Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of fatigue warrior. I found a list on LiquidHearth from a player called Eversiction that originally piqued my interest. Control Warrior is a deck I’ve always wanted to play but never could, due to my limited collection. The highlight of this deck is that it only requires two legendaries: Elise Starseeker and Justicar Trueheart.

This deck runs two win conditions. The first is playing Elise, turning your entire deck into legendaries, and slamming huge dudes every turn. The second is to remove every threat the opponent plays until they run out of cards and outlast them in fatigue by gaining 4 armor a turn. While the deck is extremely time inefficient, every game is full of very interesting decisions and mechanics. It’s also very computationally intense, as most games against other control decks come down to difficult fatigue math. This naturally results in the deck having a higher win percentage because other players are less likely to be familiar with the matchup.

Of course, I quickly realized that the math is too hard and decided to build a spreadsheet to calculate everything for me. I got a ton of use out of my original Patron Lethals spreadsheet which calculated damage from hand with varying numbers of Frothing Berserkers, Whirlwinds and Inner Rages. I figured I could try and reproduce a similar thing for fatigue.

Introducing the Fatigue Calculator. You can enter game state like health, healing, fatigue and damage on board for both you and your opponent. Then it displays your life totals at each turn until you eventually die. The purpose of this is to quickly calculate the result of the game if nobody does anything except hero power for the rest of the game. Why is this so important? In most games against aggro or midrange, if you survive long enough you automatically win, no math required. This spreadsheet becomes a lifesaver in heavy control matchups, such as Control Priest or the Control Warrior mirror.

Here’s a quick puzzle. You are playing this deck vs a control Priest. Both players have drawn their entire deck. You are holding the Golden Monkey and 5 other useless cards. The priest has 1-2 copies of Entomb and 4 other useless cards in hand. The priest has a 2/8 Deathlord in play. You have 24 armor and 21 health while the priest has 30 health. You just took 1 damage from fatigue and the priest has taken 0. What’s the correct play?

As the warrior, you have two choices: play Golden Monkey or do nothing. Playing Golden Monkey is tempting since transforming your dead hand into potentially powerful legendaries is great. However, you know it will definitely be Entombed, giving the Priest one less fatigue turn and the ability to also play the Golden Monkey. Every time I’ve done this I feel at a disadvantage and only win because I get better random legendaries. The correct play in this scenario is to actually do nothing. If both players do nothing but hero power for the rest of the game, the warrior will win.

Or, imagine this situation that occurred to me the other day.

It’s currently the beginning of my turn. I will take four fatigue damage on my next turn and my opponent is going to take five. During the game, I knew my opponent had Grom and I  incorrectly thought his last card was a worthless Shield Block (turned out to be Brawl). I have two choices: play Nozdormu followed by Golden Monkey or play Golden Monkey and hope I get a better or equal legendary from the effect. What’s the right play?

First of all, if neither of us does anything for the rest of the game, I am going to lose to fatigue first. This doesn’t even consider that he has an equipped Death’s Bite that can hit me for another 4-8 damage.

Now if I play Nozdormu, he will kill it with charge Grom + Death’s Bite. Then I play Monkey and he trades enraged 10/1 Grom into Monkey. He’s left with an Acolyte of Pain and a Death’s Bite with 1 charge. He can’t use the last charge of Death’s Bite since the deathrattle would cause him to fatigue more. The new scenario is the same as the last, except my opponent will take an extra 8 damage from face tanking Nozdormu. I still lose two turns early.

So the only way I can win is to play Golden Monkey and pray for a miracle. It just so happens I ripped a Deathwing off the top for the glorious win.

Lightning Helix anyone?