I mean, it's pretty obvious that they weren't making a galaxy brained move and planned 3 years ahead with these characters.
What's more likely is that they just chekced all their previous original characters and thought "these 3 don't have established names or lore, let's use them again". Wouldn't be surprised if they just overlooked some of the promotional material.
If this is what's supposed to make Smythe playable I don't buy it. 1/3 weapons are pretty terrible these days because you can barely get rid of anything without weapon buffs (which Paladin does not have).
Getting a Secret from your deck means you cannot control which one, which is the most important aspect of Paladin secrets since you usually want a specific outcome (although you could make the argument that Avenge and Reckoning are both independently useful).
Still not sold on Secret Paladin. That deck already had better support than currently available and still saw no play. Maybe we get a really good secret that allows for a secret package in a different deck, but other than that this is filler.
and that's what they should do (regardless of wheter that's healthy for the game)
essentially what we have here is a grindy contrrol deck with unbeatable inevitability that also shit on combo decks by randomly nuking their combo pieces.
The only thing that beats this is hard aggro (which is severely nerfed after every single aggro class lost their main burn spells)
I don#t wanna play a meta where Warlock just dominate by not letting me actually play my cards without suffering any drawbacks
I just don't get why they would print something like this and not something more about actual self milling.
Like...the gameplan for Self Mill Warlock is pretty clear: Yeet your deck then play the Portal guy and Imp rush your opponent to death. Burning your opponent's deck is irrelevant in that deck because you're not trying to win a fatigue war.
This could have easily been something like "deal 4 to a minion and yeet 3 cards from your deck".
I woudln#t even play this for the disruption, I'd just play it to burn through my deck and get my Portal online. The enemy burn is literally just "oh and fuck you btw" and will occasionally just win you games because you destroyed their main win condition.
I have no idea if that Warlock archetype will even take off but if it does it will eventually have to be nerfed just because of how aids it is
Wow, what a great and totally not obnoxious way to support selfburn Warlock. Can't wait to win games at random because I happened to burn my opponent's win condition while not even trying to.
probably will have to be because Warrior has so little draw that Menagerie is the only possible option so far. At least that archetype has decent support
Cool and rather unique effect. Not sure how viable it will be though.
For achievement hunters: Celestalon is once again teasing us with upcoming achievements. Apparently you'll need to kill the drained minion with Serena.
If you only need to do this once, its simply enough, since anything with 1 health will die to this effect...I assume anyway
Celestalon did word it "attack and kill", most likely to prevent this easy "cheat". So some extra effort is required.
My initial idea is a removal heavy Priest to keep board empty, and when opponent plays one big minion play this and Hysteria. If it really requires Serena to be the one to attack (damn Hysteria nerf!) then either Mass Hysteria and hope, or roll on the floor and cry trying.
Play this against a 5/8 and you get a 5/5 vs a 1/4. That's pretty crazy actually.
Just a point, you missunderstand how works on that scenario.
You can see on video reveal how works the card when is used on an asimetrical statted minion.
He used it on a 4/8 that becomes a 2/4 and Serena goes on 3/5 stats. She steal attack points until she have more and, then, does the same with health points.
As @theodrinus said:
-----------------------------------------
Quick formula of resulting stats for head calculations:
For target minion: halve Attack and Health, rounded down.
For Serena: halve target minion's Attack and Health, rounded up, then add +1/+1.
-------------------------------------------------
Oooooh, that makes way more sense then. I thought she just sap 1/1 until both of ther stats are above.
Well then she's just kinda awful. Her only purpose would be to combo with Cabal Acolyte (in which case Wave of Apathy is simply better) or with Initiation (where the minion in question can't have more than 9 health).
That makes buffing opposing minions worthless. There better be some crazy synergy or else this is just dumpster tier.
An actual Tempo swing card for Priest, how about that.
Not entirely sure how useful this is in practice, but in theory it can turn any big minion into a weenie to run over with something on the board.
