Apexis Smuggler doesn't need to be great to see play. It's got vanilla stats, curves right into the mage secrets, and supports Mana Giant. One or two good secrets and/or one or two more pay-offs for playing cards that didn't start in your deck could make this a useful tool in Mage.
But if you both have a 2-drop on the board, you're not winning - that position is neutral. Warmaul Challenger is certainly a good tempo play in that position, but that doesn't make her a win-more card.
A good example of a win-more card is Don Han'Cho. He's a card with a powerful effect that, overall, represents a lot more tempo than a typical 7 mana card. However, the only time you can reasonably play him is if you're already winning on board because of how incredibly low-impact he is when he comes down, and that point the fact that he eventually represents a lot of tempo doesn't matter.
I don't think it needs to fit into a specific archetype or deck - it's a value generator for any Mage deck that plans to play very late into the game and doesn't want to run out of resources. The problem is that over the course of the Year of the Dragon, Mage has consistently had stronger things to do thanks to various broken interactions with Luna's Pocket Galaxy and Conjurer's Calling.
With the former rotating out and the latter nerfed (both literally in terms of cost and figuratively with the Hall-of-Faming of Mountain Giant), there's a lot more room for a more traditional win condition of out-valuing your opponent. There are enough synergies with spell-casting in Mage that having access to lots of bonus spells will be good - it's just a question of how many spells is good enough.
Something else worth noting here is that if you can fire Evocation off with some way of making spells cheaper (Sorcerer's Apprentice and/or Kael'thas Sunstrider), this is a very easy way to complete Raid the Sky Temple. Right now that hero power is generally outclassed for archetypes that want to control the game and win via infinite resource generation, but a rotation could help tremendously with that.
In a lot of classes, Kayn Sunfury would be incredibly broken, but Demon Hunter (from what we've seen so far) seems to have a lot of smaller minions and a lot of big expensive minions. The former is relevant, but it's hard to imagine the latter matters much here - if you've stuck your big minions, you're probably winning anyway.
So, it's quite possible that getting around taunts will be a reasonable finisher for aggro (a la Leeroy Jenkins), but won't cause a wildly broken, degenerate metagame where you're just getting slammed for tons and tons of burst damage because your taunts have been "deactivated."
I don't understand your meaning here. This card is only useful when it's reactive to small opposing minions, so how could it be a win-more card? If you're already ahead on the board, there are much better plays you could be making for 3 mana in warrior.
I'm giving Warmaul Challenger 5 stars on awesomeness alone. "Battle it to death!" is amazing.
More concretely, this is a great way to clear out any very low attack, high health minion like Doomsayer, and if you're just using it against a typical 2 drop it's basically a "3 mana 1/4 destroy a small minion," which seems fair. Buff this guy in a Galakrond Warrior deck and you can kill just about anything with this.
If Blizzard pushes more cards like Shadow Sensei, this could be a very compelling build-around. Even without support, Akama is probably good enough to just go into any Rogue deck - it's got vanilla stats and a deathrattle in a class that frequently cares about deathrattles, and Akama Prime is a very cool offensive tool that's also around vanilla with the added benefit of easily going face, etc.
Handbuff is a fun way to play, and it's a particularly interesting way to play Handlock that would have historically been all but impossible. May not be competitive at high ranks, but I think playing this "Big Random Demon" Handlock will be a lot of fun.
I haven't watched the video, but I scrolled through it and didn't see any gameplay footage. Is the implication here that your choices would be one from each other secret class? If that's the case, it dramatically improves the power level of this card, making this a powerful way to chain tons of spells and combos together starting as early as turn 2 or 3.
Rotation is a good opportunity to try to build toward some kind of archetype like Secret Rogue, and Shadowjeweler Hanar could prove to be interesting support for a Secret/Thief Rogue, but without a sense of the full scope of the available secrets in Rogue, it's pretty hard to judge. At the moment, I think it's a bit underwhelming on its own, but Blackjack Stunner is good enough that this could be a good, but non-critical, reload tool for that deck.
