Cute Paladin

Wild Hearthstone has thousands of cards, and a wide variety of possible decks. This incredible deck diversity is sometimes lost when only looking at the few decks common in the highest ranks. Wednesday, the Wildest of Days is a series aiming to highlight a different off meta deck each week with an in depth guide into its strategy and gameplay. The decks are selected for having interesting synergies and using rarely seen cards.

The new expansion card Dun Baldar Bridge is incredibly powerful for wide board strategies. One deck that significantly benefited from this is Cute Paladin. Cute Paladin uses 0 mana minions to be able to dump them and flood the board quickly after a Dun Baldar Bridge play. The deck also uses cards like Hobgoblin and the paladin specific Steward of Darkshire and Carnival Barker which make those minions even more of a threat. In addition, paladin has an amazing card to reload your hand after dumping all these 0 mana minions in this way: Divine Favor. Finally, since Divine Favor is a Holy spell, Knight of Anointment can tutor it out so you have access to it more consistently. Overall, this deck has a lot of nice synergies around this board-flooding strategy that combine to create a fresh and fun way to play aggro in Paladin. If you want to win games with buffed cute minions like Murloc Tinyfin and Snowflipper Penguin, give this deck a try!

Dun Baldar Bridge has also turned out to be a great addition to an older deck in the series, Tax Paladin. You can see the updated decklist here: Tax Paladin

Now, let's get into a guide on playing the deck. It's going to go through major overarching strategies to keep in mind, how to mulligan, gameplay tips on key synergies, and card choices.

Strategies

You will draw cards in the first few turns, then go all in with either a Dun Baldar Bridge turn, a Hobgoblin or other support card turn, or a combination of those. If your initial board is removed, you can refill a few times and try again.

Board Flood - You can board flood with a combination of Dun Baldar Bridge, Hobgoblin, Steward of Darkshire, and Carnival Barker. You can first play Dun Baldar Bridge then one of the other cards the turn after to combine, or two if on turn 6. You can then dump your 0 cost minions as well as 1 cost minions which also have 1/1 stats and will get the buffs.

Refill - Knight of Anointment will draw Divine Favor for you. After one of your board floods makes your hand near empty, use it to refill.

Cute Paladin's general strategy is alternating between flooding the board and refilling hand to do it again. This works well against most decks, but hyper aggressive decks that can win before your first board flood turn are its main weakness.

I played this deck in Wild Ranked between Diamond 5 and 1 to test it. After 50 games, here are the results:

Although 50 games is not a very large sample size to draw meaningful conclusions, you can see that it did very well against hunters and well against warriors, while Warlocks and Shamans were very unfavored matchups. Overall, it had a winrate of 50%, and I later played about 20 more games without the deck tracker and maintained a win rate of about 50%. Therefore, this deck would be about tier 3, meaning it's very meta dependent and not recommended for climbing unless you have a very specific meta. If you like this deck's gameplay, I would recommend either playing it in Casual or Ranked below Diamond, or playing when you see many Hunters and few Warlocks and Shamans.

Mulligans

• Keep both copies of Crystology.
• Keep one copy each of Knight of Anointment, Hobgoblin, Dun Baldar Bridge, and Drek'Thar.
• Keep Salhet's Pride but only if you think you are against a slower deck - it is way too slow against most aggro.

Gameplay

The key to playing this deck well is knowing when to go all in. If you go in too early, you may run out of steam, but if you wait too late an aggro deck may defeat you before you can get your better board down.

Below are gameplay tips regarding many of the synergies in this deck and how to use them effectively.

One thing you should look out for is turn 4 Dun Baldar Bridge into turn 5 either Carnival Barker, Hobgoblin, or Steward of Darkshire into 0 cost minions and Rebuke. Rebuke is the key card that wins you games against control making your big board hard to remove.

Usually, you want to play Dun Baldar Bridge on one turn and then play a buffer along with 0 cost minions the following turn. However, if you are being pressured by hyper aggro, you may want to dump minions along with a buffer on turn 3 or right after playing Dun Baldar Bridge. This is especially the case if you have Animated Broomstick and can prevent a lot of face damage by doing so.

In general, use Rebuke to protect a large board the turn you dump it or to make a spell based deck like Quest Hunter skip a turn.

If you don't have Rebuke in hand, you may want to dump your hand to make a threatening board anyway and use Divine Favor to try and draw into it.

If your hand is full of 0 cost minions but you have no buffers, you may want to dump the minions and play Divine Favor.

Drek'Thar, in addition to being good tempo (especially after Dun Baldar Bridge), can pull out any one of your 3 main minion buffers. Therefore, if you don't have a minion buffer in hand, you may want to play Drek'Thar for the chance to pull out one or even two of them and then dump your 0 cost minions which will now get buffed. Drek'Thar can also pull out Salhet's Pride which will then draw more 1/1s for you.

Play Crystology and pop Salhet's Pride deathrattle before playing Drek'Thar if possible. This will increase the chance he pulls 3 cost minions instead of 1/1s.

The 1/1 minions in the deck work with all 3 buffer minions, but Salhet's Pride only works with Carnival Barker and Steward of Darkshire.

Be aware that while Carnival Baker and Steward of Darkshire trigger on summoned minions including those from Drek'Thar and your hero power, Hobgoblin only triggers on minions played from hand. Also, keep in mind that the effects of these minions will stack. Even though technically after one of these cards triggers the affected minion won't be at 1 attack or hp anymore, if you have 2 or more of these cards on the board, even along with a Dun Baldar Bridge being active, they will still all trigger.

Card Choices

This section is going to go through the main packages of cards in the deck. Each package has cards that help the deck with a specific goal. When playing the deck, it's useful to know what purposes each card serves and what other cards in the deck have synergy with it or help achieve the same purpose. This section might also be useful if you're interested in the reasoning fr why each card was included in the deck.

Cute Minion Package

These 0 cost minions have 1/1 stats which get buffed by all 3 minion buffers in your deck, and can be played for free and so dumped very quickly.

Buff Package

These cards buff minions and make your cute 0 mana minions into major threats.

Powerful Cards

These cards are very powerful and are in the deck despite not fitting into any other package. Animated Broomstick is a one of that allows you to trade your minions into an opposing board the turn you make your board. Rebuke is game winning against control and combo decks as it allows you to protect your board from removals. Righteous Protector is a 1/1 and so works with all your buffers and has Divine Shield and Taunt. It can also be used outside of your all in turns to stall. Drek'Thar is tempo and deck thinning and can highroll getting 3 drops from your deck.

Card Draw

Divine Favors are your most important source of card draw and Knight of Anointment will tutor them out, while Crystology and Salhet's Pride are also important as they will tutor out 1/1 minions that work with your buffers.

If you enjoy board flooding aggro decks and want to play with the new Dun Baldar Bridge, this deck may be fun for you. If you have a question or comment, or are wondering about a card substitution, post below.

What are your favorite wild decks? Which off meta decks have you been playing? Let us know in the comments below!