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!

Probably Tomb Pillager. However, The Curator is just one wing ahead of the Swashburglar, so you can also hoard 700 gold and buy the next wing of Karazhan :p

Yes, yes it does, fixed. Pirates have lots of similar names and I’m messing them up sometimes, sorry!

Thanks! I’d go for either Feral Spirit or Healing Wave if you face a lot of Aggro and Mana Tide Totem if you face a lot of slower decks.

Yes, STB definitely gets out of the list – it’s too weak right now. And you have a plenty cards to pick from.

If you own those cards, you obviously want to go for one of the Legendaries – Patches, Leeroy or Sir Finley. When it comes to the Epics, you can also play Southsea Captains.

If you want a cheaper option, Naga Corsair or Bash would be the best ones.

If you have any more questions, let me know!

It might actually be a good time to pick up Doomhammer again – most of the decks have dropped Ooze, as its only strong against Pirate Warrior now. Replacing Spell Damage might not be the best idea, though. The deck still runs tons of spells – Bolts, Portals, Lava Bursts and Jade Lightnings.

I would probably try getting rid of 2x Spirit Claws and 2x STB and replacing it with Doomhammer + Rockbiter. It would slow the deck down significantly, but the meta has also slowed down a bit. I haven’t playtested that, because frankly I’m sick of Aggro Shaman at this point, but let me know how it works if you try it in the end.

That said, Aggro Shaman really needed those STB to have a powerful and snowbally early game. It’s falling out of the meta a bit, because it’s really hard to replace those. Argent Squires are meh, because they only work well with Flametongue – without it, 1 damage is just not enough right now. The deck is technically not “dead”, but I feel like both Pirate Warrior and Aggro/Water Rogue are better Aggro decks right now.

No problem 🙂 Updating lists so late into the expansion is usually pretty easy. Most of the “best” lists have been figured out already, meta is pretty “stale” and if not for the recent nerfs, most of the lists wouldn’t even need an update at all. I’m looking forward to writing about the new expansion. Writing new guides right after new cards are released is a more difficult, but at the same time very enjoyable task.

But thanks, I’m glad that you like my content!

Sorry to disappoint you, but I believe that this might still be the best list in the current meta. Even though The Curator list was being tried a bit, G2 has gone back to this list again in the latest Trinity Series. We’ll need to take a closer look of how the meta exactly shapes up post-patch, but I think that this and The Curator lists are incredibly close in terms of power level anyway.

The only reason I like The Curator list over this one is Stampeding Kodo tech, which gets much more useful with so many people running Finja, the Flying Star in different lists. Sometimes Finja wins the game for Aggro deck, if you can counter it with Kodo it should be an easy win. But I’ll need to look further into that and see how popular Finja gets on the ladder after all.

It wasn’t among the cards that were confirmed in the video, though. But I bet that he will also get that tribe, it would be weird if he didn’t considering he has “Elemental” in his name…

Rogue wants to play Beast, because of The Curator.

Then the deck wants to play a Beast that’s in Stealth, because it’s much more likely that it will survive to next turn, so you can get a trade you want or it’s a good Cold Blood target.

And when it comes to Beasts with Stealth, you have two options – Panther or Stranglethorn Tiger. Tiger is great, but when it comes to damage compared to mana cost, Panther clearly wins. It’s 4 damage for 3 mana, compared to 5 damage for 5 mana. Of course, it has its flaws, like playing into the AoE, but it’s better than Tiger in such a deck list.

I’m personally playing both, so if I draw one I could still pull the other from The Curator.

I’ve heard that way too often. Yes, I’m familiar with the game development’s cycle. But it’s not an excuse, not at all.

Whole community was going nuts about Aggro decks as far as 2 months ago, after the Gadgetzan meta has already stabilized. Considering that the new expansion should come out early April, that’s 3 months in total between they’ve realized that something’s wrong with the Aggro and the new expansion. 3 months.

They can tweak some cards. They can remove some cards that might be problematic altogether. For example, Gadgetzan would be much more healthy expansion if they just released 1 less card (no Small-Time Buccaneer) in total. No one would notice and yet everyone would be way more happy.

At the same time, it’s enough time to add some strong anti-Aggro tool. Like you’ve said, they design stuff months ahead. They can just pick one or two strong cards from the future expansions and add them to this one (of course, changing their theme a bit and possibly tweaking them). But even releasing a new anti-Aggro tool. If it turns out to be powerful and completely stops Aggro from being playable, just release a hotfix and change it. What’s the big deal?

“We’re planning stuff 8 months ahead so we can’t make instant changes” is a terrible, terrible excuse. Have you ever heard that in any other game? Let’s say League of Legends. They don’t say “oh, we’ve released a new, overpowered champion, but it’s fine, because 8 months from now we plan to release something that will counter it”. No, it’s not fine, and everyone knows that.

It’s not about whether they can or can’t do that. Because it’s clear as the day that they can. It’s about whether they WANT to. And before, they didn’t want to. They took a very lazy design approach and said “you guys play in that terrible meta for a few more months and we won’t do anything to fix it right away”. Instead, if something is clearly problematic, just fix it immediately. Don’t wait 6 months because “things might fix themselves”. We need more hotfixes like the one we’ve just got, we need Blizzard to care more about “now” and not “2 expansions later”. And after seeing their recent communication, answers to the questions, even a hotfix and – in general – making some changes, I really hope that they will keep it up and constantly make the game better.

Yes, I had “summon” in mind when writing this. But in reality it doesn’t matter. It only makes the card even more powerful in slow matchups, because it matters only with N’Zoth, and N’Zoth is 10 mana. It means that you wouldn’t be able to play the quest reward until turn 11 anyway, at which point the game is already decided against faster decks.

I know that you need to summon not play them. I just often use those words interchangeably, because most of the time it doesn’t matter. I wrote everything with “summon” in mind, so nothing really changes. But okay, I’ll edit and change “play” to “summon”.

And no, that’s not a huge difference. The card is still terrible against fast decks and amazing against slow decks, it doesn’t change.