hi guys asthma here recently a lot of people have been asking me about deck-building mostly the students I coach wanted to get some helpful tips and general advice about building their own decks and with the new expansion coming next month all of you guys will probably try to build your own decks early on before the meta is fully established and that's one of the most fun times in the meta cycle when people are experimenting and creating new decks however as we all know most of them are going to be pretty terrible that's why I decided to show you some of the rules and ways of building decks to help your decks suck a little bit less before we go into it I need to add a quick disclaimer no matter how good or bad you are the chances that your deck will be comparable in strength to a high tier meta decks are virtually non-existent if you just care about climbing the ladder then go and net deck the best deck you can craft and play well but if you simply enjoy deck building and want to get better at it then this guide is for you any drooling troglodytes can come up with an idea for a new deck that is by far the easiest part of the deck creation process though all of those ideas will just not work because they are based on some terrible mechanics that there is simply not enough support for but still coming up with the initial plan is easy and there are a few ways to do it first you can take an existing deck and use it as a base for your own creation this is actually a good idea because you're taking a successful deck and changing some of it and then there is only so much you can screw up and the part that you don't touch will at least keep the good cards but jokes aside whenever you're trying to modify an existing deck you should make sure that you understand the difference between tournament decks and ladder decks tournament decks take into account the tournament meta game the format and the ability to ban a class of your choice and so on some tournament lineups will be very vulnerable to a popular ladder deck but they can get away with it by simply banning that class which you cannot do when you're queuing up for a new ranked game while still sitting in your pajamas leather decks on the other hand are all about maximizing the overall win rate and decks like temporal Gore paladin are great for ladder because even though you're heavily draw dependent and can have some really shitty openings where you cannot do much about the outcome of the game you also have a lot of games where your opening will just crush the opponent and win the game for you and on ladder you can afford to have high variance and long streaks of wins and losses as long as your long-term win rate is very high if you don't want to necessarily start with an existing deck at least go on the internet and open a bunch of decklist for the class you want to use to see which cards are commonly included across multiple decklists notice which minions spells or weapons are there regardless of the deck type and which ones appear most frequently this is usually a good indication of those cards being good on their own and worth incorporating or at least considering when you build your own deck naturally all of you guys are 200 IQ geniuses so you'll want to come up with a totally original idea for a deck that will be yours and yours only and everyone on ladder will recognize you as a superior being add you as a friend on battlenet and then proceed to feed you there every single ad gold quest play a friend as a tribute to your brilliance and originality but like I've said before coming up with an idea is the easy part and the hard part is making sure that the deck includes multiple good ideas which all support each other while at the same time utilizing mostly good cards I will use one of my decks I built before as an example to go along with this guide so that you can follow these general principles being applied in practice let's say the idea is to play mind breaker and to build the deck that can use him well because you hate priests and you want to contribute to their suffering as much as possible this is the first mechanic you will want to build your deck around immediately this gives our deck a very clear direction if we are serious about the mind breaker then we have to commit to a deck that does not rely too heavily on a hero power this means generally aggressive deck with a decent early game so that we have a very high chance of playing minions and not having to hero power in the early game and it also eliminates certain classes particularly those with the best hero powers such as mage war local rogue ideally we want to keep the mind breaker alive for a while which means either buffing it or protecting it with tomes and most likely candidates that remain are and pardon and I have decided to go with paladin for the card draw and surprisingly better weapons after the fiery war axe nerf alright so we have a pile neck that's supposed to be fairly aggressive relying mostly on minions and weapons for a decent early game and to make sure that mind breaker can survive a little bit better I've decided to also build this deck around Prince Cal SF a prince deck is a good example to use in a deck building video because he's presenting us with interesting challenge and it will let me show you how to correctly use synergies while creating your own lists there are two main things about synergies which you should know first you're most likely over rating them by a huge margin synergies are great whenever they occur but most of the time you will not have the exact cards in the exact situation to take advantage of them this is why you're always trying to balance synergies against the sheer power for example ancient brew master has an incredible synergy with prince Callas F if you