This is a neat card that represents a lot of stats over time, but it's tough to imagine putting it into an deck because the initial impact is so low for turn 7. It might be kind of cool to drop after trading away your board (maybe in anticipation of playing The Storm Bringer at the start of your next turn, but that seems like a major leap of faith.
While Blizzard does seem to consistently miss the mark on these mana cheat cards, it's definitely a hard problem to solve. Just look at Luna's Pocket Galaxy - barely used at 7 mana, and unstoppable at 5. I imagine Blizzard wanted Mogu Fleshshaper to be a 7-drop in part because that means you can cheat him out around the time that a 3/4 rush minion would be still be relevant/powerful, and didn't put enough thought into how the reintroduction of Evolve (and to a lesser extent Ragnaros the Firelord) would make access to an evolve effect consistent enough effect to break balance.
If all you had was Mutate to make the evolve, there'd be plenty of games where you wouldn't have both pieces at the same time, and would just get to cheat out a rush minion. You'd still have a fair number of games decided by a lucky evolve early in the game, but as long as that number goes down, the meta can probably rebalance. It's kind of the same as Murloc Paladin with Tip the Scales - powerful when it lands, but beatable otherwise.
I don't think LoR will surpass HS, since, IMO, one of the most brilliant feature of it is the simple gameplay. On your turn, you play minions, cast some spells and try to destroy your opponent. Then you wait your opponent's turn. Straightforward.
And also, it has another advantage over MtG, that it's mobile friendly.
What I think that will happen is that many MtG newcomers will switch to LoR (since they won't have to catch up the old stuff) and they might grab some HS players that, like me, miss more in-game micromanagement, like in MtG, and at the same time, can do it in a cell phone...
LoR might not surpass HS, but it doesn't really need to. It just needs to take enough of the marketshare to push Blizzard to compete more in this space. I agree that the simple gameplay that Hearthstone offers is a bit part of its advantage, but I think that simplicity is a double-edged sword. The focus on tempo and the offense advantage in combat makes Hearthstone inherently anti-control, and when a control-heavy meta does come about, it's often quite degenerate. (This was well-demonstrated by recent Control Warrior mirrors that went on for as long as an hour per game and were often won by random discovered cards from Archivist Elysiana or the 40 turn limit.)
Hearthstone's biggest competitor today is MTGA, and the reason I think LoR will meaningfully impact HS is because LoR addresses a lot of what's wrong with MTGA:
MTGA is not mobile friendly
MTGA can't be patched for balance because of the physical game
MTGA doesn't offer an easy way for new players to get into the game because meta decks require tons of expensive cards, and the only way to get them is random packs/boatloads of money or time
MTGA suffers from the old designs of MTG (namely, mana screw/mana flood)
The concept of a "HS Killer" really reminds me of the supposed need for a "Halo Killer" during Halo's heyday... it really is a result of the human psyche's desire to have a "one vs. one" scenario and a prevalence to champion underdogs. Of course things are never that simple and there usually isn't a _____ killer; games die due to a ton of different factors. Halo's popularity (which was crazy at its peak) dropped due to some poor decisions in game design, marketing, company focus and competition, not to mention all the studio decisions regarding resources and contract negotiations. If LoR offers a legitimate alternative to HearthStone, that can only be good for fans of DCCG (note it may not be good for HS, but that's free market for you). As mentioned, if Blizzard sees a portion of the market swinging away from them and no longer feel dominant, maybe they will take some positive actions to make HS more appealing to both their veterans and newcomers to secure their position. If not, other games (including LoR) may take more and more of the market share. The introduction of a solid new product will always shake up the economy a bit, but don't expect LoR to drop and HS to die the next week... those things rarely happen.
You're right that there are a lot of factors which contribute, but at the end of the day, a game with no competition in its genre won't fall out of favor despite a lot of other failures in design, marketing, etc. Moreover, while your Halo example demonstrates how Halo's position weakened, and competition was able to come in and dethrone it, Hearthstone is not like Halo in one key aspect - the collection invests players with time and money in a way that doesn't happen in FPS games. The perceived cost of switching FPS games is much lower because the skills translate and you can start playing competitively immediately.
