If you've already played a few matches - won some, lost others - then you've started putting together the first pieces of the puzzle of what separates a glorious victory from an agonizing defeat. You're also now ready for our deckbuilding strategy guide, devoted to helping you make the all-important decisions that will shape your deck. How can you get the most out of your cards? How do you find the most powerful card combinations in your collection, and what ways are there to disrupt your opponent's strategy and to create an advantage for yourself?

 The Basics: Threats, Answers, and Inevitability
Let's start with a typical gameplay example. Your opponent managed to reduce your hit points to four, and she's got Zygore Bladebreaker in play, an ally with an ATK of four. Unless you find a way out of this situation, your opponent will win the game on her next turn. Biting your lip, you draw a card, and as luck would have it, you draw Tristan Rapidstrike, an ally with three ATK and protector. You play your ally, knowing that even though you're not out of the woods just yet, you've at least bought yourself some time to possibly turn the tide of battle.

This example illustrates three important concepts: inevitability, threats, and answers. In the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game, you win the game when your opponent's hero either takes damage equal to the hero's health or when your opponent runs out of cards. Inevitability means establishing a situation in which you will inevitably win the game, just like in the example above where your opponent had an ally capable of defeating you and you had nothing to stop her. The means by which inevitability is established are called "threats," and the means by which threats are countered are called "answers."

When building your first deck, this is the first thing to keep in mind: your deck should include threats that let you establish inevitability as well as answers to your opponent's threats. Sometimes, the lines between threats and answers become blurred. For example, you could have drawn Starfire instead of Tristan Rapidstrike. Normally, Starfire would be considered a threat, but in this case it can actually be used to counter a threat, which makes it an answer. The ability of some cards to function as both threats and answers is called "versatility"; we'll go into a little more detail on this aspect later.

Let's see how different balances of threats and answers translate into different deck types and play styles.

 Types of Decks, Types of Strategies
Before you begin building your deck, you need to take a look at your cards and determine which strategy you'll choose to establish inevitability. Do you want to quickly overwhelm your opponent with powerful allies and direct damage abilities, or do your cards favor a strategy of disruption and of sabotaging your opponent's strategy? In other words, will your strategy rely more on threats or will it incorporate mostly answers?

Brute Force: The Aggro Deck
Decks that rely on a superior number of threats to defeat their opponent are commonly known as "aggro decks." These decks usually try to put more threats on the board than the opponent can answer. Since aggro decks normally don't contain a lot of answers, most of them try to execute their strategy as quickly as possible so that the opponent can't play any of his own threats. Inevitability is established very early in the game. Aggro decks are fairly resilient against disruption, which makes them great counters against control decks.

Divide and Conquer: The Control Deck
If you want to build a deck that consists mostly of answers, you are probably looking at what's called a "control deck." Control decks try to win by making the opponent simply run out of threats by providing an answer to everything that's thrown at them. This type off deck excels at disrupting an opponent's strategy, for example by attacking enemy resources and by reducing the opponent's card impact (more on both strategies later). Control decks usually establish inevitability over time in the later stages of a match. The disruptive quality of answer-heavy control decks allows them to perform very well against the last major deck type: combo decks.

Surgical Precision: The Combo Deck
A deck that relies on a very specific card combination to win is called a "combo deck." Combo decks may resemble control decks at first because they often include a decent amount of answers to buy some time for the combo pieces to fall into place. The biggest strength of a combo deck is that it establishes inevitability "out of the blue," and a well-built combo deck will give the opponent as few clues as possible about the trap that's waiting for him. Because the only way to effectively counter a combo deck is to disrupt the combo, aggro decks with only few answers have a much harder time against this type of deck than control decks.

To sum up, these are the three basic strategies:
Put down more threats than your opponent can answer, or
Force your opponent to run out of threats, or
Create a "super threat" combination that immediately puts the game in your hands.
Now that we've talked a bit about strategy, it's time to talk about what you need to execute your strategy: resources.

 

Resources

Powerful or powersink?
Let's assume that you've decided to go with an aggro deck, and you're looking through your card library to decide which cards you'll use. Zy'lah Manslayer looks like a pretty good card, since she's both a decent threat and a surprisingly good answer. However, upon further inspection you realize that the earliest you can start using her is on turn eight, which is fairly late in the game. If your strategy relies on powerful but costly cards, then you won't be able to execute your strategy until you've built up your resource row. Meanwhile, your opponent could be using weaker allies like Windseer Tarus or Vaerik Proudhoof in combination with buffs like Mark of the Wild or the payment power of Elder Moorf to quickly and mercilessly decimate your health.

There are many factors that decide the outcome of a match – experience, luck, planning, skill, just to name a few – but the single most important game-deciding factors are oftentimes a deck's card efficiency and speed. The faster you can execute your strategy, the better. And to execute your strategy, you need resources. So, the faster you generate resources and/or the more efficiently you use the resources at your disposal, the better your chances to successfully complete your strategy.

