Best Beginner Hearthstone Decks: Hearthstone Basic Deck Guide

I just dumped an entire 3 day weekend into Hearthstone and I couldn’t be any more satisfied. During my amazing weekend there were a few things that I’ve noticed:

• Deck building is really difficult.
• Jumping into this game and realizing the insane complexity of cards and thus complexity of deck builds can be quite intimidating.
• The available deck builds found among the first pages of Google are sadly less helpful than I would like, they seem to all be disorganized and make it more difficult to read and build the deck.
• Lastly, Hearthstone is tons of fun when you have a great deck and you begin rocking people’s faces!

My Solution

I’ve decided to put together a little more optimized starter deck guide. I am going to leave out a few classes because I found them less than awesome. I’ll start by telling you, the very best decks to jump in and start with are, at least in my opinion, Hunter, Priest, and Warrior.

Also note that all of these starter decks are going to require all of the level 1-10 class cards. It’s fairly quick and easy to hit level 10 on any class. Just play some casual matches or just keep playing against the practice bots.

Most importantly about my listings below, they are listed in the same order you will find them in your collection. No more jumping around, ‘where is this card?!?!’.

Deck Builds:

Priest Starter Deck

This build is just solid. Your strategy with this deck should be basically all defensive. If you can keep a few minions alive for a handful of turns, you’ll be able to overwhelm your opponent. Be very very careful in your use of upgrade cards. You need to use them to either force your opponent to deal with your upgraded minions or in some cases, end the game swiftly.

Upgrades for Basic Priest Deck

This deck gets much better as you begin gaining more rare cards. The best part is a lot of these cards are blatantly obvious upgrades to the previous regular cards. I personally dislike Mind Control because it’s huge mana cost.

Warrior Starter Deck

This deck is all about armor and quick damage. Also note the utilities of Whirlwind, Elven Archers, Cleave and Execute. Makes a lot of sense when you need to clear the board.

Hunter Starter Deck

This deck is plain and simple. It will not get you far at all in ranked, but it will at least get you acquainted with the style of play for Hunters. As soon as you receive the card ‘Unleash the Hounds’, put it in your deck. When played in combo with the Starving Buzzard, it is quite the epic move. I also enjoy using Starving Buzzard with Snake Trap, most players don’t see that one coming. I’ve had one lucky priest foil that move. He used his Thoughtsteal and was lucky enough to get one of my flairs. Lucky, lucky.

Hunter: Hilarious Beasts Deck

I had to put this in here. I built this deck purely for fun, surprisingly my win rate in casual with this deck is higher than I would expect. With this deck you just flood people so hard with beasts that there is nothing they can do about it. Even if your enemy ends up with a large board of minions, you can be pretty much guaranteed a snake trap or Unleash the Hounds to take care of it.

Put short, this deck is all about fun.

“Hunter Burn”

As you may have noticed, I really enjoy Hunter. I am confident in saying it’s my favorite and I don’t expect that to change. Maybe if they nerf Unleash the Hounds.

Anyway, after much contemplation, I’ve decide to share my secret weapon. When I say my secret weapon what I really mean is someone else came up with this deck and its ridiculous. So thank you so much to Reynad (reynaddecks on Hearthhead) for coming up with this deck. My deck is based on this, yet tinkered enough to make it cheaper. If you would like to see his original, tiny bit more powerful deck, then check it out here.

Warning: I find this deck is a very RNG dependent deck. I will say that RNG is always more in your favor, but that doesn’t mean you won’t get a terrible draw and suffer greatly from it. If you start this deck off with two Leper Gnome draws, you basically win. Let’s just say I went from rank 25 to rank 15 and 4 stars in one night with this deck.

What to take away from this?

These basic decks above are just that, basic. The only ones that were not purely basic were the last two hunter decks I shared. The basic decks are not only great ways to start out with a nice synergy deck, but it will teach you the basics.

As you play you will unlock more and more cards and if you pay attention and read them, you’ll begin to see the non-basic cards start to fill in and replace the basics. You’ll begin to see the patterns and if you continue to play other players, you’ll see their patterns as well. If you play one deck and build it out by replacing basics with higher end cards, you’ll see your deck potential grow.

So if you had to walk away from this post with one thing, it’s this: pay attention, read cards, read patterns and put that knowledge to use.

Do my decks suck? Let me know. Or better yet, explain why and give us the alternative. That would be lovely!