I can recall playing against a fair number of Mistwraith decks shortly after the Kalista rework. I don't know if those decks are still at all popular, but they were already pretty good thanks to the fact that Shadow Isles had been such a strong region for so much of the game's existence, which in turn made playing a mostly or entirely SI deck very easy to do. In my mind, that was always the funny thing about a card like Wraithcaller. It generates a lot of stats for its cost, and it's allowed to do that because the Allegiance keyword is supposed to be something of a drawback - you're getting a powerful effect by trading away access to some second region (or splashing a second region but risking a misfire). But for SI, that really hasn't been a drawback at all.
Risen Mists seems like a really potent finisher for a deck like that - in the late game, summon one or two massive fearsome units at burst speed (potentially buffing your board at the same time) and then open attack. Because the Allegiance "penalty" is not a uniform offset of a card's power level, Wraithcaller is probably a little too good for what it's supposed to be. If this deck becomes really strong, that's the first place I'd expect to see a nerf.
More generally, though, it seems like Allegiance is not something Riot has a great handle on. They've struggled with balancing Basilisk Rider and Vanguard Bannerman, and other Allegiance cards like Kinkou Wayfinder and Yordle Grifter have been a big part of meta decks from time to time. The bonus effects probably need to be a bit more narrow to ensure they aren't so easily abused.
The biggest problem with Faces of the Old Ones isn't the weak body, it's that Behold is kind of impossible for these early game synergies. I didn't feel like doing the actual math with a hyper-geometric calculator, so I put together a little simulator that tries to play Faces of the Old Ones on curve by hard-mulliganing for it and a Behold trigger, then drawing a couple of cards naturally.
Even without worrying about the trigger, you already have kind of meh odds of getting this out on curve - something like 55%. If you want proc the effect most of the time you play it on curve, you'll need something like nine or ten 8-cost or higher cards in your deck. Even the Corina Control decks - perhaps the only really successful true control deck in LoR - never really ran more than six cards that would fit that bill. And at only six triggers, you're looking at getting this ramp on curve in only about 44% of games. Now add in the fact that this ramp is too slow to get that 8-drop out much earlier than expected, and too vulnerable to even make sure you maintain your mana advantage, and you've got a really awful card.
Maybe Riot gamed this all out and knows what they're doing with this archetype, but right now it seems crazy weak, with Faces of the Old Ones as the weakest card in the bunch.
In my various Poro experiments, the card draw and elusive offered by P&Z and Daring Poro were the most effective pair for the Freljord (even though Poros were still pretty bad...I haven't played seriously in a while, so maybe they're more reasonable since the Braum/Aurora/Herder buffs).
Clearly this is a good card in a deck that can use the Poros. Hopefully it's bad in most other decks, since it seems like a card that could is either trash or easily abused in less meme-y decks.
A unit with Challenger + Quick Attack is basically a 0 for 1 removal card. That pair of keywords isn't broken today because getting a unit with both Challenger and Quick Attack typically requires spending a card on top of the body (e.g. Sonic Wave or Rush), making it a 1 for 1 trade every time. Since your nightfall cards aren't being destroyed to give Diana her buff, she will be super broken in match-ups where your opponent lacks 3 damage removal spells.
@FortyDust, if they include enough ways to trigger Diana's effect on open attack, Nightfall isn't working properly as a mechanic. Getting a Nightfall effect and open attacking is probably okay in a small percentage of games (after all, you certainly want to feel like your champion is powerful), but the mechanic needs to really force players to make hard choices about open attacking or it's not going to make for fun play patterns. It does seem to be possible to do with Diana's signature spell - Pale Cascade - but so far that's the only burst speed Nightfall spell.
Yeah, for a game that has only been officially released for the last ~8 months, it already feels like they've added a ton of stuff. Rotations are going to be really important, and I agree that due to the mechanical constraints of different champion cards as well as the sheer number of regions, that will be very difficult for them to do well. Ultimately they'll probably end up rotation champions as well as their supporting cards, though it's hard to tell how they'll pick them. Some are obvious (e.g. all the Nightfall cards for Diana and Nocturne), but some are less obvious (e.g. you could remove various Freeze effects with Ashe, but that strikes at the core identity of Freljord). Honestly, I think they probably should be thinking about rotating regions too (which only makes the problem much harder). But then someone who really loves a specific region or champion might lose interest in the game.
This gets at the core of what I was talking about in my "what's their plan?" thread. They've created a huge, complex mess underneath this otherwise intriguing (and in some ways very novel) card game, and their solution to the complexity seems to be "keep throwing a bunch of stuff out there and see what sticks."
On its face, Lunari Duskbringer does seem to pull the whole Nightfall deck together. But I'm still not convinced it's going to work. Given the curve of Nightfall cards we've seen so far, here's basically how you'd imagine the idealized play turn by turn:
Stygian Onlooker for early game damage before your opponent can put up a defense against Fearsome
Duskrider to finish the enemy off thanks to Nocturne's lining up fearsome attacks
Of course, the problem here is that every one of these cards needs to be the second card you play, so you need lots of cheap activators. Lunari Duskbringer is a 3-of in that deck, and can act as two activators if you draw it, but you can't rely on it alone to consistently curve out your Nightfall cards. Maybe Fading Memories helps get you over the line of this, but the core problem is still that the archetype looks like an aggro deck that plays a turn behind curve by design. You could always run the archetype with Bilgewater for access to more good cheap starting plays, but then you lose out on the valuable Targon activators.
Mayba Diana makes this all worth it, but it seems clunky regardless of Lunari Duskbringer
I just played the match two more times, and won one of those two. So now I've got a 66% win rate against Gok'amok for the day at this point. I'm not saying that to brag or be a jerk about it, but rather to emphasize that it's not just a matter of "lucking out." The whole point of the Ashes of Outland story content is to get players familiar with the fundamental play patterns of the Demon Hunter class.
Because his hero power costs 1, Gok'amok plays slower than his deck should. So unless he gets a very powerful random effect early (something crazy like Deep Freeze) you should be able to get on board early. That will help ensure your hero power's attack value is +2, which is a big deal if you're trying to trade health for board control. If you mulligan for early board control tools (e.g. Furious Felfin, Imprisoned Felmaw, Twin Slice, and Chaos Strike) you should be able to maintain control long enough to snowball into your bigger outcast effects.
Ultimately you're the aggro in the match-up, since his hero power will out-value you eventually, so you need to be pretty liberal with your health to make sure you don't lose your board, and only take the highest value trades or trades with rush minions so you can keep pushing a bit of damage to face each turn.
Riot can't really release Targon with only 2 or 3 champions and expect it to feel like a full region, so they are forced to release a lot of Targon cards in the first expansion of the set.
My concerns have less to do with releasing a lot of Targon content up front, and more to do with how little content 50% of the current regions are going to get. I spent a fair amount of my original post thinking through how many cards Targon would probably have on release of this expansion as a means of emphasizing how little was left for Demacia, P&Z, Noxus, and Bilgewater. Ultimately, I'd prefer to see a lot of Targon, and a little of everything else, followed by expansions in which each region starts to get a more even number of cards. Instead, we're getting a lot of Targon, a nearly full expansion of Freljord, SI, and Ionia, and a very tiny bit of everything else.
Quote From CursedParrot
I think once all of the regions are released there will be a much more even distribution of each region's cards across expansions in a set.
