AmberFade's American Regional/World Championship Zhanna

[AmberFade]

Sup folks, since the decks of all grand finalists are shared this year I can post the deck here aswell and explain how it works. This build is an oldschool haste archetype. I tweaked it over time so it can survive most of agressive meta decks while being able to go toe to toe with other controlldecks. Overall by far the best deck I have ever created, took me to top 4 in the American regionals and was essential for my victories in big tournaments. Sadly got very unlucky with the matchups in WC and couldnt bring it to top 8.

The deck:

Hero: Zhanna Mist

Allies (26):
2x Kristoffer Wyld ~140g
3x Fleet-footed Messenger ~210g
3x Layarian Seductress ~550g
4x Devoted Knight ~120g
3x Sabreen, Hand of Unaxio ~1500g
2x Lily Rosecult ~230g
4x Tainted Oracle ~450g
3x Elizabeth Winterborn ~510g
2x Viska, The Scarlet Blade ~300g

Abilities (18):
3x Retreat! ~100g
2x Groundshift ~900g
4x Focused Prayer ~100g
1x Resurrection ~100g
3x Zail's Hymn ~200g
4x Tidal Wave ~210g
1x Mass Purification ~100g

Items (9):
4x Glass Chalice of Knowing ~120g
2x Wizent's Staff ~460g
3x The King's Pride ~670g

54 cards ~ 19680g

Tech:

-2x Lily against heavy item destruction (rogues)
-more Ressurections vs mill
-2x Mass Purification vs warriors (especially vess)
-4x Healing touch vs rushmage


Overall its not an easy deck to play and requires practise to be able to deal with agressive decks. This deck aims for an controlled start while ramping up ressources. Retreat, Seductress and Zhail are great tools to keep the agression at bay. You dont care about board presence and pressure early on at all, your only aim is not to get too much herodamage, the win condition is later on. Once you are at 7+ and can secure TKP it explodes and can finish the game very fast with hasted allies and take full controll of the game.

It is hard to describe a sequence due to the reactive nature in the early game, an optimal start would usually look something like:
T2 - Chalice
T3 Devoted Knight
T4 Elizabeth

however often you will get pressured T2 onward so you might start to use your controll spells to not taking too much hero damage early on instead of playing allies.


Matchups with this deck(difficulty in percent, this deck on the left side):

Amber 40/60
Garth 40/60
Serena 40/60
Elementalis 80/20 (only wulventalis has a chance)
Boris 50/50
Rushmage 20/80 (if you cant tech in Healing Touch)
Zaladar 40/60
Baduruu 50/50
Controllmage 80/20
Lance 60/40
Stall/Mill 100/0
Therbin 80/20
Jerry/Zhanna 50/50
Gwen 80/20
Praxix 50/50
Victor 60/40
Vess 80/20
Banebow 80/20
Tala 90/10
Ythan 70/30
Majiya 20/80
Undead Moonstalker 40/60

Overall the only near impossible matchups are Mages (unless you are able to tech 4 healing touch in before the game). Zal/Amber, Rogues and undead moon are also very hard if piloted by a top player and you cant afford to do any mistakes if you want to beat them.

[Burnout1985]

Great deck Amber and nice write up! thanks for sharing with us.

[Kylt]

Good read!

I don't think vs Threbin is 80/20. Semi solo Threbin with 4 bad santa should be able to close the game by t11 which is where this deck aims to just start exploding. I don't know what Threbin deck you had in mind, but I'd say it's 50/50.
vs Jerry/zhanna, however, is 40/60 if played by experts because haste zhanna get to choose whether to go for the throat against normal priest (from early game if you wish). So you always have the upper hand against them and opp knows that so it will be in favour of you.

Since x4 healing touch is good against EVERY bad match up you listed (given HT can be used for AB disable, and heal to mess up HP calculation for UD MS), I wonder why you just don't add them and feel good in every match up. What's your reasoning behind this?

Why 2 Lily? Chalice never gets destroyed and Staff is not really worth retrieving imo and there's only 3 KP without any Forgiveness. It's fine if you are looking at longer and grindy games (around t16) , but I can see this deck can win a bit earlier if you played 4th KP and 1 forgiveness. Is this your preference?

Ally mix looks really nice and I'll probably copy this. Thanks for sharing!

[AmberFade]

I don't think vs Threbin is 80/20. Semi solo Threbin with 4 bad santa should be able to close the game by t11 which is where this deck aims to just start exploding. I don't know what Threbin deck you had in mind, but I'd say it's 50/50.

I have never lost to that build with this zhanna, even tho it sometimes is close with the HP. The main difficulty for this Zhanna is earlygame pressure, Therbin doesnt do any. That way you can comfortably set up draw without taking any damage and start exploding T7-8 onwards, once that happens therbin will have to dedicate ressources to deal with the empowered hasted allies and TKP what slows down his burstdamage potential. Also you can disrupt him well with good use of focused prayer. If he tries to stall you with HS you can kill him off with mass purification.

vs Jerry/zhanna, however, is 40/60 if played by experts because haste zhanna get to choose whether to go for the throat against normal priest (from early game if you wish). So you always have the upper hand against them and opp knows that so it will be in favour of you.

Agree with that, the issue is that in priest matches the one who shuts down the enemy draw first usually wins, so good fortune on getting many focused prayers early on can decide games from the getgo.

Since x4 healing touch is good against EVERY bad match up you listed (given HT can be used for AB disable, and heal to mess up HP calculation for UD MS), I wonder why you just don't add them and feel good in every match up. What's your reasoning behind this?

The issue with that is that you would either have to remove cards that are usefull against other matchups (like Lily and Mass Purification) or make the deck fatter what decreases consistency and makes you worse against your good and 50/50 matchups. I personally dont like this archetype if it gets 60 cards + since it is aimed to get its core cards ASAP.

Why 2 Lilyicon? Chalice never gets destroyed and Staff is not really worth retrieving imo and there's only 3 KP without any Forgivenessicon. It's fine if you are looking at longer and grindy games (around t16) , but I can see this deck can win a bit earlier if you played 4th KP and 1 forgiveness. Is this your preference?

Lily is key against Garth and priest MU's. There are 2 ways those decks approach this matchup if piloted by a competent player. Either they try to shut down your draw early on constantly sniping chalice and kill you off before you get going, or keep all their item destruction cards to destroy all your TKP's. The main weakness of haste archetype is that it relies on TKP way more than a priest that runs fatties who are strong by default. So you always need to make sure your main wincondition TKP can be on the board. With 3 TKP's Garth can simply hold his ST's and destroy all of them what will make you unable to deal with his stronger allies later on. I prefer lily over increasing the TKP count because she is flexible. You can recycle chalice and winzents if your opponent uses all his item destruction trying to starve you early on, but its also very usefull in lategame szenarios to recycle TKP. Also its a solid ally to play and you can combo it with retreat if you feel the need to.

2 Lilys are only necessary if you expect to face heavy item destruction tho, usually I just run 1. You got a point about forgiveness tho, I plan to add some to this deck aswell to deal with the annoying situation of having TKP and many Tidal Waves in opening hand, so far havent found the optimal mix tho.