It's like Shielded Minibot only way worse...and an epic for some reason? Won't see play in Wild. Even if Dragon Paladin becomes a thing, Taunt just isn't relevant enough to warrant the Dragon condition and it has negative synergy with the best card in Hearthstone, Call to Arms.
Man that is some Wayne Reynolds art and a half on Deadly Arsenal
Woodcutter's Axe seems kind of bad til you remember Firey War Axe isn't quite as Firey anymore, and if a tempo warrior deck exists that uses a lot of rushers like Militia Commander, Muck Hunter, Darius Crowley etc then that card actually seems pretty good? I wish the stats were reversed, the problem with most rushers so far is lack of trading health, but whatever
no 3 drop rushers to curve into yet though, kind of have to hold it for a turn if you want it's deathrattle to hit Militia Commander, hope they add a 3 drop Warrior rusher to go with it
Personally, I love that they're trying to lower the overall power level of cards in the game.
Same here but it's for purely selfish reasons. Since I only play Wild, a lower power level expansion means that most of the cards will never see play in Wild because they just aren't broken enough. I'm sure a lot of the new cards will be considered unplayable pack filler or Arena cards even for Standard, so just imagine what that means for Wild.
@cesakich: Yeah, that's a neat design. Even when the opponent rules out the other possibilities and knows what secret it is, playing around it is awkward for some decks that would really rather play many cards each turn. Unfortunately a lot of other decks can easily get by with only playing 1-2 cards each turn and using hero power.
This is a weird one, glad they're making more interesting secrets
The most useless card against midrange decks though, luckily not a whole lot of those right now
rip edwin. (not really)
With the introduction of so many secrets each expansion, I hope we get some tools to counter them. Especially considering that random secrets are a thing. I can only play around so many things before it all just becomes pure rng.
Holy Water is a neat idea (at least it has an immediate effect on the board, unlike Convert), but it's still gonna be really bad against any aggro deck that just runs a bunch of small minions you don't really want copies of. In an aggro matchup, you'd be forced to either use it just to overpay for a 4-damage spell, or Holy Water your own minions to get extra copies of them if they have beneficial Battlecries or Deathrattles or whatever.
Honestly though, it's hard to evaluate Priest cards, because I have no idea what Priest decks are even going look like after the Standard rotation. Dragon decks are losing some Dragons, and Dragon-centric cards like Netherspite Historian and Dragonfire Potion. Big Priest is losing Barnes, Y'Shaarj, and a bunch of the spells it relies on to survive the early and mid game, so I imagine that archetype will be gone entirely if you have to wait for one of your two copies of Shadow Essence to put a minion on the board. I guess Spiteful Priest is more or less fine, and can make some easy substitutions for the cards it loses, but Holy Water certainly isn't going into that deck.
Hmmm, Holy Water obviously has a very unique effect but the turn you play it it is just 5 mana deal 4 damage to a minion, which seems really rough
I can't imagine it seems play unless either the meta is super fucking slow or Priest just has such trash removal that 5 mana deal 4 is their only option anyways
Oh, and to chime in on the power level conversation, this is definitely a thing I've seen before in multiple expansions
Stop underestimating shit! If you underestimate shit you'll be less prepared for it when it inevitably turns out super broken somehow
Well, you can underestimate Witch's Cauldron and Duskfallen Aviana, those cards seem trash :L
Worgen cards still seem bad to me, that Bogshaper seems to expensive, those Warlock cards are interesting and I guess Zoo will be needing some new minions with WotOG and Karazhan rotating out
some interesting design here, less broken than Barnes by a lot but somehow more RNG-y
If you're deck is all minions with good effects for that and draw could be interesting, but seems to inconsistent to build around so you'd want a deck that does that anyways
Toki seems like a fun card, but there is no room for fun in Hearthstone. Trash, there are just too many bad legendaries. On average the card you get is going to be bad, or at the least, not useful.
I guess Splintergraft opens up some more Aviana/Kun/Faceless combos, so that's cool. Outside of that I'm not sure what the use of the card would be in Wild. You could do Aviana+Kun+Stonetusk Boar+Splinter and then have 8 more mana to finish off an elaborate OTK combo. But Druid already has a ~131 damage from hand OTK with the Ixlid/Maly/Faceless combo, and that deck is actually good.
The class legendaries in this set really remind me of the class legendaries in Goblins vs. Gnomes and The Grand Tournament, in that they're all just a bunch of expensive minions with a unique effect that has no obvious place in decks that people actually play, nor do they seem good enough that they're a "build a deck around me" card.
It's weird to see them go back to this format of just a bunch of minions, when the previous 3 sets all had some weird new take on class legendaries (9 legendary Quests, 9 legendary Death Knights, 9 legendary weapons).
@cesakich: This is also the conclusion I came to. A hand Druid deck with Mountain Giants mostly needs draw, armor gain, taunt, and ways to generate more Mountain Giants so Splintergraft seems to fit in there. We’ll see, though.
Most of the legendaries shown so far I think are incredibly boring. Most also seem pretty bad. Toki is fun enough to warrant a craft from me, but other than that, meh.
Boy, comparing Toki to Drakonid Operative shows you just how much they're trying to pull back on the power creep. If it was a discover, it would be playable, but a random legendary is garbage most of the time.
Boy, comparing Toki to Drakonid Operative shows you just how much they're trying to pull back on the power creep. If it was a discover, it would be playable, but a random legendary is garbage most of the time.