Maybe - but they're talking about releasing new regions every six months, and they've still got a bunch of regions left (assuming they don't fuse any more or create their own, they've got Bandle City, Ixtal, Shurima, and The Void). That's two years worth of content. If they don't manage the game well in that time, it could easily become irrelevant in the competitive CCG space before they hit this presumed equilibrium, so how they manage new content while adding regions is still very important.
Quote From CursedParrot
Unequal card distribution allows different regions to rotate in and out of high popularity. For example, imagine if Badgerbear and Grizzled Ranger had been released in the second expansion of a set. This would have made Demacia underpowered in the first expansion of the set, allowing other regions to be dominant for a while, and then when the second expansion launched Demacia would be really good and brought back into the meta. This would make the game feel more fresh because it wouldn't be perpetually dominated by the few best regions (for example, Ionia and Shadow Isles, or more recently Freljord), as long as the new cards are slightly better than the old ones.
I think my biggest concern here is that what you're describing sounds a lot like an artificial metagame reinforced by power creep, wherein regions with the most cards start out as the most powerful, and then "slightly better" cards enter for the lagging regions to overpower those previously buffed regions. Maybe there's a brief equilibrium at the very tail end of a set, but shortly thereafter there's another cycle with a new set.
This creates a game where, if you're a big fan of some region X, you only ever play when region X gets an expansion boost because you know that's when it will be most relevant in the metagame. And while LoR is pretty F2P friendly - which diminishes some of the negative aspects of power creep/whales - power creep still does a lot of harm to the "collection" aspect of CCGs.
Quote From CursedParrot
Also, a few cards can have a huge impact on decks. For example, Blighted Caretaker and Neverglade collector could be released as cards in an expansion where Shadow Isles doesn't receive a champion and they would significantly change what Shadow Isles decks are best. If Riot manages to be really smart about which cards they release in each expansion, I think that this system will work pretty well.
This is definitely true - a small number of cards can be what you need for an archetype to hit a critical mass of good tools and become powerful. But that doesn't mean they're setting themselves up for success, it just means their current system doesn't preclude success.
I just replayed this match to remember how it works. I think the match wants to emphasize Demon Hunter fundamentals - focusing on the super powerful outcast effects of your special ally cards, making sure you're using your health as a resource to control the board and getting the +2 attack out of your hero power, etc. You want to ensure your opening hand is a low enough curve that you can get those outcast cards positioned well.
Sometimes the random effects create ridiculous early game tempo for him, but other times they're pretty medium and stall his ability to play from his hand. Other times they can go entirely south for your opponent. So if those fundamentals don't get you over the line, just try again. In my match just now, he got a hand full of random demons, played Unlicensed Apothecary at the end of his turn, but then had another random effect summon two minions. That took a big enough chunk of his life total that the AI started to act as the control and I was able to pressure it down.
On its initial announcement, I think it was kind of hard to judge what the sets vs. expansions would look like. Riot said each region would get new cards each expansion, but they made it clear that new champions and cards would be spread out unevenly across the set. What was clear, though, was that:
The full set is going to be 169 cards
Each set today has 63 cards (except for Bilgewater, which has 62)
If Targon gets a total of 76 cards in this set, that leaves ~13 for each of the other seven regions, which works out to ~76 cards per region
At this point they've revealed 50 of the upcoming 89 cards, including five of the seven champions. So far, Targon has 21 of those cards, with two of the champions. It seems reasonable to expect the remaining two champions to be from Targon, with a new Targon champion and two other region's champions in each subsequent expansion. Each new champion typically to get about eight or nine supporting cards.
With all that in mind, it seems logical to expect that Targon will get about 30 more cards in this expansion, and then another ~10 in each subsequent expansion (one champion plus supporting cards) so that when this is all said and done, each region gets to that ~76 card total. If all this is correct, that means the remaining four regions (Bilgewater, Demacia, P&Z, and Noxus) will be left dividing up about 10 new cards in this expansion.
Obviously this is a bit of speculation, but if those numbers are all basically right, then I'm honestly a bit shocked at this approach to releasing cards. In any other CCG, I would have expected a more even distribution across existing regions (at least of the non-champion cards). Specifically in the context of Riot's announced plans, I would have expected something more like Hearthstone's adventure content (most recently, "Galakrond's Awakening") in which each region gets about the same number of cards in each set, but a lower number than in a full set. I assume the reason here is that so many of the new cards tie back to champions, so they have to be released in tandem.
Maybe others don't mind that - Targon will certainly offer a lot of new content to pair with existing regions - but it seems like a bummer for anyone who likes to play any of these (presumably) neglected regions. For example, there might be a new Ezreal deck that uses Targon Gems to trigger the OTK, or there might be a new Lux Control deck that is excited to see cards like Sunburst and Bastion. But ultimately what is most likely to come out of this first expansion for those (presumably) neglected regions is a little bit support for a lot of old play patterns. The set of tools players will have to meaningfully developed new strategies in these regions will be significantly diminished, and I think ultimately that's going to be disappointing for any player who loves one of those regions.
(There's one other possible outcome here. You can imagine seeing more of the mechanics that have already shown up - Behold, Nightfall, Daybreak, and SpellShield - as new expansions are released. It's common to see champion's have natural pairs in other regions - e.g. Braum and Vladimir. If there are missing components to those synergies that will be released in later parts of the set, then there's also a risk that their initial impacts will fall flat and make the initial expansion a bit of a disappointment for the new content. Either way, this strategy seems to have a lot of risk of negatives without a lot of clear upsides.)
I'm probably going to be in the minority here but I feel like a lot of the cards being introduced seem a little under the power level required to be playable.
To your and Hellcopter's points about the cards being underwhelming - I don't entirely disagree. I think there are some pretty good cards in the new set - Lulu seems like a powerful Champion for a token deck, Risen Mists is very interesting since it generates a Mistwraith at burst speed, etc. But I agree that there are some cards and mechanics that seem underwhelming. As I mentioned above, the Behold mechanic seems pretty weak. You'd probably have to run something like six to ten 8 drops to consistently get value out of your synergies on curve, but the ramp tools in the game are so weak running that many expensive cards will often just ruin your game plan. If Riot decides they don't see enough Behold on ladder after a few weeks, I'd expect them to change it. This is entirely in line with their dev process. "We wanted people to latch on to this new thing we added, but they didn't because it wasn't well implemented, so we're giving it a buff to make it more appealing to players." This is basically the reasoning behind the buffs to Monkey Idol and Slotbot.
Quote From sto650
Honestly, if I have any complaint at all about LoR, it's quite the opposite of the OP. I would say the game is TOO balanced. What do I mean by that?
Basically this - when I play a session of, say, 5 games (I'm a casual player), I often don't see the same deck twice. The variance among the decks I come up against is absolutely massive. The result of this is that I don't really learn how to play against specific decks very well. Sometimes, I don't even have the slightest clue what my opponent's deck is even trying to do.
The variety in the meta is insanely huge. There must be upwards of 20-30 decks that are competitively viable, if not more. While it makes it quite hard for me to get a read on the "meta" and optimize my plays, this can only be interpreted as a good thing.
I think we should be careful not to conflate variety with balance - the two are deeply related, but they're not the same. A balanced game features a wide variety of decks, but in my mind the kinds of wild variance you're describing reflects less a balanced metagame and more a lack of a metagame (at least outside of top ranked play). In that way, this is a different symptom of the same chaotic design process. The development of the metagame never really slows because nerfs and buffs come in so frequently, and new content is so varied in power and consistency that it is inherently imbalanced from the start.
