The issue again is that whenever Priest gets on the Control side of things people just start throwing all sorts of complaints. Too slow, too boring to play against, too much random value and so on. The result is them constantly trying to force the Tempo archetype but failing every single time so far. That causes a lot of cards to become unusable within the class.
Look at High Abbess Alura. She is completely unplayable in the class because she forces you to abdicate of all your board control tools and run a completely buff centric deck around her. But the archetype lacks card draw so badly that you run into all sorts of issues. If you try to play conservatively, you fall behind. If you go all in, you run out of cards really fast. If you lose your board, it's pretty much impossible to recover due to a lack of resources. Your hand becomes stuck with buff spells that you can't do anything with because Priest can't dump those cards without any minions to buff while Paladin does that very easily with their Hero Power. The Priest Hero Power itself is useless most of the time because you have to keep healing your face and you don't want to be trading a lot. You pretty much have to build an early snowball in order to have any chance of winning. I have played Tempo Priest a lot and these issues have consistently plagued the archetype. It needs card draw in order to fix those issues. However, i fear that the archetype will become completely broken when that happens because they have printed too many high quality Tempo cards. I feel like the only thing that holds it back from becoming an oppressive force is its lack of card draw.
This is a collection of cards based off Warcraft III.
A few goals I had with this set was to restrict myself from adding any new Keywords or Minion types, yet still have the cards retain the distinguishing flavor of their War3 counterparts. I wanted to make this set feel compatible with the existing Hearthstone game.
While I was working on this, imagine my surprise when Blizzard announced that some spells will be able to level up as the game goes on! Although in the Barrens expansion it seems to only apply to spells, I feel it could work for minions and weapons too. In War3, both hero spells and units can be upgraded, so I've definitely taken advantage of it for this fan expansion.
Mechanics Introduced
Show Spoiler
Some cards have some simple yet unique interactions that can make things interesting.
Minions with triggered effects
This is going by the gamepedia definition. The Durotar Raider for example, can act as a kind of 'soft' Silence to keep minions with reoccurring abilities from snowballing.
Non-played minions
A minion that was not played from the hand, but brought to the board some other way. For example, Control Magic could not take control of a Water Elemental normally, but if it was created via Deep Freeze, you could spend 3 mana to take control of it.
Enchantments
A different kind of 'soft' Silence, can be used to deal with threats from heavily buffed minions, or restore your debuffed minions without also removing their card text.
Priest got kicked in the balls really hard, btw. The class got only two cards that are worth anything: Flash Heal (at least they got rid of Radiance) and the card that discovers a spell in the deck (cycle option). Everything else is incredibly bad. Silence Priest? A complete joke without Divine Spirit. Tempo Priest? Completely unviable without card draw. Shadow Form? Terrible regardless of its cost. The legendary card? An absolute unplayable piece of garbage. Priest got treated like s*** and is going back to its state of being 100% dependant on expansion cards to be relevant. I'm just done with this.
Apologies - this turned into a longer response than I intended because I really love the Tempo Priest archetype, wish it had gotten more love over the last several expansions, and I see this set as hopeful for it.
Tempo Priest has been right on the edge of playable for a long time, and I would be careful not to underestimate it in the context of a rotation and a Core Set whose focus is clearly more on Tempo/Midrange play than the Classic/Basic sets. I tried a lot of Tempo Priest after Scholomance launched, and one of the biggest issues was turn 2 - it was easy to load up on useful 1-drops like Frazzled Freshman and Intrepid Initiate (or even Soulbound Ashtongue), but if you didn't get the perfect draw into Power Word: Feast you'd often have very little to do on turn 2.
For that reason, I think you're underselling Crimson Clergy a bit. He provides a relevant body on turn 1, and a meaningful way to leverage your hero power on turn 2. In many respects, that was the most important thing Northshire Cleric had going for it. Because of how many of Priest's 2-mana options are reactive cards and resource generation cards, a turn 2 hero power is commonplace. So, any viable tempo deck needs to be able maximize the hero power on turn 2. A value trade into buffing your 1-drop into a vanilla 2-drop statline is nothing to scoff at. And in the right match-up, "Crimson Clergy into Power Word: Feast + trade" can give you a 4/5 minion on turn 2 that can continue to scale its attack over time.
The important thing to note about cards like Shadowform and Shadowed Spirit isn't that they're knockout, amazing cards, but rather that they offer Priest a way to "switch into attack mode" and pressure down their opponent. This can be a real struggle in Tempo Priest because the Priest hero power strongly incentivizes value trading and board control, but does very little for you when it's time to make the shift over to beating down your opponent.
