My Brief Tryst on the Wild Side

by hsdecktech - 5 months ago

This past week, I stepped out on my main squeeze and took a walk on the Wild side.

I hit Standard Legend within a day of the Ashes of Outland, and I couldn’t tell you if that was because the new system made it faster, because Demon Hunter was that broken before the first round of nerfs, or because I just played a ton on that day. It was probably a combination of all three. Regardless, there I was, on the 8th of April, deck in my hand and usual monthly goal already met, not knowing what to do.

I tried climbing Legend ladder a bit, but the rank multipliers had run out and my OP deck had been nerfed down to “only somewhat better than everything else” levels (with it to be nerfed again shortly thereafter). I tried to do what I usually do after I hit Legend for a month and experiment with off-meta decks, but even with the protection against falling out of Legend, I eventually got tired of losing.

I wanted to play constructed Hearthstone in a place where I could play some new and interesting decks, but also win and make some progression. A man has needs! And there she was: temptation.

I’d experimented a bit with Wild in my youth, and I admit that I’ll get the occasional wandering eye when my relationship with Standard is a bit rocky, but this was the first time in a while that I had allowed myself to be consumed by the spicier format.

At first, I was a bit trepidatious. I had heard about how Wild could be rough, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready for that right away. But I found that Wild took me by the hand and gently showed me the ropes. I had a bit of a multiplier (7 stars, I believe) from when Kael’thas was released ahead of Outland and my relationship with Standard had grown a bit stale, but I started at the bottom of the ladder, just like everyone else did with this month’s reset. The first few ranks were spent just feeling Wild out within the comfort of my star bonus. There is significantly less Wild data out there than there is Standard data, so I only had a general idea of what I was supposed to be doing.

Eventually, through pure serendipity, I ran into a Spell/Token list. The deck was a more consistent, more proactive version of the Kael’thas deck I had experimented with the month before in Wild and earlier in this Standard rotation as well, so it felt familiar and solid. I knew I wanted to go all the way with it. My version of the deck went through several iterations as I got to know it and Wild as a whole better, but eventually I landed on this:

Token Spell Druid [DeckTech Legend] Class Cards 0 Innervate 2 1 Jade Idol 1 1 Lesser Jasper Spellstone 2 1 Mark of the Lotus 1 3 Bogbeam 2 3 Ferocious Howl 2 3 Fungal Fortunes 2 3 Jade Blossom 2 3 Savage Roar 2 4 Branching Paths 2 4 Overgrowth 2 4 Soul of the Forest 2 4 Wispering Woods 2 5 Glowfly Swarm 2 6 Spreading Plague 1 10 Ultimate Infestation 2 Neutral Cards 7 Kael'thas Sunstrider 1 Dust Cost 5840 Spell Cards 29 Minion Cards 1 Deck Archetype Aggro-Combo Format Wild Import Deck in Hearthstone My Brief Tryst on the Wild Side | BlizzPro's Hearthstone

The deck’s main engine and build-around card is Fungal Fortunes. With only one minion in the deck, it is almost always “2 mana, draw 3 cards,” which is just insane in either format. Wild has a couple more ways to take advantage of that engine than Standard does, including Wispering Woods (which acts as your third and fourth copies of Glowfly Swarm), several powerful midgame cards like Ferocious Howl and Branching Paths, and the grand-daddy of all late-game refill cards, Ultimate Infestation. In all, the deck works like how the Standard version wants to work, but just does a much better job at it at several key points. That is, you draw a bunch of cards, build a big board, protect the board with Soul of the Forest, and use your AoE buffs to end the game if your board sticks! For instance, if a full board of 2/2s (either from Glowflies or Soul of the Forest) sticks, then just one Savage Roar makes for 30 total damage between the minions and your face. You use chip damage and multiple buffs to make up for the fact that most opponents know better than to just let you run a full board of 2/2s into them.

