I wouldn't be surprised if the rewards track crams in all 4 remaining mercs (Cariel, Varden, Tavish and Bru'kan) to complete them for the end of the year. If it does, there wouldn't be a whole lot of space for someone else, especially not another mage skin with Varden already in there.
Flavour-wise, I'm struggling to see where the honourable kill comes in when performing a lobotomy. Rogues have a relaxed definition of honour I suppose. It's neat how that translates mechanically into seeing into the opponent's mind though.
Its weird how only rogue, mage and perhaps warlock, always seem to get these 'meme' cards as legendaries, when there are archetypes that currently require help. We had maestra the last time, and now this. Because a case can be made to print legendary support for deathrattle, shuffle, or maybe even pirate rogue but instead that one slot is taken over by a card which is specifically designed not to be competitive. I get that cards like these are meant solely for fun, but enjoyment can be gained from executing a niche, but competitively viable, gameplan as well.
I was pondering the 3 classes you identified as getting meme legendaries, and it occurred to me that rogue and mage especially are cockroach classes. Specific archetypes of theirs might not come to fruition, but they pretty much always have a presence in the meta no matter how much silly stuff they are given. Plus, between burgle rogue and casino mage they both have long-standing meme archetypes that are guaranteed to find an audience no matter how weak they are, meaning the meme cards are never truly wasted.
In the end though, I wouldn't get too caught up on the legendary slot when it isn't a quest or hero card, since any support taking that spot would be even more useful as a common, rare or epic.
Your point lines up pretty well with the devs' shifting design philosophies swinging too far one way then the opposite. A couple of years ago they had catered a bit too much for the type of player who likes this stuff, while recently they have barely catered to those players at all. Hopefully they can strike a better balance going forwards because it's very easy to get bored and/or disillusioned with the game when several sets pass with nothing you're really interested in.
It's a sequencing issue, because the battlecry resolves before you revert back to rogue. I'm pretty sure it does anyway; the animation for drawing cards with Stowaway (after using Wyrmrest Purifier) starts before Maestra appears to take away your mask. So there would be a chance that you'd transform minions into rogue ones if Cera'thine is the first rogue card you play. It sounds like each minion chooses its own class, so it would only affect 1 in every 9 of them, but that's still about 2 each game so it does matter.
The wording is a little unclear by whether it changes class according to your hero's class, or by each card's class. Normally that wouldn't matter much, but with Maestra of the Masquerade being an obvious inclusion in the same deck, it is relevant.
Anyway, anti-synergy with Tess aside, it's nice to see them commit hard to a burgle card again. Lately their design philosophy has felt like it was backtracking the value generation of the Year of the Dragon a little too much, often at the expense of being able to have those games that HS has long been designed for: the ones that you actually tell stories about. That requires more cards like this, that nobody bothers to worry about how strong it is because it will never see meta play, but it will see an absolute ton of casual play. As @Jagu said below: it is an actual Hearthstone card, and let's hope there are more to come.
Edit: I also just looked at the art closely, and she's clearly a rogue since she decided the best way to 'capture' the Horde flag was to cheat the system by cutting off part of it and hoping that counts. Lol. I guess it explains how she's so fleet of foot.
But i do want to say that Varden is also on top of my list, Varden is pretty cool. I just hope were going to get some Varden lore or a Varden BoM in not too long. I really want to learn more about Vardens backstory, because that's something Varden kinda lacks right now. (Unless i missed something.)
Varden told Scabbs they were spying on Kazakus, so there is definitely something interesting about their backstory we don't yet know. That's about all the info we have currently though, I think.
For me personally, I like Xyrella most so far, largely because its nice to see someone of that demeanor. It's amazing how rare it is to find characters that are somewhat solemn and serious without them becoming edge-lord caricatures that completely lose all sense of humour (*cough* Kurtrus *cough*). It's also nice that when she is funny, it doesn't resort to puns, quips or even jokes, but is much more natural and just emerges as part of the conversation (she's somewhat like Black Panther in the MCU in that regard).
Overall, they did a pretty good job with diversity and representation in the mercs, with gender (5:4:1 for male:female:non-binary) and race (the Roame family being black) as well as with personalities. Hopefully Kurtrus softens a bit in AV, and Guff holds the unfortunate honour of being HS's Jar Jar Binks (he was literally outcast for his idiocy!), but otherwise they're generally pretty good.