I think people are looking for an HS killer not because they want a one vs. one battle of games, but because there's a sense that HS's position in the market has weakened, but that the sunk cost hold HS has on players, and the mobile-friendly nature of it, makes competing much harder. It's not enough to make a better game - it needs to be better, still be mobile-friendly, and provide a reasonable new-player experience that can incentivize someone to leave a game to go somewhere else where they'll need to invest money and time to build a collection large enough to play competitively
Add to that the Blizzard controversy (which they are determined to make even worse for some reason) and you have a perfect setup for many players to jump ship.
LoR is from Riot Games. They came out immediately after the Blizzard controversy to warning their players not to say anything concerning "sensitive topics" (because supporting democracy is now sensitive).
They are 100% owned by the Chinese firm Tencent. They would be issuing the same punishments as Blizzard (if not more severe) had the situation happened in one of their tournaments.
I'm not saying this to absolve Blizzard, they should be held to account but you cannot exactly jump ship from Blizzard to Riot without understanding that Riot games is wholly in China's pocket, more so than Blizzard.
I actually didn't know that Riot Games was entirely owned by a Chinese company, so thank you for posting this.
I think you're absolutely right that they'd do the same thing as Blizzard is they were faced with this controversy, but I'm not sure being owned by a Chinese company has a ton to do with how "in China's pocket" they are. The type of censorship Blizzard exercised has been happening all across American entertainment. Recent examples in other entertainment industries include the NBA's ongoing issues around Daryl Morey's tweets and the "costume ret-con" to Tom Cruise's iconic Top Gun jacket.
Entertain companies of all stripes and colors see China as the way to grow revenues, and while you're right that jumping to Riot Games from Blizzard won't benefit a company that has real independence from Chinese influence, it might make Blizzard think twice about restricting free speech because that could hurt their bottom line.
I think that's ultimately what a lot of these backlashes are about - reminding these companies that there are certain things that American audiences (and Western audiences more generally) consider sacrosanct, and that their efforts to grow revenues in China can have negative consequences on their (currently) stable fan bases here at home.
I honestly hope LoR is successful just because it will force Blizzard to put more effort into some of the major issues with HS. They have improved greatly in 2019, but there is still plenty of issues that still need addressing. Competition is good, but I'm not going to keep my hopes up, because we've been down this road before.
This. Many card games can easylie coexist, so I hope LoR will be a great game with solid fan base. I also want try how LoR so for now it's ok, but easthetic still bother me so far (also I never played LoL). What I can is for sure it's a game that is not boring to watch, and it's also important for it's potencially success.
You're right that many games can easily coexist, and that it's silly to proclaim every new digital CCG "the Hearthstone killer," but I think you may be a bit too rosy in your outlook on coexistence today. The facts remain that Hearthstone is the 500lb gorilla in the room when it comes to marketshare:
The same SuperData report that this comes from says that the overall audience size for digital CCGs is leveling out, and that a large majority of players want access on their smartphones. HS's biggest competition - MTGA - will probably never make it to mobile because the game is too complex and the board size has no limits to make rendering straight-forward. Other games like Gwent are getting into mobile, but they're just not popular enough to make a dent.
These factors, combined with the inertia of players' sunk cost in Hearthstone, makes it a juggernaut, and for someone to get into the digital CCG space, they need to take shots at Hearthstone's marketshare. That would be great, and that's why people are looking for the "Hearthstone killer." If Blizzard takes a big hit in their profits, perhaps they'll make a serious investment in Hearthstone improvements. How long have they talked about tournament modes? How long have people been calling for rotating standard sets or greater investment into the Wild format to make old cards less worthless?
Runeterra may not be a "Hearthstone killer," but from my first impressions, I think it's well-poised to deal the major hit to Hearthstone that Blizzard needs if they're ever gong to take major steps to improve the game. In particular:
Runeterra offers a "safe" F2P switch. Between the sunk cost into Hearthstone and the knowledge that switching to something like MTGA will also require massive time/monetary investment to be competitively viable, most players would prefer not to switch. Runeterra gate-limits buying cards, offers focused ways to get cards from specific regions, and only uses wildcards so that people can more easily get exactly what they want, so the risk of grinding for what you want is lower. (I believe this is a big part of why most other CCGs have failed to gain traction - they use the same basic monetizing model as Hearthstone/MTG/etc., and no one wants to sink that much money/time in twice).
