This card just feels like tempo suicide and unless the opponent draws a decent sized minion, like 5+ mana, the effect doesn't seem great. Its been a long time since a 6/8 body has been considered good on a 7 drop and when you compare it to other 7 drops that have been seeing play recently, like Exotic Mountseller and Galakronds, all of them have a large impact the turn they are played or set up a massive swing turn in the case of the Rogue Galakrond.
Unless this is a very control heavy meta where being as greedy as possible is important, I think I'd rather just run a different card to improve other matchups, especially when there's still alternatives that do this better for the most part, like Archivist Elysiana and the Priest Galakrond. If we see more cards that combo with it, this card could be pretty fun, not to mention it hard counters Plot Twist and that seems like it'd be a hilarious thing to happen, but it just seems too slow right now.
Yeah tapping into the soul fragments would be a pretty big nonbo for Quest Warlock. However if that deck has the quest completed, its already doing pretty well and the soul fragments help that process a ton. Turning some of your normal draws into effectively two for the quest is huge and having some form of extra copies of Aranasi Broodmother seems nice. I could see the deck running School Spirits for an early board clear as burning [Hearthstone Card (Dark Sky) Not Found] that early feels pretty bad.
I think the warglaives are a pretty safe disenchant as according to VS, tempo DH is better without the glaives. I'd hold onto a Dragoncaster though simply because if you ignore Highlander hunt being everywhere, Highlander Mage has still been doing fairly well in the grand scheme of things and Dragoncaster is still a very strong part of the deck.
The worst-case scenario is that you disenchant them now and just recraft them again later anyway.
Cool card but it is so painfully slow that I can only see it being played in slow control decks that don't run any other weapons. This card is very comparable to Opt from MTG but this card is considerably worse due to Opt being a cantrip and an instant. It's nice that this weapon doesn't lose durability if you keep the card on top, but that does not fix the issue of this card taking ages to get maximum value.
The reason why scry is such a good mechanic in MTG is that it is just stapled onto other cards as well as being put into decks that are specifically looking for specific cards. MTG having 60 card decks hurt the consistency of decks, resulting in cantrips like Opt, being ran in pretty much any deck that can run blue. Hearthstone on the other hand only has 30 cards which makes the games significantly more consistent and as a result, isn't as reliant on cantrips.
I don't think this card is bad per se but I also don't think it is worth a card slot in decks. I'd be happy to be wrong about this card since it seems a lot of people like the card but I'm not seeing it. Oh on an aside it's hilarious in wild with Twig but that seems like a pipe dream since there is still no neutral weapon tutors yet.
I love this card so much. First, Avalon needs to eat a shoe that is funny and I can finally talk to someone who has gone through the same thing.
Second, I love this card's effect. Being able to manipulate your deck in someway is a massive gateway to interesting deckbuilding challenges, which is my favorite part of any card game. There is so much more to this card than just "Oh I'm playing a control deck, drop this on curve and roll people" because it shoves all the good removal into the bottom of the deck. I can see this card going into more aggressive decks as well, like Tempo DH. Nothing screams "fun" like playing this card on 5 or 4 with coin, then starting to draw into Skulls and everything that becomes much better when discounted by it.
This is also the type of card that I can fully expect to tilt me when the expansion comes out, but I'll face that issue when we get to it.
Honestly, I'm a fan of this card in a lot of ways. The one thing Hearthstone has always lacked was proper ways to interact with one's hand. We saw that earlier with Glide which most cases isn't going to be hand disruption and instead just reload in my opinion, but this is the first card to really feel like proper hand interaction. It's not pushed stat-wise, the ability provides an interesting play style in the same way Madame Lazul does and I overall really like that feeling.
The issue is that this thing is limited to DH. You could easily just change Outcast to a battlecry and if it becomes too strong, just hit the stats a little bit. This type of interaction would revolutionize Hearthstone, which I'd argue is for the better. This is a big whiff to me since given that its a legendary, it is safe to assume we won't see a similar effect for at least a year or two.
