Really hard to assess how the game will play out with the removal of poisonous, but my early feelings about individual minion types:
Beasts: no more token start with Beasts in the game, cause Alley Cat is gone. With the removal of Goldrinn, Frogger tokens is now pretty much the only way to play Beasts, which is a shame, it means less variety. Beasts no longer have cleave but with the removal of Goldrinn that wouldn't have done anything unless you're really going nuts on the Felstomping (which has generally been a bad way to play the tribe). Not sure the whole Octosari thing is gonna float, but I guess I'm just too skeptical about One Big Giant Idiot playstyles, without poisonous in that might just work and Rivendare can always double dip on it if he doesn't get blown up early. I assume if you give Octo Reborn the summoned tokens still start huge and don't reset to basic size. I have absolutely no clue what Rylak Metalhead is supposed to achieve in beasts. There are barely any battlecries there, none of the minions with battlecry want to stay in your band (Bonemare, Rattler) and some are actively detrimental if triggered on the wrong thing (like having Bonemare taunt your Felstomper). Granted, since the Metalhead has taunt, if you give it reborn you are pretty much guaranteed to get two triggers on some battlecries, I'm just not sure what battlecries those are supposed to be. Maybe you splash it into murlocs or do something funky with Felemental? In beasts it seems out of place.
Murlocs: I...like...the fuck? With the removal of Toxfin, Swolefin, Seafood Slinger and Felfin Navigator, battlecry Murlocs feel kinda gutted. Some of the good cards that made you want to get Primalfin are gone and there are a whole lot more bad discovers without battlecry. That combined with the fact Murkeye didn't get unnerfed means battlecry Murlocs just tanked HARD. With the return of Honcho, the new Upbeat guy and the presence of Coldlight Seer Murlocs can stack up a lot of health but attack will be an issue. There's no more Warleader for earlygame safety, there's no way to grant Poisonous or Venomous on a Battlecry, and with Poisonous gone your big butt Murlocs may get one kill off of Venomous but then you'd want them to have some attack to work with afterwards and yet Bagurgle is currently the only way to grant your Murlocs any attack. This makes them feel pretty toothless. And the handbuff stuff...I...I don't even know. When is the last time we've been able to just waste gold sitting with minions in our hand so we can capitalise on them later? I can't recall that ever being the case. Now Bream Counter wants you to do just that and Bassgill rewards you for it, sure. But are you telling me we have to hold out for Scourfin to get any attack on our Murlocs before tier 5? That seems wishful. It feels to me like Murlocs are gonna be a lot about a bunch of supporting cast with some shopping phase effects and not a lot to show in combat, and then there's gonna be a bunch of giant morons like Bream Counter in hand, the new tier 6 that nabs its stats and a Magmaloc that you incidentally got to mediocre size along the way. Really hard to judge if this is gonna fly.
Dragons: all forms of firebreathing are gone so Divine Shields are again a thing against dragons. On the opposite end the Divine Shield-buffing dragon on 5 is gone so that makes Divine Shields on dragons and mechs less of a threat. The tier 3 attack buffer is gone but the Low-Flier just seems like a better version of it and if you have Stormbringer...hoooboy. I would say that makes the new Drakkari Enchanter an interesting inclusion in dragons, except Razorgore is gone...again...so probably less so. Otherwise, Dragons don't seem to have lost much and Tarecgosa is back on 3 so yay for them. The tier 1 Dragon generator seems kinda scary in terms of both board power and economy. Dragons might be able to power level pretty fast with that thing, which could get nutty. Oh and Sanctum Rester is simultaneously going to be responsible for absolutely terrifying blowouts when discovered off of an early triple on tier 4, while also being possibly the worst tier 5 card in the game cause...what the fuck are you supposed to do with that thing after like turn 10? You're not gonna be keeping it for your tarecgosas instead of Promodrakes. Maybe a filler before you find more Tarecgosas and Drakes?
Lelementals: No more Party Elemental, Garr (again?!), Rag or Master of Realities so the whole Elemental spamming thing with Magmaloc is gone. No more Lightspawn but Dancing Barnstormer just seems like a better Lightspawn that doesn't force stupid token shenanigans and doesn't turn off the moment you replace your board with big elementals. Seems like an overall buff to elementals to me, even though they lost their Mega-Windfury blowout against beasts and scam mech shenanigans. The Gusty Trumpeter seems like an absolutely atrocious card but the fact it can be tripled with the Elemental of Surprise means you can make it potentially huge with Divine Shield and then it just slots kinda nicely into the whole Nomi + Recycling Wraith thing. And the new Rock Rock seems on the whole like a better Rag (more stat gain overall regardless of minion tier) though a tier higher. Also no Gentle Djinni anymore. What a fall from grace. Broke the fucking game on release, now goes out with a whimper cause nobody even uses it in their Mental builds anymore. Oh, and the removal of Ball of Minions meganukes Nomi highrolls.
Nagas: Shoal Commander replaced with arguably better versions a tier higher and a tier lower (Reef Riffer, Deep Blue Crooner). Eventide Brute now more accessible for earlier permascaling, which is scary. Surprised Snail Cavalry survived the massacre, especially with the Deep Sea Angler buff, feels like the big butt aspect is pretty covered already. Not sure about Silent Swimmer, the Stealth doesn't seem to have much of a purpose other than the fact that it can protect your Lava Lurkers from Leeroys and Venom if you've taunted it early on. But it means you'd have to attack late with your Lava Lurker, which will generally be your biggest minion. Also, no more Windfury for Nagas which is a pretty damn massive nerf against deathrattle builds like Beasts, Undead or Mech. Hell it's probably a pretty big nerf against Nadina Dragons as well. Doesn't seem like much but I think Nagas just got pretty nerfed. Oh, also no Greta but that seems a bigger deal for Pirates...although...nah, Nagas could get good mileage out of that too, so that's another nerf.
Undead: Why are Undead suddenly stealing copies of enemy minions? I get it, we're digging up graves or something (not sure how it connects to the card flavour) but what are Undead gonna do with that shit? The tier 1 Gnoll carry is gone. The Reborn flavour is getting amped up with Xylobones but not sure how far that's gonna go, you'd need a lot of permanent attack buffing for that to be worth anything. In fact I'd wager the removal of Jelly Belly, as bad as it was, a tier earlier has more overall impact on the tribe's performance than the introduction of this guy, cause lategame you'd much rather just have Abom anyway. Soulsplitter on the Venomous Undead Murloc is the new and much worsened Rattler + Maexxna scam. Taking up two slots on your board to get exactly two poison hits in...doesn't feel right. Well, actually it feels very right, cause screw the scam. Overall, seems like Undead came out on top, they lost some of the unnecessary fat, gained a little bit more unnecessary fat here and there, but the majority of the core stayed the same.
Pirates: Ok, on the plus side, you no longer need to rent a second heart as a backup when playing full on Pirates, cause no more APM insanity. There's now a hard cap on how much you have to do per turn to play Pirates. On the other hand I'm not sure about the replacements. So a golden Record Smuggler can give us up to 14 extra gold. Golden Hoggar generally gave more, though potentially with less consistency, would be my guess. Issue is, we no longer have Southsea Strongarm to catapult ourselves forward in power after a good Pirate turn, there's no more free buffs off of a ball of minions and we no longer have Greta to instagold some of our boys (affects Nagas too but seemed bigger for Pirates). So to get our engine going we need to find a Record Smuggler and then either find another one and play it, or find another one and keep it in hand, find the Upbeat guy to gold the Smuggler and then the golden Smuggler doesn't do anything until the start of the next turn...seems a lot harder to put the thing together, and that's already been a problem for Pirates. Though, admittedly, making our Pirates golden in hand gives us discovers on the "triple" we play, so that's a plus, especially since the tier 6 pirate (the only one Pirates get, which is weird) seems to be pretty important. Removal of Salty Looter drops some scaling, but then we gain Gunpowder Courier on the same tier (which together with Cannoneer makes for some pretty glassy pirates) and Underhanded Dealer a tier higher, which has worse stats to start but I think it grows faster (not sure if it gains +1/+1 per gold you gain, or +1/+1 whenever you gain any gold). To make up for the glass cannon side, we got the Lovesick chick on 4 to buff health individually, but Southsea Strongarm seemed more well rounded. On the other hand, Lovesick works off of just any gold spent, while Strongarm required us to already be running Hoggar Pirates to do anything, so it's probably a buff overall. But the big thing...Pirates now have an actual effect on them!! Pirates have cleave instead of beasts! Yay! For the record, the last time Pirates had an effect was when Seabreaker Goliath was in the game (windfury + overkill). With the addition of cleave, all that glass cannon buffing makes a lot more sense for pirates and it's pretty flavourful that pirates would play aggresive. On the other hand, Eliza is gone so there go any remnants of the Pirate deathrattle scam or early blowouts off of a lucky triple on 5 on an existing Pirate board. Oh and removal of Goldgrubber potentially nerfs menagerie but...oh we'll get to that.
