Perhaps, but the artwork fits HS's style, so unless you can find it somewhere else it certainly looks like it has been commissioned for the Book of Heroes.
That or there's a really good artist out there who put a lot of work into a fake leak, but made the perverse decision to draw Anduin like a rogue, making it seem less real. That's some '5D chess' thinking there.
That depends on which time frame they are working on. DMF was weird because they released it a month early, so we have to assume it has a 5 month expansion cycle. If they are following the normal timings, we wouldn't see anything until February.
I think they were trying to really hammer home that Anduin is trying to be like his father, but that he is much better at being himself. Keep in mind he's still young, so it makes sense that he's still learning how to act, both as king and as himself.
I don't really know that much about WoW lore, but that bit fron WoWpedia makes me like the skin a lot more. Way better than a "baby Anduin" skin that almost no one would want/like. I hope the Anduin Book of Heroes (Whenever it drops, based on the real Book of Heroes order.) will make me like Anduin more, cuz whenever i see play against a priest i just get really mild amounts of ptsd from all my games against Ress & Big Priests.
In WoW, Anduin is one of the most likable guys around. He's the guy that has the will and power to try to make the world a better place, but the world refuses to comply for more than a few months at a time. So he somehow found a way for a king to have an underdog story.
I have my doubts about how well his story translates into the BoH because he's a pacifist, but there have been plenty of 'fights' that have really just been debates/arguments so I'm sure they have worked something out.
That mistake is only made once, and to be honest you would have prior knowledge anyway because it is likely you would have played Anduin's BoH before encountering it in constructed.
Plus, if rogue can use cards from every class, can we not argue that all classes are just a subset of the rogue class? :P
Well Valeera was shown in a comic to be training him to throw knives and it is perfectly believable that such training continued when Valeera returned to Stormwind after helping defeat Cho'gall.
It's a shame the WoW team chose not to use her much until HS made her popular, so all this stuff is either implicit or mentioned off-hand way later. Chapter 11 of Before the Storm demonstrates their relationship the best, and makes it clear those two are extremely close friends and that Valeera helped Anduin a lot over the years.
A rogue-ish Anduin may not look very priestly, but it is perfectly consistent with WoW lore and avoids the issue of needing to give us a literal baby Anduin skin (which I doubt there is much appetite for).
This is also a nice clue about how his BoH story will play out, without it getting stuck in the loop of: get kidnapped, get rescued, tell daddy to calm down. Given the context of HS, where Valeera is much more than the side character she has been in WoW, showing what those two got up two off-screen would make good sense.
If it wasn't for Vanessa's familial ties to Edwin I would say Garona is just as fitting as anyone else. The classic legendaries were often closely associated with the basic hero (Cenarius + Malfurion, Velen + Anduin, Antonidas + Jaina, Gromm + Garrosh, Tirion + Uther), and I'm pretty sure Valeera did more with Garona than any of the other likely options. At least in documented events; there's no doubt she has worked with Mathias quite a bit off-screen since they are both based in Stormwind and BfA showed them talking like long-time friends.
Taran Zhu seems particularly unlikely since he's a monk, not a rogue. Now they are willing to add classes to the game, my guess is they will keep him back for the basic monk hero. Him or Chen Stormstout anyway. I would say they are both conspicuously absent from the game, but so is the whole of Pandaria so that's not saying much.
I forgot that she'll get a book of heroes. Thats the only one I'm excited for and will probably buy.
My prediction is that the biggest difference between Valeera's BoH skin and her basic one will be the absence of those glorious and utterly ridiculous shoulder spikes. There's a small chance of white hair and demonic runes (she better at least have those in one of the Tavern Pass skins!), but her clothing has never really changed much beyond the shoulders.
Her story itself should be a nice little detour from the main Warcraft storyline that all the others tell, though it does link up with quite a few of the HS heroes (there's one event where Valeera, Anduin, Jaina, Thrall and Garrosh are all on the same side in a fight, and I assume Valeera will be the one to tell us about it). I'm most interested to see how they handle some of the stuff which involves Med'an, and is therefore in a weird quantum state of being both canon and non-canon.
