Card reveals continue during day 5 for Hearthstone's Festival of Legends card reveals.
Today you can expect to see Warrior, Mage, and Demon Hunter cards. Missed previous cards? Check out our expansion guide!
Don't forget to talk about the new cards in the comments and if you want to talk about them individually, we've got threads in our Card Discussion forum for every one. You can also take part in our expansion Tavern Crawl, which rewards you with limited-time cosmetics on-site, for voting and comments on cards.
Today's Card Reveal Countdowns
March 22 Festival of Legends Card Reveals
Here are all the cards that Blizzard have revealed today, March 22, 2023, for Festival of Legends.
Comments
Poor Warrior, first seeing Blackrock 'n' Roll and now these "riff" cards (which imo is a weird word to begin with). Guess team 5 was to silently delete warrior as a class and that feels bad man...
There's one more legendary, so there's still hope.
Besides, pretty sure month 1 into release if it doesnt see play, all the riff cards will probably be buffed by 1 mana. I can already see it happening.
The riff cards are alright. We got a 2 mana Claw, a Call to Adventure that doesn’t tutor, and whatever you want to call Bridge Riff. Long story short their all 1 mana overpriced for a conditional upside. I’m not actually sure what happens if you activate the finale on your first riff, but I hope it just replays itself atleast. Regardless I think this is kind o a worse version of relic dh. Whether that’s better than what warrior is already doing remains to be seen but given their current state the answer is probably yes. Also I find the finale’s wording alittle weird personally.
Rifts are nice.
But I doubt its as good as it is in practice. The card only truly gains in value as a finale card, because at baseline its slightly under-balanced. In this respect its substantially weaker than relics or concoctions.
Pretty sure the legendary would have something to do with the rifts as well. Perhaps play all three? Or just play all the rifts played before. That'll make them all playable, if nothing else.
The rifts all seem like cool cards, until you realise that Demon Hunter’s Relic package does the same thing but is so much better
Phew. It's a good thing the Riff spells don't have the Fire keyword. That way Warrior won't have to suffer from all the excessive amount of synergetic theming they've been suffering from. Y'know, because of how everyone complains that all the Warrior cards just work too well together.
More seriously, the Riff spells are overcosted, they absolutely need a synergetic card to justify them, and they're another example of the really bad package design that Team 5 has wallowed in for years now. Even if the One True Deck that gets created by the missing synergetic effect is good, its support will disappear by the next set and power creep might well crush it before we're a third more through the year (definitely by the end). These would be better cards if they stood on their own two feet. As it stands, even if these cards become good because of The Missing Synergy, the best we can hope for is a Warrior deck that doesn't suck for 4 months.
Outside of the lack of keywording, the theming is fine.
Oh hey, those Riff Finales are like my Encore keyword from the last custom-competition haha. Don't know if they're good, but they're cool.
Going Down Swinging is sending me straight back to middle school. Fel Out Boy. The flavour of this set is phenomenal.
Instrument Smasher while neat has the unfortunate caveat of being tied to dh weapons, which while they are all good cards are generally unfortunately not great weapons. In wild there’s 3 1/2 weapons + Dreadprison Glaive, [Hearthstone Card (Lion’s Frenzy) Not Found], and Trueaim Crescent. In standard atleast most of those are leaving standard so it might see play so demon hunters can turn their [Hearthstone Card (Calamity’s Grasp) Not Found]s into 4-5 attack weapons. If Umberwing is in core it probably cold be classified as deliberate sabotage. Either way I think it’s an improvement over Suckerhook.
Going Down Swinging - Ignoring the fact that its name is a barefaced lie given that it makes you immune. Is a solid option for Dh. It shares a decent amount of utility with Warglaives of Azzinoth with the bonus of preserving your health total. Speaking of warglaives it probably enables some Gonk, the Raptor-style otk with those.
Eye of Shadow is an okay card. It does suggest to me that Aldrachi Warblades are rotating. Maybe this makes the cut somewhere, but I’m not confident.
Glaivetar - while I do like myself a 4/2 thanks to my fond memories of Hooked Scimitar I’m not entirely certain this is fast enough for dh. Especially in outcast demon hunter, a deck that the last thing it probablywants is a 4 mana card without much in the way of immediate payoff gunking up its plays. Is an incentive to run Instrument Smasher in unrelated decks though.
So we get dhunter going full on weapon swings now.
