Holy Wrath Paladin (Sunken City)

Deck Idea

Holy Wrath Paladin revolves around putting high cost cards on the top of our deck (e.g., Shirvallah, Molten Giant, Naga Giant), then playing Holy Wrath on our opponent's hero to (hopefully) deal 25 damage to their face. While not a true OTK deck with the current cards in Hearthstone, it usually isn't too difficult to get our opponent below 25 health before using Holy Wrath. There have been many iterations of this archetype over time--each with their own flavor--so here is my take on the archetype thanks to some new additions from Voyage to the Sunken City.

High-Rolling

My version of the deck looks to tutor High Priest Thekal using Call to Adventure to cheat out Molten Giants and Lokholar in the early game to distract our opponent, get them below 25 health, and sometimes just kill them from high-rolling 2 Molten Giants on turn 3. From there, the goal of the deck is to stall until we can set up our combo turn with Polkelt + Holy Wrath.

For this version of the deck, I dramatically limited the amount of minions in the deck. The main reason for this deck restriction is that I wanted to abuse the newly added Naga Giant in conjunction with Shirvallah and Molten Giant. Because this version of the deck has 5 of its 9 minions costing 20+ mana, we can consistently heal for 20+ mana using Vitality Surge. Although we start the game with good odds of a high-roll off of our Vitality Surge, this deck uses Call to Adventure to tutor our low-cost minions, further increasing the effectiveness of Vitality Surge. Assuming you tutor Thekal and Northshire Farmer out of your deck before playing Vitality Surge, you have 1 bad hit, 1 mediocre hit, and 5 incredible hits for Vitality Surge.

Stalling

Although cards like Time Out! and The Immovable Object are not cards I think are healthy from a gameplay-perspective, they are incredibly useful and important for enabling an archetype like this one. Time Out! is 3 mana to draw a card and prevent your opponent from killing you, which is sometimes all you need to win the game next turn. The Immovable Object has proven its incredible strength already, and will likely be relevant for years to come. Barricade and Protect the Innocent aren't incredible cards, but they do distract our opponent, reduce the cost of Shirvallah/Naga Giant, help remove some aggro boards, and potentially lower our opponent's health total below 25. Finally, the reverted Equality combined with City Tax work wonders to remove almost any board for very low cost.

Flex Cards

There are 4 unique cards (6 card slots) that I think are fairly week in my version of the deck (depicted above). Unfortunately, because I am trying to make a spell-dense version of the archetype, it can be hard to fill these slots with strong cards that aren't minions. For example, cards like Cariel Roame, Crystalsmith Kangor, Seafloor Savior, Sir Finley, Sea Guide, Knight of Anointment, Stonehearth Vindicator, Alliance Bannerman, and Lord Barov are among many of the minions that would work very well for this archetype. However, including these minions dramatically reduces our potential to high-roll both off of Call to Adventure and Vitality Surge, effectively killing the spell-based design of my version of the deck. Whether or not my version or a more minion-heavy version is more competitive is yet to be determined, but I do know my version is fairly effective while being very fun.