LEGEND Rank Aggro Mage: The New Age

INTRODUCTION

JadeSC from LiquidHearth recently hit Legend rank on the EU server with his aggro Mage deck that was surprisingly doing well in such a diverse meta game. He started playing it at Rank 5 and had 119 games before reaching the prized Legend rank. This is actually very short compared to the average number of games you need to play if your deck's win rate is at a mere 50% (you'd have to play 500-700 games on average, according to this.)

STATS

Here, JadeSC provided some statistics on how the aggro mage fared against some of the classes and staple decks:

Aggro Warrior 1-0
Control Warrior 0-8
KolentoLock 1-3
Handlock 6-2
Hunter 3-5
Mage 7-2
Miracle Rogue 9-6
Murloc Warlock 1-0
Paladin 9-0
Priest 1-1
Ramp Druid 4-1
Shaman 6-8
Token Druid 4-5
T. Rogue 1-1
Watcher Druid 3-3
Zoo 12-6


Wins: 68 | Losses: 51

By the looks of it, it unexpectedly suffers greatly against Control Warrior, mostly because of all the accumulated armor and hard-to-kill minions of that deck. Additionally, it didn't perform that well against Token Druid and Watcher Druid, perhaps because that class also specializes in having great defense, great minions, and a bit of armor. A good news is that it handles well against the infamous Miracle Rogue.

MATCH UPS

According to JadeSC, he didn't have Archmage Antonidas at first, so he used Ragnaros, the Firelord. However, even if it allowed him to get to rank 1, he explained that the Archmage is a better play overall as Antonidas generally becomes the finisher against close match ups such as Druid and Shaman which for JadeSC "holds much more value" than a Ragnaros that is pretty much useless when you're agtainst Shaman or Token Druid. The few advantages of using Rag is that it can hold up against Miracle Rogue and Handlock, and will let you have a better chance of winning against Control Warrior (ideally).

When using this aggro mage deck, battling against any Warlock or Paladin deck would put the odds in your favour, especially with the latter. Additionally, you can deal with Miracle Rogue and if you do get to battle Control Warrior, you're betting off conceding as soon as possible. Finally, battling Shaman decks are one of the most intriguing because the match up is apparently pretty bad despite JadeSC getting an appropriate number of wins. He noted that Shamans have the right tools to take care of your early gameplay and are hard to counter once they have control of the board. Winning against it depends on a strong early play from you and a lack of answers from the Shaman, an example of which is using Mirror Image to deal with Rockbiter Weapon.

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