Hearthstone
My analysis of the early days of the expansion and my legendary cards
I decided to leave my impressions and thoughts about these first few days of the expansion and an analysis of the legendary cards i've got. The thread is long so bear with me.
Glide is a card that i despised upon first glance. I mostly play slow decks and it looked like something designed to completely screw over with them in aggro DH which is supposed to be weak to Control decks. I only played against two DH with Glide so far. The meta isn't favorable for the card but it's awful if you are trying to keep resources in hand. They vomit everything on their hand and then they play this and refill their hand while discarding yours (it's not true discard but it feels like that). It may not be as op as i thought but it's as anti-fun as i thought.
I got Lorekeeper Polkelt from the bundle and i've been testing him mostly in highlander decks. It's an interesting card that has its uses but it can be a liability as well. You can play him one turn before you get to your big cards and you are guaranteed to draw them on the next turn. I have used it to have Dinotamer Brann consistently in my hand by turn 7 but if you don't draw Polkelt in time then he just becomes useless. Also, he's bad for specific card combinations. I've been testing Professor Slate in the deck as well and it's not good to have both him and/or Rapid Fire at the bottom of your deck. Polkelt is a little tricky to use properly and not as much of a meta breaker as people thought.
Speaking of Professor Slate, that's a card i haven't seen at all. Not in ladder, not in videos, absolutely nothing. I decided to test the card and it's quite good. Hunter doesn't lack hard removal. In fact, they have a lot of it right now with both Slate and Krolusk Barkstripper joining his arsenal alongside Deadly Shot and Rotnest Drake. The key difference is that Slate isn't random. You can choose your destruction target and that's relevant against wider boards. The problem is the lack of good spells to use with the card. Rapid Fire is good with Slate and... pretty much nothing else. Well, there's Vereesa Windrunner but nobody uses her so... Yeah. Besides that, we have Explosive Shot and Multi-Shot. These are not good enough. There will be people making the atrocious mistake of running into an Explosive Trap before removing Slate but i can't really count secrets as those are very easy to play around. In the end, the card lacks proper support but he can easily become great with a decent and cheap Multi-hit/AoE spell (like Grievous Bite in Wild).
Mindrender Illucia is another card that's really hard to utilize properly. She is mostly good for disrupting combos but those are extremely rare because the ladder is full of aggro decks. In my experience, she isn't great in control or midrange games because even if you waste your opponent's resources they can do the same to you. You don't want to play her with your big cards in hand and if you wait too much then there won't be much left to disrupt. In aggro games you can actually use her more effectively because your opponent is mostly holding low cost cards and you are holding high cost cards. If you play her early you can screw them and they won't be able to do much with your hand. Overall, she is another card that's really tricky to play with and she gives me the tech card vibe.
The meta isn't great on my end as i'm facing Druid all the time. There are a lot of Face Rogues (ugh...) and all sorts of Hunter decks as well. I rarely see Paladins and Warriors and not much else. Druids tend to fall apart pretty quickly against any aggression. However, it's undeniable that Lightning Bloom is a liability and it's just going to cause problems for the remainder of the year and the next one. Secret Passage is also pretty ridiculous. Voracious Reader is only good in extreme hyper aggressive decks that vomit their hands very quickly but the card isn't very good in any deck with cards that costs 4 or more. I think it will be fine if Face DH and Face Rogue fall from the meta.
Just as i expected, Mozaki, Master Duelist is extremely difficult to utilize as she is a combo card and the ladder is infested with aggression. Combo decks just fall apart very easily because of that. So far, she seems like a big meme that's going to see play just because combo lovers will never give up on making cards like that work. Ras Frostwhisper is much better and can be slotted into Highlander Mage without any other support cards. I don't play Shaman so i don't know how he's doing in that class. Btw, Ras is the only dual class legendary i've got so far. Really unlucky.
Finally, there's Sphere of Sapience. The card is very good in specific decks. I utilize it in my Wild OTK Miracle Priest. The deck always ran into the problem of drawing my big key minions before i could play Zerek's Cloning Gallery and the weapon prevents that which greatly increased its consistency. The weapon is good in Big Warrior and Duel Paladin as well because you really want to keep the big minions in the deck so you cheat them out. Sphere is pretty good, especially in decks that want to keep certain cards inside the deck.
