Xyrella is Alliance. I agree the draenai are almost too interesting to fit with the 'traditional fantasy good guy race' thing the Alliance has going on.
As for the 20 mana thing... let's see who gets it, and if its druid, do they actually need it given they already do something more extreme with Celestial Alignment.
I'm interessted in the Alliance vs. Horde mechanic though. Wasn't there sth similiar during Gadgetzan with the gangs battling over the city?
Yep, though the Gadgetzan one was very much tied to the meta and naturally favoured the Jade Lotus just because they got the strongest tri-class mechanic. Hopefully the honor point system being tied to quests will be more a metric of people just playing the game than how strong any class or mechanic is, though it does rely somewhat on there being a roughly equal number of players choosing each side, which is difficult to guarantee.
WoW is only a semi-finite landscape. Not only is its own landscape growing with each of its own expansions, but HS has more or less complete freedom to explore alternate realities and/or expand tiny places or events into full expansions. Plus, only a small fraction of the landscape that existed back in 2014 has actually been explored so far in HS - we only just got to Stormwind and still haven't even touched Pandaria, for example - so they can keep going for a very long time.
The bigger question for me is how many paladins and demon hunters can they shoehorn into diverse expansions? Those two classes are so restrictive thematically, hence the murlocs in both I imagine :P
On the face of it Renew at 1 mana is actually fine, and honestly an appropriate power level for a class that is supposed to be good at both healing and card/value generation. It was only really hit to break the obnoxious cycle of cards that could endlessly generate each other, making for horrid gameplay where you never made any progress against the priest. However, questlines have given most classes more than enough inevitability to deal with that now, and next rotation Renew and Wandmaker will rotate out so it will be a non-issue regardless of what happens to the questlines (they'll probably stick around, but there's a fair case for cycling them early like Genn and Baku did).
So it makes sense to revert the nerf, at least to me.
Despite the obvious story reasons for them, penta-class cards seem a touch overkill; they might as well just be fully neutral at that point. Nevertheless, you are of course right that we don't know what the main set mechanics are, and Drek'thar and Vanndar might be their flag-bearers. Let's hope they are.
Scabbs' arc hasn't even begun yet, since he's just been a tag-along who we know was sent by SI:7 to recover a naaru shard, but that's about it. I suspect his sleuthing exposing Onyxia as the nefarious driver of the overarching naaru shard stuff will kick off act 3 of the story. We currently have no idea why anyone except maybe Rokara and Tavish (both for clan reasons) would go to AV in the first place, so we're probably still in Stormwind for the next installment, and only Scabbs has anything interesting left to do there. It would mean breaking the alternating Horde and Alliance sequence of the story, but it would make sense that Scabbs is more or less solo for most of it, and in fact he might spend more time with the Horde crew rescuing Varden from the Stockades than his Alliance buddies who are all caught up with Tamsin's mess.
Back on Drek'thar, he's the biggest name in AV, and unlike Edwin or Naralex he's right in the thick of it, not siphoned off to a dungeon. Leaving him out of the main set makes me wonder what exactly the AV theme would be doing that they dismiss the biggest characters from the roster.
And I had that confidence Shaw would appear last time, yet he never did, despite being among the most obvious characters to appear, and it even being a rogue set focused on the SI:7. There wasn't even a lore-based reason not to include him, since Scabbs' bio mentions him. Heck, Antonidas and Lothar came back from the grave to appear, and the mage doesn't even have anything to do with Stormwind!
So I guess I'm just expecting questionable character choices from Blizz now. Being an obvious inclusion doesn't seem sufficient, and being relevant doesn't seem necessary.
Hang on a second. If this is one of shaman's legendaries, then either the mercenary characters won't get a legendary card this time, or Drek'thar (the guy who renounced being a warlock and returned the orcs to their honourable shamanistic past, and personally taught Thrall shamanism too) isn't a shaman card.
