I particularly like it for looking back and putting decks from the game's history into perspective. E.g. old pirate warrior is parked much closer to the aggro corner than equivalent standard decks today, while in the days of classic there simply weren't the tools to stray very far from the mid-range centre (not that we knew the triangle extended any further at the time!).
"Ah, Thief Rogue. ... I decided to call it a Combo Deck rather than Aggro or Control, although the deck's play falls heavily into the mid-range category."
This is why I like to view archetypes as more of a tetrahedron than a triangle. Aggro, control, combo and value sit at the 4 corners and mid-range sits in the middle of them all. Really each individual deck sits somewhere in the middle, but closer to one corner than the others, and sometimes along an edge (e.g. a hypothetical combo-control hybrid that replaces a lot of card draw for removal, hoping to get the combo pieces by living long enough to draw it naturally rather than by power-drawing).
Anyway, in my mind Thief Rogue sits towards the value corner, but the nature of thief cards and the class in general mean it retains some amount of tempo (which I guess is mid-range-y aggro?). Plus the right RNG can shift a particular game towards control or combo... This is why I have always loved Thief Rogue, not only does it let you play with any and all cards, but you get to play all primary archetypes too!
Given the constraints of the article however, I agree with putting a value deck down as 'combo' (even without the multiplying Tess combos) since they both prey on control but struggle against aggro.
Regarding deathrattle rogue support, Sylvanas and N'Zoth should be enough to push that again (perhaps not into the top tiers but enough to have some success). Anka, the Buried with Sylvanas and Necrium Vial looks juicy enough to me.
Vol'jin is one of those cards that is quite playable, but never made it into meta decks so is written off too easily. In the early days when I still liked playing priest, Vol'jin + Shadowform was one of my favourite little combos.
An important point in this case is that there will be a sizable number of players who don't own Renounce Darkness but would now get a chance to mess around with it without having to craft the card. To the meme-playing, F2P casuals Renounce Darkness is potentially more interesting than the cards which might affect the meta.
Not at all the main point here, but I do want to point out that the thematic reason for Frightened Flunky to have taunt is that it is based on Shaggy from Scooby-do, and hence is the bait. I.e. he is the minion put down specifically to draw the attention of enemies. It may not fit the word 'taunt' but it certainly fits the mechanic.
As for elusive, I completely agree that it is something they should just pick a word for it and open up design space with, regardless of whether it doesn't always fit thematically. If nothing else, elusive minions having a meaningful presence might make poisonous a keyword people actually use due to a lack of alternative hard removal options.
Yes you need to draw them but they are cheap enough that if you do they effectively are start of game changes. Any true start of game change would need to give a weak hero power (i.e. nothing stronger than the basic ones) or we'll be back in the Genn/Baku problem.
As soon as Vargoth was printed and began being used in Big Priest I knew that even if Barnes would be nerfed or even straight up deleted from the game that Vargoth would be an instant (and in most cases superior) over Barnes as the hard mulligan 4 drop. While it is true that Barnes created early game high rolls Vargoth is infinitely times better than Barnes in the late game against control decks.
Which would you rather not have a Big Priest player top deck against you in the late game, Barnes or Mass Ressurection with Vargoth in the pool? Did I mention Shadow Visions? How about a single Mind Blast on a board of 4-7 Vargoths?
It doesn't matter how Barnes is changed when Vargoth solidifies the major anti-control playstyle that came about with the intense value, sustain, and high swing turns after the minion was printed.
The difference I find with Vargoth is that if they play him early on I can just ignore him for a couple of turns, and only bother to kill him off when turn 6 is coming. As a result I have more time and actually do OK with midrange decks if they draw Vargoth early instead of Barnes.
None of that helps slower control decks, against which Vargoth is the stronger of the two, but I don't think the aim of the nerf is to significantly improve that match-up. Similar to how any number of combo/jade/pogo/etc. decks have crazy high win rates against control, the issue is that at a fundamental level control decks give the opponent the time to do whatever unfair thing they like. They rely on faster decks pushing the bad match-ups out of the meta.
