It has a murloc's chance in hell that it'll survive the turn its played, no matter how big it is. In most cases, the best part of the card would be the three taunts it spawns along with itself, which at very least means youre not skipping your turn without affecting board. Laughably, this card can't even inherit stats from usually big stated cards in shaman like Snowfall Guardian, because it takes the original stats rather than whats on board.
Im at a loss as to what kind of shaman would play this card to be honest. Removal has only gotten more efficient as hearthstone ages, so much so that even if this was a 10/10 on turn 7 there's still a decent chance that it either gets frozen or plain destroyed, long before it ever snowballs you to victory.
Its only hope is that the meta switches to such a state where decks aren't equipped to deal with massive stat monsters. In which case this has a semblance of a chance to be good. But so much has to be contrived before this gets a second look at all.
Glaiveshark - Decent card that would see more play should the meta switch to aggro. Dhunter lost a key AoE card in Immolation Aura (assuming it isn't part of the core set), so if they are in need of clears this one would be an option. A rather expensive option though.
Glugg the Gulper - Im not too big a fan of this card. Its just a massive stat minion that mercifully spawns three taunts, easily the best feature of the card itself. In most cases, if your opponent is unable to deal with glugg himself, then they are practically dead, but removal being what it is in hearthstone today, Im not holding my breath.
At least he'll get a little bigger if there's a board prior to playing him.
Its a card you put into combo decks. In nearly every other deck, its just too slow as card draw.
Right out of the bat, you can easily slot this to tutor out Lady S'theno and Wayward Sage. And if you can play the sage immediately, then you've just guaranteed a discount on lady stheno which is quite scary.
Perhaps in quest dhunter, you can tutor out spell damage minions or just plain Persistent Peddler to finish off the quest even faster. The deck might play this just to draw 2, since it losts a good deal of its draw options.
Its just being upended by Venomous Scorpid in many ways, including cost, restrictions, and the fact that scorpid will kill anything barring divine shield while this card and its student can't.
It does has its own niche, in that the student can be bounced for multiple castings of the same spell, so essentially if you get Sinister Strike, you can conceivably just deal 3 damage each time the card goes back to your hand. The fact that the student will likely cost 1 makes that all the more easier.
The other would be the fact that this card is a naga. And the student being a naga as well, means there's plenty of fuel for a naga deck.
Outside of that, there's just very little reason not to just play the better card in scorpid.
As long as combo dhunter can still exist this card will see play. At the moment, the only cards that come to mind is Lady S'theno and Wayward Sage, or you can play this in quest dhunter just to get Persistent Peddler to finish up quest more quickly.
Perhaps in big dhunter, you can reliably get vanndar out, but it would force you to basically skip two turns playing this and vanndar on turns 4 and 5. Its weak, but still an option worth considering.
Probably more for decks that needs lots of naga synergy, or for pure minion decks. Because we're looking at a card that has a total cost of 5 casting a spell that cost 3 or less. Even a mere Venomous Scorpid costs 3 mana and allows for a wider range of spells to discover, on top of giving you another spell to trigger the requirements for other naga battlecries like Queen Azshara.
In some decks like a hypothetical naga hunter, which requires more nagas to trigger other stuff, this card may fill that part nicely. Most hunter spells tend to do damage anyway, so this card doesn't necessarily detract from the face strat.
The smallest other niche it has is bounce synergy. If you get a good spell on the 1/1, you can just bounce it back to hand and cast it over and over. Imagine getting Heavy Plate or Sinister Strike on it and repeatedly casting it. Of course there's going to be consistency issues, but the option is there, and depending on the meta might actually be plausible as a side strat.
Good on curve if you can trigger it. Not the end of the world if you cant.
Face hunter would probably play it, mostly because they've lost most of their early game to rotation, and this card is a decent turn 3 even without triggering the buff.
All that needs to happen now is an early game naga. And a card like this is practically teasing one yet to be revealed. There's currently, in neutral, only two 1 drops and one 2 drop revealed. Im somewhat certain that there would at least be a 1 mana 1/3 naga at the end, or some 2 mana naga.