Runeterra is mobile-first. This is going to make it a lot easier for casual players to pick up and try on the go, where a game like MTGA or Artifact was always going to require players to set aside time to game at home.
Runeterra will probably appeal to the Hearthstone players who want a more complex strategy game as their main CCG, but don't want to play a game like MTGA that's saddled with poor mechanics that stem from age/being a non-native to digital spaces (e.g. having to draw land cards is painful after you've played Hearthstone, and mana screw is super tilting)
Riot Games has said they'll be willing to make balance patches as frequently as once a month if needed, whereas Blizzard has been extremely slow to do any balance fixes.
Nothing is going to kill Hearthstone (which is a good thing), but it doesn't have enough real competition, and Runeterra looks poised to be a major competitor in this space.
I think the 20 HP makes more sense in a "defensive CCG" like MTG or Runeterra, but the biggest reason I'm not worried about this is that Riot Games says they're going to patch as frequently as once a month, and that seems like the kind of thing that will get sorted out pretty early on in the game if it needs patching.
This is obviously not really explicitly related to the content of this article, but the title is pretty misleading - this doesn't present a hypothesis around why Blizzard hasn't added this keyword, it presents a case for why they ought to. Not super important, but I think it's kind of confusing - this is certainly not the article I expected when I clicked into it (although I didn't mind reading this piece and seeing this point of view laid out).
Adjusting the mana cost may be boring, but it's almost always the right thing to do. There are two big problems with changing what a card fundamentally does: first, it takes away from the fundamentally cool things that the card can do, and second, it may produce some other broken strategies that will simply require more future nerfing.
By only adjusting the cost, Blizzard hasn't made the strategies these cards support entirely obsolete or entirely different, they've merely made them less overpowering. Cards where the effects have been changed are pretty limited in Hearthstone's history, and the changes are usually small in scope. One example is Raza the Chained. You can still use his effect to do the fun things you used to be able to do (i.e. big damage turns Shadowreaper Anduin and/or early/repeated inspire effects), but it's basically impossible to OTK with it now.
Bazaar Burglary seems like a very powerful tool. There is enough good support for burgling that you'll be able to complete this in a timely manner for lots of Rogue decks, and even if the 3/2 weapon isn't a hugely impactful tool in the late game, the immunity does shore up a major weakness (i.e. healing) that Rogue has.
It sort of flies in the face Spectral Cutlass, but unlike the cutlass this can be used outside of a deck that's exclusively a Burgle Rogue archetype.
Yeah, I definitely don't mean to suggest that I'm looking at this quest with the same eyes as I might have back in Un'Goro. This quest isn't intended to be the win condition of the deck. But the flip side of that is that because it's not the win condition, it's something that might not need to be in the deck at all.
"I imagine Priest developing a midrange archetype"
I agree that this belongs in a midrange Priest deck. I think the big question is, should this be the 30th card in that deck? It doesn't need a ton of work to build around it because it asks Priest to do what it naturally does, so that's a major plus, but it does cost you a card in your opening hand and it will drive some deck building choices that might weaken the deck overall.
"We don't know what the meta will be"
It's true that we don't know what the metagame will be, but we can be pretty sure that when a new expansion is released, the strongest decks in the early metagame will be either a) aggro decks, or b) decks that were already strong in the old metagame, because people will just swap a couple of cards and run them. This midrange Priest deck will be able to beat aggro decks, but I'm not convinced any midrange Priest deck needsActivate the Obelisk to achieve that. On the other hand, we can say with some certainty that this quest cannot overpower control decks without a major investment in self harm (because the control decks will just hold their minions back and make it harder for you to complete the quest in a timely manner.
Some thoughts regarding the deck:
I tried Ornery Tortoise in the early days of Rise of Shadows with a Token Heal Druid, and found that I often still had armor up from Crystallizer when it came down. That's not to say Priest would have the same issue, as Priest's hero power doesn't gain armor, but I think they clash a bit more than one might expect, and there may be other 3 drops (maybe Acolyte of Pain) instead.