Timmay!
Resources can take many different shapes. Your most important resource is your hero's health, since once your hero has lost all health, you lose the game. Then there are the cards in your resource row. Without these cards, you can play neither threats nor answers; basically, you can't play without these resources. Having more resources than your opponent means that you can execute your strategy sooner, while being able to attack your opponent's resource row means that you can effectively turn the more expensive cards in his deck into "dead cards." A rogue deck with Lobotomize and The Cruel Hand of Timmy can be a fearsome thing to behold.

However, there are other resources besides your health and your resource row that need to be considered. Your hand, for example, is an important resource. The more cards you have in your hand, the more tactical flexibility you have. At first glance, playing two Lightning Bolts instead of one Starfire might seem like a good idea, since you get more damage for the same amount of resources. But on closer inspection, the cost for Lightning Bolt is "3 resource points, and a card," whereas the cost for Starfire is simply "6 resource points." By playing two Lightning Bolts, you do more damage, but you pay the difference with a decrease in your tactical flexibility.

You always have the option of playing a card face down in your resource row, but you'll want to avoid this situation as much as possible unless the card you're playing will be of more use to you as a resource (for example, playing Pugg in the later stages of a match might not be the best move, especially if you already have a few allies in play). Roughly speaking, your deck should have enough quests to allow you to make progress on every turn. Also, when choosing quests to fill up the resource slots in your deck, try to think about how each quest will tie into your strategy. For example, if your deck's strategy relies on equipment, Sunken Treasure is your friend, or if you need specific ally cards, include Chasing A-Me 01. Other times, extracting specific cards with quests like Big Game Hunter or Kibler's Exotic Pets can be a good way to advance your strategy.

Some quests like The Defias Brotherhood let you draw additional cards, which – you probably guessed it – is actually a form of resource acceleration. Being able to restock your hand more quickly is a good thing, but the other important consideration is the number of cards you've seen in a match. If you have seen more cards than your opponent it probably means you've had access to a larger part of your deck, which again means that you more than likely have a statistical advantage in terms of having drawn strategy-critical cards. The sooner you can establish a draw advantage, the better. The concept of draw advantage also leads us to the next topic we'll be discussing in this article – card advantage and card impact.

 Card Advantage and Card Impact

Who's got the advantage now?
If you manage to gain and maintain some kind of advantage over your opponent, chances are you'll leave the table victorious. We've already seen examples of some types of advantages and how they affect the game – resource advantage, hand advantage, draw advantage – but the most crucial (and also most difficult to determine) advantage is card advantage.

Card advantage can be defined like this: the player whose cards in play have the most impact has a card advantage. Card impact is a tricky thing to judge, since a card's impact on a match can change with every turn. Bala Silentblade may look like a decent enough card on turn three, but combined with Voss Treebender you can use her special power with much more precision. And if you add allies like Elder Moorf into the mix, your ally has the potential of becoming a real killer. Whenever one of your cards enhances another card's impact, you have what's called synergy.

Having different synergies in a deck will greatly improve your chances in a match, especially if you manage to include cards that work well with not just one but several different cards. Galahandra, Keeper of the Silent Grove seems like a nice card, but combined with Lhurg Venomblade or Coup de Grace she's outright deadly. By themselves, these cards may not seem all that powerful, but when combined, they can have devastating impact for a relatively low cost.

The ability of a card to achieve high impact for low cost is called "efficiency"; the ability to work well in different situations is called "versatility." Your cards' synergy, efficiency, and versatility all contribute to your overall card impact. Keep an eye out for these qualities when you are building your deck. When you try to achieve a certain effect, always ask yourself, "Can I achieve the same result for less? What else can I do with these cards? With which other cards can these cards create synergy?"

 Putting It All Together
We said before that having a resource advantage lets you execute your strategy more quickly, and this is still true. However, having resource advantage early on also lets you establish card advantage pretty quickly, and now, all the things we've discussed before should slowly start falling into place.

Efficiently built decks can squeeze more impact out of each card, and therefore they need fewer resources. Highly synergistic decks will be able to gain card advantage more quickly, because they depend less on luck or very specific card constellations. Including versatile cards will allow more flexibility in how you execute your strategy, and therefore increases your deck's adaptability. Managing your resources such as your resource row and your hand cards wisely will let you retain tactical flexibility, while attacking your opponent's resources lets you sabotage her strategy and reduces her card impact. Being able to achieve and maintain card advantage will ultimately let you establish inevitability.

As the saying goes, even the longest journey begins with one small step. Hopefully, this article succeeded in guiding you on your own first step as you begin your journey to become a champion in your own right, to master the cards, and to build your own decks. We hope you've enjoyed this short introduction to deckbuilding and trading card game theory, and that it will help you in the many matches lying ahead.

Good luck!