Specific Card Choices

My main unique-ish twist on the archetype was the inclusion of the three Jade cards. After playing the deck for a bit, I found that it struggled against some of the slower control decks in the format (Odd Warrior, Raza Priest, Reno Mage, Defile Warlocks) that were content with just sitting back and killing everything I played and letting me die to fatigue (after all, the deck draws like 20 extra cards if you play all your card draw). I tried a few iterations of how to fix this, mostly trying to find some way to combo finish those slower decks out, but they added more dead cards to the deck, and that felt bad in most of the more common matchups. Then I remembered that one card (left unchecked) can single-handedly beat control decks: Jade Idol! Remember when we all hated that card in Standard? The Jade package was great because it was fewer slots for my combo finishers–leaving more room for main-plan gas–and because it synergized better with the rest of the deck because it was all spells and because the ramp from the Blossoms was good for getting to my power turns sooner. It ended up working great, and it just felt right.

Based on a few other lists I’ve seen, I think there are some notable card exclusions to talk about as well. I don’t like Malfurion the Pestilent in the list because he feels really slow for the faster matchups and too weak for the slower, grindy matchups. He probably shines against decks like Secret Mage, where he can help you stabilize and grind them out of their finite amounts of damage, but I think in most matchups he’s not worth a slot. I’ve also seen some people run Barnes as a second copy of Kael’thas. The problem with that, is that this version of the deck isn’t really built around Kael’thas; it’s built around Fungal Fortunes, which Barnes makes worse. Since it’s not built around Kael’thas, it also runs fewer cheap and free cards and fewer payoff cards, so even getting an early Kael’thas out wouldn’t be rewarded as much as you might think. You also draw enough that Barnes will be blank by the time you want to use him more than you might think. And finally, Poison Seeds + Starfall. These are cards that go into full Jade Druid decks, but the combo does not belong in this deck. The combo is for coming back from behind, whereas this deck likes to play from ahead. We don’t like having slow, reactive cards in our hand, and we don’t like having to spend two cards before we get to set up, since our setups (Wispering Woods and Glowflies) generally want us to have fuller hands. A correlated point: we’re not as good at coming back from the clear anyway, since our individual late-game cards are less impactful than are those of the pure Jade Druid decks, so this play doesn’t even help us as much as it does that deck.

Climbing Wild is Different than Climbing Standard

Generally speaking, regardless of what deck you play right now, Wild is in an interesting space. I’ve poked my head into Wild before and found that everyone was playing the one consensus best deck, but that did not appear to be the case this month. I barely even saw Quest Mage until I hit the top of Diamond, and even there it wasn’t the most common deck. It seemed like there were several acceptably powerful decks for people to choose from, and everyone just picked their favorite–or perhaps the one they happened to have the cards for. The result is that there was not much of a clearly defined metagame, which creates a feedback loop further encouraging you to just play what you want (since there’s no specific boogeyman to try to target). Conversely, in Standard, there are usually some clearly identified meta-shaping decks that define the meta from Legend all the way down to what is now Bronze.

One thing that is probably true for any Wild meta, though, is that all the decks are so powerful that games can feel very swingy. That is, the player who gets the nuts first (or more frequently) wins. “Of course they had _____” becomes more common when the blank can be filled by 5 different cards in your opponent’s deck. When games more frequently feel like blowouts, it can make games more tilting if you’re not careful. So remember to take breaks on your climb and remember that we’re all just having a little fun.

Matchups

Specific matchups for this deck are a little hard for me to say, since I faced so many different decks that I didn’t get a solid sample size for any of them, and there aren’t many stat-aggregations to help me out here, but I can give you my impressions from my climb.

First things first, in all matchups you mulligan for Fungal Fortunes and that’s about it; I usually don’t even keep a token-generator or Kael’thas unless I already have Fortunes (and in most matchups I don’t keep Kael’thas at all). Against known aggressive classes (specifically Demon Hunter, for instance), I sometimes keep my Spellstones. Mostly it’s just Fortunes, though, as that is the absolute most important card for our starting hand.