I suspect the latter is more likely, which just feels wrong. It has echoes of the missing Mathias Shaw last expansion, who was a sure-fire rogue card replaced by some random HS-original orc... in a set about Stormwind of all places! Come on Blizz, you better at least have made Drek'thar neutral, and not make him suffer the same indignity Shaw did.
In fairness, it's only really 1 comment with its own string of responses. If anything, you're the bigger offender by bringing them into a second, independent comment without actually discussing what Matt said either :P
Woah, there. Hold up. I fully appreciate that I'm pretty far out of the 'loop' when it comes to sensibilities on sexualised images, but when did exposed shoulders become part of the discussion? The world is a whole lot randier than I thought if they're even being discussed.
The whole problem with Jaina's original art (insofar as there was one) was with her cleavage. So yes, in that regard Cariel's singlet is serving a similar, if not identical role.
FWIW, I personally prefer nerfed Jaina, and always found it a bit weird that she wore revealing clothing so much. Women are free to do that if they choose - that's the whole point in feminism after all - but there was never anything in her personality that indicated she would make such a choice, which is why it felt a lot like the male-driven fantasy stereotype of females wearing as skimpy clothing as possible. Her covered up, post-BfA clothing feels like a better fit with her personality.
That brings us to Tamsin. Would she believably wear revealing clothing? Maybe, and more than Jaina at any rate. I imagine she doesn't give a sh*t about the implications, whereas Jaina would get fed up of telling people to stop looking at her boobs. Does that mean Blizz is being perfectly consistent? Ehhh, unlikely. But I will say the ideal, perfectly woke position would end up with a range of clothing across the whole sexualisation spectrum (well, OK, we can probably stop some time before reaching nudity). The important part is that the decision is made on a character-by-character basis to fit with their personality, rather than just some fantasy genre default.
There's definitely something I'm missing: where is the inconsistency here? The young Cariel artwork even has an orange under-shirt thing (vest? I'm no fashionista that's for sure :P) serving a similar role to the bit they added to Jaina's artwork.
Some of Tamsin's artwork is more revealing, but we already have those so that can't be what you are referring to.
I agree the final Tamsin fight was a bit too easy (though I did screw myself over at the final hurdle by playing the 9-mana card that is there for the story, only to find out her minions were way bigger than mine... whoops). That said, it does make sense that Anertheron felt like the bigger fight, because it was the bigger fight. Not just that it was 2 fights (I'm not sure why they didn't just make it 2 phases of a single fight, but oh well), but that as far as Stormwind was concerned that was the fight that mattered. Tamsin was just a family matter to mop up afterwards.
The change from saving to killing her sister may have come quickly in the dialogue, but she had been forced to kill the reanimated corpse of her father by that point, so her willingness to see good in Tamsin had taken an irrecoverable blow. It's pretty difficult to cling to the idea of protecting family when said family has just killed and defiled another family member. I'm not saying it was handled and paced perfectly, but it was about as good as we can hope a card game to do it given how atrocious it is as a medium for story-telling.
---------------------------------
[The stuff below is just me indulging in my love of the design of the forsaken]
I'm glad they didn't end with Cariel being able to help Tamsin, because she shouldn't have been able to. The forsaken are fundamentally broken characters whose emotional range is tragically 1-dimensional (they are generally left with only 1 emotion when they are brought back). It looks like poor character design but it's actually really clever as it lets them tell stories about characters who truly lack the emotional depth that the living people around them expect them to have.
Sylvanas, for instance, has been simmering in anger ever since Arthas turned her into a banshee, which is why she snaps with so little provocation, and why her worldview is so twisted. She gets no catharsis from doing, well, anything, and nor would Tamsin. It's just anger followed by more anger, and no amount of sisterly love will ever bring her out of that. Sylvanas looked like she came close when she reunited with Vereesa Windrunner during Garrosh's trial, but she wanted to kill her sister so they could 'live' together in the Undercity, which shows just how corrupted her idea of love had become. Of course the moment that plan fell apart, Sylvanas went on a bloody rampage and finally let go of the falsehood that she actually knew what love was anymore.
