If you're trying to play a slow, controlling Demon Hunter, this is a card you'll regularly pick up from Netherwalker. Not sure you'd actually take up a card slot with it, though. I could also imagine being reasonably happy to see this from a Shadow Council Warlock deck, where your minions will be big enough that this is a good tempo play that is unlikely to kill anything on your side.
This is not pack filler. Its actually good enough to see play. Basically its a sap for one turn with a vanilla stated body. Except for mage, no other class have something like this. And its 3 mana, far easier to use than Frost Elemental.
Mini Maiev Shadowsong an okay comparison, but comparing to Sap isn't really right. One of the big advantages of Sap is that you can punish your opponent for playing a big minion by forcing them to spend their next turn replaying it. For two mana, they effectively lose a turn.
Frozen Shadoweaver may neutralize a big minion for a turn, but your opponent will still be free to respond to your board while they wait for their guy to thaw.
Remember to keep up with the game cause the meta switches heavily each week and takes a serious overhaul with each nerf buff.
Respectfully, I do think I do a pretty good job keeping up with the game. I'm an active player and member of these forums, I regularly check on meta lists, and I tune in to twitch semi-regularly to see what the "pros" are playing.
Quote From Marega
Untrue. A lot of regions combo in ways u would never think of. Ezrael now combos fantastically with Noxus. Its also a great deck to combo with karma. Frostbite decks with ashe and katarina are seriously underrated and not even sen in meta lists despite its great matchup vs elusive decks.
Identity wise theres a lot of ot for each region so ifk wtf ur talking about not to mention theres practically a way to play aggro or midrange controllish for every region.
I'm not saying you can't pair less obvious region combinations, I'm saying that because themes are so built into these region pairs, and because your choice of champion dictates a lot of how you'll use the region themes, once you've picked your champions/regions, deck-building feel prescriptive. The "Noxus Ezrael" deck has replaced the "Freljord Ezrael" deck because there slower Shadow Isles control decks are gone, but that doesn't mean the deck feels all that different. You're still seeing it run a lot of single target control tools to build up to big Ezrael turns with cheap burst spells yielding direct Nexus damage.
My point isn't that the decks don't change, my point is that the regions seem to share a lot of common themes because the guiding direction for the themes is champion/region pairs, so even when the decks change the operate in much they same way they used to. The Noxus Ezrael has a different set of control tools to slow the game down now, but that was pretty trivially interchanged and the deck operates in much the same way.
Meanwhile, the single region themes that actually play toward the individual identity of the region are relegated in their importance. It's as though pairs come in two varieties:
Prescriptive pairings like the ones I originally described (i.e. the ones where they seem to have placed all the themeing work)
Inadvertently prescriptive pairings where in order to make one region in the pair work, a fairly generic support package from the other region is used that throws away any individual identity of that region
Open the bundle, then see where you are at, I mean.. the answer to this question doesn't change your course of action, hoard gold open 90 packs, see what you are missing, craft what's left of interest to you.
It might change your action - if you think you'd buy packs later, you might consider buying the 55 pack bundle as an add-on to the 90 in order to save money on packs.
Just based on a (certainly inadequate) simulator that I built with data from https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Card_pack_statistics and https://pitytracker.com/insights, I expect that opening the 90 card bundle will still typically leave you with around 30 missing epic cards and 15 missing legendaries and enough dust for about one legendary. That same simulation for 145 packs (i.e. both bundles) sets the numbers at about 20 missing epics and 10 missing legendaries and enough dust for about 2.5 legendaries.
Using the same (certainly inadequate) simulator to check how many packs you need to get a full collection (and trying to account for using dust to craft epics and legendaries as you go), I'm getting something between 260 and 270 packs to go from 0 gold and 0 dust to a full expansion set.
Note that I am accounting for free legendaries in each case (Kael'thas and the bundle legendary - or legendaries if you get both) but I'm assuming all non-golden cards out of laziness, so the dust numbers should be better that what I'm reporting, ultimately driving down the total number of packs you'd need in the second simulation and driving up the dust values in those first simulations.
