Hearthpwn

Diggy Diggy

Version 1 - ready for One Night in Karazhan
Difficulty: medium

The key cards of this deck are shown above, so you can not substitute them. This deck is all about digging for your high value minions with Barnes and Y'Shaarj, Rage Unbound or gravediggin' them with Resurrect and Onyx Bishop.

AOE choices for this deck are 2x Excavated Evil and 2x Holy Nova over Auchenai Soulpriest + Circle of Healing and Wild Pyromancer + Power Word: Shield. The reason is quite simple, resurrecting those minions have a very low value and with Holy Nova you'd rather like to heal your minions than to damage them. Moreover, each of this AOE effects require only 1 card, so you save the card slot of 2x Northshire Cleric which other Priest decks need to get the card draw going and find the second piece of the AOE.

You mulligan for your early game removals and keep an Injured Blademaster or Barnes. Try to always carry your The Coin to turn 5 since you have five possible turn 6 plays (2x Entomb, Sylvanas Windrunner, Cairne Bloodhoof and Emperor Thaurissan). The Coin also can be woth 3 health when a Priest of the Feast is in play, this might be important when you are playing against very agressive decks.

On turn 4 you should be able to play Barnes, Priest of the Feast or Resurrect for your Injured Blademaster (which you might have played on turn 3 and was killed by your opponent, otherwise you played him and trade him to resurrect him). Do not waste a Power Word: Shield on an Injured Blademaster, even if you resurrected him to a full 4/7. You always want those Power Word: Shields applied on your Priest of the Feast to also get the 3 heal from his effect.

Including Barnes you have 14 minions in the deck, which means you can get 13 possible outcomes from Barnes. The worst that could happen is an Onyx Bishop. You can reduce this chance by mulligan a bit more greedy and keep one Onyx Bishop in your starting hand (for example if you have Shadow Word: Pain, Barnes and Onyx Bishop you can keep them against a midrange/control matchup).

All other outcomes from Barnes can be insane, for example if you drew your Ysera very early and Barnes brings out Deathwing, Dragonlord then you get her very early on the board and have very high chances to resurrect Ysera or Deathwing, Dragonlord very early again. Not fair, but possible ;-)

Keep in mind what died this game (not sure if a deck tracker can do this for you) so you can value the odds of a good resurrect play better. Sometimes it's worth playing more minions to increase the chances of a better outcome.

Do not hesitate to use Excavated Evil when you have a Priest of the Feast in play. Usually he has 8 health (see above) so you can use your hero power to heal him instead yourself, you get 3 health anyway from the Priest of the Feast.

Please note: the deck is very RNG heavy, both relying on Barnes and your resurrect outcomes. If you loose a lot to this RNG then don't blame yourself or the deck, RNG is just part of the game and this deck - especially Barnes - try to manupulate RNG in your favor to cheat out high cost minions.

After playing a lot of this deck I saw decks trying to counter it with transmutation effects. For example against a Shaman you expect them to have at least 1 Hex in their decks but I also met Mages with double Polymorph (even Polymorph: Boar) and control decks running a Tinkmaster Overspark. The winrate decreased from 68% to 57%, so the meta learned how to play against this deck. But it is still viable to climb the ladder, moreover even faster than with any other Priest deck because sometimes your opponent just concedes after they see the outcome of Barnes.

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http://www.twitch.tv/leolph