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Simple as it is, the Hero Power of Galakrond, the Unspeakable is meant as a raw value generator for lategame, not as a Control tool. It's a bias to assume that anything Priest must be Control-oriented.

And Hagatha the Witch was viable at some point (including Standard Even Shaman), so I don't see why Priest Galakrond shoulnd't be.

Obviously, with Galakrond package playing a sort of greedy role, you want to optimize the rest of the deck around something else, be it Midrange, Control (Highlander?) or even Combo, which is far from impossible tbh.

Priest Galakrond Invoke is obviously not meant as a main wincondition, or a deck backbone, as it is for Shaman, Warrior and Warlock. Instead, similarly to Rogue, it plays the role of additional steam. A secondary package, if you like, where the real perks are embodied by Fate Weaver, Kronx Dragonhoof, and possibly Princess Talanji. But these perks don't win you the games on their own, not often at least, only against slower decks. The rest of the deck wins against Aggro, if you correctly build it.

Long story short, if you build and REFINE a Control/Highlander Priest deck where you slap in the Galakrond package, you should get a viable meta deck. Maybe not the best one out there, but fair enough.

If you don't like it, you can simply play some different Priest decks without Galakrond.

If I cast Aeroponics for 1 mana, does that activate Anubisath Defender?

Luckydo Buccaneer?

If you want him to be at his best then you have to "feed" your weapon

Frothing Berserker?

He has a knife in the card art (incoming hot take: this is one of my most-hated card arts in the entire game. Just looks awful.) and gets stronger when people get stabbed (or otherwise damaged). Can't think of what might rhyme with "art" about him though.

Indeed, Teamrankstar also rates this archetype as the new top tier deck in Wild.

Good side of it is that it's not an unbeatable deck, nor a disgustingly easy-to-play-deck (so misplays help at keeping it in check, meta-wise).

Gratz on Legend.

Phantom Freebooter?

The card is only good if you've "fed" a weapon and get good bonus stats.

I remember back in the day I just fatigued him to death with a f2p deck xd

Shadowcaster?

not yet in EU ? (2PM of Thursday 2nd)

You got it all including the reasoning for each line! Well done.

Thanks for an awesome 2019 outof.cards team! Very excited for all of your fantastic coverage in 2020.

Best card when you are bored to craft a  deck

Happy New Year!!!
Great article covering everything happened last year

Thanks!

Quote From Shwarzinator

There are some workable options:

1. Add a random Priest spell to your hand

2. Add a random Priest card to your hand

2. Discover a Priest minion (only choose from two)

3. Add a random 3+ mana Priest minion to your hand

4. Add a random Priest minion to your hand. Reduce its cost by 1.

5. Add a random card from your opponent's deck to your hand (maybe not great but still better and supports Thief Priest)

6. Add a random Priest deathrattle minion to your hand

7. Add a random deathrattle minion to your hand

Or just "Add a minion from your opponents deck to your hand" for Steal Priest to be viable.

'fraid I don't watch videos much, so without a transcript I can't comment on any conclusions you may have drawn.

What I will say, though, is that I worry Noxus will provide some extremely potent aggressive strategies to other decks while having very little identity of its own once the ball gets rolling. Some of Noxus' pure aggro cards (Legion Rearguard et al) provide substantial brute force which can be added to most aggressive shells to fill them out. The first deck I'm planning on putting together when LoR comes back online will be abusing precisely that.

Also in said deck will be the only other Noxian card of any significance - Katarina. Kat is being grossly underrated by the community right now simply because people haven't realised how powerful Ready Your Attack is as an effect. Particularly on a champion who is basically impossible to actually get rid of outside of targeted removal. 

Re: Crimson - it has potential, but it will remain only potential for some significant time simply because it's no more than a shell at the moment. There just aren't enough cards to support it, and the benefits to doing so are limited. What it looks like to me, rather than an archetype, is a prototype of what they want an archetype to look like when first introduced. Put in a small shell, see if it makes any waves, then tentatively add support on a per-expansion basis to avoid breaking anything. Assuming that's what they're doing - and they're using Crimson as a test - you could expect to see more support when they add more cards... but that's just hyperbole on my end.

Hm... having spoken about it though, maybe I should put my LoR deck together now and float on the site for ideas...

Never actually seen it, but it's just another type of cheese. The kind of deck that looks unbeatable on the rare occasion it actually gets the right cards, but three games out of four they'll be conceding without putting up any real fight. 