I think you accidentally included an extra copy of Circle of Healing. Seems like something the deckbuilder shouldn't allow, but it has a "x3" next to it
Hench-Clan Shadequill is good as a means to an Inner Fire combo, but I think it's bad as a quest completion tool because it heals your opponent. You don't need to do that to complete the quest.
I'm someone who is arguing that 15 is harder than it looks, and I don't think your points really refute that. You've highlighted a lot of tools that Priest has to get the job done, but the question isn't "can it be done?" it's "how quickly can it be done?" Let's play out an idealized situation:
Turn 2 [Hearthstone Card (Quest) Not Found], play the other of Cleric or Crystallizer, and kill a 2/1 minion. Your opponent develops the board rather than kill your minion
Turn 3 Injured Blademaster + kill another 2/1 with your healthy 1-drop, then Circle of Healing -> draw three cards, heal 8. Your opponent develops the board more
Turn 4 trade on board with your Blademaster into a 2+/X minion, then Divine Hymn -> draw 1 card, heal 7+, swap hero power, buff either 1 drop
That's the fastest you could possibly get this quest online, but it's totally unrealistic. We're assuming here that you go first, get the perfect draw, and that your opponent is an aggro deck. Your opponent in this case is a) playing 1 health minions into your 1/3s and b) not cleaning up your damaged 1 drops. You might see a 2/1 come down on turn 1, if you're playing against Shaman or Druid or the new aggro archetype for Paladin, but most of those classes have cheap weapons (or Druid's hero power), so those 1 drops probably aren't going to stick to the board.
So, let's assume you only get the Injured Blademaster and mass-heal combos. Now you've managed 9+ healing by turn 4, which is respectable, but you've got 5 armor, so your best bet for getting the remaining 6 healing you need is to heal your minions, which may take as long as two or three more turns.
You will complete this quest, probably around turn 6 or 7 if you get a decent hand. The big question is, will that be fast enough for the meta? If you're playing against aggro decks, the fact that you're not dead by 6 or 7 probably means you've won, and against today's control decks this hero power probably isn't enough. The speed at which you can complete this quest is going to depend a lot on the metagame because you're going to need your opponent to be playing for tempo because you're going to need to make trades on board to get to 15 damage. It has a very powerful quest reward, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum, and that context is going to dictate its relevance a big way.
Assuming you have a lot of damage to heal on turn 5 or 6, this will work nicely. But getting an extra cast of Divine Hymn won't do much if that initial heal maxed out your damaged stuff.
That's probably the right turn 1 play most of the time with this deck, but that only gets you 33% of the way there, and the armor makes it harder to take damage.
From a flavor standpoint, Activate the Obelisk and Making Mummies seem to have ended up in the wrong classes. Heal Paladin got lots of support recently, and this would fit very well into a deck like that from a payoff perspective, whereas mummies and reborn are much more consistent with the Priest deathrattle/resurrection identity.
The payoff for Activate the Obelisk is obviously incredibly powerful, but the requirement of healing 15 health is not as easy as it looks. You probably can't start making progress against this any earlier than turn 3 (turn 1 quest, turn 2 develop the board, turn 3 onward hope that you have damage to heal...or turn 1 and 2 develop the board, turn 3 quest and heal). There are a lot of neat things Priest already does (e.g. Northshire Cleric + Wild Pyromancer + Circle of Healing) that can do a lot of work to develop this quest, and having access to reborn minions will help too, but this probably won't be as fast as some people think, particularly since your opponent will know what you're up to and make clearing your minions and avoiding face damage a priority to slow you down while they develop tempo.
That's not to say that Priest will struggle to complete this quest, but the timing of when you get this online is going to be important. A single +3/+3 each turn is good, but it won't do a lot against Warrior AoE like Brawl or Plague of Wrath, or against Warlock AoE like Plague of Flames and Twisting Nether, or the various polymorph effects available to Shaman and Mage. Because Priest has limited card draw and board swarm tools, those kinds of AoEs are a real threat to the Obelisk Priest game plan.
You're probably going to need to be some kind of midrange/tempo deck that can make early game trades, heal, and then capitalize on the cheap buffs before control decks wipe you out. Tempo-y quests of the past (e.g. The Marsh Queen and Unite the Murlocs) had a hard time winning games because having the quest in your opening hand and playing it meant you weren't developing the board you needed, but maybe this will be different, as playing the quest on turn one is probably often the wrong play because you have nothing to heal yet.