Now I hate Big Priest as much as anyone (in fact I generally dislike mana cheating as a whole), but my real issue with it has been its prevalence rather than how one sided it is against slow decks. IF (and it is very much an if at the moment) the Barnes nerf lowers the win rate enough that a good portion of the Big Priest players stop playing it, then that is a win for control as much as anyone else, regardless of how bad the match-up still is.
Do I expect the nerf to be enough to eradicate Big Priest? Not at all, but if those who are left are only doing so because they truly enjoy the deck even at the cost of having a low win rate, then I'm OK with that. If instead the nerf does nothing and they still plague the meta, then by all means keep complaining about them.
I'm guessing the logic is that Barnes on 5 means the next turn requires a choice between Eternal Servitude and Shadow Essence, delaying the one of those an additional turn too rather than having a devastating 4-5-6.
As with most nerfs to polarising decks (old quest rogue I'm looking at you), it won't make much difference to the match-ups that it has a crazy win rate against, but it might be enough to decrease the win rate sufficiently to also decrease the play rate. A more fundamental change than a mana increase may have been better, but I'm not sure how much that would really help if you are playing a slow deck anyway.
Not all quests are created equal: Total Dominance and Challenge a Friend (and a few others) are generally better than the 50/60 gold quests. What is more important is that none of them take very much effort.
An alternative perspective is that a world where they can be re-rolled (i.e. our world) inherently carries a sense that not all quests are as good to get as each other. Otherwise the re-roll function would never be used.
Broadly speaking, having more legendaries be centrepieces of decks leads to a wider range of distinct decks available. This is not guaranteed as epics, rares or even commons can be centrepieces too, but it tends to be the case. Viewed from the diversity perspective this is surely a good thing. Besides, as you have already said some neutrals still do fill the versatile role.
As for rarity creep itself, we have to consider context at the time each card is printed. Take Maexxna, at the time poisonous (which wasn't even a keyword for another 2.67 years) was limited to small minions and played a kamikaze-like role where you could take down 1 minion of any size, but in practice only 1. So when Maexxna arrived, the idea of having a high health poisonous minion that could easily take down a big minion and survive to kill another was new enough to warrant the rarity.
Fast forward to SoU and poisonous has had rush, divine shield, taunt, magnetic and been a buff multiple times. So simply having a high health poisonous minion no longer feels legendary and it honestly is a common rarity effect in the current state of HS.
By the way, this sort of thing happens in wider society too. Nobody is going to remember you for thinking women should have the right to vote nowadays, but a century ago it was new and special hence the suffragette and suffragist movements are remembered as important parts of history. The normalisation of ideas in society makes them much more common, just as the normalisation of effects in HS leads to rarity creep.
Given the quests apparently require playing and winning "the Tavern Brawl" I wouldn't expect to see them at least until next Wednesday. It would be a bit of a cruel move to force people into a brawl that requires a gold investment.
You always write code to do a job, and aim to make it do that job as simply as possible (this is not quite true if you are really concerned about making code super fast, which is most obvious with parallel code which uses multiple CPUs (sometimes thousands or even more) to work on the same job, but that's a concern far beyond implementing battlecries in HS). Ultimately it is the end result (i.e. functionality) that matters, and that sets a lower bound on how simple the code can be.
I work in a physics department and spent 3.5 years working on code to simulate polymers and swimming bacteria (and other small things in liquids). By the end the code was several thousand lines long spread across 8 files, despite me working hard to make it as simple and efficient as possible. To most people it is extremely complicated, but if it was much simpler it wouldn't do its job properly and would be worthless.
Bugs, bugs, bugs. The bane of my life.
To a programmer bugs are just a fact of life. Sadly simpler code isn't necessarily less likely to have bugs, but it is easier to find bugs in simple code. Bugs are usually typos or (perhaps oddly) missing code. E.g. suppose the devs DID want Mogu Cultist to work with permanents, but they didn't include any lines to account for this. Then the interaction would be bugged, but the only fix is to add more code, thereby making it more complex, but less buggy.
