Naga Mage

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. 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.

Naga Mage is a totally new archetype from the latest expansion. It has a ton of new nagas from the expansion, and is a tempo deck built around the power of Spitelash Siren. The deck uses a lot of cheap nagas and spells to be able to play a lot of mana worth of both in one turn. Even if you don't have Spitelash Siren, all these cheap spells can also fuel Flamewakers. If you like Tempo Mage decks with a lot of spell slinging, want to play with the new naga tribe, or decks with miracle turns, give Naga Mage a try!

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.

Deck Ratings

Strategies

The deck uses tempo to take control of the board and then push damage.

Tempo - Use your cheap spells and minions to try and take control of the board early. You can then use turns with Spitelash Siren to play a lot of minions and spells in one turn. You can also use Flamewaker to deal damage along with all of your cheap spells to both take control of the board and push face.

This deck, despite being a tempo deck, has a lot of card draw and value generation so it can keep generating further waves of pressure if one is cleared.

Mulligans

• Keep a Spitelash Siren.
• Keep a Vicious Slitherspear, or two if you have Spitelash Siren.
• Keep a Gifts of Azshara if you have a Vicious Slitherspear.

Gameplay

The key to playing this deck well is to play Spitelash Siren at the right moment.

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

Spitelash Siren Turns

Don't play Spitelash Siren without having a follow-up naga to play on the same turn unless you are sure it won't be removed or have a second one in hand.

You can save a Vicious Slitherspear in hand as a 1 mana naga to activate Spitelash.

You can also create a Nagaling from School Teacher turn 4 to be able to do a Spitelash turn 5.

Those are the only 2 sources of 1 mana nagas, but going off with a 2 mana naga may be ok too.

After you play Spitelash Siren, keep playing nagas and spells, alternating between them. You can play a lot of cards this way, and it doesn't always have to be 2 costs as a 1 cost spell or naga will refresh 2 mana for a net gain of 1 mana, meaning you can play 3 cost spells or nagas in this turn as well. A 0 cost spell from a Primordial Glyph means you gain a net of 2 mana allowing you to play 4 costs.

This is the key power spike of the deck, make sure you balance discovering and drawing cards so that you keep having nagas and spells to play and be aware that the board may be filled up so try to get your more high quality nagas out first.

Other Tips

Multicaster is a key source of draw, you have Fire Frost and Arcane spells to fuel him.

Flamewaker can be played during a Spitelash turn, before, or after and combines with cheap spells to generate damage. If you play him before but have a Spitelash Siren in hand, be careful about leaving enough spells for your Spitelash turn.

Commander Sivara can get 3 more spells, but try to make the spells she gets be the spells that have Twinspell rather than spells without it. If you need more spells you can use Zola the Gorgon on her.

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 for why each card was included in the deck.

This deck's card choices are pretty self explanatory, it's the nagas of which there aren't that many to choose from and low cost spells that preferably generate more spells for your Spitelash Siren turns. The only real flex cards are Flamewakers but those are quite good with all the low cost spells in the deck to help push tempo. If you want you can put in a Queen Azshara instead.

Nagas

The nagas.

Cheap Spells

These fuel Spitelash Siren and Flamewaker.

Flamewakers

Flamewakers help the gameplan of tempo using cheap spells that Mage nagas all help with. Twinspells, spell discovers, card draw, and Commander Sivara mean you almost always have spells to activate Flamewakers.

Card Draw

Card draw.

Naga Mage is a new archetype that brings back feelings of the Tempo Mages of past expansions. 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? Share them via our deckbuilder and let us know in the comments below!

Looking for more decks? Look no further than the Wildest of Days tag to see more in this series.