Shellfish Mill Priest Deck - Voyage to the Sunken City

Shellfish Mill Priest Deck Mulligan Guide

Shellfish Mill Priest is a combo deck at its core, requiring key cards early in order to perform its combo in a timely manner. To aid this, you should use your mulligan to aggressively look through your deck for essential cards. Switcheroo Priest follows a very unique mulligan strategy where keeping random cards can be better than mulliganing them. This is because the deck relies on not drawing either of its minions in order to have the highest chance of winning. With this in mind, you should always mulligan away your minions if you draw them, and keep any spells if you already have Switcheroo.

• General Mulligan (keep regardless of what your opponent is playing) — Switcheroo, Handmaiden, Selfish Shellfish.
• Mulligan against Aggro (also keep if you think you are playing against an aggressive deck) — Xyrella.
• Mulligan against Control (also keep if you think you are playing against a slow deck) — No further cards required.

Shellfish Mill Priest Deck Strategy

Mill Priest is heavily reliant upon the use the summoning of Selfish Shellfish numerous times throughout the game in order to be successful. To streamline the process, you should use your early turns to utilise cards like Illuminate, Switcheroo, and trading Amulet of Undying to try to ensure you can play out a Shellfish on curve.

Once you are able to play a Selfish Shellfish, you should make use of Whispers of the Deep to help it control the board and Azsharan Ritual copy it, while removing the card's draw effect to prevent your opponent from drawing cards too soon. Should your Shellfish die, you can additionally make use of Amulet of Undying, ideally having it upgraded at least once, to resummon your Shellfish to the board. During this time, it may be tempting to utilise the 7/7 minion to deal 7 damage to face, but the deck will almost never be able to win on board alone and it is therefore better to always trade to give you more long-term control.

As you play through the mid game and into the late game, you should make use of any excess Mana to draw through your deck using Cleric of An'she, Handmaiden, Thrive in the Shadows, and Switcheroo to help find the deck's essential cards.

To close out the game, you should specifically look for Brann Bronzebeard, Zola the Gorgon, Priestess Valishj, and Xyrella, the Devout. With this combo, you should look to play any cheap spells, followed by Brann and then Priestess Valishj, if you have 8 Mana, you can simply play Xyrella, the Devout here to force your opponent to draw cards. Otherwise, Zola can be used to generate 2 more copies of Priess Valishj to refresh even more Mana Crystals in order to Xyrella, the Devout ultimately force your opponent to draw a large number of cards resulting in massive fatigue damage.

Perhaps the most challenging part of this deck's final combo is not the exceution, but rather the counting of the damage itself. When figuring out how many cards your opponent will draw, every Selfish Shellfish that has died will draw your opponent 4 cards, assuming you have Brann Bronzebeard and Xyrella, the Devout to play, even if the original minion's Deathrattle did not trigger. Once you known how many cards your opponent will draw, you can subtract the current number of cards they have in deck to figure out how many cards they will overdraw. With overdraw damage, each card overdrawn will deal 1 more damage than the last, allowing a quick bit of arithmetic to be done to calculate the damage quickly!

To calculate fatigue damage quickly, add 1 to the overdraw number, halve it and then multiply the result by the number. For the example, when overdrawing 7 cards, add 1 to get 8, half the 8 to get 4, and multiply 4 by the original 7 for a final result of 28 fatigue damage.

Against Aggro, you should try to ensure you always Silence your Selfish Shellfish as soon as possible. Allowing Aggro opponents to draw additional cards will often give them enough fuel to defeat you before you can pull off your combo.

Against Control, the matchup is incredibly favoured due to the amount of freedom you will be allowed. You should therefore take extra care to avoid losing to any fringe scenarios, like having your Selfish Shellfish transformed by Mass Polymorph or eaten by Mutanus the Devourer. In most cases, playing and making sure your Shellfish dies as soon as possible will prevent any complications.

Shellfish Mill Priest Deck Card Swaps

• Against Aggro — Add 1x Holy Smite for 1x Cleric of An'she for additional removal.

Changelog