Its basically allowing the opponent to do the trades for you, which is usually not good.
It only lets your opponent do the trades for you if you're not able to make value trades and clear your opponent's board. Maybe the classic set changes won't help Priest to do that, but if Priest can hold the board for a couple of turns, the buff can snowball.
It's not really fair to say that Priest has only two 1-drop minions - we haven't seen the full set, but even so there are perfectly good neutrals like Hot Air Balloon and Blazing Battlemage which make sense in tempo/aggro decks. Hell, when you're talking about following it up with Kul Tiran Chaplain, you could easily imagine running something like Worgen Infiltrator to make sure it sticks and get two 2/3s on turn 2.
Extra Arms was broken at 2 mana because it was so easy to curve Northshire Cleric into it and have an easy way to develop significant card advantage with value trades and your hero power. It's still very powerful on turn 3 if you're controlling the board, it's just not as snowbally. Dragonmaw Overseer can be very snowbally - you only pay for it once for the potential of a lot of +2/+2 buffs, and if your opponent spends their turn 3 or 4 removing it, that just means you've got an untouched buffed unit to bash them in with.
I'm not saying it's going to be a great card, but there's a big difference in potential from Shadow Ascendant. +1 HP is rarely the difference between keeping a particular minion - there are just too many classes with easy ways to deal 1 damage from turn 2 onward (and yet another is incoming with Demon Hunter). Getting +2 HP from the buff can make a world of difference here.
Haha... like I said in my post: Kalista has been #24 out of 24 since the open beta started; I don't really mind her going 4 weeks as Hecarim's replacement. Hopefully they realize what they NEEDED to do this week--reduce Rekindler's stats, because rez'ing a champion for 6-7 mana is fine you don't need a midsized body to go with it--and don't just re-gut Kalista.
This is really the core of my frustration - not that Kalista is suddenly not a dumpster-tier Champion, but that after what was supposed to be a major balance patch, I'm still playing against all the same basic archetypes and all the same basic Shadow Isles packages, but with the knowledge that we're now four weeks away from anything happening to fix it.
FWIW, this archetype is probably pretty easily beaten with serious aggro decks, but the meta was already nothing but aggro decks and the Rekindler Control package. It feels like Riot thought that having a different Champion be the face of Rekindler Control would somehow make the game feel a bit more balanced or fresh, but the rot underlying it is still there and making for a very boring metagame.
Hecarim + The Rekindler was bad enough, but now Kalista + The Rekindler is ridiculous. Once you've set the combo up, she just keeps resummoning Rekindlers, which resummon her. Once there are a couple of Kalista's in play, there's really nowhere near enough removal to deal with it.
This wouldn't be such a huge nuisance, except they didn't do nearly enough to nerf all the other Shadow Isles tools that get those kinds of decks into the late game.
I'm genuinely excited by a lot of the Priest changes, but cutting Northshire Cleric and removing the draw from Power Word: Shield dramatically impacts the card draw potential for Priest, and Priest already struggled with card draw.
0 cost spells are always something to keep an eye on, and Power Word Shield is a great tool for any kind of Spell Synergy Priest because it's great with Gadgetzan Auctioneer and [Hearthstone Card (Lyra, the Sunshard) Not Found] in Wild, and odds are pretty good that more Spell Priest tools will be printed that enable some high-value potential out of it.
Whether intentionally or not, the Unstable Voltician update is not a real change - this was the behavior the card had already. If anything, this is a text fix (although you could argue the behavior was a bug before based on how the card was templated).
Overall, I'm a little disappointed. I'm excited by the slew of "big spell" improvements and am generally excited to play a proper "big spell" deck, but I'm surprised they didn't bother to change Shadow Assassin or Glimpse Beyond - both are cards I had hoped would get nerfed (for exactly the reasons they've been added to the watch list). I'm glad that all the nerfs target the biggest problem deck archetypes, but each nerf feel pretty small in magnitude, and it's hard to believe the buffed and changed cards will do enough to rebalance the metagame.