Its hard to immediately see where this card is going, because its ever only cheating one mana...
I think it is better described as cheating the amount of mana of the thing summoned, minus the mana value of the minion destroyed. That is not always 1. If you destroy Burning Blade Acolyte for example, the value of the 1/1 is a tiny amount of the 5 mana spent playing it, and you would realistically be cheating at least 6-1=5 mana overall.
The awkwardness in that situation though is it relies on waiting 'til turn 8 or hoping the opponent doesn't kill the 1/1. If they do, you're not going to want to use the battlecry on the 5/8, and if they kill that too you're nowhere.
I guess a left-right split would be less biased, but the top-bottom split does establish you being part of the battle better. The best route would probably be to have a second, reflected board with the Horde on the bottom instead. It wouldn't be the first time there are 2 boards for a single expansion (both League of Explorers sets (LoE and SoU) did for some reason), and they are 3D assets so I imagine it would be easier than making a new board from scratch.
I've done things like that with Alex before, but it was always a faff to set it up. Certainly the hero card makes it easier to use OG Scabbs with expensive cards, which is great because that was by far the most enjoyable thing to come out of the Barrens for me.
Because it's only really active from turn 8 onwards, and rogue has the cheapest cards of all classes to begin with so they don't often need any discounts by that stage of the game. It's certainly not useless, but if it was re-cast like the druid hero card and said "set your maximum mana to 12" people wouldn't be so excited, even though that does more or less the same thing a lot of the time.
All that being said, as someone who likes slow rogue decks that use a decent number of quite expensive cards, I welcome the chance to fit more cards into a single turn.
So basically you need weapon destruction or The Immovable Object gets out of hand...well defensively. Cariel's HP is not bad either, but the weapon is what makes the hero card insane. Also bare in mind, Suckerhook could transform your 6 mana weapon into The Immovable Object as Shaman, so nice buff to that card
The Immovable Object is not itself a collectible card, so Suckerhook wouldn't be able to transform weapons into it.
That aside, I'm not really sure why the weapon has a full 5 durability if it never loses it itself and it makes no difference to full weapon removal. The protection against the full compliment of 2xBloodsail Corsair and 2xToxic Sewer Ooze seems a bit paranoid, so all it really does is give Harrison Jones a bigger payday :P
She kinda needed new artwork for it though since she's meant to be considerably younger here than she is usually depicted, e.g. in the Vanessa VanCleef card. I was actually surprised she was drawn as being adolescent, but I suppose it would have been tougher to believe Edwin would order a <10 year old up to AV with any expectation she'd survive.
In WoW, the Illidari only become playable (i.e. join horde/alliance) during Legion, when Illidan is treated as neutral good (grumpy as always, but now understood enough to not be considered evil) and to be honest the factions don't matter all that much since they work together for the most part. Since then, Illidan is off in space acting as Sargeras' jailer and the illidari settle down to proper faction stuff as per their race.
So my muddled answer would be: they technically continued to answer to Illidan while he was around, yes, but basically everyone followed him for that short time so it didn't conflict with the faction allegiances.
Hidden in case people don't want accidental spoilers:
Show Spoiler
Yeah, it was a bit of a shame really that Scabbs got swamped by all the other characters in the deadmines, to the point where they kind of hijacked his story for the sake of a big team-up. I mean, yeah, I guess he was leading that endeavour, but when you're mostly just playing the other mercs it doesn't feel like it's his mission anymore.
The whole team-up is also at odds with the whole horde vs alliance 'pick a side' thing they're leading with in Alterac Valley. At the end of Scabbs' story, I'd expect them all to be helping each other out to deal with the naaru shard problem, not fighting each other.
I doubt Vanessa will be another card, but yeah, she'll surely make a brief appearance in the next story, whoever's that is.
Yeah same here. I'm normally more of a Horde fan, but I can't think of the last time I made a deck without any 5+ cost minions (that's when they start getting interesting!), so there's not really much point in me picking Drek'thar.
Based on Maldraxxus in the Shadowlands, and in particular the House of Rituals (basically lich city), the lich look is more a product of the magics used than the species involved. Sadly, as soon as we accept that, there doesn't need to be any rhyme or reason for the look, beyond the rule of cool I suppose.
