Tools of the Trade - Pregaming
By Phil Cape

Before digging into his tournament report next week, Phil wanted to give you the lowdown on all the testing he and his friends put into the World Championship. Phil's group found two of the best decks in the tournament: here's how!

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Glenn Jones
Contributing Editor - WoW TCG and WoW Minis

Coverage Writer Extraordinaire
The War Wagon @ www.starcitywow.com
One Card at a Time @ www.wowtcg.com

Season 2 Feralas Realm Champion

As always, Cape always provides insight to the mind of a genius of the game.


That said, there is alot of lists, and alot of mage.

Indeed an interesting take on the warrior. My version plays enduring shout with adam, woodsie and arcanite dragonling, woodsie mainly for the lack of ability hate.

Good article phil.

I think everythign in your lists looks good, except the "for great honor" in your velindra list.  Didnt you find missing blizzard, dethvir, heartburn, etc really hurt?  The only "top notch" card it really hits is everlasting cold, and arguably spell suppression.

I am truely curious to see if eye of the storm is better or worse than your circle of blood.  It was something that was briefly discussed, but never tested extensively.

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Chris "Jedion" Reilkoff

1664869:

Good article phil.

I think everythign in your lists looks good, except the "for great honor" in your velindra list.  Didnt you find missing blizzard, dethvir, heartburn, etc really hurt?  The only "top notch" card it really hits is everlasting cold, and arguably spell suppression.

I am truely curious to see if eye of the storm is better or worse than your circle of blood.  It was something that was briefly discussed, but never tested extensively.

In the final list, we actually ran Undercity over Circle, which I think was the right call for sure. As to FGH, I'm pretty happy with pay 1, dig, choose an odd card, even if it does miss some good/important stuff. The problem, though, is that it missed way too often, and I do regret running it for that reason.

FWIW, one of the other changes we made after Phil wrote this was to drop Barbs for Wub's, which I was very happy with, but made FGH even worse.

1395285:

1664869:

Good article phil.

I think everythign in your lists looks good, except the "for great honor" in your velindra list.  Didnt you find missing blizzard, dethvir, heartburn, etc really hurt?  The only "top notch" card it really hits is everlasting cold, and arguably spell suppression.

I am truely curious to see if eye of the storm is better or worse than your circle of blood.  It was something that was briefly discussed, but never tested extensively.

In the final list, we actually ran Undercity over Circle, which I think was the right call for sure. As to FGH, I'm pretty happy with pay 1, dig, choose an odd card, even if it does miss some good/important stuff. The problem, though, is that it missed way too often, and I do regret running it for that reason.

FWIW, one of the other changes we made after Phil wrote this was to drop Barbs for Wub's, which I was very happy with, but made FGH even worse.

I ran cinni rolls in my side, so I felt running both it and undercity was overkill.  Would you rank velindras locations as Undercity > circle > eye?

Personally, i am not happy with "pay 1, dig, miss blizzard and dethvir".. From our testing, the mirror match came down to 3 cards.  Everlasting cold early.... dethvir mid game... blizzard late game..  Cards like mana ruby and spell suppression were honorable mentions.

We also cut our ice barbs for wubs, after realizing how good it is with the flip.

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Chris "Jedion" Reilkoff

We did the math and For Great Honor hit 7/8 times in the deck, which is pretty dang good (though I don't remember if that was before or after we flipped out ice barbs for wubs).  That said, I really wanted to cut it for something that hit 100% of the time and could find blizzard, but there was simply no *better* quest for the deck.
We also tested Tempest of Chaos a lot in the deck and found it to be a pretty incredible turn 3 play, and could often just win the game on its own... but it was just too inconsistent to make the final maindeck cut.

And Jedion, the other super important card for the matchup is spell suppression (why we ran 4 main).  The entire matchup is about getting more e-colds than the other person and then playing a blizzard and LoL'ing all your way to victory, so having 4xSS is super important to stop your opponent from doing that to you.  I would say it was just as  important as dethvir.

We were going to run cinnamon rolls in the sideboard until we went with undercity, and then we figures rolls would be overkill.  The biggest mistake of the deck was not playing 4x Spell Reflection. We really missed the boat on that. It would have been a beast in our deck and it's the one thing I regret...
I never missed taste of the arcana at Worlds. Though I would -never- cut it from the blue version, it's simply much better in blue than in red.

We tested a -lot- with agro blue mage, and found it *slightly* better in the mirror (and a lot better vs emek), but worse vs blue warlock and worse vs solo.  I expected there to be a lot more blue lock than there was, and a little bit more solo (though not a ton).  Our meta call was a little off based on the fact that the field was like 50% mage and only 25% warlock instead of like 30% of each.