Demons: Soul Rewinder is an absolute must have if you're doing anything with demons other than Felbat + tavernbuffing. Pretty much nothing in Demons happens prior to tier 6 without Rewinder. 7 other Demon cards now either require you to take damage or reward you for taking damage, so that's a whole build onto itself that requires Rewinder somewhere in the lineup. It looks like a helluva fun and thematic way to play demons though. Kinda wish they put Floating Watcher back in for nostalgia, Other than that, not sure why the token Demons stayed in the game. Bigfernal is gone, as is Soul Juggler (thank god), Impatient Doomsayer, and Kathranatir. The only reward remaining for demon tokens is Felstomper which...lol. They buffed Annihilan in theory but nerfed it in practice cause now Demon builds will not be sacrificing health to play their game cause of Rewinder. It's a poor man's substitute for Impulsive Trickster for menagerie. Overall seems like Demons are gonna be a lot more interesting and gonna have a lot more options. Also the fact that they don't have any effects doesn't really matter as much cause poisonous is gone.
Quilboar: Thorncaller moved down an replacing Roadboar is a buff, but the loss of Bristleback Brute hurts the early game. Agamaggan replaced by two permanent buffs frees up board space on one hand but pulls Quilboar in a strange direction on the other. One buff effect is on a deathrattle, the other on a battlecry. We're not gonna use both a Brann and a Rivendare so probably those minions are not gonna be as effective as, say, an Anub'arak is for Undead that already benefit from Deathrattles on other things. The rest of the stuff seems pretty much the same or not particularly noteworthy (yeah the tier 5 will be a decent big dumb idiot but Bristleback Brute already did that two tiers earlier) but the new Tier 6 is a damn joke. I'd rather they keep the Darkgaze Elder in so Quilboar menagerie has more to work off of. Now Aggem is kinda stuck with just spamming Quilboar with Prophets of the Boar on the board (or Scrapsmiths, if you're nuts). Removal of Groundshaker eliminates some midrange blowouts so that's a positive. Overall full on Quilboar seem better off but Quilboar menagerie lost some options.
Mechs: So much cool stuff here. Greasebot and Mecherel are gone, so on one hand a big sad and on the other a big yay (I'll let you guess which one goes where). But the magnetic shit is so cool now. Pretty much all magnetics are now a must buy, except it's not immediately very gold efficient, so it's an investment now for payoff later (if you find the tier 5 magnetize buffer, if you get the gold generating or growing magnetizer, etc.). On the other hand, starting to magnetise late is also good cause then you can double dip off of the tier 6. Very cool stuff. And the mech deathrattle scam is still intact (Kangor is still in, it's just included in neutrals and not mechs for some reason). It's a shame about the whole divine shield build with the dragon and Grease bot, but having Divine Shields is kinda payoff enough in itself so playing off of that any further probably didn't seem worth it when cooler stuff could be included in its place. Also, we will no longer curse the presence of Mechs in the game alongside murlocs cause while there is Mistake in place of Ball of Minions, there is no more divine shield + poison to be had. At worst we got Selfless + Venomous, which is a very different story.
Neutral: Menagerie is dead but not really. The inclusion of Drakkari Enchanter (which I'm surprised didn't happen ages ago) makes Lightfang better (along with bunch of other stuff like The Walking Fort, Magmaloc, Rag (the hero)...not sure how it works with Patient Scout and all the upbeat guys). But with Teamaster gone the high end on Menageries has taaaaanked. And Quilboar menagerie is now more limited in options too. Overall seems like menagerie has powered down but seemingly so have some of the other builds, so maybe it's balanced? The tier 4 Upbeat dude, especially in multiples, could make some hilarious things happen with Fireworks Fanatics and will be a really good find for heroes with early access to high tier minions (like Galakrond or Toki). As long as they can stay alive they can potentially print a golden tier 6 before other players even get their first. Not sure about the Boogie Monster, it can theoretically slot into anything but if it only goes up and never goes down, you'll eventually get stuck on having to keep buying tier 6 minions to get any buffs and then the build kinda turns off. Otherwise it could be a decent-ish replacement for Teamaster, except it gives you no reason to actually run menagerie. So it might just become a thing you slot into your complete build as minion number 6 and then you just cycle through the tiers to buff what you already have. Maybe. The downside is, in that respect it kinda works like a non-tribal Kalecgos, except Kalecgos has the benefit of being in the same tribe as Nadina. With no tribal association I'm not sure Boogey Monster has the payoffs it needs. Other than that, a bunch of new battlecries and deathrattles have been added across the tribes, with a bunch of Deathrattle Murlocs and Battlecry Demons and Deathrattle + Battlecry Quilboar. It's gonna be a lot harder to decide whether or not Brann and Titus are a good keep off of an unlucky triple cause a lot more tribes will be able to find some use for them. Might make for a whole mess of weirdass builds, or it might just end up being a failed experiment, we'll see. And yes, the bastards did make sure Mantid Queen can still become a goddamn 2 for 1 cause now it can get reborn instead of divine shield. Fuck. But at least Tavern Tipper is gone! Screw that card. Goddamn midrange players sitting on tier 2 by 8 gold with 2 Tippers in play...
DK is supposed to be balanced around the fact they have to sacrifice access to the majority of DK cards in favour of having access to more specific powerful rewards. In that way, they're supposed to be somewhat predictable and be very defined in what they can and can't do. So you play against a Frost DK and being aware of how they play, you use your boardclears for the little stuff to mitigate incoming damage cause they won't be playing for board lategame anyway. And then they play two Scourges back to back because of discovers and that whole philosophy crumbles.
Though they have not been top of the meta or anything, I've seen so many control DKs in Wild just cramming in literally every discover card that exists just to abuse stuff outside of their runes. Like chain-discovering Patchwerks when they're triple Frost and winning a combo matchup they have no business winning. Or getting multiples of Blood Boil against a proactive opponent. That shit violates the entire philosophy of DK's design. Let them laser focus on what they do best and prohibit their access to stuff they're not supposed to be able to do at all.
Cause what is the purpose of this triple rune ban, really? Which cards are we super scared of DKs discovering in multiples? Sure there's Mograine, Vampiric Blood and Soulstealer. But as far as I see it, it's pretty much just Frostwyrm's Fury that really drives people up the wall. So just...nerf it? It's not like Snowfall Guardian is a fun and interactive card to play against (I play Wild, I should know...fucking Shudderwock Shamans). Snowfall for 1 extra mana with 5 damage battlecry isn't any more fun, let alone in a rune combination that has so much out of hand face damage.
I'm not particularly attached to the ability to spam Mograines or anything. By all means, ban triple rune cards if you don't want to balance them properly. But if they design DK to be hyper-focused and restrictive in deck building, the least they can do is enforce that restriction. This was their opportunity to do so.
