Wild: how do you deal with Mecha'thun Warlock?

As per title.

The deck seems to have everything: cycle, healing, mana cheat, broken removals.

Not unbeatable, but virtually flawless. It can't kill you by turn-6 as Sniplock could, but it can realiably survive long enough to just OTK you later.

Dirty Rat is too much of an highroll tbh, Aggro and Burn seem too unreliable. The window to kill them seems very narrow, to the point i typically feel hopeless against their ruthless cycling (historically, decks with so much cycle used to die in few turns while trying).

Am i just seeing the empty glass?

Dirty rat aint the only disrupting card. Deathlord serves double purpose. Good vs aggro good vs combo. New beast for hunter. Albatross can delay as well  but mostly if u play a control anti aghro deck ur bot winning. U need to be pro active play around the removal too

I'm trying Unseen Saboteur rn. Since there's Bloodbloom and Cataclysm I thought I give it a try. There's also a Chance of hitting The Soularium. But, ... its not that good if you ain't drawing that Card and they play Hemet on 6.

Also thought it could be a potential Counter to Wild Quest-Mage, but thus far I hadn't any Luck with it. Cuz, ya know... they're whole damn Hand IS NOTHING BUT RANDOM SPELLS!

throw albatross when he's about to combo it slows him down, if you're aggro that's good against reno too

I’ve been playing it in Wild and the deck that consistently beats me is Secret mage. Also a quest shaman with double battle cry dirty rat and death lords beat me and it seemed with the heavy tech in his deck still had other options.

sometimes the game is over by turn 10 when I get the combo off. I think the key is to go face and not trade. Caveat this is in ranks 14-11.

Kill him before he kills you.

Quote From DelkoHS

Kill him before he kills you.

Exactly, but if you can't Zihi can help you to achieve that, you should have enough time to draw her.

Quote From DelkoHS

Kill him before he kills you.

This, really. Haven't had much trouble against them with galakrond warrior. They don't have as much heal as you think. Playing around defile and plague is key though.

Quote From doingtheobvious

Mass Dispel or Plague of Murlocs. And hope they don't already have a mech on board for the OTK.

e: also, prayer and/or sacrificing a live chicken to C'thulhu. Couldn't hurt?

It's not snisnaplock. The nerfs deleted that deck.

Quote From HighVoltagez

I’ve been playing it in Wild and the deck that consistently beats me is Secret mage. Also a quest shaman with double battle cry dirty rat and death lords beat me and it seemed with the heavy tech in his deck still had other options.

sometimes the game is over by turn 10 when I get the combo off. I think the key is to go face and not trade. Caveat this is in ranks 14-11.

I second Secret Mage - a well-timed Potion of Polymorph has frustrated many OTK decks for me...

Amused at the Secret Mage suggestion - that's a skill matchup. At lower ranks Secret Mage is heavily favoured, but the higher you go the better the Mech'thun deck does. When I was spamming Mech'thun games for my Wild Legend, I was always very happy to see Jaina pop up because it was highly likely to be a win.

Re: thread - as a Mech'thun player, I would honestly say that the answer is a well timed Dirty Rat. Don't just throw it out whenever, that's not going to get you anywhere. Drop it after Thaurissan's hit the board (which is your best read that Mech'thun's in hand) or wait til they're almost decked out. Even if you're actively playing around Rat it's difficult to keep that many minions in hand, five at most - and frankly most people aren't smart enough to play around Rat intentionally anyway until you start hitting ~3-L. Even if you assume five minions in hand, dropping two Rats gives you a 40% chance to pull the Mech'thun, at which point the game is essentially won (unless you're playing them late and can't clear it, of course). Dropping that to four minions in hand leaves you with a ~49% chance. Of course, if you're playing Highlander that'll mean saving Zola (or similar) for your Rat turn.

Saboteur is another option, but in a lot of ways strictly inferior to Rat - it's a lot easier to keep random spells in hand than random minions (because spells are often reactionary cards you won't bother casting unless you have a reason to). Include if you're actively trying to hate on Mech'thun, and include alongside rat. Deathlord is actually a very careful decision to make, because while it has a chance to win you the game on the spot, if it doesn't it simply accelerates their win condition - the main reason to include it, in my opinion, is because it's great against other decks.

The key, in my opinion, is knowing what your win condition is very early into the matchup. If you're playing something relatively slow and without a lot of sticking power and/or on-demand damage - the more defensive variants of Renolock are a good example - then don't even bother trying to threaten aggressively and instead do some hardcore digging for your Rat/Zola/etc. 