Who knows, maybe we'll get a midrange naga hunter out of all this at the end.
A decent card on its own, comparable to Landscaping. The buff is somewhat significant on curve, assuming you can trigger it.
Its likely to only exist in face hunter, because in nearly every other archetype hunter would prefer to do something else than curving out, and face hunter would likely go through a massive revamp, having lost nearly all its good cards. Unless of course we see the return of midrange hunter, that primarily play nagas, this card would slot in there too.
The only thing missing now is an early naga. There might be one at the end, because so far we've seen few 1 and 2 drops, and theres usually at least two of them. At very least Im expecting a cheap naga somewhere, maybe a 2 mana 2/3 naga with no other description, or a 1 mana 1/3 naga
If Im not mistaken they also ported the treasures you get into duels as well, so all the sr adventurers would be up for selection, which would be interesting because every one of them are fairly broken. Perhaps team5 have made some balancing, because otherwise those treasures would just win the entire game on their own.
Nice to know that at least with these guys I dont have to bother unlocking their stuff. Being unable to select the class I want in duels gets annoying when all I wanted to do was to unlock the treasures and hp.
We've seen this card before. Its called Unsleeping Soul, and that card came out in an expansion focusing on silence priest. And that card still saw a total of zero plays.
The sunken variant is good. But the base variant is so unbelievably slow that I cant see it happening. The only way it'll even have a shot at all is that team5 have printed some crazy 3 cost 7/7 minion that can't attack. But I doubt it.
Outside of a hypothetical silence priest, I expect this card to simply not exist anywhere else.
This card is practically doing what paladin wants: sticky minions, mechs, and putting more mechs down your deck for radar detector to bring up.
There's not much else to say except that this card will see play, and its sunken variant will likely be one of the most common sunken card to be seen in the next meta. Assuming mech pally is even a thing.
Honestly, if Radar Detector didn't exist, I'd only be lukewarm about a card like this. Thankfully it does exist.
This card is just insane. For a murloc deck anyway. The fact that this base card has good vanilla stats and the effect is a battlecry means you can play this on 3, curve into Bloodscent Vilefin on 4, and then play a free 3/4 kaleseth on turn 5 along with another murloc.
So far the legendary murlock deck is coming round good. All it needs now is decent card draw and a good win con outside of tempo. Then we've got a real winner.
The best sunken card so far. Only Sunken Gardens can top it, and even then Im still all hyped for murlocs to make it.
A good card, with an excellent pay off. Basically you can play this and get the sunken scroll with Scalding Geyser easily and reload the next turn. A good all round card that offers something decent even in its base form.
Fact is that the base and sunken card is cheap so its not even that difficult to accomplish. I can see plenty of shaman decks playing with this, especially if there are better fire spells down the line.
I really want to like this card. But I have to admit that its not very good. The stats are subpar, and the sunken beast stats is also subpar. The only saving grace is that the sunken beast will summon any beast, not limited by anything, which means you can literally get King Krush out on turn 6 at the earliest.
But of course...this card being a beast itself means you're likely to 50-50 yourself into summoning the same 4 mana 3/3 from your deck as well. So rather than king krush it is entirely possible that both the setup and payoff suck, which makes this card unplayable. Playing this card also means you're not playing vanndar, the best card of the archetype we have now. So Im not optimistic to say the least.
The one niche it has is that its a deathrattle, which means your Stormpike Battle Ram does cheapen it and the sunken beast. And you can put a bunch of Sunken Sabers down, use finley and use them all immediately the next turn.
Edit: Thinking about this for some time. You can actually chain summon both the second copy and sunken copy all in the same turn. So there's some hope for this card after all. Deal somewhere around 6-9 damage and summon a big boy out. Why not? Even if you have to give vanndar up for it. Perhaps Im underestimating this card.
The first half is practically just a vanilla 3/2 weapon for 3, which does nothing whatsoever special. The 2nd part does an 2 damage AoE to enemy minions, assuming you're able to dredge it up. The problem is twofold;
- The sunken weapon is unavailable until you pop this weapon. Which may or may not be possible on the following turn after this is equipped
- You have to dredge that sunken weapon and then pay 3 mana for it.
