The most in depth and extensive Duels guide ever, with practical tips, guidelines, example decklists and jokes. Aimed at Heroic Duels, but useful for anyone looking to get more out of their Duels game play.
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You generally always want to find yourself a Wildfire since its mana efficient and you're generally the deck on the defensive. Many opponents will put minions down faster than you and start swinging at your face to kill you before you draw your stall and health/armor gain. Other cards that you want in the opener could be a Amplified Snowflurry with its ability to freeze out a minion for free while progressing your Mordresh Fire Eye activation and it puts a body down to defend you. If you already have Wildfire, you want to consider Reckless Apprentice if you're going up against a broad board class - especially Harvest Time! Druid has a tendency to have a board full of 2 health minions on the turn when you can drop Reckless Apprentice, and if you dont deal with it, he tends to kill you next turn. However Mozaki does have the safety net of Frost Shards being able to somewhat bail you out of bad mulligans with small and annoying minions the opponent feels like they have to deal with.
All that being said, this is one of the hardest decks to pilot since you have to identify the games where you're able to be the aggressor - for instance it's often prudent to be on the offensive if you have just a semblance of a good start in the first couple of games. Doing 20 damage is very easily achieveable for many decks, and the cards that are generally used to stall can now be used to lock your opponent out of dealing with your board while you swing haymakers at their face. Another thing making this deck hard to pilot is you have to use your resources smart to live till you can turn the tides of battle. This is especially true now because you will on average need one more Mordresh Fire Eye to go off before your opponent is dead, than we did with Battle Totem.
In general we are looking for the small divine shieldy bois and girls. We are talking Righteous Protector, Shielded Minibot, Goody Two-Shields and Annoy-o-Tron. These cards are almost always good because they are such a pain to deal with for your opponent. However they don't contest the board very well, except for Goody Two-Shields because of their low attacks. So that needs to be kept in mind. Paladin is not as underpowered as the stats suggest, he is just extremely tech card and mulligan based so if I were you I would pay the most attention to this part of the paladin guide, as this is where the winrate really comes from.
Against Mozaki you need things that stops the Ice Shards from hitting you. You can't even keep Nerub'ar Weblord which is traditionally the card that you keep against battlecry decks to slow them down. Because you only have one gold, get the Greatsword out. Don't be frozen when you get it out. If you can manage those two conditions you can often pull enough a head that if they dont have a freeze for one turn, you win.
Now I used to get real creative with paladin. My high winrate with it came from the fact that I knew how to mulligan in the early games and how to tech for the later stages of the run. Last patch that meant dealing with Deathrattle Hunter. So I would put Deathwarden in my starting deck and found out it literally just makes hunters concede instantly. But it also just makes Harvest Time! Druids leave you alone when their eggs dont pop and their living mana dont give mana back. And it beat the Questline armor druid designed to deal with priest cause they concede in embarrasment when Twig of the World Tree don't give you 10 mana crystals. But those lists are gone for now, and so is Deathwarden - But they will be back, and so will he.
Moving on. You meet the no longer so dreaded pirate decks - you keep that Nerub'ar Weblord, it will slow them down so much some of them just concede to save time. This should also work for Fireheart/Drek'Shaman and Willow since all their minions are well stated battlecry minions. But I haven't gotten around to test paladin much in the current meta of things so I can't say with certainty.
Now for the big one. Vanndar has one of his worst match ups with paladin if they hit the right unit in the mulligan. Stoneskin Basilisk is sort of hard to deal with for Vanndar. Yes there is Goliath, Sneed's Masterpiece and in some cases Abominable Lieutenant if certain conditions are met. But that's it. Anything else he has got gets the two for one treatment by our dishonorable little Argent Squire pretender. And it comes right back with From Golden Light or Redemption. I swear to you. This works. I have a ... Friend ... Who lost to this with big Vanndar. He even sent me a screenshot of it.
You're a board guy. Everything that applies to other board guys applies here. If you aren't on board, you're losing. You want the minions, you want the board buffs. Draw is also good cause you just wanna find that Royal Greatsword or that Selfless Sidekick. You do not want to put any sort of weapons into this deck at any point since it would pollute your weapon tutoring effects.