The forsaken aren't all edge-lords though. Some forsaken do get left with positive emotions, and the book Before the Storm does a good job of showing how the Undercity was populated by generally nice people getting by with a shit situation. I love the idea that these happy forsaken can't actually feel negative emotions anymore, and they press on with their 'lives' with a mangled smile on their face. They are just as emotionally broken as Tamsin and Sylvanas, but are rather more socially acceptable (ignoring the rotting zombie part).
I liked it personally. It was very much a family matter rather than a big advancement of the plot, and that's a decent way to make use of the family they introduced. The first mission in particular did much more for Cariel's character than I expected.
There's no way K'T will res Tamsin. Quite aside from him being less than welcome in Stormwind by this point, he has no love for demons, the Burning Legion, and the forsaken, so why would he want to res a forsaken warlock? If she does get res'd in some capacity, I expect the Horde mercs to be involved.
As for Xyrella, she got the shit beaten into her by Tamsin shortly before Cornelius arrived, so she's probably just tending her wounds wherever she fled to, if she's not unconscious. I assume the events of her questline (purifying the void shard) happen in the aftermath of it all. Taking the questlines as guide to what everyone is doing around this time, I guess we'll find out next time that Scabbs has taken advantage of the commotion to do a bit of sleuthing.
The most important reason as to why people deep-dive into lore is simply that they enjoy it, as you acknowledge. I for one am a complete sucker for learning the lore of (usually) fantasy worlds, and tend to value that over the character-driven stories told within. People like me just like to have a big, mental map of the setting and the large-scale events. Inconsistencies in how it is portrayed in-game can be a bit annoying, but they don't affect that map.
Aside from Gruul's missing label, I'm not sure this is really all that inconsistent though since it falls in line with Hearthstone's long-standing refusal to give anything multiple tribes unless they go the whole way and give them ALL tribes. Pirates have always been a bit awkward in this regard because piracy is a profession, not a race, so dual-tribe pirates would be the default if races were actually allocated all the time (as they are in Mercs). If anything the pirate tribe itself is, and has always been, the problem.
The undead are in a more hazy spot, and Sylvanas (along with her dark rangers) are actually some of the few who truly have their own bodies in a form easily identifiable as what they were in life: elves. But if they leave their bodies behind and go full-banshee, there is more of a debate to be had. Meanwhile, many forsaken are a bit of a hodge-podge of body parts as they 'repair' themselves over time. Then at the far end the scourge are often so twisted that it feels wrong to identify them by what they were in life. I mean, how would you even handle that with Abominations?
So the undead thing doesn't trouble me too much, and it's really just the weird choice of putting pirates on the same level as races that causes the issue.
A few additional comments from my own efforts (with all done except the bugged hunter one and a few kills to go with Goliath): Generally, I'm glad none of these were frustratingly grindy. Hopefully that's a sign of things changing in future, and not just a one-time-only deal due to probably only having 1 month to get XP from these.
DH: I was really annoyed it didn't work with dormant minions, and obviously doesn't encourage deathrattles either. So give DH is a class with mostly aggressive statted minions, I wasn't really sure what they were aiming for with this one, since it seemed to actively discourage the very things that the card is best at.
Priest: I just went full shadow and thief priest and assumed when I won a game it would probably be with something stolen from the opponent. That was indeed the case pretty quickly, though I was annoyed when a minion summoned by Princess Talanji didn't count when it got the finishing blow. I'm not sure what happened there.
Rogue: I don't think you need to try quite as hard as @YourPrivateNightmare did. The opponent playing Parrrley contributes to the total (it is a 2-way conversation after all), so if you have a game that goes long enough for both players to draw most of their decks, you can probably do it without any real set up. I did it myself only using Valeera the Hollow to make a couple more copies.