So the conditions of getting the sunken weapon is hard enough. The payoff is ludicrously weak even when it is dredged up. We're talking about a turn 5 play, with 2 mana left over to build up your own board.
The only way this card sees play is that theres literally no other weapon left and this card is the cheapest of the bunch. As Whetstone Hatchet has proven; even a useless but cheap weapon is better than no weapon at all, especially in quest pirate.
I think its more about the emotions rather than any real concrete reason. Dean was being diplomatic by pointing out some facts, rather than address the emotions people tend to feel about the subject. Hence why he thought it was an 'unpopular' opinion.
If the idea is that theorycrafting streams ruins hype and solves the meta for a certain group of people, then surely the best solution for them is to simply not watch it.
Im actually pleasantly surprised that elden ring took off so well. Seems like everyone is playing it, as opposed to just within the sphere of fromsoft's usual audience. Who'd ever guess that games that's not insultingly casual, handholding, and feature a story where people are supposed to work a little more for, be so acclaimed. Oh, and fromsoftware actually balance their games so their players have more fun, not on 'time savers'.
I look forward to the eventual ubisoft overreaction - especially if elden ring becomes a financial success beyond their expectations.
Back to hearthstone:
Im open to another doom in the tomb event, and in my opinion that's much better than implementing midsets to freshen the meta up. For one thing, at least it'll reduce the cost of the game, both long and short term. And players like me get to play old cards without having to go through the cess pit that is wild.
As for a forth expansion. Im very much opposed to it. Three per year is fine. The midset complicated things a little, but I think we can do away with it, and bring in events that'll shake up the meta for a short period of time. Having 4 expansions spaced between three months may lead to fatigue, and team5 have to contrive more descriptions per year to keep the expansions from looking too samey.
I think we can all agree that stormwind was an anomaly, a botch to put it mildly. Team5 wanted the questlines to shine so they designed each and every quest in stormwind to feature a win condition that ultimately took it too far. From my understanding, it went way past what they originally intended, and none of us predicted how powerful and impactful the questlines ultimately became. It took 3 nerfs within a month, that's unprecedented.
Far as Sunken City's own cards are concerned, I think there's enough stuff so far to keep me interested in the expansion: Lady S'theno, nellie, Emergency Maneuvers, murlock deck, Queen Azshara. If the questlines starts running rampant (which Im not certain that they will, having lost a chuck of their good cards) I'd imagine team5 nerfing them down again.
Also, I'd point out again that team5 have this habit of leaving the best cards for last. We didn't even see galakrond shaman until the end of the reveal, and again none of us have predicted that it'll take over the entire meta for the 1 week before it got nerfed.
On the subject of card redundancy, I think its pretty much clear that that has been happening throughout hearthstone's history. Only under very specific circumstances does previous expansion cards matter more than the current one, like the ungoro-kobolds vs witchwood-rastakhans. Otherwise, the result has been fairly consistent - As the years move forward, previous expansions loses relevance. How many barrens cards are still being played today?
Its not specifically in hearthstone too. I still have old Pokemon tcg cards that are completely redundant today (My old machamp used to do 60 damage and at that time it was insane. Now even an unevolved pokemon can do it). But in its lifetime I got some worth out of my money. I dont think its fair to say money has been wasted if you have had a good deal of time playing it.
I think the fairer assessment is actually that this expansion may follow barrens rather than rastakhan's. RR had a lot more problems because it was the last entry of the year and is generally one of the weakest expansions because it was followed up a tough act, being designed to be weak as a counter to the more powerful ungoro-kobolds expansions.
As it stands, you might be right that the power level of Sunken city might will not last past its expansion cycle, but isn't that kinda the point? Team5 specifically wanted to design expansions to shine in their cycle, because that's how they get players to buy more packs and generally spend money in the game. If I get to play dredge throughout the next meta because the power level is weaker, and then subsequently in the next expansion dredge gets completely forgotten, is that really so much of a big issue?
