Silence of the Souls - 1st Week Tempo Disruption Deck

*UPDATE 8/25/20*

Thanks to the OOC team for the front page feature. I admittedly shelved this deck briefly for my (first ever!) run to Legend — it powered me to Diamond 5, as I faced a continued run of Libram Paladins, but was a huuuuge slog from Diamond 5 to 1, since it had a less than 50% split against Aggro Rogue or Bomb Warrior. (Ironically, I wound up toggling to Libram Paladin purely to make the Legend push, and went something like 19-4. Feels bad. But let’s move on.)

Since then, however, I’ve found that this deck actually excels in the Legend ranks, in part because half the player base seems to be open to experimenting with more off the wall concepts, and because the other half... seems to be running Libram Paladin, or a version of Tempo Rogue reliant on Questing Adventurer, who himself is super susceptible to the 3+ silences included here. So if you’re still feeling oppressed by beefy minions in the meta, this deck still might work for you.

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This deck began as an attempt to deploy the new Demon Hunter mechanics for this expansion, Soul Fragments and hand disruption... but ideally to do so without losing too many games. As the early expansion meta has gravitated towards Libram Paladin and Big Druid shenanigans, with a sprinkling of Combo Mages thrown in, it turns out that dealing fast damage while keeping your opponent off balance is, in fact, an actually viable path for victory.

Back in the Spellbreaker era, silences were solely tech cards. But in this early meta, dropping your opponent's minions down to a more manageable size is often all you need to do to secure the board. The deck currently runs 5 effective silences, between Consume Magic, Magehunter, and Kayn Sunfury. The rest of the deck takes a more "aggro" posture with a heavy emphasis on card draw. (Including Consume Magic, if the Outcast stars align.)

Mulligans

• Against Paladin, Druid, or Warlock, mulligan for one or more of your silences. 
• Against everyone else, mulligan like you're playing a Tempo Demon Hunter from last expansion. Fast, nimble, and as close to on curve as possible.

The Basics

• You have every Soul Fragment generator available to Demon Hunters here, but only two Fragment "burners." That's 24 hypothetical healing over the course of a full game, distributed across 12 Soul Fragments. At most, you will destroy 2 Fragments and lose out on 4 healing overall.
• With that extra sustained healing, you can afford to use your face against pretty much whatever, protecting your minions for aggregate face damage.
• Even if your opponent clears your board, however, you don't really care, because what you're setting up for is a late game Marrowslicer into Soulshard Lapidary for 9 instant face damage. If you get this off twice, you have almost certainly won the game.
• This deck has an almost hysterical amount of card draw. Which is good, for two reasons. First,on only the rarest of occasions -- with a very bad mulligan -- will you wind up with more than 3 cards in hand. Second, drawing excessively makes you more likely to cycle into your Soul Fragments.
  • A word of warning: Soul Fragments have a kind of broken interaction with Skull of Gul'dan's Outcast effect, where the (3) mana discount "hits" the Soul Fragment, skips the next card in line, and then continues discounting as normal. This means that if you draw Card 1 > Fragment > Card 2 > Card 3, you'll wind up with Card 1 and Card 3 at the discounted cost and Card 2 at full cost. Most of the stuff in the deck is cheap, so this barely matters, but it is kind of weird. 
• Approximately half of your wins will be straight up and down successes, with you sitting at 24+ health when the opponent's face explodes. The other half of the time, you will win exactly one turn before you would have lost. (See the note on Glide below.)

Glide?! Star Student Stelina?!

Okay, so hear me out here. I originally designed this deck principally as a way to play with these incredibly irritating cards. While they're certainly not the powerhouses that everyone feared, and I don't see them run in most DH match-ups, they do have their times to shine. Stelina has singlehandedly won games for me by dumping a Galakrond or a Sorcerer's Apprentice back into the opponent's deck. And while Glide primarily serves to punish Control decks, even against similarly paced match ups, by Turn 7 or 8, if someone is holding onto a card, odds are it's because they haven't been able to play it yet. There's a small sense in which Glide "feels bad," because you have no way of knowing what you've just done. But you can usually tell if it's "hit" based on whether or not your opponent's next turn feels atypical to the style they've been playing.

Really, however, the chief use of Glide here is for you. While I would never run two copies of it, at the end of a game, Glide makes a wonderful -- if costly -- imitiation of Secret Passage. Say you're a taunt minion away from dealing lethal, and looking at a board that threatens to deal lethal to you on the next turn, but with none of our wonderful silences in hand. Playing Glide immediately, regardless of whether or not it's in the Outcast position, offers two reprieves. First, you have a chance of pulling Soul Fragments along with the other cards you're drawing, giving you a healing "shield" that perhaps negates your vulnerability. But more importantly, there isn't a single silence or taunt nullifier in the deck that can't be run alongside Glide on Turn 8. You play Glide, get back Kayn Sunfury, and the game is over.