I recently made legend with this list, going 13-0 from rank 2-legend:
https://gyazo.com/7bdf1b329f8364603403a604eb0f9cf9
It's a reboot of the old self damage battlemage decks which are very fun to play. I included 11 self damage cards, GA, AA, BA, and SS, and 37 prophecies. The win condition is self damage into a snowball/kill on turns 6-9 vs control, and winning a race on turns 5-8 against aggro. Vs control, mulligan for self damage, particularly GA/BA. Vs aggro, mulligan for curve/ no prophecy, e.g., RR, CH etc.
With such a high prophecy count, no deck can win a race against this deck, so the self damage cards force the race.
I like to go field lane, allow them to trade while I go face, but occasionally take an excellent value trade, then when I inevitably lose lane on turns 4-6, I hope they're running low on removal, go to shadow lane, and try to close out.
Lots of fun EV plays to make and lots of planning ahead/counting/ playing around stuff. But games are still short and action packed. Very fun to play.
The deck is very matchup based; aggro/control matchups are defined relative to the speed of our deck, which is very aggro. So most midrange decks play like control matchups. So, aggro (race) matchups are mostly the other BM, the aggro warrior variants, and the faster crusader decks. The midrange decks which play like control are the sorcer/mage/archer variants, and the control matchups are the hist grove / slow mages type of decks. Generally play all the midrange matchups mulliganing for self damage as if they were control, but you need to be able to audible to aggro/control styles as game conditions warrant. The general idea though is get stuff on board and go face, force them to trade, and deny the stall/board flood counter strategy with your self damage cards. Close out the game with burn or cast out / silence into face damage.
You can tech this deck pretty heavily for the metagame with the new Skrim set printing a bunch of strong BM cards. Vs aggro, you cut some amount of self damage (particularly BA) and add PotI, CS etc. Vs Control, you want to cut the CS, SS type of stuff and add Garnag/Reive/ES/Ancano/type of stuff. I'm playing this Free2play so I don't have Dark Brotherhood yet; if you do PotI is probably an auto include in the deck because it's OP. I think the best strategy is to tech the deck vs control as a default because the aggro matchups are always going to be good. It's funny, but your worst matchup is probably against a prophecy BM that doesn't pack the self damage package because you can't really race efficiently or control efficiently.
Contrast with the most popular prophecy BM list, Syntactic
https://www.legends-decks.com/deck/1...ecy-battlemage . I prefer this list because the Syntactic list is slower and loses to a board control counterstrategy (this is where opponent leaves us at 30-26 health and takes board, then kills us in one turn). In contrast this deck forces self dmg to regain tempo in the early mid game and draws 37/50th (more usually bc we mulligan for non prophecy) of a card with each self dmg face ping. Since I'm defining a control matchup as one where our opponent's deck is slower, that means that like 65-70% of the games are control matchups where the self dmg is key.
Last edited by sauce123; 07-26-2017 at 10:23 AM.