Resurrect Priest Deck List Guide – Uldum Doom – October 2019

Resurrect Priest Deck List Guide – Uldum Doom – October 2019

Our Resurrect Priest deck list guide goes through the ins-and-outs of this popular Priest build for the Saviors of Uldum expansion! This guide will teach you how to mulligan, pilot, and substitute cards for this archetype!

Introduction to Resurrect Priest

Resurrect Priest’s been around the block for quite some time by now, with the foundations of the archetype laid all the way back in Blackrock Mountain with the eponymous Resurrect. It did take a while though for a Priest deck dedicated to minion resurrection to emerge, and it was a very different beast compared to this iteration in the Doom in the Tomb event. There was the infamous Barnes, originally only four mana, enabling many shenanigans to this day by “cheating out” massive minions on early turns. Back then, the archetype was often referred to as “Big Priest”, and it wasn’t until The Boomsday Project until a truly resurrection-based version emerged, one which was capable of instantly killing you off the back of Prophet Velen, Malygos and a healthy dose of Mind Blasts and Holy Smites regardless of your total health, staving off aggression with cards like Spirit Lash and Psychic Scream as they set up their combos.

Nowadays, playing Resurrect Priest is a much more grindy affair, seemingly spawning taunt after taunt after taunt, erecting impenetrable walls until the opponent is completely exhausted, both mentally and in terms of available resources in the game. With cards like Convincing Infiltrator and Khartut Defender to be brought back, especially with N'Zoth, The Corruptor returning to the fold, it is a unique and fairly old-school proposition, strong enough to reach Legend #1 with, as evidenced by Furyhunter’s featured build.

Resurrect Priest Deck List


Deck Import

Resurrect Priest Mulligan Strategy & Guide

VS Fast Decks

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

  • Shadow Word: Pain and Penance – By far your best early-game removal tools in a deck with little to do over the first few turns: limiting your opponent’s damage output in the first few turns is crucial to your success against aggro decks.
  • Mass Hysteria – This will often serve as the point where you truly turn your tables on your opponent, clearing the board they’ve established early in the game before you begin dropping taunt after taunt after taunt. Lightbomb is both slower and less reliable against aggro, so it isn’t a viable mulligan alternative.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

  • Bone Wraith – Though it’s a very effective stall tool, the statline of the minion means that most aggro decks will be able to value-trade through it, forcing you to use different tools as well to clear up the rest of your opponent’s board. As such, you can’t just rely on this Taunt to carry you through the early game.
  • Zilliax and Khartut Defender – If you have a stable gameplan lined up for the first four or five turns, you want to keep these around as logical follow-ups. However, much like Bone Wraith, they aren’t enough on their own to stabilize.
  • Forbidden Words – Though you’d prefer the removal options listed above in the early game against aggro, it’s certainly better than nothing and worth keeping if you’re missing the rest.

VS Slow Decks

Higher Priority (Keep every time)

  • Forbidden Words – The most flexible of removal options, since you won’t be doing anything significant for the first few turns you want to have some answer in case your opponent drops a high priority target.
  • Sylvanas Windrunner – Not only is it great to match a high-value minion with it, Sylvanas is also a minion you’d love to add to your Resurrect pool as soon as possible.
  • Convincing Infiltrator – Think of it as a budget Sylvanas of sorts with a similar impact on your gameplay.

Lower Priority (Keep only if certain conditions are met)

  • Ragnaros the Firelord – The logic is same as with Sylvanas: you want to juice up your Resurrection pool as much as possible if you can.
  • Mass Resurrection or Zerek's Cloning Gallery – If it’s a really, really slow matchup, it’s your first bomb out of many.
  • Shadow Word: Pain and Shadow Word: Death – Ideally, you want your minions’ Deathrattle effects to take care of your opponents’ big threats, therefore you should only keep these if you expect crucial early-game targets for them in specific matchups.

Resurrect Priest Play Strategy

VS Aggro Decks

Resurrect Priest has inevitability against basically every aggro deck in the meta, able to block off their minion damage by a wall of Taunts with the added capability of huge heals via Khartut Defenders, Zilliax and the hero power. As such, it’s a question of staying alive until the finish line.

You need to carefully ration out your early-game removal tools. Eventually, you will need a Mass Hysteria or another AoE to take care of the opponent’s accumulated board, and you should choose your targets carefully on the way there. For instance, it’s not worth using a Penance or a Shadow Word: Pain on a vanilla 2/3 like Questing Explorer minion whose damage output you can fully mitigate with Lesser Heal, at no cost of using a card. However, the same can’t be said of a Sorcerer's Apprentice or an EVIL Totem.

Speaking of which, special mention needs to be given to the Shaman matchups, because it’s tough to categorize them based on aggression itself. It’s a tough nut to crack and one of the main things which keep this deck down in the charts. Though it may seem like a value-based approach, the real danger playing against Quest-based builds is their ability to deal massive amounts of damage to you from their hand, so you will need to prioritize resurrecting Khartut Defenders against them when possible. However, when you play against a pure token/Evolve-oriented aggressive build, they almost exclusively rely on minion damage to take you down, and therefore, as counter-intuitive as it may seem at first, Convincing Infiltrator becomes the one you want to stack.

