OurHeartstone Pure Paladin Deck List Guidetakes a look at this archetype from the Descent of Dragons expansion! We’ve got a look at the best list for the deck as well as mulligans, play strategy & combinations, and card replacements! This deck is referred to as “Pure”, because it only uses cards from the class and no neutrals. This is due to the new Lightforged cards from that have effects that trigger if you have no Neutral cards in your deck! They are pretty powerful effects, so it has encouraged people to build around this idea. Whether or not this style of play will last further into the meta game is unknown at this time.
This whole Pure Paladin archetype is a relatively new idea that is being explored. There have been some popular decks in the past that have not featured neutral cards. An older version of Tempo Mage comes to mind. However, there was no incentive towards this type of play. Now that there is an incentive, it does seem like an interesting deck building exercise and we hope that Blizzard toys with more ideas like this in the future.
Pure Paladin Deck List
Here’s a look at thetop performingPure Paladin deck in Descent of Dragons so far:
Possible Keeps
Pure Paladin Tips & Play Strategy
This is pretty much a Midrange Paladin deck, so it’s fairly straightforward to play. We’re looking to take good trades and continually place minions on the board. We have some defensive tools, so we can deal with problematic minions and comeback against aggressive decks. We can also risk dumping a lot of our cards at times due to things likeLightforged Crusadergiving us additional resources in the later stages of the game.
We’re hoping to get a bit ahead early because we do have some cards that benefit from having minions on board. One way we can get ahead is by getting an earlySanctuaryto trigger which gives us a fairly sturdy minion on the board. If we can combine this with hitting an early game card withBlessing of Kingsthen we’re pretty much set for future turns. Sticking a minion and then getting a buff on it is one of our main paths to victory.
Lightforged Zealotis going to be one of your powerful turns, it’s a great card that not only gets a body on the board but equips us with a weapon we can utilize. This card is one of the main reasons to run this type of deck, so playing it on curve is going to improve our success rate immensely! Based on win-rate percentages, this is the card that swings it into our favor with the highest frequency.
If we get beat up in the early game, we do have some help inAmber Watcherthat can heal us back up a bit. We’ve also gotTirion Fordringwhich poses a formidable obstacle in front of our opponent’s minions. Aldor Peacekeeper is another big piece of our defensive strategy, if we can land it on one of their big minions, that’s a pretty considerable tempo play for us!
Lightforged Crusaderis another of those purity cards, and it can help us take back the game if we’ve been forced to use up all of our resources. The cards are random, so we won’t always get something useful, but most of the time we should get something at least usable.
The path to victory mostly involves sticking a couple of hard to kill minions and slowly beating up our opponent with them. We don’t have huge burst, but we do have a few buff cards that can get us enough reach to get the job done!