What sort of things lead you to construct the decks that you do?
Two things for the most part. I either like to base it off of a dumb combo, then having every other card support that niche/help me draw into it, or when it comes to making a competitive deck, I focus primarily on taking a concept that is almost there/doing well and building off of that.
What are some common strategies and combinations that you really enjoy playing and iterating on?
The biggest strategy I use a ton of is Packages, which is devoting a small subset of cards towards a group of highly synergistic cards. An example of this would be with Spirit of the Frog and including spells to curve out with it, or with slotting in Morag Artificers into literally any warlock deck under the sun as it synergizes heavily with the rest of the deck.
In the past, which mechanics or interactions really caught your attention and made you want to try them yourself?
Interactions that have made me excited to build decks around them are with things that just let me obliterate the opponent, often with an OTK. This tends to extend to other games as well, considering my favorite MTG mechanic is Storm.
Do you prefer building new lists from the ground up, or iterating on existing archetypes?
I start from the ground up, but often include existing archetypes if they are strong enough to justify running.
Has the meta ever influenced you to try building something new to counter it?
Yes, I like rolling people and playing anti-meta stuff rolls things.
When you get an idea, does it typically involve a particular strategy, or do you focus on a card you like to build around?
I do a bit of both. Often an idea starts with a single card looking sweet, but if there aren't enough cards to support it I tend to just put it on the shelf for later.
Do you make use of tech cards often, or just play a particular list as is?
If the meta requires a specific tech card, I'd try to shoehorn it in but most the time tech cards come last and I only get around to finely tuning a deck after playing it a ton.
I wasn't originally planning on visiting Nicol Bolas since he's from back in WAR and when I just started off writing Brawl Haul, he was fairly popular and I didn't see much merit in covering what was probably one of the best decks in the format. However, with new cards being added and the format-shifting a lot, I'll see if I can go back to the drawing board with him and see if I can bring him back to his former glory as being the de facto super friends commander. If it turns out to be interesting, I'll make sure to showcase it in an article. If it turns out to be boring/too much of the same old thing he always did, I can just DM you the decklist I was experimenting with if you'd want me to. I still have some ideas for the new cards brought along with M21, but this set brought along a lot fewer interesting commanders compared to Ikoria so I think it should be expected to visit older sets and try to tinker with some of the commanders from them.
On a side note, I am thinking of revisiting some older decks giving them a completely different spin. There was that new legendary shrine enchantment that looks like a blast to play but unfortunately, there's only one commander that can run it, that being Niv-Mizzet Reborn which was featured in the first Brawl Haul.
As much fun brawl is with the new jumpstart cards, I cannot recommend trying out Historic enough. The format is probably one of the most balanced formats throughout the entire game right now and with WotC handpicking cards to be added to it, it can only become more interesting as far as I am aware. I'm not sure if any of the new legendaries are going to do well in the format, but there is just a ton of potential and so much cool stuff to do there.
As for Zurzoth, he's a very interesting card, to say the least. He could be a super fun madness commander but as of right now there is none of those on Arena, as well as very little red discard synergy/red graveyard matters cards which makes him feel a bit lackluster to me, at least with the currently available cards. I have some pretty high hopes for him though, lots of potential.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of Galakrond Priest at all either, always felt bad playing it since it just felt like I was playing bad minions after bad minions. I mentioned it a bit in the article but Quest Warlock has an absurdly strong matchup against Galakrond Priest so if you have the cards for it, I'd recommend trying it out. It is a bit hard to pick up at first so it might feel a little clumsy, but once you get used to it, its a very strong deck. It has been my go-to ladder deck for a while now.
Getting more Librams would be sweet! Not only could it help the playstyle a bit more, but it'll also be the first time in a while that Paladin had consistently pushed archetypes in a while since it felt like Uther's been through an identity crisis the last couple of years.