You're right that Wrapped Golem is sturdier than [Hearthstone Card (Obsidian Destoryer) Not Found] against certain forms of removal, but the impact of this card against aggro decks is still just as low as Obsidian Destroyer, and reborn isn't even a sure thing against control decks (e.g. Priest has Plague of Death, Shaman has Earthquake, Mage has basically any removal + ping, Warlock has Lord Godfrey). The big difference is that those AoE/Removal tools can work in more match-ups than this card, so even if you find yourself able to stick it to the board against control, you're still probably losing more matches on average than they are because you're running this weak card.
Well, my point is that [Hearthstone Card (Madam Lazul) Not Found] isn't the only support tool for Thief Priest, and that in fact the problem has never really been support for the archetype because there's lots of it. The problem is a lack of payoffs to make up for the lack of tempo from that support. Where Rogue gets cards like Underbelly Fence, Spectral Cutlass, Obsidian Shard, Vendetta, and Tess Greymane as payoffs for low tempo burgle cards, Princess Talanji is the only major payoff Priest has for that archetype.
I think the thought behind that is that because the cards are not strictly random, but rather random cards from your opponent's deck, the card quality is naturally higher and the payoffs can be lower. Additionally, Priest has lots of AoE to deal with higher tempo decks. That's probably true to a point, but Hearthstone is at its core a tempo game, so these kinds of slow plays mean you need even more powerful plays later, and good AoE on turn 5 is often too little, too late.
You're right that Drakonid Operative was exceptional because it had a vanilla statline and a powerful effect, but it would probably still have been quite good as a 4/6 or a 3/6, or at 6 mana. Crystalline Oracle is perhaps a better example of a Thief Priest card that saw play and was useful both as a stealing tool and a tempo tool.
Obsidian Destroyer wasn't that good. Wrapped Golem's reborn balances out the slightly lower health (sort of makes it a 7/6). So if there's some class that wants access to a slightly worse Obsidian Destroyer, cool, they've got it. There probably isn't, though, so this is just for Arena.
To say that Wretched Reclaimer is "just Reincarnate for Priest" dramatically undersells how much of an upgrade this is. Priest supports the reincarnate effect much more effectively than Shaman, and for the low price of one extra mana and an irrelevant "can only target friendly minions" clause, this gets you a 3/3 minion.
This is a neat card that represents a lot of stats over time, but it's tough to imagine putting it into an deck because the initial impact is so low for turn 7. It might be kind of cool to drop after trading away your board (maybe in anticipation of playing The Storm Bringer at the start of your next turn, but that seems like a major leap of faith.
While Blizzard does seem to consistently miss the mark on these mana cheat cards, it's definitely a hard problem to solve. Just look at Luna's Pocket Galaxy - barely used at 7 mana, and unstoppable at 5. I imagine Blizzard wanted Mogu Fleshshaper to be a 7-drop in part because that means you can cheat him out around the time that a 3/4 rush minion would be still be relevant/powerful, and didn't put enough thought into how the reintroduction of Evolve (and to a lesser extent Ragnaros the Firelord) would make access to an evolve effect consistent enough effect to break balance.
If all you had was Mutate to make the evolve, there'd be plenty of games where you wouldn't have both pieces at the same time, and would just get to cheat out a rush minion. You'd still have a fair number of games decided by a lucky evolve early in the game, but as long as that number goes down, the meta can probably rebalance. It's kind of the same as Murloc Paladin with Tip the Scales - powerful when it lands, but beatable otherwise.
LoR might not surpass HS, but it doesn't really need to. It just needs to take enough of the marketshare to push Blizzard to compete more in this space. I agree that the simple gameplay that Hearthstone offers is a bit part of its advantage, but I think that simplicity is a double-edged sword. The focus on tempo and the offense advantage in combat makes Hearthstone inherently anti-control, and when a control-heavy meta does come about, it's often quite degenerate. (This was well-demonstrated by recent Control Warrior mirrors that went on for as long as an hour per game and were often won by random discovered cards from Archivist Elysiana or the 40 turn limit.)