What often happens when you add more features to the code, such as every expansion in HS, is the new code interacts with existing code and that is fine because it was written knowing what it will interact with (hopefully!). The bugs usually arise in the old code which hasn't been fully updated to work with the new stuff. This happens all the time and is VERY easy to miss! HS has thousands of cards to keep up to date and many of the interactions are so obscure it is almost unthinkable that they would all be noticed. Even worse, you often have bugs starting somewhere and manifesting as apparent errors somewhere else (I suspect a lot of HS bugs actually had nothing to do with the cards involved but were caused by an error buried somewhere else altogether).
With my own programming, every update/upgrade I made I expected to introduce a bug somewhere and have to spend longer finding and fixing the bug(s) than it took to update the code in the first place. This is completely normal.
There is an amusing side to all this though: it is up to whoever writes the code to decide whether something is a 'bug' (i.e. unwanted) or a 'feature'. Sometimes unexpected behaviour can be good and be kept (I believe that is how Cloak of Invisibility came about), or simply be harmless enough (and difficult enough to find) that it is OK to leave it in as a 'feature'. As long as the code does what it's author says it does, it doesn't matter what it was meant to do originally.
Other Mogu Cultist decks
Thanks for pointing these out. I had thought about the Elise+Floop approach, but was unconvinced about how likely it would be to keep the hand empty enough to fit the 7 Cultists in it (given you are duplicating anything else there too).
I hadn't thought of Glinda though. It seems more likely to work without hoping to get it to 0 mana with the quest HP to me, but I'll try it out for sure. Perhaps try to get a Finicky Cloakfield in Wild?
I should say, simple code is only as good as what it does, i.e. it is best to be simple but that comes after functionality. No doubt many of the bug fixes over the years have actually been making relatively simple bits of code a little bit more complicated.
In the case of the Mogu Cultist, we don't yet know what functionality they chose when writing the code (there is no explicit mention of 7 minions), so it could yet go either way. And honestly I want it to work with dormant minions because I have been struggling to come up with many ways to use the card outside of rogue.
!! Warning: I found the question interesting enough to actually imagine coding these minions, and hence my main arguments revolve around speculative computer code. Hopefully you find it a bit enlightening, and I'll gladly answer any questions about it !!
Firstly, good job on compiling all the evidence: that makes these discussions so much better thought through. In light of it all I now have to agree it is likely dormant 'minions'/permanents are not actually coded as minions. Although they still share enough traits that we cannot rule it out.
Thoughts on Reliquary Seeker
Anyway, putting my programmer's hat on I went back and thought about how the code would likely be written for Reliquary Seeker to buff itself with permanents on the board. It is true that it is quicker and easier to check if there are any spaces left on the board than it is to check all of the other 6 spaces for minions. Since the card was printed before permanents needed to be considered, and has never seen nearly enough play to warrant a slight nerf by going back and changing it to not count permanents, it is plausible that is how the devs coded the card. If so, it behaves weirdly because it doesn't actually look at your board at all.
To help show the differences in code simplicity, here's what I would write the battlecry as (in C syntax, which HS very probably isn't written in but most languages work essentially the same for this stuff):
Checking for empty spaces:
if(space 7 != empty){activate battlecry;}
Note: "!=" means "not equal to", and I am assuming the minions always fill the spaces 1-7 from 1 upwards so that space 7 is only filled if there are 7 minions. The order of them is probably 1=far left, 2=second from left etc., which is only a guess but because of cards like Betrayal that care about neighbours it is helpful to keep the numbers connected (so 3 minions would occupy spaces 1, 2 and 3 rather than 2, 5 and 7 say).
Checking all spaces, reducing the number of required minions if permanents are present:
required count = 7; //note not 6 as you might as well include the seeker in this to make the code more general
count = 0;
for(i=1; i<=7; i++) // this just looks at all 7 board spaces 1 by 1.
