OTK DK (Exodia) Paladin Deck List Guide – Rastakhan’s Rumble – February 2019

Check out alternative versions of this deck on our Exodia Paladin archetype page!

OTK DK Paladin Mulligan Strategy & Guide

VS Fast Decks

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

• Call to Arms – Draw three cards and swing the board. Your most important tool for both card draw and board control.
• Loot Hoarder – Early minion to contest the board and draw a card.
• High Priest Thekal – If you play a version with Thekal, you always want to keep him to enable armor and healing.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

• Truesilver Champion – Keep in matchups where you expect four damage early to be relevant: Rogue and Hunter.
• Wild Pyromancer – Keep against expected tokens: Paladin, Shaman, and Warlock.
• Consecration – Keep against expected one- or two-health minions: Paladin and Shaman.
• Potion of Heroism – Keep with an early-game minion, such as Loot Hoarder or Wild Pyromancer.

VS Slow Decks

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

• Call to Arms – Draw three cards and swing the board. Your most important tool for both card draw and board control.
• Loot Hoarder – Early minion to contest the board and draw a card.
• High Priest Thekal – If you play a version with Thekal, you always want to keep him to enable armor and healing.
• Potion of Heroism – Early card draw.
• Uther of the Ebon Blade – Your main win condition. After playing this, you can start to threaten the Horsemen kill. Even though it’s not a great keep, you can’t afford to have it on the bottom of your deck, that’s why you keep it.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

• Equality – Keep against decks that might drop big minions quite early, such as Even or Cube Warlock.

OTK DK Paladin Play Strategy

VS Aggro Decks

You are usually not looking to beat aggro decks with the one-turn-kill combo. Instead, your goal is simply to survive their assault. At the start of the game, try to draw as many cards as possible to find your key removal combos, such as:

• Wild Pyromancer + Equality – Board clear (except for minions with Divine Shield and minions summoned from Deathrattles).
• Equality + Consecration – Board clear (except for minions with Divine Shield and minions summoned from Deathrattles).
• Wild Pyromancer or Bloodmage Thalnos + Consecration – Three damage to all enemy minions, useful for clearing Greater Emerald Spellstone.
• Equality + Wild Pyromancer + any spell – Board clear where Wild Pyromancer survives, especially useful with a buff card that makes Wild Pyromancer more difficult to remove next turn.

You also have several nice healing combos with Crystalsmith Kangor that doubles your healing:

• Crystalsmith Kangor + Flash of Light – Eight healing.
• Crystalsmith Kangor + Truesilver Champion – Four healing, works very nicely also if you equip Truesilver Champion on turn four and pull Crystalsmith Kangor from your deck with Call to Arms on turn five.
• Crystalsmith Kangor + Shirvallah, the Tiger – 14 healing!
• Crystalsmith Kangor on the board + Uther of the Ebon Blade – Five armor, and 10 healing from the weapon swing.
• Crystalsmith Kangor is also an excellent buff target because of his Lifesteal ability.

Making good use of combos such as the ones mentioned above is the key to defeating aggressive decks.

In aggro matchups, the ideal buff targets are generally Crystalsmith Kangor (Lifesteal), Wild Pyromancer (Sticky removal), and Righteous Protector (Cheap target, enabling Spikeridged Steed for seven mana on an empty board).

You can use your bounce combo pieces – Zola the Gorgon and Ancient Brewmaster – liberally in Aggro matchups. Crystalsmith Kangor is a great target for Zola the Gorgon, and if you make it to the later stages of the game, Shirvallah, the Tiger can be a great card to bounce and copy. You can also refresh the Divine Shield of your Righteous Protector with a quick bounce to the hand and replay. Remember not to bounce any of your buffed minions though, or the buff will be lost.

Time Out! is an interesting card against Aggro. You often want to use it when your board is empty, so that the opponent essentially has to wait a turn without doing much of anything. However, it can also be a great card to use when you have a weapon equipped: swinging with a weapon after casting Time Out! means that you take no damage from the target, which can allow you to remove a minion almost for free.

Be patient with your board clears. Especially Equality is a valuable card that needs to be used carefully. Boards with Divine Shield minions or Deathrattles are the greatest challenge, and you may need to come up with a multi-turn plan on how to clear them, as a simple Equality will not do. Use your health as a resource: sacrifice health when you will still have enough left to not be at risk, if you can get your opponent to commit more resources into a board clear by doing so.

There are Aggro decks, and then there is Hunter. Deathstalker Rexxar means that Hunters simply will not run out of steam, even in the late game. However, once Rexxar is played, there is a momentary loss of tempo for the Hunter and their Hero Power stops applying direct pressure. You can use this opportunity to strike back on the board, and it is sometimes possible to pull off the Horsemen kill on a Hunter too, even if you have already spent some or even all of your bounce cards. Hiding Horsemen behind Taunt minions or buffing them up can help them survive multiple turns, given that Hunters don’t always have ways to deal with them.