As for your assessment of the current crop of mechanics;
- Dredge doesn't draw you a card but allow you to choose what you get next turn based on the bottom three cards of your deck. That's significant. Your assessment that it doesn't revolutionize your draws because you only put good cards in your deck is a rather moot point because even Kazakusan drawn on turn 2 can be significantly worse than any vanilla 2 mana 2/3 depending on matchups. If I could play a card that allows me to choose from three cards what to topdeck, that's not an insignificant resource to have.
The only thing now is to assess the dredge cards themselves. And we've got a few good ones so far. Aquatic Form, Scalding Geyser, Bloodscent Vilefin are all good on their own. You dont need to wait for the sunken cards before playing these things, you can just play it and prepare accordingly for the next turn when you draw the dredged card.
As for the sunken cards themselves. Well, Ive seen some good ones like azsharan gardens, scavenger and possibly vessel. At least they're nowhere near as random as the prime cards was in AoO. Whether they will be worth the trouble keeping a dredge card in hand, that'll depend on what payoff we're looking at.
- I would agree with your assessment for the naga cards. But in my opinion, it all depends on payoff. Queen Azshara offers a payoff good enough that I'll climb some mountains to get the reward it offers. Cards like Coilskar Commander, maybe not so much. There's not many naga cards that feature these conditions though, and if every one of them dont see any play, that's not a mark against the entire expansion.
- Colossal minions are probably the one thing Im sure will last over this expansion. Im not sure what you mean by bombast vs good/interesting. Crabatoa is a good minion, its not bombastic or interesting, but its good. Nellie, the Great Thresher is interesting, is likely good, and is 'bombastic'. They have high costs because they tend to do very powerful things, not because its to make the cards look better.
And also, let's not forget that team5 have a tendency to save the best cards for last. So chances are good our assessment of the the sunken city expansion is premature. I'd see the entire set and the core set first before forming opinions of my own.
Its probably not very good.
It has a murloc's chance in hell that it'll survive the turn its played, no matter how big it is. In most cases, the best part of the card would be the three taunts it spawns along with itself, which at very least means youre not skipping your turn without affecting board. Laughably, this card can't even inherit stats from usually big stated cards in shaman like Snowfall Guardian, because it takes the original stats rather than whats on board.
Im at a loss as to what kind of shaman would play this card to be honest. Removal has only gotten more efficient as hearthstone ages, so much so that even if this was a 10/10 on turn 7 there's still a decent chance that it either gets frozen or plain destroyed, long before it ever snowballs you to victory.
Its only hope is that the meta switches to such a state where decks aren't equipped to deal with massive stat monsters. In which case this has a semblance of a chance to be good. But so much has to be contrived before this gets a second look at all.
Glaiveshark - Decent card that would see more play should the meta switch to aggro. Dhunter lost a key AoE card in Immolation Aura (assuming it isn't part of the core set), so if they are in need of clears this one would be an option. A rather expensive option though.
Glugg the Gulper - Im not too big a fan of this card. Its just a massive stat minion that mercifully spawns three taunts, easily the best feature of the card itself. In most cases, if your opponent is unable to deal with glugg himself, then they are practically dead, but removal being what it is in hearthstone today, Im not holding my breath.
At least he'll get a little bigger if there's a board prior to playing him.
Its a card you put into combo decks. In nearly every other deck, its just too slow as card draw.
Right out of the bat, you can easily slot this to tutor out Lady S'theno and Wayward Sage. And if you can play the sage immediately, then you've just guaranteed a discount on lady stheno which is quite scary.
Perhaps in quest dhunter, you can tutor out spell damage minions or just plain Persistent Peddler to finish off the quest even faster. The deck might play this just to draw 2, since it losts a good deal of its draw options.
Its just being upended by Venomous Scorpid in many ways, including cost, restrictions, and the fact that scorpid will kill anything barring divine shield while this card and its student can't.
