A Guide To The Top Decks In Professional Hearthstone – Week 2 – Patron Warrior

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Week 2 of the review of the top decks that appear in the professional Hearthstone tournaments. This week will be reviewing the Grim Patron Warrior. So… “EVERYONE… GET IN HERE…”

Grim Patron

Top Decks 2 - Deck List

With the introduction of Grim Patron in the recent Black Rock expansion, it could be said that Grim Patron Warrior is a new beast to the professional scene, but behind the Grim Patron itself the core mechanics surrounding the premise of a combo Warrior have been there for some time, particularly pre nerf Warsong Commander.

Unlike last week’s Handlock, where we could associate it with a Pro player, Grim Patron has been so heavily used in the last few months meta, in some ways, it’s easier to list the pro’s that aren’t using it. However, if you want to look up some unique plays, look up Reynad playing in the Season 2 ESL Finals and his experience with the Grim Patron Deck.

Top Decks 2 - Warsong and PAtron

Patron Warrior focuses around a core combo, using the interaction of Warsong Commander and Grim Patron. Since the nerf, Warsong Commander now only gives charge to minions with 3 or less attack, which, when a new Patron is spawned from the activation on the Grim Patron ability, subsequently gives it Charge.

By using Whirlwind effects, (Whirlwind itself, Death’s Bite deathrattle effect, Unstable Ghoul – although not listed in the decklist above, however, features in variants of this deck) you can spawn multiple charging Grim Patrons that can both set up a huge board presence removing op    ponents minions and often pull of OTK kills, particularly when combined with the other big part of the combo, Frothing Berserker.

The deck uses aggressive card draw, using Acolyte and the Cantrip effects of Slam and Gnomish Inventor to draw through the deck quickly to build into the combo pieces.

The combo itself is also heavily helped with the other recent addition from the Black Rock expansion Emperor Thaurissan. A single tick of Thaurissan is incredibly powerful within this deck, dropping Whirlwind to zero mana and making huge combos easy to play. Two ticks of Thaurissan if your opponent can’t remove it is game changing.

Early game is a combination of factors, focusing on weapon use for smart creature removal, hero power for armour creation and using the card draw to rip through the deck into the combo.

One of the strongest aspects about this deck is it has strong match ups against most decks due to the very nature of its combo, however, there are some decks it is weaker against. Last week’s Handlock Deck is a difficult beast to tackle, which has seen the introduction of a single BGH into the deck in recent weeks. Its large taunted creatures combined with massive AOE board clears makes it hard to beat.

Equally, the other popular Warrior list in the meta, the Control Warrior list is hard to get to grips with and worse still, on ladder particularly, the rise in the use of Acidic Swamp Ooze and Harrison Jones to reduce the effectiveness of Death’s Bite.

Top Decks 2 - Harrison and Axe

The decklist does have some variants floating around with other popular cards being the aforementioned Unstable Ghoul and Dread Corsair. Another card which gets a lot of discussion is Grommash, but it can be particularly strong against the Handlock and Control Warrior and that’s why it’s seeing play in the current variants of the list.

Patron is a particularly fun deck to play, though a difficult beast to master. It’s also not particularly expensive dust wise to get the basics of the deck together. So if you want to join in with the pro’s and get a combo deck flowing, give this one a try…

Until next time… “PILE ON”

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Daniel McHugh

When not dressed up as his favourite cosplay Daniel McHugh likes nothing more than dropping Dr Balanced in the hope the Boom Bots RNG falls heavily in his favour. Outside of that, esports, his beautiful fiance Rebecka and his two children (in that order) fill his life with fun and frolics.

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