by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

With Hearthstone on the iPad releasing, we’re starting to see a lot of new players entering the game. While we provide several deck lists from a competitive angle, we tend to look at them from a perspective that players will have access to all of the cards to build their decks. This isn’t always the case as Hearthstone is a Free to Play game where you can spend money to get more packs or not spend a single dime and grind your way to the cards that you need. Going the free to play route will take you longer to acquire those cards, so how can you be competitive if you don’t have everything?

Well, lucky for you, Hearthstone is not Pay to Win (as opposed to what people say) and there are ways you can make competitive decks on the cheap – or in this case, free. All it takes is the right combination and some skill in understanding how the game works and lots of practice to learn a deck.

For those players who are looking for a competitive angle without spending any money in the game, we bring you the budget deck of the week. The rules of our budget decks are simple, they cannot contain any legendary cards and will have very few rares and epics. This means that if you have leveled up all your classes to level 10 in Hearthstone you should have access to most, if not all, of these cards.

In the current meta game, Warlock Zoo and Hunter are the primary decks you will see in ranked play. They are efficient and fast decks and honestly don’t take as much skill as a more control heavy deck does. They’re also relatively cheap to build as well.

Warlock Zoo is all about putting out small creatures, life tapping, and getting more creatures to put out. You make efficient trades on the board and eventually just overwhelm your opponent with the vast amount of tiny creatures you put out starting at turn 1.

This particular deck is TrumpSC’s version of Warlock Zoo which is a free to play deck that he was able to take all the way to legendary in 184 games. This particular zoo deck plays a little differently as it’s a little more focused on board control than just going to the face. Because of this, you’re not going to see some finishers like you see in some zoo decks such as Power Overwhelming, Arcane Golem, or Leeroy Jenkins. Keep in mind though, that even though this deck is about controlling the board, it’s a very aggressive deck. If you fall behind or lose tempo, you will more than likely lose the match.

Warlock Zoo Free to Play

Class: Warlock

Cards sorted by Low Cost

Neutral (21)

• Argent Squire x2
• Elven Archer
• Shieldbearer
• Young Priestess x2
• Dire Wolf Alpha x2
• Knife Juggler x2
• Blood Knight x2
• Harvest Golem x2
• Scarlet Crusader x2
• Shattered Sun Cleric x2
• Defender of Argus x2
• Argent Commander

Warlock (9)

• Soulfire x2
• Mortal Coil
• Flame Imp x2
• Voidwalker x2
• Doomguard x2