I am not sure if this is the correct forum/category. First, I am playing as a Pure Paladin running essentially the top used deck according to HSReplay minus the Lady Liadrin (Close to getting it) so to replace that, I just have a shotbot in there (maybe I should have something else but I am not sure what as I rarely draw shotbot anyways).
I have been playing with this setup for 42 games now and I am struggling with one specific deck which is the Aggro/Face hunter deck. I am 2-7 against the deck where the two I won were because I drew my Aldor Attendant + Hand of A’dal in the first two turns to really push out some of their minions right away and put them on their heels. For the 7 losses, I just couldn’t deal with the constant minion pressure and couldn’t draw any sort of taunt, Hand of A’dal to beef up my minions and sat for almost two turns doing nothing but using my hero power.
I can deal with most other aggro decks easily (haven’t played much besides a rogue/tons and tons of demon hunters) but for some reason I cannot handle the hunters. I am not sure if I play more that I will have better draws at some point or if this is just a thing I have to get use it.
TLDR; How do you deal with an aggro hunter that can constantly put out tons of minions as a Pure Paladin? Or is this some sort of hard counter?
Low cost minions, lots of heals and taunts, swords and other stuff that can just chuck out there. Other than that would perhaps need to branch out into neutral card territory.
How many taunts would be a lot of taunts? Currently I run 6 but they are 5 cost, 6, and 9 (if I don’t count Reducing cost of Libraems or however they are spelled). I could run more low cost minions. I have pretty balanced acrossed all costs for minions which might make it harder against the hunters.
What would a lot of heals mean as well? I’ve got two minions that give me weapons for healing as well as an 8 heal, 8/8 taunt (which I almost can never get to unless I make it past about turn 4). Maybe running some straight heals could help but with how my deck is built, removing something for a heal might make it detrimental and I would have to change up the whole deck.
If I can get past turn 4 relatively healthy, I can turn it around but it seems like I just can’t get there. To your point, I could try running a Broom Paladin or maybe Murloc Paladin but I am fairly new (started Tuesday and went from rank 40-12 now) so it takes a long time to get the cards. It sounds like this hunter deck is almost too fast for my Pure Paladin atm so losses will be abundant against it.
It’s a cheap deck that is very effective against aggro/face hunter.
Not only can you match their damage, you also have board clears and residual healing tacked into your kit through soul fragments/warblades.
Alternatively, if you enjoy Paladin then you might try ‘Broom Paladin’ which is much more effective against early aggro decks.
You can find the deck-list here: https://hsreplay.net/decks/ui5yuomuRj1mCoDyWRZ4Zb/
Although the Broom variant requires Lady Liadrin as the win-con. There’s no real replacement.
Pure Paladin just doesn’t have reliable ways to contest the board early if they don’t get their early drops. If you lose the board early, it’s just very hard to get it back against hunter’s. It also suffers from lack of card draw.
Side note: Broom Paladin is also favored against Pure Paladin builds once you get the hang of it.
It’s simply the better of the two meta Paladin builds imo.
Paladin usually doesn’t struggle against face hunter unless they have a nuts hand, with early board pressure from first day of school/aldor attendant/hand of adal/libram into truthseekers and devout pupils they can hardly do anything. Also if you have just one libram of hope in hand that often wins you the game cus they can’t deal with the healing and large taunt. I’m not sure of libroom or pure run consecration already, but you could tech that in also as it deals with a lot of their 1-2 drops
That seems the problem with pure paladin they don’t seem to have a lot of early game taunts, that’s where need to look at neutral cards. But if you try specialise against just one class too much then would do badly against many of the other ones.
Strange also talking about just making it to turn 4 but that seems just how bad things are right now against these high aggro decks.
Pharaoh’s blessing might be useful, but that is high cost 6 mana. Also hunter trap destroy minion can mess that up. Kharkut seems good amongst the neutral cards, just don’t attack with it unless sure because of hunter freezing trap.
A large portion of Paladin’s power counts on you getting libram discounts as fast as possible.
The problem is, Pure paladin doesn’t have easy and reliable ways to get the right cards in their hand at the right time (unless they start with all of them, not likely).
Dropping a Libram of Hope on turn 6 is much better than dropping it on turn 9 because you are likely dead by 9 against face hunter.
To do that, it requires a lot of discounts that you probably didn’t get because you have very little card draw in the Pure archetype.
With Broom paladin you can contest the board with brooms and clears while simultaneously discounting all of your libram spells to very cheap.