I also kind of regret not playing the solo warrior deck :)   it was boggling to me that I ended up playing red mage rush while phil cape played solo warrior... It was such a cool deck, especially considering our opponents would likely make mistakes against it constantly.

Here was our final List:

Velindra Sepulchre

2 Dragonling
4 Archon
4 Sivandra
4 Dethvir
3 Johnny

4 Blizzard
4 E-cold
4 Mana Ruby
4 Brittilize
4 Heartburn
4 Spell Suppression

4 Wub's (mvp)

4 Rise and Be Recognized
4 Proving Grounds
4 For Great Honor
3 Undercity

SB:
3 Tempest of Chaos (probably should have been ice barbs)
3 XXX (don't ask, most worthless card ever, didn't test it at all. should have been Spell Reflection).
4 Munkin (lol at solo or rogue/shaman agro - can recur with Wubs).


One thing that is different about our list compared to the top 8 lists is that we run more quests AND more mana rubies... We were all about drawing cards and winning the war of attrition if it came down to it :P  that said, it's kind of impossible to win the mirror when they have spell reflection and you don't.

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For reference, Luke chen's top 8 deck = THe deck I played, except my side was 3 cinni rolls, 3 zalan ragewind, 1 spell suppression, 3 Whiteout staff.

I agree with all of you regarding not playing taste and still having people play around it.  Only in the very late rounds (when people started figuring it out) did I see people tapping completely out to play stuff.

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Chris "Jedion" Reilkoff

Also, for the record, Phil ended up playing the solo warior deck along with his RIW teammate Mike.
Mike went X-1. And Phil learned that playing solo warrior sucks when you get stuck in the losers bracket. he played vs like 5 rogues (the worst matchup for the deck) and didn't make day 2. Once you get stuck in the losers bracket, he just kept playing vs non-mage, non-warlock weird decks that have really good answers vs solo.

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1354190:

Also, for the record, Phil ended up playing the solo warior deck along with his RIW teammate Mike.
Mike went X-1. And Phil learned that playing solo warrior sucks when you get stuck in the losers bracket. he played vs like 5 rogues (the worst matchup for the deck) and didn't make day 2. Once you get stuck in the losers bracket, he just kept playing vs non-mage, non-warlock weird decks that have really good answers vs solo.

I bet he shat himself against some of those singaporian druid lists.  Whats worse for solo than druid having cyclone?... Druid having a cyclone on a stick :P

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Chris "Jedion" Reilkoff

Eh, i wasn't actually scared of the cyclone on a stick.  It costs a ton and its not like druid has any other way to keep me from just interrupting it.  Post board i have answers for it just like baton, and it doesnt really do any lasting damage to my board.

In short, it was not even top 5 best cards against me.

Oh, and this thread is awesome.  It's like an entire bonus article!  Ya'll don't know how lucky you are.

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Check out my Article Series "Tools of the Trade" here at wowtcg.com!

1326613:

Eh, i wasn't actually scared of the cyclone on a stick.  It costs a ton and its not like druid has any other way to keep me from just interrupting it.  Post board i have answers for it just like baton, and it doesnt really do any lasting damage to my board.

In short, it was not even top 5 best cards against me.

Oh, and this thread is awesome.  It's like an entire bonus article!  Ya'll don't know how lucky you are.

I know you have absolute poise, but it just seems liek druid has at least 10 main deck cards you NEED to interrupt (cyclone on a stick, utopia, battle mage baton)... 

While I was testing solo paladin only (which doesnt have the option to play demolish or absolute poise) i learned that both battle mage baton and the druid armor make you auto lose.  And utopia is a huge pain to play around.

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Chris "Jedion" Reilkoff

Utopia's not that bad.  Usually when they cast it you get to hit them with gorehowl the very next turn, even if you only have a keys.

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Check out my Article Series "Tools of the Trade" here at wowtcg.com!

The 3 cards that McArthur left off were Cromarius, and they were awesome for me all day. He is just a noob who clearly didn't know how to use them. :)

As to Undercity > Circle > Eye... I guess I'd agree with that, but I'm not sure Eye really competes with the other two if you aren't running Skeletor. And Circle could be the superior choice depending when you expect to face. We went with Undercity because it's much better in the mirror and vs. Emek.

1395285:

The 3 cards that McArthur left off were Cromarius, and they were awesome for me all day. He is just a noob who clearly didn't know how to use them. :)

As to Undercity > Circle > Eye... I guess I'd agree with that, but I'm not sure Eye really competes with the other two if you aren't running Skeletor. And Circle could be the superior choice depending when you expect to face. We went with Undercity because it's much better in the mirror and vs. Emek.

We ran eye so you can race opposing allies, enable johnny rotten, randomly get an extra damage out of everlasting cold, and exaust our own dethvir against ice lance.

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Chris "Jedion" Reilkoff