{if(space i == occupied by a normal minion){count++;}
else if(space i == occupied by a permanent){required count--;}
else{break;} }
if(count == required count){activate battlecry;}
Of course there are other routes you could take, but it makes a point: the previous version asks 1 question, while this version has a loop, declares 2 more variables and asks way more questions. Both bits of code will do exactly the same thing.
Anyway, the purpose here is simply to say Reliquary Seeker's strange behaviour can be rationalised by the devs trying to avoid unnecessarily complicated 'spaghetti code'. Note this is a peculiarity that only occurs because is specifically requires a full board (including itself). Cards like Frostwolf Warlord have no choice but to count minions.
[edit]: I've just seen your next comment, which is pretty much the same I said above.
I then considered what we really want to find out: how would Mogu Cultist work? The first question is how is it different from the Seeker? Both need a full board, but the Cultist asks specifically for Cultists. It therefore NEEDS to check the other 6 spaces, and cannot do the whole job with a single check like the Seeker. The simplest version of the code I can think of is:
for(i=1; i<=7; i++)
{if(space i != Mogu Cultist) {battlecry = fail; break;}}
if(battlecry != fail){activate battlecry;}
which scans through the board spaces until one is not a Mogu Cultist. If it makes it to the end, the battlecry triggers.
As above, the code itself is speculative and it is possible the devs chose to add in tests for permanents. I personally doubt it but I'd love to find out on Tuesday!
Given how Reliquary Seeker works, I think we have to conclude dormant minions do count as 'normal' minions. That way they simply contribute to the 6 other minions. Of course they would have special rules to make sure they interact with absolutely nothing, but we already have partial non-interacting minion types with stealth and immune (which your opponent cannot target) so that is not a silly idea.
There's further evidence they count as actual minions from them having the minion card type in game (i.e. with an oval image when hovered over), and that they can be moved around the board in exactly the same way as ordinary minions.
From a programmer's perspective though, it would be silly to create an entire new card type for what was initially just 2 cards*, especially when a fairly simple adaptation to the existing tools (i.e. minions) does the job.
* I think there were some dormant minions in the Karazhan adventure so Sherazin, Seed and Nether Portal may not have been the first, but I'd have to play back through the adventure to check.
EVIL Miscreant is probably still the strongest single lackey generator and rogue... well we already know rogue doesn't need more lackeys to make powerful deck around them.
As for priest, it is possible priest and warrior get their lackey synergy cards next expansion. I also wouldn't be surprised if they aren't ever going to be pushed to use lackeys much. Unlike rogue, shaman and warlock those two have never done much with tiny minions.
The plus side for rogue and priest is that by not getting a lackey card they got something else, and had more support for other archetypes.
Sadly I doubt it will work and expect "board is full of Mogu Cultists" to translate into "control 7 Mogu Cultists" in the code. Personally I don't see the distinction between a space being occupied by a dormant minion and an active one.
Nevertheless, it is good to see someone else taking a story-driven approach to deck guides. In this case it gives you a great out if it doesn't work, where you could write the alternate ending: Malfurion 'activates' the Mogu Cultist and nothing happens....
I've learned from Hero cards and Genn & Baku to be wary of anything that majorly upgrades hero powers (keep in mind no one had any issues with them until we actually got to play with them). Upgraded HPs can be well designed and make the game a lot more interesting, but they are easy to break and when there's 9 more being added it is not unlikely we'll all be hating at least one of them in a couple of weeks.
Still, for now the approach is at least interesting and appears to address a couple of the issues from previous HP upgrades (namely starting with them on turn 1 or coming alongside powerful battlecries).
I think people are overestimating how quickly this will be finished. It's 'easy' sure, but you still need to draw the cards that make it easy first, and it won't often be the case you have them all neatly on turns 2,3,4 and 5 (especially as the plan seems to be to play them on curve and none of them draw cards to improve the likelihood).
Realistically then, using the HP on turn 6 is optimistic, so we have to start asking the usual quest question: how problematic is the loss of a card in the opening hand against aggro? The answer here is unclear to me, so if the meta is aggressive enough the quest might still end up sub-optimal.