Hearthstone's biggest competitor today is MTGA, and the reason I think LoR will meaningfully impact HS is because LoR addresses a lot of what's wrong with MTGA:
You're right that there are a lot of factors which contribute, but at the end of the day, a game with no competition in its genre won't fall out of favor despite a lot of other failures in design, marketing, etc. Moreover, while your Halo example demonstrates how Halo's position weakened, and competition was able to come in and dethrone it, Hearthstone is not like Halo in one key aspect - the collection invests players with time and money in a way that doesn't happen in FPS games. The perceived cost of switching FPS games is much lower because the skills translate and you can start playing competitively immediately.
I think people are looking for an HS killer not because they want a one vs. one battle of games, but because there's a sense that HS's position in the market has weakened, but that the sunk cost hold HS has on players, and the mobile-friendly nature of it, makes competing much harder. It's not enough to make a better game - it needs to be better, still be mobile-friendly, and provide a reasonable new-player experience that can incentivize someone to leave a game to go somewhere else where they'll need to invest money and time to build a collection large enough to play competitively
I actually didn't know that Riot Games was entirely owned by a Chinese company, so thank you for posting this.
I think you're absolutely right that they'd do the same thing as Blizzard is they were faced with this controversy, but I'm not sure being owned by a Chinese company has a ton to do with how "in China's pocket" they are. The type of censorship Blizzard exercised has been happening all across American entertainment. Recent examples in other entertainment industries include the NBA's ongoing issues around Daryl Morey's tweets and the "costume ret-con" to Tom Cruise's iconic Top Gun jacket.
Entertain companies of all stripes and colors see China as the way to grow revenues, and while you're right that jumping to Riot Games from Blizzard won't benefit a company that has real independence from Chinese influence, it might make Blizzard think twice about restricting free speech because that could hurt their bottom line.
I think that's ultimately what a lot of these backlashes are about - reminding these companies that there are certain things that American audiences (and Western audiences more generally) consider sacrosanct, and that their efforts to grow revenues in China can have negative consequences on their (currently) stable fan bases here at home.
You're right that many games can easily coexist, and that it's silly to proclaim every new digital CCG "the Hearthstone killer," but I think you may be a bit too rosy in your outlook on coexistence today. The facts remain that Hearthstone is the 500lb gorilla in the room when it comes to marketshare:
The same SuperData report that this comes from says that the overall audience size for digital CCGs is leveling out, and that a large majority of players want access on their smartphones. HS's biggest competition - MTGA - will probably never make it to mobile because the game is too complex and the board size has no limits to make rendering straight-forward. Other games like Gwent are getting into mobile, but they're just not popular enough to make a dent.
These factors, combined with the inertia of players' sunk cost in Hearthstone, makes it a juggernaut, and for someone to get into the digital CCG space, they need to take shots at Hearthstone's marketshare. That would be great, and that's why people are looking for the "Hearthstone killer." If Blizzard takes a big hit in their profits, perhaps they'll make a serious investment in Hearthstone improvements. How long have they talked about tournament modes? How long have people been calling for rotating standard sets or greater investment into the Wild format to make old cards less worthless?
Runeterra may not be a "Hearthstone killer," but from my first impressions, I think it's well-poised to deal the major hit to Hearthstone that Blizzard needs if they're ever gong to take major steps to improve the game. In particular:
Nothing is going to kill Hearthstone (which is a good thing), but it doesn't have enough real competition, and Runeterra looks poised to be a major competitor in this space.
I think the 20 HP makes more sense in a "defensive CCG" like MTG or Runeterra, but the biggest reason I'm not worried about this is that Riot Games says they're going to patch as frequently as once a month, and that seems like the kind of thing that will get sorted out pretty early on in the game if it needs patching.
Blizzard is getting ready to follow up their recent "Classic WoW" release with a "Classic Hearthstone." Get psyched - Chillwind Yeti meta incoming.
This is obviously not really explicitly related to the content of this article, but the title is pretty misleading - this doesn't present a hypothesis around why Blizzard hasn't added this keyword, it presents a case for why they ought to. Not super important, but I think it's kind of confusing - this is certainly not the article I expected when I clicked into it (although I didn't mind reading this piece and seeing this point of view laid out).