Yeah, a couple of months ago it started off as being "Wednesday Brawls", aka you could only queue for brawl matches on Wednesday, and the only other times you could be by direct challenging someone. WotC then got the brilliant idea of charging people 10k gold to give them permanent access to a Brawl queue for a month or two. Once the Coronavirus started getting taken seriously in the US, WotC decided to open up the queue for free and just recently decided to keep it free forever.
They've had a different 'rotation of game modes' in the past, like Artisan, Omniscience Draft, Momir Vig, and the super fun Momir Vig Oko Edition, so it would not surprise me if Jumpstart joins that special group of formats.
I'm all for more crowdfunding stuff to help prize pools. The Dota 2 Invitational has been doing that since its inception as far as I'm aware and has consistently pushed for the largest prize pools in Esports and generally, everybody loves them as both sides prosper out of it.
As for why Blizzard isn't a fan of them, we can only speculate why. Like with the Thunder King one, they capped it off at an additional 250k for the prize money which is better than nothing for sure, but still weird that they would cap something like that considering that they were still making a profit out of it. My best guess as to why they haven't brought this back is simply because either the current state of the economy and the world as a whole with the Corona Virus, or some issue popping up when it came to distributing the money out. It'd be great to see them again, but with a new expansion being revealed tomorrow, I don't feel like Blizzard is going to try selling any other bundles for the upcoming month.
I've had countless 'favorite decks' over my time playing this game so I'll try to touch on every one of them. The two main types of strategies I love in card games are either midrange slugfests where it is just playing efficient things on curve, and then on the polar opposite, I love playing combo decks with a fair amount of moving parts (which probably stems from me being a diehard storm fan in MTG).
The first two decks I fell in love with were Patron Warrior and Miracle Rogue, which both just devolve into not playing the game until you delete the opponent. Granted I was never great at playing Patron Warrior because it was just too much math and I never worked on finding faster ways of adding it all up, My love for degenerate combo decks expanded later on during MSOG, where Anyfin Paladin was a niche yet powerful alternative to fill the Jade Druid/Miracle Rogue part of the meta and I grinded an ungodly amount with that deck. Then for a while, I decided to play fairly up until this expansion, with Quest Warlock bringing me back into just goldfishing the opponent with cheeky turn 7 lethal with Malygos. Pretty much all the reasons I love these decks is because I just don't get to validate the opponent with a fair match and instead get to find some way to BS a victory.
On the polar opposite side of things, after Anyfin Paladin rotated out, I stuck with the class while it transformed into a very strong midrange class in Un'goro. When I realized how much fun it was to just whack someone repetitively with random nonsense they cannot deal with very easily, I swapped over to those style of decks for the most part, playing pretty much only paladin during Un'goro, just not playing during KFT due to reasons, only to return to more paladin KnC. Then Witchwood came out and I played Even Paladin and fell in love with it. I've grinded to legend 4 times now, two of those being with Even Paladin, once with it still being an aggro deck with 4 mana Call to Arms, a somewhat wonky version in Boomsday using Glowstone Technician back when it was 6 mana, then once before Genn rotated out of standard during Rastakhan's Rumble. There haven't been too many other midrange decks that have really struck me as Even Paladin did, but I feel like that's more just the game shifting away from those strategies for the most part. I guess the other main midrange deck that I loved to play a lot was Galakrond Warrior after Shamans got deleted from the game, but since then my opinions on that deck and Galakrond as a concept, have soured so I don't look back fondly to it.
I guess now that I think about it, all the decks I loved to play just make the opponent feel like they don't get to play the game, whether that be killed out of the middle of nowhere, or just not having good enough removal to defeat what seems like an endless onslaught of efficient minions.
Yeah, Pack Leader is a hell of a card. If the rest of the tribe was a little bit stronger, it could definitely carry a dog tribal deck on its own. As for the deck doing better post rotation, I'm always a bit shaky on guessing how well a deck would do without seeing the newly printed cards, especially given how pushed some of the newer cards have been. I'd love to see more support for dogs and cats and if they do make new ones that push Rin and Seri into being a more dominant/different style of deck, I might do another article on them as they are a blast to play.