Having said all that, the fact it presents genuine competition for Spectral Cutlass in burgle decks means it is clearly very powerful in a long enough game. I still think the cutlass is stronger but the freed up deck slots, added reliability, and resistance to weapon removal probably swing it towards the quest.
Feel free!
I particularly like it for looking back and putting decks from the game's history into perspective. E.g. old pirate warrior is parked much closer to the aggro corner than equivalent standard decks today, while in the days of classic there simply weren't the tools to stray very far from the mid-range centre (not that we knew the triangle extended any further at the time!).
"Ah, Thief Rogue. ... I decided to call it a Combo Deck rather than Aggro or Control, although the deck's play falls heavily into the mid-range category."
This is why I like to view archetypes as more of a tetrahedron than a triangle. Aggro, control, combo and value sit at the 4 corners and mid-range sits in the middle of them all. Really each individual deck sits somewhere in the middle, but closer to one corner than the others, and sometimes along an edge (e.g. a hypothetical combo-control hybrid that replaces a lot of card draw for removal, hoping to get the combo pieces by living long enough to draw it naturally rather than by power-drawing).
Anyway, in my mind Thief Rogue sits towards the value corner, but the nature of thief cards and the class in general mean it retains some amount of tempo (which I guess is mid-range-y aggro?). Plus the right RNG can shift a particular game towards control or combo... This is why I have always loved Thief Rogue, not only does it let you play with any and all cards, but you get to play all primary archetypes too!
Given the constraints of the article however, I agree with putting a value deck down as 'combo' (even without the multiplying Tess combos) since they both prey on control but struggle against aggro.
Regarding deathrattle rogue support, Sylvanas and N'Zoth should be enough to push that again (perhaps not into the top tiers but enough to have some success). Anka, the Buried with Sylvanas and Necrium Vial looks juicy enough to me.
Vol'jin is one of those cards that is quite playable, but never made it into meta decks so is written off too easily. In the early days when I still liked playing priest, Vol'jin + Shadowform was one of my favourite little combos.
An important point in this case is that there will be a sizable number of players who don't own Renounce Darkness but would now get a chance to mess around with it without having to craft the card. To the meme-playing, F2P casuals Renounce Darkness is potentially more interesting than the cards which might affect the meta.
Not at all the main point here, but I do want to point out that the thematic reason for Frightened Flunky to have taunt is that it is based on Shaggy from Scooby-do, and hence is the bait. I.e. he is the minion put down specifically to draw the attention of enemies. It may not fit the word 'taunt' but it certainly fits the mechanic.
As for elusive, I completely agree that it is something they should just pick a word for it and open up design space with, regardless of whether it doesn't always fit thematically. If nothing else, elusive minions having a meaningful presence might make poisonous a keyword people actually use due to a lack of alternative hard removal options.
You mean like Sir Finley Mrrgglton? Or the new quests? Or Dinomancy?
Yes you need to draw them but they are cheap enough that if you do they effectively are start of game changes. Any true start of game change would need to give a weak hero power (i.e. nothing stronger than the basic ones) or we'll be back in the Genn/Baku problem.
The difference I find with Vargoth is that if they play him early on I can just ignore him for a couple of turns, and only bother to kill him off when turn 6 is coming. As a result I have more time and actually do OK with midrange decks if they draw Vargoth early instead of Barnes.
None of that helps slower control decks, against which Vargoth is the stronger of the two, but I don't think the aim of the nerf is to significantly improve that match-up. Similar to how any number of combo/jade/pogo/etc. decks have crazy high win rates against control, the issue is that at a fundamental level control decks give the opponent the time to do whatever unfair thing they like. They rely on faster decks pushing the bad match-ups out of the meta.
Now I hate Big Priest as much as anyone (in fact I generally dislike mana cheating as a whole), but my real issue with it has been its prevalence rather than how one sided it is against slow decks. IF (and it is very much an if at the moment) the Barnes nerf lowers the win rate enough that a good portion of the Big Priest players stop playing it, then that is a win for control as much as anyone else, regardless of how bad the match-up still is.