Might have some interesting applications in Rogue or Demon Hunter, where expect to have easy ways to deal 1 damage and help mitigate the battlecry. Most of these "big minion that summons enemies" aren't that good.
Token Druid regularly runs Soul of the Forest (and did even before the many Treant synergies). If Shaman can build a board of anything larger than 2/2s, this is a fantastic card to defend against board wipes and prepare for a Bloodlust finisher.
In light of the recent Demon Hunter and Priest revamp news in Hearthstone, and the fact that MTG has never introduced a sixth color to its wheel, I've been thinking about whether or not LoR's regions have clear enough identities. Ultimately, I think the answer is no, they don't have enough identity.
The stated Riot philosophy is that every card should be playable in at least one deck, and I think you see a lot of that reflected in the ways that certain region pairs combine to form themes. Some examples:
The Shadow Isles and Noxus pair has access to a Spiders deck
The Freljord and P&Z pair has access to a Poro and/or Elnuk Cloning deck
The Demacia and P&Z pair has access to a Big Spells deck
The Freljord and Noxus pair has access to a Crimson Self-harm deck
The result is that a lot of the theming seems to have been done primarily at the "region pair" level, and it makes less obvious combinations of those same regions clumsier. Yes, regions have their some of their own dedicated mechanics (e.g. Demacia has Tough Elites, Freljord has Frostbite, Ionia has hand buffs etc.), but those mechanics don't generally pair in interesting ways across regions. Because so much of the work of theming has been done at the "region pair" level, many of the decisions on how to pair a region feel forced and ultimately deck-building is less interesting and more paint-by-numbers.
By contrast, when you look at a game like MTG (which is probably the best comparison, because you can mix/match colors there like you can regions), you see primary and secondary themes for colors, and players are left to mix and match those colors to get to useful synergies. I can very easily build a Black/White deck that emphasizes token creatures for a more go-wide aggressive strategy, and I can create a Black/White deck that uses hard removal and AoE to control the game. Yes, there are multi-color cards that tend to emphasize shared themes, but even in those you see variety. Taking Blue/White as an example, you see cards that emphasize the shared enchantments and artifact subtheme of those colors, but you also see cards that emphasize the smaller fliers theme that they share. This leaves players with a lot of freedom to decide which colors to run, and how much of any primary or shared themes they want to emphasize in their deck.
Ultimately, I think this problem will only get more muddled in LoR as they introduce more regions. The reason other major CCGs have been so reticent to add new classes, colors, etc., is because you have to divide up the game mechanics pie into smaller pieces, which ultimately makes the archetypes more prescriptive and hinders creative deck-building. LoR seems to have started at a place of fairly prescriptive deck-building already, so cutting that pie up could do a lot of damage.
That deck was quite rare to see but so powerful and successful and easy to make you at least diamond rank. I assume that this change was a bit needed because there are so much ways to summon Spiderlings and everytime they come, They are buffed as hell. I guess they want to decrease its earlier power level and even better at late game which is quite reasonable when i think of that deck.
I think this is exactly right. It may have been rare, but it's clearly pretty popular right now - it's considered an S Tier meta deck on Mobalytics. It looks like Riot realized this deck would be a problem after the other nerfs they made, and changed Iceborn Legacy so that it would really fit better into the clone decks they want it to go into, and not the Spiders deck it would be going into today. This represents the broader philosophy Riot has espoused for this game - each card should be playable, and should fit into at least one particular deck, even if that deck isn't very powerful.
Crimson Sigil Runner is a great topdeck, and because it's so cheap it should be easy fit into a deck that wants to run lots of outcast cards. Seems solid.
Murgur Murgurgle seems fantastic - the divine shield helps it stick to the board long enough to buff it, etc., and if you end up late in the game as a token/aggro deck, Murgurgle Prime can be a very useful reload when you need to get a board to stick long enough to close the game out.