This card just feels like tempo suicide and unless the opponent draws a decent sized minion, like 5+ mana, the effect doesn't seem great. Its been a long time since a 6/8 body has been considered good on a 7 drop and when you compare it to other 7 drops that have been seeing play recently, like Exotic Mountseller and Galakronds, all of them have a large impact the turn they are played or set up a massive swing turn in the case of the Rogue Galakrond.
Unless this is a very control heavy meta where being as greedy as possible is important, I think I'd rather just run a different card to improve other matchups, especially when there's still alternatives that do this better for the most part, like Archivist Elysiana and the Priest Galakrond. If we see more cards that combo with it, this card could be pretty fun, not to mention it hard counters Plot Twist and that seems like it'd be a hilarious thing to happen, but it just seems too slow right now.
Poor Dekkster had his reveal overshadowed by Blizzard dumping a blog post with 9 cards, such a shame since the video was pretty nice too.
Card is super sweet though, can't wait to get my hands on it.
Yeah tapping into the soul fragments would be a pretty big nonbo for Quest Warlock. However if that deck has the quest completed, its already doing pretty well and the soul fragments help that process a ton. Turning some of your normal draws into effectively two for the quest is huge and having some form of extra copies of Aranasi Broodmother seems nice. I could see the deck running School Spirits for an early board clear as burning [Hearthstone Card (Dark Sky) Not Found] that early feels pretty bad.
I think the warglaives are a pretty safe disenchant as according to VS, tempo DH is better without the glaives. I'd hold onto a Dragoncaster though simply because if you ignore Highlander hunt being everywhere, Highlander Mage has still been doing fairly well in the grand scheme of things and Dragoncaster is still a very strong part of the deck.
The worst-case scenario is that you disenchant them now and just recraft them again later anyway.
Cool card but it is so painfully slow that I can only see it being played in slow control decks that don't run any other weapons. This card is very comparable to Opt from MTG but this card is considerably worse due to Opt being a cantrip and an instant. It's nice that this weapon doesn't lose durability if you keep the card on top, but that does not fix the issue of this card taking ages to get maximum value.
The reason why scry is such a good mechanic in MTG is that it is just stapled onto other cards as well as being put into decks that are specifically looking for specific cards. MTG having 60 card decks hurt the consistency of decks, resulting in cantrips like Opt, being ran in pretty much any deck that can run blue. Hearthstone on the other hand only has 30 cards which makes the games significantly more consistent and as a result, isn't as reliant on cantrips.
I don't think this card is bad per se but I also don't think it is worth a card slot in decks. I'd be happy to be wrong about this card since it seems a lot of people like the card but I'm not seeing it. Oh on an aside it's hilarious in wild with Twig but that seems like a pipe dream since there is still no neutral weapon tutors yet.
I'm glad to see what I can only presume is 4C Omnath. Gives me hope that eventually he'll get his 5th color soon.
We won. Good work gamers.
I love this card so much. First, Avalon needs to eat a shoe that is funny and I can finally talk to someone who has gone through the same thing.
Second, I love this card's effect. Being able to manipulate your deck in someway is a massive gateway to interesting deckbuilding challenges, which is my favorite part of any card game. There is so much more to this card than just "Oh I'm playing a control deck, drop this on curve and roll people" because it shoves all the good removal into the bottom of the deck. I can see this card going into more aggressive decks as well, like Tempo DH. Nothing screams "fun" like playing this card on 5 or 4 with coin, then starting to draw into Skulls and everything that becomes much better when discounted by it.
This is also the type of card that I can fully expect to tilt me when the expansion comes out, but I'll face that issue when we get to it.
Honestly, I'm a fan of this card in a lot of ways. The one thing Hearthstone has always lacked was proper ways to interact with one's hand. We saw that earlier with Glide which most cases isn't going to be hand disruption and instead just reload in my opinion, but this is the first card to really feel like proper hand interaction. It's not pushed stat-wise, the ability provides an interesting play style in the same way Madame Lazul does and I overall really like that feeling.