Apexis Smuggler doesn't need to be great to see play. It's got vanilla stats, curves right into the mage secrets, and supports Mana Giant. One or two good secrets and/or one or two more pay-offs for playing cards that didn't start in your deck could make this a useful tool in Mage.
But if you both have a 2-drop on the board, you're not winning - that position is neutral. Warmaul Challenger is certainly a good tempo play in that position, but that doesn't make her a win-more card.
A good example of a win-more card is Don Han'Cho. He's a card with a powerful effect that, overall, represents a lot more tempo than a typical 7 mana card. However, the only time you can reasonably play him is if you're already winning on board because of how incredibly low-impact he is when he comes down, and that point the fact that he eventually represents a lot of tempo doesn't matter.
I don't think it needs to fit into a specific archetype or deck - it's a value generator for any Mage deck that plans to play very late into the game and doesn't want to run out of resources. The problem is that over the course of the Year of the Dragon, Mage has consistently had stronger things to do thanks to various broken interactions with Luna's Pocket Galaxy and Conjurer's Calling.
With the former rotating out and the latter nerfed (both literally in terms of cost and figuratively with the Hall-of-Faming of Mountain Giant), there's a lot more room for a more traditional win condition of out-valuing your opponent. There are enough synergies with spell-casting in Mage that having access to lots of bonus spells will be good - it's just a question of how many spells is good enough.
Quick point regarding the question of starting with one less card - access to Questing Explorer, Licensed Adventurer, and Sky Gen'ral Kragg can make up for this initial setback.
Something else worth noting here is that if you can fire Evocation off with some way of making spells cheaper (Sorcerer's Apprentice and/or Kael'thas Sunstrider), this is a very easy way to complete Raid the Sky Temple. Right now that hero power is generally outclassed for archetypes that want to control the game and win via infinite resource generation, but a rotation could help tremendously with that.
This is gonna be really wacky if you can stick Kael'thas Sunstrider to the board
In a lot of classes, Kayn Sunfury would be incredibly broken, but Demon Hunter (from what we've seen so far) seems to have a lot of smaller minions and a lot of big expensive minions. The former is relevant, but it's hard to imagine the latter matters much here - if you've stuck your big minions, you're probably winning anyway.
So, it's quite possible that getting around taunts will be a reasonable finisher for aggro (a la Leeroy Jenkins), but won't cause a wildly broken, degenerate metagame where you're just getting slammed for tons and tons of burst damage because your taunts have been "deactivated."
If you're holding a Tundra Rhino, this is basically a better, cheaper The Boomship attached to a 5/5 body. Seems ridiculously powerful.
I don't understand your meaning here. This card is only useful when it's reactive to small opposing minions, so how could it be a win-more card? If you're already ahead on the board, there are much better plays you could be making for 3 mana in warrior.
I'm giving Warmaul Challenger 5 stars on awesomeness alone. "Battle it to death!" is amazing.
More concretely, this is a great way to clear out any very low attack, high health minion like Doomsayer, and if you're just using it against a typical 2 drop it's basically a "3 mana 1/4 destroy a small minion," which seems fair. Buff this guy in a Galakrond Warrior deck and you can kill just about anything with this.
If Blizzard pushes more cards like Shadow Sensei, this could be a very compelling build-around. Even without support, Akama is probably good enough to just go into any Rogue deck - it's got vanilla stats and a deathrattle in a class that frequently cares about deathrattles, and Akama Prime is a very cool offensive tool that's also around vanilla with the added benefit of easily going face, etc.
Handbuff is a fun way to play, and it's a particularly interesting way to play Handlock that would have historically been all but impossible. May not be competitive at high ranks, but I think playing this "Big Random Demon" Handlock will be a lot of fun.
I haven't watched the video, but I scrolled through it and didn't see any gameplay footage. Is the implication here that your choices would be one from each other secret class? If that's the case, it dramatically improves the power level of this card, making this a powerful way to chain tons of spells and combos together starting as early as turn 2 or 3.
