Hearthstone Rogue Wild

An introduction to Kingsbane Rogue in the Scholomance Academy

September Update of our old Kingsbane Rogue guide.

With the recent release of new cards, the Kingsbane Rogue got several big buffs. The Kingsbane deck is now once more a tier 1 deck, competing with archetypes such as Raza Priest, Quest Mage for the top spots. Players can adapt the deck in various ways to adapt to the meta. Besides this, the deck is very enjoyable to play, as long as you can avoid Kobold Stickyfinger!

Deck core

The deck core for Kingsbane Rogue is a bit of a unique scenario, as nearly every player using the deck plays the same list. With how streamlined the deck is, very few flexibility is possible. As such Kingsbane Rogue has no “core” as the majority of decks play at least 29 of the same cards.

Build options & tech cards for Kingsbane Rogue

The current build for Kingsbane Rogue centers around being as consistent as possible. The largest weakness of the deck remains its relative inconsistency. In a decent number of your games, you simply run out of engines to draw cards, since the majority of lists are limited to six drawing engines.

While six may sound like a lot at first, it is very common to require two or more of these draw sources to successfully close out a difficult matchup. Because of this some players have resorted to trying cards such as Voracious Reader in the list for increased consistency.

Example decklists for Kingsbane Rogue

List 1 by 西索 #5 Legend CN:

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Corbett (?) List:

This list is widely attributed to the Wild Hearthstone streamer Corbett, however, many players have experimented with the list since the Scholomance Academy expansion leaving the original creator unconfirmed.

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Mulligan for Kingsbane Rogue

HSreplay Rogue Stats
Kingsbane Rogue stats by hsreplay.com

With more than 26,000 games of data available at the high-ranks for Kingsbane Rogue, we have a fairly accurate idea of what the mulligan for the list should be. One-mana cards are great, and cards such as Dread Corsair should be avoided.

However, there are some interesting stats we obtain from the data available to us for several specific cards. The first card that grabbed my attention is the relatively high percentage of people holding Preparation.

From my experience playing with and against the deck, some players keep Preparation alongside cards such as Raiding Party or Tinker’s Sharpsword Oil. However, the low winrate of Preparation proves that the community likely does this too frequently.

Tinker’s Sharpsword Oil only being kept 14% of the time with a relatively high win rate implies that it is likely good to hold onto, if the rest of your hand is already high-value.

The general strategy of the deck

Kingsbane Rogue aims to apply heavy constant damage using a high attack Kingsbane and early board pressure with pirates onto control/combo decks such as Quest Mage, Reno Priest, and Combo Druid. In general, the majority of games of Kingsbane Rogue are decided by turn five to six, in one direction or the other.

The strength of the deck makes many games a total blowout in your favor. However, the matches where you are going to have to make more decisions make the difference between the good and the great Kingsbane Rogue players.

Matchups & Meta

Kingsbane Rogue excels at pressuring control and combo decks, however, it is not alone at this. Faster aggressive opponents tend to run over the deck. With Secrets Mage being a particularly bad matchup due to Counter Spell and Arcane Flakmage and the face damage. 

Some players consider the other Rogue archetype, Odd Rogue, to be better against the other aggressive matchups such as Aggressive Druid. However, since those decks are quite uncommon, it is hard to make an accurate judgement on this.

Conclusion

Overall Kingsbane Rogue remains one of the most powerful decks in the Wild Hearthstone format. Even though one of its vital cards, Secret Passage, received a major nerf recently, the deck is holding up strong.

Do you want to have your deck featured or work with AceGameGuides on creating strategic content? Email Arend@AceGameGuides.com, and we’ll talk! For more of AceGameGuides, be sure to join the new discord! If you still cannot get enough, take a look at LaboreSangre’s Rattlegore Warrior Guide!

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