Secret Mage was by far the most common deck I faced on my climb, especially up until around Diamond 3 (at which point more of the Mages ended up being Quest Mages). That matchup is a bit of a tug-of-war, because they can kill you before you get going but, at the same time, if you position yourself right, you can kill them in one turn. I had the most success when I played more as the control deck in the matchup: carefully and methodically testing secrets (if you can, always check for Flame Ward before summoning tokens, and check for Counterspell before playing your big, impactful spells), using my tokens and buffs to clear their board, and gaining a bunch of armor (usually, my Branching Paths gain 12 in this matchup). Eventually, they lose the board and can’t get it back again, so you can connect a few times with some dudes while they play Aluneth to try to find the burn to burn you out. You then gain as much armor as you can while continuing to control the board, and they either scoop or die to fatigue. Getting a minion-generating spell down as early as possible in this matchup is actually more important than you might think, because it gives you guys to make trades with or, even better, it scare them into spending their resources into clearing your board–just make sure not to run it out into a Counterspell. It’s stressful, but it feels slightly favored.

If they’re Quest Mage, then it’s just a race. They don’t tend to naturally run secrets, except for sometimes an Ice Block, so you can play with a bit more freedom. Keep the pressure up so they don’t have as much time to freely activate their quest and/or draw into their giants. You can pre-buff tokens with Mark of the Lotus or Soul of the Forest to help protect against Flamewaker clears. Try to keep a Spellstone or Bogbeam to clear their Sorcerer’s Apprentice and/or Flamewaker, in the event that they play them and don’t fully go off that turn. Ideally, you’ll be killing them before they can complete their quest, but that doesn’t always happen. Quest Mage is the top deck in the format for a reason! Pure Quest Mage feels slightly unfavored and largely dependent on just how broken their hand is, though I faced very few of them so it’s hard to say. Reno Quest Mage can’t go off as quickly, and the tools they add to make up for that aren’t the best at reacting to what we’re doing, so we feel slightly favored in that matchup.

Paladins are mostly Mech Paladins and sometimes Odd Paladins, but either way you play them about the same way you play Secret Mage–as the control deck. You don’t have to worry about secrets, and their burst damage is a bit more limited, but they come on the board much faster, so you have to aggressively get out your token-generators and start fighting them for it. Hopefully, you can use your tokens to trade them down and eventually swap into the place of the aggressor, while they have few cards in hand. Against Mech Paladin, you sometimes don’t even need to ever become the aggressor, since you can actually run them out of stuff and they draw to fatigue even faster than you do! These both feel slightly unfavored, with Odd Paladin being worse but also less common. If you see lots of Odd Paladin, you can switch things up a little and add Swipe or the second Spreading Plague.

Demon Hunter is the new hotness, of course, so I think I saw a lot more of it than was warranted. Before I settled on Druid, I tried out a few Demon Hunter decks (Keleseth, Odd, Reno, and full Combo), and it just didn’t seem to impress, in any of its iterations. Still, there are some people who are having success with it, and others who just want to play the new deck, so Odd Demon Hunter was the second most common deck I faced on my climb–and it’s a cake-walk. With the exception of the one that I faced who teched in Wrathspike Brute, they have no way of dealing with our boards now that Altruis was moved up to 4 mana, so your game plan is just to survive the first few turns, build a couple boards they can’t keep up with, and eventually do your thing with the AoE buffs. The only thing you really have to be aware of in the common lists is to keep a Spellstone for their Battlefiend and be aware of Priestess on 7 (so set up a Soul of the Forest before that turn, or save some removal spells if you can). Overall, highly favored.

