This Druid deck is an aggro-combo deck that is fully designed around casting a critical mass of cheap and free spells to take advantage of Guff Runetotem and Stormpike Quartermaster. Oracle of Elune can then double all of these buffs, letting us pump out a massive board all in one turn.
Jump right in to the video to see some gameplay with the deck, or keep scrolling to check out the decklist and discussions on the individual card choices, as well as some tips and tricks for winning with the deck!
Deck Code:
AAECAZICAorkA/vtAw6bzgPw1AOV4APR4QOP5AOt7APJ9QOB9wOE9wOsgASvgASunwTnpASApgQALet’s get into discussion of the individual card choices!
Stormpike Quartermaster is an unassuming neutral card from Fractured in Alterac Valley that actually inspired the creation of this blog. We love building around cards like this, and actually have exciting builds in several classes with this card. Druid lets us play a ton of free spells that add fast mana – letting us really go off all at once with the Quartermaster. Oracle of Elune is what puts us over the top – we can summon two Quartermasters at once, and then summon copies of whatever minion we’ve buffed huge in our hand.
Guff Runetotem gives us a third “spells matter” payoff to build around. There are a ton of cheap Nature spells in this deck already to power Stormpike Quartermaster, so Guff gives us just enough of this effect to reliably have access to it. Guff can be used in the midgame to provide a huge board that is difficult to deal with, or he can simply provide a ton of burst damage if you started the turn with a minion in play to finish off your opponent
Frostsaber Matriarch is another awesome new card from Fratured in Alterac Valley. Any time there are free spells or minions, we figure out how to abuse them. Umbral Owl is great in this deck, as it is trivial to make it free with how many cheap spells we are playing. Frostsaber Matriarch takes a bit more work to get down to 0 in this deck, since we are not just a low to the ground beast aggro deck. However, we have carefully chosen the right mix of cards to include in the deck that provide multiple beasts per card in order to ensure that it can consistently cost 2 or less. Having four free minions that have large base stats is incredible when we are going off with Quartermaster and Oracle of Elune, but they are also very efficient when we are trying to stabilize the board in the early to mid game.
We’ve mentioned Oracle of Elune a few times already, and it’s deserved because of how amazing she is. This deck really wouldn’t be worthwhile without this card. It is very easy to take over the board by just copying a few random cheap minions (including our big free minions), but when we “go off” with Quartermaster it becomes really insane. The Quartermaster gets doubled to two copies, and each of these doubled buffs goes into minions that will then be copied themselves – effectively giving us QUADRUPLE the value for each spell!
Jerry Rig Carpenter is an interesting card from United in Stormwind that we feel doesn’t get enough attention. Just having a 2-mana minion that draws a card is often an attractive effect in combo decks like this one, but the fact that it turns one card into two gives us some extra advantages. It turns out we like doubling things in this deck! Let’s take a look at the “Choose One” cards we’re running:
Sow the Soil is included as a cheap “Choose One” effect to make sure that Jerry Rig Carpenter consistently fetches value. Splitting Sow the Soil contributes to our plan of having a critical mass of cheap spells, and they’re even Nature spells for Guff. Having another 1-mana minion can be useful for building a board at certain points in the game, and buffing our entire team can help us add enough burst damage to end the game after sticking a large board.
Capture Coldtooth Mine is a super exciting card that we’ve built an entire different deck around, but here it serves as our third Choose One card to ensure that Jerry Rig Carpenter can consistently split something. Drawing a high cost card gives us one of the two 7-drop “free” minions and drawing a low cost card gives us a coin effect, so either way it can get fill in the pieces we need for a large combo turn.
Composting is just amazing card draw and a key reason why “token” style decks (including this one) have enough longevity to fight the long game when Plan A doesn’t work out. It’s quite easy to achieve a board of three or more minions along with two spare mana to cast Composting. Just be careful not to have too big of a board with minions that will draw cards compared to your hand size – burning cards can sometimes be a real concern with this deck!
Vibrant Squirrel is a staple in aggressive Druid decks just due to its raw power level, but it goes over the top in our Miracle Druid deck. We’re already planning to churn through cards in our deck, so this thing will pump out tons of minions for just a single mana. This can be great for generating beasts to reduce the cost of Frostsaber Matriarch and often gives us easy boards with which to get value from Composting. Between all of the ways we have to copy effects in this deck, it’s not all that rare to have a deck filled with 16+ acorns!