Fun fact: the first two volumes of the comic that tells most of her story credit a certain Ben Brode for 'additional development'. So that might be a hint about who first suggested using her as the basic rogue hero.
I had never considered it this way before, but Seline is similar to an 8-mana Mind Control. You don't copy whatever effects the minion had, but you will have 1 more health and normally have more attack too. Of course mechanically she has nothing to do with MC, which is why it looks like she doesn't represent the class very well. And I guess it doesn't help that hard removal isn't anything unique to priest.
As an aside (since I don't think anyone else is bothering to read our whole discussion) I want to say I do genuinely respect your opinions despite often disagreeing with them. I saw you get justifiably angry at a few disrespectful comments below, and while I doubt they are going to apologise, I can at least make it 100% clear that I am no enemy :)
In some metas yes, but I don't think he's a fundamentally weak card. With a bit of miracle rogue support he can pull his weight. Plus, I wouldn't be against a small stat buff to a 4/2 or 3/3 if need be. If the stats are refined he can feel like a card that would be considered in lots of archetypes, without being an auto-include.
Perhaps more than any other cards, Classic class legendaries should excite players about class mechanics. Edwin's design was good in this regard as he had a serious reward for stringing several cards together, but some are much less successful. E.g. I would say Natalie Seline is a very bad design for Classic legendary because it doesn't get anyone interested in priest. She's not a particularly bad card (it hasn't helped that aggro has dominated all year), she just doesn't invite you to do any priestly things. Xaril's strength, on the other hand, is that he is an open invitation to try out almost all the class has to offer, which makes him a great ambassador for the class.
Perhaps I'll make a thread about my thoughts on this over the weekend. I'd be interested to hear everyone else's views on what makes a good Classic legendary.
They could and they probably will, but when talking about making an evergreen card there is merit to using what we know works. As the saying goes: there is no point in reinventing the wheel.
As much as I like the card, Xaril's power level is too low to compete in Wild, so he might as well not exist at the moment. Yes, you could argue for buffing him - and he'd be a good target for that - but I still believe he'd be a perfect fit for Classic as he is.
Of course, this whole argument only holds if Blizz wants a card like Xaril in Classic. If they want Edwin's replacement to go in a different direction then it is like comparing apples with oranges, so there's little point in dwelling too much on the idea.
Good one, all that´s left is to find someone who´s actually playing them on ladder :D
(would hit you with a snowball for this, if I had any left :P)
No need to find anyone, that's priest's schtick. Burgle rogue just generates them out of 'thin air'. Dragon's Hoard is your best friend here, although it will take quite a while to find specific legendaries enough times to finish the achievements.
It'll probably be someone new, but Xaril, Poisoned Mind is such a good representative of the class' mechanics that I would approve of him being promoted to Classic. In one card you have all of:
Deathrattle
Battlecry (not a strong rogue thing, but the class has had direct synergies in the past and things like Shadowstep make rogue better with them than most classes)
Low stats (much more of a rogue thing than Edwin's high stats)
Briarthorn Toxin and Firebloom Toxin are a little more general-purpose, but attack buffs and damage dealing spells are not uncommon in the class.
And of course indirect combo synergy by adding 2 cheap spells to your hand.
A mantid would be a bit weird as the representative in Classic though. Re-skin him as Vanessa VanCleef and its perfect since she is also a poisons user. Actually, using Vanessa is quite likely now I think of it...
He's an appropriate character at a sensible power level for Classic.
Is he though? Its a must kill card with 12 health, is impactful the same turn you play him, and is miles ahead of Archmage Antonidas. Also, team5 would have the additional burden of having to design spells around this guy in every expansion, so I wouldn't want him permanently in standard.
Why would they need to design spells around him? You cannot cheat any spells out early because you have to wait 'til turn 10 to play him, and on that turn you can only cast 1 spell. As far as 10 mana cards go, his immediate impact is pretty tame. The only thing they'd have to avoid printing is a minion (not even a spell) that pulls him out of your hand/deck, but that's a tiny bit of design space that is very easily avoided.
