Title says it all. If you can manage to defend yourself despite having your life total halved (perhaps more than once), you've earned the win. Having Commander Ledros deal lethal damage at 1 HP means that if you don't have something to meaningfully diffuse his effect (e.g. Mageseeker Investigator), or if you're not already way in the lead, you're screwed.
I think the reason aggro is so good is because, basically, everything has haste and vigilance.
I understand what you mean, and I do suspect this makes balancing aggro harder than in other games, but I don't think it's entirely fair to describe everything as having haste.
Specifically, playing an ally is a slow-speed action, so your opponent always gets a chance to respond to that play so long as they have mana to do so.
Where I think aggro manages to pull ahead is less because they get to attack immediately and more because AOE tools are few and far between, and elusive aggro decks have access to Deny. This makes it easier for aggro decks to overcommit to the board without punishment. Everyone has to play a fairly board-centric early game, and the line between midrange and control is blurrier than in other CCGs
Favorite moment in 2019: Explicit descriptions of class identities and some basic/classic set additions to refill for lost Hall of Fame cards
Hopes for 2020: Further revisiting of the classic set (especially for Priest) to try and codify those class identities and balancing out the power level of the basic/classic cards.
Escaped Manasaber is interesting. You probably can't plan to get a lot of long-term value out of it - once it loses stealth your opponent will take it down hard - so the biggest question is which 6-drops do you want to be playing on turn 5. This is clearly very useful in a Ramp Druid as a way to get Nourish out on turn 5 like the pre-nerf days, and dropping Reno the Relicologist or Blizzard (or just about every Mage 6-drop) a turn early could be pretty impactful. It doesn't immediately leap out at me as worth the opportunity cost in other contexts, though.
One potentially interesting application might be in a combo deck - enabling you to play an 11 mana combo the turn after it enters play, but that case is probably niche.
For what it's worth, there are 20+ cards getting patched, and until we see those patch notes, it will be hard to assert that any previous strategy/champion is good/competitive.
Winged Guardian seems great - fair stats, plus taunt, reborn, and evasion makes this a really compelling defensive tool.
Aeon Reaver is a great removal tool. Most of the time, this will destroy whatever it targets, and in those cases this compares well to Vilespine Slayer - for one extra mana you drop the combo requirement and add +1 attack. It's also a nice little buff to Galakrond Priest.
Grand Lackey Erkh is a funny card. Priest and Warrior don't really have any payoffs for playing lackeys, and I doubt more lackeys is the payoff they've been waiting for. Rogue has enough lackey generation already, and the Shaman payoff of Weaponized Wasp isn't compelling enough to run a card this weak. Maybe Warlock will like this, though as pairing with Dark Pharaoh Tekahn gives you a ton of cheap 4/4s.
Air Raid seems good. Taunt is probably worth about 0.5 mana, so getting Lost in the Jungle with taunts for one extra mana seems fair, and the twincast is icing on the cake. Decent for swarming, decent for control, and it's 4 mana for a Shirvallah Paladin deck. Since there aren't any Silver Hand payoffs in Standard, this is just two small taunts, but maybe we'll see other Silver Hand cards in this adventure.
Some deck for which casting lots of spells is important. Right now the only major payoff for that in standard is Grave Horror, but the remaining Priest cards in this adventure set might feature some new synergies/payoffs for Priest that make this specific card more appealing.
Dark Prophecy isn't really that bad - on average it creates a slightly above vanilla 3-drop for 3. That's playable enough that it wouldn't take much to make it good in a Spell Priest deck.
I really like the design of the card symbol - clearly shows it comes from the Descent of Dragons adventure, and lays some UX groundwork for future adventure tie-in collectibles.
Most of these cards are also pretty cool, and I'm glad that the explorers are getting hero cards, but the Dark Prophecy card seems pretty weak. Yeah, you'll get some high rolls, but you'll get plenty of low rolls too, and the average result is a vanilla 3 mana 3/5 - not bad, but probably not far enough above vanilla to be good (unless we also see some powerful spell synergies along with it).
I don’t believe that there’s a pro-Legendary bias - I’ve been playing a ton of Galakrond Priest and I get no shortage of non-Legendary minions.
That said, I can’t recall ever seeing it generate Invoke minions (Fate Weaver or Disciple of Galakrond), and as far as I’m concerned that would be a bug. It’s common to omit these kinds of build-arounds from random pools, and I know there’s a post here saying I’m wrong about these being omitted, but I can’t recall ever getting either after well over 100 games with Galakron
These nerfs do seem pretty weak, and it would have been nice to hear more from Blizzard about why these are the changes they're making, what (if anything) they're still monitoring, etc.. But I think there's enough here to make some guesses as to what they're thinking:
The nerfs are minimalist because this is still a very new set, and they don't want to over-tweak what they (presumably) thought was a balanced set
The nerfs seem to mostly target Galakrond Shaman's ability to overpower aggro decks (upping some mana costs, weakening Sludge Slurper so it can't easily trade up into a 3/2, etc.)
