• Home
  • Theorycrafting Saviors of Uldum

Theorycrafting Saviors of Uldum

by - 5 years ago

Once every four months I get the gift of a giant pile of cards to play with, unrestricted by things like tier lists and winrates. Usually I hit on some of my stuff and miss on some of it. Per usual, the point is more to explore the interesting stuff coming out of the new set than it is to 100% predict the most powerful archetypes that the meta will see, but I’m giving you some good stuff here, and I expect it all (unless I state otherwise) to be able to compete in the early meta.

Per usual, if you just want our Card Ratings or even just the overall Set Spoiler, we have those, too. But, assuming you’re here for this, let’s goooooo!


I’m going to start things off with the deck that I’m most hyped about, featuring one of my favorite cards from the set, Expired Merchant:

[wcp_deck id=”28350″]

The deck works like this: Expired Merchant discards Soulwarden and then immediately dies to your Plague, Mortal Coil, or EVIL Genius. That gets you two Soulwardens in your hand and each Soulwarden gets you back a Soulwarden. Boom, infinite value. Then, you can use your other discard activators to make sure Soulwarden has whatever targets it needs for your particular matchup, be it removal, Giants, or tech cards, and you’re in a pretty good spot. Your discard effects are targeted, so you can more easily craft your hand around getting them in the discard pool. For instance, Shriek/Diretroll can make it pretty easy to throw a Plague into that pool, and now you have infinite cheap board wipes to keep up with Giants decks.

Aside from the engine, you’re just running solid midrange cards that have some synergy with the rest of the deck. You use the board wipes and stall for aggro decks, you use the infinite value for late-game decks, and you win the midgame against midrange decks. You can even throw in some tech cards as the meta solidifies, to react to particular decks as they crop up. If you’re a fan of Handlock or Evenlock of yore, this seems like the type of deck that will be right up your alley.


If you’re looking for a more aggressive take on Warlock, I also think that the combo could work well as just a backup plan for something more Zoo-like:

[wcp_deck id=”28351″]

The deck has aggressive starts like what we’re used to seeing from Zoo, but it also has the Expired Merchant + Soulwarden combo to make sure it never runs out of gas against control decks. This plan is much more consistent and predictable than was the Rafaam plan of last meta, and I think it fits better with the deck’s overall plan as well, since you still get to play powerful Zoo cards throughout the game, and this just gives you more of them. I also think Merchant might just be good enough to play in almost any Warlock, so the “cost” here of playing the combo is really only the Soulwardens–not much of a cost at all. Whereas the Handlock version will probably take longer to refine, this version will still win games just on the back of Flame Imp on 1, so it’s a safe version to play with on day 1 of the ladder if you’re looking for something interesting that will still climb.


That’s enough Warlock, let’s move on over to my first love and everyone’s first class: Mage.

Mage came into Saviors of Uldum as, arguably, the best class in the format. I personally just used it to fall into Legend last night. You would think that would mean they wouldn’t give it any more tools for that type of deck. You’d think wrong. There’s an arugment to be made about whether the Quest fits in Cyclone Mage, Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron is going to decide games whether you put it in your deck or not, and Tortollan Pilgrim looks to be an amazing fit for Freeze Mage. I’m playing with the Pilgrim here, as I think it’s the most interesting of the options. If you limit your spells, you can guarantee that you get offered a board-wide freeze effect off of it. Or, you can branch out a tiny bit and give yourself a bit of flexibility. Either way, you can cut most or all of your targeting spells and thereby make sure that the downside of random targets is literally no downside at all. Here’s my take on it.

[wcp_deck id=”28352″]

Here, I have kept Conjurer’s Calling, Arcane Intellect, and Luna’s Pocket Galaxy, because I think they’re all too good not to play (Intellect might get cut for any of the card draw minions, though), so there’s a chance that you won’t hit an AoE Freeze whenever you want, but you still have a pretty good shot at it. You also can get free Luna’s if you didn’t draw it yet, free card draw, or a lot of value, if the only thing on the board is good Conjurer’s targets. Locking your opponent out for 6 turns in a row while you beat them up with Giants seems pretty good. Your AoE freeze topping out at 8 mana also means that Doomsayer is a natural fit.