Its not too bad, but its really starving for a weapon that does face damage per swing, because as it stands Im not sure what the point of all this cards leads to. Going Down Swinging is basically just a poor man's AoE that can backfire because you'll likely lose whatever weapon you're holding clearing board. Glaivetar supports outcast, and will never realistically draw you more than 2 cards. And then you have Instrument Smasher, probably the better card of this lot. At very least it replaces your weapon, which given the small pool isn't a joke.
As for the two legendary spells...
I'll say one thing, mage's doesn't look too bad, although Im sure the win rates cant be good. The idea is that you get to play lots of impactful, expensive spells at once, but the requisite is actually holding on to so many expensive spells in the first place.
Warrior's...good god someone's trolling. Yes there is a pathway for this to be good. Decimator Olgra, Fleshshaper, Trenchstalker, and even grom packs a massive punch. But the pathway towards there is just riddled with holes. These cards need to be in deck for this to work, playing a 5 mana do nothing, but ultimately it might all be just redundant because...
...warrior's best deck may actually be a retarded combo of The Fires of Zin-Azshari and Tony, King of Piracy. Yes, warrior cards are so shittingly poor that the best thing to do is curse your opponents with it.
DH looks alright. Eye of Shadow implies Aldrachi Warblades leaving (because otherwise what's the point?).
Glaivetar is good and finally gives some sort of justification for running Outcast cards (although why they didn't reveal any new OUtcast cards alongside it is beyond me, maybe it's all in the Core set)
Going down Swinging is actually a pretty neat card. I would have preferred if it hit face as wel but that was probably broken with too many attack buffs. Either way, it's nice to have some decent boardclears in DH for once.
Instrument Smasher is probably bad though. Too many low value weapons and the highroll potential just isn't there. I guess it works in a funny way with the spell, but that's about it.
The dev's dedication to making Demon Hunter as uninteresting as possible continues unabated. Today we get mediocre minions that give your hero abilities temporary that will amount to nothing because the minions are overcosted for what they do and the abilities have a silly opportunity cost. The most powerful and effective DH cards have typically had nothing to do with DH's theme and that trend seems to continue: whenever we get close to something on-flavor, the quality drops off.
It doesn't help that Outcast has never jelled as a thematic concept. They'dve been better off making Illidari a tribe.
Blackrock 'n' Roll is good. Does it need a crapton of support? Sure. But it's on-brand, offers a ladder-relevant OTK, and it could get better as rotation goes forward. It's deck-defining but it allows for multiple kinds of decks to use it. And can you imagine discovering this nightmare and casting it twice or more? If Standard becomes too fast for this card, Standard is wrong and this card is right.
DJ Manastorm is weird. It's one of the few times we've seen a "wind-up" effect. The real, serious punishment comes next turn when you lay out not just your free, zero-cost spell on the Manastorm turn but the other beatdown big spells lurking in there. So your hand has to be set up and you have to be at 9+1 to 10 mana to make this go. I can appreciate everyone saying they're sick of Big Spell Mage (not a fan of random crap wins myself), but Manastorm is a weird effect in its own right, right? If it weren't for the RNG nature of the finisher, I think this would be an unambiguously good thing to explore.
Demon Hunter was never interesting.
In my personal opinion, this expansion (so far) does not seem like the sort of gameplay style that I enjoy.
"going down swinging" [makes you Immune] you had one job.
DJ Manastorm seems like a coold card. Given Kalecgos’s success (or lack there of) recently I don’t have amazing expectations, but this effect is probably just asking to be abused
Big Spell Mage, here we go again. Mage only has three repeatable archetypes, apparently: Secrets, Random Casino Bullshit, and Big Spell. At least Rune of the Archmage is rotating...to make room for another Random Casino Bullshit Big Spell, I'm sure.
Whatever happened to Elemental Mage? I miss it :(
I am so damn sick of Rune of the Archmage. But I'm also anxious about what they'll replace it with. You know there are going to be some insane big spells for Mage to make DJ Manastorm work out. I mean, Rune itself isn't the problem (sometimes it whiffs pretty badly). The problem is Mages getting to cast Rune over and over and over for little to no mana. DJ Manastorm is going to provide plenty of those feel bad moments.
Every time I face a BSM I keep saying to myself: "Good riddance to this awful deck, I just need to wait a few more weeks!"
God, I can't wait for Rune of the Archmage to rotate, it's my only hype for this standard rotation.
So this is what he does at 10-mana.....