If aggro decks begin to consistently overpower Galakrond Shaman, the popularity of the deck may level out, leaving room for some kind of good control deck to emerge and balance out the aggro.
The only thing to do now is wait a week and see if things correct themselves.
As far as I'm concerned, the 4 health is a much bigger issue than the 5 attack. It's very hard for control to clear 4 health in the midgame, making this card a lot of free tempo against control, and a strong board control tool against midrange and aggro. Both of those are still true after this change.
Corrupt Elementalist remains a double invoke, meanwhile Devoted Maniac is so awful in Galakrond Priest (due to nature of the Priest invoke) that Priest effectively has two fewer invoke activators than all the other classes.
oh and for you Bonuns....don't. So far Galakrond Priest seems weak, but it could become amazing in any meta where outressourcing your opponent is important, and I don't want another Rexxar/Dr. Boom situation. Delivery Drone has proven that having the choice out of 3 minions will usually give you an outcome to swing the current situation in your favour and Priest has a fairly szeable collection if decently sized minions. Wouldn't want them to throw those out every turn while you struggle to even stay on the board.
For what it's worth, I'm not totally convinced that your comparisons are fair.
I think "Discover a Priest Minion" is inherently a lot weaker than the other two hero powers. In the case of Deathstalker Rexxar, you got to build unusually powerful cards by combining effects that would typically not be together in the interest of balance. If his hero power had simply been "Discover a Beast," he would not have been nearly as oppressive. In the case of Dr. Boom, Mad Genius, there really is no bad mech because every mech has rush. Add to that the fact that several mechs in standard have removal effects (Omega Devastator and Dyn-o-matic for example), and you get a hero power that makes controlling the board trivial. By comparison, Priest minions are often weak and rarely generate the kinds of tempo swings you'd see with Deathstalker Rexxar and Dr. Boom, Mad Genius.
Now, there is some math to suggest that discover could be dangerous. Today there are 41 Priest minions in standard, and if we assert that about 25% of them are generically good (e.g. Catrina Muerte, Murozond the Infinite), then you'd have a shot at picking one of these good minions about 58% of the time. Those are pretty good odds and could make for some major swing turns, but many of those are still at or under vanilla in terms of stats. Even the ones that might provide a lot more tempo above their costs probably can't impact the board immediately (e.g. Murozond the Infinite and Princess Talanji can create big boards, but don't automatically clear your opponent's stuff). So there are lots of cases where getting a high power minion still doesn't auto-win you the game.
All that said, while discover doesn't scare me all that much, I think I'd be satisfied with simply removing some minions from the random pool for Galakrond, so you wouldn't be stuck getting total garbage like Lightwell. Any buff is generally unlikely, but I do think a buff would be important to make this hero power viable - right now it's incredibly easy to get garbage minions like Lightwell or hyper situational minions like Sand Drudge that are hard to get value out of in a deck that isn't built to use them.
This doesn't really solve the problem of getting bad minions like Lightwell or Test Subject (or, to a lesser extent, Spirit of the Dead), which mostly act as a dead card and add no real tempo value even if you cheat them out of your hand.
There are also a lot of conditionally useful minions that you'll be annoyed to get even if they are tempo-positive. Examples include Dead Ringer and Sand Drudge and Zerek, Master Cloner. These are all worse than vanilla if your deck isn't built to leverage their effects, and you can't possibly build around all such effects in a Galakrond deck. (Special callout to Quartz Elemental, which is better than vanilla but has anti-synergy with losing the Lesser Heal hero power when you become Galakrond.)
The card is definitely busted. But being a neutral card means that I get to play a similarly busted card as do my opponent.
This way of thinking about neutral cards isn't quite right. When Baku the Mooneater was the king of the standard meta, did you see a lot of Odd Priests? And when Grim Patron was around, were there a lot of non-Warrior classes taking advantage of that super powerful neutral card?
Many neutral cards synergize with specific strategies, and class differences mean that simply being a neutral card doesn't mean you fit into decks for every class. A card like Faceless Corruptor will always be unusually strong in decks that can generate junk minions (EVIL classes with lackeys, hyper aggro archetypes, Paladin and Shaman with hero powers, etc.), while control decks (whose AOE tools typically do about 3 damage that this point) will struggle to clear it.