One further interesting note for Mech'thun counterplay - Mech'thun checks its win condition after deathrattles on the board conclude. That means that if there's a Voidlord on your opponent's board, they have to kill it before they can win. Not a problem if they have a Sac Pact or something left, of course, but if they don't then you can feasibly just sit there tanking 3 per turn while they fatigue out. Voidcaller doesn't work, unfortunately, because you discard your hand before the deathrattle triggers.

I just secretly stole my opponent's Mecha'thun with Mischief Maker. Even the Zephrys I gave him didn't make up for the fact he didn't know and kept drawing through his deck at lightning speed until he ran out of cards and I gave him a "The pleasure is mine" as he finally realised.

He was a good sport though and let me finish him off (possibly because I was playing the most abysmal deck imaginable. Seriously, it is a deck built around The Boogeymonster and all the other unloved corrupted cards from the Old Gods expansion....).

Anyway, it is an extremely unreliable way to beat them, but my goodness is it the most satisfying!

I play this deck... a lot.  In fact, my build of the deck has continually got me to upper ranks for the past few months.  The Achilles Heel of the deck... honestly... milling.  Aggro can take it if the deck cannot control by turn 4, but the deck relies on drawing certain cards at certain times.  If I draw those cards in mass, and I end up burning a key part of the deck... I'm dead.  Happens more than I like to admit. 

I feel like this combo deck is too strong in wild, ok you can run some tech counter cards like dirty rat effects ( deathlord / hecklebot / unseen saboteur ) or even a Zihi, but the interaction between warlock hero power and all the card draw they can put in their deck with bloodbloom and cata getting rid of all your remaining cards without any issues makes the combo way too easy to pull off.

I say that beccause I just played the deck after being rek by it quite a few times, and I have to say that... it's waaay too easy to pull off the combo !

Mecha'thun lock is probably the easiest and most efficient combo deck to play in wild right now.

Blizzard nerfed wild cards before ( e.g. Naga Sea Witch / Barnes / Patches  ) so they can and should do it again for the most oppressive decks even in wild.

One of the nerfs that would completely break this deck is for example : make Cataclysm discard your whole hand except 2 random cards and boom no more mecha'thun lock on the ladder !

and then we have to deal with even more secret mage / mech pal  / aggro decks :(

Some Salty Thoughts

Welcome to my new episode of SST, which should've been made as videos on YouTube, but I don't bother doing so. xd Now on the more serious side. I quite agree with other comments, but I'll also say some thoretical counters to Mecha'thun Warlock.

Loatheb and Rebuke can slow down their combo by a turn or two, because if you increase the cost of Bloodbloom, they can't do their combo. It's not as consistent, but considerable.

I would even consider fighting fire with fire, except by playing a Mecha'thun variant of King Togwaggle Priest. You do your usual combo except you wait before your opponent's deck is running low. Then just do it, wait a few turns to get your combo ready and win. Priest in general also has a bit of tools to slow them down with cards like Psychic Scream.

The effect of which being to give Zoolock a busted reset tool for aggro mirrors :P

@Neoguli - Loatheb certainly can delay the deck by a turn (nobody runs Rebuke in Paladin in Wild, primarily because nobody plays Paladin in wild :P). The trouble with considering that a counter is that it's very rare you'll be short a kill on a Mech'thun Lock by one turn - Highlander decks might occasionally be in that situation, but that's about it. And they run Loatheb anyway as a matter of course because it's such a good card.

Priest, meanwhile, is not a reliable counter because you're never going to get through your deck as quickly as they do, even building pure cycle. Particularly because you can't afford to run Hemet like they can. So you've got a significant in-built lossrate simply from the proportion of games in which you just don't draw your key tools before game over (I'd estimate this, pulling the numbers out of my backside estimating based on experience, at around ~20-30% of games minimum). That's before you even play the game, which could definitely go either way based on play patterns. I'm pretty confident that if you wanted to go pure Lock-hate, you could do so more effectively with a Rat-copying strategy rather than Tog Priest.

Easy

When they star that Dark Skies, plague of flames, defile shenanigans, I hit "Concede" and save my precious minutes and mental health!!

You should do that too. Don't bother with other useless stuff... 

If you play Loatheb, you just delay your defeat for 1 turn, if you play dirty rat you will pull one or two of the several unused minions from their hand. Same goes for saboteur regarding spells. The only consistent strategy is milling, but you won't play these stuff on a serious deck.