And while killing a 12 health minion on turn 10 may be non-trivial, you still have all the mana crystals you could ever need, so it's not like having to deal with a 12 health minion on one of the early turns. It is no bigger a problem than trying to remove Ysera or Malygos, and they cost 9 mana.
Kalecgos' usage over his time in Standard (which, keep in mind, started off the back of the low-power Year of the Raven) has been pretty much exactly what you'd want of a Classic legendary: present, but usually left out of decks. That was even with dragon synergies being relevant in mage!
He's been in highlander mage pretty much since Uldum, and its pretty hard to say he's not one of the winners of that deck. All its needed is for the meta to slow down slightly and he wouldn't be too far from being an auto include. Any midrange deck can easily fit this in.
Your point in the design aspect, I can sort of understand. It is after all a 10 cost card. But I still think he's not something I'd like to see in evergreen. Blizzard, frost nova, and flamestrike are already very powerful swings cards on their own with kalecgos, and I'd hate to see more cards introduced making this a consistent feature.
I doubt team5 would be removing Archmage Antonidas anyway. In the right deck, he's still a very powerful card, and I think he still fits your criteria for a classic legendary. You dont need apprentice to make this card good, its already a decent card with frost nova.
Well I haven't seen a mage play him in ages. I actually don't remember when it last happened, it was so long ago. Perhaps I have just been beating highlander mages before they can play him? That seems a bit unlikely as I prefer my games to go beyond turn 10. Regardless, I'll take your word for it that he is played more than I have seen him.
Certainly the dominance of aggro this year has made it tougher to play him, but isn't that more evidence that he is fine? A turn 10 high-ish tempo turn (which is pretty piddly compared to what many classes can do) is always going to be limited by the fact you have to wait 'til turn 10 to do it. I guess it's a similar story for Antonidas + Frost Nova: there's enough removal in Standard at all times that taking turn 10 to threaten something next turn if a minion survives is just not a big problem.
For the record, I'm fine with saying Antonidas is good without the Apprentice, but that 'good' is historically not good enough to have any meta significance. The only time I remember him being used in the meta outside of an Exodia deck was to turn spare parts into extra reach in mech mage.
Anyway, let's shelve this discussion lest we accidentally turn a priest thread into a mage one.
He's an appropriate character at a sensible power level for Classic.
Is he though? Its a must kill card with 12 health, is impactful the same turn you play him, and is miles ahead of Archmage Antonidas. Also, team5 would have the additional burden of having to design spells around this guy in every expansion, so I wouldn't want him permanently in standard.
Why would they need to design spells around him? You cannot cheat any spells out early because you have to wait 'til turn 10 to play him, and on that turn you can only cast 1 spell. As far as 10 mana cards go, his immediate impact is pretty tame. The only thing they'd have to avoid printing is a minion (not even a spell) that pulls him out of your hand/deck, but that's a tiny bit of design space that is very easily avoided.
And while killing a 12 health minion on turn 10 may be non-trivial, you still have all the mana crystals you could ever need, so it's not like having to deal with a 12 health minion on one of the early turns. It is no bigger a problem than trying to remove Ysera or Malygos, and they cost 9 mana.
Kalecgos' usage over his time in Standard (which, keep in mind, started off the back of the low-power Year of the Raven) has been pretty much exactly what you'd want of a Classic legendary: present, but usually left out of decks. That was even with dragon synergies being relevant in mage!
Perhaps, but the artwork fits HS's style, so unless you can find it somewhere else it certainly looks like it has been commissioned for the Book of Heroes.
That or there's a really good artist out there who put a lot of work into a fake leak, but made the perverse decision to draw Anduin like a rogue, making it seem less real. That's some '5D chess' thinking there.
That depends on which time frame they are working on. DMF was weird because they released it a month early, so we have to assume it has a 5 month expansion cycle. If they are following the normal timings, we wouldn't see anything until February.
Hopefully we do see something quite soon though.
Yes, it was the BfA cinematic.
I think they were trying to really hammer home that Anduin is trying to be like his father, but that he is much better at being himself. Keep in mind he's still young, so it makes sense that he's still learning how to act, both as king and as himself.
The most useful thing he did in that fight happened when he stopped using his sword...
