Reno Combo Lock

RENO COMBO LOCK STRATEGY
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Your early-game cards in the deck are quite powerful and can help you to fight back efficiently against decks with a lot of early pressure. Dark Peddler, Imp Gang Boss, Mortal Coil, and Shadow Bolt are all excellent cards for fighting back early against Aggro, or simply for generating an early board presence. However, due to the nature of the deck, you will not be able to consistently draw into these cards, meaning you will sometimes have to be content with simply using Life Tap for the first few turns in order to draw into more useful options. You should not be afraid to do this, even against aggressive decks, since it is important to cycle through your deck to look for Reno Jackson and other important cards.

If you have been forced to skip the opening turns and find yourself behind on the board, the deck plays numerous options for catching up in the mid-game turns. AoE spells like Hellfire, Demonwrath, and Shadowflame can all be used to halt your opponent’s early onslaught, while Mind Control Tech can also be used to create a swing on the board.

Entering into the mid-game turns, your plays start to become more proactive. There are a lot of high quality minions in the deck and come the mid-game turns you are more likely to have drawn into them. Although you cannot reliably have access to any specific card since they are all single copies, you are almost guaranteed to draw into some sort of proactive play if you have been able to control the early-game sufficiently.

Once you reach the late-game, the game simply becomes apart sustaining yourself for as long as possible. You should be tapping every turn you can in order to draw necessary combo pieces and then simply relying on powerful healing effects like Reno Jackson and Brann Bronzebeard in combination with your healing Battlecries to keep yourself alive.

When the time is right, you will usually need to play Emperor Thaurissan onto the board in order to discount your combo pieces, since under standard conditions, your full burst combo costs 11 Mana. Since this is only slightly outside your regular Mana constraints, it is enough to only hit one piece of the combo with your Emperor activation. However, against heavy Control decks, you may want to wait until you hit more combo pieces so that you have enough spare Mana to fit in extra cards like Abusive Sergeant to increase your damage output.

Cho’gall is a new addition to the deck that can allow you to regain lost Tempo on turn 7 or later. In terms of Tempo, Cho’gall makes one spell free for you on the turn you play it, which can be very beneficial in a deck that is often fighting from behind in these situations. Cho’gall plus Shadow Bolt, Cho’gall plus Siphon Soul, and Cho’gall plus Shadowflame are all potentially powerful in the right situation and in a deck that aims to heal to full with Reno Jackson at some point anyway, you should not be too worried about damaging yourself.

This is a deck with dramatically different win conditions against different types of decks. Against Control, you are looking to draw as many cards as possible in order to look for key pieces of the Leeroy Jenkins, Power Overwhelming, Faceless Manipulator combo, while stabilising the board. From here, you then simply need to wait for your moment to unleash your game winning combo. Against extremely aggressive decks however, you should abandon this gameplan and instead focus on survival with the enormous amount of healing in the deck. It is important however, even when you are focused on this strategy that you continue to tap in order to maintain your resource advantage, and make sure you draw into enough survival cards to win the game.