That's certainly the cycle we have been used to since Frozen Throne slowed things down by giving super powerful late game tools (most notably hero cards), but the reverse was true for pretty much the entire time between Naxx and Frozen Throne, when HS was locked in what felt like a never ending aggro meta. (Old Gods provided a glorious respite, but that didn't last long).
Importantly, Outland broke that cycle and brought us our first real aggro meta for years. If Scholomance is going to change that, it needs a lot of tools that help control out, but instead most of the strong cards look to be helping aggro out more than anyone else. The main exception to this is druid, which certainly doesn't qualify as aggro, but whatever it is aggro seems the best way to beat it, so it isn't really helping matters.
So I personally expect aggro to keep standing just fine unless nerfs hit it.
I think it is simply that old decks are still legal (i.e. you could still make the same deck with the SA card pool), so there was no need to reset them.
I think it is because your old decks are still legal in the current arena rotation. The reason they had to end runs before (and hence give out arena tickets) was because the pool of cards changed such that old decks did not use cards available in the new pool.
While I agree it is underrated, Cursed Disciple was only used in constructed in Jungle Giants druid, which itself used it for the super niche reason that it was two 5 attack minions in 1 cheap card (cheap in the context of 5+ attack minions). So it is unlikely Divine Rager is actually used in constructed and it will join the huge pool of decent cards that unfairly get called 'unplayable'.
Arena players will respect it though, which I often find is the better measure of whether a card is bad or not.
While I agree Spectral Cutlass was underestimated (largely because there were few burgle rogue players that existed prior to Witchwood that had enough experience to even begin to assess it), I was surprised to not see Genn and Baku representing that expansion. As with Keleseth before them, the cost of the deck-building limitation was assumed to cripple them completely.
The new combo cards (Coerce, Wand Thief and Brain Freeze) are all great to get, making the standard pool actually pretty solid on the whole. There are a couple of duds certainly, but I wouldn't put Headcrack or Perdition's Blade in that category. Both can be reasonably useful, and Headcrack especially can be a great card to generate if you are the aggressor in a given match-up.
Aside from weapons (and by extension pirates), warrior and rogue really don't have very much in common. Warrior has lots of taunt, armour, AoE, and an interest in minions being damaged, while rogue is expressly given none of these (having an interest in undamaged minions for the last of them). Similarly warrior has little in common with rogue's main mechanics. So it is little surprise that the rogue/warrior cards focused on the one thing they actually overlap on.
Even then though, it is not as though the 3 weapon-based rogue/warrior cards mean the whole set revolves around weapons for the two classes. Accounting for all 14 cards each class gets, they both have 9 that have nothing to do with weapons, which would almost constitute an entire set of class cards in a normal expansion.
Which armour are you referring to? Her scarlet crusade clothes in Infiltrator Lilian, or her more usual, darker armour in the Forsaken Lilian token and the old Lilian Voss card? Or both?
If we do get her as a hero, I'd expect to see her in her standard forsaken appearance. I wouldn't put it past Team 5 to use a living version of her, but it would be a misuse of the character that is synonymous with the personal and emotional struggles of being brought back into undeath.
Regarding the long anticipated rogue hero, my current best guess at the Scholomance solo content is that we will follow Lilian Voss infiltrating the school and revealing its dark secrets, and that there will be a Lilian hero portrait to go along with it like there was for Aranna. My flimsy evidence:
Lilian Voss was an existing rogue legendary at the time Blizzard teased that the next one would be 'legendary', and one relevant in the current context.
Lilian looks to be the only card in the set that is antagonistic towards the school, and solo content is going to need some conflict, whatever form it takes.
It is heavily implied in the trailer that the dark side of the school exists, but the cards themselves don't do much to portray this. So the obvious path for the solo content to take is to have us infiltrate the school, expose it and (try to) clean it up. I.e. do exactly what Lilian does in WoW and her card implies she's doing in HS's version of the school.
I have no doubt that in 2 months I'll be proven completely wrong, but this narrative makes so much sense to me.
I'm loving the flavour text alongside the artwork, especially on the Spectral Delinquent token. She got killed by the mimic (very minor callback to Toothy Chest and the mimic in the top-right corner of the K&C game board), but took the loot anyway.
