In many games, I think you'll miss a step in your curve at some point. From there on, you'll either have to play behind the curve or postpone quest completion. If you go second, you'll have a better chance to stay on curve due to starting with one more card, but you can't really get value out of the coin, so you're still behind your opponent's curve.
The quest itself eating up a card slot in your hand was a significant drawback of the Un'goro quests. Questing Explorer compensated for that in the Uldum era, but that card is no longer in Standard. You get to discover a card after the first stage, so you are compensated eventually for playing the quest, but you might have missed a curve beat by then already.
I think this would work best with mostly minions in your deck: they tend to be less situational than spells, so easier to play on curve. Having multiple minions in hand when you get Xyrella, the Sanctified will be important to dodge Mutanus the Devourer. Assuming you went first, played on curve and played no 0-cost cards, you should have 6 cards in hand after quest completion; if that is 5 minions you should be relatively safe, but if it is 2 minions you might see your quest line end prematurely. Also tutoring the final reward spell is more reliable if you don't have many spells in the deck.
All in all, I don't think this will be a top deck (which is probably for the better). Priest can already play minions on curve and end with N'Zoth, God of the Deep, which is more forgiving when you can't curve out perfectly.
I think they didn't use the legendary quest slot because it might be taken up by other events. For example, people that didn't finish their Fire Festival questline yet will still have that in their legendary quest slot.
As for the reward, it's still 50% more XP for a quest that is relatively easy to complete. And while Hearthstone is expensive, I don't think a monthly event would be the way to fix that. It's much easier to increase the gold to XP ratio, if they wanted to make the economy more budget friendly.
I played three games with Nozdormu in Wild and it activated 2 out of 3 times, so the quest seems to make a big difference compared to two months ago when I couldn't find a single opponent playing Nozdormu.
When I first got the Omu deck I thought it would be the best, but there is an even crazier deck out there, with a completed Quel'Delar, a passive that starts you at 10 mana and a hero power that gives your hero windfury. If you draw any burn, it's a first turn kill. The only times I didn't get an OTK is when the opponent played a taunt and when I went second in the mirror match.
At least it was a quick way to complete the 10 Shaman games for the Fire Festival questline.
They made the people who usually make new Brawls work on Mercenaries instead, which is why we're seeing a lot of repeats. Let's hope for more new Brawls after Mercenaries releases.
A bit late in the week, but if you just got the "Win 5 times in Arena, Battlegrounds, Duels or Tavern Brawl" weekly quest, this is a nice way to complete it.
I managed to OTK with Demon Hunter once, when my opponent didn't manage to OTK me and was at 26 health instead of 30 when I got my turn. I think you can get 30 damage in turn 1 if you draw both copies of Inner Demon, but I wasn't that lucky.
The main problem I ran into is the popularity of Druid, which has enough healing and armor to exceed the total amount of damage in my deck.
I have had games where I just didn't have enough life left to do crazy things, so Drain Soul makes sense. And for early board control of course.
I've also been playing the Frost Giant version, but the demon version feels more consistent. Tamsin was a bit clumsy in the Giants version: I often spent my whole turn clearing minions, while Hysteria could do that for less mana, so I'm not sure she's worth risking a low roll on Free Admission. Of course Hysteria doesn't heal, but if you can play it earlier it might save you from taking face damage instead.
Fire Breather is probably one of the less consistent cards: it is good against Rogue and Paladin, but less so against decks that don't play many minions. Depending on the meta, you might be able to cut it.
Midway Maniac is not much of a threat, especially without Felosophy. In a low-aggro meta you could cut Maniac, but against Hunter a high-health taunt is pretty useful.
I'm not sure how useful Flesh Giant would be in this deck: against aggro you want interact with the board on turn 2 instead of tapping, which means it will be hard to get the Giant discounted early enough for it to matter. Against slower decks the Giant eventually becomes free, which is great for a reload after a board clear, but with Stealer of Souls + draw on turn 6/7 you probably already have enough reload capability.