I'm not as impressed by Imprisoned Sungill. Murlocs have historically tried to win the board very early, so spending your first turn doing nothing feels very bad, and the payoff isn't immediately impactful. Maybe it will pair well enough with Righteous Cause to make for an effective buff combo, but now you have to draw two cards pretty early in the game to make that combo useful. Ultimately I don't see it being consistent enough to be good.
It's pretty common for expansions to push a primary and secondary theme for a class, in order to make sure players have options. I think this just follows that logic.
The fantasy of this card looks like this: you reduce the cost of Ysiel Windsinger, drop her on turn 10 with a hand full of board-wide buffs, then play this into cards like Gift of the Wild. Seems pretty impractical.
In terms of raw value, Coilfang Warlord is amazing. But it only really works as this big tempo swing defensive tool if you can make it to turn 8 and if your opponent has something with 5+ attack to hit immediately. Otherwise you're still dead (either because you didn't last long enough to stabilize with this, or because you couldn't get this killed to have it turn into a big taunt).
Seems like a very powerful card for a slower Demon Hunter deck so long as there's a fairly powerful midrange deck in the metagame that you can abuse with this effect.
That combo is certainly very slow (one turn to play your cheat trigger, one or two turns to play, silence, and duplicate your 12/12s, and then finally you get go face). But if there's any class that can do it, it will be Demon Hunter.
This is certainly not Voidcaller, not simply because Mal'Ganis is unavailable but because the mana discount you'll be getting is just nowhere near as good. But ultimately, I think that comparison is a bit unfair and Fel Summoner is probably better than it looks.
Demon Hunter has at least a few decent targets for Fel Summoner's deathrattle where they'll be getting a minion for a discount (Pit Commander, Hulking Overfiend, and Priestess of Fury). So the question is, will those targets have a meaningful impact on the game if you can cheat them out?
Obviously Fel Summoner is very easy to kill on board - an aggressively stated 2 drop can kill it - and it doesn't have rush, so odds are pretty good that if your opponent wants to kill Fel Summoner and trigger the deathrattle on their turn, they can and will. But in those cases your opponent either has access to hard removal for the demon that gets summoned, or will be punching through that demon. In either case, you're probably looking at your opponent spending at least 6 mana's worth of resources (the initial attack and subsequent removal or attacks on the demon) and at least two cards. That's a fair pretty trade, and if any of those demons stick to the board long enough for you to take a turn, that's a lot of upside.
If you're trying to play a slow, controlling Demon Hunter, this is a card you'll regularly pick up from Netherwalker. Not sure you'd actually take up a card slot with it, though. I could also imagine being reasonably happy to see this from a Shadow Council Warlock deck, where your minions will be big enough that this is a good tempo play that is unlikely to kill anything on your side.
Kind of funny that the image is still a claw, but the upgraded hero power is "Demon's Bite"
Mini Maiev Shadowsong an okay comparison, but comparing to Sap isn't really right. One of the big advantages of Sap is that you can punish your opponent for playing a big minion by forcing them to spend their next turn replaying it. For two mana, they effectively lose a turn.
Frozen Shadoweaver may neutralize a big minion for a turn, but your opponent will still be free to respond to your board while they wait for their guy to thaw.
This has been a long time coming! Thank goodness
Respectfully, I do think I do a pretty good job keeping up with the game. I'm an active player and member of these forums, I regularly check on meta lists, and I tune in to twitch semi-regularly to see what the "pros" are playing.
I'm not saying you can't pair less obvious region combinations, I'm saying that because themes are so built into these region pairs, and because your choice of champion dictates a lot of how you'll use the region themes, once you've picked your champions/regions, deck-building feel prescriptive. The "Noxus Ezrael" deck has replaced the "Freljord Ezrael" deck because there slower Shadow Isles control decks are gone, but that doesn't mean the deck feels all that different. You're still seeing it run a lot of single target control tools to build up to big Ezrael turns with cheap burst spells yielding direct Nexus damage.
