Introduction
Priest has been in a bad place for a while. In fact, I myself recently wrote about how the new Priest cards are awful. However, I’ve been forced to bite my tongue as Priest has reappeared on ladder. Making use of Resurrect and Onyx Bishop while playing slowly allows for some incredible shenanigans. This certainly won’t last forever, as it is not very good against an aggressive meta. However, for the moment, this Priest deck is extremely dominant on ladder.
Resurrect Priest Decklist
This is Thijs’ version of the deck. Obviously the gimmick here is that almost nothing in the deck is low cost. You play an Injured Blademaster on turn three, then Resurrect him, then Onyx Bishop him. A two mana 4/7 is great, regardless of the other 3/4 body attached. I would seriously consider cutting the Loot Hoarders. They work well as cycle, but you really don’t want them to be one of your early resurrect possibilities. Having a two mana card minion you can never play on turn two isn’t that great.
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Playstyle
As mentioned, this is a slow deck, and excels against control decks. Your optimal line of play is Injured Blademaster on turn three, Resurrect on turn four (assuming it died) and Onyx Bishop on turn five (if either died). Suddenly you’ve played three cards and have a 4/3, two 4/7s, and a 3/4. 15/21 in stats for three cards and ten mana is incredibly strong. You can, however, do fairly well with other cards replicated. Auchnai Soulpriest is very strong, and Sylvanas is obviously incredibly powerful if you can pull it off.
The deck does run some cards such as Barnes which are poor Resurrect targets. If you have a good setup with Resurrect and Onyx Bishop, and don’t need to play Barnes early, don’t. It’s better to set up your long term plans than get a quick advantage.
Positive Matchups
This deck is extremely good against control decks. Injured
Blademaster especially is quite difficult for control to deal with. From personal experience, this deck is a massive pain to deal with using Control Warrior. The ladder is in a fairly slow state at the moment, with many people trying out new decks. This means that this deck is extremely strong, and has a skewed positive win rate. However, even without the current shakeup, this deck is very strong against other control decks. It is very greedy, very value heavy, and runs two Entombs to make sure it wins.
Negative Matchups
Unfortunately, this deck does very poorly against extremely aggressive decks. It can hold its own using Auchnai + Circle and small removal, but easily gets overwhelmed. It simply doesn’t have early minions to contest the board. Even if you are able to answer their early minions, you don’t have a clean turn to drop Blademaster. It certainly isn’t an unwinnable matchup, but it’s difficult. If you are facing a lot of aggro on ladder, teching in a second Excavated Evil is highly recommended. Other than that, make use of Priest of the Feast as much as possible to keep yourself alive!
