Introduction
Hi Guys, Smashthings here. For the past couple of days I have been doing a little bit of thinking and have tried to create a couple of decks in preparation for release of the new expansion. Today I am going to share one of my projects with you. I call it Dragon Freeze Mage.
Deck Basics
If you have a look through the list of cards you will notice that I have basically taken a traditional Freeze Mage List (see here for Camzeee’s Freeze Mage guide) and have poked around a little; I cut some burst/combo potential (e.g no Pyroblast, Ice Lance), cut some of the defences (e.g. Blizzard) and cut some card draw (e.g. Arcane Intellect). With those cards out of the way I had the room to add a crap-tonne of mother-fucking Dragons.
My hope for this deck is that it maintains some of the game-ending combo potential of Freeze Mage but due to the high minion count won’t be reliant on such combo’s to win. With our minions hitting them hard maybe such a deck could stand a chance versus Control Warrior, for example.
UPDATE (9th september 2015): Decklist now shows effigy instead of Ice block. This is due to me updating the list for an upcoming article. Stay Tuned!
Card Choices
Instead of talking about every individual card I thought I would talk about the ‘packages’ (see here to learn about ‘package deck-building’) the deck has.
The Freeze Mage Set-up (19 cards):
- The Burn/Removal: Frostbolt, Fireball, Doomsayer, Frost Nova
- The Secrets: Mad Scientist, Ice Barrier, Ice Block (1x)
- The Draw: Acolyte of Pain
- The Dragons: Alexstrasza, Malygos
- Emperor Thaurissan
19 out of 30 cards are taken from Freeze Mage. And so therefore there is not too much to say about these cards, if you want to know how I intend to use these card simply consult a standard Freeze Mage guide.
I have decided to run only one copy of Ice block because I am hoping that due to the Dragons being better able to pro-actively fight for the board the deck will require fewer defensive cards.
The Dragon Package (12 cards):
- The Dragons: Alexstrasza, Malygos, Twilight Drake, Twilight Guardian, Chillmaw, Azure Drake
- The Dragon support: Blackwing Corruptor, Duplicate
Given that Dragon Synergy typically requires having Dragons in hand and that we happen to have a lot of Dragons in this deck I thought it might be nice to experiment with a Duplicate. If for example a Turn 4 Twilight Guardian is killed (triggering duplicate) then we get two Dragons in the had which therefore the next Twilight Guardian we play is going to be a 3/6 Taunt. Turn 10 double Azure Drake also sounds like fun and let’s not also forget that Duplicate can lead to some pretty big Twilight Drakes. Moreover, If we happen to have Dragons in hand then getting more Blackwing Corruptor’s sounds rather exciting. In short, I think that the spell Duplicate has a lot of natural synergy with the ‘Dragon in hand’ mechanic, so therefore it is a card probably worth experimenting with.
Also, noteworthy is my ambition for Chillmaw. The observant among you may notice I’m not running Flamestrike, a staple in Freeze Mage. Well, I replaced Flamestrike with Chillmaw partly because the buzz around town is that this card is going to be rather decent. In this case 3 damage to the board kinda performs the role of Flamestrike (for the same mana cost) while also fuelling the Dragon Synergy.
The Malygos Combo Package (4 cards):
- The Combo: Rhonin, Emperor Thaurissan, Malygos, sorcerers-apprentice
When I took Ice Lance out of Freeze Mage I took out a considerable about of Burst Damage with it. Well, these four cards are my attempt to put that raw combo-power back into the deck. The basic plan is on turn 10 to blast the enemy with 3x Arcane Missiles with Malygos on board for a massive 24 damage.
This deck has two ways to enable this combo. The first way is to kill Rhonin and then play Emperorer Thuarissan (Arcane Missiles now cost 0). The problem with this combo is that it requires us to kill Rhonin before dropping Thaurissan and that could be very difficult indeed. I mean, what if we what to play Thaurissan on curve? Make no mistake, hurting your combo by dropping Thaurissan on curve is this is potentially a huge problem.
After giving the above problem some thought I had a bit of a brain wave and added a single copy of sorcerers-apprentice to the deck. This one card should make the whole combo considerably more consistent, since now we can play Thaurissan before Rhonin dies and still get the combo so long as either Malygos and/or sorcerers-apprentice are in the hand (e.g. Turn 10 Malygos + Apprentice + Arcane Missiles x3).
Of course this combo is not the same as spamming Frostbolt + Ice Lanes to the face (which is what Freeze Mage typically does). Indeed, since Arcane missiles can hit minions such a combo is considerably less likely to kill the opponent. But once again I’ll point out that this deck is less reliant on combo finishes; if our flurry of Arcane missiles clear all of their minions then thats cool too, we’ve paved the way for our massive Dragons to pummel the face.
Replacements & Other Ideas
Given that this deck is running lots of Dragons I did wonder about adding coldarra-drake and Volcanic Drake. In addition to both being Dragons they also have some other synergies with the deck. For example, Volcanic Drake is a powerful in concert with Doomsayer + Frost nova. Ultimately I dismissed this idea because I felt that such a combo was a bit “win-more”; if I clear the enemy board with Doomsayer then I probably don’t need a cheap Drake to follow up with because I am already winning at that point.
coldarra-drake would allow us to ping Acolyte of Pain multiple times, which is a nice way of squeezing more card draw into the deck. However, in the end I dismissed this idea because I felt that with so many late game cards in the deck something has probably gone dreadfully wrong if my best play is to use my Hero Power multiple times a turn in the late stages of the game.
Blackwing Technician is also nice, but adding it is made a bit tricky due to our curve being saturated with 3-drops already.
Effigy is also a really interesting card owing to the fact that since this deck has a high curve it is likely that this secret would get decent value. Moreover, it could be a really good way of stabilising early on versus aggro decks (e.g. fetch said secret from Mad Scientist and then play Turn 4 Twilight Guardian. If they kill it, the second 4-drop is likely to be able to mop up the board). This is certainly a cool idea and is something I may end up testing.
Polymorph: Boar. Transform effects are basically like silence and as the deck currently stands I think the lack of silence is a major weakness of the deck (how do I beat sylvanas-windrunner, for example?) Boar is cheaper than Polymorph and also has a cute application with Doomsayer: if they enemy silences the Doomsayer then I can make use of an otherwise useless 0/7. But with that said, Polymorph has some nice synergy with Acolyte of Pain. Right now I don’t know which one of these cards is better, I’ll probably have to test both, and I suspect the “final” version of the deck will probably run one of these.
Conclusion
That’s it folks, you have the deck-list and glimpsed an insight into how I built it. Obviously a lot of testing is required and I am likely to make numerous changes in the future. But nonetheless I hope that this deck will give you something to play with on day one of the expansion.
Have fun experimenting. And as always comments, likes, questions are welcome. 🙂