Edit: I completely forgot about Infiltrator Lilian. I guess that's how much i care about aggressive cards. I tried her in a Secret Passage Stealth Rogue and it was fine. The deck has a lot of damage. Self-Sharpening Sword and Vulpera Toxinblade are really strong. Sometimes i didn't even need Secret Passage to win but that card just improves the deck's consistency a lot. Drawing 5 cards for so little just leaves a ton of flexibility and you can make the most out of your mana because of it. Also, if you draw Eviscerate the combo is going to active already. Lilian itself is just okay. The guaranteed damage can make the difference occasionally but she isn't needed to play a deck like this.
So far, the expansion just feels okay. There's some big mana cheat shenanigans happening (mostly because of Lightning Bloom but High Abbess Alura also contributes to the issue), lots of aggro decks, combo decks dying to aggro decks (as always) and Control decks seem to be AFK (at least, i haven't seen a lot of them). Let's see what's going to happen next week. Any thoughts? Thanks for reading!
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I decided to leave my impressions and thoughts about these first few days of the expansion and an analysis of the legendary cards i've got. The thread is long so bear with me.
Glide is a card that i despised upon first glance. I mostly play slow decks and it looked like something designed to completely screw over with them in aggro DH which is supposed to be weak to Control decks. I only played against two DH with Glide so far. The meta isn't favorable for the card but it's awful if you are trying to keep resources in hand. They vomit everything on their hand and then they play this and refill their hand while discarding yours (it's not true discard but it feels like that). It may not be as op as i thought but it's as anti-fun as i thought.
I got Lorekeeper Polkelt from the bundle and i've been testing him mostly in highlander decks. It's an interesting card that has its uses but it can be a liability as well. You can play him one turn before you get to your big cards and you are guaranteed to draw them on the next turn. I have used it to have Dinotamer Brann consistently in my hand by turn 7 but if you don't draw Polkelt in time then he just becomes useless. Also, he's bad for specific card combinations. I've been testing Professor Slate in the deck as well and it's not good to have both him and/or Rapid Fire at the bottom of your deck. Polkelt is a little tricky to use properly and not as much of a meta breaker as people thought.
Speaking of Professor Slate, that's a card i haven't seen at all. Not in ladder, not in videos, absolutely nothing. I decided to test the card and it's quite good. Hunter doesn't lack hard removal. In fact, they have a lot of it right now with both Slate and Krolusk Barkstripper joining his arsenal alongside Deadly Shot and Rotnest Drake. The key difference is that Slate isn't random. You can choose your destruction target and that's relevant against wider boards. The problem is the lack of good spells to use with the card. Rapid Fire is good with Slate and... pretty much nothing else. Well, there's Vereesa Windrunner but nobody uses her so... Yeah. Besides that, we have Explosive Shot and Multi-Shot. These are not good enough. There will be people making the atrocious mistake of running into an Explosive Trap before removing Slate but i can't really count secrets as those are very easy to play around. In the end, the card lacks proper support but he can easily become great with a decent and cheap Multi-hit/AoE spell (like Grievous Bite in Wild).
Mindrender Illucia is another card that's really hard to utilize properly. She is mostly good for disrupting combos but those are extremely rare because the ladder is full of aggro decks. In my experience, she isn't great in control or midrange games because even if you waste your opponent's resources they can do the same to you. You don't want to play her with your big cards in hand and if you wait too much then there won't be much left to disrupt. In aggro games you can actually use her more effectively because your opponent is mostly holding low cost cards and you are holding high cost cards. If you play her early you can screw them and they won't be able to do much with your hand. Overall, she is another card that's really tricky to play with and she gives me the tech card vibe.
The meta isn't great on my end as i'm facing Druid all the time. There are a lot of Face Rogues (ugh...) and all sorts of Hunter decks as well. I rarely see Paladins and Warriors and not much else. Druids tend to fall apart pretty quickly against any aggression. However, it's undeniable that Lightning Bloom is a liability and it's just going to cause problems for the remainder of the year and the next one. Secret Passage is also pretty ridiculous. Voracious Reader is only good in extreme hyper aggressive decks that vomit their hands very quickly but the card isn't very good in any deck with cards that costs 4 or more. I think it will be fine if Face DH and Face Rogue fall from the meta.
