I crafted all related cards yesterday and had some runs myself. Overall, the experience was okay, but plagues are only efficient counter to decks that draw excessively. Even with Helya, plagues are still not that good. And drawing her on your starting hand is not that easy, not to mention that everybody is running steam cleaner or generating excessive amounts of health or armor. Fun archetype, though. Any tips?
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Plan around not giving a damn about the plagues, and just fight for board control. Seen some people do the egg + yodeler for some fat boards, but also running plagues.
7 Likes
Its still pretty bad though.
I would love to see some DK cards based around Plagues that trigger based off the total number or the number of a specific type in deck. Make shuffling them in have a meaning.
1 Like
I also gave that version a try, but it’s out of steam and very fragile to board silences (priest).
UUB versions lack the burst, so…
Also depends on what version of DK plague you are playing.
If you are playing a version that feels more like unholy aggro, you are not planning for a long game, you won’t have much payoff from plagues and may run out of gas.
If you play a version that is more control/value, you can more easily sustain while the plagues are slowly chopping your opponent. The only real thing you want to rely on plagues on for the early turns is the aoe minion that consumes a plague, but for the rest you should mostly ignore the fact that plagues exist and just focus on the board.
We have the giant that got discounted but that’s it. But I’d hate cards that count specific plague types. You don’t chose what plague goes in your opponent deck, so if they don’t exactly get the good number of a specific plague you’re screwed. I think that would be way too RNG dependant.
But other support cards that just check the total amount of plagues shuffled or even other cards that consume them sure. I’m actually surprised we only have 2 plague lover cards in the game.
2 Likes
The only time i ever won with plagues was when i wasnt even playing a plague dk deck.
Every time you “shuffle” a plague you are shuffling their deck. You can disrupt a dredge for sure but the amount of times ive shuffled 10-20 plagues and my opponent never chain drew them was frustrating so i stopped playing the deck with JUST plagues in mind
As someone said above the best versions are basically zoo with plagues as extra win more cards
2 Likes
Imo, if you want to play with the plagues, UUU doesn’t make a lot of sense. With a UUU package you really just want to play for a big board and hit your opponent. The plagues aren’t really doing much to your game plan other than an occassional extra zombi on your side of the board. You will run out of steam and lose the longer matchups anyway; so might as well just go for a fully classic UUU deck without any plagues at all. You’ll probably win significantly more.
UUB is the way for plagues imo. You want to control the board and focus on disrupting your opponent while fattening up their deck with plagues. Still not a really good deck but blood is the only shell where it makes sense running plagues imo. Running them in any other game plan is just counterproductive. I think the concept of plagues can only make sense in a control deck such as BBB. I bet they went for the UU runes because they knew people are fed up of Blood and it would become far too toxic.
3 Likes
I think they need to increase the dmg to plagues by 1. But that’s just me.
I think they specifically avoided this. They want deckbuilding flexibility where the ideal isn’t just to stuff the deck full of every plague card.
Like Chained Guardian has a cap and isn’t that strong even if you get him to 0.
I think the deck could use another payoff card like Tomb Traitor maybe. Something with a lot of tempo. But I doubt they print more plague cards.
Re: OP
There’s now like a UUB deck with plagues that I think is popular. That lets you slot in Patchwerk and Gnome Muncher which are both pretty good in the current meta. That’s more of a midrange deck.
There’s also 3U Plague, which is an aggro deck that just runs the plagues for the chance of them drawing frost/unholy plague to disrupt them and gain tempo.
UUF actually got buffed with the rune changes. It’s not terrific, but there’s like a control deck with Sindragosa, the plague package, renathal, grimewalker (alongside Army, Darkfallen Shadow, tour guide). It’s really bad vs. Warrior, though.
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Hey, a lot of decks struggle with warrior. Not really a downfall of a deck to fail to deal with them.
I can’t agree with this. The point of plagues should be twofold. First: the plagues themselves are a counter to draw heavy decks. But they also serve as enablers for the two payoffs. Tomb traitor and chained guardian are extremely powerful cards. People just haven’t found the correct package to leverage them. But I’ve come really close to perfecting my lists and I’m confident that a small but curated deathrattle package is the way to go. I’ve been playing with two similar lists. One is FUU, the other is UUU. And I can honestly say I think the FUU list performs better. Here is my FUU list.
2x (1) Death Growl
2x (1) Foul Egg
2x (1) Staff of the Primus
2x (2) Distressed Kvaldir
2x (2) Down with the Ship
2x (3) Acolyte of Death
2x (3) Chillfallen Baron
2x (3) Howling Blast
2x (3) Ravenous Kraken
1x (4) Helya
1x (4) Thassarian
2x (4) Tomb Traitor
2x (4) Yelling Yodeler
2x (5) Infectious Ghoul
1x (8) Cage Head
1x (8) The Primus
2x (11) Chained GuardianAAECAa2aBgTLpQWBwwWT+wXt/wUN7eME2fEEh/YEuJgFoJkF88gF8OgF9fcFgvgF8vgFu/kF6/8F+IIGAAA=
My only changes to the UUU list are
-2 Acolyte of Death
-2 Howling Blast
-1 Thassarian
+2 Famished Fool
+2 School Teacher
+1 Lord Marrowgar
The list is intricate and there are far more comboes and lines of play than you probably see at first. The death growl, kraken, and yoedeler package are core enablers for many lines of play. You can use them to get an early board with the foul egg, draw with chillfallen baron, combo them with Thassarian to get a sticky mid game board by duplicating his body or effect half a dozen times, combo them with infectious ghoul to generate 12-14 neverending beatsticks (VERY effective against earthen paladin, and surprisingly good against warrior), you can combo them with cage head to create a turn of 4 charging piggys that do 36 face damage in a turn (kills renethal dead without armor)
And my personal favorite against warrior… on turn 9 you go zero mana chained guardian into Ravenous Kraken on the guardian, then yoedeler the kraken, then death growl the kraken. If you position them all correctly you’ll get 3 or 4 fully enabled chained guardians on board and when the warrior brawls or clears you get 4 more immediately after. I have never failed to kill a warrior outright on the next turn after that play if he didn’t already have a pre played odyn ahead of time and ended up OTKing me first.
