How can I beat Maexxna on Heroic?

Solution 1:

I was able to beat heroic Maexxna with a Hunter rushdown deck. As others have mentioned, your primary strategy is to make sure that her board is filled with 1/1s or 1/2s to lessen the damage you're taking each round.

The key to winning as a hunter, however, is not to outlast, but to outpace her damage. Unleash the Hounds will net you a ton of 1 cost 1/1 minions with charge (and you can throw in 2 of the neutral Boars as well), but the bigger advantage here, is that Maexxna tends to ignore them.

But even if you get out 7 hounds to her 7 spiders, you're still looking at a loss, due to her 15 HP advantage. To tip the odds further in your favor, consider:

Timber Wolf -- All your 1/1s are now 2/1s. Hope for this guy to get bounced back to your hand, because Maexxna does target this guy when possible.

Animal Companion -- You have a 66% chance of getting either a 3-cost 4/2 with charge (Huffer) or a 3-cost Timberwolf+ (Leoric). Misha is, unfortunately, pretty useless in this matchup.

Explosive Trap -- The perfect card to turn those 1/2 deathrattle spiders into 1/1 board-clogging spiders. Consider Also Explosive Shot if you're running into issues with the Sludge Belcher (Maexxna's only Taunt minion).

Weapon Cards -- Eaglehorn Bow and his big brother are pretty good damage, and won't get bounced by her hero power.

Kill Command -- Don't waste this on minions. Set that 5 damage (You do have a hound still, right?) straight to that Spider's face.

Houndmaster -- +2/+2 & taunt for a beast can give you a little bit of extra damage, with the caveat that you'll lose the minion if it doesn't get bounced. On the other hand, if your Houndmaster gets bounced, you can buff another minion, too!

Abusive Sergeant -- "Effectively" a 2/1 charge if you already have a charge minion on the board. For 1 cost, that's pretty good. And if he gets bounced, rinse and repeat!

After struggling to win with Freeze mage, I switched to this hunter strategy, and won the very next attempt (and that was even with forgetting to stick Timber Wolves in my deck!). As before, the RNG of Maexxna's draw means that it can't help to have a little luck in this fight. Don't give up, the RNG will eventually fall in your favor!

Solution 2:

One very interesting approach is to play Priest with Lorewalker Cho and Shadowform. As soon as you can cast both, Maexxna will have a Shadowform in her hand and she will play it. Which basically turns her ability off.

Another way, which I have used myself, is to use Warrior with Voodoo Doctors, Earthen Ring Farseers and Charge Minions. The primary goal is to flood Maexxna's field with low-attack Minions, ideally 2 Nerubian Eggs and 5 1/x minions, although up to 7 1/x also work. To achieve this, you need some luck with the Minions she has and have to kill off the 1/2 spiders at the right time. Once her field is clogged up, ignore it, then a combo of Voodoo Doctors, Earthen Ring Farseers and your Hero ability (depending on what you draw) brings your life to either a constant value or even up. Make sure you never play more than 2 Minions. Using Weapons and Spells, you can then deplete her life while keeping yours up. Occasionally throw in a Charge Minion, but keep in mind your Minion total should not exceed 2, otherwise you might lose an important Minion that gets destroyed instead of bounced. If available, Captain Greenskin can make your Weapons last much longer. Once you have lethal, just play everything and swing for the win. Don't do that though unless you actually have lethal.

This strategy also works with Paladin (Guardian of Kings is very important here as your Hero power doesn't up your life by 2) or Priest (no access to Weapons there, though, which makes it somewhat harder).

The advantage of this strategy is that it requires nearly no cards from the Expert Set and is thus available to everyone.

Solution 3:

It's pretty easy to engineer (with a board sweeper) a situation where Maexnna has 7 1/1 minions on the board, i.e. is attacking you for 7 a turn, and has no space to bring new, stronger minions into play.

In your hand at this stage you'll want: Guardian of Kings, Earthen Ring Farseer, Wolfrider.

Once you have 10 mana, cast Guardian and Wolfrider every turn - Maexnna loses 3 life per turn to your (in aggregate) 1. If you're close to death cast Guardian and Farseer for a few turns instead to give you an aggregate +2 life a turn and bring you out of the danger zone.

Solution 4:

The trick is quite simple once you get the hang of it.

What you need to do is mitigate the damage until you can reach late game (having Alexstrasza for the late game kill will make this very easy).

Keys to the deck:

Make sure you have a lot of battlecry units to abuse her 0 mana return ability. Cards like Voodoo Doctor, Earthen Ring Farseer, Novice Engineer etc, will be great for that.
Use a lot of charge creatures to kill her creepers to flood her board with 1/1s, once her board becomes full she can't cast anything anymore and can only deal 7 damage per turn.
Stall till late game using the above strategy until you can finish her off by flooding the board to negate her unsummon.

Some decks you can consider is a old school zoo hunter deck with UTH. Just keep a hard removal or two handy in case she squeezes out a Sea Giant.

Solution 5:

I used a Priest. It's a good deck if you don't have any legendaries.

Must have cards:

Voodoo doctor - Use this card every turn. She'll send it right back to your hand. So you can heal for 2 each turn.
Earthenring Farseer - Use this card every turn once you get 3 mana. Now you'll be healing for 3 every turn, and once you hit 4 mana, you'll heal for 5 with the Voodoo doctor!
Mind Control Tech - Really useful for taking control of her minions. You can get really lucky and snag a sea giant or spectral knight.
Power Word Death / Pain - Death is exclusively for the sea giants. Pains are exclusively for the 3/5 slime dudes. Don't let these 2 cards kill you!

General Tips

Once she starts summoning spectral knights and sea giants, do everything you can to kill them. They are pretty much the only cards in her deck that she can beat you with.
Don't take any minions or spells over 5 mana. At the late game, you are going to want to put at least 3 minions down per turn so you can start hitting down her lift points.
DO NOT kill 1 damage minions!!!!! Let her flood her board with 1 damage minions. They aren't going to kill you, especially with all of your Earthenrings and voodoo doctors. They are not an issue.

Keep in mind you are going to go, more than likely, into fatigue. So once she starts to run out of cards, just make sure you will always have an answer for a sea giant or spectral knight on the board.

Cool guide to follow