It’s not uncommon for me to drop the 6 mana taunt for 0 mana most games I play (by spamming 0 mana librams of wisdom early).
The reason being, I can tutor out all of the low end cards with Salhet’s pride and Loot hoarder’s.
Doing this thins the deck and makes it very likely that I have only my top end/essential cards left and they are all ridiculously cheap quite early.
So, face hunter is a very easy matchup as a result.
P.s.
With broom, it is very easy to defuse any hunter secrets played and even use freezing trap/pressure plate to your own advantage (i.e return battle-cry minions back to your hand or activate your barov).
Face hunter is built to stick it to mid-range-y decks - it’s literally filled with threats and answers that counter most of the stuff associated with the mid-range archetype.
Board of small-to-mid size minions? Check.
Able to ignore non-taunts? Check.
Able to counter singular minions? Check.
Ends games before the board state can be turned? Check.
Snowballs early tempo like mad? Check.
Wow, thank you for all of the replies. Still trying to learn all of the deck archetypes and all of the in class archetypes (Feels similar to when I played Yugioh and how fast some of the archetypes were).
For the most part, I dominate games against mages but priests I am struggling a bit (stealing my murgu murgurgle sucks hard and copying libram of hope). For a while, I am just going to be taking losses against the face hunter it seams.
Broom Paladin sounds incredibly fun, it will just take me a long time to get there (just got Lady so that’s awesome). Although, I was going to try Bomb Warrior next. It just sounds fun. Essentially I have disenchanted all of my cards to get my Pure Paladin deck running. I chose Pure Paladin based on Win rate vs how many games so I could have the best shot at rising up as high as possible. It’s sporting a 57% on HSReplay at 192,000 games which allowed me to reach 62% win rate with around 60 games so far.
I am going to definitely look at Broom Paladin and see how it plays to see if I want to transition to that (since it’s only 3% behind in win rate) or try out Bomb Warrior for fun.
Not wanting to burst your bubble but Libroom Paladin has a worse matchup than Pure Paladin vs Face Hunter according to VS. By the way, matchup should be pretty even.
Things I’d look at:
how you mulligan. I swear most of the replays I see of people struggling in the game amount to bad mulligans. Too often players settle for mediocre option, or, worse, settle for the comeback tools when they should go for the proactive plays.
holding too much to resources (a.k.a. greed). Example: not playing First day of School on turn 1 because you want to save it for, say, an Alura turn. Now, there are matchups where this makes sense, but specifically against Face Hunter your top priority is to not get behind on board, to contest what they play and stall them until the big taunts/heals hit.
efficient use of ressources. You probably figured it out already, but always good to remember that using Hero Power is almost always the worst play, for instance, putting a 1 mana minion and leaving 1 mana unused is usually better. One of the only cases when you want to HP as Paladin is to add something to a board that is already threatening without committing more cards to play around AoE (and even then, it’s not always the best play, like, for instance, against Brawl).
But overall the easier for you to get relevant help would be you posting a replay of a game you played vs Face Hunter.
On a side note, I’d tell you that disenchanting all your cards to make one deck is a pretty bad idea - you’ll be left with nothing if a key card gets nerfed or if the deck can’t compete when the next expansion hits (in ~2 months).
hsreplay(dot)net/replay/w523TP2sZzKMXPjZFbhYMN - I think I missed an opportunity to remove a card but this one felt like it was over from the first hand. I may needed to keep one hand of A’Dal for that one since it limited my draws.
hsreplay(dot)net/replay/vp4p6epMaFzhmszTDhiW7D - I could have limited 4 damage on this one which would have allowed me to survive one more round. That was dumb of me.
(They wouldn’t let me added hyperlinks to the post so I had to change it).
After watching these replays (I like to play a lot before going over them), I think I get overwhelmed when I go against a hunter and just don’t think, a lot of them I actually miss things like removing a minion instead of attacking their face etc. I am thinking that I always need consecration which is just not the case. I need to understand that I need to survive as long as possible against this deck to get some better cards out.
As for disenchanting, I am going to work towards getting cards still doing some solos and such so I won’t be completely out of it but I guess I didn’t realize that when creating the deck.
For healing I like the dragon that heals for an instant 8hp. Can attack with it and if it triggers hunter freezing trap then the dragon gets returned straight back to hand. Can then replay the dragon on the next turn or two for another instant 8hp heal.
The longer the match goes the more the hunter turns into a knife in a gun fight. If you play to limit his chances to damage you with smart trades and choices, it turns in your favor.
It is not always possible, but that is the strategy for the most part.