Death growl, Foul Egg, Chillfallen Baron, Ravenous Kraken, Yelling Yoedeler, Thassarian, Infectious Ghoul, and Cage head. THESE are the core cards that make the plague package sing. UUU uses famished fool and school teacher discovers for draw alongside baron, but FUU has acolyte of death. When used correctly acolyte of death can easily draw 5-10 cards and is vastly superior to the fool.
Bonus points for you if you noticed that in my FUU list howling blast can go face and delay an odyn or Ignis swing by a turn or two (also great against hunter wyrms and paladin 1/1’s). And that if you combo it with The Primus’s runes of frost you get an 8 mana combo that fireballs the enemy face (and freezes it) while flamestriking their board. This is my perfect 30. It takes a fair bit of practice to master this list. But if you really get the hang of it it can pull off some amazing stuff.
4 Likes
Wow that’s a very interesting list. I’ll try your UF list after druid is annihilated from the meta.
All plague lists just roll over immediately to drum Druid. So just accept that loss and move on. You cannot tech to fix a drum circle blowout turn so don’t make the list worse trying to.
However, if the Druid is miracle and draw heavy you can often win. Against draw you combo death growl, kraken, and yoedeler with distressed kvaldir to rapidly accelerate plague generation and chained guardian discounts. If you couple that with helya on 4 you can easily jam up their deck. Frost plagues hurt miracle draw BAD, and Druid cannot handle a board of 4 or 5 repeating infectious ghouls. Prison breaker and yogg both cannot remove that so long as the ghouls have a body to transfer too. Foul egg is often not killed, so if a foul egg is onboard the ghouls become immortal. THAT Druid is very winnable.
we have the 4 mana 3 damage aoe too
One of two things will happen with plagues:
-
They will get the Relic treatment and soon become a solid deck
-
It will be a niche mechanic the devs will do nothing more with in the future
I had a run and it’s quite fun. Sindragosa is considerable. You need some bodies for DR to spread? Maybe put the other egg in, too.
Replay (funny I actually made x4 boars):
https://hsreplay.net/replay/6S7LsUY5MaUHurqv6Z6H58
Experimental list:
UUF
Class: Death Knight
Format: Standard
Year of the Wolf
2x (1) Death Growl
2x (1) Foul Egg
2x (1) Staff of the Primus
2x (2) Distressed Kvaldir
2x (2) Down with the Ship
1x (3) Acolyte of Death
2x (3) Chillfallen Baron
2x (3) Ravenous Kraken
1x (4) Helya
1x (4) Malignant Horror
1x (4) Thassarian
2x (4) Tomb Traitor
2x (4) Yelling Yodeler
1x (5) Army of the Dead
2x (5) Infectious Ghoul
1x (5) Magatha, Bane of Music
1x (8) Cage Head
1x (8) The Primus
2x (11) Chained Guardian
AAECAe2qBgiQ5ATZ8QSZgQXLpQWBwwXm5AWT+wXt/wULh/YEuJgFoJkF88gF8OgF9fcFgvgF8vgFu/kF6/8F+IIGAAA=
To use this deck, copy it to your clipboard and create a new deck in Hearthstone
I tried your list but the number of times you end up holding your Deathrattle synergies with no Deathra ttles to activate was frustrating. And Infectious Ghoul needing a board already present was a tough ask, too.
I feel like if this deck started at 3 or 4 mana it would be awesome. And forcing a full board of staggered Infectious Ghouls is great against Warrior, Warlock, and the odd Blood DK.
I did exactly this yesterday with a similar deck. It was nasty.
I’ve thought about her as well, but I’m not sold she’s a good add. The colossal is a turn 7 play that basically removes two things and gives you a 6/6. That’s an ok play, but it doesn’t feel impactful enough to me. Sindragosa is literally “worse crabatoa”, and not just a little bit worse, but a lot worse. There is no synergy that allows you to freeze an entire board of minions on the turn you drop her. The only notable minion freezes are howling blast, which only freezes a single minion (the AoE ping doesn’t freeze so there’s no synergy) and rimescale siren, which doesn’t combo until turn 10. Siren is such a terribly weak card on its own that drawing it just makes you lose games, and a turn 10 combo is far too late to matter when most decks do their thing earlier. Druid, paladin, warrior, mage, hunter etc etc… all do the thing they do by turns 6-8. So sindragosa really has no place in the list IMO.
I tried your list but the number of times you end up holding your Deathrattle synergies with no Deathra ttles to activate was frustrating.
It takes some getting used to with the mulligan, and it’s often right to not hoard them. Bad draws happen with every deck though. I’ve been refining this list for a while now and this is as close as I’ve come to something that feels really workable.
I did exactly this yesterday with a similar deck. It was nasty.
Yeah, I think there’s room for the deck to grow. You guys have to realize that this is the first expansion plagues are out and as new expansions release more stuff will become available to play with. Also keep in mind that plagues will be around all of next year, and when april’s rotation happens prince renethal is GONE, and steamcleaner also gets the boot. Those two cards are really oppressive to the plagues themselves, since plagues are better against 30 card decks than 40 card lists. Right now you have to build the deck with a bigger game plan in mind, but next year I promise you people will be complaining about drawing the actual plagues.
The deck WILL eventually become relevant. Just give it time.
1 Like