Wild Hearthstone has thousands of cards, and a wide variety of possible decks. This incredible deck diversity is sometimes lost when only looking at the few decks common in the highest ranks. Wildest of Wednesdays is a series aiming to highlight a different off meta deck each week with an in depth guide into its strategy and gameplay. The decks are selected for having interesting synergies and using rarely seen cards.
While we're waiting for the new expansion reveal tomorrow, how about a Wild Meme deck? This is one of the ultimate memes you can play in the game, where you will be able to repeat Yogg-Saron, Hope's End's effect infinitely (well, until he completely destroys your hand and deck or you reach the turn limit - but you can have games lasting over an hour where he gets replayed over 50 times).
The main way we are doing this is by going infinite with Shudderwocks, each of which will repeat Yogg's effect. Infinite Yogg-Saron Shaman got an incredible support card in the recent miniset: Kazakusan! Usually, Yogg-Saron draws you multiple cards, so if you keep replaying Shudderwock to replay its effect, you'd just end up fatiguing yourself and losing the game. When we add in Kazakusan's battlecry into Shudderwock's arsenal, Shudderwock will automatically make your deck go back up to 10 cards whenever it gets low, thereby preventing a loss by fatigue. The deck also uses Armor Vendors so that the Shudderwocks will stack armor for both players and let you keep playing with Yogg's effect for longer. In addition, Windchill from the initial Alterac expansion has been a great card for card draw and stall, especially with Zentimo.
If you like randomness and Yogg-Saron, Hope's End in particular, this is the ultimate deck that lets Yogg decide the outcome of games. Due to Shudderwock infinite loops and Kazakusan to infinitely refill your deck after drawing, you will be able to replay Yogg's effect more times per game while surviving than any other Yogg deck.
Infinite Yogg-Saron Shaman is a meme deck, so you should definitely not be ranking up with this. It's to play in Casual, on rank floors, or against friends (you can let them borrow this deck and then do an Infinite Yogg-Saron vs Infinite Yogg-Saron showdown).
Now, let's get into a guide on playing the deck. It's going to go through major overarching strategies to keep in mind, how to mulligan, gameplay tips on key synergies, and card choices.
Strategies
You will first want to play the Corrupt the Waters quest. From there, use your removal tools and card draw to draw and play your combo pieces. Finally, when they are all ready, go into an infinite chain of Shudderwocks that each replay Yogg-Saron, Hope's End effect and other useful battlecries to keep it going for as long as possible.
Card Draw and Survival - For card draw, your main tool is Spirit of the Frog. In addition, you have Windchills and cards that duplicate its effect, as well as Questing Explorers and Bloodmage Thalnos.
Combo Setup - First of all, you need to complete the quest, but that happens naturally as many of your minions are battlecries. Next, you want to either have a Tour Guide played before the first Shudderwock turn, or save a Lightning Bloom in hand. This is so you can guarantee that Shudderwock will add copies of himself to your hand by activating the Heart of Vir'naal quest reward hero power the turn you play him. Before you play Shudderwock, you also need to have played a Saronite Chain Gang and Grumble, Worldshaker. You should generally play Shudderwock before you play Yogg to safely get multiple copies of him added to your hand without the possibility that Yogg's battlecry destroys him. In addition, before you start your Infinite Yogg strategy, you should try and play Kazakusan, even if he's inactive. This is so that your deck will keep being set to 10 cards by Shudderwocks whenever it gets low, making it so that all the card draw from Yogg will be less likely to fatigue you and you can keep the effect going longer. You can play Armor Vendors as setup as well but that is not necessary.
Infinite Yogg - Once your combo is ready, keep playing Shudderwocks each turn to replay Yogg-Saron, Hope's End's effect while also dumping your hand of other cards you may draw or generate to keep hand space for more Shudderwocks. Sometimes you may need to spend a turn trading your board and dumping random cards in your hand to ensure that Shudderwocks will get bounced back to hand.
Your entire endgame strategy is based off of Yogg. Will this win you many games? No. Will this lead to some hilarious and memorable moments? Yes. And remember, the best strategy with this deck is to simply put your faith in the awesome power of Yogg-Saron, Hope's End.
Mulligans
- Keep Corrupt the Waters.
- Keep Ice Fishing. Keep Toxfin and Firemancer Flurgl if you have both unless you have Ice Fishing.
- Keep Windchills and Zentimo if you have both.
- Keep a Spirit of the Frog, and if you have it keep Lightning Blooms.
- Keep Questing Explorers.
Gameplay
The key to playing this deck well is to believe in the power of Yogg.
Below are gameplay tips regarding many of the synergies in this deck and how to use them effectively.
Pre-Combo Synergies
Check the Strategies section for in depth info on setting up the Infinite Yogg-Saron combo. This will have a few synergies to keep in mind pre-combo. In general though, you should first complete the Corrupt the Waters quest and play a Saronite Chain Gang and Grumble, Worldshaker at any time, then play Shudderwock and the Heart of Vir'naal quest hero power in the same turn to get 1 mana Shudderwocks added to your hand. You should only play Yogg-Saron, Hope's End when you have multiple 1 mana Shudderwocks in hand unless you're in a desperate situation and need Yogg to bail you out. Either before or after Yogg and Shudderwock, you should also try to fit in Kazakusan even if his Battlecry is inactive.
