Alterac Menagerie Warrior

The name of the game here is delay, delay, delay. The early turns are entirely about managing any aggressive strategies so that you can start dropping your big threats, eventually overwhelming the opponent with too much value.

Vanndar Stormpike is a fun card that seems right at home in a deck like this. While there are certainly some interesting ideas you miss out on by not including lower-cost minions, I'm all about having fun; dropping big minions several turns early, sometimes two at a time, is fun.

The minions have been carefully selected, and fall into roughly three categories:

• Minions which have Taunt
• Minions which deal with Armor
• Minions which have a minion type

As you can imagine, many of them are chosen because they hit multiple points at once - look at Mo'arg Forgefiend hitting all three! - and each category was selected to maximise using new cards.

Taunt minions were chosen to help stave off damage later in the game, and because I really like Bulk Up as a card and want an excuse to use it more often. Armor-based minions were chosen to help guarantee that Captain Galvangar doesn't whiff, something that I'd honestly be impressed if you managed to pull off. After those two categories were populated, it became very clear that good ol' N'Zoth, God of the Deep was destined to make an appearance, so a few tweaks were made to make sure there weren't too many overlapping minion types.

With the move away from just being a Big Warrior deck towards Menagerie, some cards like Commencement were cut to prevent unfortunate loss of Battlecries. This did free up some more space for defensive tools, so I can't be too sad about it.