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I guess hiding in plain sight does work.
Quote From Noxious A basic 1-cost card with stealth, and good turn 1 stats. If this card didn't come out in Ashes of Outland, I wouldn't find it particularly interesting or useful, aside from the free 3 damage to face or minion trade.
However, with Ashes of Outland comes more support for the stealth mechanic than in any other recent expansion. Ashtongue Slayer and [Hearthstone Card (Greyheart Shade) Not Found], two new cards with low costs, can play very well off Spymistress. If Stealth Rogue actually becomes a thing (possible, with Akama Prime), I could see Spymistress being the choice 1-cost to fill that deck.
Pocket Sand!
Quote From ShadowsOfSense Rogue's getting Secrets again! In Standard, this set of three is all you'll have, so they're pretty easy to play around. Keeping that in mind, their effects need to be pretty good to make it worth it - and honestly, they kind of are. It says a lot when the weakest of the three still draws you two cards.
Dirty Tricks is the weakest of the new Secrets. Drawing cards isn't a struggle for Rogue, so a Secret which only serves to get you a couple cards and otherwise doesn't hinder your opponent's gameplan in any way isn't exactly mindblowing. The real utility of this card is in forcing the opponent to carefully play around the other potential Secrets; tricking them into suboptimal trades or playing weaker cards in order to leave mana available to deal with either of the other two options is a far greater boon than the actual effect of the Secret, at least for a class which can so readily draw cards in other, better ways.
You'll never be sad to have a couple extra cards, but I don't know that I'd play this outside of anything but the most synergy dependent decks.
I can have a dark side, if you want me to...
Quote From Noxious Strong card; essentially a 14/10 for 7 mana, bonus stealth in the latter half. Silence is a must against this minion. A 7/5 on its own is not particularly threatening, but things can get icky sticky when the next one pops in and has stealth. While definitely a great card for arena, it does have some potential in constructed as well! With Rogue focusing more on stealth this expansion (and, I suspect, the entire Year of the Phoenix as a whole) this card has the potential to become even stronger. It may not look like too much on its own, and it's certainly not very interesting, but it enables a lot of plays around it, with other cards such as Ashtongue Slayer, Greyheart Sage and Shadow Sensei, and even with Deathrattle cards like Necrium Blade, Necrium Vial, Kobold Illusionist, Unearthed Raptor in Wild and Anka, the Buried and Necrium Apothecary in Standard.
She aced the Secret exam at just 21 years old.
Quote From Demonxz95 If there's one thing I'm gathering from this card, it's that Team 5 might continue support for Rogue Secrets after this set instead of making them a one-trick pony as they were in K&C. I'm personally fine with this. I'm excited to see what more Rogue Secrets and synergies they do. Shadowjeweler Hanar is already a pretty cool piece of synergy for the deck.
This card seems to be just something you include in any Secret Rogue. Even if you have to play it with a Secret (for 3 total mana), you still get a 1/2 body and a Freezing Trap effect. One you target nonetheless! That in general just seems quite strong, and if you can just play it as one card, then it's even stronger. As the flavor text hilariously suggests, you can also use it on a 10-Cost minion (or even a 9-Cost one) and make it wholly unplayable. In a world with Primes we haven't seen yet, perhaps this situation will come up there. You can also target your own minions with this. That's usually a bit inefficient in mana, but there's probably times where you can take advantage of this.
Never play Hide and Seek with a Rogue.
Quote From ShadowsOfSense Venomstrike Trap but with a mildly different activation condition. Just like with Venomstrike Trap, playing around this will often force opponents to play a suboptimal turn to protect themselves from a really nasty follow-up. Even if the opponent does manage to play around it, you've managed to take out a minion or removal spell for only 2 mana of investment; if they don't play around it, you can likely get even higher value than that.