Do I expect the nerf to be enough to eradicate Big Priest? Not at all, but if those who are left are only doing so because they truly enjoy the deck even at the cost of having a low win rate, then I'm OK with that. If instead the nerf does nothing and they still plague the meta, then by all means keep complaining about them.
I'm guessing the logic is that Barnes on 5 means the next turn requires a choice between Eternal Servitude and Shadow Essence, delaying the one of those an additional turn too rather than having a devastating 4-5-6.
As with most nerfs to polarising decks (old quest rogue I'm looking at you), it won't make much difference to the match-ups that it has a crazy win rate against, but it might be enough to decrease the win rate sufficiently to also decrease the play rate. A more fundamental change than a mana increase may have been better, but I'm not sure how much that would really help if you are playing a slow deck anyway.
Not all quests are created equal: Total Dominance and Challenge a Friend (and a few others) are generally better than the 50/60 gold quests. What is more important is that none of them take very much effort.
An alternative perspective is that a world where they can be re-rolled (i.e. our world) inherently carries a sense that not all quests are as good to get as each other. Otherwise the re-roll function would never be used.
Broadly speaking, having more legendaries be centrepieces of decks leads to a wider range of distinct decks available. This is not guaranteed as epics, rares or even commons can be centrepieces too, but it tends to be the case. Viewed from the diversity perspective this is surely a good thing. Besides, as you have already said some neutrals still do fill the versatile role.
As for rarity creep itself, we have to consider context at the time each card is printed. Take Maexxna, at the time poisonous (which wasn't even a keyword for another 2.67 years) was limited to small minions and played a kamikaze-like role where you could take down 1 minion of any size, but in practice only 1. So when Maexxna arrived, the idea of having a high health poisonous minion that could easily take down a big minion and survive to kill another was new enough to warrant the rarity.
Fast forward to SoU and poisonous has had rush, divine shield, taunt, magnetic and been a buff multiple times. So simply having a high health poisonous minion no longer feels legendary and it honestly is a common rarity effect in the current state of HS.
By the way, this sort of thing happens in wider society too. Nobody is going to remember you for thinking women should have the right to vote nowadays, but a century ago it was new and special hence the suffragette and suffragist movements are remembered as important parts of history. The normalisation of ideas in society makes them much more common, just as the normalisation of effects in HS leads to rarity creep.
Given the quests apparently require playing and winning "the Tavern Brawl" I wouldn't expect to see them at least until next Wednesday. It would be a bit of a cruel move to force people into a brawl that requires a gold investment.
Complex vs simple code
You always write code to do a job, and aim to make it do that job as simply as possible (this is not quite true if you are really concerned about making code super fast, which is most obvious with parallel code which uses multiple CPUs (sometimes thousands or even more) to work on the same job, but that's a concern far beyond implementing battlecries in HS). Ultimately it is the end result (i.e. functionality) that matters, and that sets a lower bound on how simple the code can be.
I work in a physics department and spent 3.5 years working on code to simulate polymers and swimming bacteria (and other small things in liquids). By the end the code was several thousand lines long spread across 8 files, despite me working hard to make it as simple and efficient as possible. To most people it is extremely complicated, but if it was much simpler it wouldn't do its job properly and would be worthless.
Bugs, bugs, bugs. The bane of my life.
To a programmer bugs are just a fact of life. Sadly simpler code isn't necessarily less likely to have bugs, but it is easier to find bugs in simple code. Bugs are usually typos or (perhaps oddly) missing code. E.g. suppose the devs DID want Mogu Cultist to work with permanents, but they didn't include any lines to account for this. Then the interaction would be bugged, but the only fix is to add more code, thereby making it more complex, but less buggy.
