Hearthstone: Control Paladin in Rastakhan's Rumble
I was inspired to try out Control Paladin after reading this great Reddit post (?!) by 星辰之沙(sand of star). They're a long-time Control Paladin diehard. Akin to Zetalot as Priest, ApxVoid as Mage, or Fibonacci as Control Warrior; Sand of Star is a one-Hero player and we can trust that they have "explored the space" of Paladin options. A decklist from before Rastakhan appears here:
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1x Crystology
2x Equality
1x Hydrologist
2x Wild Pyromancer
1x Gluttonous Ooze
2x Stonehill Defender
2x Consecration
1x Meat Wagon
Lx Spiritsinger Umbra
2x Truesilver Champion
2x Carnivorous Cube
Lx Harrison Jones
2x Mechano-Egg
2x Shrink Ray
Lx Zilliax
1x Mossy Horror
1x Nerubian Unraveler
1x Spikeridged Steed
Lx Sunkeeper Tarim
Lx Kangor's Endless Army
1x Lay On Hands
Lx Uther of the Ebon Blade
Yikes! Like most Control decks, it's heavy, with a lot of high cost cards; and expensive, packing six Legendaries and seven Epics.This is tuned for high Legend level play, and doesn't work down in the soup with folks like me at Rank 15. But the ideas of the deck are sound regardless and we can make some tweaks to get it right for lower ranks, as well as refresh the concept for Rastakhan's Rumble.
You can see all the 1x, even with Commons, and this definitely tips the hand that this build is for late-game play. You want the right card, but you don't need it right away. Most of the early game cards are focused on surviving a rush. Equality, Wild Pyromancer, Hydrologist to get a cheap Secret to feed the Pyro, and Stonehill Defender are all about not dying by turn 4. Assuming you make it to turn 5, you are looking for Consecration, Mossy Horror, Sunkeeper Tarim, or Shrink Ray to asymetrically reset the game, stabilize and grind to a win against aggressive decks. In my experience, they concede if you are 15+ life on Turn 8 or higher. If they don't, start playing around the Leeroy Jenkins they have in hand. All these cards have reasons, and the post linked above explains them well. But for where I am, I can dump a lot of this and still have a lot of success and fun making big robots and dancing with the devil while watching my life total.
You need to keep the board management stuff. You need to keep the Mechano-Eggs and/or Mechanical Whelp, and you want to make sure you can dress them with either Zilliax or some other decent Magnetic Mech. You want Carnivorous Cubes as well to guarantee they die, and Kangor's Endless Army to get them back in cool form. But the Nerubian Unraveler can go—it's there to beat Druids (hard to cast a 12-mana Ultimate Infestation when your hand is low) and Mecha'Thun Priests (they depend on a 10-mana turn that needs Twilight's Call to cost 3, not 5). Spiritsinger Umbra is overkill and underwhelming unless you get the magical Umbra-into-Meat-Wagon-into-Egg-into-8/8. Your weapon removal doesn't need to be Harrison Jones and Gluttonous Ooze. And so on. You can port these themes to budget options and still have a good time.
What changes does Rastakhan bring? Well, the hero-healing aspect of Paladin has been dialed up as a theme. Between Zilliax, Lay On Hands, and Truesilver Champions, you'll get 10 life restored, and that makes this an option:
Zandalari Templar Rare 4/4 Minion for {4}. Battlecry: If you've restored 10 health this game, gain +4/+4 and Taunt.
I like 8/8 Taunts, and I like it when they cost 4.
Also, Paladin, for whatever reason, was deemed worthy of Ice Block. It isn't a Secret, but you know when to cast this in today's OTK-heavy meta:
Time Out! Common Spell. You are Immune until your next turn.
Even beats the (bad) Temporus deck that's been bandied about!
Paladin also gets an excellent early-game card that's worth it even if you only get an extra 2 life from a Truesilver hit:
Crystalsmith Kangor Legendary 1/2 Minion for {2}. Divine Shield. Lifesteal. Your healing effects are doubled.
Small Legendary minions are tricky to get right. You want them good enough to play, like original Patches the Pirate, but not that good; and you want them weak enough to pass over sometimes, like Bloodmage Thalnos, but not so weak they never see play, like Patches now. This gets the mix right, I think. The effect gets better with decks that want fewer small cards. It's a nice effect, but you can do without it. Swapping this in for a Hydrologist is easy enough. With the bubble and Lifesteal, it represents at least 4 life, and potentially a lot more if it gets dressed by Steed, appears after you have Uther's blade, &c. Could mess up your Meat Wagon math, though, so your mileage may very.
HEARTHSTONE has been tough the last couple of months. I was pretty burnt out on the metagame and I wasn't the only one. But I'm heartened to see a little light at the end of the tunnel. At first glance, it looks like there are decks that survive a weenie rush and still have tools to kill OTKs, without being one of those kinds of decks. Let's see how it plays out.
Paladin is in this odd spot because its hero power makes it one of the best aggro classes in the game, as we can all see from the omnipresence of Odd Paladin and, prior to CtA's nerf, Even Paladin. You can't introduce awesome control elements to the aggro class because then they have the best of both worlds. It's the same problem they've had with introducing any other kind of archetype to Priest. You can see this problem with the healing angle they've tried to reinforce with Paladin. Zandalari Templar sounds like a cool card but, in practice, it really isn't. In order to get value from it, you have to wait until you've done something extraordinarily passive: heal yourself of 10 damage. Truesilver is only going to get you four of that, per sword, so you have to do something else or arrange your deck in such a way that healing is its focus (Djinn, Flash of Light, etc.) Until then, Zandalari is either a dead card in your hand or a vanilla 4/4 for 4 mana, which is awful. What that normally means is that you won't be playing your 4-mana 8/8 until turns 8, 9, or 10, where they're far less impactful, despite being cheap. Yes, on turn 10, you can do the Equality-Consec-Zandalari move and clear your opponent while dropping an 8/8. That's great. But it's also turn 10, where the likelihood that your opponent has something to deal with your single minion is quite high. If they'd made it even a 4/5 for 4 (i.e. Yeti stats), so that it wasn't simply an awful card sitting in your hand until you've taken multiple steps that don't help you win the game (e.g. the story of healing since the game's introduction), it might've been more worthwhile. Personally, I'd have argued for baseline Taunt that gets +4/+4 if you heal 10. That way, it would at least be a passable card to play in the early/mid game.