Battlegrounds may well be the most important addition/change to the game in 2019. It provides an alternative to the ladder when the standard/wild meta gets stale or off-balance (Arena who?). Changes are cheaper/faster to implement thereby ensuring that the game mode itself doesn't become stale. As a bonus, it even brought back streamers who would, for all likelihood, never have returned to Hearthstone.

Getting there slowly, latest against putricide with this deck:

[Frozen Throne] Professor Putricide

Wild · Unknown Mage · by frenzy · 6 years, 8 months ago

• 1 Mana Wyrm x 2
• 2 Arcanologist x 2
• 2 Frostbolt x 2
• 2 Medivh's Valet x 2
• 3 Argent Horserider x 1
• 3 Counterspell x 2
• 3 Mirror Entity x 2
• 3 Twilight Flamecaller x 1
• 3 Vaporize x 2
• 3 Volcanic Potion x 2
• 4 Eater of Secrets x 1
• 4 Ethereal Arcanist x 1
• 4 Fireball x 2
• 4 Polymorph x 1
• 4 Water Elemental x 1
• 5 Rolling Fireball x 1
• 7 Flamestrike x 2
• 7 Siamat x 1
• 8 Twin Tyrant x 1
• 10 Pyroblast x 1

3,640 Dust 4,977 0 Copy Deck Code

My guess had actually been 28-29. Not sure I buy into your reasoning, but if you are correct it's a week sooner than I'd hoped, so I for one certainly won't be complaining.

Been shadowing the discussion for a while, and the conclusion I've drawn is that there's no point to changing the Galakrond Invoke/HP. You'd just be poking at a symptom.

The underlying disease, to continue the metaphor, is the lack of direction and theme underlying the Priest class, which has been widely acknowledged by both community and developers. Shadow is hard to really sell in card form - is it targeted removal, card theft, mind control, direct damage? - and healing simply doesn't work as a unifying class identity. Hypothetically healing could work, if it were reworked to be more effective on minions and (more importantly) Inner Fire were HoF'd so as to remove potential abuse cases (so as to promote the board-centric conservative gameplan which looked to be the original design philosophy) but it'd be awkward and anachronistic in today's rush-heavy, board-interactive Hearthstone.

Thus, the problem. With no idea where to take the class, how can you pick an effective hero power? If the class's cards are schizophrenic, how can any hero power support them properly without simply ignoring most of them? In the end, the solution chosen was a shrug and hand-wave - the reason the current HP is underwhelming is that it doesn't actually aim to synergise with anything. It plays the middle ground - if your cards are schizophrenic, generate a lot of them and sooner or later you'll get some cards that work together, right?

The further problem is that this issue goes all the way to the root of the class. It's not something you can actually fix with expansion cards - even if you did manage to create a new class identity (which seems unlikely) it's still a temporary fix until the cards rotate. I don't particularly like the idea, but I'm forced to agree with others on this board and conclude that the only thing that will really fix Priest is a complete redesign from the ground up.

Quote From Avalon

Not only: I've also seen Zentimo + Hex multiple times, which was cool when it was a meme, but now that it's meta it's really gross lol.

To be honest, most of Galakrond Shaman's problems will go away once Shudderwock rotates (once you clear the two 8/8s you won't have to play around the second wave), but I'd still like to see some changes to Dragon's Pack: I really hate that spell, even more now that Shaman has Electra Stormsurge.
Not being able to kill the wolves with Kronx Dragonhoof is tragic and 10/12 worth of stats for 5 mana with taunt and no overload doesn't make much sense (we can argue that Scion of Ruin is on the same page though) but, to be honest, nerfing Pack may be excessive now. It really depends on how much love Shaman will receive with the upcoming adventure and with the new expansion in April.

For what concerns class popularity and winrate, I prefer to rely on Vicious Syndicate more than on HS Replay, since the former's Meta Reports are pure gold if you want to know about the meta.

For what its worth, I would probably agree with you on VS but hsreplay is just the more readable of the two.

As for Dragon's Pack, its a problem but mostly because of how easy it is for shaman to invoke twice. I'd expect some form of nerf around mid-expansion, or for this to go away by itself when the set rotates.

One thing thats interesting is that even if you're getting milled horribly all your replayability goes up in this set, you'll have lots of choices and ways to put things into play even when they're just memories in your graveyard.