It's true card draw was a struggle for the deck - often if you didn't get Voracious Reader in time, you'd run out of gas. With that in mind, I think this rotation has more going for it than you give it credit for. Thrive in the Shadows provides deck-thinning and a useful tutor effect, either for buffs to keep your board trading up or reload in the form of Rally!. Also, Insight and Raise Dead are still available, and we may get more draw tools in the FitB expansion.
(One other shout-out here is the potential tempo sleeper for Priest - Nerubian Egg. By turn 3 you have access to two strong buffs: Power Word: Feast and Apotheosis. These make the egg a real threat. It also offers a very relevant deathrattle for Disciplinarian Gandling, which never really took off.)
Every single Wild set has at least one card returning except one.
Was it so hard to give us a something like a hunter handbuff synergy card since it didn't work out back than and now we have more tools? Trogg Beastrager, Rat Pack, Dispatch Kodo... Shaku the Collector as the Rouge legendary would also fit nicely.
This card remains too slow. The one mana discount barely matters when the issue with the card is drawing it early enough. You are pretty much forced to run two copies of this if you want to draw it with any consistency. There was a point in doing it before because you could upgrade the Hero Power a second time to 3 damage. They removed that though. This means that the second copy is a dead card in your deck and a terrible draw after changing the Hero Power. Now you have to choose between a better chance of drawing it time to deal direct damage to your opponent and hopefully win before they kill you or ignore the second copy and run the risk of drawing it too late or not at all. Out of all direct damage options they had to bring back the absolute worst possible option. Total garbage.
A slightly sturdier Lightwarden with less snowballing capabilities won't change Tempo Priest's fortunes. The issue with that archetype is not card quality but lack of card draw. Without that, they can print all the best possible Tempo minions in the world and the deck will still suck because it runs out of gas too easily and has a really hard time recovering from a board wipe.
It could be good if it wasn't for the rotation. Some of its most synergistic cards are leaving as it arrives in standard. Shadowy Figure and Wretched Reclaimer would be good with this. Without them, this card seems to have no place in the class. As always, all attempts at Tempo Priest will fail miserably until the archetype gets some actually usable card draw.
Well hi there, in light of Core Set reveals and what they do to my favorite keyword (F for Charge ;-;), I suppose a heavy overhaul is due anyway. Luckily, a lot of the more solid/favorite cards of this class' Classic are here to stay. The unlucky part is that I gotta gut at least a lot of' em to pasture. Saddo.
Anyway, we don't need to dwell on this much. Here we go! Gryphon Core 2021 Set for Dragoon.
Good on paper but completely irrelevant as Tempo/Silence Priest are dead on arrival without proper card draw. Also, Inner Fire is gone which makes all health buffs a lot weaker. And targeting an enemy minion with this is always going to feel bad. Terrible.
Wait, are these the 30ish buffs that blizzard is talking about? If so then I'm kinda disappointed that no wild specific cards are getting buffed. Was hoping for at least a bit of love for the format.
It's fine if you think this can be fun but i'm not into that. Incredibly short turns aren't fun so i'm certainly not playing with this. The thing that annoys me is that i got the impression that Nozdormu was this really important character in the lore of WoW. The other dragon aspects got really good cards that make them relevant choices when building a deck. They can have an impact in the game but Nozdormu doesn't get the same treatment. It feels like some kind of injustice. It doesn't matter. I was expecting the core set to raise my interest in constructed again but i have seen nothing interesting besides the changes to a few cards (like Tracking).
Priest got kicked in the balls really hard, btw. The class got only two cards that are worth anything: Flash Heal (at least they got rid of Radiance) and the card that discovers a spell in the deck (cycle option). Everything else is incredibly bad. Silence Priest? A complete joke without Divine Spirit. Tempo Priest? Completely unviable without card draw. Shadow Form? Terrible regardless of its cost. The legendary card? An absolute unplayable piece of garbage. Priest got treated like s*** and is going back to its state of being 100% dependant on expansion cards to be relevant. I'm just done with this.
Edit: I just realized they got rid of Inner Fire and Shadow Word: Pain. The main finisher for any sort of buff based Aggro/Tempo/Silence Priest deck is gone. One of the best early game removal tools is gone as well. Instead they gave us a bunch of Tempo cards that are completely irrelevant without proper card draw. Without Northshire Cleric and Acolyte of Pain that archetype will never get anywhere. Basic cycle options aren't good enough when every other Aggro/Tempo class can draw through their entire deck in a few turns or have much higher quality cards and methods of dealing direct damage. Priest's core set is absolutely atrocious. A complete joke.