I was really hoping they'd do the DK change properly and make it so we can't discover cards outside of our rune combinations. I get that it would probably power boost DK in Standard for now with how few cards there are but it feels really stupid when your triple Blood DK opponent starts freezing your board with Frost spells or plays The Scourge and has a massive board all of a sudden. As the card pool expands the problem for Standard would fix itself, they'd just have to wait to release in the second expansion rather than now.
I'm more shocked (heh) that they plan to buff Lightning Storm. One-sided 3 damage for 5 total mana is perfectly reasonable. Yeah Hellfire's been buffed to 3 but it blows up your stuff as well and hits your face which is a big deal for Warlock. If they make Lightning Storm overload 1 it's gonna be one of the best basic board clears in the game. Though maybe that might mean they'll finally fix Flurgl + Tox in Wild so that Shaman doesn't have that stupidass crutch holding it aloft for all eternity and has to actually play fair for once.
So previously The Demon Seed required 6+7+8 (21) damage taken, now it requires 30, nearly 50% more. That's a nerf so girthy even that brokenass card probably can't withstand it. Good, better it stay a meme for the enthusiasts rather than what it used to be.
Questline Hunter may be back on the menu with the unnerf to Dragonbane Shot. The deck's surprisingly not all that awful even after the questline got nerfed and this should be a big help.
Overload Shaman isn't getting too much good new ammo in the next expansion (the deal 5 heal 5 for 2 if overloaded does look nice) so the unnerf probably won't do much.
Questline Mage and Questline DH will likely remain meh cause the reward in Mage wasn't much of an issue for wild, it was the requirement of 9 typed spells cast. DH questline was a meme before the nerf, nothing's changed for the better.
The Warrior stuff is curious. The War Axe unnerf brings with it the warm, cinnamon-scented smell of the golden Control Warrior days when this thing popped down on turn 2 and for two turns the opponent couldn't muster any aggression without it getting instantly bonked off the board. But the pace at which boards develop has sped up so much since those days I don't think the Axe is even gonna get a wistful look in the collection.
Warsong on the other hand, is interesting. We've got more ways to damage our own shit than when Warsong was in its prime (particularly the Warrior location) and we've got To the Front! to get stuff down cheaper, so a Worgen combo that used to take 6 mana just for the Worgen + Warsong can now cost 4 mana. That gives Warrior a lot more space for stuff like Rampage. Also, Frothing Berserker is still around and now we've got Risky Skipper to combo it with and I believe a Frothing, even a big one, copied by Bloodsworn Mercenary will still have Charge if Warsong gave it to the original, so there might be some solid 28 to face type of chonking going down (To the Front + Warsong + Skipper + Frothing + Bloodsworn is only 6 mana and Warrior can draw pretty fast these days).
The rest of the stuff shouldn't matter too much, maybe Pirate Rogues will start adding Cold Blood since they always seem to feel they need to get as degenerate as they can. Oh, nvm, Conviction in Odd Pally, Call to Arms Pally or the new Divine Shield pally is making me shit my pants.
The only good card among what's been revealed for Warrior seems to be the 1/3 armor booster. With Armorsmith (in Wild since it drops out of Standard) and any Whirlwind-like effect (like Risky Skipper) you can gain a ridiculous amount of armor. Not sure how that's going to help Warrior win, but it's a start. Voone joins Hogger as one of those legendary minions that has multiple versions and all of them suck.
Oh man! Warrior top tier after this exp...no, sorry, couldn't even finish the joke. I would say what they're trying to do with Warrior this expansion is not going to work but I'm honestly not even sure what it is they're trying to do. They're pushing menagerie but can't decide on the playstyle. You got soloist expecting you to have no board, Roaring Applause expecting you to have a wide board and Voone expecting you to have a hand full of gas in a board-centric deck. Are we go wide aggro, are we big chonker dropping menagerie, are we lategame value deck? Pick one.
Ok now THIS is an interesting package of cards for Wild! The armor + attack gain for Druid is incredible, plus the draw on top...umpfh, can't wait to try that out in Questline Druid. I do have the inkling this stuff is gonna get nerfed from orbit for the sake of Standard though, it seems incredibly unfun to play against. The Hunter stuff seems fun but Hunter doesn't have good enough ways to cheat or discount mana to be able to set up like a big beast Recruit package finishing with a Stranglethorn Heart, kinda like an imitation of Anyfin OTK Pally. Maybe someday.
That's exactly what I'm doing. I look at the overheal cards they've revealed so far and I can honestly say I wouldn't want to play a single one of them without having the perfect heal combo piece already prepped. In some cases that combo piece doesn't even exist currently. Even looking at the best case scenario, let's say I have a Circle of Healing in my mitts. That's not even enough to overheal Heartbreaker Hedanis. It summons a free 4/4 with Heartthrob, ey, that ain't bad! In this very specific combination. Anything less than Circle and, well, stick Gift of the Naaru alongside it and do the math. Let's be generous and assume you're not helping your opponent by healing their stuff, BTW, which both Gift and Circle do. With Gift you've paid 4 mana for 5/8 worth of stats for two cards. Didn't Silence Priests use to make 3 mana 4/8s for 2 cards through Humongous Razorleaf? How far did that get them? And that was back in Un'goro, we've moved forward a lot in power level. Or let's say that you have the heal location they revealed. Well, sure, you generate a 3/3 alongside your 3 drop on turn 3. But you must have spent the mana to get the location down on turn 1. Your opponent didn't. Their 1 drop in the form of Filletfighter just trades into your glorious 3/3 you got as payoff and what exactly did you achieve? Setting up your overheal just put you behind on the board so that the overheal tempo you were supposed to get is negated. Then there's Dreamboat. Just how many minions do they think Priests can stick? If this lands as a 2 mana 2/3 with heal on your 1 drop, that's a Neferset Ritualist you just put in your deck. Welcome to Arena gaming I guess.
None of this sounds like an appealing way to play the game. And even if there's just an absolute baller heal card we haven't seen yet, let's say 2 mana heal a minion for 6, then 4, then 2. That gives you a ton of stats with Heartthrob and does a bunch of clear or face damage with Hearbreaker Hedanis. How are you gonna ensure you get those cards together? Cause drawing isn't Priest's strong suit. In fact one of Priests main weaknesses has always been that they'd get stuck with a situational card in hand that they couldn't use cause they were missing the other half needed to make it do miracles. There's a reason Shamans run Firemancer Flurgl + Toxfin in almost everything but Priests never ran Wave of Apathy + Shadow Word: Horror. And that was in control decks. Now you're trying to build a proactive, board-centric Priest with these requirements. You can't spend your mana on tutoring the pieces for your deck to actually work if you intend to retain board presence. That's a solution for control and combo decks, but not zoo or aggro.
I've tried to build board-centric Priests A LOT in the past, expansion after expansion, for years. I think I finally stopped some time around Alterac Valley. It never worked, because Priest never had the tools to compete with other board-oriented decks, nor was it aggressive enough to pressure control or combo decks nor did it have the consistency of draw/tutoring to ensure they don't get stuck with big-butt minions but no buffs or a hand full of buffs but no board presence. Overheal, to me, is just the latest addition to the same failing pattern. Again, I'd be happy to be wrong. Don't think I will be though.
I'm gonna call it now, and I'd be happy the be wrong, but I think overheal will be a failure and Priest will remain a class without a keyword. Overheal only does something IF you have minons that stick around on the board and IF you have a way and the mana to not just heal them but overheal them. That's a lot of fucking ifs. You play against a control deck that just wipes anything you play and overheal does what exactly? You play against an aggro or zoo deck that's just consistently faster on the board than you are (and you're a Priest so EVERYBODY is faster than you) and there will be nothing on the board to heal cause you can't get a foothold. Every overheal minion will be coming in with an extra tax of either mana so you can overheal it the moment it hits play, or with the requirement of an extra card already on the board that heals it for you. I suspect a good portion of overheal gameplay will be sitting with an empty board and a bunch of heal effects in hand, or with a board of some low impact overheal minions with just your hero power to heal them, or with not enough healing to overheal them if your opponent is contesting you. As much as I'd like board centric Priest to be a real thing, the class is simply too oppressive when that works (cause they just value trade into everything and heal it up so no board presence was lost) and so they've been made intentionally fairly slow and low-impact in developing their board outside of Aggro Shadow Priest.