My point isn't that the decks don't change, my point is that the regions seem to share a lot of common themes because the guiding direction for the themes is champion/region pairs, so even when the decks change the operate in much they same way they used to. The Noxus Ezrael has a different set of control tools to slow the game down now, but that was pretty trivially interchanged and the deck operates in much the same way.
Meanwhile, the single region themes that actually play toward the individual identity of the region are relegated in their importance. It's as though pairs come in two varieties:
It might change your action - if you think you'd buy packs later, you might consider buying the 55 pack bundle as an add-on to the 90 in order to save money on packs.
Just based on a (certainly inadequate) simulator that I built with data from https://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Card_pack_statistics and https://pitytracker.com/insights, I expect that opening the 90 card bundle will still typically leave you with around 30 missing epic cards and 15 missing legendaries and enough dust for about one legendary. That same simulation for 145 packs (i.e. both bundles) sets the numbers at about 20 missing epics and 10 missing legendaries and enough dust for about 2.5 legendaries.
Using the same (certainly inadequate) simulator to check how many packs you need to get a full collection (and trying to account for using dust to craft epics and legendaries as you go), I'm getting something between 260 and 270 packs to go from 0 gold and 0 dust to a full expansion set.
Note that I am accounting for free legendaries in each case (Kael'thas and the bundle legendary - or legendaries if you get both) but I'm assuming all non-golden cards out of laziness, so the dust numbers should be better that what I'm reporting, ultimately driving down the total number of packs you'd need in the second simulation and driving up the dust values in those first simulations.
For a different back-of-envelope view - an article from PC Gamer about the duplicate protection changes (https://www.pcgamer.com/hearthstone-packs-are-getting-total-duplicate-protection-but-how-much-will-that-actually-save-you/) suggests that it will take around 260 packs to get a full set of epics (probably not accounting for the excess common and rare dust to craft epics).
Might have some interesting applications in Rogue or Demon Hunter, where expect to have easy ways to deal 1 damage and help mitigate the battlecry. Most of these "big minion that summons enemies" aren't that good.
Very cool tech card, probably most effective in a class that lacks AoE against a metagame that pushes aggro tribes like Murloc and Pirate.
Token Druid regularly runs Soul of the Forest (and did even before the many Treant synergies). If Shaman can build a board of anything larger than 2/2s, this is a fantastic card to defend against board wipes and prepare for a Bloodlust finisher.
In light of the recent Demon Hunter and Priest revamp news in Hearthstone, and the fact that MTG has never introduced a sixth color to its wheel, I've been thinking about whether or not LoR's regions have clear enough identities. Ultimately, I think the answer is no, they don't have enough identity.
The stated Riot philosophy is that every card should be playable in at least one deck, and I think you see a lot of that reflected in the ways that certain region pairs combine to form themes. Some examples:
The result is that a lot of the theming seems to have been done primarily at the "region pair" level, and it makes less obvious combinations of those same regions clumsier. Yes, regions have their some of their own dedicated mechanics (e.g. Demacia has Tough Elites, Freljord has Frostbite, Ionia has hand buffs etc.), but those mechanics don't generally pair in interesting ways across regions. Because so much of the work of theming has been done at the "region pair" level, many of the decisions on how to pair a region feel forced and ultimately deck-building is less interesting and more paint-by-numbers.
By contrast, when you look at a game like MTG (which is probably the best comparison, because you can mix/match colors there like you can regions), you see primary and secondary themes for colors, and players are left to mix and match those colors to get to useful synergies. I can very easily build a Black/White deck that emphasizes token creatures for a more go-wide aggressive strategy, and I can create a Black/White deck that uses hard removal and AoE to control the game. Yes, there are multi-color cards that tend to emphasize shared themes, but even in those you see variety. Taking Blue/White as an example, you see cards that emphasize the shared enchantments and artifact subtheme of those colors, but you also see cards that emphasize the smaller fliers theme that they share. This leaves players with a lot of freedom to decide which colors to run, and how much of any primary or shared themes they want to emphasize in their deck.
