I went into my Kinguin Pro League match this week against Sjow with the same basic gameplan as previous weeks – play the decks with which I am the most comfortable. In the past week or so, I’ve spent much more time playing Priest on ladder than anything else, and not just because the games take a long time. Priest is my favorite class, and I’d been experimenting with more proactive builds than the typical control priest decks for quite a while.

The idea was that the Priest hero power is at its best in a deck with early minions and buffs for them, since it’s providing the most value when it is allowing you to maintain and slowball a board advantage. Thus began the Legacy of Mech Tyson – my nickname for Shadowboxer. I had mixed success and eventually moved my attention elsewhere, in part because I felt like midseason Priest wins on ladder were wasted since I already had the golden hero for the class.

Then last week I happened across Savjz’s stream where he was playing a Chinese Priest deck that shared a lot of elements with the versions I had been working on and I was intrigued. I decided to try it out, and found that it was much stronger in many of the matchups where traditional Priest decks struggled, while retaining many of the class’s good matchups. I liked that the list cut many of the same sacred cows that I had gotten a lot of flack for going without – cards like Injured Blademaster, Circle of Healing, and Auchenai Soulpriest.

The biggest difference compared to my versions was the inclusion of Cabal Shadow Priest, a card that I had generally forsaken in my proactive Priest decks since I wanted solid bodies to cast on curve. But after playing with the deck, I found that Cabal Shadow Priest helped swing games in ways that few other cards could, and decided to embrace it once more. I’ll write a more comprehensive post about my thoughts on this deck and Priest in the current metagame soon, but I feel pretty strongly that it’s among the best builds available to the class right now.

The one change I made from my ladder version to the one I played in the KPL was swapping out a Shadow Word: Death for a copy of Vol’jin, which incidentally came up huge against Sjow’s Jaraxxus that hit the table thanks to a Voidcaller deathrattle. That’s one big troll!

My other two decks were Hotform’s Bloodlust Shaman deck and the same Face Hunter deck I’ve used every week. The one change I made to Hotform’s deck was to remove a Rockbiter Weapon for a second copy of Piloted Shredder, since I found myself getting flooded with situational spells more often than I liked and wanted another consistently solid body.

My games against Sjow were all pretty interesting. I beat his Shaman in the mirror match, and then lost to his Shaman with my Priest. A lot of people think that Priest has a good matchup against Shaman structurally, but without Auchenai and Circle of Healing, you lack the ability to clear the board of totems as consistently, so I think this version loses a bit of ground. I think I got a little too greedy and took more damage than I should have trying to set up a good Lightbomb and ended up getting bursted out. I then lost a close matchup to his Druid with my Priest, then took down his Warlock with my Hunter, before winning an epic game with MechTyson against his Demonlock deck, including the aforementioned Jaraxxus health swap with Vol’jin.

Anyway, without further ado, here are my lists: