Aggro Paladin, Face Hunter, Control Warlock… what do these phrases mean?!

There are a ton of different deck names and strategies in Hearthstone, and it’s easy to get lost in the jargon. This guide will aim to help you with that. It will explain what common deck archetypes are, how to play them, and why they are named what they are named. Whether you are a new Hearthstone player, or a veteran who has a hard time following technical strategy articles bursting with terminology, this guide will help you understand the many decks of the Hearthstone meta.

Deck archetypes are primarily categorized by how aggressive they are. These archetypes loosely define the strategy that each deck attempts to win with. It’s a spectrum that ranges from the most aggressive decks, which attempt to kill your opponent before they kill you, and the most defensive decks, which attempt to disrupt your opponent’s game plan until there is no feasible way for them to win.

Face decks have one plan: hit the opponent’s face (i.e. their life total.) They don’t care about the opponent’s board at all. Their goal is to reduce the opponent’s life to zero as quickly as possible before the opponent can reasonably do anything about it. Face Hunter and Pirate Warrior are two of the most notorious face decks in Hearthstone history. Face decks have a weakness to powerful taunt minions and life recovery making them a poor matchup against dedicated control decks. Even so, the most degenerate of face decks could out speed the best control decks at their high-points in the Hearthstone meta.

Aggro decks are one step slower than face decks. Their goal is to play many strong minions early in the game in order to create a commanding board presence that the opponent cannot overcome. They usually focus on hitting the opponent’s face; however they are more willing to trade with dangerous minions and are more resilient to taunts and life gain. They seek to maintain board dominance in order to secure a win, as opposed to face decks with race the opponent to zero life.

Aggro decks will sometimes include small amounts of card draw or removal while face decks tend to focus on damage and only damage. Aggro decks are far more common than face decks, simply because most classes are not fast enough to make the face strategy work. Both aggro and face decks tend to play low cost cards which puts them in danger of playing with an empty hand in the mid to last game.

Midrange decks are the halfway point between aggro and control decks. As opposed to aggro decks which love to run many efficient low-cost cards, midrange decks like to run cards of nearly every mana cost. Their main goal is to “curve out” and play the highest value card they can on each turn.

Midrange decks play like a control deck against aggro decks and like an aggro deck against control decks. When facing an aggro deck, they want to use their higher value minions control the board, making as many two-for-one trades as possible. Their goal is to eventually run the aggro deck out of gas, putting them into top-deck mode. At that point, the midrange deck has “stabilized”, as they will routinely drop cards of higher value than their aggro opponent.

Against control decks, midrange decks want to continuously drop new threats and aim for the opponent’s face. Their hope is that their constant stream of high value minions and spells will kill the opponent before they can draw enough answers to stabilize.

If you are having difficulty understanding the difference between control and midrange decks, just remember that midrange decks are proactive while control decks are responsive. Midrange decks always want to be playing a new threat while control decks want to be responding to the opponent’s threat. If you are having difficulty understanding the difference between control and aggro decks, just remember that aggro decks tend to focus on killing the opponent while midrange decks focus on building value on the board.

The first three archetypes we covered (face, aggro, and midrange) always want to be playing “ahead.” They always want to be dropping threats that the opponent then has to respond to. These next three archetypes are more comfortable playing from “behind.” Instead of dropping threats of their own, they are comfortable responding to the opponent’s threats until they run out.

Control decks are the most common defensive deck. They usually have few one and two drops, and instead focus on powerful removal and late game threats. Their goal is to kill each and every minion the opponent drops while healing up any damage that they might cause. When the opponent is out of threats, they tend to drop a few absurdly high value cards (usually high mana legendaries) to close out the game.

Control decks struggle to stabilize against face decks, but the slower the opponent gets the more favorable their matchup. Control versus control matchups are considered some of the most skill based matchups in Hearthstone.

Combo decks follow the same control philosophy as control decks, except they tend to “do less.” Instead of dropping threats of their own, they tend to stick to controlling the board while drawing through their deck as quickly as possible. Their goal is to draw into a particular combination of cards that is so powerful, it alone will win the game. Exodia Mage and Raza Priest are two notable combo decks.

Combo decks tend to take even longer to stabilize than control decks do, but since they don’t really interact with the board in any meaningful way, they can be hard to stop. Playing against a combo deck is always a race. Fast decks attempt to kill combo decks before they can play their game winning combo, while slower decks try to draw to a win condition faster than the combo deck can.

Fatigue decks are the slowest decks in Hearthstone. Once again they play from behind like control decks, however fatigue decks play few to no threats of their own. Their only goal is to provide an answer to anything the opponent can play. This means killing every minion, healing every point of damage, playing around every spell, and so on.

Fatigue decks simply look to run the opponent out of cards. They have no win condition other than, well, fatigue. If the opponent has nothing to play and draws through their entire deck, they will start to take fatigue damage. At that point, if the fatigue player has more life and more cards than their opponent, they win by default. Some fatigue decks, like Dead Man’s Warrior, go out of the way to shuffle extra cards into their deck, so it becomes easier to outlast their opponent.

Hybrid Decks

Not every deck falls neatly into one of these archetypes. Many have elements of multiple archetypes. Tempo decks, for example, combine the board controlling nature of a control deck with the face focus of an aggro deck. Evolve decks combine the early board presence of an aggro deck and the game winning card combinations of a combo deck.

In decks like these, it’s important to understand when to shift gears, so to speak. For example, every turn Tempo Mage should be asking if it wants to fire it’s spells at the board, or at the opponent’s face to set up lethal. It’s essentially asking itself when it shifts gears up from control to aggro.

More Complex Decks

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Many Hearthstone decks get even more complex than this. We will take a look at these more complex strategies in part two, “A Glossary of Subvariants.” It will cover some of the most popular decks of Hearthstone history, their gameplans, and their sometimes confusing names., so be sure to check it out.