Mana cheating is good here. If you happen to have Bag of Coins you can either play a strong unit early that can be ressurected with your hero power, or sometimes you can just lay down the law with a turn one or two Royal Greatsword. Bag of Stuffing is generally a good treasure here since a lot comes down to can you play your sword on 5/6 or can you not play your sword on 5/6. Wax Rager performs well in this class. But he kinda does in all classes. I wonder why he is ultra rare ... Hmmm. Anyways. Board treasure are good, mainly ones that ruins your opponents board. We are talking Wand of Disintegration, Staff of Scales and Book of the Dead here. All are great.
This is where Paladin has the chance to just guarantee a double digits win run. No passive pool 1, nor 2 passive performs close to as good as Grommash's Armguards in paladin. You will draw your Royal Greatsword at the start of the game, because you have listened to the guide and not put any other weapons in your paladin list, and dodged them in buckets. You will reduce the cost of said Royal Greatsword by 1 and therefor guarantee it gets played. Every. Damn. Game.
I am making a new paragraph for the other passive pool 1 treasure because Armguards are the Vanndar of passives for Paladin. So if we don't get the nutty nuts, what do we want? Well. Boring stuff. We want our old friend Mysterious Tome. It helps us stay alive till we find game swinging turns. We want good old Crystal Gem for the same reason. We want Small Backpacks just to get us closer to drawing Royal Greatsword and minions that keeps us alive till we can play it. after that the immediate minion value passives takes the spotligt. Rocket Backpacks lets us act with initative which can be amazing with divine shield units. Righteous Reserves lets us effectively hold the board and value trade and plays really well with certain pool 2 passives we are looking for.
We are looking for the general tempo stuff, because it works real damn well in paladin. That would be Party Replacement and Legendary Loot. We are looking for ultra rares like Captured Flag and Stargazing and we have been trying to tutor Avenging Armaments with our deck. The more Holy warrior buckets you have picked up, the more you want Avenging Armaments, if you also have Righteous Reserves, Avenging Armaments will take you places. So generally the thing we will be looking for is Avenging Armaments since the algorithm should favor us for that with our deck composition. Other minion centric passives are great also, I both recommend Hagatha's Embrace and Meek Mastery here. If none of those are available, we are going for some mana cheat value with Emerald Goggles or Scepter of Summoning.
As a rule of thumb divine shield minions good, weapons bad. But with all heuristics they aren't always true, just the case most of the time. So take that with a grain of salt. Mischief Makers can be a really good bucket for Paladin. Especially in a Meek Mastery run.
Be cognizant of keeping your resspool clear for the first minion. It can be quite valuable to make sure its not polluted with for instance a 1/1 Knight of Anointment that you picked up in a blessings bucket. I use external software that separates what died, from what got poofed into something else and keeps track of my general ress pool. It comes in clutch to know what's in there every now and then. Goody Two-Shields has pretty much soloed games for me just by being coined on two and being my resspool minion. You would pay 2 mana for a 4/1 divine shield unit with spellburst get Divine shield back, and you don't expend cards for it. Any. Day. Of. The. Week. She does very little for stopping a zerg though, so grain of salt. Again.
Have a little thought about what's actually in your less than 2 pool before you cast Call to Arms, from one paladin player to hopefully another. Things can go real bad if you use your 4 mana turn on summoning a shielded minibot or nothing.
Something that has saved me more times than I can count is this sequence. I am 10 ish health. I have Lokholar the Ice Lord and Hold the Bridge in my hand and 7 mana to play with. Luckily I coined my greatsword out earlier. So I attack. I get Cariel Roame out of the deck, she attacks and reduce Hold the Bridge to 2 mana, I play Lokholar the Ice Lord I buff him. He attacks twice. I am back to full health. Everyone claps. Now this sequence is in and off itself not that important. What is important here is that holding onto Hold the Bridge and using it with Lokholar the Ice Lord who is discounted or got called out of your deck by a Greatsword attack, can save your life. Now I love tempo a lot more than the next guy. A tempo Hold the bridge is generally a bad idea. Thats it. Maybe this tip is more for me than for you tbh.
Also probably my favorite card in the deck is Far Watch Post, it used to deal with Priest, but it does have a soft taunt on it against tempo decks because it disrupts their curve a lot. Its second to Nerub'ar Weblord in slowing down fast decks. But you know. Taunts with Divine shields are great at that also.
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