Where you take it from there, is a bit up to you, I think. I added the Dragon package so that Firetree Witchdoctor could give me some of the spells I’m missing back in my life, and because Dragonmaw Scorcher seems like it will get much better once Reborn is introduced into the meta. Ysera and Lynchen are to help get that final push against Warriors, who are certainly capable of running us out of threats–in fact, depending on how their lists end up looking, we might need to add even one or two more threats back in. Still, it all comes together pretty nicely, and so I think this is a good starting point for one of my favorite types of decks.


Warrior, the other pillar of the current format, also got some good tools. One tool, in particular, makes Warrior not really need to care much about having its board frozen. That card is Bloodsworn Mercenary, a mini-Faceless Manipulator that happens to get activated very easily by Inner Rage. Combining those two with Leeroy, and maybe a Rampage (on that turn) or an Alexstrasza (on the turn before) gives Warrior a ton of burst potential to really up its aggression and, like I said, avoid being frozen out entirely.

Now, you can put the Bloodsworn Mercenary package into just about any kind of Warrior, though Warrior is already pretty well refined, so the slots get really tight. If you want to be the fun police in the early meta, you play Warrior with Bombs in it (as those also turn off peoples’ “No Duplicates” decks). If you want to let people do their cool stuff and still kill them anyway, you play Control Warrior. And if you want to be the one playing the cool stuff, you can go all the way in with some sort of Enrage Tempo Warrior build. I’ve chosen to show you the more midrange option, because it is the newest and freshest of the bunch, and because I’ve always enjoyed Tempo Warrior:

[wcp_deck id=”28353″]

In most matchups, you won’t need to go full combo, and probably shouldn’t be saving your cards for it. Instead, you just make strong tempo plays with synergistic cards and try to close the game out one swing at a time. Remember that Warpath is a huge damage swing if you stuck a Frothing the turn before. I like Restless Mummy over Militia Commander in this deck in particular for the same reason: it buffs Frothing 4 times, instead of 2. And, if all else fails, you have Dr. Boom and Azalina to bail you out.

I don’t know if it’ll be as good as the other builds, but at least you won’t be ruining anyone’s day with Bomb Warrior. If we could all be cool for a few days and let people at least try the no duplicates stuff, that would make me happy.


Speaking of no duplicates, the Explorer that I’m most interested in trying to make work is none other than Sir Finley! The classy murloc is back, messing with hero powers, changing the way we can play the game.

As with most traditional no-duplicates deck, your gameplan is to try to get to your payoff card(s) as soon as possible. To do that, we use lots of card draw and tutoring to tear through the deck. Unfortunately (maybe), it does seem that the team was pretty cognizant of the various interactions that might help this deck a bit more consistent and efficient, and they seem to have intentionally avoided some of them (like giving us another good murloc, or too many 1-attack or 1-health guys, or even making Zephrys and Finley cost different amounts).

Anyway, we were able to come up with something:

[wcp_deck id=”28488″]

One major consideration for me was whether I wanted to run Piper and Call to Adventure, if I wanted to run 1- and 2-mana minions, or both. There are lots of good minions in those slots–including minions that synergize well with Crystology and Salhet’s Pride, so that was tougher than I expected. I decided to go with a hybrid, where the tutor effects will sometimes miss my No Duplicates cards, but I still get to run Crystology and Salhet’s, as that seemed like the strongest and most consistent (in terms of playing on curve) overall route. With zero 1-drops and seven 2-drops, that means that you have roughly a 28.5% chance of hitting Finley or Zephrys with your Piper/Call if you haven’t already drawn or tutored out any of the other two drops.

Finally, you’ll notice that I threw one copy of the Shirvallah+Holy Wrath combo into the deck, to help you close games out. With all the cycling and tutoring in the deck, you should be able to do one shot of 25 with not too much more difficulty than does the regular build of it and your opponent will never see it coming. The one tutor effect I did not get in, because it didn’t seem worth it, was Tastyfin. As we get a few more decent murlocs in the pool, or if something like Bluegill ends up being just good enough, that might change. I’m not sure if this deck is better than either of the two existing Paladin decks, or any of the other Paladin decks that were pushed in this expansion, but it seems like a lot of fun, so I’m hoping I open enough stuff to give it a whirl.


That’s two good guys and two bad guys, so I guess it’s EVIL’s turn for a deck. And boy do I have an evil one: MECHA’THUN ROGUE!