Warlock: I ran a deck with only a single spell (the Wicked Shipment, obviously), so Hullbreaker let me draw it lots really easily.
Magician's assistant: some variant of thief rogue is definitely the way to go. The fact rogue already has 5 spells schools available is helpful, and it's easy to use thief cards to fill in gaps and/or speed up finding them.
Sneed's new shredder: I just wanted to say I really like Goliath! While it is tough to get much mileage out of an 8-mana removal card in the current standard meta, it does feel good to play him, and just plain cool launching the little missiles. It also helps with the achievement that they coded it like 5 separate battlecries, so deathrattles go off between missiles, letting you kill any minions spawned that way.
Balancing may come into it, and I suppose it is akin to how HS has balancing made fundamentally easier by having truly distinct classes. I'm not sure Edwin being a human would be a problem, but fine. I was more bothered by it on philosophical grounds than anything else, so I won't make any arguments there.
The reason Gruul made it into the game is pretty obvious from his abilities and alternate artworks: he's the one character known to beat up dragons, without being a dragon himself. So he was the obvious choice for an anti-dragon tech merc. With only 2 dragon mercs around atm - one of which being super janky (Brightwing) - there's maybe not much need for that, but we do have to deal with dragons in Blackrock so he has his place in PvE too.
As for his race: I don't really see what the harm is in labeling him a gronn. It's obscurity would probably be less conspicuous than the blank race he has currently. I also foresee issues with Rexxar's half-orc label. It certainly true that's what he is, but he's a very different type of half-orc to Garona who should really be up for some draenai synergy too if/when she becomes a merc. Similarly, how long is it before an ogre appears, and Rexxar could be argued to be dual-race? I expect Blizz will just decide the orc half of their genetics is the important part, and ignore any ogre/draenai links, which would be very questionable philosophically.
Yeah, I've had both of these issues. I'm waiting for them to announce a fix for the hunter one before I start on it again.
Meanwhile, the dormant part not working with the DH achievement really annoys me because without it, why would you ever want to have both minions survive? To me the main purposes of the card are to summon big deathrattles (of which you expect 1 dies), or cheese something with dormant minions. The achievement doesn't want you to do either of those.
[Mercenaries] We’re aware that “Pirates” are not affected by Abilities that affect “Humans”—despite what they look like. This is intended and not a bug. Once you pick up the Pirate life, you leave your Human side behind!
But, Edwin is still a human... It's not just what he looks like, it's what he is. I thought they would handle the pirate + race issue by having the race be a hidden property (like the Alliance and Horde affiliations are). Oh well.
I guess its a similar philosophical problem to handling the undead. Sylvanas never really stopped being an elf, for example. Her soul may be fragmented (that apparently didn't stop Arthas counting as a human...) and her body may be dead and essentially just being worn by her like clothing, but everything she is is still elven.
Oh, and while I'm here, can we get some justice for Gruul? He's a gronn. They might as well label him as such even if they never use it for anything.
I think a lot of people are judging him by the wrong metric, and counting it as a success only when he's absolutely massive. Quite frankly, just being a 4 mana 6/6 that drew 2 cards is pretty damn good already, and even just a 4/4 that drew 1 is fine (unimpressive in modern HS, though do recall that Azure Drake was sent to the HoF for less than that!).
Regarding the battlecry continuing, I guess it makes sense and is consistent with Instructor Fireheart. Their battlecries are like auras for the rest of the turn, and once he's in your hand he's still around to be buffed.
I think that's exactly my problem as I always feel really dirty with high-roll-y decks that don't need much of a high-roll, so tend to 'lock them away' to repent for my sin of playing them :P
If it's not very difficult now, I shudder at the thought of it in the hypothetical universe where you have enough 0-cost cards to avoid faffing around with the awkward 1-drops. Maybe if there were more ways to remove the Edwin then it would be OK, but I can't think of many things that can actually remove a 30/30 stealth minion on turn 4. They exist, but most classes can't do anything about it even if they draw well, hence why it's not the sort of deck I'd want to be easy to make work.