It is a nice followup to turn-2 Hero Power. But I don't see why anyone would play this when Deadly Poison exists. The only way this is better than Deadly Poison is that it can be used to buff several weapons, but there is no way it will be able to survive that long. Deadly Poison is cheaper, more reliable, and a spell for activating Spellburst.
Why not just play both? They don't have to be competing for the same deck slots, and if you want +2 attack on weapons you'd surely want to make that more reliable by having 4 cards in the deck instead of 2.
I expect Mana Reservoir will actually be one of the better picks. It hasn't been used so far because decks haven't been very interested in spell damage, so they only use it when the spell damage minions have board presence of their own. But if spell damage itself is the most important part, then a low cost high health option is perfect.
I'm opening them first, but I don't think it makes much difference because apparently they don't have pity timers. I'm only doing it first because I always craft the rogue legendaries golden before I open packs to avoid opening non-golden copies, and there's a tiny chance I could save the dust if I get one of them in the golden packs first.
I suppose if you are most of the way through the commons and you still haven't opened any of a specific card you want golden then you could improve your odds that way, but since you don't know which order you'll find cards in this is not useful at a statistical level: if you happened to find them first you would have missed the opportunity, so it all averages out.
Equality + 3/2 + Whirlwind + an awkward combination that forces you to destroy your own board where Equality doesn't, and/or leaves a Whirlwind up for your opponent to choose to activate when it suits them = 3 mana.
Given how little he costs, I'm willing to bet that deathrattle is more of a liability than it looks. It is too slow to be used to kill off the opponent's minions the turn you play him, so that still needs 2 cards, and even if you do that by giving him rush, you're then killing off any minions you had on your side, saving your opponent the hassle of doing it themselves.
You will usually be ahead on the board too after you clear the board with, say, Consecration, so you don't want the deathrattle to go off anymore most of the time.
So all in all, I have to think that the two effects looks super synergistic, but the way it is put together means they probably don't mix well most of the time.
I'm glad they were willing to say something on this. I appreciate it only leaves you with +1 card in hand, but at the same time shaman is a jack-of-all-trades class so it cannot be difficult to find an effects for legendaries that don't arguably violate class weaknesses.
To me it is less about the card itself and more about trusting the class identities to hold, because they ensure each class has weaknesses that you can target if you want to beat them. As soon as those weaknesses are filled in or made so minor as to not matter, you get games where one player feels like there was nothing they could do to win even if they tweak their deck to improve their odds, and that really sucks.
That's certainly the cycle we have been used to since Frozen Throne slowed things down by giving super powerful late game tools (most notably hero cards), but the reverse was true for pretty much the entire time between Naxx and Frozen Throne, when HS was locked in what felt like a never ending aggro meta. (Old Gods provided a glorious respite, but that didn't last long).
Importantly, Outland broke that cycle and brought us our first real aggro meta for years. If Scholomance is going to change that, it needs a lot of tools that help control out, but instead most of the strong cards look to be helping aggro out more than anyone else. The main exception to this is druid, which certainly doesn't qualify as aggro, but whatever it is aggro seems the best way to beat it, so it isn't really helping matters.
So I personally expect aggro to keep standing just fine unless nerfs hit it.
I think it is simply that old decks are still legal (i.e. you could still make the same deck with the SA card pool), so there was no need to reset them.
I think it is because your old decks are still legal in the current arena rotation. The reason they had to end runs before (and hence give out arena tickets) was because the pool of cards changed such that old decks did not use cards available in the new pool.
While I agree it is underrated, Cursed Disciple was only used in constructed in Jungle Giants druid, which itself used it for the super niche reason that it was two 5 attack minions in 1 cheap card (cheap in the context of 5+ attack minions). So it is unlikely Divine Rager is actually used in constructed and it will join the huge pool of decent cards that unfairly get called 'unplayable'.
Arena players will respect it though, which I often find is the better measure of whether a card is bad or not.
While I agree Spectral Cutlass was underestimated (largely because there were few burgle rogue players that existed prior to Witchwood that had enough experience to even begin to assess it), I was surprised to not see Genn and Baku representing that expansion. As with Keleseth before them, the cost of the deck-building limitation was assumed to cripple them completely.
The new combo cards (Coerce, Wand Thief and Brain Freeze) are all great to get, making the standard pool actually pretty solid on the whole. There are a couple of duds certainly, but I wouldn't put Headcrack or Perdition's Blade in that category. Both can be reasonably useful, and Headcrack especially can be a great card to generate if you are the aggressor in a given match-up.
