How to play against Hunter as Handlock

Alright, the mid range hunter hype has finally died, but face hunter (or aggro hunter, the one that runs Abusive sergeant and Leper gnome) is still there. This short article helps you understand how to defeat hunter using a very risky style (lol, since when Handlock isn't risky?)

You know, hunter is quite weak in term of defense, the face hunter typically doesn't run any taunts or hp restorers, so every attack is worth calculating. The general rule of thumb is to summon every spare minion as possible to damage his face, save Argus/Sunfury because you need them to wrap big bosses like Drakes, giants.

Don't waste soulfires and power overwhelming! For example, if they have Companion into Misha, and you have Soulfire + Drake/Mountain in hand, don't Soulfire that Misha! It sucks if next turn your Drake will eat a Hunter's Mark, but that's it, better let hunter mark your early game minions than your last defense minions like Moltens.

Bait out Marks and Kill commands as soon as possible (preferably turn 4 or 5). You don't want to lose to 2x Kill commands turn 7 or 8 when you are having a nice field of giants/drakes taunted.

Do I need to clear their weenies? (Leper, Abusive etc, even Arcane Golem and Wolf rider) If you don't have taunted big dudes, you must clear them. Else, you can go to his face instead. If he's greedy and use Mark on taunted Watcher, that's a good thing for you.

Always calculate to secure a way to have lethal next turn. Generally this involves some crazy early calculation like how many times you have to tap + predict the amount of damage he could deal in order to bring yourself to molten giant's range. Usually the best I could pull off is a play that lead me to lethal next turn, unless he has leeroy. Well Leeroy is leeroy, you can't play around everything.

So yeah, typically, it comes down to this (tl;dr):
- You win thanks to double Moltens
or
- You win thanks to multiple mountain/drake
or
- You win thanks to Leeroy burst

These methods all require you to be brave a hit hunter's face a few times, ignoring his board. Let me quote a famous yugioh phrase "Life Point is nice, but I only need 1 to beat you". Probably I get used to play vs hunter so now I actually enjoy getting paired against them (don't even need any specific build). But damn mage is still lurking around and their burst damage is so damn cheap and effective. Lol you can't always assume that he's having Frost Bolt, Lance, Lance, Fireball=17 dmg at 8 mana, so after clearing the early rush of Juggler/Apprentice/Wyrm, you mustn't tap! That sounds very stupid because if you don't tap, you can't win: no burst, no out to Water Elemental, no taunt etc. Well I will leave the anti mage discussion to the next article.

Until then, hf laddering.