Xyrella is Alliance. I agree the draenai are almost too interesting to fit with the 'traditional fantasy good guy race' thing the Alliance has going on.
As for the 20 mana thing... let's see who gets it, and if its druid, do they actually need it given they already do something more extreme with Celestial Alignment.
Yep, though the Gadgetzan one was very much tied to the meta and naturally favoured the Jade Lotus just because they got the strongest tri-class mechanic. Hopefully the honor point system being tied to quests will be more a metric of people just playing the game than how strong any class or mechanic is, though it does rely somewhat on there being a roughly equal number of players choosing each side, which is difficult to guarantee.
WoW is only a semi-finite landscape. Not only is its own landscape growing with each of its own expansions, but HS has more or less complete freedom to explore alternate realities and/or expand tiny places or events into full expansions. Plus, only a small fraction of the landscape that existed back in 2014 has actually been explored so far in HS - we only just got to Stormwind and still haven't even touched Pandaria, for example - so they can keep going for a very long time.
The bigger question for me is how many paladins and demon hunters can they shoehorn into diverse expansions? Those two classes are so restrictive thematically, hence the murlocs in both I imagine :P
On the face of it Renew at 1 mana is actually fine, and honestly an appropriate power level for a class that is supposed to be good at both healing and card/value generation. It was only really hit to break the obnoxious cycle of cards that could endlessly generate each other, making for horrid gameplay where you never made any progress against the priest. However, questlines have given most classes more than enough inevitability to deal with that now, and next rotation Renew and Wandmaker will rotate out so it will be a non-issue regardless of what happens to the questlines (they'll probably stick around, but there's a fair case for cycling them early like Genn and Baku did).
So it makes sense to revert the nerf, at least to me.
Despite the obvious story reasons for them, penta-class cards seem a touch overkill; they might as well just be fully neutral at that point. Nevertheless, you are of course right that we don't know what the main set mechanics are, and Drek'thar and Vanndar might be their flag-bearers. Let's hope they are.
Scabbs' arc hasn't even begun yet, since he's just been a tag-along who we know was sent by SI:7 to recover a naaru shard, but that's about it. I suspect his sleuthing exposing Onyxia as the nefarious driver of the overarching naaru shard stuff will kick off act 3 of the story. We currently have no idea why anyone except maybe Rokara and Tavish (both for clan reasons) would go to AV in the first place, so we're probably still in Stormwind for the next installment, and only Scabbs has anything interesting left to do there. It would mean breaking the alternating Horde and Alliance sequence of the story, but it would make sense that Scabbs is more or less solo for most of it, and in fact he might spend more time with the Horde crew rescuing Varden from the Stockades than his Alliance buddies who are all caught up with Tamsin's mess.
Back on Drek'thar, he's the biggest name in AV, and unlike Edwin or Naralex he's right in the thick of it, not siphoned off to a dungeon. Leaving him out of the main set makes me wonder what exactly the AV theme would be doing that they dismiss the biggest characters from the roster.
And I had that confidence Shaw would appear last time, yet he never did, despite being among the most obvious characters to appear, and it even being a rogue set focused on the SI:7. There wasn't even a lore-based reason not to include him, since Scabbs' bio mentions him. Heck, Antonidas and Lothar came back from the grave to appear, and the mage doesn't even have anything to do with Stormwind!
So I guess I'm just expecting questionable character choices from Blizz now. Being an obvious inclusion doesn't seem sufficient, and being relevant doesn't seem necessary.
Hang on a second. If this is one of shaman's legendaries, then either the mercenary characters won't get a legendary card this time, or Drek'thar (the guy who renounced being a warlock and returned the orcs to their honourable shamanistic past, and personally taught Thrall shamanism too) isn't a shaman card.