One last comment. That honorable fight keyword will likely end up like overkill. Unless of course, they ramp up the powerlevel on this one.
Yeah, the keyword itself is like a more efficient but also more awkward overkill, so is probably pretty similar in power level. But as we've seen before with inspire, the strength of a keyword and the strength of the cards using it are very different things, to the point where I'm not sure it's even worth judging keywords themselves most of the time. Very few are generally good on their own, with only tradeable coming to mind because it doesn't care what the card actually does.
I wouldn't be surprised if the rewards track crams in all 4 remaining mercs (Cariel, Varden, Tavish and Bru'kan) to complete them for the end of the year. If it does, there wouldn't be a whole lot of space for someone else, especially not another mage skin with Varden already in there.
Flavour-wise, I'm struggling to see where the honourable kill comes in when performing a lobotomy. Rogues have a relaxed definition of honour I suppose. It's neat how that translates mechanically into seeing into the opponent's mind though.
I was pondering the 3 classes you identified as getting meme legendaries, and it occurred to me that rogue and mage especially are cockroach classes. Specific archetypes of theirs might not come to fruition, but they pretty much always have a presence in the meta no matter how much silly stuff they are given. Plus, between burgle rogue and casino mage they both have long-standing meme archetypes that are guaranteed to find an audience no matter how weak they are, meaning the meme cards are never truly wasted.
In the end though, I wouldn't get too caught up on the legendary slot when it isn't a quest or hero card, since any support taking that spot would be even more useful as a common, rare or epic.
Your point lines up pretty well with the devs' shifting design philosophies swinging too far one way then the opposite. A couple of years ago they had catered a bit too much for the type of player who likes this stuff, while recently they have barely catered to those players at all. Hopefully they can strike a better balance going forwards because it's very easy to get bored and/or disillusioned with the game when several sets pass with nothing you're really interested in.
It's a sequencing issue, because the battlecry resolves before you revert back to rogue. I'm pretty sure it does anyway; the animation for drawing cards with Stowaway (after using Wyrmrest Purifier) starts before Maestra appears to take away your mask. So there would be a chance that you'd transform minions into rogue ones if Cera'thine is the first rogue card you play. It sounds like each minion chooses its own class, so it would only affect 1 in every 9 of them, but that's still about 2 each game so it does matter.
The wording is a little unclear by whether it changes class according to your hero's class, or by each card's class. Normally that wouldn't matter much, but with Maestra of the Masquerade being an obvious inclusion in the same deck, it is relevant.
Anyway, anti-synergy with Tess aside, it's nice to see them commit hard to a burgle card again. Lately their design philosophy has felt like it was backtracking the value generation of the Year of the Dragon a little too much, often at the expense of being able to have those games that HS has long been designed for: the ones that you actually tell stories about. That requires more cards like this, that nobody bothers to worry about how strong it is because it will never see meta play, but it will see an absolute ton of casual play. As @Jagu said below: it is an actual Hearthstone card, and let's hope there are more to come.
Edit: I also just looked at the art closely, and she's clearly a rogue since she decided the best way to 'capture' the Horde flag was to cheat the system by cutting off part of it and hoping that counts. Lol. I guess it explains how she's so fleet of foot.
Varden told Scabbs they were spying on Kazakus, so there is definitely something interesting about their backstory we don't yet know. That's about all the info we have currently though, I think.
For me personally, I like Xyrella most so far, largely because its nice to see someone of that demeanor. It's amazing how rare it is to find characters that are somewhat solemn and serious without them becoming edge-lord caricatures that completely lose all sense of humour (*cough* Kurtrus *cough*). It's also nice that when she is funny, it doesn't resort to puns, quips or even jokes, but is much more natural and just emerges as part of the conversation (she's somewhat like Black Panther in the MCU in that regard).
Overall, they did a pretty good job with diversity and representation in the mercs, with gender (5:4:1 for male:female:non-binary) and race (the Roame family being black) as well as with personalities. Hopefully Kurtrus softens a bit in AV, and Guff holds the unfortunate honour of being HS's Jar Jar Binks (he was literally outcast for his idiocy!), but otherwise they're generally pretty good.
Now we know it's name, I guess the jewel is the 'dreadprison' (=prison of a dread lord?).