What often happens when you add more features to the code, such as every expansion in HS, is the new code interacts with existing code and that is fine because it was written knowing what it will interact with (hopefully!). The bugs usually arise in the old code which hasn't been fully updated to work with the new stuff. This happens all the time and is VERY easy to miss! HS has thousands of cards to keep up to date and many of the interactions are so obscure it is almost unthinkable that they would all be noticed. Even worse, you often have bugs starting somewhere and manifesting as apparent errors somewhere else (I suspect a lot of HS bugs actually had nothing to do with the cards involved but were caused by an error buried somewhere else altogether).
With my own programming, every update/upgrade I made I expected to introduce a bug somewhere and have to spend longer finding and fixing the bug(s) than it took to update the code in the first place. This is completely normal.
There is an amusing side to all this though: it is up to whoever writes the code to decide whether something is a 'bug' (i.e. unwanted) or a 'feature'. Sometimes unexpected behaviour can be good and be kept (I believe that is how Cloak of Invisibility came about), or simply be harmless enough (and difficult enough to find) that it is OK to leave it in as a 'feature'. As long as the code does what it's author says it does, it doesn't matter what it was meant to do originally.
Other Mogu Cultist decks
Thanks for pointing these out. I had thought about the Elise+Floop approach, but was unconvinced about how likely it would be to keep the hand empty enough to fit the 7 Cultists in it (given you are duplicating anything else there too).
I hadn't thought of Glinda though. It seems more likely to work without hoping to get it to 0 mana with the quest HP to me, but I'll try it out for sure. Perhaps try to get a Finicky Cloakfield in Wild?
I should say, simple code is only as good as what it does, i.e. it is best to be simple but that comes after functionality. No doubt many of the bug fixes over the years have actually been making relatively simple bits of code a little bit more complicated.
In the case of the Mogu Cultist, we don't yet know what functionality they chose when writing the code (there is no explicit mention of 7 minions), so it could yet go either way. And honestly I want it to work with dormant minions because I have been struggling to come up with many ways to use the card outside of rogue.
!! Warning: I found the question interesting enough to actually imagine coding these minions, and hence my main arguments revolve around speculative computer code. Hopefully you find it a bit enlightening, and I'll gladly answer any questions about it !!
Firstly, good job on compiling all the evidence: that makes these discussions so much better thought through. In light of it all I now have to agree it is likely dormant 'minions'/permanents are not actually coded as minions. Although they still share enough traits that we cannot rule it out.
Thoughts on Reliquary Seeker
Anyway, putting my programmer's hat on I went back and thought about how the code would likely be written for Reliquary Seeker to buff itself with permanents on the board. It is true that it is quicker and easier to check if there are any spaces left on the board than it is to check all of the other 6 spaces for minions. Since the card was printed before permanents needed to be considered, and has never seen nearly enough play to warrant a slight nerf by going back and changing it to not count permanents, it is plausible that is how the devs coded the card. If so, it behaves weirdly because it doesn't actually look at your board at all.
To help show the differences in code simplicity, here's what I would write the battlecry as (in C syntax, which HS very probably isn't written in but most languages work essentially the same for this stuff):
Checking for empty spaces:
if(space 7 != empty){activate battlecry;}
Note: "!=" means "not equal to", and I am assuming the minions always fill the spaces 1-7 from 1 upwards so that space 7 is only filled if there are 7 minions. The order of them is probably 1=far left, 2=second from left etc., which is only a guess but because of cards like Betrayal that care about neighbours it is helpful to keep the numbers connected (so 3 minions would occupy spaces 1, 2 and 3 rather than 2, 5 and 7 say).
Checking all spaces, reducing the number of required minions if permanents are present:
required count = 7; //note not 6 as you might as well include the seeker in this to make the code more general
count = 0;
for(i=1; i<=7; i++) // this just looks at all 7 board spaces 1 by 1.
{if(space i == occupied by a normal minion){count++;}
else if(space i == occupied by a permanent){required count--;}
else{break;} }
if(count == required count){activate battlecry;}
Of course there are other routes you could take, but it makes a point: the previous version asks 1 question, while this version has a loop, declares 2 more variables and asks way more questions. Both bits of code will do exactly the same thing.