I suspect the latter is more likely, which just feels wrong. It has echoes of the missing Mathias Shaw last expansion, who was a sure-fire rogue card replaced by some random HS-original orc... in a set about Stormwind of all places! Come on Blizz, you better at least have made Drek'thar neutral, and not make him suffer the same indignity Shaw did.
In fairness, it's only really 1 comment with its own string of responses. If anything, you're the bigger offender by bringing them into a second, independent comment without actually discussing what Matt said either :P
Woah, there. Hold up. I fully appreciate that I'm pretty far out of the 'loop' when it comes to sensibilities on sexualised images, but when did exposed shoulders become part of the discussion? The world is a whole lot randier than I thought if they're even being discussed.
The whole problem with Jaina's original art (insofar as there was one) was with her cleavage. So yes, in that regard Cariel's singlet is serving a similar, if not identical role.
FWIW, I personally prefer nerfed Jaina, and always found it a bit weird that she wore revealing clothing so much. Women are free to do that if they choose - that's the whole point in feminism after all - but there was never anything in her personality that indicated she would make such a choice, which is why it felt a lot like the male-driven fantasy stereotype of females wearing as skimpy clothing as possible. Her covered up, post-BfA clothing feels like a better fit with her personality.
That brings us to Tamsin. Would she believably wear revealing clothing? Maybe, and more than Jaina at any rate. I imagine she doesn't give a sh*t about the implications, whereas Jaina would get fed up of telling people to stop looking at her boobs. Does that mean Blizz is being perfectly consistent? Ehhh, unlikely. But I will say the ideal, perfectly woke position would end up with a range of clothing across the whole sexualisation spectrum (well, OK, we can probably stop some time before reaching nudity). The important part is that the decision is made on a character-by-character basis to fit with their personality, rather than just some fantasy genre default.
There's definitely something I'm missing: where is the inconsistency here? The young Cariel artwork even has an orange under-shirt thing (vest? I'm no fashionista that's for sure :P) serving a similar role to the bit they added to Jaina's artwork.
Some of Tamsin's artwork is more revealing, but we already have those so that can't be what you are referring to.
I agree the final Tamsin fight was a bit too easy (though I did screw myself over at the final hurdle by playing the 9-mana card that is there for the story, only to find out her minions were way bigger than mine... whoops). That said, it does make sense that Anertheron felt like the bigger fight, because it was the bigger fight. Not just that it was 2 fights (I'm not sure why they didn't just make it 2 phases of a single fight, but oh well), but that as far as Stormwind was concerned that was the fight that mattered. Tamsin was just a family matter to mop up afterwards.
The change from saving to killing her sister may have come quickly in the dialogue, but she had been forced to kill the reanimated corpse of her father by that point, so her willingness to see good in Tamsin had taken an irrecoverable blow. It's pretty difficult to cling to the idea of protecting family when said family has just killed and defiled another family member. I'm not saying it was handled and paced perfectly, but it was about as good as we can hope a card game to do it given how atrocious it is as a medium for story-telling.
---------------------------------
[The stuff below is just me indulging in my love of the design of the forsaken]
I'm glad they didn't end with Cariel being able to help Tamsin, because she shouldn't have been able to. The forsaken are fundamentally broken characters whose emotional range is tragically 1-dimensional (they are generally left with only 1 emotion when they are brought back). It looks like poor character design but it's actually really clever as it lets them tell stories about characters who truly lack the emotional depth that the living people around them expect them to have.
Sylvanas, for instance, has been simmering in anger ever since Arthas turned her into a banshee, which is why she snaps with so little provocation, and why her worldview is so twisted. She gets no catharsis from doing, well, anything, and nor would Tamsin. It's just anger followed by more anger, and no amount of sisterly love will ever bring her out of that. Sylvanas looked like she came close when she reunited with Vereesa Windrunner during Garrosh's trial, but she wanted to kill her sister so they could 'live' together in the Undercity, which shows just how corrupted her idea of love had become. Of course the moment that plan fell apart, Sylvanas went on a bloody rampage and finally let go of the falsehood that she actually knew what love was anymore.