I think it is better described as cheating the amount of mana of the thing summoned, minus the mana value of the minion destroyed. That is not always 1. If you destroy Burning Blade Acolyte for example, the value of the 1/1 is a tiny amount of the 5 mana spent playing it, and you would realistically be cheating at least 6-1=5 mana overall.
The awkwardness in that situation though is it relies on waiting 'til turn 8 or hoping the opponent doesn't kill the 1/1. If they do, you're not going to want to use the battlecry on the 5/8, and if they kill that too you're nowhere.
I guess a left-right split would be less biased, but the top-bottom split does establish you being part of the battle better. The best route would probably be to have a second, reflected board with the Horde on the bottom instead. It wouldn't be the first time there are 2 boards for a single expansion (both League of Explorers sets (LoE and SoU) did for some reason), and they are 3D assets so I imagine it would be easier than making a new board from scratch.
0 or 1 mana card -> hero power -> Scabbs Cutterbutter for 2 mana -> Alexstrasza the Life-Binder for 6 mana -> Potion of Illusion for 1 mana. That all adds to 9 or 10 mana.
I've done things like that with Alex before, but it was always a faff to set it up. Certainly the hero card makes it easier to use OG Scabbs with expensive cards, which is great because that was by far the most enjoyable thing to come out of the Barrens for me.
Because it's only really active from turn 8 onwards, and rogue has the cheapest cards of all classes to begin with so they don't often need any discounts by that stage of the game. It's certainly not useless, but if it was re-cast like the druid hero card and said "set your maximum mana to 12" people wouldn't be so excited, even though that does more or less the same thing a lot of the time.
All that being said, as someone who likes slow rogue decks that use a decent number of quite expensive cards, I welcome the chance to fit more cards into a single turn.
The Immovable Object is not itself a collectible card, so Suckerhook wouldn't be able to transform weapons into it.
That aside, I'm not really sure why the weapon has a full 5 durability if it never loses it itself and it makes no difference to full weapon removal. The protection against the full compliment of 2xBloodsail Corsair and 2xToxic Sewer Ooze seems a bit paranoid, so all it really does is give Harrison Jones a bigger payday :P
Umm. I'm just gonna leave this here for you: Battle of Lordaeron cinematic
Edit: And that's Little Lion to you... well, to Sylvanas anyway.
In WoW, the Illidari only become playable (i.e. join horde/alliance) during Legion, when Illidan is treated as neutral good (grumpy as always, but now understood enough to not be considered evil) and to be honest the factions don't matter all that much since they work together for the most part. Since then, Illidan is off in space acting as Sargeras' jailer and the illidari settle down to proper faction stuff as per their race.
So my muddled answer would be: they technically continued to answer to Illidan while he was around, yes, but basically everyone followed him for that short time so it didn't conflict with the faction allegiances.
Hidden in case people don't want accidental spoilers:
Yeah, it was a bit of a shame really that Scabbs got swamped by all the other characters in the deadmines, to the point where they kind of hijacked his story for the sake of a big team-up. I mean, yeah, I guess he was leading that endeavour, but when you're mostly just playing the other mercs it doesn't feel like it's his mission anymore.
The whole team-up is also at odds with the whole horde vs alliance 'pick a side' thing they're leading with in Alterac Valley. At the end of Scabbs' story, I'd expect them all to be helping each other out to deal with the naaru shard problem, not fighting each other.
I doubt Vanessa will be another card, but yeah, she'll surely make a brief appearance in the next story, whoever's that is.
Yeah same here. I'm normally more of a Horde fan, but I can't think of the last time I made a deck without any 5+ cost minions (that's when they start getting interesting!), so there's not really much point in me picking Drek'thar.
Based on Maldraxxus in the Shadowlands, and in particular the House of Rituals (basically lich city), the lich look is more a product of the magics used than the species involved. Sadly, as soon as we accept that, there doesn't need to be any rhyme or reason for the look, beyond the rule of cool I suppose.
Yeah, the keyword itself is like a more efficient but also more awkward overkill, so is probably pretty similar in power level. But as we've seen before with inspire, the strength of a keyword and the strength of the cards using it are very different things, to the point where I'm not sure it's even worth judging keywords themselves most of the time. Very few are generally good on their own, with only tradeable coming to mind because it doesn't care what the card actually does.