Every once in a while, a formerly crappy Hearthstone card finds its place in a deck and works so well that it starts to look like it might actually be good. A while back, that card was a Hungry Crab. Today, itâs a fedora-wearing rodent called Weasel Tunneler.
If thereâs one thing you should know about todayâs Hearthstone metagame, itâs that most of the popular decks youâll see in competitive games run a lot of high-quality cards. These cards either kill you really quickly, or they continually apply pressure until you simply canât beat their minions and youâre forced to tap out. From quick and efficient âTempoâ Rogue decks, to the obnoxiously consistent âCubeâ Warlock decks, itâs a massive struggle to try and make a deck that can either outlast or outpace these common archetypes, since theyâre already so well-optimized.
Luckily, thereâs a new deck in town that can actually beat some of these decks, and on top of that, itâs a blast to play. Invented by the streamer Janne âSavjzâ Mikkonen, âWeasel Priestâ doesnât look to beat the enemy deck outright. Instead, it looks to water down the enemy deck until itâs so bad that it becomes beatable.
The star of this deck is the Weasel Tunneler, an extremely weak little ratty dude with a lazy eye, a creepy smile, and a very strange effect: When it dies, it gets shuffled into the opponentâs deck.
In the past, cards like the Priest spell Excavated Evil have exhibited similar âshuffle into the opponentâs deckâ mechanicsâbut Weasel Tunneler is a much weaker card than Excavated Evil was, so it has the potential to really mess up the enemyâs game plan. Since you can only run a maximum of two copies of a card in a deck, the trick to Savjzâ Weasel Priest is that it makes copies of Weasels and then resurrects the ones that have already died in order to toss as many Weasels as possible into the enemy card pool.
The legendary card Herald Volazj can make copies of every Weasel you have on the field, while a card called Carnivorous Cube will kill your Weasel (shuffling it into the enemy deck), then respawn two more once it dies. Another card called Mirage Caller will instantly make a copy of a weasel, while cards likeNâzoth, The Corruptor and Twilightâs Call will revive your dead Weasels. If you play it right, by the time you get to later turns, the enemy deck has more Weasels than Redwall
The Weasel Tunneler mechanic has been around since 2016âs Mean Streets of Gadgetzan expansion, but up until now, there havenât been enough copy/resurrect cards, and itâs been too weak to spend the early turns watering down the enemy deck. After all, you canât copy your Weasels if youâre dead at turn four.
To boost survivability, the Weasel Priest deck runs a Quest card from the Journey to UnâGoro expansion called Awaken the Makers that can increase your max health over time, giving you more time to build up Weasels.
Even this might not have been enough to make the deck work, but recent changes to Hearthstoneâs metagame have made a Weasel strategy even more viable: Most of todayâs popular decks take a handful of turns to get rolling, so youâve got even more breathing room to get the Weasel engine up and running before your enemy starts doing damage.
Watching someone win with Weasel Priest is like watching a child win the Indy 500 by tossing marbles onto the track: Itâs crude, itâs slightly unfair, and itâs pretty damn funny. Will it become a top-tier competitive contender and the new deck thatâs so OP that everyone hates it? Maybe not. But as Savjz and others, like popular streamer Thijs Molendijk, have demonstrated, Weasel Priest can stand paw-to-paw with some of the best decks in the game, and ratâs enough for me.
Want to run Weasel Priest for yourself? Hereâs the code for Savjzâ deck: AAECAa0GCJ8D7QXgrAKKsAKWxALPxwKQ0wLD6gILigH7AbW7AuW8AsPBAtHBAtXBAujQAovhAqniAurmAgA=
