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What do you expect from a

mechagnome ;)

One of the coolest decks I've seen in a hot minute. 

There is no refund for cards that are joining the Core set. You get the cards for free for the year, but next year they will be gone again, so in the end you do not lose or gain anything.

I think this card is partially overated, but still a decent card.  You will usually get 4 mana back on it, which just makes this a 2-5 with semi-taunt for free.  I worry that with mages strong draw engine it could be worse, but atleast Incanter's Flow will be gone to partially reduce mana cheat, though Siphon Mana and Shivering Sorceress will help with that.

Pretty slow card, but if you keep this in your opener, you can get back spells relatively consistently.  A funny thing would be doubling up on Sorcerer's Gambit, but realistically, not going to happen.  Bad top deck, but at least the stats aren't to far behind.  Also, why another Mage Diamond legendary?  I love mage, but dude give it to something else already.

I've had that quite a few times, even wrote about it before. Sometimes just setting airplane mode and then Wifi fixed these things for me (it is silly), sometimes just restarting the device or clearing the temporary data did the trick. One time I had to reinstall the whole thing before the download gracefully went through. 

I think that based on the Mech Cards that have been released, there is just not enough support for a Mech mage to be competitively viable unfortunately.  However, if more support comes down the line, this card will be an excellent finisher/comeback card for Mech Mage.  You get rush, you get board clear, and you get a body left on board at a bare minimum.  

I think that based on the Mech Cards that have been released, there is just not enough support for a Mech mage to be competitively viable unfortunately.  However, if more support comes down the line, this card will be an excellent finisher/comeback card for Mech Mage.  You get rush, you get board clear, and you get a body left on board at a bare minimum.  

There are rumors that they *might* have also managed to fix the "Epics offering" bug. Until the next time, eh.

Missed the mark with that one. Seems clunky. But it may be due to RNG pool. Does warrior still has some way of generating weapons in standard other than War Cache?

Anyways, it's bad, but I don't think it's that much of an issue. Warrior has lots of stuff. Mage case is different. Only one archetype received support. That's bad from a design perspective. Most of the other classes received support for many archetypes. Do the exercise and review all cards and you'll notice that they gave support for 2 or 3 archetypes on each class.

Warrior had support for Quest previously. Now they added support for Control as well. Mage only has Big Spell Mage. That's it. They gave support somewhat to Hero Power... But with only 1 bad card. That's not support. Mage needed some extra tools for Mech and Naga mage. Don't think it's viable as it's right now.

Probably related to RNG pool that one.

Quote From Melliflue

I find it worrying how many of these cards are not good enough to see play in standard in their unnerfed forms, eg Kayn Sunfury, Shattershard Mystic, Bloodboil Brute, ...

I think that says a lot about the power level of the previous year.

Scholomance and DoD reallyl started showing the great powercreep and then Stormwind they want overboard with it.

Here's a few dust tips (keep in mind that this advice is coming from a player who's been F2P/budget since Whispers of the Old Gods... so if you're willing to average more than $5ish spent on each expansion, probably not all of this will apply):

• In general, if you play wild (and even if you play mostly standard), it's a good idea to totally avoid crafting and disenchanting before the end of a rotation. There are a couple reasons for this:
  • New metas for a whole month - Prior to the expansion, you don't know exactly how the new expansion will affect the meta, and it usually takes a couple weeks for a meta to fully take shape--cards that are awful before the expansion may become playable, and cards that are playable now may become horrible. Since it usually takes about two weeks for the initial meta to shape up, and since the dev team usually announces a round of balance changes after the initial meta takes shape (creating another new meta that takes another couple weeks to shape up), you probably won't have a clear picture of what cards are good/bad and what cards you want to keep until at least a month after the expansion launches.
  • Capitalizing on dust refunds - The point at which the dev team announces nerfs two-ish weeks into the expansion is the point at which you should definitely disenchant any and all nerfed commons/rares to get the full dust refund, since duplicate protection means you're pretty much guaranteed to get them back at some point over the next month or so. You should also disenchant any nerfed epics and legendaries that you'd like to trade in for a different epic/legendary.

A couple other general tips for maximizing dust (not necessarily restricted to expansion launch):

• NEVER craft commons or rares (except perhaps when trying to get specific wild cards). Duplicate protection's got your back for the rares and commons from the standard expansions, as long as you can wait the few weeks it'll take to collect them all.
• If you want to try a new netdeck, don't craft any legendaries or epics right away. Instead, substitute cards and tweak the decklist in light of your collection and playstyle (it not only saves you dust but also hones your deck-building and meta-reading skills). Check out stats on websites like HSReplay to see what role the expensive cards are supposed to perform and how well they actually do their job. After a couple dozen games with your version of the deck, you'll have a pretty good idea of whether it's actually necessary to craft those epics/legendaries or whether they're simply a luxury (or simply in the decklist just because they fit the original deck creator's personal playstyle).
• The best rule of thumb is "when in doubt, wait it out." If you're not certain whether you should craft something or disenchant something, don't do it--this prevents you from making dust-inefficient choices you may regret later. Only disenchant something when you're sure that you really want the card you want to craft more than the card(s) you'll need to disenchant.
• Buy the mini-sets (great dust-to-gold value!), but don't buy anything else between the launch of a mini-set and the launch of the next expansion. This lets you stockpile gold, which you can then sink into packs on launch day. Those packs then get turned into potential dust as you quickly begin to gather extra commons/rares right away on launch day (or within a couple weeks of it)!

