We’ve designed the spiciest of spicy Druid decks for you today. This deck is built around just 1 key new card from Fractured in Alterac Valley, but it’s so completely core to the deck that this archetype simply could not have existed before. That card, my friends, is Capture Coldtooth Mine.
Jump right into the video to see some gameplay, or scroll further to see the decklist and card discussions!
Deck Code:
AAECAZICAo/kA+TuAw7kugPlugPmugPsugObzgPw1AOJ4AOK4AOK5AOK7QOvgASwgASHnwSwpQQA
At first glance, Capture Coldtooth Mine appears interesting but somewhat lackluster. But let’s start looking at it through the lens of deckbuilding constraints. We can control exactly what this card draws…so what do we want that payoff to be?
Ding ding ding! Lady Anacondra is the answer. Lady Anacondra is a proven combo card that lets people do insane things. But in the past, these insane things have often involved cards like Celestial Alignment and a bunch of super expensive spells. But we’ve made it work with only cards costing less than 6 mana!
Before we get to the actual nuts and bolts of the deck, we just wanted to mention Jerry Rig Carpenter. By playing Capture Coldtooth Mine as our only “Choose One” spell, we ensure that we have a full 5 copies of cards that put Lady Anacondra into our hand. With this much redundancy, this deck that looks like a one trick pony is actually extremely consistent at executing that trick.
Now we’re starting to get to the meat of the deck. Germination is the second key “expensive” card in the deck – yes, that does mean that we’re restricted to only including cards that cost three or less. Once Lady Anacondra is in play, the first copy of Germination only costs 2 mana, and any copies past that (as well as a lot of our card draw) is free.
These six random pump spells are purely combo pieces. They all cost 0 once we have a single Lady Anacondra in play, so we simply buff her as much as we can before copying her with Germination. It’s very common to have multiple copies of Lady Anacondra in play that have stats of 8/15 or bigger.
Imprisoned Satyr is one of the two key ways that this deck can set up for its combo turn. Since we have so much consistency in the ability to find Lady Anacondra in the early turns, you can almost always drop this on curve and be confident that it will reduce the cost of Anacondra to 1 on turn 5. Just make sure to play out the random extra copies of Jerry Rig Carpenter or the other copy of Imprisoned Satyr if you’re unlucky enough to draw them on turn 4 so that they don’t steal the buff. Once Anacondra costs 1, it’s trivially easy to be able to play your entire hand and have mana left over for whatever non-Nature card draw is in your hand.
Lightning Bloom is the second way that we go off with this deck. If we don’t find Imprisoned Satyr, we need 8 mana to combo off – 6 mana for Lady Anacondra and 2 mana for the first Germination. Lightning Bloom lets us go off on turn 5 with the coin or turn 6 without it. It is also quite easy to find both copies of Lightning Bloom – it turns out that both modes of Capture Coldtooth Mine are very relevant (which certainly makes Jerry Rig Carpenter even more of an MVP!).
Fungal Fortunes makes it so fun to go even bigger on a combo turn. It will be free after a Germination, and will usually chain you into more card draw and buffs. It’s important to note that you almost certainly do not want to cast Fungal Fortunes before you have drawn Lady Anacondra, as if you discard her the game is instantly over.
Solar Eclipse is an awesome glue card to include. When we have achieved a combo turn it gives us twice as many of our best effect – usually another Germination or going insane with Fungal Fortunes. In a pinch, it can also be combined around turn 4 with another card draw spell in order to dig deeper into the deck to enable our big turn.
Moonlit Guidance is the best of the card draw options available, even though it’s Arcane rather than a Nature spell. It can be used early just to discover a key card (oftentimes one of the 5 cards that find Lady Anacondra), or it can be played with 1 or 2 mana to spare and almost always generate additional value. Being able to create copies of card in the deck rather than just drawing them let us go even bigger on the turns where we have it all going according to plan.
Nature Studies is just an obvious staple for a lot of Druid decks, and the logic certainly still applies here. Sometimes you can be creative with the cost reduction and enable going off a bit earlier than you would otherwise, but mostly it is just included as a flexible discover that breaks even on mana. It can often discover cards that are already cards we are running in the deck and just serve as extra copies of those, but it also can find some super powerful late game cards if your army of Anacondras has encountered a worthy resistance (let’s be real though, that rarely happens!).
Lunar Eclipse is perhaps closer to the chopping block than any of the cards we’ve mentioned above, but it’s nice to be able to have an answer to something like an Irondeep Trogg that still lets us cast our card draw for that turn. This deck is loaded with 2-mana card draw spells, so counteracting some of that tempo loss can be helpful.
Guidance and Resizing Pouch are the remaining filler cards to get us to 30 cards. We’re really restricted by the mana cost at the top end, but these cards do a fine job at filling in the cracks. Don’t be afraid to Overload with Guidance even if the spells seem somewhat irrelevant – the turn after going off with Anacondra, mana becomes mostly irrelevant. Resizing Pouch is a card that gets better the more you study each mana cost, but some of the common uses include getting a 0 for a 60% chance at a Lightning Bloom (and 90% to have a consolation prize of Innervate), or just looking for a 2-cost card since this includes lots of card draw and random buff spells.
Mulliganing with this deck is not very difficult – we want to find Lady Anacondra as quickly as possible, and once we find her we want to find as many Germinations and card draw as possible. The cards that we for sure keep in our opener are Lady Anacondra, Imprisoned Satyr, Capture Coldtooth Mine, Jerry Rig Carpenter, and Moonlit Guidance. If we already have a way to find Lady Anacondra, our next priority is to find either Saytr or Lightning Bloom (though I’m not sure I would keep Lightning Bloom most of the time).
There are a few other cards that we’ve been considering or have tried and rejected, but the list is really tight due to the deckbuilding constraints. There are a few slots up for debate though, so here are some of those options.
Innervate was in the first version of this deck that we built, but once we realized that guaranteeing a draw of Lightning Bloom off of the “low” half of Capture Coldtooth Mine, our ability to go off quickly became much more consistent.
We also started off by playing Guess the Weight, but so many of our cards have the same mana cost due to the deckbuilding constraints that it was too often simply drawing 1 card.
Pathmaker could be interesting if we decide that the random spells from Guidance and Resizing Pouch are not strong enough to warrant an inclusion, but it’s probably too gimmicky. We also really don’t want to include too many minions, as they can make Imprisoned Satyr sequences much more awkward and get discarded to Fungal Fortunes.
That’s pretty much it – this is a short list compared to out other deck primers because there really is not much more you can add to this deck. It does what it does, and it does that thing very well.
If you think this deck sounds fun and want to check out some gameplay with the deck before spending any dust on it, be sure to check back soon for our video!
Off Meta Hearthstone 