This is weird. Normally they try to lead with the good stuff and leave the neutral dump for last. Now they're essentially leading with it as if these are cards we're meant to be excited about. Either they're powering the game down, which is fine by me, or the set has little to offer, or there's something utterly broken coming up.
It is somewhere around tier 2, yeah. The issue isn't really that much in its power rating but more its popularity and its play pattern. Play pattern in particular is something they've nerfed even average decks for and Res Priest is just absolutely toxic in that regard, has been for quite a while now and yet hasn't been touched at all. It is also EVERYWHERE. I'm not at the tippity top of MMR but I get legend every month and usually I hit legend at around the 300-600 range (and then plummet as I play fun decks after the climb). So the meta I see isn't the most cutthroat and optimised to perfection, but still extremely competitive. In my laddering last month, I've met exactly 2 Quest Mages in all, and that deck got nerfed. Meanwhile, 25 % of my matchups were Res Priests. They camp at Diamond 5-3, they camp at mid-legend. If you're climbing you have to accept the fact 25 % of your games will be decided entirely by how hard the Priest will highroll you, cause there's nothing you can do to stop that. They either just fold cause they drew bad or you explode by turn 5. And the latter happens a lot more often due to their tutoring consistency.
I don't think I've ever laughed this hard at patch notes, for any game, ever. I expected disappointment as they give Parrot, Pillager and Cataclysm a mild slap on the wrist as they tend to do, and they fucking ANNIHILATED them. Pillager in particular has just evaporated from every card collection on the planet cause who'd play that pile of crap now? Honestly, I'd have probably preferred a hit to Scabbs Cutterbutter cause I don't see the Spirit of the Shark + Scabbs interaction leading to anything good in the future, but I guess for now this utter deletion will suffice. As for Parrot, I think that's a great change. It will work just fine for some fun Big Spell Mage shenanigans and there's still hope for Quest Mage to at least be playable in some form with Giants like it was before Parrot's introduction. There are still ways to get some mileage out of Time Warp through Archmage Vargoth or Queen Azshara, and the ways to complete the quest are still as lightning-fast as before, so I'm sure Quest Mage enthusiasts will still find a way to make that deck operate in some capacity at, say, tier 3 or 4. Cataclysm nerf is actually quite elegant, cause the card itself is considerably more playable outside of discard now, and some forms of discard miiight still consider playing it, it'll just have to be a wholly different deck now, which is good. Also the shift to 5 mana wrecks Expired Merchant consistency on Soul Barrage so the deck will simply have no choice but to play fair, for now. The deck might just shift to a more board-centric version with Tiny Knight of Evil, and will obviously drop down the tiers like a brick, but it might not become strictly unplayable.
Now one card that I would definitely have liked to see nerfed is Illuminate cause...I'm still not sure how they thought they could get away with printing that card. As a reminder for the old timers, there was a time, a quite long stretch of time in fact, when Innervate used to give 2 mana crystals. It was busted, it got nerfed. We had Lightning Bloom, which was old Innervate but came at the cost of overload. It was kinda busted, it got removed from the game (no, Lightning Bloom does not exist, you can't convince me otherwise). Illuminate is BETTER unnerfed Innervate for spells. Not just better current Innervate for spells, better UNNERFED Innervate. How is it ok for Priests to play Shadow Essence for 3 mana? How is it ok for them to play Idol of Y'Shaarj on turn 4 (after a Palm Reading, which itself is also kinda busted). Priest is not the ramp class and they're cheating mana faster than Druids are in the early game! To compare, if Shadow Essence was in Druid, the Druid would have to play 2 Innervates to get it down a turn later than Priest, or would have to play a Biology Project AND an Innervate to play it on the same turn as Priest, except Priest isn't ramping the opponent in the process and isn't spending an extra card doing it. If Res Priest had to wait till turn 5 to get their Shadow Essence, it'd be pretty damn annoying for anything that isn't aggro or OTK. If they're playing it on 3, sometimes even 2, they just creating non-games for every deck in the game. The brokenness of Neptulon the Tidehunter, Shadow Essence, the whole res mechanic, that's one thing and a more complex issue to address. But how has Illuminate not been touched at all if they're trying to fix Wild play patterns?
I didn't say it's beyond repair. I just have doubts this "internal wild summit" will bring about the changes required to bring the mode back to what it used to be, where all of combo, control, aggro and midrange were viable in some fashion (this was pretty much before they unnerfed Raza). But as it stands it's not unplayably broken either, there's just certain types of decks that are much more favoured to succeed (generally those that take the initiative by ending the game fast, either through aggression or an OTK). If you want to play, say, value based control, you can, but you have to accept that you're going in with a handicap, and that most of your games aren't even going to be about value, but about whether you can effectively counter the proactive opponent's gameplan.
As to why I play it, that's simple. I play it because I prefer eternal formats over rotating formats. I like being creative, having all the options to work with and I most certainly don't like the feeling of "oh, there's this new tool I can add to my toolbox, too bad I can no longer use all the other tools required to make it work". If they release new Silver Hand Paladin cards, I want to make use of them in a full on Silver Hand Paladin deck, not some bastardised version of it that uses the 6 Silver Hand cards currently in the format and fills the rest with some mediocre garbage cause Paladin doesn't have anything better to play that year. I like to play with a full theme and synergy, not a package of 6-10 cards that support my archetype while the rest of my deck feels like I'm playing Arena. If they were to completely change the mode into a rotating one, people like me would probably just quit the game, cause the idea of "here! play your favourite card game! now with fewer cards!" sounds like an outright castration of creativity.
I don't have high hopes. Wild is the only constructed format I play but it's far from a healthy one. It's burdened by issues and cards that do too much for too little that have been stacking up and up since around Scholomance without being addressed. If you were to nerf all of the best decks in the format quite brutally today, there'd be a new batch of similarly broken or uniteractive decks tomorrow because there's a lot of broken shit in the format that's just being held down by what's currently strong. The devs would have to take a holistic approach and address a lot of stuff from as far as 3 years back to bring the format back in check. Cause as it stands, the format is, and has been for quite a while, extremely polarized. You got busted uninteractive OTKs and combos, and you've got aggro decks trying to kill those OTKs before they go off. Nothing else is left. Control is dead (Shudder Shaman being the exception cause they infinitely lock aggro out of the game and have an utterly busted Murloc package holding them afloat). Midrange is dead. They have been for years.
Obviously etarnal formats will end up stacking up in power over time to create some pretty nutty play patterns, but in a game like Hearthstone where reactivity isn't nearly what it is in something like MtG, the format can't simply correct itself through proper teching (forget sideboarding, too). All the initiative is in the hands of the player who's turn it is, so when your Druid opponent starts slinging 45 mana worth of stuff because of Floop's Gloop + Flipper Friends + Celestial Alignment by turn 6, there isn't shit you can do to stop them Mecha'thuning you the same turn (they can do insane shit like this and that isn't good enough for them to be tier 1). Similar stuff with Priest's turn 3 Neptulons, Discardlock's lethals from full to dead all from hand. We're in an environment where an uninteractive deck like Quest Mage doesn't seem all that bad anymore cause at least the game isn't over turn 3 or 4.
They have A LOT to address and I don't think they have the guts to take the hammer to the format in the manner it needs.
The card wasn't changed with the release of the mini-set though. And I haven't found it reported on the bugs forum (checked before I posted). Seems weird coincidence.
