Hey guys. POWER here again with another seemingly off-the-wall, but pretty friggin effective deck. Check out my Malygos variant on freeze mage sometime.

A lot of the priest decks out there are the same old crap with a few different cards -- play crap, buff it, hope it sticks, make trades, steal stuff from people, so on and so forth. F*** that. It's such a low skill ceiling and aside from cards letting you steal crap off the board, it's really unreactive. It's not quite face hunter cancer, but it's still cancer. But I like the idea of priests in general - the nature of the class cards giving hard removal and maximum control is my style.

So I started looking for ways to make the lesser known side of priest decks viable - Shadowform. This is what I came up with, and it performs WONDERFUL. It's expensive, but if you've got the cards, give it a shot.

A word of caution - when you play the deck, you WILL fall behind on the board 90% of the time. It's the nature of the deck. Your job is to play your taunts, removals, shadowmadness, so on and so forth - lightbomb is ONLY TO BE USED WHEN THERE IS LITERALLY NO OTHER OPTION. The card is way too good at what it does and if it was more widely used people would be crying for a nerf all over the place. That said, you only have two of them, so make them count. Stall the board as much as possible, let your opponent fill it up, and then WIPE IT OUT with lightbomb. They'll be down to 1 or two cards and you'll have a full hand of reactionary cards/healing to basically just take over the game with. It may go another 5-6 turns before the opponent realizes its just pointless and concedes, but most of the time people pick up on it pretty quickly and realize that after they've lost that much board presence there is literally no coming back. It's just an amazing deck all around - it does well against control decks like handlock and warrior because of how much hard removal there is, it does well against aggro because the taunts stall it out (plus shadowform gets rid of stupid little shit minions like jugglers for two mana).

I put in a shrinkmeister both to help with early board presence against aggro, and also to give you an additional removal option if an Ysera is played and voljin isn't available. Ideally, you save voljin for near the end of the game, when they're drawing their last few cards, on that last big drop like a Rag or Nef - voljin with shadowform is a guaranteed 7 mana hard removal into a very solid body. Using him on ysera the turn after she's dropped is backbreaking to an opponent - the one card they think is safe from priests is immediately dealt with and now you've got a 6-12 on the board. lol.

Always mulligan for doomsayer, SWP, and a taunt - hopefully you draw into a lightbomb or a nova as the game goes on, but with all the aggro BS out there, you need to have lots of stall. Once you start getting into the deck, you're really going to be tempted to play shadowform on curve -- sometimes that's fine, but you really need to pay attention to whats happening on the board before you do. For example, if you're opponent coined out a warper on turn 1 and is currently in the process of tearing you a new asshole, it might not be a good idea to basically take a dead turn on turn 3 to take away a source of damage mitigation. Now, if you're up against a control warrior, which is such an easy matchup with this deck, shadowform is fine on turn 3 -- they're not playing anything worth caring about until turn 5 anyway. Just be discerning.

VERY IMPORTANT - You can hero power TWICE on the same turn with shadowform from turn 7 onward. For example, you heal yourself for 2, play shadowform, and then mind spike something. Additionally, you can do the same thing when you play your second shadowform, giving yourself 5 damage for 5 mana - can dumpster a pesky mechanical yeti or a couple of minions left over from a lightbomb or holy nova on an earlier turn.

Once you get in shadowform 2, the board will most likely firmly be in your control, and your hero power is just going to completely suffocate the opponent before they realized what the hell is happeneing. "B-but I was winning!! H-he was only reacting to what I played and taking damage 5 turns ago!! H-how does he have a full hand and a belcher and tazdingo out when I have one card in my hand??" It's beautiful. You can literally see people momentarily stupefied after a big lightbomb or shadow madness. Especially aggro shitters. It is so nice watching them think they can win because you're being extremely passive early, then you slowly turn the board against them turn by turn, and now your hero power kills anything they play as soon as it hits the board.

UNTIL THAT POINT, STALL STALL STALL. Use Velen on a late turn for a fireball if you've got no other options.

THE ONE WEAKNESS OF THIS DECK IS THAT IT HAS ZERO (0) DRAW. There is NO WAY to draw cards beyond Cabal'ing an acolyte or something. That said, it does not solely come down to drawing luckily. You will always have options unless you mulligan absolute crap, which in that case it doesn't matter what deck you're playing. Just think through every turn and you will find yourself winning in the long haul.

I rarely lose with this deck. If I do, it's because I couldn't draw well against aggro (which doesn't happen often) or because I can't draw a GD lightbomb when I really, really need one (patron warrior, handlock, muster+qm paladin, dr boom, etc). Those are the only two scenarios. Spend enough time learning the deck and you will literally NEVER lose against any kind of slower tempo/control deck.

Lastly, the odd benefit of Shadowform as opposed to Auchenai (besides the obvious increased damage) is you can still use cards that heal for their intended purpose. You can use healbots to heal yourself. You can use Holy Fire to remove and heal yourself. Holy Nova heals you. Basically, after you shadowform, the deck still provides exactly 30 points of healing via those 6 cards. So you're really not giving up much, and the effectiveness of your healing cards is much better than just a straight healing hero power because you can remove with them/pair them with shadowform to help removal/or put a body out that heals you and helps with trades.

Again, you will always have options on each turn with this deck and even though you don't have draw, you'll find the removal so economic that you'll be able to deal with an entire board for 1-2 cards at a time. You'll never be short on cards with this deck. There will be games that you take your opponent to fatigue, and their hand is empty, and you literally still have 4-6 cards to draw and a full hand. That's how efficient it really is.

Give it a try. It may be frustrating while you learn how to use it, but once you get the hang of it, you'll be blown away.

IF YOU ONLY REMEMBER ONE THING FROM THIS WRITE UP, REMEMBER THIS: DO NOT USE VOL'JIN OR LIGHTBOMBS UNLESS YOU HAVE ZERO. OTHER. OPTIONS.

Good luck!