Adjusting the mana cost may be boring, but it's almost always the right thing to do. There are two big problems with changing what a card fundamentally does: first, it takes away from the fundamentally cool things that the card can do, and second, it may produce some other broken strategies that will simply require more future nerfing.
By only adjusting the cost, Blizzard hasn't made the strategies these cards support entirely obsolete or entirely different, they've merely made them less overpowering. Cards where the effects have been changed are pretty limited in Hearthstone's history, and the changes are usually small in scope. One example is Raza the Chained. You can still use his effect to do the fun things you used to be able to do (i.e. big damage turns Shadowreaper Anduin and/or early/repeated inspire effects), but it's basically impossible to OTK with it now.
Bazaar Burglary seems like a very powerful tool. There is enough good support for burgling that you'll be able to complete this in a timely manner for lots of Rogue decks, and even if the 3/2 weapon isn't a hugely impactful tool in the late game, the immunity does shore up a major weakness (i.e. healing) that Rogue has.
It sort of flies in the face Spectral Cutlass, but unlike the cutlass this can be used outside of a deck that's exclusively a Burgle Rogue archetype.
"Uldum's quests aren't Un'Goro quests."
Yeah, I definitely don't mean to suggest that I'm looking at this quest with the same eyes as I might have back in Un'Goro. This quest isn't intended to be the win condition of the deck. But the flip side of that is that because it's not the win condition, it's something that might not need to be in the deck at all.
"I imagine Priest developing a midrange archetype"
I agree that this belongs in a midrange Priest deck. I think the big question is, should this be the 30th card in that deck? It doesn't need a ton of work to build around it because it asks Priest to do what it naturally does, so that's a major plus, but it does cost you a card in your opening hand and it will drive some deck building choices that might weaken the deck overall.
"We don't know what the meta will be"
It's true that we don't know what the metagame will be, but we can be pretty sure that when a new expansion is released, the strongest decks in the early metagame will be either a) aggro decks, or b) decks that were already strong in the old metagame, because people will just swap a couple of cards and run them. This midrange Priest deck will be able to beat aggro decks, but I'm not convinced any midrange Priest deck needs Activate the Obelisk to achieve that. On the other hand, we can say with some certainty that this quest cannot overpower control decks without a major investment in self harm (because the control decks will just hold their minions back and make it harder for you to complete the quest in a timely manner.
Some thoughts regarding the deck:
I'm someone who is arguing that 15 is harder than it looks, and I don't think your points really refute that. You've highlighted a lot of tools that Priest has to get the job done, but the question isn't "can it be done?" it's "how quickly can it be done?" Let's play out an idealized situation:
That's the fastest you could possibly get this quest online, but it's totally unrealistic. We're assuming here that you go first, get the perfect draw, and that your opponent is an aggro deck. Your opponent in this case is a) playing 1 health minions into your 1/3s and b) not cleaning up your damaged 1 drops. You might see a 2/1 come down on turn 1, if you're playing against Shaman or Druid or the new aggro archetype for Paladin, but most of those classes have cheap weapons (or Druid's hero power), so those 1 drops probably aren't going to stick to the board.
So, let's assume you only get the Injured Blademaster and mass-heal combos. Now you've managed 9+ healing by turn 4, which is respectable, but you've got 5 armor, so your best bet for getting the remaining 6 healing you need is to heal your minions, which may take as long as two or three more turns.
You will complete this quest, probably around turn 6 or 7 if you get a decent hand. The big question is, will that be fast enough for the meta? If you're playing against aggro decks, the fact that you're not dead by 6 or 7 probably means you've won, and against today's control decks this hero power probably isn't enough. The speed at which you can complete this quest is going to depend a lot on the metagame because you're going to need your opponent to be playing for tempo because you're going to need to make trades on board to get to 15 damage. It has a very powerful quest reward, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum, and that context is going to dictate its relevance a big way.
Assuming you have a lot of damage to heal on turn 5 or 6, this will work nicely. But getting an extra cast of Divine Hymn won't do much if that initial heal maxed out your damaged stuff.
