RDU's Freeze Mage - The Deck That Won Him Dreamhack Summer 2014

INTRODUCTION

Dreamhack Summer 2014 is finally over, with RDU winning 3-0 against Amaz in the grand finals in a best-of-5 game format. Interestingly, he only used one deck: Freeze Mage. This is compared to Amaz using Combo Druid, Face Hunter, and his famous Randuin Wrynn Priest deck. That's right, it would seem that the mages have begun a comeback in tournament play, aside from Aggro Mage getting attention in Ranked Play.

THE DECK

This deck list was posted by HP user Bibikis, and it is an exact replica of what RDU used. This is actually a typical freeze mage deck, but was put to good use because it goes well against Miracle Rogue, the most famous deck in Ranked Play right now. 

CARD DRAW

The deck has two copies of Arcane Intellect, and they are actually good to have in your opening hand. Aside from this, Bloodmage Thalnos and Azure Drake provide card draw and spell damage. Finally, two copies of Acolyte of Pain and a single piece of Loot Hoarder are in it, which is great because you can just use your hero power to activate the card-drawing abilities of those two minions.

SLOWING YOUR OPPONENT

With the deck being called Freeze Mage, it's no wonder that the deck has two copies of Frost Nova, Blizzard, and Ice Block. The deck has four secrets in total. The other two secrets are one Ice Barrier and one Vaporize, with the latter giving a more aggressive tone to the dominantly control deck compared to having two copies of Ice Barrier. Aside from this, Mirror Image is included to stall your opponent's minions, with Doomsayer to threaten your opponent's board and bait your enemy into using his removal spells to get rid of it, allowing you to ideally drop an Alexstrasza on the next turn. Not to mention, there are two copies of Flamestrike.

DRAGON WIN

The ideal win condition with this deck is to use Alexstrasza on your opponent if his life is still a bit high. If your Alex survives, then you can attack next turn and a Fireball and a Frostbolt will do the job. Additionally, with the deck having two copies of Flamestrike and Blizzard, it wouldn't be impossible to deal about 20 burst damage to your opponent in one turn, even without the help of Sorcerer's Apprentice. This can be done by using Fireball + 2Frostbolt and + 2X Ice Lance. It's even better when you have Azure Drake or Bloodmage Thalnos in play.

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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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