The issue is that this thing is limited to DH. You could easily just change Outcast to a battlecry and if it becomes too strong, just hit the stats a little bit. This type of interaction would revolutionize Hearthstone, which I'd argue is for the better. This is a big whiff to me since given that its a legendary, it is safe to assume we won't see a similar effect for at least a year or two.
Come on Regis don't fail me now.
Two things for the most part. I either like to base it off of a dumb combo, then having every other card support that niche/help me draw into it, or when it comes to making a competitive deck, I focus primarily on taking a concept that is almost there/doing well and building off of that.
The biggest strategy I use a ton of is Packages, which is devoting a small subset of cards towards a group of highly synergistic cards. An example of this would be with Spirit of the Frog and including spells to curve out with it, or with slotting in Morag Artificers into literally any warlock deck under the sun as it synergizes heavily with the rest of the deck.
Interactions that have made me excited to build decks around them are with things that just let me obliterate the opponent, often with an OTK. This tends to extend to other games as well, considering my favorite MTG mechanic is Storm.
I start from the ground up, but often include existing archetypes if they are strong enough to justify running.
Yes, I like rolling people and playing anti-meta stuff rolls things.
I do a bit of both. Often an idea starts with a single card looking sweet, but if there aren't enough cards to support it I tend to just put it on the shelf for later.
If the meta requires a specific tech card, I'd try to shoehorn it in but most the time tech cards come last and I only get around to finely tuning a deck after playing it a ton.
I wasn't originally planning on visiting Nicol Bolas since he's from back in WAR and when I just started off writing Brawl Haul, he was fairly popular and I didn't see much merit in covering what was probably one of the best decks in the format. However, with new cards being added and the format-shifting a lot, I'll see if I can go back to the drawing board with him and see if I can bring him back to his former glory as being the de facto super friends commander. If it turns out to be interesting, I'll make sure to showcase it in an article. If it turns out to be boring/too much of the same old thing he always did, I can just DM you the decklist I was experimenting with if you'd want me to. I still have some ideas for the new cards brought along with M21, but this set brought along a lot fewer interesting commanders compared to Ikoria so I think it should be expected to visit older sets and try to tinker with some of the commanders from them.
On a side note, I am thinking of revisiting some older decks giving them a completely different spin. There was that new legendary shrine enchantment that looks like a blast to play but unfortunately, there's only one commander that can run it, that being Niv-Mizzet Reborn which was featured in the first Brawl Haul.
As much fun brawl is with the new jumpstart cards, I cannot recommend trying out Historic enough. The format is probably one of the most balanced formats throughout the entire game right now and with WotC handpicking cards to be added to it, it can only become more interesting as far as I am aware. I'm not sure if any of the new legendaries are going to do well in the format, but there is just a ton of potential and so much cool stuff to do there.
As for Zurzoth, he's a very interesting card, to say the least. He could be a super fun madness commander but as of right now there is none of those on Arena, as well as very little red discard synergy/red graveyard matters cards which makes him feel a bit lackluster to me, at least with the currently available cards. I have some pretty high hopes for him though, lots of potential.
You get to keep all the cards from the previous selections, even if you resign.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of Galakrond Priest at all either, always felt bad playing it since it just felt like I was playing bad minions after bad minions. I mentioned it a bit in the article but Quest Warlock has an absurdly strong matchup against Galakrond Priest so if you have the cards for it, I'd recommend trying it out. It is a bit hard to pick up at first so it might feel a little clumsy, but once you get used to it, its a very strong deck. It has been my go-to ladder deck for a while now.
Getting more Librams would be sweet! Not only could it help the playstyle a bit more, but it'll also be the first time in a while that Paladin had consistently pushed archetypes in a while since it felt like Uther's been through an identity crisis the last couple of years.