I still think that their design approach is too oriented toward "throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks." This was the approach that led to Odd/Even decks being introduced as a "cool thing" that then dominated the meta for months until the nerfs and are still pretty strong (Odd Paladin, as noted; it's dominating the legend ranks again.) I know that they're taking this approach to avoid having too many clearly mapped out decks for people to play, which means every deck is the same on ladder and people get bored. However, they're still bored in many cases because they're presented with these scattershot cards with no obvious application (Crystalsmith Kangor...), try new decks that don't work, and then go back to decks that do. And we end up back where we were eight months ago with Odd/Even decks steamrolling everything. Can't please all of the people all of the time and so on. /rant
Anyway, nice work. I am very off the game (obvsly) but I appreciate your insights.
I hear the complaints, the early game for Control Paladin is still Wild Pyro/Equality/Consecration. I just don't know how much this bothers me. Almost every Hero leverages Wild Pyro effects (Warrior/Mage just roll their own) in an Aggro metagame--you'd be crazy not to. Priest is far more reliant on Wild Pyro tricks than Auchenai + Circle over the last year at least. Auchenai is simply too slow, and competes with Duskrider at {4}. If anything, I'd say the anti-aggro metagame of HEARTHSTONE is more dominated by Stonehill Defender/Tar Creeper at {3}. Should we complain about the ubiquity of Lightning Storm?
The wrinkle this build adds is that where Pyro-Equality used to clear the board, now it can flip the board if you have Eggs scattered about. I've been using this in the Tavern Brawl and have cleared the opponents' boards and made three 8/8's with mana left over more than once. It's just in there.
The 4/4 on 4 isn't that bad. I see it like the Crackling Razormaw on 2 without a Beast. You'd rather have not, but sometimes you need to make a body. It puts Druid's 3/6's into Consecration range, for example. The issue with a full-throated commitment to Healadin is that you can end up with nothing to actually do except gain more life. I like the healing as a flank, and not main theme.
jeb wrote: The 4/4 on 4 isn't that bad. I see it like the Crackling Razormaw on 2 without a Beast. You'd rather have not, but sometimes you need to make a body.
Except that a 3/2 on 2 is still a good play: it can deal with 1/1s or opposing 3/2s, can provide pressure, is 5 stats for 2 mana, etc. The most Arena of Arena minions, Ogre Magi, gives you +1 Spell Power for being a 4/4 on 4. Cards that actually get played in constructed (or genuinely good Arena decks) have better stats or at least do something useful: draw you a card; give you another smaller body; drain life from your opponent; silence things; or have Taunt all on their own and a fatter ass so that they can't just get removed by... a Truesilver Champion.
Razormaw depends on a relatively simple condition to achieve its value (Have a beast. Hi, Springpaw!) Zandalari requires you to expend a considerable amount of resources to satisfy its condition; most of which are resources that don't enable you to win the game (healing) unless you're a mill deck or are so expensive that you'll never be able to play them before the cheaper cost of Zandalari becomes irrelevant. There's a reason that the majority of Paladin control decks in recent years DON'T play Lay on Hands, because it's too expensive for what it does and wastes your whole turn doing nothing that affects the board state (typically; unless you have something that can be benefited by 8 healing.) I'm fine with just playing a body to have a body, but most class minions are supposed to be better than the average joe you can pluck from the neutral ranks. I'm betting that, in the majority of games, you'll have rather had an Ogre Magi than a Zandalari, if only because the former does something (Consec for 3!), whereas the latter often won't.
I have one Zandalari, and across 6 games it's been 4/4 twice and 8/8 twice. I wouldn't call it bad yet, but still trying it out.
Well, I built it assuming I'd see Aggro and Control, not a lot of mid-range stuff, and essentially no Silence. Why don't people run Silence? Anyway. Here's my build (I don't have Tarim):Jackwraith wrote: OK. Where did you slot it into the Egg list? For that matter, given Paladin's historic glut at the 4, what "essential" card did you remove to fit it in?
1x Crystology
2x Equality
2x Hydrologist
2x Wild Pyromancer
1x Aldor Peacekeeper
2x Stonehill Defender
1x Time Out!
2x Consecrate
1x Meat Wagon
Lx Spiritsinger Umbra
2x Truesilver Champion
1x Zandalari Templar
2x Carnivorous Cube
2x Mechano-Egg
1x Shrink Ray
Lx Zilliax
1x Mossy Horror
1x Nerubian Unraveler
Lx Kangor's Endless Army
1x Lay On Hands
Lx The Lich King
Lx Uther of the Ebon Blade
So, it's "replacing" Tarim would be the most charitable thing to say.
Shrink Ray has been good too. With Eggs it's like a strictly better Equality. I
I would play Tarim if I had it. The synergy with ... everything ... is awesome. 3/3 Eggs? YES PLZ PLus sometimes it's really in my interest to have my Cubes die and I can't kill them fast enough at 4/6.
I would play Kangor too if I had it. That card is solid and likely better than a Hydrologist. Kangor + Lay On Hands late game? That would be an okay turn.