The obvious is problem is how dependant she is on actually having a target.
There are a couple different scenarios for this
Play this against an 8/8 and you get a 5/5 vs a 4/4. That's pretty alright.
Play this againt a 5/5 and you have a 4/4 vs a 2/2. That's a lot better.
Play this against a 5/8 and you get a 5/5 vs a 1/4. That's pretty crazy actually.
I haven't done all the math, but you want to prioritize minions with an odd number of stats (because that usually nets you an additional 1/1 stolen) and wildly differing attack and health values.
According to my calculations the best targets are those with 4 points between health and attack starting at 4/8 and 8/4 respectively (which allows you to get a 5/5 while reducing either attack or health of the target to 0). You can then scale those up by adding +1/+1 but in general it would make sense to manipulate your target's stats for the best results (which might unironically make you consider buffing opponents minions with stuff like Power Infusion to optimize your outcome)
For instance, if the opponent has a 5/5 that I want to or need to deal with I can give that thing +2/+6 and instead of turning it into a 4/4 vs 2/2 make it a 7/7 vs a 1/5.
Basically this is the only minion that allows you to buff your opponent's minions to significantly buff yourself. Will that actually be good? Probably not, unless we get some crazy support for tempo buff Priest I don't see this happening. Control Priest won't need this because they can usually just kill what they want to remove and can't do anything with these tempo swings anyways.
The biggest problem is probably that she prefers to drain minions with higher attack than their health...and those aren't exactly common. High health minions will always survive, even if they won't have much attack left meaning she is useless as removal against persistent effects.
One particular synergy worth mentioning would be Focused Will because you can use it to silence an enemy and then sap it which is great against minions with big stats and persistent effects (Used on Savannah Highmane this gives you a 5/5 into a 2/4) but even then you're very dependant on having a good stat distribution on your target to really make use of it.
Overall this seems like the kind of card that can be really useful if the right deck comes together, but other than that she'S pointless
canon until further notice
I mean, it's pretty obvious that they weren't making a galaxy brained move and planned 3 years ahead with these characters.
What's more likely is that they just chekced all their previous original characters and thought "these 3 don't have established names or lore, let's use them again". Wouldn't be surprised if they just overlooked some of the promotional material.
Okay now that really begs the question what the fuck the actual Hearthstone timeline is
Meh, unimpressive.
If this is what's supposed to make Smythe playable I don't buy it. 1/3 weapons are pretty terrible these days because you can barely get rid of anything without weapon buffs (which Paladin does not have).
Getting a Secret from your deck means you cannot control which one, which is the most important aspect of Paladin secrets since you usually want a specific outcome (although you could make the argument that Avenge and Reckoning are both independently useful).
Still not sold on Secret Paladin. That deck already had better support than currently available and still saw no play. Maybe we get a really good secret that allows for a secret package in a different deck, but other than that this is filler.
tell it to all the polarizing combo decks that neve rbroke 50% winrate and still got nuked
and that's what they should do (regardless of wheter that's healthy for the game)
essentially what we have here is a grindy contrrol deck with unbeatable inevitability that also shit on combo decks by randomly nuking their combo pieces.
The only thing that beats this is hard aggro (which is severely nerfed after every single aggro class lost their main burn spells)
I don#t wanna play a meta where Warlock just dominate by not letting me actually play my cards without suffering any drawbacks
I just don't get why they would print something like this and not something more about actual self milling.
Like...the gameplan for Self Mill Warlock is pretty clear: Yeet your deck then play the Portal guy and Imp rush your opponent to death. Burning your opponent's deck is irrelevant in that deck because you're not trying to win a fatigue war.
This could have easily been something like "deal 4 to a minion and yeet 3 cards from your deck".
I woudln#t even play this for the disruption, I'd just play it to burn through my deck and get my Portal online. The enemy burn is literally just "oh and fuck you btw" and will occasionally just win you games because you destroyed their main win condition.