Quote From Caro

This naga alone could make Smokescreen actually playable. I feel it does limit design space for rogue though as it can become bonkers if more high cost rogue spells are released. Time will tell

Agreed, although if you look at the entire history of rogue spells they have only ever had 2 that cost more than 6 mana, and one of those (Sprint) was buffed down to 6. So 7+ mana spells were basically never part of rogue's design space to begin with, and it has very little real impact in that regard. It might cement the class' inability to get any worthwhile deathrattles for a while though :( 

Thanks for this comment, really appreciate it! Will definitely keep it going as long as I have time and ideas.

I really love these articles and the amount of work put into them! I had a lot of ideas back in the day that I played on a daily basis, but ended up scrapping most of them due to insufficient time to write these extensive guides, so thanks for writing these and keep up the amazing work!

Quote From bondiolorg

Congrats guys! You're the first ones to put this given that Blizz had most of the day the site off.

Now talking about core set, in general I really like the changes done overall. But they missed the mark again with Mage cards. Although some are a pretty much BIG success, there are some that are there with not that much of a purpose. If I were on charge, I'd done the following:

• Snap Freeze -> Ray of Frost: WAY more useful in most of the scenarios. Snap Freeze is just a bad card.
• Shooting Star -> Magic Trick: More useful for giving support to nagas or in general as a card. Shooting Star without good spell damage and Firebrand is useless.
• Ethereal Conjurer -> Goblin Blastmage: It's just a very bad card. The only use it had was when an RNG Font of Power gave you REALLY bad cards. Goblin Blastmage is an OK card and very good support to mech mage.
• Pyromaniac -> Snowchugger: Very slow and without Tour Guide don't think it's worth the slot. Snowchugger is direct support to mech mage and a good card in general that could fit the 2 mana slot, tempo wise.

It seems they REALLY want us to play nothing but Big Spell Mage only, because it's the only archetype which had support (and by support I mean A LOT of it). Secret Mage got also some love, but it has anything to do with the current expansion, probably will be something for the upcoming ones.

As I said, overall very good changes, but they don't seem to know what to do with Mage...

Youd keep War axe then?

Quote From YourPrivateNightmare

Gonna be honest, I'm somewhat disappoint with this Core set. Not that there aren't some neat changes, but it feels like a lot of stuff just wasn't thought out at all while other stuff got removed prematurely without reason.

Take DH for instance. We keep Metamorphosis around but it's still the nerfed version and it hasn't even seen play in Fel DH, so....what's the point? Then we get Flamereaper, which also has never seen play and barely even has synergy at all. Meanwhile you keep Felscreamer around, when the only purpose of that thing is too cheese with big demons...out of which only 2 remain.

Then you get to Druid where they massively overcompensate for the rotation of Lunar Eclipse and Overgrowth by adding both Wrath and Living Roots, just to make sure that Druid no longer loses to turn 1 Trogg. Oh and Nourish is back at 5 so if you run Florist it's like Overgrowth never left.

Meanwhile Mage doesn't even get Snowchugger while the neutral section is desperately lacking in useful mechs. Is Piloted Shredder still so broken that you wouldn't put it in Core? Also Pyroblast to replace Mask of C'Thun except it doesn't work with Clumsy Courier, Iceblood Tower or Magister Dawngrasp. Great. Could have had Power of Creation at the very least, but no, let's just make sure Big Spell Mage remains a jumbled mess. But hey, at least Kalecgos is here and now it costs 1-mana less to not actually run him in any deck.

Other stuff is puzzling as well but at least there's indication for future themes this year. Would love to see Discard decks make a return now that Jeklik is back and buffed.

Also no Living Dragonbreath, so have fun getting molested by Freeze Shaman

 

Most puzzling thing is, War axe its useless who is still in core. Like atleast replace it with kings defender or the axe from Withwood that buffs a rush minion

Could be a nice combo with Swiftscale Trickster but I'm sure Rogue can do better things though. This is definitely a great Arena card but wouldn't be surprised if it sees no play in constructed. 

I'm glad I reached legend before this Il'gynoth BS.

Pretty sure this spell will see a ton of play in it's lifetime in Standard. It's just so flexible and I'm sure you draw the card you dredge so it'll definitely be good.

Well we know this weapon will be good in a pirate focused deck but that's about it. It's not bad by all means, just have to wait an see how Pirate Rogue turns out

sometimes it is your router firewall that might be blocking it... I had this problem before

This naga alone could make Smokescreen actually playable. I feel it does limit design space for rogue though as it can become bonkers if more high cost rogue spells are released. Time will tell

Insane Dredge spell with mana cheat that will definitely see play in a multitude of archetypes