Regarding Nozdormu, and big lore characters more generally, my stance is always that they have been handled well as long as they are exciting to a noticeable fraction of players. That doesn't require them to actually be strong, especially in a neutral cycle of cards like the dragon aspects where they'd all be competing with each other for the 9/10 mana spot anyway. So by my metric, Noz is much more likely to be a success than any of the other reworked dragons, since he's practically guaranteed to have a following. It's just that that following probably won't include many Spikes.
----------------------------------
Regarding the priest Core set, it is very buff-centric, which doesn't usually go well for the class I agree. Whether it will be "absolutely atrocious" after the significant shift when the Barrens arrives remains to be seen, however. Aside from not knowing what the Barrens set will bring, it is also almost impossible to say what will happen when all the classes lose staple cards.
In the end priest's problems are always rooted in it being at the greedier end of control than warrior: they always have more value at the cost of lower tempo removal. That is a benefit in slow metas, but a hindrance in the aggro metas the Year of the Phoenix pushed so hard. From a game design point of view this is all perfectly sensible, but I've played the game more than long enough to acknowledge it has its problems in practice.
So the best solution to the priest problem is probably just to design sets that swing the balance away from aggro and back towards control a bit. Priest can then prey on the slower meta. Sadly, I'm not optimistic that a horde-focused expansion is going to weigh control over aggro...
Oh yeah, thanks, I forgot about Spirit Healer. There is plenty of design space there, but I wonder if the cards will be good enough. Almost all Druid spells are Nature, so a minion that reacts positively to Nature spells would be a shoo-in for Druid. But Mage spells are divided between Arcane, Fire and Frost, so you'd need to do multiple school like you suggested, or such synergy would not be good enough.
Either way, I'm very excited to see what else is coming in this area.
I wouldn't disenchant any card with a unique effect (Doomsayer, Knife Thrower, Sea Giant, Wild Pyromancer, etc.) if you think you'll play one of these modes at any point in the future:
- Adventures
- Classic
- Duels
- Tavern Brawl
- Wild
In other words, unless you strictly play Standard ladder and no other mode, you're handicapping yourself by disenchanting cards.
New Shaman Minion - Novice Zapper
Yeah, Landslide 's best friend.
Also an increidble tempo and early threat on itself.
Core Set Reactions
The issue again is that whenever Priest gets on the Control side of things people just start throwing all sorts of complaints. Too slow, too boring to play against, too much random value and so on. The result is them constantly trying to force the Tempo archetype but failing every single time so far. That causes a lot of cards to become unusable within the class.
Look at High Abbess Alura. She is completely unplayable in the class because she forces you to abdicate of all your board control tools and run a completely buff centric deck around her. But the archetype lacks card draw so badly that you run into all sorts of issues. If you try to play conservatively, you fall behind. If you go all in, you run out of cards really fast. If you lose your board, it's pretty much impossible to recover due to a lack of resources. Your hand becomes stuck with buff spells that you can't do anything with because Priest can't dump those cards without any minions to buff while Paladin does that very easily with their Hero Power. The Priest Hero Power itself is useless most of the time because you have to keep healing your face and you don't want to be trading a lot. You pretty much have to build an early snowball in order to have any chance of winning. I have played Tempo Priest a lot and these issues have consistently plagued the archetype. It needs card draw in order to fix those issues. However, i fear that the archetype will become completely broken when that happens because they have printed too many high quality Tempo cards. I feel like the only thing that holds it back from becoming an oppressive force is its lack of card draw.
New Rogue Minion - Vanessa VanCleef
I love this kind of cards, would like to see a similar effect but with battlecries.
New Priest Minion - Shadowed Spirit
Good stats and effect, though priest is not known in standard for being a burn class.
'Warcraft III'-themed Expansion
This is a collection of cards based off Warcraft III.
A few goals I had with this set was to restrict myself from adding any new Keywords or Minion types, yet still have the cards retain the distinguishing flavor of their War3 counterparts. I wanted to make this set feel compatible with the existing Hearthstone game.
While I was working on this, imagine my surprise when Blizzard announced that some spells will be able to level up as the game goes on! Although in the Barrens expansion it seems to only apply to spells, I feel it could work for minions and weapons too. In War3, both hero spells and units can be upgraded, so I've definitely taken advantage of it for this fan expansion.
Mechanics Introduced
Some cards have some simple yet unique interactions that can make things interesting.
Minions with triggered effects
This is going by the gamepedia definition. The Durotar Raider for example, can act as a kind of 'soft' Silence to keep minions with reoccurring abilities from snowballing.