I have no idea if that Warlock archetype will even take off but if it does it will eventually have to be nerfed just because of how aids it is
Wow, what a great and totally not obnoxious way to support selfburn Warlock. Can't wait to win games at random because I happened to burn my opponent's win condition while not even trying to.
but why
you're the best
around
nothing's gonna ever keep you down
probably will have to be because Warrior has so little draw that Menagerie is the only possible option so far. At least that archetype has decent support
I really want this to be a thing but I'm hesitant.
At the very least at 10 mana it can allow for some pretty nasty boards, but after the cut so much draw from Warrior I'm not sure that's a possibility.
I feel like this is best used at turn 5 to buff some 3-drop to play alongside and then hopefully have enough fuel in hand to go from there.
I really love this artwork.
Montage Warrior incoming
I'm not sure this is good enough.
IT's necessary for Swinetusk Shiv, but it doesn't exactly inspire hope for that archetype.
Xaril had way more flexible outcomes and he saw almost no play in a meta that was way slower.
Also, it's pretty risky to build your deck around stacking a single weapon.
Called it
Also, nice hairline bro
Or just Broom
Oooooh, that makes way more sense then. I thought she just sap 1/1 until both of ther stats are above.
Well then she's just kinda awful. Her only purpose would be to combo with Cabal Acolyte (in which case Wave of Apathy is simply better) or with Initiation (where the minion in question can't have more than 9 health).
That makes buffing opposing minions worthless. There better be some crazy synergy or else this is just dumpster tier.
it's not really tempo to not kill an enemy minion...at least nowadays
There's a reason why Aldor Peacekeeper hasn't seen play in years.
only if you have something to kill the target with afterwards. Otherwise you're just trading stats and achieving nothing.
An actual Tempo swing card for Priest, how about that.
Not entirely sure how useful this is in practice, but in theory it can turn any big minion into a weenie to run over with something on the board.
The obvious is problem is how dependant she is on actually having a target.
There are a couple different scenarios for this
Play this against an 8/8 and you get a 5/5 vs a 4/4. That's pretty alright.
Play this againt a 5/5 and you have a 4/4 vs a 2/2. That's a lot better.
Play this against a 5/8 and you get a 5/5 vs a 1/4. That's pretty crazy actually.
I haven't done all the math, but you want to prioritize minions with an odd number of stats (because that usually nets you an additional 1/1 stolen) and wildly differing attack and health values.
According to my calculations the best targets are those with 4 points between health and attack starting at 4/8 and 8/4 respectively (which allows you to get a 5/5 while reducing either attack or health of the target to 0). You can then scale those up by adding +1/+1 but in general it would make sense to manipulate your target's stats for the best results (which might unironically make you consider buffing opponents minions with stuff like Power Infusion to optimize your outcome)
For instance, if the opponent has a 5/5 that I want to or need to deal with I can give that thing +2/+6 and instead of turning it into a 4/4 vs 2/2 make it a 7/7 vs a 1/5.
Basically this is the only minion that allows you to buff your opponent's minions to significantly buff yourself. Will that actually be good? Probably not, unless we get some crazy support for tempo buff Priest I don't see this happening. Control Priest won't need this because they can usually just kill what they want to remove and can't do anything with these tempo swings anyways.
The biggest problem is probably that she prefers to drain minions with higher attack than their health...and those aren't exactly common. High health minions will always survive, even if they won't have much attack left meaning she is useless as removal against persistent effects.
One particular synergy worth mentioning would be Focused Will because you can use it to silence an enemy and then sap it which is great against minions with big stats and persistent effects (Used on Savannah Highmane this gives you a 5/5 into a 2/4) but even then you're very dependant on having a good stat distribution on your target to really make use of it.
Overall this seems like the kind of card that can be really useful if the right deck comes together, but other than that she'S pointless