Typically meta shifts would slow down as pro players (who have the earliest useful datasets on match-ups) start to determine what they think the best decks are. As players in lower ranks and more casual forms of play start to net-deck those "best decks" and learn how to play them, you will in turn start to see a fairly consistent metagame across ranks. The order here is really baked into CCGs - the people who play the most will always set the meta because they have the most data and they spend the most time iterating on strategies. The more casual a player you are, the less time you have to spend playing the game, so the more stable the meta needs to be to make deckbuilding meaningful.
But the nerf/buff cycle means the players at the top tier rarely settle into an idea of what the best deck is - what's best today will not be in a couple of weeks. Those problems are exacerbated as your go down to lower ranks and casual play, where keeping up with those changes is expensive (in a temporal sense); if you're playing more casually then you have less time to learn the new top decks and how they interact with other top decks. If the decks don't trickle down in a bigger way from top tiers to lower tiers, then there's even more chaos at those lower tiers of play.
So, I definitely meant the title question rhetorically. They clearly have a lot of plans for the game, but it feels to me like the lack discipline in their approach to game development and balance.
I don't mean to suggest that either MTG or Hearthstone do a perfect job at balance, but there are a couple of things which I think they do consistently (even if they make mistakes from time to time with individual cards) that help to ensure some balance at the start of a metagame:
They focus on a small set of new mechanics
With the exception of adding Demon Hunter, they work within their existing colors/classes to find an expression of those new mechanics in each
The former is important because when you add too much new stuff, you're left reinventing the wheel every time you try to balance the game. The latter is important because it helps iron out the identity of each color/class in the game.
Regarding your specific examples, while I don't think the Ashes of Outland example is fair, I think Galakrond (and even Death Knights before it) is a prime example of the sorts of bad behaviors I'm talking about.
So first, with Ashes of Outland, Blizzard needed Demon Hunter to be super powerful to make it attractive to players and bring people back into the game. Oddly enough, due to the seismic nature of adding a new class after years of having only nine classes, this is one of few times where I think an emphasis on fun, exciting new content over balance makes sense. That LoR wants the same kind of thing (i.e. adding new regions) to be commonplace with updates only further demonstrates what I mean - they're constantly designing in a way that will create chaotic balance. There was a lot of fear that Demon Hunter wouldn't have enough of a unique class identity. Riot risks that all the time.
For Galakrond, and Death Knights before it, I think Blizzard presented it as a single mechanic (A new "Death Knight" mechanic, the "Galakrond package" for E.V.I.L classes). By imagining that it was some single mechanic, they fooled themselves into thinking they were in that typical expansion world where they were adding one or two shared mechanics across classes. But because each of those heroes were so different in practice (with Galakrond Shaman being particularly unfair from a tempo perspective), the balance was way off. That's what Highlander Shadowreaper Priest was such a butcher for so long. Again, this is something Riot seems to do by design - giving different regions wildly different mechanics and hoping it will shape up into a balanced metagame. The thinking seems to be: Pick a Champion -> Pick mechanics that support the "fantasy" of that Champion -> Add those to the identity of the Champion's region even if it doesn't really fit pre-existing identities. This pattern will always emphasize adding tons of new stuff that may or may not fit well into the game as it is.
In a perfect CCG, the metagame wouldn't be determined by a buff/nerf cycle, but rather by creative deck-building to answer the top tier decks. That doesn't happen perfectly anywhere, but I do believe Riot's nerf/buff cycles weaken deck-building for all but the most dedicated players. Their goal is to ensure every region gets to shine at the top of the tier list for a while, and that every champion is eventually in a good deck, but they do that by frequently tweaking the meta themselves. Sometimes this is done in small ways, but other times (like the major Epic overhaul) it's a big change to how cards work. I can already see that coming for "Behold" - the number of 8+ drops you'd need to run to consistently land your "Behold" synergies on curve is too high to make a viable deck.
The game is always going to need to add new mechanics, and that was especially true with Bilgewater since the game was so new. But at this point, Riot has already added a lot of mechanics to the game that they can play around with and explore - things like Challenger, Freeze, Barrier, Vulnerable, Quick Attack, and Regeneration. But because they spend so much time and effort exploring new mechanics instead of playing around with the design space available with these older mechanics, it's entirely unclear that they've mastered balancing them to a level where they'd be able effectively balance a new card like Uzgar the Ancient (which features two of those core mechanics). There are lots of interesting ways to play around with these ([Hearthstone Card (Caught in the Cold) Not Found] is a decent example), but that's not where they seem to want to spend their time, so the game is caught on a sort of balance roller coaster.
Full disclosure - I stopped playing LoR right around the time they started introducing Gauntlet and Labs. Between a certain amount of burnout on CCGs in general and a fair amount of disappointment with Riot, I just decided it was time for a break.
With all that in mind, I've been following the latest expansion in the hopes that the new cards might renew my interest in the game. And some of what I've seen has been really encouraging:
A much more significant emphasis put on the Support mechanic (which I always felt was one of the more interesting - yet least utilized - mechanics in the game)
A major uptick in Regeneration in the Freljord. A while back on this forum I had noted that Regeneration is a form of healing, and that while it didn't show up on many units anywhere, that it made sense as the Freljord expression of the healing identity. At the time Riot said healing was a big part of the identity of the Freljord, but it plainly wasn't in the actual cards, so this is encouraging.
The Gem token card. This one is a little obscure, but I like that Riot is willing to make a Burst speed spell that can't be cast in combat or in response to a spell. That is exactly what I think Glimpse Beyond ought to be, and I've said as much at least a couple of times on this forum.
More sources of Obliterate. So far this is just Passage Unearned, but I'm glad there are tech cards that can respond to some of the crazier revive effects that have often created some very frustrating top tier decks. It might be a little too good against those decks, but hopefully it's weak enough against many other decks that it sees only limited play (which would be perfect for a tech card).
So, even without reveals from many of the regions, there's a lot here that makes me think this could be good for the game.
At the same time, I'm pretty worried about yet another massive influx of mechanics. With only a few regions having revealed cards so far, they've already introduced SpellShield, Nightfall, and Behold. Maybe there won't be too many new things with this set, but given how much was introduced with Rising Tides (Powder Kegs, Toss, Plunder, Nab, Deep, Vulnerable, Scout, Attune) it seems unlikely that this set will end up with a short list of new mechanics.
It may seem counter-intuitive to complain about new mechanics in a new set, but I think the Riot approach feels a bit like its not well thought out. By introducing so many new mechanics, and placing them in only small subsets of the regions, you end up in a state where content is much harder to balance. When new mechanics are paired with the new region and some supporting region (e.g. Toss in SI/Bilgewater) you can't think about how to balance new mechanics in isolation from the pre-existing balance issues between the regions more broadly. Moreover, any new mechanic is inherently harder to balance because the devs have no experience balancing it and have no audience feedback about the mechanic in action. So, it's way better to limit the surface area of new content to ensure balancing can be done well from the get-go.
By contrast, in games like MTG and Hearthstone, expansions typically highlight only one or two new mechanics, and they put those mechanics in each color/class/region, which allows developers to think about how fit that new content to the identity of each color/class/region. These mechanics also often deviate only slightly from existing content (e.g. Proliferate in MTG, which adds counters to cards that already have counters, or Spellburst in Hearthstone, which acts as a one-time "after you cast a spell" trigger). Following these patterns makes it easier to think about whether the mechanic is too powerful or too weak in isolation, or if it is too easily abused by a subset of the colors/classes/regions.