Non-played minions
A minion that was not played from the hand, but brought to the board some other way. For example, Control Magic could not take control of a Water Elemental normally, but if it was created via Deep Freeze, you could spend 3 mana to take control of it.
Enchantments
A different kind of 'soft' Silence, can be used to deal with threats from heavily buffed minions, or restore your debuffed minions without also removing their card text.
Human ( Mage / Paladin )
Orc ( Shaman / Warrior )
Undead ( Priest / Warlock )
Night Elf ( Hunter / Druid )
Combined Archer & Hippogryph:
Neutral
Doom Guard spells:
Mercenaries ( Obtained from the Mercenary Camp card )
Show Spoiler
Treasures ( Obtained from the Treasure Hunt card )
Show Spoiler
Tokens
Show Spoiler
Can Wild players craft the original classic dragon aspects for "free"?
U should be able to dust ur golden dupes of basic cards but i can be wrong. Are basic rotating too?
Core Set Reactions
Apologies - this turned into a longer response than I intended because I really love the Tempo Priest archetype, wish it had gotten more love over the last several expansions, and I see this set as hopeful for it.
Tempo Priest has been right on the edge of playable for a long time, and I would be careful not to underestimate it in the context of a rotation and a Core Set whose focus is clearly more on Tempo/Midrange play than the Classic/Basic sets. I tried a lot of Tempo Priest after Scholomance launched, and one of the biggest issues was turn 2 - it was easy to load up on useful 1-drops like Frazzled Freshman and Intrepid Initiate (or even Soulbound Ashtongue), but if you didn't get the perfect draw into Power Word: Feast you'd often have very little to do on turn 2.
For that reason, I think you're underselling Crimson Clergy a bit. He provides a relevant body on turn 1, and a meaningful way to leverage your hero power on turn 2. In many respects, that was the most important thing Northshire Cleric had going for it. Because of how many of Priest's 2-mana options are reactive cards and resource generation cards, a turn 2 hero power is commonplace. So, any viable tempo deck needs to be able maximize the hero power on turn 2. A value trade into buffing your 1-drop into a vanilla 2-drop statline is nothing to scoff at. And in the right match-up, "Crimson Clergy into Power Word: Feast + trade" can give you a 4/5 minion on turn 2 that can continue to scale its attack over time.
The important thing to note about cards like Shadowform and Shadowed Spirit isn't that they're knockout, amazing cards, but rather that they offer Priest a way to "switch into attack mode" and pressure down their opponent. This can be a real struggle in Tempo Priest because the Priest hero power strongly incentivizes value trading and board control, but does very little for you when it's time to make the shift over to beating down your opponent.
It's true card draw was a struggle for the deck - often if you didn't get Voracious Reader in time, you'd run out of gas. With that in mind, I think this rotation has more going for it than you give it credit for. Thrive in the Shadows provides deck-thinning and a useful tutor effect, either for buffs to keep your board trading up or reload in the form of Rally!. Also, Insight and Raise Dead are still available, and we may get more draw tools in the FitB expansion.
(One other shout-out here is the potential tempo sleeper for Priest - Nerubian Egg. By turn 3 you have access to two strong buffs: Power Word: Feast and Apotheosis. These make the egg a real threat. It also offers a very relevant deathrattle for Disciplinarian Gandling, which never really took off.)
All 51 Returning Cards That Received Buffs and Changes in Hearthstone's New Core Set
I'm still confused - can you give an example? Why are there cards in your deck that you don't want to draw?
All 51 Returning Cards That Received Buffs and Changes in Hearthstone's New Core Set
I'm honesetly confused. Why do you have cards in your deck that you don't want to draw? Can you give an example?
Edit: Are we just talking about playing a late Tracking, and thinning out cheaper cards that are less impactful in the late game?
All 51 Returning Cards That Received Buffs and Changes in Hearthstone's New Core Set
Every single Wild set has at least one card returning except one.
Was it so hard to give us a something like a hunter handbuff synergy card since it didn't work out back than and now we have more tools? Trogg Beastrager, Rat Pack, Dispatch Kodo...
Shaku the Collector as the Rouge legendary would also fit nicely.
Core 2021
Don't you mean warm and fuzzy on the outside, but mechanical and unstable on the inside? That's how I feel...
New Priest Spell - Shadowform
This card remains too slow. The one mana discount barely matters when the issue with the card is drawing it early enough. You are pretty much forced to run two copies of this if you want to draw it with any consistency. There was a point in doing it before because you could upgrade the Hero Power a second time to 3 damage. They removed that though. This means that the second copy is a dead card in your deck and a terrible draw after changing the Hero Power. Now you have to choose between a better chance of drawing it time to deal direct damage to your opponent and hopefully win before they kill you or ignore the second copy and run the risk of drawing it too late or not at all. Out of all direct damage options they had to bring back the absolute worst possible option. Total garbage.
