How I Completely Murdered Thaddius: A Hearthstone Love Story

Despite not being a huge collectible card game fan, I completely fell in love with Hearthstone this year. Here's a recap of the ridiculous boss match that won my heart (again).

One of the reasons I (along with everyone else) love Hearthstone so much is the sheer variety of unique abilities cards offer, and how they can be combined in countless different ways. The Naxxramas expansions do a great job of highlighting this facet (while giving you some pretty awesome cards), to the point of completely breaking the game in some interesting and fun ways.

I managed to beat most of the Naxxramas bosses on the first try, but The Construct Quarter was more challenging, and forced me to build some new custom decks. The Construct Quarter's final boss, Thaddius, gave me the most grief, thanks to the fatally flawed strategy I devised going into the fight.

On the left is Thaddius, and as you can see, his hero power – which flips the attack and health of all minions – costs zero crystals. This causes him to use it at the beginning of every turn, even if it works against him. As such, I devised the deck seen on the right, which probably has pro Hearthstone players shaking their heads.

If you're not super well versed in Hearthstone (I'm no aficionado either, as evidenced by my selections), the deck is stacked with minions that have low attack and high health stats, such as Deathlord (2/8), Baron Rivendare (1/7), Oasis Snapjaw (2/7), and Gurubashi Beserker (2/7). That way, as my reasoning went, when Thaddius flips my minions' stats on the next turn, they'd be transformed into low-cost heavy hitters.

It took a couple of embarrassing matches to realize that the tactic just wasn't working; Thaddius puts out too many low-level minions, who were more than capable of taking down my extremely weak glass cannons before I regained control of them. The two Sludge Belchers (which are Taunts that must be killed before the player can attack other minions) gave me a little breathing room, but either way I was spending every match trying to pry back board control from Thaddius and not having enough punching power to attack his face when I did. Then, just when I was about to give up, I got a perfect storm of cards that led to the biggest win I've ever had in Hearthstone (even if it was just against the A.I.).

First, I played Duplicate, which will give you two cards of the next minion that the enemy kills. Along with it I played a Nerubian Egg, which can't attack at all, but spawns the 4/4 Nerubian spider to its right when it dies.

It was Thaddius' move next, and when he used his Polarity Shift, the 0/2 Nerubian Egg became a 2/0 – instantly causing it to break. Not only did I get my 4/4 Nerubian, but I received two more eggs back in my hand thanks to the Duplicate spell. Thaddius used the rest of his turn to kill my new six-legged friend and thump my face, but my diabolical win was already in motion.

For my next turn, I played the two new Nerubian Eggs, along with Baron Rivendare. As you can see in the image above, Rivendare causes minions to trigger their deathrattle twice. Like, for instance, spawning a Nerubian spider...

Thaddius once again triggered his Polarity Shift at the start of his next turn, which popped both Nerubian Eggs and triggered each of their deathrattles twice, giving me a quartet of 4/4 Nerubians, and turning Baron Rivendare into a 7/1 minion. Thaddius then played a Nerubian Egg of his own and took out Rivendare, then focused the rest of his minions at my hero in hopes of bringing the match to an early end. His strategy failed, however, because...

I had and played the above three cards in my hand. In normal play, Deathlord's deathrattle is quite bad, because it gives your opponent a free minion. In order to get the bonus minion, however, your opponent has to actually kill Deathlord first, and the Frost Nova I played assured that all of Thaddius' minions would be frozen for the next turn.

When Thaddius took control, he flipped me to a hilariously lopsided victory. My Deathlords became 8/2 super sluggers, while my 4/4 Nerubian spiders stayed the same. Thaddius seemed to give up at this point and played a Haunted Creeper, which summons two 1/1 Spectral Spiders upon death. Since minions can't attack on the turn they're played (unless they have the Charge ability) and the rest of his minions were still frozen, Thaddius had no choice but to end his turn. As the board jumped back to me, I got one final lucky draw: a Flamestrike spell, which deals four damage to all enemy minions. Here's what the board looked like:

As you can see, all of Thaddius' minions had four or less health, which meant after the Flamestrike, I was looking even better:

I had a total of 32 points of damage amongst my minions, plus a Frostbolt spell for an additional three points – on top of the 13 points I had just dealt to (almost) wipe the board. In the end, I passed up the Frostbolt and used my fireball hero ability instead to pick off one of the Spectral Spiders, and took out the other with one of my Nerubians just to be a jerk. It was finally time to put Thaddius out of his misery, and snap a final victory pic.

No, Thaddius, thank you, for reminding me why I love Hearthstone so much.

I'm sure better players have had even bigger and more lopsided victories (against human opponents no less), but the ability to endlessly experiment with new decks and ideas – along with a healthy dose of chance that keeps things interesting – has me eager to see what Blizzard has lined up for Hearthstone in 2015.