Cards like Drakonid Operative and Curious Glimmerroot are costed differently because when it pulls a card from your opponent's deck, sometimes you get garbage that is never going to be useful to you (cards that buff weapons, or require you to have armour or Beasts or whatever, etc.), though I agree that they've been really pushing those cards in a powerful direction for Priest last year. They would never print a 5-mana, 5/6 that simply said "draw a card" because that's basically always a good effect. By comparison, 5-mana, 5/6 that says "discover a card from your opponent's deck IF you're holding a dragon" A) sometimes doesn't draw anything if you don't have the dragon, B) sometimes you get a card but it's not very good, or C) sometimes you discover a really good card. So I don't think it's super realistic to expect Toki to have a similar statline to what Drakonid Operative has; Toki always draws the card, and it's like 50/50 whether it's super garbage, or actually a decent minion.
That being said, yeah, a lot of legendary minions are bad, and the only reason that Elise Starseeker/The Golden Monkey (and to a lesser extent The Golden Kobold) were ever good is that you get so many random legendaries that 1 or 2 of them are bound to be good. Getting only one random legendary with Toki is probably going to be poor most of the time.
Miracle rogue is getting an awful lot of good cards. They just need to find a way to survive against aggro decks. Spellshifter would actually be pretty amazing in rogue against a paladin......if it didn't switch stats. If it's in your opening hand it's a 4/1 rather than a 1/4 blah. Should be the other way around.
Livestream on the 9th, expansion releases the 12th
After a year of not playing Shaman while it was the best and a year of not playing Shaman while it was the worst, I've been kind of committed to playing Shaman this pack but they still haven't shown much that makes me interested, hope the livestream reveals some neat stuff
Other than that I kind of want to play some Rush Tempo Warrior or whatever that deck turns out to be
@mike: The wording on this card is terrible. It should either say “whenever a friendly character is healed” or “whenever your hero is healed.” The current wording is extremely confusing.
Ben Brode: "Alright, Hearthstone design team, listen up. We're doing The Witchwood and I've decided we're going to play a game with the design. Here are the rules: we each design one card for each of the classes but the catch is we don't get to see what cards the other designers are making until we finalize the set. Except Warrior. We collaborate on Warrior. Also, if we end up having to nerf your card, you're fired. So make sure to TGT this one. Alright, break!"
@quid_pro_bono: If you read the Glass Knight as written, it seems more like it is trying to trigger every time any healing effect owned by you heals something (friend or foe). So every Djinn heal, every Truesilver Champion heal, every Forbidden Healing, every Lifesteal minion, would all trigger it regardless of who or what is gaining the HP, just so long as that effect belongs to the player who controls Glass Knight.
Granted, I haven't googled around to see if Blizzard has clarified this.
Also I still don't quite see the point, because life gain Paladin (clearly what they're trying to make happen with the Djinn, Paladin spellstone, and Glass Knight) really doesn't seem to have enough going for it compared to how disgusting aggro Paladin is thanks to Call to Arms.
It might be OK if it just gained +2/+2 for each Totem and left them alive, but this? Also...who ignores Totems and just leaves them on the board? This is trash, no possible way it will see play in Wild and I doubt it is good enough for Standard either.
@bisonhero: There was a time back when control paladin was a deck I ran ( I think after seeing Day9 try to perfect it). Back when you had the 'heal 2x the mana spent' along with the healing Ragnaros it was decent, but not great, at the time.
Paladin can be control in HS, which is does on the back of healing. So its hampered both by the maximum health cap at 30 (compared to armor) but most importantly, it heavily relies on Equality for its board-sweep effects. My win % with that deck back in the day was directly related too 'how often did I draw equality". Almost to the point of being 1 to 1. I draw it in my opening hand/first turn I win, I don't, I lose.
It was fun in a "I refuse to play aggro I wanna be differnt' and just competitive enough not to get steam-rolled all the time. But a tier one deck I don't believe it was. These days I'm not sure the meta-game would even allow for Paladin to play control. I guess we will see with the rotation and these new cards. Unless I missed them retiring consecration/wild pyromancer and equality, the control paladin still has its most required core element to play around with. Now if this new set has something that could act as equality's 3 and 4..now you might be talking business? I dunno, the meta seems like even that is too much card-disadvantage and too reactive for the combo and control decks in the format. Aggro feels slowed down enough that 'I wiped your board, you can't recover' isn't the name of the game and its more mid-rangy, sticky threats and/or completely uninteractive combo-kills.
God I wish I hadn't pre-ordered this expansion. I keep forgetting how much OTK decks digust me in HS until I get back into it for a bit then watch someone spend 90-180 seconds gold-fishing on their side for the win while I have literally no imput besides do I conceed now or let them finish. Up until this game either cuts out OTK decks (which I'd stick mill decks and etc into) or lets me pro-actively interact with my opponent in some way (neither of which I see them ever doing) I'm gonna keep being grumpy about this, sigh. At least MtG arena seems like it means to be a serious thing. and Eternal continues to hum along.
Which is bad for me, because I spend too much money on digital card games (Re:I pre-ordered this expansion because 70 packs is so many!). Arg.
@mike: The default service pages for hearthstone refunds directs too a basic faq which states "all purchases are final, check your password to make sure you don't..." etc.
I could find the number, and yell at them, and etc. But, honestly, its not worth. I just needed to vent at myself for dumb purchases. I should be humbled to be able to spend money on a game I actively loath at times. I am sure I'll get my moneys worth in the end, I've have so much dust by the time I open all these packs and dusting every last rotating card in my collection to play whatever deck I want in the new meta.
But yah, your right. I wanna be excited for this, it's just that all my existing angst about the game comes roaring back when I start talking about it again.
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