are able to reliably pull off that combo and replay class as a second time as a paladin you'd create a big advantage however most games you will not even get to play Prince in the early game and when you do you will not have the brewmaster out of the time or you will be forced to play them earlier or Prince will die before you can bounce him back this specific scenario occurs so rarely that the sacrifice in power is too big in comparison to just playing something like a nicely buffed corpse taker for the same mana cost relying on few synergies with big rewards that use pool cards is not a good idea instead you want to rely on many small synergies that can use cards which are at least good on their own and that's the second thing you should take away from this guide you want to pick mostly strong cards that just happen to work a little bit better when played together with the rest of your deck so rather than having four cards that have huge outside if you combine them you want to play 20 cards that have small upside when you combine any number of them with many possible ways of doing it so back to our pattern deck what synergizes with mind breaker prince calluses and maybe some paladin weapons let's start looking at Prince he buffs minions so naturally we want most of our deck consisting of those and a good way to look at buffs is imagine them as a limited resource if you give a minion plus one attack how many times can use it a minion which can attack more times will naturally benefit more from the same buff this means that minions with wind fury will be able to better utilize bass same with minions that survive longer be it through having high health or divine shields mind wrecker is a great buff target because at six health it is likely to survive more than one hit and use that +1 attack more than once Prince Nikolaus of Bath also works great when you can buff multiple bodies at once for example something like a cyanide chain gang or doppelganger since their copies retained the +1 +1 and similarly with a buffed pirates which will be summoning a buffed patches the pirate alright so since we want to go with an aggressive deck let's add the obvious choices for pirates touches the pirate and dread Corsair are both incredible and Red Cross era also protects the mind breaker and other minions we want to defend we can also add south sea captain because we want a decent amount of three drops in a prince deck and he works well with everything else we have so far we can also add south sea deckhand it is a pirate which works with our weapons and pirates synergies it is a charged minion which means that it can immediately attack and take advantage of the Prince color safe path however for my deck I actually went with small-time Buccaneer a blast from the past small-time Buccaneer doesn't work in regular decks but once he baths him to the base of two two and protect him with taunts he starts reminding people why this little got nerve I also found out that a lot of people panic a new sort of tempo to make sure he dies and the neat thing about playing mind breaker is the fact that you stopped your opponents from using hero power which means that even at 1 health he can still be incredibly annoying and hard to remove and this brings me to the most obvious set of synergies for this deck divine shield divine shield synergizes with prince because buffed minions with divine shield can take better advantage of those bonus stats and the mind breaker stops hero powers from pinging the divine shields off making your board deceptively hard to deal with it's really a pain in the ass for your opponent if mind breaker sticks for a while and will include the best divine shield minions first so both one groups are great especially with rallying blade being there to buff them with her flame and Tyrion are both very strong and just fantastic cards and once we have those it is good to add corpse takers as well argent commander is a minion that I just love and Prince Colossus Dex I tend to use him and Prince version of temper oak instead of something like leroy jenkins because he has both divine shoot and charge and the jump from 4 to stats to 5/3 is really really massive and makes this card so much more valuable it's one of the minions that benefits the most from Prince carousel with so many divine shield minions I also have added bolívar fire blood and he worked very well he was always pulling his weight and was just a solid 5 drop that can sometimes have a big upside and having nearly every single one of your minions provide you with some kind of persistent effect makes barns a really nice addition because no matter what minion he pulls it's going to either have charge taunt divine shoot or some kind of a decent effect only corpse taker and Prince Class EV are going to be just vanilla 1/1 everything else is good with the last remaining spots we have to take care of card draw when building your decks you will have to first go with some arbitrary amount of draw based on your experience and as you play with the list you have to adjust it until it feels right you're balancing your tempo and the card draw against each other with more tempo which means cheaper cards which you can spend quickly you will be running out of cards faster and if you run out of cards too fast then you can either increase the curve by replacing some minions for something more expensive or just add more card draw on the other hand if you always have enough stuff to play then the card draw just takes away from being able to put another useful card instead of it drawing cards sacrifices tempo so usually you will want to go with the bare minimum your deck can afford and rely on having as much power and tempo as you can but it always depends on the specifics of your deck here