OurHearthstone Zoolock Deck List Guidegoes over the ins-and-outs of this legendary Hearthstone deck. We’re taking an early look at what this list looks like in the Rise of Shadows meta, and featuring a mulligans guide, card choices, play strategy, and are featuring substitutions for players who might be lacking some of the cards to play this deck.
Warlock Zoois probably one of the most iconic decks in Hearthstone. It is also one of the best options for beginners who are heading into the game for the first time, because it teaches you how to efficiently trade minions and the importance of controlling the board. You’ll also get a primer in positioning your minions correctly, because this deck from time to time runs minions that require you to keep your cards in the right spots to take advantage of positional buffs.Zoolockis not always at the top of the meta, however, it has never failed to comeback from the dead at some point.
Zoolock Deck List for Rise of Shadows
Warlock is off to a rocky start so far, but this Zoolock list that has popped up has been doing well in RoS!
Zoolock Gameplay
Zoolock Mulligan Guide
We’re looking to get our plethora of 1-drops in the early game to start getting our board going right off the bat.
Situational Keeps
Zoolock Play Strategy
Zoolock has one main goal and that’s to control the board. We have no ability to remove minions with spells, and generally our main objective is to keep our opponent from having much of anything on the board and getting in chip damage from turn to turn. This version of Zoo is particularly low cost due to us looking to abuseMagic Carpetwhich will allow us to trade up with our cheap minions. Playing these low cost minions also makesThe Soulariumeven better. We should be able to play just about anything it pulls as long as we dodgeArch-Villain RafaamandSea Giantif we have an empty board.
Positioning can be very important in Zoo because there will be times when you are having to trade a bunch of your minions and you want to get the most out of yourDire Wolf Alphabuff. The general rule of thumb is to position your minions like this: Value Minions (Knife Juggler, stuff you don’t want to trade), Big Minions (higher health minions that generally won’t die in a trad), with Dire Wolf Alpha in the middle. As for the right of Dire Wolf, we want to place our cheap, Deathrattle, or Token minions that will die on trade. Why do we need to do this? Well, because minions that are generated from a spell or Deathrattle spawn on the very right side of your board. These are generally the smaller minions you want to be trading, this allows us to trade each of these lesser minions efficiently, one after the other without being blocked by our stronger minions.
One exception to these rules in particular, is that we don’t want to placeArgent Squireon the right side (you’re able to place it on the VERY right if you have a wide board already). It won’t die if it has the Divine Shield, so don’t place it on the right unless you are immediately popping the shield and don’t need to trade anymore that turn.
Now that we have a good idea on how we’re going to control the board, we’ll need to take advantage of some of these unique cards.Grim Rallyshould generally be used on a wider board, and particularly with a minion that was generated or has a Deathrattle.MecharooandScarab Eggare some of your prime targets for this card. However, if you are worried about AOE, it is going to be almost always better to destroy one of your weaker minions and keep the Deathrattles. This makes it much harder for your opponent to use the AOE, because they’ll be leaving behind a board still. This goes forEVIL Geniusas well.
The key to the deck is Magic Carpet. We’ve packed our list with 1-drops, and we want to use as many of them as we can with the card. We get a lot more easy trades, and some stronger minions to push damage with if we can get some value out of it. Most of the time you’ll want to save it for turns where you can get at least a couple of buffs from it, but if there’s an empty board on an early turn you can risk playing it. It has a lot of health, so it’s going to be hard to remove. Your knowledge of how other decks are built will also dictate if this is the right play. Against something like Priest, you’d be less likely to do this if you think they are runningShadow Word: Painand haven’t used one yet.
If we’re still fighting off our opponent in the later part of the game, then we do have a final go to card to help us out. That card isArch-Villain Rafaam! While there’s quite a few Legendaries that are kind of weak, for the most part we should be getting some strong stuff that can push our opponent to the brink. It’s not always going to work out for this if we’re this deep in the game, but it can give us a better shot at winning if things are looking bleak.