This dynamic is important in other aggro matchups as well: you want to pay close attention to their main damage source and prioritize minion development accordingly. In fact, manipulating the resurrection odds is one of the most crucial aspects of this deck regardless of opposition.

VS Control Decks

Whew. Relax. Take a deep breath. Grab a cup of coffee or something. You’ve got all the time in the world. It’s going to be a long one. This means you’ll have at least a bit of a chance to manipulate your Resurrection pool. You’d prefer to play N'Zoth, The Corruptor later down the line expecting to bring back half a dozen copies of Sylvanas Windrunner over six Khartut Defenders in this case.

Since this deck runs absolutely no card draw and has no reach to work with other than Ragnaros the Firelord, it will generally be your opponent who has to assume the beatdown role. These are fairly old-school matchups with finite value to work with: you want’t to give as little as possible to force out a board clear, and you want to be as greedy as possible before committing a card like Plague of Death. There is little no point in pushing for damage in these matchups (unless your opponent can drown you in value, like a Control Warrior player, a truly miserable experience which was thankfully made quite rare by the Shaman decks on the ladder): since you play so many massive and impactful minions, you only need one board to stick at any point to solidify your advantage. Calculate with four big turns: the two copies of Mass Resurrection, your N'Zoth, The Corruptor and (to a lesser extent) Catrina Muerte. Otherwise, play out your threats one by one to force out a response and focus on gaining value whenever you can. Since these games will often go all the way to fatigue – especially the mirror matches! – please don’t forget about that cup of coffee we’ve mentioned above.

Resurrect Priest Card Substitutions

Though we’ve featured Furyhunter’s #1 Legend deck, we’ve also had some success early in the expansion with a slightly different build which had a greater emphasis on interacting with your own minions on the board. Since it is a slightly cheaper alternative (featuring only Zilliax as a Legendary which you don’t necessarily have access to as part of the Doom in the Tomb event), we’ve decided to list it in full for you below:


Deck Import

Though its Resurrect pool is slightly weaker and takes longer to get on the board against aggro due to the lack of Bone Wraiths, this version allows you to make some fairly powerful plays against both faster and slower matchups which the featured build is incapapble of. Using Vivid Nightmare and/or Embalming Ritual on Zilliax is a great way to immediately impact an aggressive opponent’s board while also recovering some health, while Wretched Reclaimer works very well with Convincing Infiltrator and Sylvanas Windrunner against slower opposition. If you’re lacking some of the more expensive cards from Furyhunter’s version, this is a tested Legend-viable alternative to it and you can mix and match the two based on the cards you have available in your collection.

Yellorambo

Luci Kelemen is an avid strategy gamer and writer who has been following Hearthstone ever since its inception. His content has previously appeared on HearthstonePlayers and Tempo/Storm's site.

Check out Yellorambo on Twitter!

Leave a Reply

6 Comments

  1. H0lysatan
    October 17, 2019 at 1:31 am

    IMO Resurrect Priest is quite overwhelmingly strong since this event lately. Even at Ranked 5 to 1, most of my matches is filled with this Priest deck, and sadly, I can’t counter it.
    Go aggro? Priest got Mass Hysteria + Death Taunt
    Go slow? Priest got massive death taunt and ressurect, plus N’zoth
    Go control? Priest had that too, Resurrect Priest is equal Control Priest. Plague of Death, Shadow Words, Sylvanas.

    I just can’t wait until the event is over to hope for any chance climbing to Legend Ranks. just stuck at 5 whenever I see Priest, auto gameover.
    the only decks that may survive Priest maybe OTK spells damage to the face, maybe dealing 30 at once. But it’s not cheap. Malygos, Jepetto, etc.

    • Gibilan
      October 17, 2019 at 3:46 am

      It`s a hard matchup, but it`s not that much of a big deal. Like the guide says they have no card draw. They don`t got everything all the time. Most of the decks out there have a chance, if you pilote them with some brains.

    • JoyDivision
      October 17, 2019 at 5:26 am

      Play Shudderwock Quest Shaman. Multiple Mind Control Techs is a pretty solid counter for Priest.

      • JoyDivision
        October 17, 2019 at 5:28 am

        is that ‘… to Priest.’? idk … MCT counters Priest. 😉

      • H0lysatan
        October 17, 2019 at 10:38 am

        sadly, I’m not having the luxury for having a reliable Shaman Decks.
        My most complete Decks consists of Warrior, Hunter, and Mage decks in that order.
        meaning, I have the most complete set in Warrior, and the least in mage.
        Other deck is not so lucky (since I dust em one too many to create perfect deck for other class)

      • Cruxkid
        October 18, 2019 at 1:02 am

        Can confirm, quest shaman is the most annoying deck for me to play against when using this list. I will always bait out both MCT before making big plays, if I can.