Astral Druid Theorycraft – Doom in Tomb

Astral Druid is an old Druid archetype that took “ramp” concept to another level. Instead of slowly but surely ramping with your regular cards, it took a gamble and went all in on a single card – Astral Communion. Getting 10 Mana Crystals on Turn 4 is obviously game-winning, but it has a clear downside – discarding your entire hand. It means that you can’t run it in a regular deck, where the quality of topdecks is not nearly enough. That’s why the deck is packed with expensive, late game cards as well as a bunch of card draw. The ideal scenario is playing Biology Project on T1, then Astral Communion on T2, then topdecking something like Juicy Psychmelon or Overflow and flooding your opponent with big minions way before he can realistically answer all of them.

I’ve decided to incorporate N'Zoth, The Corruptor to the deck too. While the deck does not run A LOT of Deathrattle cards, keep in mind that each Khartut Defender counts as two. Once the first part dies and reborns, the second part is a separate minion. So it’s quite easy to bring the whole board back. Deranged Doctor is a kind of experiment – given that you will always be on the backfoot for the first few turns, an 8/8 that heals you is not a bad card to have, and it gets even better when you get it back for free with N’Zoth. In general, most of the big minions in the deck have some kind of defensive effect / immediate value, but are also big threats.

But why play Biology Project and Wild Growth on top of Astral Communion? Ideally, you get Communion on curve and then topdeck big stuff. But realistically, you won’t always draw it early, and it gets pretty useless past Turn 6-7 (because you don’t gain much, but you do discard a lot of cards). So if you don’t draw your Astral Communion, you still want to have a way to play all of those big cards – your regular ramp. Biology Project is more of an experiment – I’m not a big fan of the card, because while Wild Growth can be cycled in the late game, Biology Project will be a terrible topdeck after you Astral. On the other hand, if you don’t get Astral Communion, getting to high mana is VERY important with this deck – after all, the first minions you can drop cost 6 mana. On average, you will get much more value out of your mana than your opponent. It also lets you play Astral on T2, so without discarding a lot of cards.

All in all, it will most likely end up being a meme deck, but I was always a big fan of Ramp (or later called “Big”) Druid and I’m pretty sad that the archetype wasn’t available for a while already.