They kind of did with Coerce, where the combo effect doesn't do anything unless the target is undamaged.
Aside from weapons (and by extension pirates), warrior and rogue really don't have very much in common. Warrior has lots of taunt, armour, AoE, and an interest in minions being damaged, while rogue is expressly given none of these (having an interest in undamaged minions for the last of them). Similarly warrior has little in common with rogue's main mechanics. So it is little surprise that the rogue/warrior cards focused on the one thing they actually overlap on.
Even then though, it is not as though the 3 weapon-based rogue/warrior cards mean the whole set revolves around weapons for the two classes. Accounting for all 14 cards each class gets, they both have 9 that have nothing to do with weapons, which would almost constitute an entire set of class cards in a normal expansion.
Good read as always. I think Instructor Fireheart is also a living re-imagining of the WoW boss Instructor Chillheart.
Which armour are you referring to? Her scarlet crusade clothes in Infiltrator Lilian, or her more usual, darker armour in the Forsaken Lilian token and the old Lilian Voss card? Or both?
If we do get her as a hero, I'd expect to see her in her standard forsaken appearance. I wouldn't put it past Team 5 to use a living version of her, but it would be a misuse of the character that is synonymous with the personal and emotional struggles of being brought back into undeath.
Regarding the long anticipated rogue hero, my current best guess at the Scholomance solo content is that we will follow Lilian Voss infiltrating the school and revealing its dark secrets, and that there will be a Lilian hero portrait to go along with it like there was for Aranna. My flimsy evidence:
I have no doubt that in 2 months I'll be proven completely wrong, but this narrative makes so much sense to me.
I'm loving the flavour text alongside the artwork, especially on the Spectral Delinquent token. She got killed by the mimic (very minor callback to Toothy Chest and the mimic in the top-right corner of the K&C game board), but took the loot anyway.
Why not just play both? They don't have to be competing for the same deck slots, and if you want +2 attack on weapons you'd surely want to make that more reliable by having 4 cards in the deck instead of 2.
As someone who always passes on learning Python properly because C serves my purposes better, I confess I wore a smug smile when I read that one.
I expect Mana Reservoir will actually be one of the better picks. It hasn't been used so far because decks haven't been very interested in spell damage, so they only use it when the spell damage minions have board presence of their own. But if spell damage itself is the most important part, then a low cost high health option is perfect.
I think they're all meant to reduce the cost of the card type they discover, it just happened that the druid one was spells.
I'm opening them first, but I don't think it makes much difference because apparently they don't have pity timers. I'm only doing it first because I always craft the rogue legendaries golden before I open packs to avoid opening non-golden copies, and there's a tiny chance I could save the dust if I get one of them in the golden packs first.
I suppose if you are most of the way through the commons and you still haven't opened any of a specific card you want golden then you could improve your odds that way, but since you don't know which order you'll find cards in this is not useful at a statistical level: if you happened to find them first you would have missed the opportunity, so it all averages out.
Equality + 3/2 + Whirlwind + an awkward combination that forces you to destroy your own board where Equality doesn't, and/or leaves a Whirlwind up for your opponent to choose to activate when it suits them = 3 mana.
Given how little he costs, I'm willing to bet that deathrattle is more of a liability than it looks. It is too slow to be used to kill off the opponent's minions the turn you play him, so that still needs 2 cards, and even if you do that by giving him rush, you're then killing off any minions you had on your side, saving your opponent the hassle of doing it themselves.
You will usually be ahead on the board too after you clear the board with, say, Consecration, so you don't want the deathrattle to go off anymore most of the time.
So all in all, I have to think that the two effects looks super synergistic, but the way it is put together means they probably don't mix well most of the time.
I'm glad they were willing to say something on this. I appreciate it only leaves you with +1 card in hand, but at the same time shaman is a jack-of-all-trades class so it cannot be difficult to find an effects for legendaries that don't arguably violate class weaknesses.
To me it is less about the card itself and more about trusting the class identities to hold, because they ensure each class has weaknesses that you can target if you want to beat them. As soon as those weaknesses are filled in or made so minor as to not matter, you get games where one player feels like there was nothing they could do to win even if they tweak their deck to improve their odds, and that really sucks.