Brawlers - Deal Your Fate Part 2

Introduction

Hi Brawlers!

Have you tried fancy decks with current rule or did you get the fast way and picked Mage? Just in case you missed the first part of this week, here you have it.

After a couple of days playing against Mages again and again I come now with my own version of the most popular class of this week. I put aside the Zoolock deck and joined the masses my way. I would say that it probably takes advantage of nearly all available Fates. And that’s a huge advantage. Of course I have my favourites, but saying that all but two fit the deck is great. Before going down, please, go through the deck and you’ll know what I mean.

The first thing you’ll see is that it has two cores. My initial version was a full Mech Mage deck. The point of playing Mech Mage is that no one is expecting it this week. When you see Jaina (or Medivh) in front of you, first thing that comes to your mind is random shots from Flamewaker. So people chose other Fates that in the end benefited this deck. I was countering their counterpicks.

It was after a game against a Flamewaker Mage deck where I found my hand full of Bananas and Coins and I realized that I was wasting some of the Fates. So it was time to make room to spells synergy cards as well and I present now the last version of the deck.

Ladies and gentlemen, here you have (Near) All Fates ManaMech Mage!

The deck

I will separate the cards into three categories: Mechs, spell synergy cards and rest.

Mech cards:

clockwork-gnome: Cheap Mech that will give as a Spare Part with its Deathrattle. Bananas are usually better, but Spare Parts are still Spells and will give us other options (Stealth, Freeze…)
cogmaster: One of the best cards of the deck if Confusion has been chosen. You’ll see later.
mechwarper: Reduce the cost of our Mechs. Plain and simple. Responsible of explosive starts, of course.
annoy-o-tron: Key Mech to protect our most valuable minions.
snowchugger: We could use its ability to protect our most valuable minions as well.
harvest-golem: Included to add a resilient Mech. If it dies it will spawn another bot so other cards with Mech synergy won’t lose it.
gorillabot-a-3: I think this bot is really good for a Mech deck in general and this one in particular. Mech decks are cheap, so we will find lots of games that we empty our hand. Here thanks to Bananas and maybe coins, hands won’t be empty in general but we still need minions. Gorillabot will help us with an extra “draw”.
piloted-shredder: The best four drop of the game is a bot so it’ll be absurd to not include it.
goblin-blastmage: Removal in this deck comes basically in the form of minions and random shots. Goblin will shoot 4 times if we have a Mech on board, and that will be frequent as we run 14 Mech cards.

Spell synergy cards:

mana-wyrm: We will see its power growing fast if Bananas or Coins have been chosen. We don’t run a lot of spells so I usually play it as a lure minion to protect Mechs, our main strategy.
mana-addict: The other Attack grower with Spells. With Bananas or Coins it will become huge.
flamewaker: Our machine gun. It’s a late game card that will give us extra uses for Coins and Bananas if we have those Fates active.

Rest:

nerubian-egg: I said that my favourite Fate for this deck is Confusion. This is one of the reasons I like to choose it. the-coin+nerubian-egg first turn play will give us a big board presence since the first turn. We could also activate it with Bananas and it’ll protect our board against random shots from our opponent if we face a Mage deck. Maybe the weaker card in the deck as if we don’t have the Confusion Fate it’s less effective but I still like it.
frostbolt: I’ve included two direct damage spells to have the option of removing a specific minion and don’t have to rely on combat or random flamewaker shots. forgotten-torch would be another good option, I opted for the cheaper one but I would definetely try the Torch and see if the extra crystal doesn’t disturb us and the cheap Fireball that is put into our deck works well.
arcane-intellect: There are games that we run out of gas and our other options to get cards depend on board presence so we need usual drawing cards.
echo-of-medivh: A single copy to help refill our hand as well.

