The Priest class will be looking for ways to reinvent itself after the Standard rotation coming up in just a few days. The loss of numerous key cards leaves Priest with its “original” problems: Low board clear potential, few high value minions, and a purely reactive Hero Power.
With Rise of Shadows, Team 5 looks to support a very special Priest archetype of the past: Silence Priest. The Priest class has always used Silence effects one way or the other, and ever since the introduction of Purify, Silence Priest was bound to make several comebacks to Hearthstone’s tier lists.
In this theorycraft guide we take a look at the new tools of Silence Priest provided by the Rise of Shadows set and how they could revive the archetype!
- 0Circle of Healing2
- 0Lazul’s Scheme2
- 0Silence1
- 0Silence Priest Theorycraft Deck List – Rise of Shadows – April 20191
- 0Silence Priest Theorycraft Deck List – Rise of Shadows – April 20192
- 0Silence Priest Theorycraft Deck List – Rise of Shadows – April 20192
- 0Silence Priest Theorycraft Deck List – Rise of Shadows – April 20192
- 1Inner Fire2
- 1Power Word: Shield2
- 2Divine Spirit2
- 3Shadow Madness1
- 4Hench-Clan Shadequill2
- 4Unsleeping Soul2
- 6Cabal Shadow Priest1
Let’s start with Silence Priest’s new toys right away!
Arcane Watcher, a 3-cost 5/6 that can’t attack unless you have Spell Damage, will be able to fire up Silence Priest’s early game. Besides his younger brother Ancient Watcher, you can have a total of 20 stats on the board by turn 3.
Another Rise of Shadows card, Dalaran Librarian, will be the new enabler for Silence Priest. It silences all adjacent minions and solves a past problem of Silence Priest where you could only enable one minion per card like Silence or Purify.
Hench-Clan Shadequill backs up the board with a beefy 4/7 body for only 4 mana. Silence Priest can safely ignore its deathrattle of healing the opponent for 5 health, just because it needs to hit for big numbers anyway and we build in a total of five silence cards to counter the effect.
Unsleeping Soul solves the archetype’s value problem; it works wonders on Hench-Clan Shadequill and Arcane Watcher while you can also just copy minions like Cabal Shadow Priest.
Talking about Cabal Shadow Priest: Lazul's Scheme, one of Priest’s new spells, could become a key card in almost every upcoming Priest archetype. The ability to gain permanent control of basically every minion for only 6 mana does not only create immense power swings but also forces the opponent to play around that new two-card combo.
The rest of the deck showcases Priest’s strength coming from the Basic and Classic sets: As always, nothing beats Priest’s draw engine featuring Northshire Cleric, Wild Pyromancer, Acolyte of Pain, Power Word: Shield and Circle of Healing. The deck features enough low-cost spells to create consistent card draw scenarios while clearing the board at the same time.
Inner Fire and Divine Spirit exponentially increase Silence Priest’s damage reach. Yes, Shadow Visions is gone and will be sorely missed, but thanks to Northshire Cleric we should be able to draw into these spells sooner or later anyway. We have seen other iterations of Silence Priest featuring EVIL Conscripter and Faceless Rager; however, we think that the Combo package will perfectly supplement the archetype’s game plan to hit face hard as early and often as possible.
The interaction between Priest’s classic draw engine, established Combo mechanics and the brand new Silence package could make for an exciting fresh iteration of the Silence Priest archetype!
Thanks to this deck, i get it and replace Zilliax and shadow madness by two sunfury, my thought is this is better against aggro 🙂
@Tharid Interesting archetype! Would be great to see if it can hold up. I would consider using a Sunfury Protector and Mass Hysteria for controlling the board if your behind. Especially against aggro decks. I would get rid of Shadow Madness and Cabal Shadow Priest because there conditional cards based on what your opponent does. I would remove one Circle of Healing to add an extra Silence to have a slightly better chance of drawing a silence card to activate your Watchers giving you a 1/5 chance. I look forward to trying out this deck!
Sounds like quite a boring archetype to me… but I guess without DKs everything will be a bit underwhelming now…
It is rather boring, but until you have seen one silence their own minion and hit face for 15 on turn 3, it’s hard to understand just how powerful it can be.
The archetype will have its niche, especially in the specialist format. Another big plus is the fact that we haven’t seen any powerful cheap Taunt minions like Tar Creeper so far, so early minion damage will get through much more often!