a card, prevent 3 damage as your opponent has to kill it.

I usually don't need the additional invokes from Shield of Galakrond because of the double dip from Corrupt Elementalist.

Include Bandersmosh if you want some fun times. You can get some great battlecries off then evolve it into an expensive minion with your weapon for lols and shenanigans.  

Proof: I couldn't figure out how to upload images from my desktop (1st time poster) but if someone let's me know how I'll upload my hs replay stats. From Diamond 2 to Legend I had 10 wins, 2 losses for an 83% win rate (small sample I know).

Anyway, hope you have some fun with this list and good luck on the ladder. Enjoy!