Admit it, you had at least one of amazing deck ideas: Taunt Mage, Spell Damage Mage, Enrage Mage, Inner Fire Priest, Discard Warlock, Heal Paladin, Overload Shaman, Charge Hunter. Chances are, typing “taunt” into the search box and clicking every card that comes up did not work so well, resulting in three to six consecutive lost matches at which point you were far too frustrated to keep playing.

Well good news is, a lot of these deck archetypes have viable versions. Bad news, they look nothing like what you had in mind, because odds are you were going about making a deck the wrong way! But creating decks with crazy and fun archetypes is a good deal of why Hearthstone is so fun. Just so you do not miss out on that aspect of the game, I will lay down the basics of deck building, while also following my own advice and making a Ramp Druid deck out of entirely basic cards.

The win condition is by far the most important aspect of a deck. In a way, there is only one way to win a match: get your opponent’s health to zero. But decks achieve this in a myriad of ways. Some are pretty straightforward, like the notorious Face Hunter, now a thing of the past, which did nothing the entire game but attack the enemy hero. Control Warrior aims to control the board and use its resources more efficiently than the opponent, and deals the killing blow with big finishers. Some decks win in a roundabout way, like Fatigue Druid which hopes to make the enemy draw every single card in their deck, and kill them with fatigue damage. Yet some other win conditions are like the pieces of a puzzle, like the Freeze Mage, which relies on Archmage Antonidas and spells to trigger it to produce a lot of damage.

When you define what your win condition will be, this gives you a pretty good idea to build your deck around. If your win condition is a specific card, go ahead and put it in your deck. If it is a more general strategy, identify the core 4-5 cards that define that strategy (or make it possible) and put them in!

My example deck Ramp Druid aims to use the druid cards that give you mana to put bigger minions on board before your opponent does and keep the upper hand. The core cards here are Innervate and Wild Growth, each of which I will put two in my deck. I will also need big threats so that I actually can play something threatening with the extra mana, which is why I’ll also take two each of Boulderfist Ogre and Ironbark Protector.

Of course, to get to your win condition, you will need a game plan. How will you begin the game? What do you do mid-game? How do you clear your enemy’s minions? You should be able to act and react every turn. Then again, some decks might sacrifice a lot of early game strength in favor of a strong late game – and that is okay. You can get away with not playing tons of minions early on if your deck is full of strong late game cards and you have the means to survive up until that point. Freeze Mage, for example, clears the board a lot using removal spells or area of effect spells that do damage to several targets, then plays its win condition. On the opposite end, Zoolock plays a lot of minions all the time to constantly put the pressure on the opponent, but the minions prove too weak if the game goes on for a while, so the deck aims to keep the game short.

Cards that help your game plan should keep you in the game, making sure your opponent does not get ahead and you are almost always in a position to play your win condition. As such, these cards have to be well distributed in mana cost so that you have something to play most of the time. It also helps if they are strong cards in their own rights. Bonus points if they synergise with your win condition or help it in some other way.

The Ramp Druid has some big minions it might not be able to play early – it needs to keep the board as clear as possible so that the bigger threats it puts out are not dead the next turn. So we will need Swipe (two of them) to keep the board clear, Sen’jin Shielmasta (again, two) to trade with other minions, River Crocolisk (two) so that we have something to play early on. Ironfur Grizzly (two) keeps us from being dealt damage and trades with enemy minions, while Wolfrider can be used to get rid of a minion that is bugging you instantly. Chillwind Yeti (two) has solid stats, so will always be a good play, Stormpike Commando can be decent if I ever need extra damage to take back the board, and Claw is helpful if I need to react to a minion with two health. I add all of these cards to my deck.

To carry out a game plan and meet their win condition, decks need lots of utility, like survivability, card draw, combo enablers, spell damage, what have you. What sort of utility you need depends entirely on your game plan. A heal is useless if you intend to finish the game by turn 5 or 6. A spell damage serves no purpose if you have no damage dealing spells (duh.)

But, for example, if your win condition comes into play late at game (a good heuristic: if you need your deck to survive past turn 7 or so, you need survivability) you should have some cards that let you stay in the game – these can take the form of taunts you can get behind, heals that undo the damage you have been dealt, or minions that keep the board in check to make sure your opponent cannot deal that much damage to you.

If your deck plays a lot of minions and spells (say, if you expect to play two-three cards each turn) you will run of cards pretty fast, so you will need lots of card draw. The same applies if your deck relies on a combo that requires several cards to pull off. To ensure you have your combo when the time is right, you will need to draw a lot of cards.

Utility cards cover your bases and make up for the deck’s weaknesses. They might seem out of place and unthematic, or their benefits might not be obvious, but they are the thin threads that keep your deck together – love them.

My deck relies on me playing some big minions with the help of Innervate, so I should be able to draw the minions in the first place. I will take one Novice Engineer, one Gnomish Inventor and one Starfire to that end. I also expect the games to go on for a bit, so I will take one Healing Touch, since two would be too much for a card that does not do much else than heal me.

Finally, you may need some tech choices. These cards help you counter popular strategies. They might not always be necessary, and if your deck has them, you will want to keep changing this as a new meta evolves. But if you often face opponents with murlocs, maybe you can use one more board clear. If there are a lot of aggressive decks that deal damage around, you might use another heal. If the enemies always seem to have weapons, you may want to include a card that destroys enemy weapons.

At the time of me building this deck, there was no tech choice available among the basic cards to counter the prevalent strategies of prolonging the game and then playing a big minion with a huge effect. Picking a tech card would hinder my deck anyway, so I skip this step.

After all that is done, look for places to refine your deck. You might have ended up with less or more than thirty cards, so try to look for things to cut off or add. Remember your deck does not exist in a vacuum, it exists in a meta and maybe you should try to change your game plan accordingly so that you can respond to the meta. This will be an ongoing process where, after a few games, you will notice that second Consecration never really gets played, or the cool Magma Rager is so effortlessly dealt with there is no point having it in the deck in the first place. Don’t be afraid to experiment!

The deck I made is four cards short of a full list. I think I can use a card to play at 1 mana, so I get two Voodoo Doctors, which I can also play later on to heal up myself or a minion. I add a Mark of the Wild because I expect to always have a target available on board for it, and one Reckless Rocketeer to put out some extra damage just in case I need it. Since this deck is made out of basic cards, there are sure to be stronger cards in the Classic set or other expansions to replace them. As I get more and more cards, I would replace a lot of the basics with these, keeping to the deck’s win condition of putting down big minions early.

So that is the basics of deckbuilding for you. Go out and figure out how make that Enrage Mage (do let me know if you ever get to make it viable!) and most importantly, have fun!

PS: Here’s the Basic Druid deck I ended up with, you are welcome to give it a try!