Poisonous cards suffer most when they need to be played straight, allowing opponents the opportunity to respond to them in the least detrimental way possible. Even when playing around this card perfectly, an opponent still needs to get the Poisonous minion on the board to kill it off in the first place, and sometimes they're not going to be able to do that. You'll occasionally run into an opponent who has to slam a big minion down to take the fall, just because they have no other options to deal with a minion that hasn't even been summoned yet.
This is a simple, flavourful Rogue Secret and I really like its inclusion as part of this three. The trigger for it is both helpful for messing with opponents, and actively difficult for most opponents to play around completely.
She can't really give you a hand, but she'll take a stab at it anyway.
Quote From Noxious If you don't have stealth in your deck, this minion is of no use to you. If you do… then this is great! The +3 Attack is already decent on its own, but the immunity effect is what really brings this home. Your stealth minion is already pretty sticky, there's not many spells or minions that can take care of it in its initial form. Stealth minions also tend to have small health pools. With the Ashtongue Slayer, however, you can guarantee you get one attack out of your stealth minion and your opponent still needs to deal with it. At the cheap cost of 2 mana, it is a very versatile minion to play on any turn throughout the game - provided you have the stealth minion to set it up. With Akama Prime, at least, you shouldn't even need to worry.
Those Pandarens really know how to make a drink!
Quote From ShadowsOfSense This is a fun one. It has unfortunate anti-synergy with Shadowjeweler Hanar, but in the end do you really care that you lost out on some potential future Secrets when your 2-drop got upgraded to a 5-drop?
This forces tricky trades onto your opponent. Which of your minions do they care about upgrading the least? Which one might upgrade into the worst thing? What should they attack with to try and ensure the least bad outcome for themselves? Throw in cards with Stealth or Taunt and you've got a real brain bender on your hands.
Now, this card doesn't come without downsides. There are situations where you may have to hold back some cards in your hand to avoid them becoming the target for Bamboozle. I know I certainly wouldn't be running this Secret in any deck that has Akama in it, for example, because I wouldn't want to risk losing my amazing Prime to a rogue Bamboozle. Similarly, it probably wouldn't be to your advantage to run this in a Deathrattle deck, where you want your minions to die as they are.
In many situations this card will be a complete nightmare for the opponent and a wonderland for you; it's certainly the best of the three new Secrets. Just be careful when adding it to your deck. It doesn't fit everywhere!
Just waiting for all this to blow over.
Quote From Noxious Yet another draw card for Rogue. As we know, Rogue has plenty of draw power already. This card, however, is tailored for decks built around stealth. Stealth is clearly being pushed as a core mechanic for Rogue in Year of the Phoenix, more so than in recent years. Think of this as the Stowaway of this expansion. You got stealth? Great, here's two cards. Put two of those into your deck and you don't need to hold onto that Preparation and Sprint. Getting card draw out of this guy should be a piece of cake with Akama Prime. His stats are also decent - not amazing as some other 3-costs have, but still good enough considering you get to draw 2 cards - and you have no reason to play him unless you plan on that.
Choose from three great options: Mage, Hunter or Try Again.
Quote From Avalon This is a spicy one. 5 health for a 2 mana minion is already good by itself, even more with an effect like this. With such survivability, it will be really hard to kill it in the early stages of the match. Just like with EVIL Totem a few expansions ago, I think that turn 1 The Coin into Shadowjeweler Hanar will be one of the strongest moves in the meta. The upside? If you manage to do so, you can follow it up with one of the new (really good) Secrets Valeera received in AoO and manage to pick a choice for the following turn at the same time. Sticky stats, strong synergy and card generation: like I said, one of the best cards for Rogue and, possibly, of the entire set. Apparently, Team 5 really wants Secret Rogue to be a thing after all.
Since I read some confusion about how the Discover effect will work, I'll just remind everyone: if you're playing a Rogue Secret, you'll always be offered one Mage, one Paladin and one Hunter secret; if, for example, you play a Mage secret, you'll always get a Rogue, a Paladin and a Hunter one.
Akama out to have a good time, and I'm honestly feeling so attacked right now.
