I underestimated jailor

Multiplayer Discussion
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Looks like I was wrong along with many people including this forum that thought jailor is weak.

I’ve been experimenting with him in ramp druid as an alternative win condition (assuming my sure gets stolen) and holy crap is he strong.

I’ve won more games thanks to him than sire in ramp druid, sire is a constant target for Theotar so it’s hard to consistently get him off.

Of course doesn’t work as well vs certain priest and mage decks, but overall it’s a very strong card. Been on a tear ever since I started using him.

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With 20 mana availables, any 10 mana card could see play, it’s amazing :joy:
If tyrantus was standard it could probably be included in the main deck just to flex.

I honestly only saw it in wild druid (the one with infinite jades) and paladin; but not recently.

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It was also pretty good as a win con in Paladin, though that ultimately succumbed to the fact that it was a Paladin deck.

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It would be perfect for Pally if it wasn’t so dang slow. I’m curious to toy with it next expansion though.

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Like I said in another thread, Paladin with Jailer is actually good and many people don’t have an answer for him.

I play mill druid jailer bolf in wild and ripped through the ranks easily. They have to answer mill, or infinite jade, or immune bolf. 3 win conditions. Often, they can’t answer all them.

He is going in my upcoming dk deck.

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Y’know, Jailer really doesn’t sound too bad as a win con for Triple Blood. You can fatigue for a while at 60 health. Fair amount of Lifesteal available.

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Also helps a lot that Jailor is a soft-counter to Sire, if you have enough minions with enough health on the board due to the interaction with Sire wasting a lot of damage on the immune minions. Part of the reason he is so good; druid can create pretty massive minions with devourers, and pretty much hard counter Sire along with creating a sticky 20/20+ minion.

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Jailor is pretty good at 1 mana in a class that has 20. Who would have thougt?

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I experimented with celestial alignment. It’s obvious a really good card for slow match-ups as it allows you to pop off insane combos in one turn.

However, you sacrifice far too much in the more aggressive match-ups, to the point where you likely don’t have a single turn in which getting an alignment off makes sense.

If the meta is extremely slow, alignment is a good card, but it’s not good enough to warrant putting in ramp druid IMO, there are too many downsides with the 3 cards you have to run (minion + 2 alignments), whereas you can replace these with much needed early aggression combating tools like druid of the reef + anyother card of your choice.

Also Okani or secrets after a alignment is a huge pain to deal with, likely you lose two turns instead of 1.

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Not really. You can alignment behind a plaguewall knowing next turn you have crap like anacondra and nourish and whatever else you wanna do for free like miracle growth, armor, more taunts whatnot to plop down get mana back up and get to your infused devourers to mop up the board and gain a million armor.

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I mean I played tens of games with alignment at legend and I can tell you the number of times I shot myself in the foot with that card is much higher than the number of times that card led me to a victory, it’s that simple.

Overall, Okani + secrets are the major issue at legend. Okani is run in a lot of mid-range like decks (like hunter), and secrets come up in various scenarios (most notably in thief rogue.) If these come down the following turn, its pretty impossible to deal with, without a really good hand that allows you to bait out the okani or secret. And losing 2 turns is enough to lose you the game at legend typically.

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@yellowvvsnovv could you please elaborate? I have never played Jailer and so would highly appreciate it. I have really no clue how to use Jailer.

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Sure.

Jailor use will differ from MU to MU.

I’m using him in ramp druid, so the main idea behind him is to get a good hand, playing defensively.

Typically you want both devourers, Brann, sire, jailor, both earthen scales saved in hand, and maybe Sylvanus.

Everything else, use up to stay alive, use all of onyxia plus scales plus spreading plague.

Then there are typically two options as ramp druid to win, either you can otk with sire, and if not then drop jailer plus use devourers to create 40 plus worth of stats minion, use both earthen scales and you will be at 40 to 80 health, then just pummel face lol. The devourers are your main means of damage plus being able to clear minions so use them wisely.

Obviously if you can just otk with sire, but since your opponent will be expecting it, they will be throwing everything at you you to stop it.

Also helps a tonne that once you got jailor plus a big devourer on board you are pretty much safe from a sire otk yourself.

Also if you plan to win via jailor, try to drop your sire after you drop jailer, he is a much bigger threat then.

Note this approach has major weakness versus one or two spells, mass polymorph is very bad for you and so is the priest vortex spell, thankfully they aren’t run much in the meta but if they are those spells hard counter jailor. In those cases you have to rely on sire to win, which thankfully is not that hard in those mu.

Good luck. Remember once you drop jailor your deck is gone so make sure you either use up as many resources from your deck as possible or have high confidence you have enough in hand to kill your opponent.

As a rule of thumb I would not drop jailor without at least sire and one devourer on hand and I’d want at least one earthen scale at the very minimum.

Jailor is very strong vs any MU that doesn’t have ability to freeze or clear the minions, so it’s strong vs everything except:

  • EFFECTIVE SOMETIMES against some priest decks with vortex
  • EFFECTIVE RARELY most mage decks due to: rune, freeze, mass polymorph
  • EFFECTIVE SOMETIMES vs thief rogue due to their ability to discover removal

the above three decks I wouldn’t recommend going all in with jailor against. Pretty much every other deck is fair game though. With thief rogue, if they haven’t discovered a removal you are good, so its a total coin toss.

Also, Jailer is an excellent hail-mary card. If you got nothing better to play and you can see the game slipping away from you you can sometimes just plant him down followed by a sire or devourer and win on the spot. I’ve had several games where my sire was stolen and this is what I did and I ended up winning. I don’t even run Theotar anymore due to most decks not being able to consistently steal both Jailor & Sire.

To give you an idea of how I’m doing with him, I hit legend about two days (using a homebrew vandar rogue build) into this month, played a bit at high legend then didn’t play for a long time (several weeks.) I logged on occasionally to experiment with Vandar rogue builds but they all kind of sucked with the shifting meta, so my rating dropped to 4k+ legend due to all the experimentation and lack of play for most of the month.

REcently, I decided I wanted to try to tune ramp druid, so I’ve been trying different variants (gave the VS alignment druid a solid try) but my rank kept slipping futher into the 4000s.

Once I started running jailor my win-rate went to like 75%+, and now I’m quickly approaching <1k legend again lol. Just today I believe I’m like 12-2. Pretty funny how that works.

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Bingo. That’s the main use really. They have a big fat Denathrius and jailer soaks up tons of damage.

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Can you Devourer the immune minions if your opponent drops the Jailer?

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No, Jailer makes minions unable to be targeted by Devourer. Immune minions can only be destroyed by non-targeted means

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Jailer is still susceptible to paladin secrets though, I found today. That 10/10 becomes a 1/1, and swapping the highest/lowest attack works. Destroy works from the Damage of 3 or higher secret. Immune to damage I guess doesn’t mean immune to being altered. I managed to win on the strength of paladin secrets.

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Nope, a common mistake by nearly everyone I face. They try to devour it or Sylvanas it. They see it can’t target it so they play it anyway thinking it will just randomly target it. They do nothing at all.

Quite hilarious to see the concede happen quickly after that happens.