Bluegill Warrior
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Warsong Commander
JUSTICE!
New Priest Minion - Crimson Clergy
A slightly sturdier Lightwarden with less snowballing capabilities won't change Tempo Priest's fortunes. The issue with that archetype is not card quality but lack of card draw. Without that, they can print all the best possible Tempo minions in the world and the deck will still suck because it runs out of gas too easily and has a really hard time recovering from a board wipe.
New Priest Minion - Shadowed Spirit
It could be good if it wasn't for the rotation. Some of its most synergistic cards are leaving as it arrives in standard. Shadowy Figure and Wretched Reclaimer would be good with this. Without them, this card seems to have no place in the class. As always, all attempts at Tempo Priest will fail miserably until the archetype gets some actually usable card draw.
Dragoon Custom Class
Well hi there, in light of Core Set reveals and what they do to my favorite keyword (F for Charge ;-;), I suppose a heavy overhaul is due anyway. Luckily, a lot of the more solid/favorite cards of this class' Classic are here to stay. The unlucky part is that I gotta gut at least a lot of' em to pasture. Saddo.
Anyway, we don't need to dwell on this much. Here we go! Gryphon Core 2021 Set for Dragoon.
New Priest Spell - Focused Will
Good on paper but completely irrelevant as Tempo/Silence Priest are dead on arrival without proper card draw. Also, Inner Fire is gone which makes all health buffs a lot weaker. And targeting an enemy minion with this is always going to feel bad. Terrible.
All 51 Returning Cards That Received Buffs and Changes in Hearthstone's New Core Set
Wait, are these the 30ish buffs that blizzard is talking about? If so then I'm kinda disappointed that no wild specific cards are getting buffed. Was hoping for at least a bit of love for the format.
I'm a dumbass. These are buffs, not unnerfs.
[Game] Card Treasure Hunt (The Resurrection Attempt)
That's right, back to you again!
Core Set Reactions
Regarding Nozdormu, and big lore characters more generally, my stance is always that they have been handled well as long as they are exciting to a noticeable fraction of players. That doesn't require them to actually be strong, especially in a neutral cycle of cards like the dragon aspects where they'd all be competing with each other for the 9/10 mana spot anyway. So by my metric, Noz is much more likely to be a success than any of the other reworked dragons, since he's practically guaranteed to have a following. It's just that that following probably won't include many Spikes.
----------------------------------
Regarding the priest Core set, it is very buff-centric, which doesn't usually go well for the class I agree. Whether it will be "absolutely atrocious" after the significant shift when the Barrens arrives remains to be seen, however. Aside from not knowing what the Barrens set will bring, it is also almost impossible to say what will happen when all the classes lose staple cards.
In the end priest's problems are always rooted in it being at the greedier end of control than warrior: they always have more value at the cost of lower tempo removal. That is a benefit in slow metas, but a hindrance in the aggro metas the Year of the Phoenix pushed so hard. From a game design point of view this is all perfectly sensible, but I've played the game more than long enough to acknowledge it has its problems in practice.
So the best solution to the priest problem is probably just to design sets that swing the balance away from aggro and back towards control a bit. Priest can then prey on the slower meta. Sadly, I'm not optimistic that a horde-focused expansion is going to weigh control over aggro...
New Neutral Minion - King Mukla
so basically
monke
New Neutral Minion - King Mukla
Clockwork Giant Synergy!
All 51 Returning Cards That Received Buffs and Changes in Hearthstone's New Core Set
Oh yeah, thanks, I forgot about Spirit Healer. There is plenty of design space there, but I wonder if the cards will be good enough. Almost all Druid spells are Nature, so a minion that reacts positively to Nature spells would be a shoo-in for Druid. But Mage spells are divided between Arcane, Fire and Frost, so you'd need to do multiple school like you suggested, or such synergy would not be good enough.
Either way, I'm very excited to see what else is coming in this area.
All 51 Returning Cards That Received Buffs and Changes in Hearthstone's New Core Set
I wouldn't disenchant any card with a unique effect (Doomsayer, Knife Thrower, Sea Giant, Wild Pyromancer, etc.) if you think you'll play one of these modes at any point in the future:
- Adventures
- Classic
- Duels
- Tavern Brawl
- Wild
In other words, unless you strictly play Standard ladder and no other mode, you're handicapping yourself by disenchanting cards.