Rotation is a good opportunity to try to build toward some kind of archetype like Secret Rogue, and Shadowjeweler Hanar could prove to be interesting support for a Secret/Thief Rogue, but without a sense of the full scope of the available secrets in Rogue, it's pretty hard to judge. At the moment, I think it's a bit underwhelming on its own, but Blackjack Stunner is good enough that this could be a good, but non-critical, reload tool for that deck.
It only lets your opponent do the trades for you if you're not able to make value trades and clear your opponent's board. Maybe the classic set changes won't help Priest to do that, but if Priest can hold the board for a couple of turns, the buff can snowball.
It's not really fair to say that Priest has only two 1-drop minions - we haven't seen the full set, but even so there are perfectly good neutrals like Hot Air Balloon and Blazing Battlemage which make sense in tempo/aggro decks. Hell, when you're talking about following it up with Kul Tiran Chaplain, you could easily imagine running something like Worgen Infiltrator to make sure it sticks and get two 2/3s on turn 2.
Extra Arms was broken at 2 mana because it was so easy to curve Northshire Cleric into it and have an easy way to develop significant card advantage with value trades and your hero power. It's still very powerful on turn 3 if you're controlling the board, it's just not as snowbally. Dragonmaw Overseer can be very snowbally - you only pay for it once for the potential of a lot of +2/+2 buffs, and if your opponent spends their turn 3 or 4 removing it, that just means you've got an untouched buffed unit to bash them in with.
I'm not saying it's going to be a great card, but there's a big difference in potential from Shadow Ascendant. +1 HP is rarely the difference between keeping a particular minion - there are just too many classes with easy ways to deal 1 damage from turn 2 onward (and yet another is incoming with Demon Hunter). Getting +2 HP from the buff can make a world of difference here.
This is really the core of my frustration - not that Kalista is suddenly not a dumpster-tier Champion, but that after what was supposed to be a major balance patch, I'm still playing against all the same basic archetypes and all the same basic Shadow Isles packages, but with the knowledge that we're now four weeks away from anything happening to fix it.
FWIW, this archetype is probably pretty easily beaten with serious aggro decks, but the meta was already nothing but aggro decks and the Rekindler Control package. It feels like Riot thought that having a different Champion be the face of Rekindler Control would somehow make the game feel a bit more balanced or fresh, but the rot underlying it is still there and making for a very boring metagame.
Hecarim + The Rekindler was bad enough, but now Kalista + The Rekindler is ridiculous. Once you've set the combo up, she just keeps resummoning Rekindlers, which resummon her. Once there are a couple of Kalista's in play, there's really nowhere near enough removal to deal with it.
This wouldn't be such a huge nuisance, except they didn't do nearly enough to nerf all the other Shadow Isles tools that get those kinds of decks into the late game.
I'm genuinely excited by a lot of the Priest changes, but cutting Northshire Cleric and removing the draw from Power Word: Shield dramatically impacts the card draw potential for Priest, and Priest already struggled with card draw.
0 cost spells are always something to keep an eye on, and Power Word Shield is a great tool for any kind of Spell Synergy Priest because it's great with Gadgetzan Auctioneer and [Hearthstone Card (Lyra, the Sunshard) Not Found] in Wild, and odds are pretty good that more Spell Priest tools will be printed that enable some high-value potential out of it.
Whether intentionally or not, the Unstable Voltician update is not a real change - this was the behavior the card had already. If anything, this is a text fix (although you could argue the behavior was a bug before based on how the card was templated).
Overall, I'm a little disappointed. I'm excited by the slew of "big spell" improvements and am generally excited to play a proper "big spell" deck, but I'm surprised they didn't bother to change Shadow Assassin or Glimpse Beyond - both are cards I had hoped would get nerfed (for exactly the reasons they've been added to the watch list). I'm glad that all the nerfs target the biggest problem deck archetypes, but each nerf feel pretty small in magnitude, and it's hard to believe the buffed and changed cards will do enough to rebalance the metagame.