Ultimately, I fear this reflects a continued reality with Riot's dev process, where they feel like they can constantly dump a lot of new content because they're constantly rebalancing the game. It's a philosophy that seems to emphasize "exciting new content" over "fun, balanced gameplay." In that way, it feels like there's a certainly lack of ownership in the quality of the initial work, and that bothers me.
(One related note - I have no idea how to judge the decision to break the expansion up over multiple months. Given how often LoR is rebalanced, the high frequency influx of new content may be fine and have no outsized impact on the way the metagame is formed. But it may also reinforce this apparent design philosophy that it's better to constantly throw out shiny new content in place of balanced content.)
I think it could be a decent low tier in the right metagame, but I agree that Voracious Reader, for as strong as it is in the right deck, is surprisingly weak in these Tempo Priest decks.
Ultimately, I think Priest needs more narrow, cheap cycle cards. Paladin and Hunter - two classes that have historically had limited card draw - serve as pretty good examples of this. This type of card includes Scavenger's Ingenuity, Ursatron, and Diving Gryphon in Hunter, and Hand of A'dal, Call to Adventure, and Salhet's Pride in Paladin. These cards cycle, they offer a limited benefit to account for the cost of the card outside of cycle effect, but are only really useful in specific archetypes.
Priest has historically had Purify, Dead Ringer, and pre-nerf Power Word: Shield in this category. Cleric of Scales also serves this purpose, which is why I've started experimenting with dragons. It's definitely a tricky problem for Blizzard to solve. Control Priest decks are pretty good already, and they can develop card advantage without card draw thanks to AOE cards and Galakrond. So you don't want to make generic card draw that can tip the scales for control in an unfair way, but Tempo Priest definitely needs one or two more decent, narrow draw effects to build on.
Power Word: Shield with Intrepid Initiate is a 1 mana 3/4, and it has plain synergies with Sethekk Veilweaver, but it is weak enough as a top-deck that I couldn't convince myself to run two copies. I've really liked Soulbound Ashtongue in the deck, both as another way to activate Brittlebone Destroyer on curve, and also as a way to make Flesh Giant cheaper (this is particularly effective when you put Apotheosis on him). I think the Flesh Giant is a pretty important inclusion. I tried Devout Pupil (in place of as well as in tandem with Flesh Giant), but I found that it was often not impactful enough. Flesh Giant, on the other hand, can be a really strong top deck, and since card draw is so limited and there's no direct face damage anymore, you need to have powerful threats like that to close the game out before your hand dries up.
I still find that it's easy to run out of resources, though, even with Sethekk Veilweaver and Voracious Reader, since there's really no way even just cycle single cards to help improve the odds of drawing one of those two minions.
I tried a version of this that ran the quest package. Obviously that's a risky endeavor - drawing the quest on turn 1 means worse odds to get your powerful 1-drop into buff play. (Note that you don't want to play the Quest on turn 1.) That enabled me to swap out Kul Tiran Chaplain for Questing Explorer for more cycle, and helped make getting 1-drops back from Raise Dead feel less bad, since in the mid to late game I'd have a buffing hero power. Ultimately I didn't like it more than this one, but that's how desperate I've been to try and find more card draw. (I've also considered running Mass Dispel, but I think that would be more valuable to clear taunts and push lethal than it would be as cycle.)
I've also tried versions that focus more on buffs, like the various buffs that copy minions. But without access to decent rush minions, I often found that those cards were too low impact to run in the deck. I'm often happy to take Psyche Split off of Renew, but without really strong synergies like Zerek, Master Cloner, I didn't think running it in the deck made sense. (Archmage Vargoth can still be good synergy for that spell, but I think at that point you're running a very different deck.)
The midrange version I've had some success with is this one:
A big part of why I wanted to build this version was that I often found Raise Dead to be too low impact in the aggro version (as indicated above with the Quest tests). Sometimes it gives you back key minions, but oftentimes it just gives you weak 1-drops for which you have no more buffs. Even Voracious Reader can be bad to get back since the card draw all comes at the end of your turn, which is often too late in the midgame when you're desperate for more resources.
So, in this version I'm still running the 1/4 1-drops, but with the higher curve I've cut Voracious Reader. I also cut the 1-drops that die to Backstab. I've got Cleric of Scales to find buffs a bit more effectively (by keeping the number of different spells low, this card works wonders for tutoring exactly what you want). I've also got extra card generation thanks to Cobalt Spellkin. Priest has a lot of relevant 1-drop spells for a Dragon Tempo deck, so that card does a lot of work. I've also got 1x Onyx Magescribe in there as a little extra power if things go sideways in the mid to late game. The 2x Dragon Breeder is in there for the same reason I tried a Quest package in aggro - there's just not enough card draw in Priest, so any extra resources are a blessing. I could imagine swapping them for something like Wandmaker so you don't need to wait for a Dragon in play to get the value. And depending on how many Rogues you're seeing on ladder, I could also see a case for swapping something for another copy of Breath of the Infinite to deal with stealth boards.
In principle, this change seems pretty good - varied gameplay is important, and these "discover cycles" can be very frustrating to play against. That said, I think it the impact will be felt much more significantly by the classes with very weak card draw (I'm thinking Priest and Shaman primarily). Random cards are (on average) worse than cards in your deck, so you need to be able to generate more cards to make up for their relative quality. This could mess with the consistency of those classes who lack meaningful card draw tools.
I'd be more excited about this news if I thought that the Priest revamp went well. But as far as I can tell, while it did remove some cards which were degenerate with respect to their play patterns/the class identity generally, the cards that were added in fall into two camps: they're designed for the consistently weak, under-supported Tempo Priest, or they're outclassed control cards.
The former camp is made up of Kul Tiran Chaplain, Power Infusion, and Scarlet Subjugator. The Scarlet Subjugator is garbage in a world with Demon Hunter thanks to the 1 mana hero power, but on paper the other two seem like they should be decent cards - Kul Tiran Chaplain represents 3 mana's worth of stats and can help you make trades, while Power Infusion offers a way to leverage Inner Fire as a finisher. In practice, though, the health buff doesn't do anything to make trading easier because 1-drops usually have 1 attack and therefore can't trade with enemy minions until you play an attack buff, while the finishing power of Inner Fire is largely irrelevant because there's almost no card draw available for in Priest, and therefore very little consistency in the decks. (The card draw thing is really very upsetting here - right now in standard, the average number of class-specific draw effects is 6, but Priest only has 1: Mass Dispel. Shaman is close with only 2, but their hero power and mass buffs make Tempo play easier.) I have tried a lot of different versions of this deck since Scholomance Academy dropped, and they're all wildly inconsistent.
The latter camp is made up of Shadow Word: Ruin, Natalie Seline, and [Hearthstone Card (Pyschic Conjurer) Not Found]. Like the Subjugator, [Hearthstone Card (Pyschic Conjurer) Not Found] sees no play because a random enemy card isn't worth the horrific tempo of a 1/1. And as with the other set of cards, Shadow Word: Ruin and Natalie Seline are strong on paper but don't really see any play (outside of getting pulled from Zephrys the Great). Perhaps with rotation, when Highlander stops being so omnipresent in control, we'll see more of these cards. But right now they're outclassed.
I don't want to be too negative here - a massive revamp might make the Priest revamp more relevant and generally improve the health of the game - but I come at this news with very strong skepticism.