VS Control Decks

Against control decks, the OTK combo becomes your main win condition, but do not underestimate your ability to surprise them with Sunkeeper Tarim and buffs: you can also win by reducing your opponent’s health total to zero.

The combo requires you to get all four Horsemen – Deathlord Nazgrim, Darion Mograine, Inquisitor Whitemane, and Thoras Trollbane – on the board at the same time. Therefore, it all begins with Uther of the Ebon Blade, without which you cannot summon any Horsemen.

The most basic version of the combo is to bounce or copy Horsemen into your hand one at a time with Zola the Gorgon and your two Ancient Brewmasters. Just be careful not to bounce any duplicates, all names have to be unique! Once you have three different Horsemen in hand, you can play them on the board and then use your Hero Power – it will never duplicate a Horseman that is already on the board, so you are guaranteed to get the fourth one. Boom, that’s a win.

In actual games, things rarely go quite that smoothly. Most of the time, you will try to get some of your Horsemen to survive a turn by hiding them behind Taunt minions or by buffing them with your buff cards or with Sunkeeper Tarim, so that you do not need to have three in hand. This can put a lot of pressure on the opponent, who will want to clear your Horsemen to deny the combo – and sometimes this opens up a way to defeat them on the board without using the combo at all!

Some versions of the deck use Blackwald Pixie to make the combo easier to pull off. Blackwald Pixie allows you to summon two Horsemen with your Hero Power in a single turn for a total of seven mana. Therefore, if you have one Horseman on the board and one in hand, Pixie can enable the combo for nine mana. Unfortunately, to do the combo fully from hand with the Pixie requires you to have two Horsemen in hand and 11 mana available, so you need to have started with the Coin and held on to that the entire game to pull that one off.

Time Out! has a different role to play in slow matchups. You can use it to buy an extra turn against most control and combo decks – any that are not based on Uther of the Ebon Blade or Mecha'thun (as those don’t really care about your immunity) – and either assemble your own combo during that time or build a game-winning board. You can often use it to put the opponent into zugzwang: force them to either use their damage combo to clear the board or perish, and if they clear the board, they may lack the means to finish you off in the following turns.

As an interesting tidbit, when you swing at a minion with a weapon while you are immune from Time Out!, any Lifesteal effect the minion may have does not activate, as you are taking no damage. This may allow you to push through a Lifesteal minion for lethal.

Another important note is that Lynessa Sunsorrow is obviously played because you run 2x Spikeridged Steed, but those are not the only things she copies. She will also copy Potion of Heroism, drawing you cards AND Flash of Light if you’ve played it on a minion and not on yourself. In the best case scenario, Lynessa can draw four cards – but it might be a double-edged sword, since you need to care about your hand size (you don’t want to burn your combo pieces) and about fatigue if you’re that late into the game.

The role of Equality is interesting in control matchups. Sometimes you use it as a board clear just like in aggro matchups, but often you also try to save it for lethal: Equality + Consecration clears the opponent’s board and leaves yours alive at one health so that they can hit face. If dealing damage looks like a viable win condition, you often try to hold on to Equality and Consecration for that key turn and use other means to push earlier, even if that means dealing less damage: control decks can usually deal with a board full of one-health minions, so you do not want to make your side vulnerable without a plan.

OTK DK Paladin Card Substitutions

Like all Control Paladin decks, OTK DK Paladin includes several Legendary cards that are difficult to replace. The combo pieces are mandatory, and the others improve the survivability of the deck to a large degree.

• Uther of the Ebon Blade and Zola the Gorgon are needed for the combo and cannot be replaced.
• Call to Arms is the main card draw mechanism in the deck and cannot be replaced.
• Crystalsmith Kangor can be replaced with a Vicious Scalehide, although you lose a lot of healing potential that way.
• Lynessa Sunsorrow and High Priest Thekal are extra Legendaries that are not necessary, but I would say that having them does help – especially Lynessa, which is an extra win condition after you’ve played double Spikeridged Steed and Potion of Heroism. Second Truesilver Champion, second Time Out! or Blackwald Pixie. Blessing of Kings is also an okay replacement for Thekal, but not really for Lynessa – she’s the reason you might want to run Kings in the first place (to make her even bigger – if your opponent has no Silence, she could win you the game after Steeds and Kings).
• Sunkeeper Tarim, Shirvallah, the Tiger, and Bloodmage Thalnos all have effects that are difficult to replace. Additional removal in the form of Shrink Ray and perhaps even Primordial Drake or Dragonmaw Scorcher may help replace those. It will make the deck more dependent on the combo, as those cards can be used for both defense and offense, and will result in a weaker deck overall. You might also try using any of the replacements listed next to Lynessa and Thekal.