With the addition of the upcoming new 25 mana Epic “Blood Taura” 12/12 Provoke with the ability: This minions cost is equal to your general’s health.
I was inspired to try to create a very “Han” style deck, as many of you probably know one of the most infamous decks in Hearthstone’s history is the dreaded “Hanlock” created with the intention to slow down and focus on pure control. They normally rely on spells and powerful minions to clear the board and keep their face healthy. While in Duelyst we can use our health a bit of a resource mostly if our opponent avoids beating us down in fear of this monstrous card. I thought at first “HanMar” with Vaath for an even slower version of an already popular deck “Control Magmar”. Alongside that I thought it would just be control magmar but with a new card… I jumped to Starhorn with the idea of taking the “RenoBurst” strategy but putting it into Starhorn where we can drop the super slow pace and run a more minion build with the mix of Magmar’s heavy removal then refill our hand with his hero power. As a slow deck with big heals you won’t mind giving your opponent an extra card because you will always stay around the same card advantage as that’s how you play “Hand” style decks.
So I created this deck for now, it’s at 37 cards (general included) leaving space for 3 Blood
So let me explain my reasoning behind my choices for this deck.
- 3 Sundrop: Pretty straight forward, it’s a strong heal being 1 mana +5 HP, this synergies’ extremely well with Blood Taura as you can drop her then heal afterwards which is also a reason I picked Lyonar over Magmar, the ability to play Blood Taura even for 8 mana and still heal back +5 health is extremely powerful tempo swing that can possibly win games
- 3 Divine Bonds: we obviously need win conditions and this allows for burst to steal games that we wouldn’t win without it. Half our deck is big provoke bodies that synergies’ well with this power also so there is no reason to be running less, you can always use it as replace fodder.
- 3 Circle of Life over 3 Martyrdom: This choice is simply because we will need to value our health more then hard removal, if this ends up to be the case still but I feel like more hard removal is needed I may drop Holy Immo completely since we can’t do the cheap drop->Immo like other decks and may add another Martyr and another Elyx
- 1 Z’ir, I can’t really see how this is bad. My idea is to follow the path of Hanlock and Z’ir is our Jaraxxus LORD OF THE BURNING LEGION (Sorry couldn’t resist) so ya.
- 2 Zen’Rui now this is more of a personal choice you could drop this and play more spells or even greedier minions but one problem I think you will find by not running Zen’Rui is that Songhai can pressure you faster then you can pressure them to slow down w/ out him. The ability to take control of a Lantern Fox or Prismatic Illusionist with him can tempo swing matches completely and help run them out of steam.
How do we play this deck? The idea of this deck is we use our spells early on and Regalia to pick up easy kills and slow the early match down, we normally won’t try to set up any sort of fancy ramp’s because we won’t need it so taking over the mana tiles just to deny your enemy them isn’t a bad option if you can’t deny them any other way. We want to be in a situation where we’re only playing really 1 spell per a turn, though as we get into the later game we may begin to make more tempo plays and play 2-3 cards. This is where Scientist kicks in w/ Argeon’s BBS to not only apply a 6/6 body on the field (Amazing stat line for a 6 drop) but also get us some draw power going. We will use our big bodies to take over the board and out value our enemy. Keeper will allow us to “rebirth” our big bulky minions and as you see in the deck list any minion is good to bring back so Vale is always value.
So what are your ideas to help improve this deck, will it be viable? Could Taura not even be needed for this deck to play out and just add in a 3rd IMMO and Matyr + 3rd Elyx and call it Hanar? I would love the feedback and I plan to try this out when Taura comes out. I’m super excited! Can’t wait to hear everyone’s opinion.
would love to see it work tho, i’m no expert so i cant give advice sorry.