we went with the divine favor which is one of the big reasons for playing pardon in the first place it's just an insane card that works fantastically an aggressive pad index especially when your goal is beating something like Razakars priest which draws a ton of cards making divine favour even stronger we also use acolyte of pain it synergizes greatly with Prynne scholar self because of the stat distribution and of course his ability and he's also a nice pickup for Barnes battle cry so we are keeping that synergy strong in general you will want to play all other cards first and then once your hand is empty use divine favor if you have acolyte and divine favor in your hand you will want to draw with divine favor first because the more you drove acolyte the less benefit you get from the divine favor as your hand size will grow ideally you'll be able to drop a kite and then use divine favor in the same turn with just these four cards I found that I am able to draw almost my entire deck in many games and this is a great situation to be in it means that your opponent will have to deal with your 30 cards by having to use only a smaller part of his deck and it's one of the advantages you have it's actually one of your wind conditions and something I have to explain because there are a lot of misconceptions about that term as well when condition is very often hijacked for all kinds of situations and cards which makes people really confused when condition is not a card prince kael SF is not the wind condition of this deck Alexstrasza is not the wind condition of freeze mage and shallow river Anduin is not the wind condition of Razakars priest sure they all can be a wind condition but that's not the only way these decks win games the correct way to think about this term wind condition is to understand it as something that will be necessary to win the game it can change depending on the matchup or even during the game when you play Razakars priest against a token shaman your AoE can be as much of a wind condition as death knight and Raza and I have won many games in that matchup by just removing shaman board over and over again and never playing my combo and just running him out of value to the point that he gives up not taking face damage can be a wind condition saving removal for your opponents and tinnitus can be a wind condition or saving taunts and playing them just before your opponent uses time warp with charging Giants so don't get confused and think that it always has to be d1 card or d1 combo that the deck ends to use for our 200 IQ pad and deck there wind conditions are early and mid-game board control and playing obnoxious and hard to remove minions and smarten your opponent's face with them until he dies and if he removes the board we just draw half of our deck with one card and do again so now we have the deck but do you think we are done we haven't even started yet this is where other people miss the point as well deck building doesn't end when you press done this is where it truly starts look even if we all call hearthstone the children's card game it is still an insanely complex system with over 1,000 playable cards and a mind-boggling amount of possible combinations I have asked some people who are good with numbers to give me some estimations and even just for the brainless hunter class we have over 1000 cilium combinations of possible cards just imagine how many decks are possible in this game in total it's over 1 billion times more combinations than there are atoms on earth but of course if you ask Blizzard they would say that this number is actually 18 whatever idea you have however good it may be it has to be tested and verified in real environment sometimes things just don't work as expected and none of us are all-knowing Oracle's so testing and adjusting process is very important what you want to do is to most importantly pay attention to how you lose most of your games not how you lost your most recent game but just how it happens on average the more games you play the better idea you have if you run out of cards often then you can bump up the cost of some cards or add more card draw if you fall behind on board in the early game then maybe you need either comeback mechanics like a week or more early game board control tools if you keep losing to huge minions you cannot deal with then consider adding large removal but only if it happens frequently you shouldn't go out of your way to change your deck and adjust it against something rare so let's say you have terrible match up against quest mage but that that contributes only to 2% of the ladder then you shouldn't be adding secret eater as a tech card because while it will improve 2% of your games it will also lower your win rate in over 90% of your total games which is the only thing that matters on ladder your overall win rate you should also definitely consider the meta game for example if it's full of pirates find a way to fit go like a crawlers in your deck on the other hand if Galaga crawlers are popular then maybe you shouldn't be trying to develop a new pirate deck right now after creating the deck testing it adjusting it the last step is to share it and look at the feedback you get share it with other people with your friends and see what changes they make to it and what comments they have about it deck building is a very collaborative process and virtually no top tier deck was ever created in its final form by just one person hopefully this guide will help you create better decks or at least understand the general process of deck building or maybe it's just an elaborate trick that I used so if I can get all of you guys playing your own decks while I farm the other points with the hottest netback thank you guys for watching and see you next time