I've tried a lot of different versions, some that are more midranged with Dragon synergies, some that are more aggressive with lots of 1-drops, but I keep finding that they just don't cut it. They're not fast enough to be consistent against control decks, and the other classes that support aggro and tempo decks are often better at it, so if you don't have a 1-drop into Power Word: Feast as your opening play, you're often dead in the water. Relying on getting at least one cheap buff in your opening hand has been a struggle.
As a rule, I would say that any new set/mechanic that gets you to re-evaluate cards like Pit Lord that you might have never otherwise played is a good thing. It's the part of the CCG that awards you for the "collection" part of the game and ensures that cards which might otherwise seem like dead/junk cards get an opportunity to shine. Soul Fragment might need to be tweaked - particularly in Warlock thanks to the Warlock/Priest dual-class cards that synergize so well with it - but the argument about Pit Lord is deeply flawed.
Kael'thas Sunstrider has been a broken card for a long time, and the original nerf probably wasn't sufficient. That said, I think it's way too early to discuss the nerfs on these other cards, and I think the nerfs are going to be particularly complicated for the dual-class cards because the degree to which they're "well tuned" varies by class. Because of that, I expect that if Blizzard decides to start nerfing class archetypes, they will be far more likely to nerf supporting class cards rather than dual-class cards.
Guardian Animals is probably the best example presented here - nerfing Survival of the Fittest and Twilight Runner would go a long way to decreasing the power level of the Big Druid decks without making Guardian Animals even worse for Hunter. Similarly, I think Raise Dead and Flesh Giant are both pretty fair in Priest, so the best approach to fixing the Self-Harm Zoolocks will probably be to weaken any of Darkglare, Diseased Vulture, or even the Soul Fragments mechanic (perhaps by making them only heal for 1).
I can recall playing against a fair number of Mistwraith decks shortly after the Kalista rework. I don't know if those decks are still at all popular, but they were already pretty good thanks to the fact that Shadow Isles had been such a strong region for so much of the game's existence, which in turn made playing a mostly or entirely SI deck very easy to do. In my mind, that was always the funny thing about a card like Wraithcaller. It generates a lot of stats for its cost, and it's allowed to do that because the Allegiance keyword is supposed to be something of a drawback - you're getting a powerful effect by trading away access to some second region (or splashing a second region but risking a misfire). But for SI, that really hasn't been a drawback at all.
Risen Mists seems like a really potent finisher for a deck like that - in the late game, summon one or two massive fearsome units at burst speed (potentially buffing your board at the same time) and then open attack. Because the Allegiance "penalty" is not a uniform offset of a card's power level, Wraithcaller is probably a little too good for what it's supposed to be. If this deck becomes really strong, that's the first place I'd expect to see a nerf.
More generally, though, it seems like Allegiance is not something Riot has a great handle on. They've struggled with balancing Basilisk Rider and Vanguard Bannerman, and other Allegiance cards like Kinkou Wayfinder and Yordle Grifter have been a big part of meta decks from time to time. The bonus effects probably need to be a bit more narrow to ensure they aren't so easily abused.
The biggest problem with Faces of the Old Ones isn't the weak body, it's that Behold is kind of impossible for these early game synergies. I didn't feel like doing the actual math with a hyper-geometric calculator, so I put together a little simulator that tries to play Faces of the Old Ones on curve by hard-mulliganing for it and a Behold trigger, then drawing a couple of cards naturally.
Even without worrying about the trigger, you already have kind of meh odds of getting this out on curve - something like 55%. If you want proc the effect most of the time you play it on curve, you'll need something like nine or ten 8-cost or higher cards in your deck. Even the Corina Control decks - perhaps the only really successful true control deck in LoR - never really ran more than six cards that would fit that bill. And at only six triggers, you're looking at getting this ramp on curve in only about 44% of games. Now add in the fact that this ramp is too slow to get that 8-drop out much earlier than expected, and too vulnerable to even make sure you maintain your mana advantage, and you've got a really awful card.
Maybe Riot gamed this all out and knows what they're doing with this archetype, but right now it seems crazy weak, with Faces of the Old Ones as the weakest card in the bunch.
In my various Poro experiments, the card draw and elusive offered by P&Z and Daring Poro were the most effective pair for the Freljord (even though Poros were still pretty bad...I haven't played seriously in a while, so maybe they're more reasonable since the Braum/Aurora/Herder buffs).
Clearly this is a good card in a deck that can use the Poros. Hopefully it's bad in most other decks, since it seems like a card that could is either trash or easily abused in less meme-y decks.
A unit with Challenger + Quick Attack is basically a 0 for 1 removal card. That pair of keywords isn't broken today because getting a unit with both Challenger and Quick Attack typically requires spending a card on top of the body (e.g. Sonic Wave or Rush), making it a 1 for 1 trade every time. Since your nightfall cards aren't being destroyed to give Diana her buff, she will be super broken in match-ups where your opponent lacks 3 damage removal spells.
@FortyDust, if they include enough ways to trigger Diana's effect on open attack, Nightfall isn't working properly as a mechanic. Getting a Nightfall effect and open attacking is probably okay in a small percentage of games (after all, you certainly want to feel like your champion is powerful), but the mechanic needs to really force players to make hard choices about open attacking or it's not going to make for fun play patterns. It does seem to be possible to do with Diana's signature spell - Pale Cascade - but so far that's the only burst speed Nightfall spell.
Yeah, for a game that has only been officially released for the last ~8 months, it already feels like they've added a ton of stuff. Rotations are going to be really important, and I agree that due to the mechanical constraints of different champion cards as well as the sheer number of regions, that will be very difficult for them to do well. Ultimately they'll probably end up rotation champions as well as their supporting cards, though it's hard to tell how they'll pick them. Some are obvious (e.g. all the Nightfall cards for Diana and Nocturne), but some are less obvious (e.g. you could remove various Freeze effects with Ashe, but that strikes at the core identity of Freljord). Honestly, I think they probably should be thinking about rotating regions too (which only makes the problem much harder). But then someone who really loves a specific region or champion might lose interest in the game.
This gets at the core of what I was talking about in my "what's their plan?" thread. They've created a huge, complex mess underneath this otherwise intriguing (and in some ways very novel) card game, and their solution to the complexity seems to be "keep throwing a bunch of stuff out there and see what sticks."
On its face, Lunari Duskbringer does seem to pull the whole Nightfall deck together. But I'm still not convinced it's going to work. Given the curve of Nightfall cards we've seen so far, here's basically how you'd imagine the idealized play turn by turn:
Of course, the problem here is that every one of these cards needs to be the second card you play, so you need lots of cheap activators. Lunari Duskbringer is a 3-of in that deck, and can act as two activators if you draw it, but you can't rely on it alone to consistently curve out your Nightfall cards. Maybe Fading Memories helps get you over the line of this, but the core problem is still that the archetype looks like an aggro deck that plays a turn behind curve by design. You could always run the archetype with Bilgewater for access to more good cheap starting plays, but then you lose out on the valuable Targon activators.
Mayba Diana makes this all worth it, but it seems clunky regardless of Lunari Duskbringer
I just played the match two more times, and won one of those two. So now I've got a 66% win rate against Gok'amok for the day at this point. I'm not saying that to brag or be a jerk about it, but rather to emphasize that it's not just a matter of "lucking out." The whole point of the Ashes of Outland story content is to get players familiar with the fundamental play patterns of the Demon Hunter class.