The forsaken aren't all edge-lords though. Some forsaken do get left with positive emotions, and the book Before the Storm does a good job of showing how the Undercity was populated by generally nice people getting by with a shit situation. I love the idea that these happy forsaken can't actually feel negative emotions anymore, and they press on with their 'lives' with a mangled smile on their face. They are just as emotionally broken as Tamsin and Sylvanas, but are rather more socially acceptable (ignoring the rotting zombie part).
I liked it personally. It was very much a family matter rather than a big advancement of the plot, and that's a decent way to make use of the family they introduced. The first mission in particular did much more for Cariel's character than I expected.
There's no way K'T will res Tamsin. Quite aside from him being less than welcome in Stormwind by this point, he has no love for demons, the Burning Legion, and the forsaken, so why would he want to res a forsaken warlock? If she does get res'd in some capacity, I expect the Horde mercs to be involved.
As for Xyrella, she got the shit beaten into her by Tamsin shortly before Cornelius arrived, so she's probably just tending her wounds wherever she fled to, if she's not unconscious. I assume the events of her questline (purifying the void shard) happen in the aftermath of it all. Taking the questlines as guide to what everyone is doing around this time, I guess we'll find out next time that Scabbs has taken advantage of the commotion to do a bit of sleuthing.
The most important reason as to why people deep-dive into lore is simply that they enjoy it, as you acknowledge. I for one am a complete sucker for learning the lore of (usually) fantasy worlds, and tend to value that over the character-driven stories told within. People like me just like to have a big, mental map of the setting and the large-scale events. Inconsistencies in how it is portrayed in-game can be a bit annoying, but they don't affect that map.
Aside from Gruul's missing label, I'm not sure this is really all that inconsistent though since it falls in line with Hearthstone's long-standing refusal to give anything multiple tribes unless they go the whole way and give them ALL tribes. Pirates have always been a bit awkward in this regard because piracy is a profession, not a race, so dual-tribe pirates would be the default if races were actually allocated all the time (as they are in Mercs). If anything the pirate tribe itself is, and has always been, the problem.
The undead are in a more hazy spot, and Sylvanas (along with her dark rangers) are actually some of the few who truly have their own bodies in a form easily identifiable as what they were in life: elves. But if they leave their bodies behind and go full-banshee, there is more of a debate to be had. Meanwhile, many forsaken are a bit of a hodge-podge of body parts as they 'repair' themselves over time. Then at the far end the scourge are often so twisted that it feels wrong to identify them by what they were in life. I mean, how would you even handle that with Abominations?
So the undead thing doesn't trouble me too much, and it's really just the weird choice of putting pirates on the same level as races that causes the issue.
A few additional comments from my own efforts (with all done except the bugged hunter one and a few kills to go with Goliath): Generally, I'm glad none of these were frustratingly grindy. Hopefully that's a sign of things changing in future, and not just a one-time-only deal due to probably only having 1 month to get XP from these.
DH: I was really annoyed it didn't work with dormant minions, and obviously doesn't encourage deathrattles either. So give DH is a class with mostly aggressive statted minions, I wasn't really sure what they were aiming for with this one, since it seemed to actively discourage the very things that the card is best at.
Priest: I just went full shadow and thief priest and assumed when I won a game it would probably be with something stolen from the opponent. That was indeed the case pretty quickly, though I was annoyed when a minion summoned by Princess Talanji didn't count when it got the finishing blow. I'm not sure what happened there.
Rogue: I don't think you need to try quite as hard as @YourPrivateNightmare did. The opponent playing Parrrley contributes to the total (it is a 2-way conversation after all), so if you have a game that goes long enough for both players to draw most of their decks, you can probably do it without any real set up. I did it myself only using Valeera the Hollow to make a couple more copies.