Really hard to assess how the game will play out with the removal of poisonous, but my early feelings about individual minion types:
Beasts: no more token start with Beasts in the game, cause Alley Cat is gone. With the removal of Goldrinn, Frogger tokens is now pretty much the only way to play Beasts, which is a shame, it means less variety. Beasts no longer have cleave but with the removal of Goldrinn that wouldn't have done anything unless you're really going nuts on the Felstomping (which has generally been a bad way to play the tribe). Not sure the whole Octosari thing is gonna float, but I guess I'm just too skeptical about One Big Giant Idiot playstyles, without poisonous in that might just work and Rivendare can always double dip on it if he doesn't get blown up early. I assume if you give Octo Reborn the summoned tokens still start huge and don't reset to basic size. I have absolutely no clue what Rylak Metalhead is supposed to achieve in beasts. There are barely any battlecries there, none of the minions with battlecry want to stay in your band (Bonemare, Rattler) and some are actively detrimental if triggered on the wrong thing (like having Bonemare taunt your Felstomper). Granted, since the Metalhead has taunt, if you give it reborn you are pretty much guaranteed to get two triggers on some battlecries, I'm just not sure what battlecries those are supposed to be. Maybe you splash it into murlocs or do something funky with Felemental? In beasts it seems out of place.
Murlocs: I...like...the fuck? With the removal of Toxfin, Swolefin, Seafood Slinger and Felfin Navigator, battlecry Murlocs feel kinda gutted. Some of the good cards that made you want to get Primalfin are gone and there are a whole lot more bad discovers without battlecry. That combined with the fact Murkeye didn't get unnerfed means battlecry Murlocs just tanked HARD. With the return of Honcho, the new Upbeat guy and the presence of Coldlight Seer Murlocs can stack up a lot of health but attack will be an issue. There's no more Warleader for earlygame safety, there's no way to grant Poisonous or Venomous on a Battlecry, and with Poisonous gone your big butt Murlocs may get one kill off of Venomous but then you'd want them to have some attack to work with afterwards and yet Bagurgle is currently the only way to grant your Murlocs any attack. This makes them feel pretty toothless. And the handbuff stuff...I...I don't even know. When is the last time we've been able to just waste gold sitting with minions in our hand so we can capitalise on them later? I can't recall that ever being the case. Now Bream Counter wants you to do just that and Bassgill rewards you for it, sure. But are you telling me we have to hold out for Scourfin to get any attack on our Murlocs before tier 5? That seems wishful. It feels to me like Murlocs are gonna be a lot about a bunch of supporting cast with some shopping phase effects and not a lot to show in combat, and then there's gonna be a bunch of giant morons like Bream Counter in hand, the new tier 6 that nabs its stats and a Magmaloc that you incidentally got to mediocre size along the way. Really hard to judge if this is gonna fly.
Dragons: all forms of firebreathing are gone so Divine Shields are again a thing against dragons. On the opposite end the Divine Shield-buffing dragon on 5 is gone so that makes Divine Shields on dragons and mechs less of a threat. The tier 3 attack buffer is gone but the Low-Flier just seems like a better version of it and if you have Stormbringer...hoooboy. I would say that makes the new Drakkari Enchanter an interesting inclusion in dragons, except Razorgore is gone...again...so probably less so. Otherwise, Dragons don't seem to have lost much and Tarecgosa is back on 3 so yay for them. The tier 1 Dragon generator seems kinda scary in terms of both board power and economy. Dragons might be able to power level pretty fast with that thing, which could get nutty. Oh and Sanctum Rester is simultaneously going to be responsible for absolutely terrifying blowouts when discovered off of an early triple on tier 4, while also being possibly the worst tier 5 card in the game cause...what the fuck are you supposed to do with that thing after like turn 10? You're not gonna be keeping it for your tarecgosas instead of Promodrakes. Maybe a filler before you find more Tarecgosas and Drakes?
Lelementals: No more Party Elemental, Garr (again?!), Rag or Master of Realities so the whole Elemental spamming thing with Magmaloc is gone. No more Lightspawn but Dancing Barnstormer just seems like a better Lightspawn that doesn't force stupid token shenanigans and doesn't turn off the moment you replace your board with big elementals. Seems like an overall buff to elementals to me, even though they lost their Mega-Windfury blowout against beasts and scam mech shenanigans. The Gusty Trumpeter seems like an absolutely atrocious card but the fact it can be tripled with the Elemental of Surprise means you can make it potentially huge with Divine Shield and then it just slots kinda nicely into the whole Nomi + Recycling Wraith thing. And the new Rock Rock seems on the whole like a better Rag (more stat gain overall regardless of minion tier) though a tier higher. Also no Gentle Djinni anymore. What a fall from grace. Broke the fucking game on release, now goes out with a whimper cause nobody even uses it in their Mental builds anymore. Oh, and the removal of Ball of Minions meganukes Nomi highrolls.
Nagas: Shoal Commander replaced with arguably better versions a tier higher and a tier lower (Reef Riffer, Deep Blue Crooner). Eventide Brute now more accessible for earlier permascaling, which is scary. Surprised Snail Cavalry survived the massacre, especially with the Deep Sea Angler buff, feels like the big butt aspect is pretty covered already. Not sure about Silent Swimmer, the Stealth doesn't seem to have much of a purpose other than the fact that it can protect your Lava Lurkers from Leeroys and Venom if you've taunted it early on. But it means you'd have to attack late with your Lava Lurker, which will generally be your biggest minion. Also, no more Windfury for Nagas which is a pretty damn massive nerf against deathrattle builds like Beasts, Undead or Mech. Hell it's probably a pretty big nerf against Nadina Dragons as well. Doesn't seem like much but I think Nagas just got pretty nerfed. Oh, also no Greta but that seems a bigger deal for Pirates...although...nah, Nagas could get good mileage out of that too, so that's another nerf.
Undead: Why are Undead suddenly stealing copies of enemy minions? I get it, we're digging up graves or something (not sure how it connects to the card flavour) but what are Undead gonna do with that shit? The tier 1 Gnoll carry is gone. The Reborn flavour is getting amped up with Xylobones but not sure how far that's gonna go, you'd need a lot of permanent attack buffing for that to be worth anything. In fact I'd wager the removal of Jelly Belly, as bad as it was, a tier earlier has more overall impact on the tribe's performance than the introduction of this guy, cause lategame you'd much rather just have Abom anyway. Soulsplitter on the Venomous Undead Murloc is the new and much worsened Rattler + Maexxna scam. Taking up two slots on your board to get exactly two poison hits in...doesn't feel right. Well, actually it feels very right, cause screw the scam. Overall, seems like Undead came out on top, they lost some of the unnecessary fat, gained a little bit more unnecessary fat here and there, but the majority of the core stayed the same.
Pirates: Ok, on the plus side, you no longer need to rent a second heart as a backup when playing full on Pirates, cause no more APM insanity. There's now a hard cap on how much you have to do per turn to play Pirates. On the other hand I'm not sure about the replacements. So a golden Record Smuggler can give us up to 14 extra gold. Golden Hoggar generally gave more, though potentially with less consistency, would be my guess. Issue is, we no longer have Southsea Strongarm to catapult ourselves forward in power after a good Pirate turn, there's no more free buffs off of a ball of minions and we no longer have Greta to instagold some of our boys (affects Nagas too but seemed bigger for Pirates). So to get our engine going we need to find a Record Smuggler and then either find another one and play it, or find another one and keep it in hand, find the Upbeat guy to gold the Smuggler and then the golden Smuggler doesn't do anything until the start of the next turn...seems a lot harder to put the thing together, and that's already been a problem for Pirates. Though, admittedly, making our Pirates golden in hand gives us discovers on the "triple" we play, so that's a plus, especially since the tier 6 pirate (the only one Pirates get, which is weird) seems to be pretty important. Removal of Salty Looter drops some scaling, but then we gain Gunpowder Courier on the same tier (which together with Cannoneer makes for some pretty glassy pirates) and Underhanded Dealer a tier higher, which has worse stats to start but I think it grows faster (not sure if it gains +1/+1 per gold you gain, or +1/+1 whenever you gain any gold). To make up for the glass cannon side, we got the Lovesick chick on 4 to buff health individually, but Southsea Strongarm seemed more well rounded. On the other hand, Lovesick works off of just any gold spent, while Strongarm required us to already be running Hoggar Pirates to do anything, so it's probably a buff overall. But the big thing...Pirates now have an actual effect on them!! Pirates have cleave instead of beasts! Yay! For the record, the last time Pirates had an effect was when Seabreaker Goliath was in the game (windfury + overkill). With the addition of cleave, all that glass cannon buffing makes a lot more sense for pirates and it's pretty flavourful that pirates would play aggresive. On the other hand, Eliza is gone so there go any remnants of the Pirate deathrattle scam or early blowouts off of a lucky triple on 5 on an existing Pirate board. Oh and removal of Goldgrubber potentially nerfs menagerie but...oh we'll get to that.