It does has its own niche, in that the student can be bounced for multiple castings of the same spell, so essentially if you get Sinister Strike, you can conceivably just deal 3 damage each time the card goes back to your hand. The fact that the student will likely cost 1 makes that all the more easier.
The other would be the fact that this card is a naga. And the student being a naga as well, means there's plenty of fuel for a naga deck.
Outside of that, there's just very little reason not to just play the better card in scorpid.
As long as combo dhunter can still exist this card will see play. At the moment, the only cards that come to mind is Lady S'theno and Wayward Sage, or you can play this in quest dhunter just to get Persistent Peddler to finish up quest more quickly.
Perhaps in big dhunter, you can reliably get vanndar out, but it would force you to basically skip two turns playing this and vanndar on turns 4 and 5. Its weak, but still an option worth considering.
Probably more for decks that needs lots of naga synergy, or for pure minion decks. Because we're looking at a card that has a total cost of 5 casting a spell that cost 3 or less. Even a mere Venomous Scorpid costs 3 mana and allows for a wider range of spells to discover, on top of giving you another spell to trigger the requirements for other naga battlecries like Queen Azshara.
In some decks like a hypothetical naga hunter, which requires more nagas to trigger other stuff, this card may fill that part nicely. Most hunter spells tend to do damage anyway, so this card doesn't necessarily detract from the face strat.
The smallest other niche it has is bounce synergy. If you get a good spell on the 1/1, you can just bounce it back to hand and cast it over and over. Imagine getting Heavy Plate or Sinister Strike on it and repeatedly casting it. Of course there's going to be consistency issues, but the option is there, and depending on the meta might actually be plausible as a side strat.
Good on curve if you can trigger it. Not the end of the world if you cant.
Face hunter would probably play it, mostly because they've lost most of their early game to rotation, and this card is a decent turn 3 even without triggering the buff.
All that needs to happen now is an early game naga. And a card like this is practically teasing one yet to be revealed. There's currently, in neutral, only two 1 drops and one 2 drop revealed. Im somewhat certain that there would at least be a 1 mana 1/3 naga at the end, or some 2 mana naga.
Who knows, maybe we'll get a midrange naga hunter out of all this at the end.
A decent card on its own, comparable to Landscaping. The buff is somewhat significant on curve, assuming you can trigger it.
Its likely to only exist in face hunter, because in nearly every other archetype hunter would prefer to do something else than curving out, and face hunter would likely go through a massive revamp, having lost nearly all its good cards. Unless of course we see the return of midrange hunter, that primarily play nagas, this card would slot in there too.
The only thing missing now is an early naga. There might be one at the end, because so far we've seen few 1 and 2 drops, and theres usually at least two of them. At very least Im expecting a cheap naga somewhere, maybe a 2 mana 2/3 naga with no other description, or a 1 mana 1/3 naga
If Im not mistaken they also ported the treasures you get into duels as well, so all the sr adventurers would be up for selection, which would be interesting because every one of them are fairly broken. Perhaps team5 have made some balancing, because otherwise those treasures would just win the entire game on their own.
Nice to know that at least with these guys I dont have to bother unlocking their stuff. Being unable to select the class I want in duels gets annoying when all I wanted to do was to unlock the treasures and hp.
Its been done, so Ive read in reddit at least.
You can complete it anytime you want. The only reward here is a cardback after all.
We've seen this card before. Its called Unsleeping Soul, and that card came out in an expansion focusing on silence priest. And that card still saw a total of zero plays.
The sunken variant is good. But the base variant is so unbelievably slow that I cant see it happening. The only way it'll even have a shot at all is that team5 have printed some crazy 3 cost 7/7 minion that can't attack. But I doubt it.
Outside of a hypothetical silence priest, I expect this card to simply not exist anywhere else.
This card is practically doing what paladin wants: sticky minions, mechs, and putting more mechs down your deck for radar detector to bring up.
There's not much else to say except that this card will see play, and its sunken variant will likely be one of the most common sunken card to be seen in the next meta. Assuming mech pally is even a thing.
Honestly, if Radar Detector didn't exist, I'd only be lukewarm about a card like this. Thankfully it does exist.