Warlock is going through a renaissance of sorts right now, with like 4-5 different viable Wild decks (Discard Zoo, Cubelock, Darkest Hour (still), Evenlock, and people experimenting with Mecha’Thun alternatives). The main thing, though, is knowing which and how many board clears they have. Zoo doesn’t run any, so you play your token generators early to contest the board and then, eventually, kill them. The others have various levels of clears, but all run Defile, so these are matchups where you need to be careful about giving them juicy clears, and where Kael’thas + U.I. really shines. Just don’t over-commit to the board and you’re usually okay. Lower in the ladder, I saw all Zoo decks, but when things got more serious in Diamond, they were mostly the Defile decks. Once they switched to mostly Defile decks, I started keeping Kael’thas in the mulligan. Against Zoo, you keep your early removal instead. Overall, favored in all matchups if you guess correctly on your mulligan; unfavored if you guess wrong and/or they get the nuts.

Priest was tough and annoying, regardless of which version I played against. If they play something like a Loot Hoarder early, then you can assume they are Raza Priest, which gives you valuable information that they only have one of each of their clears. Big Priest is less common these days, but I did see a couple of them on my way up as well. Luckily, I think the more common matchup is the easier one for us. I think the gameplan is to just try to set up board after board, starting early, instead of necessarily waiting for Soul, since that gives them time to find Psychic Scream, and hope that they don’t have the responses. The ideal draw against Priest is something like Fungal Fortunes, Wispers, Wispers, Glowflies, and Savage Roar, so you can set up several rounds of tokens and force them to have all their early clears. This is also another class against which Kael’thas + U.I. turns are more important to keep up the pressure and refill if your initial waves can’t get there. Unfavored either way, but not unwinnable in either case.

Even Shaman is another matchup where I tended to play more of the control route. Even Shaman has very few threats, but, unfortunately, their cards line up pretty well against our’s. Token generators are a bummer when they give your opponent two free Sea Giants, and Wispering Woods in particular is bad naked because they run Maelstrom Portal. At the same time, you can’t pre-buff stuff too much because they run Devolve! If you can get some boards to stick, and you can avoid doing so into all their threats/counters dropping at once, they you should be in a good spot to just control the board from then on out. Even Shaman plays a very “fair” game aside from when we don’t ramp their Giants out for them, so you can take advantage and just kill everything they play until you run them out of stuff. Unfavored if they mulligan correctly; favored if they don’t draw too many of their natural counters.

Mirror matches and other Druids are tough because you have to balance lots of concerns: you want to be first on board, unless they can counter with Spreading Plague. You want to go off with Kael’thas, unless doing so gives them targets for a better Kael’thas turn. If you play your token generators without a Soul of the Forest, then they just Swipe or Starfall it, but if you play it with a Soul, then they can play Poison Seeds to negate the Soul (and any other pre-buffs you do) and then respond with something else. I didn’t see a ton of other Druids, but my plan against them both was mostly just to try to be aggressive. In the mirror, the first person on the board tends to win, and against Jade Druid, you have less of a chance the longer the game goes, so for both matchups I think you just go in and hope they don’t have the answer. Uncommon, but even (mirror) or unfavored (Jades).

Rogue, Warrior, and Hunter were not common appearances on my climb. Rogue does not appear to be in a good spot in Wild right now, so I usually won those games without much trouble. Warrior is a little tricky, because you want opposite cards depending on if they are Aggro Pirates versus one of the control matchups. I’d mulligan for Fortunes and my anti-aggro stuff and expect that, if it’s control, you’ll have time to get to the end of your deck for your Kael’thas and Jade plan. Hunter is rare and all over the place, so just play your own gameplan and respond to whatever they present to you. The main thing you need to worry about is Explosive Trap, but luckily you can test for that with your hero power. Try to keep removing Phase Stalker in mind and generally play that more controlling role you play in the aggressive matchups.

The Morning After

Now that I’ve done the deed, I’m not sure where I’ll land. I might go back into Wild and try to get a high finish, so I have something to brag about, but I expect I’ll play meme decks in both formats for a bit, and then get -reacquainted with serious Standard decks in anticipation of next month’s climb. That might carry me through to the end of the month. But, on the other hand, Battlegrounds is looking pretty nice right now, too. *bites lip*