Warlock: I ran a deck with only a single spell (the Wicked Shipment, obviously), so Hullbreaker let me draw it lots really easily.
Magician's assistant: some variant of thief rogue is definitely the way to go. The fact rogue already has 5 spells schools available is helpful, and it's easy to use thief cards to fill in gaps and/or speed up finding them.
Sneed's new shredder: I just wanted to say I really like Goliath! While it is tough to get much mileage out of an 8-mana removal card in the current standard meta, it does feel good to play him, and just plain cool launching the little missiles. It also helps with the achievement that they coded it like 5 separate battlecries, so deathrattles go off between missiles, letting you kill any minions spawned that way.
Balancing may come into it, and I suppose it is akin to how HS has balancing made fundamentally easier by having truly distinct classes. I'm not sure Edwin being a human would be a problem, but fine. I was more bothered by it on philosophical grounds than anything else, so I won't make any arguments there.
The reason Gruul made it into the game is pretty obvious from his abilities and alternate artworks: he's the one character known to beat up dragons, without being a dragon himself. So he was the obvious choice for an anti-dragon tech merc. With only 2 dragon mercs around atm - one of which being super janky (Brightwing) - there's maybe not much need for that, but we do have to deal with dragons in Blackrock so he has his place in PvE too.
As for his race: I don't really see what the harm is in labeling him a gronn. It's obscurity would probably be less conspicuous than the blank race he has currently. I also foresee issues with Rexxar's half-orc label. It certainly true that's what he is, but he's a very different type of half-orc to Garona who should really be up for some draenai synergy too if/when she becomes a merc. Similarly, how long is it before an ogre appears, and Rexxar could be argued to be dual-race? I expect Blizz will just decide the orc half of their genetics is the important part, and ignore any ogre/draenai links, which would be very questionable philosophically.
Yeah, I've had both of these issues. I'm waiting for them to announce a fix for the hunter one before I start on it again.
Meanwhile, the dormant part not working with the DH achievement really annoys me because without it, why would you ever want to have both minions survive? To me the main purposes of the card are to summon big deathrattles (of which you expect 1 dies), or cheese something with dormant minions. The achievement doesn't want you to do either of those.
But, Edwin is still a human... It's not just what he looks like, it's what he is. I thought they would handle the pirate + race issue by having the race be a hidden property (like the Alliance and Horde affiliations are). Oh well.
I guess its a similar philosophical problem to handling the undead. Sylvanas never really stopped being an elf, for example. Her soul may be fragmented (that apparently didn't stop Arthas counting as a human...) and her body may be dead and essentially just being worn by her like clothing, but everything she is is still elven.
Oh, and while I'm here, can we get some justice for Gruul? He's a gronn. They might as well label him as such even if they never use it for anything.
I think a lot of people are judging him by the wrong metric, and counting it as a success only when he's absolutely massive. Quite frankly, just being a 4 mana 6/6 that drew 2 cards is pretty damn good already, and even just a 4/4 that drew 1 is fine (unimpressive in modern HS, though do recall that Azure Drake was sent to the HoF for less than that!).
Regarding the battlecry continuing, I guess it makes sense and is consistent with Instructor Fireheart. Their battlecries are like auras for the rest of the turn, and once he's in your hand he's still around to be buffed.
I think that's exactly my problem as I always feel really dirty with high-roll-y decks that don't need much of a high-roll, so tend to 'lock them away' to repent for my sin of playing them :P
If it's not very difficult now, I shudder at the thought of it in the hypothetical universe where you have enough 0-cost cards to avoid faffing around with the awkward 1-drops. Maybe if there were more ways to remove the Edwin then it would be OK, but I can't think of many things that can actually remove a 30/30 stealth minion on turn 4. They exist, but most classes can't do anything about it even if they draw well, hence why it's not the sort of deck I'd want to be easy to make work.