A nerf on its stats is entirely appropriate to ensure it doesn't get to be both a strong tool for board-centric mirrors and a ton of free tempo against control decks.
Yeah, you may be right that making it a 5 mana 3/3 (or something more extreme) will nerf it out of play, but I don't really have a problem with that.
The comparison Horus made to Corridor Creeper a couple of comments down from here is exactly right. It had some trade-offs built into it (had to draw it, had to trade stuff on your board), but ultimately it just acted as an easy pay-off for board-centric decks that warped the metagame. Blizzard solved that with a nerf so extreme it dropped it out of the metagame.
I get why you think that, but I don't think that's the right view.
With your change, in the case where you're transforming a 1/1, you're getting 4/3 and 3/2 in stats for 5 mana. In terms of raw stats, that's basically the same as Oasis Surger, but you had to have a target to transform to get the value, so it makes some sense that the minor stat adjustment you've recommended would be fair - Faceless Corruptor now generates the same number of stats, but requires more set up.
But this view assumes that the transform is a drawback. If I'm already ahead on board, I have the opportunity to push face damage prior to the transformation, or to make a value trade before the transformation for extra board control.
In this way, the Faceless Corruptor problem runs much deeper than a minor stat line issue. It is inherently way too powerful in decks that play early, board-centric strategies (like Galakrond Shaman) - they get ahead on board, and then leverage this card to hold the board without having to lose any minions. It's this snowball effect that makes the card so unfair and puts it so far over the power curve of even class cards like Oasis Surger.
Consider Galakrond Deathrattle Rogue. It's very common to see those decks run one or two copies of Wisp because it activates Necrium Apothecary and Faceless Corruptor. While it's generally fun to see players revisit cards they wouldn't have thought to run before, the fact that running a card as far below the power curve as Wisp is a good strategy highlights just how far over the power curve Faceless Corruptor is as a neutral. We saw this same thing with Baku the Mooneater - its effect was so far above the power curve in certain classes that the right strategy was often to run cards which would historically be considered way too far below the curve to see play.
Of course, Faceless Corruptor is not nearly as degenerate as Baku the Mooneater, but it's having a similar effect of warping the metagame around it. It's strongest in decks that fight for early board control, Galakrond Shaman is the best deck at that today, and subsequently the massive Galakrond board swings mean the only decks that can compete are similarly swingy, board-centric decks like Galakrond Deathrattle Rogue. This warping has effectively crushed any serious control strategies, as they either run out of AOE, or don't have AOE available early enough to beat the swing turns.
Title says it all. If you can manage to defend yourself despite having your life total halved (perhaps more than once), you've earned the win. Having Commander Ledros deal lethal damage at 1 HP means that if you don't have something to meaningfully diffuse his effect (e.g. Mageseeker Investigator), or if you're not already way in the lead, you're screwed.
I understand what you mean, and I do suspect this makes balancing aggro harder than in other games, but I don't think it's entirely fair to describe everything as having haste.
Specifically, playing an ally is a slow-speed action, so your opponent always gets a chance to respond to that play so long as they have mana to do so.
Where I think aggro manages to pull ahead is less because they get to attack immediately and more because AOE tools are few and far between, and elusive aggro decks have access to Deny. This makes it easier for aggro decks to overcommit to the board without punishment. Everyone has to play a fairly board-centric early game, and the line between midrange and control is blurrier than in other CCGs
Favorite moment in 2019: Explicit descriptions of class identities and some basic/classic set additions to refill for lost Hall of Fame cards
Hopes for 2020: Further revisiting of the classic set (especially for Priest) to try and codify those class identities and balancing out the power level of the basic/classic cards.
Escaped Manasaber is interesting. You probably can't plan to get a lot of long-term value out of it - once it loses stealth your opponent will take it down hard - so the biggest question is which 6-drops do you want to be playing on turn 5. This is clearly very useful in a Ramp Druid as a way to get Nourish out on turn 5 like the pre-nerf days, and dropping Reno the Relicologist or Blizzard (or just about every Mage 6-drop) a turn early could be pretty impactful. It doesn't immediately leap out at me as worth the opportunity cost in other contexts, though.
One potentially interesting application might be in a combo deck - enabling you to play an 11 mana combo the turn after it enters play, but that case is probably niche.
The Fist of Ra-den seems really powerful. Where Eye of the Storm seemed like a card that really wants to be supporting some kind of Wild Spellstone Shaman, now it's a compelling tool in a Big Shaman deck that uses this in concert with Hagatha's Scheme, Earthquake, and various big tempo spells (Rain of Toads and Eye of the Storm) to overpower the enemy.