Because his hero power costs 1, Gok'amok plays slower than his deck should. So unless he gets a very powerful random effect early (something crazy like Deep Freeze) you should be able to get on board early. That will help ensure your hero power's attack value is +2, which is a big deal if you're trying to trade health for board control. If you mulligan for early board control tools (e.g. Furious Felfin, Imprisoned Felmaw, Twin Slice, and Chaos Strike) you should be able to maintain control long enough to snowball into your bigger outcast effects.
Ultimately you're the aggro in the match-up, since his hero power will out-value you eventually, so you need to be pretty liberal with your health to make sure you don't lose your board, and only take the highest value trades or trades with rush minions so you can keep pushing a bit of damage to face each turn.
My concerns have less to do with releasing a lot of Targon content up front, and more to do with how little content 50% of the current regions are going to get. I spent a fair amount of my original post thinking through how many cards Targon would probably have on release of this expansion as a means of emphasizing how little was left for Demacia, P&Z, Noxus, and Bilgewater. Ultimately, I'd prefer to see a lot of Targon, and a little of everything else, followed by expansions in which each region starts to get a more even number of cards. Instead, we're getting a lot of Targon, a nearly full expansion of Freljord, SI, and Ionia, and a very tiny bit of everything else.
Maybe - but they're talking about releasing new regions every six months, and they've still got a bunch of regions left (assuming they don't fuse any more or create their own, they've got Bandle City, Ixtal, Shurima, and The Void). That's two years worth of content. If they don't manage the game well in that time, it could easily become irrelevant in the competitive CCG space before they hit this presumed equilibrium, so how they manage new content while adding regions is still very important.
I think my biggest concern here is that what you're describing sounds a lot like an artificial metagame reinforced by power creep, wherein regions with the most cards start out as the most powerful, and then "slightly better" cards enter for the lagging regions to overpower those previously buffed regions. Maybe there's a brief equilibrium at the very tail end of a set, but shortly thereafter there's another cycle with a new set.
This creates a game where, if you're a big fan of some region X, you only ever play when region X gets an expansion boost because you know that's when it will be most relevant in the metagame. And while LoR is pretty F2P friendly - which diminishes some of the negative aspects of power creep/whales - power creep still does a lot of harm to the "collection" aspect of CCGs.
This is definitely true - a small number of cards can be what you need for an archetype to hit a critical mass of good tools and become powerful. But that doesn't mean they're setting themselves up for success, it just means their current system doesn't preclude success.
I just replayed this match to remember how it works. I think the match wants to emphasize Demon Hunter fundamentals - focusing on the super powerful outcast effects of your special ally cards, making sure you're using your health as a resource to control the board and getting the +2 attack out of your hero power, etc. You want to ensure your opening hand is a low enough curve that you can get those outcast cards positioned well.
Sometimes the random effects create ridiculous early game tempo for him, but other times they're pretty medium and stall his ability to play from his hand. Other times they can go entirely south for your opponent. So if those fundamentals don't get you over the line, just try again. In my match just now, he got a hand full of random demons, played Unlicensed Apothecary at the end of his turn, but then had another random effect summon two minions. That took a big enough chunk of his life total that the AI started to act as the control and I was able to pressure it down.
On its initial announcement, I think it was kind of hard to judge what the sets vs. expansions would look like. Riot said each region would get new cards each expansion, but they made it clear that new champions and cards would be spread out unevenly across the set. What was clear, though, was that:
At this point they've revealed 50 of the upcoming 89 cards, including five of the seven champions. So far, Targon has 21 of those cards, with two of the champions. It seems reasonable to expect the remaining two champions to be from Targon, with a new Targon champion and two other region's champions in each subsequent expansion. Each new champion typically to get about eight or nine supporting cards.
With all that in mind, it seems logical to expect that Targon will get about 30 more cards in this expansion, and then another ~10 in each subsequent expansion (one champion plus supporting cards) so that when this is all said and done, each region gets to that ~76 card total. If all this is correct, that means the remaining four regions (Bilgewater, Demacia, P&Z, and Noxus) will be left dividing up about 10 new cards in this expansion.
Obviously this is a bit of speculation, but if those numbers are all basically right, then I'm honestly a bit shocked at this approach to releasing cards. In any other CCG, I would have expected a more even distribution across existing regions (at least of the non-champion cards). Specifically in the context of Riot's announced plans, I would have expected something more like Hearthstone's adventure content (most recently, "Galakrond's Awakening") in which each region gets about the same number of cards in each set, but a lower number than in a full set. I assume the reason here is that so many of the new cards tie back to champions, so they have to be released in tandem.
Maybe others don't mind that - Targon will certainly offer a lot of new content to pair with existing regions - but it seems like a bummer for anyone who likes to play any of these (presumably) neglected regions. For example, there might be a new Ezreal deck that uses Targon Gems to trigger the OTK, or there might be a new Lux Control deck that is excited to see cards like Sunburst and Bastion. But ultimately what is most likely to come out of this first expansion for those (presumably) neglected regions is a little bit support for a lot of old play patterns. The set of tools players will have to meaningfully developed new strategies in these regions will be significantly diminished, and I think ultimately that's going to be disappointing for any player who loves one of those regions.
(There's one other possible outcome here. You can imagine seeing more of the mechanics that have already shown up - Behold, Nightfall, Daybreak, and SpellShield - as new expansions are released. It's common to see champion's have natural pairs in other regions - e.g. Braum and Vladimir. If there are missing components to those synergies that will be released in later parts of the set, then there's also a risk that their initial impacts will fall flat and make the initial expansion a bit of a disappointment for the new content. Either way, this strategy seems to have a lot of risk of negatives without a lot of clear upsides.)
To your and Hellcopter's points about the cards being underwhelming - I don't entirely disagree. I think there are some pretty good cards in the new set - Lulu seems like a powerful Champion for a token deck, Risen Mists is very interesting since it generates a Mistwraith at burst speed, etc. But I agree that there are some cards and mechanics that seem underwhelming. As I mentioned above, the Behold mechanic seems pretty weak. You'd probably have to run something like six to ten 8 drops to consistently get value out of your synergies on curve, but the ramp tools in the game are so weak running that many expensive cards will often just ruin your game plan. If Riot decides they don't see enough Behold on ladder after a few weeks, I'd expect them to change it. This is entirely in line with their dev process. "We wanted people to latch on to this new thing we added, but they didn't because it wasn't well implemented, so we're giving it a buff to make it more appealing to players." This is basically the reasoning behind the buffs to Monkey Idol and Slotbot.
I think we should be careful not to conflate variety with balance - the two are deeply related, but they're not the same. A balanced game features a wide variety of decks, but in my mind the kinds of wild variance you're describing reflects less a balanced metagame and more a lack of a metagame (at least outside of top ranked play). In that way, this is a different symptom of the same chaotic design process. The development of the metagame never really slows because nerfs and buffs come in so frequently, and new content is so varied in power and consistency that it is inherently imbalanced from the start.
Typically meta shifts would slow down as pro players (who have the earliest useful datasets on match-ups) start to determine what they think the best decks are. As players in lower ranks and more casual forms of play start to net-deck those "best decks" and learn how to play them, you will in turn start to see a fairly consistent metagame across ranks. The order here is really baked into CCGs - the people who play the most will always set the meta because they have the most data and they spend the most time iterating on strategies. The more casual a player you are, the less time you have to spend playing the game, so the more stable the meta needs to be to make deckbuilding meaningful.