Demons: Soul Rewinder is an absolute must have if you're doing anything with demons other than Felbat + tavernbuffing. Pretty much nothing in Demons happens prior to tier 6 without Rewinder. 7 other Demon cards now either require you to take damage or reward you for taking damage, so that's a whole build onto itself that requires Rewinder somewhere in the lineup. It looks like a helluva fun and thematic way to play demons though. Kinda wish they put Floating Watcher back in for nostalgia, Other than that, not sure why the token Demons stayed in the game. Bigfernal is gone, as is Soul Juggler (thank god), Impatient Doomsayer, and Kathranatir. The only reward remaining for demon tokens is Felstomper which...lol. They buffed Annihilan in theory but nerfed it in practice cause now Demon builds will not be sacrificing health to play their game cause of Rewinder. It's a poor man's substitute for Impulsive Trickster for menagerie. Overall seems like Demons are gonna be a lot more interesting and gonna have a lot more options. Also the fact that they don't have any effects doesn't really matter as much cause poisonous is gone.
Quilboar: Thorncaller moved down an replacing Roadboar is a buff, but the loss of Bristleback Brute hurts the early game. Agamaggan replaced by two permanent buffs frees up board space on one hand but pulls Quilboar in a strange direction on the other. One buff effect is on a deathrattle, the other on a battlecry. We're not gonna use both a Brann and a Rivendare so probably those minions are not gonna be as effective as, say, an Anub'arak is for Undead that already benefit from Deathrattles on other things. The rest of the stuff seems pretty much the same or not particularly noteworthy (yeah the tier 5 will be a decent big dumb idiot but Bristleback Brute already did that two tiers earlier) but the new Tier 6 is a damn joke. I'd rather they keep the Darkgaze Elder in so Quilboar menagerie has more to work off of. Now Aggem is kinda stuck with just spamming Quilboar with Prophets of the Boar on the board (or Scrapsmiths, if you're nuts). Removal of Groundshaker eliminates some midrange blowouts so that's a positive. Overall full on Quilboar seem better off but Quilboar menagerie lost some options.
Mechs: So much cool stuff here. Greasebot and Mecherel are gone, so on one hand a big sad and on the other a big yay (I'll let you guess which one goes where). But the magnetic shit is so cool now. Pretty much all magnetics are now a must buy, except it's not immediately very gold efficient, so it's an investment now for payoff later (if you find the tier 5 magnetize buffer, if you get the gold generating or growing magnetizer, etc.). On the other hand, starting to magnetise late is also good cause then you can double dip off of the tier 6. Very cool stuff. And the mech deathrattle scam is still intact (Kangor is still in, it's just included in neutrals and not mechs for some reason). It's a shame about the whole divine shield build with the dragon and Grease bot, but having Divine Shields is kinda payoff enough in itself so playing off of that any further probably didn't seem worth it when cooler stuff could be included in its place. Also, we will no longer curse the presence of Mechs in the game alongside murlocs cause while there is Mistake in place of Ball of Minions, there is no more divine shield + poison to be had. At worst we got Selfless + Venomous, which is a very different story.
Neutral: Menagerie is dead but not really. The inclusion of Drakkari Enchanter (which I'm surprised didn't happen ages ago) makes Lightfang better (along with bunch of other stuff like The Walking Fort, Magmaloc, Rag (the hero)...not sure how it works with Patient Scout and all the upbeat guys). But with Teamaster gone the high end on Menageries has taaaaanked. And Quilboar menagerie is now more limited in options too. Overall seems like menagerie has powered down but seemingly so have some of the other builds, so maybe it's balanced? The tier 4 Upbeat dude, especially in multiples, could make some hilarious things happen with Fireworks Fanatics and will be a really good find for heroes with early access to high tier minions (like Galakrond or Toki). As long as they can stay alive they can potentially print a golden tier 6 before other players even get their first. Not sure about the Boogie Monster, it can theoretically slot into anything but if it only goes up and never goes down, you'll eventually get stuck on having to keep buying tier 6 minions to get any buffs and then the build kinda turns off. Otherwise it could be a decent-ish replacement for Teamaster, except it gives you no reason to actually run menagerie. So it might just become a thing you slot into your complete build as minion number 6 and then you just cycle through the tiers to buff what you already have. Maybe. The downside is, in that respect it kinda works like a non-tribal Kalecgos, except Kalecgos has the benefit of being in the same tribe as Nadina. With no tribal association I'm not sure Boogey Monster has the payoffs it needs. Other than that, a bunch of new battlecries and deathrattles have been added across the tribes, with a bunch of Deathrattle Murlocs and Battlecry Demons and Deathrattle + Battlecry Quilboar. It's gonna be a lot harder to decide whether or not Brann and Titus are a good keep off of an unlucky triple cause a lot more tribes will be able to find some use for them. Might make for a whole mess of weirdass builds, or it might just end up being a failed experiment, we'll see. And yes, the bastards did make sure Mantid Queen can still become a goddamn 2 for 1 cause now it can get reborn instead of divine shield. Fuck. But at least Tavern Tipper is gone! Screw that card. Goddamn midrange players sitting on tier 2 by 8 gold with 2 Tippers in play...
DK is supposed to be balanced around the fact they have to sacrifice access to the majority of DK cards in favour of having access to more specific powerful rewards. In that way, they're supposed to be somewhat predictable and be very defined in what they can and can't do. So you play against a Frost DK and being aware of how they play, you use your boardclears for the little stuff to mitigate incoming damage cause they won't be playing for board lategame anyway. And then they play two Scourges back to back because of discovers and that whole philosophy crumbles.
Though they have not been top of the meta or anything, I've seen so many control DKs in Wild just cramming in literally every discover card that exists just to abuse stuff outside of their runes. Like chain-discovering Patchwerks when they're triple Frost and winning a combo matchup they have no business winning. Or getting multiples of Blood Boil against a proactive opponent. That shit violates the entire philosophy of DK's design. Let them laser focus on what they do best and prohibit their access to stuff they're not supposed to be able to do at all.
Cause what is the purpose of this triple rune ban, really? Which cards are we super scared of DKs discovering in multiples? Sure there's Mograine, Vampiric Blood and Soulstealer. But as far as I see it, it's pretty much just Frostwyrm's Fury that really drives people up the wall. So just...nerf it? It's not like Snowfall Guardian is a fun and interactive card to play against (I play Wild, I should know...fucking Shudderwock Shamans). Snowfall for 1 extra mana with 5 damage battlecry isn't any more fun, let alone in a rune combination that has so much out of hand face damage.
I'm not particularly attached to the ability to spam Mograines or anything. By all means, ban triple rune cards if you don't want to balance them properly. But if they design DK to be hyper-focused and restrictive in deck building, the least they can do is enforce that restriction. This was their opportunity to do so.
I was really hoping they'd do the DK change properly and make it so we can't discover cards outside of our rune combinations. I get that it would probably power boost DK in Standard for now with how few cards there are but it feels really stupid when your triple Blood DK opponent starts freezing your board with Frost spells or plays The Scourge and has a massive board all of a sudden. As the card pool expands the problem for Standard would fix itself, they'd just have to wait to release in the second expansion rather than now.