For what it's worth, there are 20+ cards getting patched, and until we see those patch notes, it will be hard to assert that any previous strategy/champion is good/competitive.
They've said that golden versions are craftable once you earn them from the adventure, and the adventure is for purchase with money or gold.
Winged Guardian seems great - fair stats, plus taunt, reborn, and evasion makes this a really compelling defensive tool.
Aeon Reaver is a great removal tool. Most of the time, this will destroy whatever it targets, and in those cases this compares well to Vilespine Slayer - for one extra mana you drop the combo requirement and add +1 attack. It's also a nice little buff to Galakrond Priest.
Grand Lackey Erkh is a funny card. Priest and Warrior don't really have any payoffs for playing lackeys, and I doubt more lackeys is the payoff they've been waiting for. Rogue has enough lackey generation already, and the Shaman payoff of Weaponized Wasp isn't compelling enough to run a card this weak. Maybe Warlock will like this, though as pairing with Dark Pharaoh Tekahn gives you a ton of cheap 4/4s.
Air Raid seems good. Taunt is probably worth about 0.5 mana, so getting Lost in the Jungle with taunts for one extra mana seems fair, and the twincast is icing on the cake. Decent for swarming, decent for control, and it's 4 mana for a Shirvallah Paladin deck. Since there aren't any Silver Hand payoffs in Standard, this is just two small taunts, but maybe we'll see other Silver Hand cards in this adventure.
Some deck for which casting lots of spells is important. Right now the only major payoff for that in standard is Grave Horror, but the remaining Priest cards in this adventure set might feature some new synergies/payoffs for Priest that make this specific card more appealing.
Dark Prophecy isn't really that bad - on average it creates a slightly above vanilla 3-drop for 3. That's playable enough that it wouldn't take much to make it good in a Spell Priest deck.
I really like the design of the card symbol - clearly shows it comes from the Descent of Dragons adventure, and lays some UX groundwork for future adventure tie-in collectibles.
Most of these cards are also pretty cool, and I'm glad that the explorers are getting hero cards, but the Dark Prophecy card seems pretty weak. Yeah, you'll get some high rolls, but you'll get plenty of low rolls too, and the average result is a vanilla 3 mana 3/5 - not bad, but probably not far enough above vanilla to be good (unless we also see some powerful spell synergies along with it).
I don’t believe that there’s a pro-Legendary bias - I’ve been playing a ton of Galakrond Priest and I get no shortage of non-Legendary minions.
That said, I can’t recall ever seeing it generate Invoke minions (Fate Weaver or Disciple of Galakrond), and as far as I’m concerned that would be a bug. It’s common to omit these kinds of build-arounds from random pools, and I know there’s a post here saying I’m wrong about these being omitted, but I can’t recall ever getting either after well over 100 games with Galakron
These nerfs do seem pretty weak, and it would have been nice to hear more from Blizzard about why these are the changes they're making, what (if anything) they're still monitoring, etc.. But I think there's enough here to make some guesses as to what they're thinking:
The only thing to do now is wait a week and see if things correct themselves.
As far as I'm concerned, the 4 health is a much bigger issue than the 5 attack. It's very hard for control to clear 4 health in the midgame, making this card a lot of free tempo against control, and a strong board control tool against midrange and aggro. Both of those are still true after this change.
Corrupt Elementalist remains a double invoke, meanwhile Devoted Maniac is so awful in Galakrond Priest (due to nature of the Priest invoke) that Priest effectively has two fewer invoke activators than all the other classes.
For what it's worth, I'm not totally convinced that your comparisons are fair.
I think "Discover a Priest Minion" is inherently a lot weaker than the other two hero powers. In the case of Deathstalker Rexxar, you got to build unusually powerful cards by combining effects that would typically not be together in the interest of balance. If his hero power had simply been "Discover a Beast," he would not have been nearly as oppressive. In the case of Dr. Boom, Mad Genius, there really is no bad mech because every mech has rush. Add to that the fact that several mechs in standard have removal effects (Omega Devastator and Dyn-o-matic for example), and you get a hero power that makes controlling the board trivial. By comparison, Priest minions are often weak and rarely generate the kinds of tempo swings you'd see with Deathstalker Rexxar and Dr. Boom, Mad Genius.
Now, there is some math to suggest that discover could be dangerous. Today there are 41 Priest minions in standard, and if we assert that about 25% of them are generically good (e.g. Catrina Muerte, Murozond the Infinite), then you'd have a shot at picking one of these good minions about 58% of the time. Those are pretty good odds and could make for some major swing turns, but many of those are still at or under vanilla in terms of stats. Even the ones that might provide a lot more tempo above their costs probably can't impact the board immediately (e.g. Murozond the Infinite and Princess Talanji can create big boards, but don't automatically clear your opponent's stuff). So there are lots of cases where getting a high power minion still doesn't auto-win you the game.
