New Warlock Minion - Za'qul

I like the creative idea of turning your chip damage into healing, but I fear he might be a bit too expensive to be reliable....unless ramping curse damage is easy, but then holy fuck, do we have a problem on our hands. Just spamming Curses that your opponent needs to spend mana on just to not die seems very anti-fun.

Hmm this seems hard to judge. We need to see more cards in order to judge this legendary better. However i personally hope this "curselock" DOES NOT become good/competative because it seems like solitairstone 2.0 if its a meta deck. These curses seem so un-interactive and not fun to play against. Also turning the curses into healing just makes it harder to deal with that deck, which i hope this archetype will fail and i hope it doesn't get good support.

Edit: "Un-interactive" might not have been the best word choise, but i was imagine the scenario where it's "Curselock" mirrors every game, and the support it got was/is insanely strong. I probably should have used "toxic" or something in this direction. I just want to express that i really hope this is a overreaction, because i just wish to see warlock not go into another "feelsbad" direction again. Especially after Tickatus and The Demon Seed made warlock often the class that gets bashed at a lot because of unfun archetypes.

are you just using un-interactive to mean "i don't like it" because how could a play pattern be MORE interactive than putting a card in hand and giving your opponent a choice to make???

Quote From edennnnnn

are you just using un-interactive to mean "i don't like it" because how could a play pattern be MORE interactive than putting a card in hand and giving your opponent a choice to make???

 

Okay looking back at it, maybe un-interactive was poorly worded, "Disrupting your opponents turn by making them pay 2 mana to remove 1 curse, or make them spend most of their mana to get rid of curses, depending on the support this archetype will get" is a better way of wording it i suppose.

The main reason i used "Un-interactive" is because i imagined the worst case scenario (I like imagining the "best" and "worst" case scenarios for a lot of cards when they get revealed.) where "curselock" is a meta warping archetype/deck, and it's curselock mirrors most of your games. Both locks just playing curses and removing their opponents. Both ignoring board cuz they want they 1. Dont have the mana to spend on minions cuz they spent it on removing curses. 2. Want to play their own curse cards so they can curse their opponent. Of course this is just speculation, and such things are really dependand on the support this archetype will get. But i really hope they make it a fun archetype, and not one that feels both bad to play as and play against. We have had enough bad experiences with warlock in the last year. (And btw this comes from someone who likes playing warlock. I'm just concerned about one of my favorite classes going into another bad direction.)

Its kinda like Abyssal Wave, in that both cards' viability is largely determined by the performance of the abyssal curses. The problem is that we dont know how the curses work, or the number of cards that apply these curses, because there's another 4 more warlock cards left unrevealed.

It is implied that the curses work like rafaam's curse, in that you can dispel it by playing the card off your hand. If that is true, then the viability of this card goes down pretty hard. Because in what world will the opponent not dispel the curses within 2 turns? The ideal would be giving curse cards while building tempo, which this card provides, but judging from the only other revealed card Abyssal Wave, it is implied that this is not how team5 have designed the archetype to work.

So against aggro decks, they will simply shrug at the curse ticks and dispel it at a later point of the game, while control/combo decks will simply spend their mana to immediately get rid of it. Tempo decks will probably have enough board to discourage you from playing these curse cards. At the end, exactly what kind of deck is this, and what is it expecting to beat?

All this can change, and immediately win this card the lady liadrin award in the Sunken City expansion, by revealing either; a card with a massive battlecry enabled by curses, or a card that puts multiple curse cards into your opponent's hand. Until then, the curse cards looks bad, and will likely follow the same fate as the fel archetype team5 wanted us to play in Alterac.

Seems to slow .... also depending on how many Curse Cards we will get - right now it looks realy weak!

So now there's multiple ways to generate Abyssal Curses, and with this in play you get healed for the damage the enemy hero takes. Still not sure this will be all that great, but I don't think I fully understand how it works from reading the card text.

Were there any comments from devs on how the Abyssal Curse work? I suspect that it won't be like Cursed!, but instead will persist for two turns objective-like dealing more damage each turn.

Disregard that. As FortyDust mentioned on the other page, devs commented on Twitter:

The first curse starts at 1 damage (it counts itself and immediately ticks up from 0 to 1). Each curse will disappear on its own after 2 turns, or you can "cast" it for 2 mana to get rid of it early. Every additional curse deals 1 more ongoing damage than the last.

It's niche, and only going to see play in Abyssal Curses decks. Since Abyssal curses will probably be a slow strategy that is at its best against other slow strategies, and since other slow strategies aren't likely to be doing a lot of damage to you until late in the game when that damage will stick, I can only say that the healing probably won't matter a whole lot. Abyssal curses Warlock sounds very off-meta to me. I'm sure there will be people who play it and have fun, but I'm going to guess it won't be a strong deck.

Such a cool concept. Sadly the supposing cards are just so slow. Blizzard seemed to  taxed this mechanic in mana cost. We'll see if that was warranted in the theory crafting stream.

Glad Brann is back or this wouldn't be impacted enough. Since he is here I think this has some potential.

Wish it said "all curses". That way it could  play with past and future curse cards. This being self contained its really mini set or bust. That's a shame as it's a fun idea. 

I'm not placing any faith into those Abyssal Curses just yet. I do like the design and how it turns the pressure into an even greater beneficial deals for the warlock casting it, but unless it is as consistent as say Soul Fragment, building a deck around the Abyssal Curse doesn't seem as reliable and more restrictive.

Once again, I think Cussing Warlock is going to be a reddit complaint deck, but not a very viable deck.

Will only be as good as the Abyssal Curse archetype. The healing is nice, but you'd probably want to give your opponent at least 3 curses before playing Za'qul

I love the art and flavor. Not sure if it'll actually be any good, but as someone who loves the concept of an Affliction Warlock, I'll be sure to give it a try!