I'm more shocked (heh) that they plan to buff Lightning Storm. One-sided 3 damage for 5 total mana is perfectly reasonable. Yeah Hellfire's been buffed to 3 but it blows up your stuff as well and hits your face which is a big deal for Warlock. If they make Lightning Storm overload 1 it's gonna be one of the best basic board clears in the game. Though maybe that might mean they'll finally fix Flurgl + Tox in Wild so that Shaman doesn't have that stupidass crutch holding it aloft for all eternity and has to actually play fair for once.
You kinda forgot to mention all the Battlegrounds changes there.
Aaaaand Patron Warriors...EVERYWHERE!
So previously The Demon Seed required 6+7+8 (21) damage taken, now it requires 30, nearly 50% more. That's a nerf so girthy even that brokenass card probably can't withstand it. Good, better it stay a meme for the enthusiasts rather than what it used to be.
Questline Hunter may be back on the menu with the unnerf to Dragonbane Shot. The deck's surprisingly not all that awful even after the questline got nerfed and this should be a big help.
Overload Shaman isn't getting too much good new ammo in the next expansion (the deal 5 heal 5 for 2 if overloaded does look nice) so the unnerf probably won't do much.
Questline Mage and Questline DH will likely remain meh cause the reward in Mage wasn't much of an issue for wild, it was the requirement of 9 typed spells cast. DH questline was a meme before the nerf, nothing's changed for the better.
The Warrior stuff is curious. The War Axe unnerf brings with it the warm, cinnamon-scented smell of the golden Control Warrior days when this thing popped down on turn 2 and for two turns the opponent couldn't muster any aggression without it getting instantly bonked off the board. But the pace at which boards develop has sped up so much since those days I don't think the Axe is even gonna get a wistful look in the collection.
Warsong on the other hand, is interesting. We've got more ways to damage our own shit than when Warsong was in its prime (particularly the Warrior location) and we've got To the Front! to get stuff down cheaper, so a Worgen combo that used to take 6 mana just for the Worgen + Warsong can now cost 4 mana. That gives Warrior a lot more space for stuff like Rampage. Also, Frothing Berserker is still around and now we've got Risky Skipper to combo it with and I believe a Frothing, even a big one, copied by Bloodsworn Mercenary will still have Charge if Warsong gave it to the original, so there might be some solid 28 to face type of chonking going down (To the Front + Warsong + Skipper + Frothing + Bloodsworn is only 6 mana and Warrior can draw pretty fast these days).
The rest of the stuff shouldn't matter too much, maybe Pirate Rogues will start adding Cold Blood since they always seem to feel they need to get as degenerate as they can. Oh, nvm, Conviction in Odd Pally, Call to Arms Pally or the new Divine Shield pally is making me shit my pants.
Smells like something I'm going to double with Vargoth till I turn blue in the face. Is it overkill? Yes. Am I gonna do it anyway? You betcha.
The only good card among what's been revealed for Warrior seems to be the 1/3 armor booster. With Armorsmith (in Wild since it drops out of Standard) and any Whirlwind-like effect (like Risky Skipper) you can gain a ridiculous amount of armor. Not sure how that's going to help Warrior win, but it's a start. Voone joins Hogger as one of those legendary minions that has multiple versions and all of them suck.
Oh man! Warrior top tier after this exp...no, sorry, couldn't even finish the joke. I would say what they're trying to do with Warrior this expansion is not going to work but I'm honestly not even sure what it is they're trying to do. They're pushing menagerie but can't decide on the playstyle. You got soloist expecting you to have no board, Roaring Applause expecting you to have a wide board and Voone expecting you to have a hand full of gas in a board-centric deck. Are we go wide aggro, are we big chonker dropping menagerie, are we lategame value deck? Pick one.
Ok now THIS is an interesting package of cards for Wild! The armor + attack gain for Druid is incredible, plus the draw on top...umpfh, can't wait to try that out in Questline Druid. I do have the inkling this stuff is gonna get nerfed from orbit for the sake of Standard though, it seems incredibly unfun to play against. The Hunter stuff seems fun but Hunter doesn't have good enough ways to cheat or discount mana to be able to set up like a big beast Recruit package finishing with a Stranglethorn Heart, kinda like an imitation of Anyfin OTK Pally. Maybe someday.
That's exactly what I'm doing. I look at the overheal cards they've revealed so far and I can honestly say I wouldn't want to play a single one of them without having the perfect heal combo piece already prepped. In some cases that combo piece doesn't even exist currently. Even looking at the best case scenario, let's say I have a Circle of Healing in my mitts. That's not even enough to overheal Heartbreaker Hedanis. It summons a free 4/4 with Heartthrob, ey, that ain't bad! In this very specific combination. Anything less than Circle and, well, stick Gift of the Naaru alongside it and do the math. Let's be generous and assume you're not helping your opponent by healing their stuff, BTW, which both Gift and Circle do. With Gift you've paid 4 mana for 5/8 worth of stats for two cards. Didn't Silence Priests use to make 3 mana 4/8s for 2 cards through Humongous Razorleaf? How far did that get them? And that was back in Un'goro, we've moved forward a lot in power level. Or let's say that you have the heal location they revealed. Well, sure, you generate a 3/3 alongside your 3 drop on turn 3. But you must have spent the mana to get the location down on turn 1. Your opponent didn't. Their 1 drop in the form of Filletfighter just trades into your glorious 3/3 you got as payoff and what exactly did you achieve? Setting up your overheal just put you behind on the board so that the overheal tempo you were supposed to get is negated. Then there's Dreamboat. Just how many minions do they think Priests can stick? If this lands as a 2 mana 2/3 with heal on your 1 drop, that's a Neferset Ritualist you just put in your deck. Welcome to Arena gaming I guess.
None of this sounds like an appealing way to play the game. And even if there's just an absolute baller heal card we haven't seen yet, let's say 2 mana heal a minion for 6, then 4, then 2. That gives you a ton of stats with Heartthrob and does a bunch of clear or face damage with Hearbreaker Hedanis. How are you gonna ensure you get those cards together? Cause drawing isn't Priest's strong suit. In fact one of Priests main weaknesses has always been that they'd get stuck with a situational card in hand that they couldn't use cause they were missing the other half needed to make it do miracles. There's a reason Shamans run Firemancer Flurgl + Toxfin in almost everything but Priests never ran Wave of Apathy + Shadow Word: Horror. And that was in control decks. Now you're trying to build a proactive, board-centric Priest with these requirements. You can't spend your mana on tutoring the pieces for your deck to actually work if you intend to retain board presence. That's a solution for control and combo decks, but not zoo or aggro.
I've tried to build board-centric Priests A LOT in the past, expansion after expansion, for years. I think I finally stopped some time around Alterac Valley. It never worked, because Priest never had the tools to compete with other board-oriented decks, nor was it aggressive enough to pressure control or combo decks nor did it have the consistency of draw/tutoring to ensure they don't get stuck with big-butt minions but no buffs or a hand full of buffs but no board presence. Overheal, to me, is just the latest addition to the same failing pattern. Again, I'd be happy to be wrong. Don't think I will be though.
I'm gonna call it now, and I'd be happy the be wrong, but I think overheal will be a failure and Priest will remain a class without a keyword. Overheal only does something IF you have minons that stick around on the board and IF you have a way and the mana to not just heal them but overheal them. That's a lot of fucking ifs. You play against a control deck that just wipes anything you play and overheal does what exactly? You play against an aggro or zoo deck that's just consistently faster on the board than you are (and you're a Priest so EVERYBODY is faster than you) and there will be nothing on the board to heal cause you can't get a foothold. Every overheal minion will be coming in with an extra tax of either mana so you can overheal it the moment it hits play, or with the requirement of an extra card already on the board that heals it for you. I suspect a good portion of overheal gameplay will be sitting with an empty board and a bunch of heal effects in hand, or with a board of some low impact overheal minions with just your hero power to heal them, or with not enough healing to overheal them if your opponent is contesting you. As much as I'd like board centric Priest to be a real thing, the class is simply too oppressive when that works (cause they just value trade into everything and heal it up so no board presence was lost) and so they've been made intentionally fairly slow and low-impact in developing their board outside of Aggro Shadow Priest.
