All Comments

Southsea Captain is indeed a buggy interaction. My experience with him is that any minion that gets damaged while buffed does not lose the health buff after the captain is removed, ie a 2/2 that is buffed to 3/3 and takes one point of damage goes to 3/2. Once captain is removed it debuffs to 2/2. Quite frustrating.

Was every minion in your deck still cheaper than Vanndar, even with their cost reduced by three?

What turn do you typically take 5 damage? Not turn 1 for sure. Sometimes if a Hunter goes second and they coin out an Adorable Infestation you can take 5 with the hero power. More commonly on turn 3. So you could reliably get this out a turn early with an extra 2 drop beside it. I guess that is decent.

Pretty decent support for anyone running frost spells. I think this will see some play in the bigger decks looking to stall for a big payout.

Without rush, this becomes difficult to benefit from. Your opponent will surely get to dictate how the damage is applied to it and make it advantageous for them. I don't see this working out very often. Of course it does require immediate answer so that you don't get the opportunity to decide how to damage it. Maybe warrior with their whirlwind effects is the place for it.

The windfury should be permanent after the first HK, right? If this sticks long enough for you to buff it on the next turn it can become devastating. Even if you don't get the windfury, it will still be useful as a rush removal tool.

This does at least have high enough health to make it a threat to trigger the honorable kill more than once. I still don't see it being very useful.

Not much point to this one. I'm surprised this wasn't a Rager of some sort. I just don't see a double 4/1 minion being worth it right now.

Is this Buffception? Put this in paladin that typically buffs with its spells anyway and you get extra buffing power. Throw down a divine shield minion, buff it with this in play and buff your hand. Then trigger the weapon by losing the divine shield and buff the hand some more. That adds up to quite a few stats.

This has got to go in aggro decks. Just flooding the board with chip damage here and there is what it is about. Of course this does open up counter plays from some of those 1 health honorable kill requirements we have seen on other cards.

Nice that this is a neutral card and gives any class a little bit of minion buffing power. Token spells are also useful for testing against various secrets these days. I think this will see some nice utility in many classes,

I think this is merely average. I don't know how often I have two minions still on board on turn 4. I guess he might still be ok as a vanilla 4/4, but merely ok cards don't cut it in this game these days.

Awesome that they're letting us get some FiAV cards early. For the Alliance!

Interestingly enough, this may help out in wild against questline Hunter. Going first really puts them in a bad spot of having to use removal prior to the quest coming out. Even going second forces them to have at least two damage in one spell. If they don't have those things to deal with it immediately, almost any buff (mount spells are ideal) starts to put it out of range and just lets it snowball away,

Thanks for this well written article and explanations, Aesan!  You seem to out do yourself each time you contribute a big article  

Now i need to go read it again... me head is a spinning....

Edit: sure hope there is a fix soon for the mobile search functionality.  It is very frustrating!

Another interesting one in freeze shaman. Casting the frost spell will usually freeze something to buy you a turn to let him utilize the buffs. Should be interesting to see if it works that well in practice.

Put him in freeze Shaman and all of the sudden you are a very consistent deck. He compares well with Primal Dungeoneer. While this one only can draw one card, it is always the correct spell school for you.

Reduce his cost with Vandar and you might have a playable minion. As others have said, outside of Warlock, you are too close to dead when the conditional cost reduction is met for this to really save you. In most of those situations you have more than two minions to remove.

It is nice that they made it so you can't reroll the nonstacking buffs. That means you can at least count on a minimum level of minion once you hit the 4 mana break point. Although, I guess you could  technically roll the +2/+2 multiple times and not get any of the other immediate impact buffs.

We now know it is supposed to combo with Shield Shatter. Is it good enough by itself that you can run it and be happy playing without drawing that card? Since you won't go negative on the armor, it can be a good boost of armor that you were counting on losing anyway.

Obviously intended as an immediate combo with Frozen Buckler. Without that, this is a tough card to use. While warrior often has some armor, it isn't always up in the range that makes this an easy card to play.

I like this in Druid/Hunter with Adorable Infestation. I'm not sure what I'm dropping to put it in, but it looks good on paper.

We got several cards for taunt warrior, but I don't know if taunt warrior was an 'almost deck' that just needed a few extra cards to make it work. It is card draw though and that is always a good thing.

So, everyone is using the specific examples of eggs as the target, but what are you putting in there that you hope to summon after the egg. You would need enough 3 drops that lose nothing from being summoned instead of played to make it consistent. How many of those do you want to still have to play since you only have two of these guys to use?

If only the economy of Magic Arena isn't absolute trash, Alchemy would make me consider committing another card game.