1. Firemancer Flurgl and Toxfin is a full one sided board clear for 3 mana, and Ice Fishing will draw both of these cards for you. This is your most powerful removal tool in this deck, so you have to time it wisely. Try to hold on to it until you really need it. Something to note is that after you do this combo, the enemy board may be empty, and if they don't remove these minions you can use Grumble, Worldshaker to get both of them back to your hand. You can also get them back to hand the same turn they are played using Lightning Blooms to gain mana for Grumble.
2. You should predict and plan around what cards you will draw from Spirit of the Frog. From using 0 cost spells (either the coin or Lightning Blooms), you will draw Windchills. From Windchills, you will draw either a Maelstrom Portal or Ice Fishing for the 2 cost slot, and from one of those you will draw Tidal Surge.
3. You can use Zentimo combined with Windchills to draw and freeze more minions and with Tidal Surges to damage more minions and heal more.
4. You can use Diligent Notetakers to get more copies of key spells like Windchill for more draw and freeze or Tidal Surge for more removal.
5. Bloodmage Thalnos will make your Maelstrom Portals and Tidal Surges more effective.
6. Lorekeeper Polkelt will put the main cards you need for the combo on top of your deck, in the following order: Yogg-Saron, Hope's End, Shudderwock, Kazakusan, Grumble, Worldshaker, and Saronite Chain Gang. Be sure that you either have a Lightning Bloom or Tour Guide in hand or have a 0 mana hero power from Tour Guide already before playing Polkelt, as you need one of these to use the quest reward hero power the same turn as your initial Shudderwock. If you play Polkelt too soon, all of these cards will be at the bottom of your deck.
Card Choices
This section is going to go through the main packages of cards in the deck. Each package has cards that help the deck with a specific goal. When playing the deck, it's useful to know what purposes each card serves and what other cards in the deck have synergy with it or help achieve the same purpose. This section might also be useful if you're interested in the reasoning for why each card was included in the deck.
Infinite Yogg-Saron Package
These cards let you have the Yogg-Saron, Hope's End effect for as long as possible during your Infinite Yogg-Saron endgame. Shudderwock is the main enabler of this, while the other cards all support the combo in various ways. Saronite Chain Gang and Grumble, Worldshaker are needed for Shudderwock to go infinite, Armor Vendors help keep both heroes at high health, and Kazakusan lets you keep replenishing your deck whenever it becomes empty. Corrupt the Waters is needed to guarantee that your initial Shudderwock will go infinite, while Tour Guide helps you play the quest reward Heart of Vir'naal hero power enabling double battlecries the turn you play Shudderwock.
Survival
While this is a meme deck and is not meant to be competitive, some healing and removal is still great to increase the chance that you will be able to play your combo and Yogg on turn 10. The Firemancer Flurgl Toxfin combo is very powerful and with all of this deck's card draw, including getting Ice Fishing from a Spirit of the Frog, you will be able to play it almost every game.
Spirit of the Frog Package
Spirit of the Frog provides not just draw, but targeted draw that you can plan around. The spells included are of different costs and have great effects on their own as well.
Other Card Draw
In general, card draw in this deck has to not come from Battlecries, or else it will mess up the infinite Yogg endgame with Shudderwocks drawing too much and not leaving space to bounce other Shudderwocks back to your hand. Spirit of the Frog is one great option. While Questing Explorer is a Battlecry, it is conditional and only activates while your quest is still active, meaning Shudderwock won't draw cards from its Battlecry during your combo. Lorekeeper Polkelt is technically not card draw but he's amazing in that he puts all 5 of your main combo enablers at the top of your deck.
Spell Synergy
Zentimo and Diligent Notetaker are great to get more value out of your spells, providing you with either survival or card draw.
This is an incredibly fun deck to see the power of Yogg-Saron, Hope's End. You can swing for lethal early on if he makes you a board or keep the Yogg effect going for as long as you want and have Shudderwocks to play. If you have a question or comment, or are wondering about a card substitution, post below.
What are your favorite wild decks? Which off meta decks have you been playing? Share them via our deckbuilder and let us know in the comments below!
Comments
I was confused at to how Saronite Chain Gang helps the combo because the site still has the old text from before the nerf was reverted, then I thought to check the card. You guys really should go through the card database and update everything that's out of date. That change was almost 3 expansions ago.
Going through 19812 cards, and counting, manually, to figure out if a card has an out of date image isn't really a thing we can do. Our tech back then lacked some proper tooling and nowadays when we do new patches, we immediately know what cards need to be rendered again so we can kick those off as soon as we validate our renderer works with the new client.
For whatever reason, that card didn't get rendered again or it errored during rendering and wasn't caught. Since no one reported it as a problem, until now, it's been out of date for that whole time. Typically we rely on staff for these on a patch-by-patch basis, but sometimes stuff doesn't get caught.
That's some insight into why this kind of stuff happens though. I appreciate you bringing it up so we can get this image fixed.
I guess re-rendering all the cards would cause too much downtime or something? I could be wrong, but I think I remember a bunch of Duels treasures being out of date, but maybe that was in nerf announcement posts before the patch went live. I guess in the future I can mention any incorrect card text in the #site-support channel on Discord.
Though is there a way to quickly identify cards that have changed since a given patch and either check them manually, or just re-render them all?
Kazakusan is more than enough, Shudderwock repeats his Battlecry each time the deck has few cards left. Since you go infinite with the Shudderwocks, the deck size keeps going down to 0 but then getting set back to 10 whenever it gets low.