This card is just insane. For a murloc deck anyway. The fact that this base card has good vanilla stats and the effect is a battlecry means you can play this on 3, curve into Bloodscent Vilefin on 4, and then play a free 3/4 kaleseth on turn 5 along with another murloc.
So far the legendary murlock deck is coming round good. All it needs now is decent card draw and a good win con outside of tempo. Then we've got a real winner.
The best sunken card so far. Only Sunken Gardens can top it, and even then Im still all hyped for murlocs to make it.
A good card, with an excellent pay off. Basically you can play this and get the sunken scroll with Scalding Geyser easily and reload the next turn. A good all round card that offers something decent even in its base form.
Fact is that the base and sunken card is cheap so its not even that difficult to accomplish. I can see plenty of shaman decks playing with this, especially if there are better fire spells down the line.
I really want to like this card. But I have to admit that its not very good. The stats are subpar, and the sunken beast stats is also subpar. The only saving grace is that the sunken beast will summon any beast, not limited by anything, which means you can literally get King Krush out on turn 6 at the earliest.
But of course...this card being a beast itself means you're likely to 50-50 yourself into summoning the same 4 mana 3/3 from your deck as well. So rather than king krush it is entirely possible that both the setup and payoff suck, which makes this card unplayable. Playing this card also means you're not playing vanndar, the best card of the archetype we have now. So Im not optimistic to say the least.
The one niche it has is that its a deathrattle, which means your Stormpike Battle Ram does cheapen it and the sunken beast. And you can put a bunch of Sunken Sabers down, use finley and use them all immediately the next turn.
Edit: Thinking about this for some time. You can actually chain summon both the second copy and sunken copy all in the same turn. So there's some hope for this card after all. Deal somewhere around 6-9 damage and summon a big boy out. Why not? Even if you have to give vanndar up for it. Perhaps Im underestimating this card.
This weapon is honestly not good.
The first half is practically just a vanilla 3/2 weapon for 3, which does nothing whatsoever special. The 2nd part does an 2 damage AoE to enemy minions, assuming you're able to dredge it up. The problem is twofold;
- The sunken weapon is unavailable until you pop this weapon. Which may or may not be possible on the following turn after this is equipped
- You have to dredge that sunken weapon and then pay 3 mana for it.
So the conditions of getting the sunken weapon is hard enough. The payoff is ludicrously weak even when it is dredged up. We're talking about a turn 5 play, with 2 mana left over to build up your own board.
The only way this card sees play is that theres literally no other weapon left and this card is the cheapest of the bunch. As Whetstone Hatchet has proven; even a useless but cheap weapon is better than no weapon at all, especially in quest pirate.
I think its more about the emotions rather than any real concrete reason. Dean was being diplomatic by pointing out some facts, rather than address the emotions people tend to feel about the subject. Hence why he thought it was an 'unpopular' opinion.
If the idea is that theorycrafting streams ruins hype and solves the meta for a certain group of people, then surely the best solution for them is to simply not watch it.
Im actually pleasantly surprised that elden ring took off so well. Seems like everyone is playing it, as opposed to just within the sphere of fromsoft's usual audience. Who'd ever guess that games that's not insultingly casual, handholding, and feature a story where people are supposed to work a little more for, be so acclaimed. Oh, and fromsoftware actually balance their games so their players have more fun, not on 'time savers'.
I look forward to the eventual ubisoft overreaction - especially if elden ring becomes a financial success beyond their expectations.
Back to hearthstone:
Im open to another doom in the tomb event, and in my opinion that's much better than implementing midsets to freshen the meta up. For one thing, at least it'll reduce the cost of the game, both long and short term. And players like me get to play old cards without having to go through the cess pit that is wild.
As for a forth expansion. Im very much opposed to it. Three per year is fine. The midset complicated things a little, but I think we can do away with it, and bring in events that'll shake up the meta for a short period of time. Having 4 expansions spaced between three months may lead to fatigue, and team5 have to contrive more descriptions per year to keep the expansions from looking too samey.