There's also a difference between talent and skill. If he's any good with heavy weapons it's through hard work, not natural aptitude (aka talent).
In WoW, Anduin is one of the most likable guys around. He's the guy that has the will and power to try to make the world a better place, but the world refuses to comply for more than a few months at a time. So he somehow found a way for a king to have an underdog story.
I have my doubts about how well his story translates into the BoH because he's a pacifist, but there have been plenty of 'fights' that have really just been debates/arguments so I'm sure they have worked something out.
That mistake is only made once, and to be honest you would have prior knowledge anyway because it is likely you would have played Anduin's BoH before encountering it in constructed.
Plus, if rogue can use cards from every class, can we not argue that all classes are just a subset of the rogue class? :P
Well Valeera was shown in a comic to be training him to throw knives and it is perfectly believable that such training continued when Valeera returned to Stormwind after helping defeat Cho'gall.
It's a shame the WoW team chose not to use her much until HS made her popular, so all this stuff is either implicit or mentioned off-hand way later. Chapter 11 of Before the Storm demonstrates their relationship the best, and makes it clear those two are extremely close friends and that Valeera helped Anduin a lot over the years.
A rogue-ish Anduin may not look very priestly, but it is perfectly consistent with WoW lore and avoids the issue of needing to give us a literal baby Anduin skin (which I doubt there is much appetite for).
This is also a nice clue about how his BoH story will play out, without it getting stuck in the loop of: get kidnapped, get rescued, tell daddy to calm down. Given the context of HS, where Valeera is much more than the side character she has been in WoW, showing what those two got up two off-screen would make good sense.
All in all, it gets a big thumbs up from me :)
If it wasn't for Vanessa's familial ties to Edwin I would say Garona is just as fitting as anyone else. The classic legendaries were often closely associated with the basic hero (Cenarius + Malfurion, Velen + Anduin, Antonidas + Jaina, Gromm + Garrosh, Tirion + Uther), and I'm pretty sure Valeera did more with Garona than any of the other likely options. At least in documented events; there's no doubt she has worked with Mathias quite a bit off-screen since they are both based in Stormwind and BfA showed them talking like long-time friends.
Taran Zhu seems particularly unlikely since he's a monk, not a rogue. Now they are willing to add classes to the game, my guess is they will keep him back for the basic monk hero. Him or Chen Stormstout anyway. I would say they are both conspicuously absent from the game, but so is the whole of Pandaria so that's not saying much.
My prediction is that the biggest difference between Valeera's BoH skin and her basic one will be the absence of those glorious and utterly ridiculous shoulder spikes. There's a small chance of white hair and demonic runes (she better at least have those in one of the Tavern Pass skins!), but her clothing has never really changed much beyond the shoulders.
Her story itself should be a nice little detour from the main Warcraft storyline that all the others tell, though it does link up with quite a few of the HS heroes (there's one event where Valeera, Anduin, Jaina, Thrall and Garrosh are all on the same side in a fight, and I assume Valeera will be the one to tell us about it). I'm most interested to see how they handle some of the stuff which involves Med'an, and is therefore in a weird quantum state of being both canon and non-canon.
Fun fact: the first two volumes of the comic that tells most of her story credit a certain Ben Brode for 'additional development'. So that might be a hint about who first suggested using her as the basic rogue hero.
I had never considered it this way before, but Seline is similar to an 8-mana Mind Control. You don't copy whatever effects the minion had, but you will have 1 more health and normally have more attack too. Of course mechanically she has nothing to do with MC, which is why it looks like she doesn't represent the class very well. And I guess it doesn't help that hard removal isn't anything unique to priest.
As an aside (since I don't think anyone else is bothering to read our whole discussion) I want to say I do genuinely respect your opinions despite often disagreeing with them. I saw you get justifiably angry at a few disrespectful comments below, and while I doubt they are going to apologise, I can at least make it 100% clear that I am no enemy :)
In some metas yes, but I don't think he's a fundamentally weak card. With a bit of miracle rogue support he can pull his weight. Plus, I wouldn't be against a small stat buff to a 4/2 or 3/3 if need be. If the stats are refined he can feel like a card that would be considered in lots of archetypes, without being an auto-include.