[wcp_deck id=”28365″]

Fair warning, this one feels like one of the less competitive decks in this article, but who doesn’t like a good Mecha’Thun deck?! And, even as one of the weaker decks on my list, I still think there’s a chance that this will actually work.

Let me tell you where my head’s at, and you can decide if you want to try it out: Anka, the Buried seems like an extremely powerful card just on its own, but the effect is particularly strong with expensive Deathrattle minions that you only want for their Deathrattles, like Mecha’Thun. With the metallic god’s stats reduced to 1/1, he’s easy for you to pick off on your own with a Backstab, Shiv, or Walk the Plank. And with its cost also reduced to 1, you have plenty of mana to play with to make it happen. You can use Myra’s Unstable Element and Anka on turn 10 if you’re sure you’ll have Mecha’Thun in hand, or you can play Myra the turn before and play Anka, Mecha’thun, Walk the Plank (on Anka), and Backstab on Mecha’Thun if those are the last cards. Voodoo Doll is a possible Sub for Walk the Plank, too.

The question, then, is how deep down the rabbit hole we want to go. We can go full combo with just a bunch of card draw and stall, we can go full deathrattle with a bunch of strong deathrattle effects and synergy cards, or we could even go minimal combo with basically just a normal Tempo Rogue with one copy of Anka and one copy of Mecha’Thun in it.

In this version, I’m doing something mid-way through “full deathrattle rogue” and “full combo.” My idea is that “full deathrattle rogue” probably doesn’t run Mecha’Thun, as it wins through 7/7s. However, by dipping a bit deeper into Deathrattle Rogue, I can do stuff like play a reduced-cost Deranged Doctor and then play Necrium Vial to heal for 16. I wasn’t too impressed when I first saw Shaket Sapper, but then I realized it let me run Raiding Party to search out my Necrium Blades, and that the Sapper itself is a great follow-up to the Blade. There’s enough value there and tempo there that you can close out without the combo versus some opponents, and you can Mecha’Thun out the fools who try to take you long.


At this point, it feels like we might as well keep it going and give you at least one deck per class, so let’s keep it going. This time, it’s Brann’s turn! But not Dinotamer Brann because, while I actually do think that deck is buildable, I’m not convinced there’s enough reason to play it over regular Midrange Hunter or, if you plan to go deep into the weeds with combo-Brann, then I’m not sure why you’d play that over Jepetto Hunter.

Instead, I present to you… another deck that might not be as good as regular Midrange Hunter!

[wcp_deck id=”28491″]

Once again, the deck revolves around a strong synergy/combo that caught my eye: Scarlet Webweaver + Tundra Rhino. Reducing Tundra Rhino to 0 is crazy dangerous, and it’s the type of thing that got Warsong Commander hit so hard with the nerf bat that it became a meme. You use Master’s Call and Subject 9 to tear through your deck, while dealing incremental chip damage and generating tons of card advantage. Then, you finish your opponent off with either Hyena Alpha (with a secret out, of course) + Webweaver + Rhino (reduced to 0) for 14-point burst, or you set up a turn where you can play a free Tundra Rhino and a Zul’jin on the same turn, so that you can charge in with all your Unleash the Beasts and Animal Companions.


Last time I did one of these theorycrafting articles, I was drawn by the allure of all Shaman’s value-based battlecry effects and branded myself as a Shaman main for the expansion. Shaman ended up doing okay, but not quite as well as we expected or hyped it up to be, and I did not play as a Shaman main… SO HERE WE ARE, READY TO MAKE THAT EXACT SAME MISTAKE AGAIN!

Shaman continues to get great tools in this expansion, including multiple strong AoE effects, buffs to Murloc Shaman, and, perhaps, the strongest quest of the set. It was already difficult to cut Shaman decks down to 30 cards, and now it’s nigh impossible. The upside is that you have near-limitless room to tweak stuff depending on how the meta shapes up. I think Murlocs are less exciting to theorycraft, since they probably just plug in a few new cards (like Murmy, which was just built for them) and be on their way. I think Control Shaman has a lot of potential, but is hard to theorycraft because it suffers from the same issue all Control theorycrafts do–it’s hard to figure out what you want to put into your control deck if you don’t know what threats you need to be able to respond to. So I went with Quest/Token Shaman.

