This is the Best Priest Deck I Can Build

(According to Hearthstone Deck Tracker)

I haven’t been happy with the gameplay in Hearthstone since the Shadow of the Badlands expansion dropped. While I’d been doing pretty well, I felt, in competitive standard hearthstone up until that point, I started losing a lot more games than I won as soon as the expansion dropped. Now, some of that was surely a skill issue, at least as far as understanding and mastering the new meta, but this felt different. It felt – feels, really – like everyone I played against suddenly had dramatically better cards than I do. This seemed to suggest that they had bought packs or a set of the new expansion with real-world money, and so had leap-frogged my abilities without actually getting better at playing the game. I’m trying to get back to winning more than I lose, but I want to do it in a free-to-play fashion.

In my last stream, I tried to get around this by building a Priest deck that would copy or steal cards from my opponents. I figured that, if their cards were better than mine, it just made sense to play with their cards. My results with this strategy were mixed to poor. I won the first three games I played with the new deck, but once I started streaming and recording, I went one-for-six for the rest of the night. That’s why I’m trying something different tonight.

I’ve been using the Hearthstone Deck Tracker app to show my deck and the cards my opponent has played when I stream. I recently noticed that inside the app itself is a box that says, “Find the best decks for your collection! Just start Hearthstone and open your collection.” That’s pretty on the nose for what I want to do, so tonight I’m trying that for the first time. Wait, no – that’s only half true. I’m trying it for the first time while I blog and plan the stream. Let’s call it the second time in the video.

I checked my in-game journal for today’s quests. Two of my daily quests depend on playing three or more Priest games, so I’m going to use the deck tracker to make the best Priest deck. Coincidentally, that’s also my favorite class to play, from a “fun” perspective, even though it might not be the most powerful. This is where things got a little bit tricky. The best deck I can build with my collection, according to the deck tracker, is an undead priest with a 42.5% win-rate. That supports my theory that Hearthstone gameplay is too dependent on having access to more and better cards, but I wasn’t about to give up.

I removed the filter that was limiting it to my collection and looked for a deck where I had most of the cards I needed and where the winning percentage was over 50%. That gave me some very solid contenders. Even better, the top deck on the list was also an undead priest deck, and was not altogether different from what I was playing before Badlands changed the meta. At this point, I noticed that each of these decks had, below the title, the cost in dust to craft the cards that were missing from my collection.

The 4th deck down the list had a 66% winning percentage and would only require 100 dust to craft the last card to build, but I did have some reservations. First off, I would be playing in the platinum bracket. I didn’t know if that 66% overall win rate would translate to a good winning percentage in that bracket. Second, with over 12,000 games seen by the deck tracker, it was the most commonly played deck on the list. On one hand, I like to play decks that are a little off-beat, but on the other hand, I also enjoy winning. I decided to go with it.

I’ll actually publish this now and go ahead and update it after I’ve played with the deck. In the unlikely event you see this in between – I’ll be back.

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Alright – I’m back and I’ve got great news. The deck and the stream went *almost* exactly to plan. There was a bit of a learning curve where I made some mistakes and how to use it, and while I started the Youtube stream as planned, the Twitch stream was waiting for a button press all the way through the first game. But here’s the thing – the deck performed exactly as promised. I won four out of six games, giving exactly a 66% win rate.

From here on out, the post might get a little bit rough as I try to put in a play-by-play from the transcript. Read on, or if you prefer, check out the video.