Hearthstone Guide: The best decks for the Witchwood expansion

The Year of the Raven is nearly a week old. In spite of the big changes it ushered in, some patterns are starting to become clear. As is pretty much always the case in Hearthstone, they're not what most players were expecting.

Here's what we've learned about the expansion and its cards over the last few days, and what you can do to take advantage of it.

Common advice is that you should wait before crafting any new cards once and an expansion comes out. Often, early contenders for over-powered effects turn out to be easily countered. The Witchwood is no exception.

That said, it's a rare player who can resist trying out all the new toys on offer in the wake of an expansion. So here's the early contenders for your crafting list.

Neutrals are best value since you can include them in multiple decks. Right now the top trump is Baku the Mooneater. His ability to soup up your hero power from turn one is super useful. And his restriction, that you can only include odd-mana card in your decks, is interesting to build around.

His counterpart, Genn Graymane, reduces the cost of your hero power if you only use even-mana cards in your deck. There are decks that leverage this, but right now he's looking less useful than Baku.

Countess Ashmore looked good on paper and made it into a lot of early decks. But she hasn't lasted. We'll have to wait and see whether top players manage to make better use of her card draw effect.

Class legendaries are more marginal, and you should definitely wait on this. For the moment, the only two seeing regular play are Lord Godfrey for the Warlock and Shudderwock for the Shaman. The latter is a tempting craft since there's a good chance it'll get nerfed, allowing you to disenchant it for full dust value.

One of the solid predictions from before the expansion was that Cubelock would stay competitive and so it has. Indeed, it's possible to run a version that's changed only slightly to the one we described in our guide. The best setup, though, includes the new cards Lord Godfrey and Voodoo Doll. Copy the deck code below to import it into your collection.

Paladin also did well prior to the changes and was forecast to continue strongly. So it has, but not in the form that everyone expected. It's biggest incarnation is an "odd" card version that uses Baku the Mooneater to help flood the board with Silver Hand Recruits, then buffs them.

A less expected holdover from the old meta is Secret Mage. The new version plays rather differently from the previous one. It's less aggressive and uses Archmage Antonidas as a primary win condition. Our guide is thus somewhat out of kilter, but we'll update it once the contents of the deck has settled. Here's the most popular version at the moment.

Spiteful Summoner got an unexpected boost, too. The pool of 10-mana minions it can summon with a 10-mana spell shrunk. As a result you're more likely to get something super powerful when you play the Summoner. Although Priest made best use of this card previously, Druid is now the primary beneficiary.

Priest isn't out of the running, though. The Spiteful version is still viable. However a somewhat bizarre aggressive control variant has emerged. It uses dragon synergies to maintain board presence early on. Later, it utilises Mind Blast and the repeatable hero power of Shadowreaper Anduin to close out games.

The biggest question mark remains over Shudderwock Shaman. This card, which repeats every Battlecry you've played in the game, was initially thought to be game-breaking. Although it's buggy, it hasn't yet proved the powerhouse it first seemed. That's because it requires a very specific sequence of plays to work, and is vulnerable to aggressive decks.

It's a similar story for odd face Hunter, which looked like sweeping all before it in the first few days. Now it looks easier to counter with Taunt and healing effects becoming more common. It's still a solid deck if you want to burn through games fast, though.

Another archetype that's been re-invented for the Year of the Raven is Tempo Rogue. It lost a lot of important components, but they've been replaced by a bunch of cards that play around Rogue's ability to copy cards from other classes. So far, it looks like this might be too reliant on getting lucky draws to be a new staple, but time will tell.

Last but not least is Warrior. Before release, there was a general assumption that the best build would use the new Rush mechanic. However, it's actually quite an old archetype that's reappeared, again thanks to Baku: Quest Warrior. This uses the upgraded hero power to build itself a wall of armour in addition to the Taunt wall needed to fulfil the quest.