But the nerf/buff cycle means the players at the top tier rarely settle into an idea of what the best deck is - what's best today will not be in a couple of weeks. Those problems are exacerbated as your go down to lower ranks and casual play, where keeping up with those changes is expensive (in a temporal sense); if you're playing more casually then you have less time to learn the new top decks and how they interact with other top decks. If the decks don't trickle down in a bigger way from top tiers to lower tiers, then there's even more chaos at those lower tiers of play.
So, I definitely meant the title question rhetorically. They clearly have a lot of plans for the game, but it feels to me like the lack discipline in their approach to game development and balance.
I don't mean to suggest that either MTG or Hearthstone do a perfect job at balance, but there are a couple of things which I think they do consistently (even if they make mistakes from time to time with individual cards) that help to ensure some balance at the start of a metagame:
The former is important because when you add too much new stuff, you're left reinventing the wheel every time you try to balance the game. The latter is important because it helps iron out the identity of each color/class in the game.
Regarding your specific examples, while I don't think the Ashes of Outland example is fair, I think Galakrond (and even Death Knights before it) is a prime example of the sorts of bad behaviors I'm talking about.
So first, with Ashes of Outland, Blizzard needed Demon Hunter to be super powerful to make it attractive to players and bring people back into the game. Oddly enough, due to the seismic nature of adding a new class after years of having only nine classes, this is one of few times where I think an emphasis on fun, exciting new content over balance makes sense. That LoR wants the same kind of thing (i.e. adding new regions) to be commonplace with updates only further demonstrates what I mean - they're constantly designing in a way that will create chaotic balance. There was a lot of fear that Demon Hunter wouldn't have enough of a unique class identity. Riot risks that all the time.
For Galakrond, and Death Knights before it, I think Blizzard presented it as a single mechanic (A new "Death Knight" mechanic, the "Galakrond package" for E.V.I.L classes). By imagining that it was some single mechanic, they fooled themselves into thinking they were in that typical expansion world where they were adding one or two shared mechanics across classes. But because each of those heroes were so different in practice (with Galakrond Shaman being particularly unfair from a tempo perspective), the balance was way off. That's what Highlander Shadowreaper Priest was such a butcher for so long. Again, this is something Riot seems to do by design - giving different regions wildly different mechanics and hoping it will shape up into a balanced metagame. The thinking seems to be: Pick a Champion -> Pick mechanics that support the "fantasy" of that Champion -> Add those to the identity of the Champion's region even if it doesn't really fit pre-existing identities. This pattern will always emphasize adding tons of new stuff that may or may not fit well into the game as it is.
In a perfect CCG, the metagame wouldn't be determined by a buff/nerf cycle, but rather by creative deck-building to answer the top tier decks. That doesn't happen perfectly anywhere, but I do believe Riot's nerf/buff cycles weaken deck-building for all but the most dedicated players. Their goal is to ensure every region gets to shine at the top of the tier list for a while, and that every champion is eventually in a good deck, but they do that by frequently tweaking the meta themselves. Sometimes this is done in small ways, but other times (like the major Epic overhaul) it's a big change to how cards work. I can already see that coming for "Behold" - the number of 8+ drops you'd need to run to consistently land your "Behold" synergies on curve is too high to make a viable deck.
The game is always going to need to add new mechanics, and that was especially true with Bilgewater since the game was so new. But at this point, Riot has already added a lot of mechanics to the game that they can play around with and explore - things like Challenger, Freeze, Barrier, Vulnerable, Quick Attack, and Regeneration. But because they spend so much time and effort exploring new mechanics instead of playing around with the design space available with these older mechanics, it's entirely unclear that they've mastered balancing them to a level where they'd be able effectively balance a new card like Uzgar the Ancient (which features two of those core mechanics). There are lots of interesting ways to play around with these ([Hearthstone Card (Caught in the Cold) Not Found] is a decent example), but that's not where they seem to want to spend their time, so the game is caught on a sort of balance roller coaster.
Full disclosure - I stopped playing LoR right around the time they started introducing Gauntlet and Labs. Between a certain amount of burnout on CCGs in general and a fair amount of disappointment with Riot, I just decided it was time for a break.
With all that in mind, I've been following the latest expansion in the hopes that the new cards might renew my interest in the game. And some of what I've seen has been really encouraging:
So, even without reveals from many of the regions, there's a lot here that makes me think this could be good for the game.
At the same time, I'm pretty worried about yet another massive influx of mechanics. With only a few regions having revealed cards so far, they've already introduced SpellShield, Nightfall, and Behold. Maybe there won't be too many new things with this set, but given how much was introduced with Rising Tides (Powder Kegs, Toss, Plunder, Nab, Deep, Vulnerable, Scout, Attune) it seems unlikely that this set will end up with a short list of new mechanics.
It may seem counter-intuitive to complain about new mechanics in a new set, but I think the Riot approach feels a bit like its not well thought out. By introducing so many new mechanics, and placing them in only small subsets of the regions, you end up in a state where content is much harder to balance. When new mechanics are paired with the new region and some supporting region (e.g. Toss in SI/Bilgewater) you can't think about how to balance new mechanics in isolation from the pre-existing balance issues between the regions more broadly. Moreover, any new mechanic is inherently harder to balance because the devs have no experience balancing it and have no audience feedback about the mechanic in action. So, it's way better to limit the surface area of new content to ensure balancing can be done well from the get-go.
By contrast, in games like MTG and Hearthstone, expansions typically highlight only one or two new mechanics, and they put those mechanics in each color/class/region, which allows developers to think about how fit that new content to the identity of each color/class/region. These mechanics also often deviate only slightly from existing content (e.g. Proliferate in MTG, which adds counters to cards that already have counters, or Spellburst in Hearthstone, which acts as a one-time "after you cast a spell" trigger). Following these patterns makes it easier to think about whether the mechanic is too powerful or too weak in isolation, or if it is too easily abused by a subset of the colors/classes/regions.
Ultimately, I fear this reflects a continued reality with Riot's dev process, where they feel like they can constantly dump a lot of new content because they're constantly rebalancing the game. It's a philosophy that seems to emphasize "exciting new content" over "fun, balanced gameplay." In that way, it feels like there's a certainly lack of ownership in the quality of the initial work, and that bothers me.
(One related note - I have no idea how to judge the decision to break the expansion up over multiple months. Given how often LoR is rebalanced, the high frequency influx of new content may be fine and have no outsized impact on the way the metagame is formed. But it may also reinforce this apparent design philosophy that it's better to constantly throw out shiny new content in place of balanced content.)
I think it could be a decent low tier in the right metagame, but I agree that Voracious Reader, for as strong as it is in the right deck, is surprisingly weak in these Tempo Priest decks.
Ultimately, I think Priest needs more narrow, cheap cycle cards. Paladin and Hunter - two classes that have historically had limited card draw - serve as pretty good examples of this. This type of card includes Scavenger's Ingenuity, Ursatron, and Diving Gryphon in Hunter, and Hand of A'dal, Call to Adventure, and Salhet's Pride in Paladin. These cards cycle, they offer a limited benefit to account for the cost of the card outside of cycle effect, but are only really useful in specific archetypes.
Priest has historically had Purify, Dead Ringer, and pre-nerf Power Word: Shield in this category. Cleric of Scales also serves this purpose, which is why I've started experimenting with dragons. It's definitely a tricky problem for Blizzard to solve. Control Priest decks are pretty good already, and they can develop card advantage without card draw thanks to AOE cards and Galakrond. So you don't want to make generic card draw that can tip the scales for control in an unfair way, but Tempo Priest definitely needs one or two more decent, narrow draw effects to build on.
