#secrecy mage

Okay, I don’t want to say that I *invented* the Secrecy Mage. That would be ridiculous. However, if I can call upon my inner hipster, I do wanna say that I played it before it was cool. And if I can call upon my inner realist, I also have to say that I’ve played it well after its time. Let’s take a look here...

### Arcana Obscura # Class: Mage # Format: Standard # Year of the Mammoth # # 1x (1) Babbling Book # 2x (1) Kabal Lackey # 1x (1) Mana Wyrm # 1x (1) Mirror Image # 2x (1) Secretkeeper # 2x (2) Medivh's Valet # 1x (2) Primordial Glyph # 1x (3) Arcane Intellect # 2x (3) Counterspell # 1x (3) Ice Barrier # 1x (3) Kirin Tor Mage # 1x (3) Mana Bind # 2x (3) Mirror Entity # 2x (3) Spellbender # 1x (3) Vaporize # 1x (4) Ethereal Arcanist # 1x (4) Fireball # 1x (4) Polymorph # 2x (5) Avian Watcher # 1x (6) Kabal Crystal Runner # 1x (7) Firelands Portal # 1x (7) Flamestrike # 1x (8) Marin the Fox # AAECAf0EEE2eArsClQOrBO0E7AXsB7wIyQ2BsgKjtgKHvQLGwQKYxAKk5wIHcZ4BwwHuAsG0Ate2Auu6AgA= # # To use this deck, copy it to your clipboard and create a new deck in Hearthstone

I made this deck slightly after Mean Streets of Gadgetzan released and, weirdly, I made it because of my love of playing Shaman. I heard it (somewhere) that the devs had created Spirit Claws in the hopes that it would make a “new archetype” for Shaman, but I didn’t know what sort of archetype they’d wanted. Ultimately, Shamans just used it to make their (then) super-powered archetypes already more powerful (and we LOVED IT!) I was curious about the new archetypes, but I liked the idea of the devs tossing out cards to see what sorts of things the players might do with them, so I looked at the other cards in Karazhan to see what I could find.

I immediately noticed Secrets. I was already aware of Secrets in general as something that Hunters or Paladins or Mages who were really good at beating me could use (I was still super new to the game) but a quick search for a “Secrecy Mage” didn’t turn up much (and neither did “Secret Mage”, even though Secrecy Mage obviously sounds so much cooler in spite of being what people commonly call the archetypes. See also: Crystal Rogue vs. Quest Rogue). A few decks used secrets and such for their own merits, but none really used the secrets themselves as the engine. I noticed that Karazhan had a lot of cards that worked with secrets (namely the neutral Avian Watcher and the Mage exclusive Medivh’s Valet) and I also saw a Hearthstone player named WoWGirl introduce Kabal Crystal Runner as a card with an effect like Thing From Below (which I loved.) So I immediately started throwing together a deck with everything “secret” I could find.

I tinkered with it over time... you’ll note I included Marin the Fox eventually because I love that card in spite of empirical evidence that it’s bad for me, though I can’t recall what I took out to make room for it... and while the deck never really underperformed, it’s become kinda moribund. I don’t really advance in ranks when I use it, though I tend to also not lose ranks either. It doesn’t “get the job done”. I still have fun with it, though, and it’s still a delight to see people auto-concede on their third secret.