Anyway, the purpose here is simply to say Reliquary Seeker's strange behaviour can be rationalised by the devs trying to avoid unnecessarily complicated 'spaghetti code'. Note this is a peculiarity that only occurs because is specifically requires a full board (including itself). Cards like Frostwolf Warlord have no choice but to count minions.
[edit]: I've just seen your next comment, which is pretty much the same I said above.
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Predictions for how Mogu Cultist will work
I then considered what we really want to find out: how would Mogu Cultist work? The first question is how is it different from the Seeker? Both need a full board, but the Cultist asks specifically for Cultists. It therefore NEEDS to check the other 6 spaces, and cannot do the whole job with a single check like the Seeker. The simplest version of the code I can think of is:
for(i=1; i<=7; i++)
{if(space i != Mogu Cultist) {battlecry = fail; break;}}
if(battlecry != fail){activate battlecry;}
which scans through the board spaces until one is not a Mogu Cultist. If it makes it to the end, the battlecry triggers.
As above, the code itself is speculative and it is possible the devs chose to add in tests for permanents. I personally doubt it but I'd love to find out on Tuesday!
Given how Reliquary Seeker works, I think we have to conclude dormant minions do count as 'normal' minions. That way they simply contribute to the 6 other minions. Of course they would have special rules to make sure they interact with absolutely nothing, but we already have partial non-interacting minion types with stealth and immune (which your opponent cannot target) so that is not a silly idea.
There's further evidence they count as actual minions from them having the minion card type in game (i.e. with an oval image when hovered over), and that they can be moved around the board in exactly the same way as ordinary minions.
From a programmer's perspective though, it would be silly to create an entire new card type for what was initially just 2 cards*, especially when a fairly simple adaptation to the existing tools (i.e. minions) does the job.
* I think there were some dormant minions in the Karazhan adventure so Sherazin, Seed and Nether Portal may not have been the first, but I'd have to play back through the adventure to check.
EVIL Miscreant is probably still the strongest single lackey generator and rogue... well we already know rogue doesn't need more lackeys to make powerful deck around them.
As for priest, it is possible priest and warrior get their lackey synergy cards next expansion. I also wouldn't be surprised if they aren't ever going to be pushed to use lackeys much. Unlike rogue, shaman and warlock those two have never done much with tiny minions.
The plus side for rogue and priest is that by not getting a lackey card they got something else, and had more support for other archetypes.
Sadly I doubt it will work and expect "board is full of Mogu Cultists" to translate into "control 7 Mogu Cultists" in the code. Personally I don't see the distinction between a space being occupied by a dormant minion and an active one.
Nevertheless, it is good to see someone else taking a story-driven approach to deck guides. In this case it gives you a great out if it doesn't work, where you could write the alternate ending: Malfurion 'activates' the Mogu Cultist and nothing happens....
I've learned from Hero cards and Genn & Baku to be wary of anything that majorly upgrades hero powers (keep in mind no one had any issues with them until we actually got to play with them). Upgraded HPs can be well designed and make the game a lot more interesting, but they are easy to break and when there's 9 more being added it is not unlikely we'll all be hating at least one of them in a couple of weeks.
Still, for now the approach is at least interesting and appears to address a couple of the issues from previous HP upgrades (namely starting with them on turn 1 or coming alongside powerful battlecries).
I think people are overestimating how quickly this will be finished. It's 'easy' sure, but you still need to draw the cards that make it easy first, and it won't often be the case you have them all neatly on turns 2,3,4 and 5 (especially as the plan seems to be to play them on curve and none of them draw cards to improve the likelihood).
Realistically then, using the HP on turn 6 is optimistic, so we have to start asking the usual quest question: how problematic is the loss of a card in the opening hand against aggro? The answer here is unclear to me, so if the meta is aggressive enough the quest might still end up sub-optimal.
Having said all that, the fact it presents genuine competition for Spectral Cutlass in burgle decks means it is clearly very powerful in a long enough game. I still think the cutlass is stronger but the freed up deck slots, added reliability, and resistance to weapon removal probably swing it towards the quest.