Quote From Noxious Regular Akama: Fine. Good stats. Stealth, so it is protected from most silences (except nuclear options such as Plague of Death or Mass Dispel.)
Akama Prime? Awesome! This card can only be taken out by either the Priest spells mentioned above (or other big clears like Twisting Nether) or random effects. You can also trade it into another minion, but why would you? If you can keep the board clear of taunts with other minions and spells, Akama Prime is your empty, no speed limit highway to your opponent's face. If your opponent cannot remove him and cannot heal enough, it's only a matter of time until you win. Again, Priest is the biggest counter to this minion, with all its "destroy a random enemy minion cards", but other classes should have a much harder time dealing with him. I'm confident this will see some play, perhaps even in non-stealth-oriented decks. It's all in all just good value.
Comments
"Choose from three great options: Mage, Hunter or Try Again"
Good thing Paladin is a healing class, because, good LORD, that burn!
Well to be fair the "try again" part is partially true in that if you didn't like your mage or hunter secrets that were offered, for 1 mana you get a pally secret and get a new choice of secrets. I wouldn't discount the power of a paladin secret in a chain like this.
I don't really think that Paladin has a specific straight tho :v...
This was also my favorite part of this review. Nice one, Shadows
We know rogue is pretty good already, so there's no need for me to hammer it home. I'll just state some few observations;
Bamboozle is pretty much the strongest of all the secrets if you're playing for tempo since it effectively discourages opponents to trade into any minions. Even a 1 drop can be upgraded into a 4 drop that your opponent cant deal with, and thereby giving you an advantage. This is particularly effective when you have low health, high attack stuff like Spymistress. And if they feel like using a spell, then it might activate Dirty Tricks, giving you a card advantage. Not to mention that your opponent would need to commit resources to do all of that. So you might well see a spymistress simply surviving all 3 turns, best case scenario.
Akama is great, and is very likely better than his prime. My biggest problem with Akama Prime is, first you got to draw akama, then play akama, then allow akama to die, and only then you stand a chance to draw akama prime, and then you have to commit to a 6 mana do nothing. This is basically a slower Waxadred without infinite potential. In any aggro deck, where Akama Prime can possible be useful, even Wasteland Assassin seems like a better card. But because Akama himself is a decent stealth card, this will be seen in competitive play. The tragic thing is if akama gets silenced, that might actually come back to haunt your opponent, not you.
Since rogue is one of the big card draw classes (alongside warlock and druid) the need to draw it twice isn't that concerning. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if trusty old Waxadred gets played alongside Akama to have two great reasons to run Stowaway even before considering more gimmicky shuffle cards.
How would you lose Akama prime to bamboozle if it's permanently stealthed? I don't understand your logic at all there.
Also, what rogue draw do you speak of? Card generation sure, but their current card draw pool isn't something that couldn't be replaced by some of the new cards. Sprint is too expensive, shiv and fan of knives are too weak and cards like stowaway or candle breath are deck-specific. Greyheart sage requires a specific deck too, but not many rogue cards can draw 2 for 2 mana like dirty tricks. It may be suboptimal as the card draw is delayed, but I can't think of why any of the cards mentioned above would be better in the general case.
Frosty covered the first part. I too had to think about the the card draw perspective and realized that he meant Galakrond and Toggwaggle.
True, running those two I have on occasion come up against a full hand, because the only low drops I can play are targeted (Sap, Backstab) on an empty board or card generating themselves (damn you inconvenient Dranconic Lackey!) But both of those are fairly late game scenarios. Not sure that I agree with the broader opinion.
I think the idea is that you "lose" Akama Prime if the regular Akama gets Bamboozled. You're correct that you can't lose the Prime itself to the secret unless some mass Silence happens before that. And at that point you wouldn't mind losing a bare 6/5 minion.
But then again, Akama has stealth itself, so you could time it to die and prevent Bamboozle. Plus you could delay playing a secret early if you want to trade with Akama more efficiently. I think you could run Akama in a secret deck with no problems.