Fates

As I said, the deck has two diferent cores that will benefit from 4 out of 6 Fates. I’ll order them from the less useful to the most one

Spells: There are only 5 spells in the deck (7 if we take into account the Spare Parts we could get). If the opponent has not chosen Bananas, it’s senseless to pick this Fate, we won’t take advantage of it. If he has chosen Bananas then maybe we want to try it but I think we will always have a better option.
Armor: In general we will more aggresive than our opponent so I don’t see the point of slowing us down.
Portals: I don’t like to choose this Fate. It will prevent us for drawing what we’ve chosen to include in the deck. Anyway, if it’s the opponent the one who chooses it, we have included a spell sinergy part to take advantage of those free spells that will flood our deck.
Coin: I would choose it only if the options we received are the first three and this one. And I would doubt between this one and Portals. We would accelerate our game a bit but we don’t really need Coins to do that as costs are low. Anyway, we still have spell synergy cards so it fits.
Bananas: A paradise card for zoo decks. 25 out of 30 of our cards are minions so we will receive a lot of bananas. Both cores will benefit from bananas and we will be able to do fanzy combos with the worst of them
Confusion: This is the option I always choose if I receive it. No one expects it and near no one chooses it so games will be crazier for the opponents as this deck is built to benefit a lot from the swap rule. I will explain later combos we have.

General strategy

We’ve already said that Fates will benefit us more than our opponent thanks to the minion and spell synergy built. My favourite Fate is Confusion and it’s time to explain why.

One of the reasons is that it seems nobody has prepared their decks to this Fate so they will have to face a different game when playing against us. This deck is prepared to it so while our opponent won’t know what to do, we will see some of our minions growing. As we saw in the first part, when you swap Attack and Health, the minion will preserve all buffs it had, even temporary ones. Let’s check all the combos we will find in the deck.

First one is easy, nerubian-egg will die and we will have a 4/4.
Second one is really crazy. If we have in play cogmaster and any other bot, we will have a 3/2. When the swap comes it’ll become a 2/3 and gain 2 Attack again so we will have a 4/3. We can do this in the first turn if we have the-coin, cogmaster and clockwork-gnome. Having a 4/3 and a 1/2 in the first turn will be hard to our opponent. If the opponent doesn’t get rid of the Mech, next turn Cogmaster will become a 3/4 -> 5/4 and it’ll continue growing. Sometimes I prefer to wait and play Cogmaster with annoy-o-tron and follow it up with more Mechs.

Third one would be mana-addict. The ideal game would be Bananas and Confusion to give a lot of Attack to the minion and then swap parameters. I’ve had had an 8/4 thanks to a +1/+1 Banana and a couple of coins that become 4/8 (really hard to kill) on my opponent’s turn.
Last and weaker one would be mana-wyrm. Swapping it the first turn will end in an easy to kill 3/1 so we need some spells to help Wyrm, that’s the reason I called it before a “lure” minion. The opponent will kill try to kill it fast and we will have better minions later. It’s still possible to grow it and swap Attack and Health to have a bigger minion, but it’s harder than the other ones.

I want to remember that we also have another two options in the form of a Spare Part (from clockwork-gnome) and Deviation Banana. If we play any of those spells into Cogmaster or mana-addict we could end with really big minions really fast. Try it!

General mulligan for cheap minions and safe your flamewaker as plan b. Always prioritize Mech cards. Spell synergy minions are again a plan b. We need our hands full of Bananas or coins before getting advantage of them so don’t put them on board too soon.

My last tip would be how to face the Dire Fate point. With a strong board presence I’ve always avoided to put my opponent below 20 life. I’ve always prefered to trade minions and maintain board presence to try to kill him directly from 21 life. And I’ve won lots of games this way.

I said last time that Murlocs Dire Fate is the most used one so if we don’t have a way to refill our board after it, don’t put the opponent below 20 life. And try to avoid the Windfury Dire Fate as well not allowing the opponent to have a big board. I’ve won one game being at 1 (from 21) with two little minions on board thanks to Bananas and Windfury. Now I understand why they put this Dire Fate, heheh.

Conclusion

Do you want a fun different Mage deck for this week? Then try the deck I’ve presented here, it’ll be one of the last chances of playing Mechs before rotation (we don’t know how many Brawls will be Wild and how many will be Standard). There’s also room for changes, it’s a proper list but it’s not been fully tested (it’s impossible in Tavern Brawls!). Oh, and the most important thing, it’s really cheap!

Have fun!