I’ve just updated the Card Substitutions section and added Rat Pack!

Bottom of the guide, “Midrange Beast Hunter Card Substitutions”.

I’m adding Rat Pack to the list now.

Well, subbing Swash is hard. Not only it’s a great bounce target, but it’s also a Pirate to get out Patches early. You might be running out of cards quite fast without Swashburglars, but you can try another 1-drop like Glacial Shard.

That’s the thing about the early meta. It varies A LOT depending on the rank, on the server and it can even change on a hourly basis. Maybe I’ve just got lucky with the meta or maybe you’ve got unlucky. To be 100% sure about the power level of the decks, we’ll need at least a few days for the meta to stabilize a bit.

I had to obviously base it on a feeling, because there is no big statistical sample yet, and Zoo felt strong for me. But of course I might be wrong on that one 🙂

Oh well, that would be REALLY broken 😀

I don’t think that’s the case. I’ve opened around 110 packs and got 6 Legends, so close to average. Looking at the different streamers opening packs, they sometimes were more lucky, other times less lucky, but it was still close to Legendary per 20 packs on average. I think that hundreds of thousands of Hearthstone viewers would have noticed that there’s something off with streamers pack openings and I honestly haven’t seen any threads like that on reddit or anywhere.

Sorry to hear that, but it appears that you’ve just got pretty unlucky, it happens and there is really nothing you can do.

Definitely, but we’ll give some time for the meta to settle. You should probably expect update around 2-3 weeks from now!

Hey! Thanks, I’m glad that you liked it.

The new versions indeed run SIlent Knights and Shadow Senseis. It’s most likely stronger than this one. However, this guide was written pretty shortly after the deck was discovered and it was still being optimized. It’s one of the first versions. Normally I’m doing the monthly updates (early every month), but there is no point in updating the decks in April when the new expansion is coming out in a few days and everything will change anyway 🙂

Probably few days? I’ve received my first pack for voting after like 4 or 5 days. Remember that the Winter Championship has just finished.

Patience you must have, my young padawan.

Yep, I’ve noticed that too. Reno Mage wasn’t the best choice for this tournament, but it seems that Shtan got away with it while Pavel got more unlucky than he should.

The article isn’t necessarily targeted at beginner players – it’s targeted at beginner deck builders 🙂 I know people who play the game for 2 years and they didn’t build any deck themselves. It’s a great resource for people like that too.

On the other hand, I know that a lot of new players try to build their own decks right away, because for them that’s where the fun from playing Hearthstone comes. Heck, I have a friend who never passed rank 5, but he’s probably a much better deck builder than I am, even though I’m hitting Legend easily pretty much every season. He’s just building his own decks since the day he started playing the game – but let’s just say that he isn’t the best pilot.

Hey guys, instead of answering every comment separately, I’ll answer the concerns in one place:

Yes, I agree that a part of the article might not be easily understandable to a new player. But explaining every term here would be a little bit pointless, because instead of focusing on the topic I would have to interrupt it every other sentence and start explaining what is card advantage or what is tempo etc. Those things would have to be explained in every article targeted at new players, basically making them really clunky and harder to read for people who know what those things mean (I mean, it’s not hard guessing what “card advantage” is even without playing the game before).

If a new player doesn’t understand what something means, he should look into a Glossary instead. Evident already wrote a Glossary of terms related to card games and Hearthstone (http://www.hearthstonetopdecks.com/hearthstone-term-glossary/). It doesn’t include every term, but adding more HS jargon is something we can always work on 🙂

You’re right – if you don’t have Aya, but you really want to play this deck, Lotus Agents might be an okay choice. Especially since the chance to discover another Jade Card is relatively high. It might be even better late game topdeck, as it gives you some flexibility. However, the main reason Aya is so strong is tempo. Even with 3/3 or 4/4 Jade Golems, she’s already great tempo card, not to mention your future tempo grows by A LOT (let’s say the difference between 5/5 + 3/3 Taunt and 5/5 + 5/5 Taunt is pretty significant if you follow her by Jade Chieftain). This thing can’t really by replaced. Well, unless you get Aya from Lotus Agents 🙂

One person had made it “playable” in a deck built specifically around her and in the end he didn’t even have very impressive results with it. You can have the same or even better results with a generic Control Shaman.

Without a huge sample size it’s hard to tell, but I don’t see anyone more really picking the deck on the ladder. It might be the case of “some crazy deck getting to Legend and then no one playing it again”, it happens very often. The combination of picking a good moment to play the deck (in the right meta) and the surprise factor, you can get a bad deck with bad cards to high ranks. I’ve seen Reno Hunters in top 100 Legend before even though the deck is technically very weak. I can bet that the Goya version isn’t even the best Control Shaman list.

I think that my point still stands. Goya is a bad card.

Actually, people have been adding Defender of Argus as an anti-Aggro tech and it might be a good idea to try that!

If there will be enough people that want to read about Wild decks, I can try. Right now I haven’t played any Wild games, because I just found it unappealing when compared to Standard. If things will change and they will develop the mode more, I can play it and write about it 🙂

Sorry, I’ve updated the replacements list and added Edwin. The card is really hard to replace to be honest ((because it’s very powerful)), but I’d go for another Tomb Pillager. The deck is very low on 4-drops.

Honestly, I don’t think so. You can try Aggro Rogue, but not in this form. If you don’t have Finja, you don’t want to run other Murlocs. If you don’t run Murlocs, you probably don’t want to run The Curator either. If you don’t run The Curator, you don’t want to run Panther.

So you’d need to change like 7 or 8 cards to play it without Finja. You should look for a non-Water Aggro Rogue deck somewhere!

You have replacements section on the bottom of the guide!