[wcp_deck id=”28366″]

As with Warrior, one problem with the Quest is that it has anti-synergy with the Hero Card. In this case, however, Hagatha also has anti-synergy with the swarm strategy and the quest takes over her duties of providing late-game value, so that’s why she didn’t make the cut in my list. The quest is nice because non-murloc Shamans very frequently skipped turn 1 before, and the one play you did have (Sludge Slurper) is usually just as good, or better, on 2. You use Thunderhead to help clean up aggro boards and then hope you can get late enough to do a Quest Activation + Giggling Inventor or something. I think swarm is still the primary way to go, in terms of finishers, but the Quest reward also opens up the burn route. Activate Quest, Kobold Lackey, Kobold Lackey, Weaponized Wasp, Weaponized Wasp is 10 mana for 20 damage from hand. So if you gameplan and play carefully, you could even burn out slow, greedy control decks. We might even add Lifedrinkers back in, once we figure out what we want to cut, because Fireballs with lifesteal and 3/3 bodies seems good to me!


Druid was actually the toughest deck for me to come up with for this piece, despite the fact that it got the crowd favorite card BEEEES!!! and, arguably, the most interesting of the Explorers. Still, Druid only had one viable archetype going into this expansion, Token Druid, and it seems like the archetype will likely get a lot of splash hate from the various AoE effects designed to target Reborn. I’m just not so sure how well Druid will compete in the upcoming meta, even though I think a lot of the things it has are close. If it gets a few more Choose One cards, and/or good cards that cost 5 or more next set, then I think it will become a real powerhouse again.

For now, I present you with this version of Token Druid that sacrifices a bit of your early plays for big mid-game swing turns and, my favorite, infinite value!

[wcp_deck id=”28492″]

First, in case you didn’t see it elsewhere already, the “infinite value” is that once you get low enough in your deck that you have no duplicates, you can play Elise with Floop in your hand, which will give you two of everything in your hand (including Floop). However, Floop will be copying Elise, so you can play the other stuff out of your hand and then repeat the process. Do that until one of your boards sticks and you win.

Next, the big swing turns that I added come from the “spell costing 5 or more” package, centered around Garden Gnome and Anubisath Defender. We already ran Forest’s Aid, so I through a few more in to make it work. Nourish gives us yet more fuel if we run out early. Force of Nature… is good enough until we get something better.

Finally, I added Knife Juggler in because it seemed really good with BEEEES!!! and Wispering Woods (which should almost always be for a lot of guys in this version) and, y’know, basically the entire deck.

I have no idea if this is better than the current Token Druid. But at least the “infinite value” part means that you won’t just lose to the pile of additional AoE being added to the meta.


And last but not least (heh), comes Priest! It’s no secret that I’m not the biggest Priest fan. And, as a result, I don’t really build Priest decks all that often. But I’m going to give it the old college try. Once again, it’s a deck based on some cool interaction that I’m interested in. This combo: High Priest Amet, Stonetusk Boar, Divine Spirit, and Inner-Fire/Topsy Turvy. With Turvy and Power Word Shield, you can hit for 36 damage from hand on turn 10. If you have a second Boar (not in my list, but likely in some), then you can replace the PW: Shield in that combo for a Boar, add another Topsy Turvy in, and attack for 56! I like that! Just, you know, not playing against it.

[wcp_deck id=”28368″]

Being the Priest not-expert that I am, I’m not sure if we want to do this with more of a Nomi Priest shell, or more of a traditional Inner Fire shell. The Nomi shell seems more explosive, but the question that raises is why not just play Nomi then. I think the reasons why not are: 1) because Nomi requires you to be in fatigue, whereas this does not, and 2) this will usually kill your opponent the turn you get it, whereas Nomi still needs to attack through 6 AoE board Freezes or clears. The Inner Fire shell, of course, just works, because this is, afterall, an Inner Fire deck. It seems like that deck had a few slot devoted to bad cards that you just put on the board in hopes that they survive, so this seems like an upgrade that might just be good enough to work. It’s much easier to combo people down when you don’t have to rely on them letting your big-booty board stick. It also means that you can build this deck with as little as literally just one new card. A budget option! Too bad that one card is a Legendary.


That’s all for today! If you want even more theorycrafting, make sure to check out the pros working the set on the official Theorycraft streams tomorrow and/or at the Inn-vitational event on Monday–both starting at 9am Pacific time (details).


Nicholas Weiss

Is a lawyer by day and a cardslinger by night. He's decent at both. He's been playing Hearthstone since open beta and writing about it for a few years now.


Comments are closed.