As we're coming to the end of the season and most of the decks are fairly established, I thought I'd have some fun coming up with decks. I stumbled upon a Reincarnate Shaman deck that actually worked and was fun to play, so I thought I'd see how far I could go with it. I played it successfully from rank 4 to rank 7, and decided to turn to reddit see if they had any suggestions on how to improve the deck.

Decklist: Reincarnate Shaman

FAQ

Q: Why aren't you running Ancestral Spirit and Sneed's Old Shredder? I thought they were pillars of the archetype.

A: Ancestral Spirit is a win more card when you're ahead and incredibly dead when your behind. If we want to actually win more than 50% of our games, we're going to have to leave it on the bench. As for Sneed's, I unfortunately don't own a copy to test with. It's probably a wise inclusion if you have it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being too slow for the current metagame.

Q: Isn't Reincarnate also a dead card most of the time?

A: Reincarnate has a lot more utility than Ancestral Spirit. You can use it to 'heal' a minion after attacking, offensively to knock buff spells and certain battlecry effects off of your opponent's minions, and to trigger your opponents negative deathrattles (mainly Zombie Chow and Deathlord). In its main purpose of triggering your own deathrattles, its much better to have Sylvanas Reincarnate on turn 8 than Sylvanas Ancestral Spirit.

Q: The deck might be improved if you cut one or both Reincarnates. Why not try that?

A: As the deck is specifically built around playing Reincarnate, so both are staying in.

Q: Is the deck even remotely viable?

A: Yes, of course! It plays plenty of removal and strong, resiliant minions, and is quite capable of winning games. However, it tends to get edged out by a turn or two against most of the main meta decks, as both its gameplan is less threatening than what they are doing and it kills much slower.

What sort of experiences have you had with playing a similar deck? How did you optimize the deck's strengths? How did you overcome its weaknesses? Please let me know how you would improve the deck!

(If players would be interested in a primer on the deck I'd be happy to write one, even though it isn't a 'meta' deck)