Yeah, a couple of months ago it started off as being "Wednesday Brawls", aka you could only queue for brawl matches on Wednesday, and the only other times you could be by direct challenging someone. WotC then got the brilliant idea of charging people 10k gold to give them permanent access to a Brawl queue for a month or two. Once the Coronavirus started getting taken seriously in the US, WotC decided to open up the queue for free and just recently decided to keep it free forever.
They've had a different 'rotation of game modes' in the past, like Artisan, Omniscience Draft, Momir Vig, and the super fun Momir Vig Oko Edition, so it would not surprise me if Jumpstart joins that special group of formats.
I'm all for more crowdfunding stuff to help prize pools. The Dota 2 Invitational has been doing that since its inception as far as I'm aware and has consistently pushed for the largest prize pools in Esports and generally, everybody loves them as both sides prosper out of it.
As for why Blizzard isn't a fan of them, we can only speculate why. Like with the Thunder King one, they capped it off at an additional 250k for the prize money which is better than nothing for sure, but still weird that they would cap something like that considering that they were still making a profit out of it. My best guess as to why they haven't brought this back is simply because either the current state of the economy and the world as a whole with the Corona Virus, or some issue popping up when it came to distributing the money out. It'd be great to see them again, but with a new expansion being revealed tomorrow, I don't feel like Blizzard is going to try selling any other bundles for the upcoming month.
I've had countless 'favorite decks' over my time playing this game so I'll try to touch on every one of them. The two main types of strategies I love in card games are either midrange slugfests where it is just playing efficient things on curve, and then on the polar opposite, I love playing combo decks with a fair amount of moving parts (which probably stems from me being a diehard storm fan in MTG).
The first two decks I fell in love with were Patron Warrior and Miracle Rogue, which both just devolve into not playing the game until you delete the opponent. Granted I was never great at playing Patron Warrior because it was just too much math and I never worked on finding faster ways of adding it all up, My love for degenerate combo decks expanded later on during MSOG, where Anyfin Paladin was a niche yet powerful alternative to fill the Jade Druid/Miracle Rogue part of the meta and I grinded an ungodly amount with that deck. Then for a while, I decided to play fairly up until this expansion, with Quest Warlock bringing me back into just goldfishing the opponent with cheeky turn 7 lethal with Malygos. Pretty much all the reasons I love these decks is because I just don't get to validate the opponent with a fair match and instead get to find some way to BS a victory.
On the polar opposite side of things, after Anyfin Paladin rotated out, I stuck with the class while it transformed into a very strong midrange class in Un'goro. When I realized how much fun it was to just whack someone repetitively with random nonsense they cannot deal with very easily, I swapped over to those style of decks for the most part, playing pretty much only paladin during Un'goro, just not playing during KFT due to reasons, only to return to more paladin KnC. Then Witchwood came out and I played Even Paladin and fell in love with it. I've grinded to legend 4 times now, two of those being with Even Paladin, once with it still being an aggro deck with 4 mana Call to Arms, a somewhat wonky version in Boomsday using Glowstone Technician back when it was 6 mana, then once before Genn rotated out of standard during Rastakhan's Rumble. There haven't been too many other midrange decks that have really struck me as Even Paladin did, but I feel like that's more just the game shifting away from those strategies for the most part. I guess the other main midrange deck that I loved to play a lot was Galakrond Warrior after Shamans got deleted from the game, but since then my opinions on that deck and Galakrond as a concept, have soured so I don't look back fondly to it.
I guess now that I think about it, all the decks I loved to play just make the opponent feel like they don't get to play the game, whether that be killed out of the middle of nowhere, or just not having good enough removal to defeat what seems like an endless onslaught of efficient minions.
Yeah, Pack Leader is a hell of a card. If the rest of the tribe was a little bit stronger, it could definitely carry a dog tribal deck on its own. As for the deck doing better post rotation, I'm always a bit shaky on guessing how well a deck would do without seeing the newly printed cards, especially given how pushed some of the newer cards have been. I'd love to see more support for dogs and cats and if they do make new ones that push Rin and Seri into being a more dominant/different style of deck, I might do another article on them as they are a blast to play.