This is weird. Normally they try to lead with the good stuff and leave the neutral dump for last. Now they're essentially leading with it as if these are cards we're meant to be excited about. Either they're powering the game down, which is fine by me, or the set has little to offer, or there's something utterly broken coming up.
It is somewhere around tier 2, yeah. The issue isn't really that much in its power rating but more its popularity and its play pattern. Play pattern in particular is something they've nerfed even average decks for and Res Priest is just absolutely toxic in that regard, has been for quite a while now and yet hasn't been touched at all. It is also EVERYWHERE. I'm not at the tippity top of MMR but I get legend every month and usually I hit legend at around the 300-600 range (and then plummet as I play fun decks after the climb). So the meta I see isn't the most cutthroat and optimised to perfection, but still extremely competitive. In my laddering last month, I've met exactly 2 Quest Mages in all, and that deck got nerfed. Meanwhile, 25 % of my matchups were Res Priests. They camp at Diamond 5-3, they camp at mid-legend. If you're climbing you have to accept the fact 25 % of your games will be decided entirely by how hard the Priest will highroll you, cause there's nothing you can do to stop that. They either just fold cause they drew bad or you explode by turn 5. And the latter happens a lot more often due to their tutoring consistency.
I don't think I've ever laughed this hard at patch notes, for any game, ever. I expected disappointment as they give Parrot, Pillager and Cataclysm a mild slap on the wrist as they tend to do, and they fucking ANNIHILATED them. Pillager in particular has just evaporated from every card collection on the planet cause who'd play that pile of crap now? Honestly, I'd have probably preferred a hit to Scabbs Cutterbutter cause I don't see the Spirit of the Shark + Scabbs interaction leading to anything good in the future, but I guess for now this utter deletion will suffice. As for Parrot, I think that's a great change. It will work just fine for some fun Big Spell Mage shenanigans and there's still hope for Quest Mage to at least be playable in some form with Giants like it was before Parrot's introduction. There are still ways to get some mileage out of Time Warp through Archmage Vargoth or Queen Azshara, and the ways to complete the quest are still as lightning-fast as before, so I'm sure Quest Mage enthusiasts will still find a way to make that deck operate in some capacity at, say, tier 3 or 4. Cataclysm nerf is actually quite elegant, cause the card itself is considerably more playable outside of discard now, and some forms of discard miiight still consider playing it, it'll just have to be a wholly different deck now, which is good. Also the shift to 5 mana wrecks Expired Merchant consistency on Soul Barrage so the deck will simply have no choice but to play fair, for now. The deck might just shift to a more board-centric version with Tiny Knight of Evil, and will obviously drop down the tiers like a brick, but it might not become strictly unplayable.
Now one card that I would definitely have liked to see nerfed is Illuminate cause...I'm still not sure how they thought they could get away with printing that card. As a reminder for the old timers, there was a time, a quite long stretch of time in fact, when Innervate used to give 2 mana crystals. It was busted, it got nerfed. We had Lightning Bloom, which was old Innervate but came at the cost of overload. It was kinda busted, it got removed from the game (no, Lightning Bloom does not exist, you can't convince me otherwise). Illuminate is BETTER unnerfed Innervate for spells. Not just better current Innervate for spells, better UNNERFED Innervate. How is it ok for Priests to play Shadow Essence for 3 mana? How is it ok for them to play Idol of Y'Shaarj on turn 4 (after a Palm Reading, which itself is also kinda busted). Priest is not the ramp class and they're cheating mana faster than Druids are in the early game! To compare, if Shadow Essence was in Druid, the Druid would have to play 2 Innervates to get it down a turn later than Priest, or would have to play a Biology Project AND an Innervate to play it on the same turn as Priest, except Priest isn't ramping the opponent in the process and isn't spending an extra card doing it. If Res Priest had to wait till turn 5 to get their Shadow Essence, it'd be pretty damn annoying for anything that isn't aggro or OTK. If they're playing it on 3, sometimes even 2, they just creating non-games for every deck in the game. The brokenness of Neptulon the Tidehunter, Shadow Essence, the whole res mechanic, that's one thing and a more complex issue to address. But how has Illuminate not been touched at all if they're trying to fix Wild play patterns?
I didn't say it's beyond repair. I just have doubts this "internal wild summit" will bring about the changes required to bring the mode back to what it used to be, where all of combo, control, aggro and midrange were viable in some fashion (this was pretty much before they unnerfed Raza). But as it stands it's not unplayably broken either, there's just certain types of decks that are much more favoured to succeed (generally those that take the initiative by ending the game fast, either through aggression or an OTK). If you want to play, say, value based control, you can, but you have to accept that you're going in with a handicap, and that most of your games aren't even going to be about value, but about whether you can effectively counter the proactive opponent's gameplan.
As to why I play it, that's simple. I play it because I prefer eternal formats over rotating formats. I like being creative, having all the options to work with and I most certainly don't like the feeling of "oh, there's this new tool I can add to my toolbox, too bad I can no longer use all the other tools required to make it work". If they release new Silver Hand Paladin cards, I want to make use of them in a full on Silver Hand Paladin deck, not some bastardised version of it that uses the 6 Silver Hand cards currently in the format and fills the rest with some mediocre garbage cause Paladin doesn't have anything better to play that year. I like to play with a full theme and synergy, not a package of 6-10 cards that support my archetype while the rest of my deck feels like I'm playing Arena. If they were to completely change the mode into a rotating one, people like me would probably just quit the game, cause the idea of "here! play your favourite card game! now with fewer cards!" sounds like an outright castration of creativity.
I don't have high hopes. Wild is the only constructed format I play but it's far from a healthy one. It's burdened by issues and cards that do too much for too little that have been stacking up and up since around Scholomance without being addressed. If you were to nerf all of the best decks in the format quite brutally today, there'd be a new batch of similarly broken or uniteractive decks tomorrow because there's a lot of broken shit in the format that's just being held down by what's currently strong. The devs would have to take a holistic approach and address a lot of stuff from as far as 3 years back to bring the format back in check. Cause as it stands, the format is, and has been for quite a while, extremely polarized. You got busted uninteractive OTKs and combos, and you've got aggro decks trying to kill those OTKs before they go off. Nothing else is left. Control is dead (Shudder Shaman being the exception cause they infinitely lock aggro out of the game and have an utterly busted Murloc package holding them afloat). Midrange is dead. They have been for years.
Obviously etarnal formats will end up stacking up in power over time to create some pretty nutty play patterns, but in a game like Hearthstone where reactivity isn't nearly what it is in something like MtG, the format can't simply correct itself through proper teching (forget sideboarding, too). All the initiative is in the hands of the player who's turn it is, so when your Druid opponent starts slinging 45 mana worth of stuff because of Floop's Gloop + Flipper Friends + Celestial Alignment by turn 6, there isn't shit you can do to stop them Mecha'thuning you the same turn (they can do insane shit like this and that isn't good enough for them to be tier 1). Similar stuff with Priest's turn 3 Neptulons, Discardlock's lethals from full to dead all from hand. We're in an environment where an uninteractive deck like Quest Mage doesn't seem all that bad anymore cause at least the game isn't over turn 3 or 4.
They have A LOT to address and I don't think they have the guts to take the hammer to the format in the manner it needs.
The card wasn't changed with the release of the mini-set though. And I haven't found it reported on the bugs forum (checked before I posted). Seems weird coincidence.
Man they're fast, I reported that Vengeful Walloper bug yesterday and it's already fixed.