Moonlit Guidance and Guess the Weight give us plenty of card draw to get through our deck and find the combo pieces we need. Moonlit Guidance in particular feel great at any point in the game. It can either create an extra copy of a key card that you need based on the context of your hand, or it can simply create extra value. There are so many cheap cards in this deck that you will almost always be able to cast something useful immediately and draw the original copy. Guess the Weight is also very powerful here – we have a nice mix of costs including several on either end of the extra ends of the spectrum. Note that if you draw one of the four “free” minions, it will treat the value of the card as zero (or whatever it is currently) for the purposes of guessing the next card.
Look at these beautiful fast mana spells. Having access to so many copies of this effect is a large part of the reason that Druid has a leg up on this sort of “spells matter” strategy. You’ll generally want to wait as long as you can to play them on a turn that you are going off big, but they can also be quite useful at building a reasonable board for Composting if you need to dig deeper into the deck.
We became very excited about building this deck when we realized that the Druid card pool for Resizing Pouch at 0 mana is exactly 5 cards, and two of them are the fast mana spells that we are already playing. The odds of hitting either Innervate or Lightning Bloom are 90%. For the 10% of scenarios where you discover Pounce, Desk Imp, and Murloc Tinyfin, well it’s sad but at least you can still either get a free spell for Quartermaster or a free minion for a Composting board. In games that have gone longer where you don’t need a 0, you’ll gain an edge by studying which mana costs have the most useful effects that you want. Just be careful not to pick an expensive minion if you aren’t planning to cast it any time soon, as it will eat up a lot of the Quartermaster buffs that you would prefer to go towards something that will be copied with Oracle of Elune.
Last but definitely not least, Nature Studies is just an amazing card to have access to. It is effectively free on turns where we’re comboing off, but it’s also just incredible at any other point in the game. It is a huge contributer to being able to cast an Umbral Owl early, getting enough value off of an early mini Guff or Quartermaster turn, or just finding whatever late game card you need to seal it.
As with many combo decks that are built around certain cards, you should mulligan aggressively to optimize your winrate. We’re not just focused on curving out, we are trying to sculpt a master gameplan. The cards that we want to see and cast early are Vibrant Squirrel, Nature Studies, Jerry Rig Carpenter, Moonlit Guidance, and Guess the Weight. We are also often willing to keep Oracle of Elune and Guff simply on power level, and Composting if you have either Vibrant Squirrel or Jerry Rig Carpenter. The fast mana can sometimes be kept if you already have a nice hand that you know will be able to take advantage of it, but it’s more common to use them in the midgame (same as Stormpike Quartermaster).
A lot of times when we brew decks, it takes a while to hone in on the final 30 cards. Here are a few of the cards that we’ve tried or considered, or could see being useful in the deck if we continue to tweak it. They are also great replacements if you are a few dust short of crafting the deck as we’ve built it above!
Gibberling has such a high raw power level that it might be silly of us to not be including it. We did try it for several games, and had some nuts draws where we popped out a very early board full of 7 Gibberlings that would redraw us 6 cards with Composting. However, we’re not including enough AoE buffs to take full advantage of this card and we didn’t like the ineligance of including a minion that didn’t play well with Oracle of Elune. However, it’s powerful enough that we could see a modified version of this deck including it for sure.
Adorable Infestation seems like a perfect fit in this deck since it provides multiple beasts in one card, multiple small cheap bodies, and is a cheap spell. However, we found it slightly awkward in one too many playtesting games that we ended up trimming it to 1 copy and then cutting it. The 1/1 cub would sometimes steal Quartermaster buffs, but the biggest issue we ran into was the 1/1 cub taking up space on a big Elune turn where we needed enough board space to copy our 15/15 free minion.
Guidance is pretty good at contributing to the cheap spells plan and flexibility, but there are just so many good cards that we wanted to cram into the deck and Guidance is not always guaranteed to find a spell that contributes to our gameplan so it was eventually cut.
Thorngrowth Sentries actually performed quite well for us in some of the initial builds of this deck, but since we eventually settled on a version without AoE buffs it was cut.
Frostwolf Kennels provides a great rate of 3 beasts for 1 card, but we found it to be a bit too slow at 3 mana and delayed gratification.
Heart of the Wild is the best of the AoE buffs that we keep mentioning, but it felt like too tall of an order to make it work in this deck. It definitely has us interested in building a full Beast Druid deck though!
We originally thought that Jerry Rig Carpenter said “draw a Choose One card” and not “draw a Choose One spell” and were extremely disappointed when we realized that Druid of the Reef did not work with it. However, it is great at killing Irondeep Trogg and is a cheap beast so it is actually included in the version of the deck that we recorded a video with.
Thanks for reading! We hope that we’ve piqued your interest to try out a deck like this, as it’s not something we’ve ever seen anyone else playing.
Off Meta Hearthstone 