Just as i expected, Mozaki, Master Duelist is extremely difficult to utilize as she is a combo card and the ladder is infested with aggression. Combo decks just fall apart very easily because of that. So far, she seems like a big meme that's going to see play just because combo lovers will never give up on making cards like that work. Ras Frostwhisper is much better and can be slotted into Highlander Mage without any other support cards. I don't play Shaman so i don't know how he's doing in that class. Btw, Ras is the only dual class legendary i've got so far. Really unlucky.
Finally, there's Sphere of Sapience. The card is very good in specific decks. I utilize it in my Wild OTK Miracle Priest. The deck always ran into the problem of drawing my big key minions before i could play Zerek's Cloning Gallery and the weapon prevents that which greatly increased its consistency. The weapon is good in Big Warrior and Duel Paladin as well because you really want to keep the big minions in the deck so you cheat them out. Sphere is pretty good, especially in decks that want to keep certain cards inside the deck.
Edit: I completely forgot about Infiltrator Lilian. I guess that's how much i care about aggressive cards. I tried her in a Secret Passage Stealth Rogue and it was fine. The deck has a lot of damage. Self-Sharpening Sword and Vulpera Toxinblade are really strong. Sometimes i didn't even need Secret Passage to win but that card just improves the deck's consistency a lot. Drawing 5 cards for so little just leaves a ton of flexibility and you can make the most out of your mana because of it. Also, if you draw Eviscerate the combo is going to active already. Lilian itself is just okay. The guaranteed damage can make the difference occasionally but she isn't needed to play a deck like this.
So far, the expansion just feels okay. There's some big mana cheat shenanigans happening (mostly because of Lightning Bloom but High Abbess Alura also contributes to the issue), lots of aggro decks, combo decks dying to aggro decks (as always) and Control decks seem to be AFK (at least, i haven't seen a lot of them). Let's see what's going to happen next week. Any thoughts? Thanks for reading!
"True mastery takes dedication."
Can I just say its kinda interesting you classify Glide as an anti fun card and to screw over control decks. While you classify Mindrender Illucia as an interesting tech card.
I should have mentioned that Glide is an anti-control tech for aggressive DH decks. And Illucia is indeed an anti-combo tech for control priests. Both are techs and both seem situational. I like slow strategies that rely on resource management and having a card that interferes directly with that while i'm unable to do anything about it is not fun for me. But i don't play exclusively control decks. I prefer those decks but i play everything and i understand everyone's perspective. It feels awful to play an aggro deck while a control player just turtles behind taunts and remove everything you play until you have no choice but to concede. It also feels terrible when i lose a combo piece because my opponent just played some weird tech that just wins the game instantly for them. It's also not fun trying to survive against face decks while they just ignore everything you do. It's all a matter of perspective.
"True mastery takes dedication."
That is most definitely true. I personally feel that this game has been lacking tech cards speficaly against control other than hurderdur go face harder. So seeing them add things like Mana burn and Glide makes it more interesting. While ofcourse it feels bad if its used against you, but I think all tech cards suffer from that.
One possible use for Lorekeeper Polkelt would be for Warlock to cheat out Flesh Giant (unless sorting accounts for current cost) or Hand of Gul'dan, but having the deck ordered like that could be annoying after that. So I guess then shuffle in Soul Fragments to shuffle the deck. Sounds really niche and kinda annoying to use.
"The screen door slams, Mary's dress sways"
To be fair the priest class has been the default "Lose to combo deck" class for a long time now, since mage, druid, warrior, and rogue through discover effects can gain enough armor to be out of range of combo decks, priest can't. Look up any combo deck on youtube and most of the time it'll be against a slow control priest that 100% sees the combo coming and is unable to do anything about it.
That said.
It should have a higher manacost. You shouldn't be able to play it and just win the game against almost every matchup.
Living like that.
The problem is that by increasing the manacost of Ilucia you make her unusable, because you would not be able to cast cards from your opponents hand, while he will be on fulll mana crystals. So this will not happen.
-=alfi=-
On deck it should consider the original manacost... remember OTK paladin decks dealing 25 damage with Shirwallas even though they were discounted?
-=alfi=-
Thats good and all, but I don't think it's healthy for a slow control deck to have an auto win card against its worst matchup.