Ultimately, I think this problem will only get more muddled in LoR as they introduce more regions. The reason other major CCGs have been so reticent to add new classes, colors, etc., is because you have to divide up the game mechanics pie into smaller pieces, which ultimately makes the archetypes more prescriptive and hinders creative deck-building. LoR seems to have started at a place of fairly prescriptive deck-building already, so cutting that pie up could do a lot of damage.
I think this is exactly right. It may have been rare, but it's clearly pretty popular right now - it's considered an S Tier meta deck on Mobalytics. It looks like Riot realized this deck would be a problem after the other nerfs they made, and changed Iceborn Legacy so that it would really fit better into the clone decks they want it to go into, and not the Spiders deck it would be going into today. This represents the broader philosophy Riot has espoused for this game - each card should be playable, and should fit into at least one particular deck, even if that deck isn't very powerful.
Crimson Sigil Runner is a great topdeck, and because it's so cheap it should be easy fit into a deck that wants to run lots of outcast cards. Seems solid.
You have an impressively limited view of Hearthstone history.
Murgur Murgurgle seems fantastic - the divine shield helps it stick to the board long enough to buff it, etc., and if you end up late in the game as a token/aggro deck, Murgurgle Prime can be a very useful reload when you need to get a board to stick long enough to close the game out.
I'm not as impressed by Imprisoned Sungill. Murlocs have historically tried to win the board very early, so spending your first turn doing nothing feels very bad, and the payoff isn't immediately impactful. Maybe it will pair well enough with Righteous Cause to make for an effective buff combo, but now you have to draw two cards pretty early in the game to make that combo useful. Ultimately I don't see it being consistent enough to be good.
It's pretty common for expansions to push a primary and secondary theme for a class, in order to make sure players have options. I think this just follows that logic.
The fantasy of this card looks like this: you reduce the cost of Ysiel Windsinger, drop her on turn 10 with a hand full of board-wide buffs, then play this into cards like Gift of the Wild. Seems pretty impractical.
In terms of raw value, Coilfang Warlord is amazing. But it only really works as this big tempo swing defensive tool if you can make it to turn 8 and if your opponent has something with 5+ attack to hit immediately. Otherwise you're still dead (either because you didn't last long enough to stabilize with this, or because you couldn't get this killed to have it turn into a big taunt).
Seems like a very powerful card for a slower Demon Hunter deck so long as there's a fairly powerful midrange deck in the metagame that you can abuse with this effect.
This is almost certainly a bad idea, but you could try to run this in some kind of Control Demon Hunter. You can use Fel Summoner or Raging Felscreamer to cheat out a Supreme Abyssal, and then silence it (maybe with Dalaran Librarian or Ironbeak Owl) and generate cheap copies of it with Soul Split.
That combo is certainly very slow (one turn to play your cheat trigger, one or two turns to play, silence, and duplicate your 12/12s, and then finally you get go face). But if there's any class that can do it, it will be Demon Hunter.
Un'Goro was one of the best expansions/metagames HS has ever had, so I'm going back to Un'Goro for this one.
This is certainly not Voidcaller, not simply because Mal'Ganis is unavailable but because the mana discount you'll be getting is just nowhere near as good. But ultimately, I think that comparison is a bit unfair and Fel Summoner is probably better than it looks.
Demon Hunter has at least a few decent targets for Fel Summoner's deathrattle where they'll be getting a minion for a discount (Pit Commander, Hulking Overfiend, and Priestess of Fury). So the question is, will those targets have a meaningful impact on the game if you can cheat them out?
Obviously Fel Summoner is very easy to kill on board - an aggressively stated 2 drop can kill it - and it doesn't have rush, so odds are pretty good that if your opponent wants to kill Fel Summoner and trigger the deathrattle on their turn, they can and will. But in those cases your opponent either has access to hard removal for the demon that gets summoned, or will be punching through that demon. In either case, you're probably looking at your opponent spending at least 6 mana's worth of resources (the initial attack and subsequent removal or attacks on the demon) and at least two cards. That's a fair pretty trade, and if any of those demons stick to the board long enough for you to take a turn, that's a lot of upside.