That's probably the right turn 1 play most of the time with this deck, but that only gets you 33% of the way there, and the armor makes it harder to take damage.
From a flavor standpoint, Activate the Obelisk and Making Mummies seem to have ended up in the wrong classes. Heal Paladin got lots of support recently, and this would fit very well into a deck like that from a payoff perspective, whereas mummies and reborn are much more consistent with the Priest deathrattle/resurrection identity.
The payoff for Activate the Obelisk is obviously incredibly powerful, but the requirement of healing 15 health is not as easy as it looks. You probably can't start making progress against this any earlier than turn 3 (turn 1 quest, turn 2 develop the board, turn 3 onward hope that you have damage to heal...or turn 1 and 2 develop the board, turn 3 quest and heal). There are a lot of neat things Priest already does (e.g. Northshire Cleric + Wild Pyromancer + Circle of Healing) that can do a lot of work to develop this quest, and having access to reborn minions will help too, but this probably won't be as fast as some people think, particularly since your opponent will know what you're up to and make clearing your minions and avoiding face damage a priority to slow you down while they develop tempo.
That's not to say that Priest will struggle to complete this quest, but the timing of when you get this online is going to be important. A single +3/+3 each turn is good, but it won't do a lot against Warrior AoE like Brawl or Plague of Wrath, or against Warlock AoE like Plague of Flames and Twisting Nether, or the various polymorph effects available to Shaman and Mage. Because Priest has limited card draw and board swarm tools, those kinds of AoEs are a real threat to the Obelisk Priest game plan.
You're probably going to need to be some kind of midrange/tempo deck that can make early game trades, heal, and then capitalize on the cheap buffs before control decks wipe you out. Tempo-y quests of the past (e.g. The Marsh Queen and Unite the Murlocs) had a hard time winning games because having the quest in your opening hand and playing it meant you weren't developing the board you needed, but maybe this will be different, as playing the quest on turn one is probably often the wrong play because you have nothing to heal yet.
You're right that Wrapped Golem is sturdier than [Hearthstone Card (Obsidian Destoryer) Not Found] against certain forms of removal, but the impact of this card against aggro decks is still just as low as Obsidian Destroyer, and reborn isn't even a sure thing against control decks (e.g. Priest has Plague of Death, Shaman has Earthquake, Mage has basically any removal + ping, Warlock has Lord Godfrey). The big difference is that those AoE/Removal tools can work in more match-ups than this card, so even if you find yourself able to stick it to the board against control, you're still probably losing more matches on average than they are because you're running this weak card.
Well, my point is that [Hearthstone Card (Madam Lazul) Not Found] isn't the only support tool for Thief Priest, and that in fact the problem has never really been support for the archetype because there's lots of it. The problem is a lack of payoffs to make up for the lack of tempo from that support. Where Rogue gets cards like Underbelly Fence, Spectral Cutlass, Obsidian Shard, Vendetta, and Tess Greymane as payoffs for low tempo burgle cards, Princess Talanji is the only major payoff Priest has for that archetype.
I think the thought behind that is that because the cards are not strictly random, but rather random cards from your opponent's deck, the card quality is naturally higher and the payoffs can be lower. Additionally, Priest has lots of AoE to deal with higher tempo decks. That's probably true to a point, but Hearthstone is at its core a tempo game, so these kinds of slow plays mean you need even more powerful plays later, and good AoE on turn 5 is often too little, too late.
You're right that Drakonid Operative was exceptional because it had a vanilla statline and a powerful effect, but it would probably still have been quite good as a 4/6 or a 3/6, or at 6 mana. Crystalline Oracle is perhaps a better example of a Thief Priest card that saw play and was useful both as a stealing tool and a tempo tool.
Obsidian Destroyer wasn't that good. Wrapped Golem's reborn balances out the slightly lower health (sort of makes it a 7/6). So if there's some class that wants access to a slightly worse Obsidian Destroyer, cool, they've got it. There probably isn't, though, so this is just for Arena.
To say that Wretched Reclaimer is "just Reincarnate for Priest" dramatically undersells how much of an upgrade this is. Priest supports the reincarnate effect much more effectively than Shaman, and for the low price of one extra mana and an irrelevant "can only target friendly minions" clause, this gets you a 3/3 minion.