Perhaps more than any other cards, Classic class legendaries should excite players about class mechanics. Edwin's design was good in this regard as he had a serious reward for stringing several cards together, but some are much less successful. E.g. I would say Natalie Seline is a very bad design for Classic legendary because it doesn't get anyone interested in priest. She's not a particularly bad card (it hasn't helped that aggro has dominated all year), she just doesn't invite you to do any priestly things. Xaril's strength, on the other hand, is that he is an open invitation to try out almost all the class has to offer, which makes him a great ambassador for the class.
Perhaps I'll make a thread about my thoughts on this over the weekend. I'd be interested to hear everyone else's views on what makes a good Classic legendary.
Come on, don't be like that. There are many possible reasons for spelling errors, and none of them call for mockery.
They could and they probably will, but when talking about making an evergreen card there is merit to using what we know works. As the saying goes: there is no point in reinventing the wheel.
As much as I like the card, Xaril's power level is too low to compete in Wild, so he might as well not exist at the moment. Yes, you could argue for buffing him - and he'd be a good target for that - but I still believe he'd be a perfect fit for Classic as he is.
Of course, this whole argument only holds if Blizz wants a card like Xaril in Classic. If they want Edwin's replacement to go in a different direction then it is like comparing apples with oranges, so there's little point in dwelling too much on the idea.
No need to find anyone, that's priest's schtick. Burgle rogue just generates them out of 'thin air'. Dragon's Hoard is your best friend here, although it will take quite a while to find specific legendaries enough times to finish the achievements.
It'll probably be someone new, but Xaril, Poisoned Mind is such a good representative of the class' mechanics that I would approve of him being promoted to Classic. In one card you have all of:
A mantid would be a bit weird as the representative in Classic though. Re-skin him as Vanessa VanCleef and its perfect since she is also a poisons user. Actually, using Vanessa is quite likely now I think of it...
Sure, and that would be better unless you dislike golden versions. I was just putting numbers to @shky's proposed process.
Taking the steps in the order you said it, the maths is: +1600-3200+3200+1600-1600=+1600. I.e. the same as if you just keep it now and get HoF dust.
Well I haven't seen a mage play him in ages. I actually don't remember when it last happened, it was so long ago. Perhaps I have just been beating highlander mages before they can play him? That seems a bit unlikely as I prefer my games to go beyond turn 10. Regardless, I'll take your word for it that he is played more than I have seen him.
Certainly the dominance of aggro this year has made it tougher to play him, but isn't that more evidence that he is fine? A turn 10 high-ish tempo turn (which is pretty piddly compared to what many classes can do) is always going to be limited by the fact you have to wait 'til turn 10 to do it. I guess it's a similar story for Antonidas + Frost Nova: there's enough removal in Standard at all times that taking turn 10 to threaten something next turn if a minion survives is just not a big problem.
For the record, I'm fine with saying Antonidas is good without the Apprentice, but that 'good' is historically not good enough to have any meta significance. The only time I remember him being used in the meta outside of an Exodia deck was to turn spare parts into extra reach in mech mage.
Anyway, let's shelve this discussion lest we accidentally turn a priest thread into a mage one.
Why would they need to design spells around him? You cannot cheat any spells out early because you have to wait 'til turn 10 to play him, and on that turn you can only cast 1 spell. As far as 10 mana cards go, his immediate impact is pretty tame. The only thing they'd have to avoid printing is a minion (not even a spell) that pulls him out of your hand/deck, but that's a tiny bit of design space that is very easily avoided.
And while killing a 12 health minion on turn 10 may be non-trivial, you still have all the mana crystals you could ever need, so it's not like having to deal with a 12 health minion on one of the early turns. It is no bigger a problem than trying to remove Ysera or Malygos, and they cost 9 mana.
Kalecgos' usage over his time in Standard (which, keep in mind, started off the back of the low-power Year of the Raven) has been pretty much exactly what you'd want of a Classic legendary: present, but usually left out of decks. That was even with dragon synergies being relevant in mage!