I don’t like it, personally. If you’re going to make Quest Druid better vs. Aggro, your first choice really should be Anubisath Defender.

Control Warrior is like the gold standard you compare other decks to. Many of the new theorycrafted decks that came up, like the new Quest Priest or Quest Rogue or Secret Mage, made me go: “okay, cool idea, but how does this beat Control Warrior?”

It’s still way too early to be sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Control Warrior nerf sometime September.

It’s so early in the expansion that this decklist is little more than a guess as to what would make for a good Highlander Mage deck. A well-educated guess, mind you! Still, a week from now, the dominant Highlander Mage decklist might look very different from this one, or maybe it’ll turn out that the entire Highlander Mage archetype is so weak it’s nearly unplayable.

At this point in time, I’d recommend saving your dust and substituting the cards you’re missing to the best of your ability, until the decklist becomes more refined and you figure out whether you enjoy the deck’s gameplay 🙂

There’s a lot of minor disagreements I have with the decklist, but no Anubisath Defenders is simply a mistake, IMO.

I’ve only been playing Quest Druid so far, and I rather like my current decklist:

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Tried it out. Didn’t work for me 🙁

Turns 1-4 are so weak with this deck, you always fall behind in terms of board presence and are then struggling to stabilize for a very long time afterwards, and playing a 7 mana minion with no immediate board impact usually meant I would die on the backswing, so it was just stuck uselessly in my hand.

Good point about Quicksand Elemental, I hadn’t paid attention to it but it can be very strong in the right deck.

Fair enough. Also, I can’t help but read your posts in the voice of Warcraft 3’s Mannoroth XD

I don’t like the Freeze Package here. You’re not looking for a burst damage finish with Fireballs like Freeze Mage, this looks more like a Control deck than a Combo deck and so seeing Frost Nova + Blizzard but no Flamestrike looks like an odd decision to me.

Also, why do you pick Voodoo Dolls over Polymorph? Is it due to Naga Sandwich and Tortollan Pilgrim anti-synergy? I kinda like Polymorph, especially in a set with new Deathrattle support and a ton of Reborn cards.

Luna’s Pocket Galaxy would probably be a good fit here, too.

If you have a Coin and a Pyroblast, and their mana costs are changed to 5 by Naga Sandwich, then King Phaoris’ battlecry will summon a random 5-mana minion for each of those two spells.

I think it’s not implausible to run this in a non-highlander deck. If you can take advantage of the 3/2 body if played on curve, this could be a mediocre card when drawn early, and a great card when drawn late. The 3/2 statline for 2 mana means it’s not _that_ bad to just play without the battlecry.

I don’t think all decks will want it, or anywhere close to a majority of decks, but I could see some non-highlander decks wanting this, especially ones that draw a lot of cards quickly.

Based on what Peter Whalen said when the card was revealed, the answer to 1) is No, the answer for 2) is that Zephrys is no more likely to offer you healing if your opponent has a Pyroblast than if he does not.

As to the third example, you may know more than Zephrys does about your opponent’s hand. Maybe your opponent played a Splintergraft and you know he’s got a 10/10 Al’akir in his hand. In that case, you could play a Secretkeeper and an Arcane Flakmage, then play Zephrys while having 3 mana left over, telling Zephrys that you’d really like a 3-mana secret right about now.

Because not all situations are as simple as finding lethal with a Fireball. If you play Zephris on curve on turn 2 against an empty board, what is the best card to get? Zephris offers you Wild Growth, Animal Companion and Brightwing, depending on whether you’re looking for mana ramp, a strong minion or long-term value for your turn 3 play.

Yeah, fair point. I guess I’d call the archetype “Uldum Quest Priest”, myself.

Damn, and here I thought Stonekeep was trying to get Desert Obelisk to work

Oh, good point about Academic Espionage. You’re right that Spectral Cutlass also requires Deadly Poison, but the end result is a weapon that performs better both offensively and defensively than these new mirage blades.

Shadowstep and Shark can also help, but Shark can be awkward to hold onto until you have one of a few generation cards to play along with it. Daring Escape is just bad IMO.

You could build a Shark deck with only as few burgle cards as possible, but the more burgle cards you add the more you look like Thief Rogue, and the fewer you add the more inconsistent completing the quest becomes. Completing the quest is easy in a full-on Thief Rogue deck, but I’m not sure there’s a sweet spot where you can still complete the quest early and consistently while keeping burgle cards to a minimum.

It does sound easier when you put it like that, but I’m not sure what a buff deck looks like. From your post, I understand it would have Divine Spirit + Inner Fire / Topsy Turvey, Extra Arms, Power Word: Shield, and… some other 22 cards, some of them being healing. That’s not specific enough for me to evaluate.

Is it just me or Togwaggle looks almost exactly like in Daring Escape?

If you run this quest in a standard Tempo Rogue shell with 2x Blink Fox and 2x Hench-Clan Burglar, you can expect to draw all 4 by turn 15 or 20. That is not a practical way of fulfilling this quest. You want at least 4 more ways of adding cards from other classes to your hand, cards like Pilfer, Stolen Steel, Academic Espionage or the new Bazaar Mugger. But then I ask… if you’re running a Thief Rogue deck, why not just use Spectral Cutlass instead of this? Maybe you want both if you’re afraid of weapon removal, I guess. 3/5

Not sure whether this’ll see play. We saw a hero power for buffing minions before, and it was never relevant in the meta (Dynomancy). This is a lot better than Dynomancy, but it could be so awkward to complete this quest in terms of deckbuilding that maybe the payoff isn’t worth it.

The hero power works best in a board-centric, aggro or midrange deck, but to get it you need to put cards like Circle of Healing, Regenerate and Divine Hymn in your deck, and those cards don’t quite fit into most aggro decks now that we don’t have Happy Ghoul anymore. They have a great synergy with Northshire Cleric, but can otherwise give you a very awkward early game- something aggro decks really dislike.

Even if you have the AoE healing spells you need, you’re telegraphing your intention to your opponent: explicitly if you play the quest on turn 1, and an experienced opponent (or anyone who uses deck tracker) can probably guess you have the quest in your hand if you keep it in your mulligan but don’t play it in an attempt to be sneaky. An opponent who knows your game plan can often play around this, denying you good healing targets.

Once you complete the quest, how good is it? It’s quite powerful if you have board control, especially with Reborn minions you can sacrifice, then buff and heal back up post-reborn activation. It likely won’t win you the game if you’re an aggro deck up against a Control deck that already stabilized, though.

My guess is that this works better in a Midrange deck than in an aggro deck. Even then, I ask myself: can this hero power carry the day against a Control Warrior? I highly doubt it, based on my experience with a more powerful hero power that summons a 6/6 Infernal every turn. 3/5

This belongs in exactly zero Constructed decks. 1/5

Guyopt is a dedicated troll