So about Nature and The Hunt clearing your board: the way to play this deck effectively is to try and kill the opponent before they reach 6 mana. The whole deck needs to be geared towards burst damage as quickly as possible. That's your win strategy.
Sometimes it's a race and you ignore the opponent's side of the board and go face; other times you have to do a little board control. Knowing when to do one or the other is hard and is one of the things that makes playing this archetype with good win rates difficult.
Armor Lurker is one of the best, if not the best 2 mana creatures in the game, ever since DO came out.
Also, you made a typo in your title: it's Rush, not Russ ;)
Thanks for letting me know about the title, I was very sleepy when I was revising this text and I missed it.
Regarding the deck in question, it's really hard to predict what it's going to do from the start. They almost always take out half of my table.