I think we can all agree that stormwind was an anomaly, a botch to put it mildly. Team5 wanted the questlines to shine so they designed each and every quest in stormwind to feature a win condition that ultimately took it too far. From my understanding, it went way past what they originally intended, and none of us predicted how powerful and impactful the questlines ultimately became. It took 3 nerfs within a month, that's unprecedented.
Far as Sunken City's own cards are concerned, I think there's enough stuff so far to keep me interested in the expansion: Lady S'theno, nellie, Emergency Maneuvers, murlock deck, Queen Azshara. If the questlines starts running rampant (which Im not certain that they will, having lost a chuck of their good cards) I'd imagine team5 nerfing them down again.
Also, I'd point out again that team5 have this habit of leaving the best cards for last. We didn't even see galakrond shaman until the end of the reveal, and again none of us have predicted that it'll take over the entire meta for the 1 week before it got nerfed.
On the subject of card redundancy, I think its pretty much clear that that has been happening throughout hearthstone's history. Only under very specific circumstances does previous expansion cards matter more than the current one, like the ungoro-kobolds vs witchwood-rastakhans. Otherwise, the result has been fairly consistent - As the years move forward, previous expansions loses relevance. How many barrens cards are still being played today?
Its not specifically in hearthstone too. I still have old Pokemon tcg cards that are completely redundant today (My old machamp used to do 60 damage and at that time it was insane. Now even an unevolved pokemon can do it). But in its lifetime I got some worth out of my money. I dont think its fair to say money has been wasted if you have had a good deal of time playing it.
I think the fairer assessment is actually that this expansion may follow barrens rather than rastakhan's. RR had a lot more problems because it was the last entry of the year and is generally one of the weakest expansions because it was followed up a tough act, being designed to be weak as a counter to the more powerful ungoro-kobolds expansions.
As it stands, you might be right that the power level of Sunken city might will not last past its expansion cycle, but isn't that kinda the point? Team5 specifically wanted to design expansions to shine in their cycle, because that's how they get players to buy more packs and generally spend money in the game. If I get to play dredge throughout the next meta because the power level is weaker, and then subsequently in the next expansion dredge gets completely forgotten, is that really so much of a big issue?
As for your assessment of the current crop of mechanics;
- Dredge doesn't draw you a card but allow you to choose what you get next turn based on the bottom three cards of your deck. That's significant. Your assessment that it doesn't revolutionize your draws because you only put good cards in your deck is a rather moot point because even Kazakusan drawn on turn 2 can be significantly worse than any vanilla 2 mana 2/3 depending on matchups. If I could play a card that allows me to choose from three cards what to topdeck, that's not an insignificant resource to have.
The only thing now is to assess the dredge cards themselves. And we've got a few good ones so far. Aquatic Form, Scalding Geyser, Bloodscent Vilefin are all good on their own. You dont need to wait for the sunken cards before playing these things, you can just play it and prepare accordingly for the next turn when you draw the dredged card.
As for the sunken cards themselves. Well, Ive seen some good ones like azsharan gardens, scavenger and possibly vessel. At least they're nowhere near as random as the prime cards was in AoO. Whether they will be worth the trouble keeping a dredge card in hand, that'll depend on what payoff we're looking at.
- I would agree with your assessment for the naga cards. But in my opinion, it all depends on payoff. Queen Azshara offers a payoff good enough that I'll climb some mountains to get the reward it offers. Cards like Coilskar Commander, maybe not so much. There's not many naga cards that feature these conditions though, and if every one of them dont see any play, that's not a mark against the entire expansion.
- Colossal minions are probably the one thing Im sure will last over this expansion. Im not sure what you mean by bombast vs good/interesting. Crabatoa is a good minion, its not bombastic or interesting, but its good. Nellie, the Great Thresher is interesting, is likely good, and is 'bombastic'. They have high costs because they tend to do very powerful things, not because its to make the cards look better.
And also, let's not forget that team5 have a tendency to save the best cards for last. So chances are good our assessment of the the sunken city expansion is premature. I'd see the entire set and the core set first before forming opinions of my own.