The most promising Aggro version I built is this one:
Power Word: Shield with Intrepid Initiate is a 1 mana 3/4, and it has plain synergies with Sethekk Veilweaver, but it is weak enough as a top-deck that I couldn't convince myself to run two copies. I've really liked Soulbound Ashtongue in the deck, both as another way to activate Brittlebone Destroyer on curve, and also as a way to make Flesh Giant cheaper (this is particularly effective when you put Apotheosis on him). I think the Flesh Giant is a pretty important inclusion. I tried Devout Pupil (in place of as well as in tandem with Flesh Giant), but I found that it was often not impactful enough. Flesh Giant, on the other hand, can be a really strong top deck, and since card draw is so limited and there's no direct face damage anymore, you need to have powerful threats like that to close the game out before your hand dries up.
I still find that it's easy to run out of resources, though, even with Sethekk Veilweaver and Voracious Reader, since there's really no way even just cycle single cards to help improve the odds of drawing one of those two minions.
I tried a version of this that ran the quest package. Obviously that's a risky endeavor - drawing the quest on turn 1 means worse odds to get your powerful 1-drop into buff play. (Note that you don't want to play the Quest on turn 1.) That enabled me to swap out Kul Tiran Chaplain for Questing Explorer for more cycle, and helped make getting 1-drops back from Raise Dead feel less bad, since in the mid to late game I'd have a buffing hero power. Ultimately I didn't like it more than this one, but that's how desperate I've been to try and find more card draw. (I've also considered running Mass Dispel, but I think that would be more valuable to clear taunts and push lethal than it would be as cycle.)
I've also tried versions that focus more on buffs, like the various buffs that copy minions. But without access to decent rush minions, I often found that those cards were too low impact to run in the deck. I'm often happy to take Psyche Split off of Renew, but without really strong synergies like Zerek, Master Cloner, I didn't think running it in the deck made sense. (Archmage Vargoth can still be good synergy for that spell, but I think at that point you're running a very different deck.)
The midrange version I've had some success with is this one:
A big part of why I wanted to build this version was that I often found Raise Dead to be too low impact in the aggro version (as indicated above with the Quest tests). Sometimes it gives you back key minions, but oftentimes it just gives you weak 1-drops for which you have no more buffs. Even Voracious Reader can be bad to get back since the card draw all comes at the end of your turn, which is often too late in the midgame when you're desperate for more resources.
So, in this version I'm still running the 1/4 1-drops, but with the higher curve I've cut Voracious Reader. I also cut the 1-drops that die to Backstab. I've got Cleric of Scales to find buffs a bit more effectively (by keeping the number of different spells low, this card works wonders for tutoring exactly what you want). I've also got extra card generation thanks to Cobalt Spellkin. Priest has a lot of relevant 1-drop spells for a Dragon Tempo deck, so that card does a lot of work. I've also got 1x Onyx Magescribe in there as a little extra power if things go sideways in the mid to late game. The 2x Dragon Breeder is in there for the same reason I tried a Quest package in aggro - there's just not enough card draw in Priest, so any extra resources are a blessing. I could imagine swapping them for something like Wandmaker so you don't need to wait for a Dragon in play to get the value. And depending on how many Rogues you're seeing on ladder, I could also see a case for swapping something for another copy of Breath of the Infinite to deal with stealth boards.
In principle, this change seems pretty good - varied gameplay is important, and these "discover cycles" can be very frustrating to play against. That said, I think it the impact will be felt much more significantly by the classes with very weak card draw (I'm thinking Priest and Shaman primarily). Random cards are (on average) worse than cards in your deck, so you need to be able to generate more cards to make up for their relative quality. This could mess with the consistency of those classes who lack meaningful card draw tools.
I'd be more excited about this news if I thought that the Priest revamp went well. But as far as I can tell, while it did remove some cards which were degenerate with respect to their play patterns/the class identity generally, the cards that were added in fall into two camps: they're designed for the consistently weak, under-supported Tempo Priest, or they're outclassed control cards.
The former camp is made up of Kul Tiran Chaplain, Power Infusion, and Scarlet Subjugator. The Scarlet Subjugator is garbage in a world with Demon Hunter thanks to the 1 mana hero power, but on paper the other two seem like they should be decent cards - Kul Tiran Chaplain represents 3 mana's worth of stats and can help you make trades, while Power Infusion offers a way to leverage Inner Fire as a finisher. In practice, though, the health buff doesn't do anything to make trading easier because 1-drops usually have 1 attack and therefore can't trade with enemy minions until you play an attack buff, while the finishing power of Inner Fire is largely irrelevant because there's almost no card draw available for in Priest, and therefore very little consistency in the decks. (The card draw thing is really very upsetting here - right now in standard, the average number of class-specific draw effects is 6, but Priest only has 1: Mass Dispel. Shaman is close with only 2, but their hero power and mass buffs make Tempo play easier.) I have tried a lot of different versions of this deck since Scholomance Academy dropped, and they're all wildly inconsistent.
The latter camp is made up of Shadow Word: Ruin, Natalie Seline, and [Hearthstone Card (Pyschic Conjurer) Not Found]. Like the Subjugator, [Hearthstone Card (Pyschic Conjurer) Not Found] sees no play because a random enemy card isn't worth the horrific tempo of a 1/1. And as with the other set of cards, Shadow Word: Ruin and Natalie Seline are strong on paper but don't really see any play (outside of getting pulled from Zephrys the Great). Perhaps with rotation, when Highlander stops being so omnipresent in control, we'll see more of these cards. But right now they're outclassed.
I don't want to be too negative here - a massive revamp might make the Priest revamp more relevant and generally improve the health of the game - but I come at this news with very strong skepticism.
I've tried a lot of different versions, some that are more midranged with Dragon synergies, some that are more aggressive with lots of 1-drops, but I keep finding that they just don't cut it. They're not fast enough to be consistent against control decks, and the other classes that support aggro and tempo decks are often better at it, so if you don't have a 1-drop into Power Word: Feast as your opening play, you're often dead in the water. Relying on getting at least one cheap buff in your opening hand has been a struggle.
As a rule, I would say that any new set/mechanic that gets you to re-evaluate cards like Pit Lord that you might have never otherwise played is a good thing. It's the part of the CCG that awards you for the "collection" part of the game and ensures that cards which might otherwise seem like dead/junk cards get an opportunity to shine. Soul Fragment might need to be tweaked - particularly in Warlock thanks to the Warlock/Priest dual-class cards that synergize so well with it - but the argument about Pit Lord is deeply flawed.
Kael'thas Sunstrider has been a broken card for a long time, and the original nerf probably wasn't sufficient. That said, I think it's way too early to discuss the nerfs on these other cards, and I think the nerfs are going to be particularly complicated for the dual-class cards because the degree to which they're "well tuned" varies by class. Because of that, I expect that if Blizzard decides to start nerfing class archetypes, they will be far more likely to nerf supporting class cards rather than dual-class cards.
Guardian Animals is probably the best example presented here - nerfing Survival of the Fittest and Twilight Runner would go a long way to decreasing the power level of the Big Druid decks without making Guardian Animals even worse for Hunter. Similarly, I think Raise Dead and Flesh Giant are both pretty fair in Priest, so the best approach to fixing the Self-Harm Zoolocks will probably be to weaken any of Darkglare, Diseased Vulture, or even the Soul Fragments mechanic (perhaps by making them only heal for 1).