All that said, while discover doesn't scare me all that much, I think I'd be satisfied with simply removing some minions from the random pool for Galakrond, so you wouldn't be stuck getting total garbage like Lightwell. Any buff is generally unlikely, but I do think a buff would be important to make this hero power viable - right now it's incredibly easy to get garbage minions like Lightwell or hyper situational minions like Sand Drudge that are hard to get value out of in a deck that isn't built to use them.
This doesn't really solve the problem of getting bad minions like Lightwell or Test Subject (or, to a lesser extent, Spirit of the Dead), which mostly act as a dead card and add no real tempo value even if you cheat them out of your hand.
There are also a lot of conditionally useful minions that you'll be annoyed to get even if they are tempo-positive. Examples include Dead Ringer and Sand Drudge and Zerek, Master Cloner. These are all worse than vanilla if your deck isn't built to leverage their effects, and you can't possibly build around all such effects in a Galakrond deck. (Special callout to Quartz Elemental, which is better than vanilla but has anti-synergy with losing the Lesser Heal hero power when you become Galakrond.)
This way of thinking about neutral cards isn't quite right. When Baku the Mooneater was the king of the standard meta, did you see a lot of Odd Priests? And when Grim Patron was around, were there a lot of non-Warrior classes taking advantage of that super powerful neutral card?
Many neutral cards synergize with specific strategies, and class differences mean that simply being a neutral card doesn't mean you fit into decks for every class. A card like Faceless Corruptor will always be unusually strong in decks that can generate junk minions (EVIL classes with lackeys, hyper aggro archetypes, Paladin and Shaman with hero powers, etc.), while control decks (whose AOE tools typically do about 3 damage that this point) will struggle to clear it.
A nerf on its stats is entirely appropriate to ensure it doesn't get to be both a strong tool for board-centric mirrors and a ton of free tempo against control decks.
Yeah, you may be right that making it a 5 mana 3/3 (or something more extreme) will nerf it out of play, but I don't really have a problem with that.
The comparison Horus made to Corridor Creeper a couple of comments down from here is exactly right. It had some trade-offs built into it (had to draw it, had to trade stuff on your board), but ultimately it just acted as an easy pay-off for board-centric decks that warped the metagame. Blizzard solved that with a nerf so extreme it dropped it out of the metagame.
I get why you think that, but I don't think that's the right view.
With your change, in the case where you're transforming a 1/1, you're getting 4/3 and 3/2 in stats for 5 mana. In terms of raw stats, that's basically the same as Oasis Surger, but you had to have a target to transform to get the value, so it makes some sense that the minor stat adjustment you've recommended would be fair - Faceless Corruptor now generates the same number of stats, but requires more set up.
But this view assumes that the transform is a drawback. If I'm already ahead on board, I have the opportunity to push face damage prior to the transformation, or to make a value trade before the transformation for extra board control.
In this way, the Faceless Corruptor problem runs much deeper than a minor stat line issue. It is inherently way too powerful in decks that play early, board-centric strategies (like Galakrond Shaman) - they get ahead on board, and then leverage this card to hold the board without having to lose any minions. It's this snowball effect that makes the card so unfair and puts it so far over the power curve of even class cards like Oasis Surger.
Consider Galakrond Deathrattle Rogue. It's very common to see those decks run one or two copies of Wisp because it activates Necrium Apothecary and Faceless Corruptor. While it's generally fun to see players revisit cards they wouldn't have thought to run before, the fact that running a card as far below the power curve as Wisp is a good strategy highlights just how far over the power curve Faceless Corruptor is as a neutral. We saw this same thing with Baku the Mooneater - its effect was so far above the power curve in certain classes that the right strategy was often to run cards which would historically be considered way too far below the curve to see play.
Of course, Faceless Corruptor is not nearly as degenerate as Baku the Mooneater, but it's having a similar effect of warping the metagame around it. It's strongest in decks that fight for early board control, Galakrond Shaman is the best deck at that today, and subsequently the massive Galakrond board swings mean the only decks that can compete are similarly swingy, board-centric decks like Galakrond Deathrattle Rogue. This warping has effectively crushed any serious control strategies, as they either run out of AOE, or don't have AOE available early enough to beat the swing turns.
It should be much worse than Oasis Surger because Oasis Surger is a class card
Corridor Creeper is a very apt comparison - they need to nerf Faceless Corruptor out of existence they way they did Corridor Creeper