I do like Flesh Giant as a card, but it's already difficult to get it to work when you build the deck around it, let alone if you try to slot it into a deck that it only partially fits into.
You could go for a larger Soul Fragments package, using Luckysoul Hoarder, Bloodmage Thalnos, Mortal Coil and Tour Guide for card draw, School Spirits for AoE and add Tamsin Roame and Lord Jaraxxus as well, while cutting Matron + Hand and most of the demon synergies. It would be a different deck by then, but maybe one in which Flesh Giants would fit better, as there would be more control tools and more frequent healing (many small heals from Soul Fragments vs a few big heals from Man'ari Mosher). I might actually try that out later.
If you don't have a full set of Wild commons yet, you'll get 5 new cards per pack, instead of half the packs being 40 dust. On the other hand, there are a lot of unplayable legendaries in Wild, so that part of the bundle is not guaranteed to work out well.
I saw Regis go super greedy with this card in Standard and while that does lead to some spectacular highlights, it is not very consistent. I made a lower-curve deck instead which doesn't go all-in on the Stealer of Souls, but does take advantage of the power spikes while rarely falling flat. Give it a try before this card gets nerfed.
As an initiative from LGBT+ employees, I think it is good that they managed to get this published. As a product of a company the size of Blizzard, it feels a bit underwhelming though. I'd rather see something showcasing their LGBT+ characters like Tracer or Varden.
It's literally just taking the Blizzard logo, then using the bucket tool to color each letter with a different color of the rainbow and then adding another one because they didn't even think about the fact that the rainbow only has 7 colors.
Which Uldum meta though? The early Uldum meta was one of the best ever, in my opinion, but after the Doom in the Tomb event it became stale very quickly.
Where did you find those subtitles? All I can get is auto-generated subtitles and those obviously only contain the words spoken in the trailer (except for errors like "Barrens" being transcribed as "barons").
I put Clockwork Giant in a Watch Posts + N'Zoth deck earlier in the expansion and it felt pretty good in the few games I played with it. But then the Watch Posts got nerfed and I disenchanted Kargal Battlescar and the deck fell apart.
For more potassium, you could even put Plagiarize in the deck and then copy your opponent's bananas as they are played. It's not even cheating: bananas are clones anyway. And then add Blackjack Stunner to deny your opponent the benefits of the bananas.
In many games, I think you'll miss a step in your curve at some point. From there on, you'll either have to play behind the curve or postpone quest completion. If you go second, you'll have a better chance to stay on curve due to starting with one more card, but you can't really get value out of the coin, so you're still behind your opponent's curve.
The quest itself eating up a card slot in your hand was a significant drawback of the Un'goro quests. Questing Explorer compensated for that in the Uldum era, but that card is no longer in Standard. You get to discover a card after the first stage, so you are compensated eventually for playing the quest, but you might have missed a curve beat by then already.
I think this would work best with mostly minions in your deck: they tend to be less situational than spells, so easier to play on curve. Having multiple minions in hand when you get Xyrella, the Sanctified will be important to dodge Mutanus the Devourer. Assuming you went first, played on curve and played no 0-cost cards, you should have 6 cards in hand after quest completion; if that is 5 minions you should be relatively safe, but if it is 2 minions you might see your quest line end prematurely. Also tutoring the final reward spell is more reliable if you don't have many spells in the deck.
All in all, I don't think this will be a top deck (which is probably for the better). Priest can already play minions on curve and end with N'Zoth, God of the Deep, which is more forgiving when you can't curve out perfectly.
I think they didn't use the legendary quest slot because it might be taken up by other events. For example, people that didn't finish their Fire Festival questline yet will still have that in their legendary quest slot.
As for the reward, it's still 50% more XP for a quest that is relatively easy to complete. And while Hearthstone is expensive, I don't think a monthly event would be the way to fix that. It's much easier to increase the gold to XP ratio, if they wanted to make the economy more budget friendly.
I played three games with Nozdormu in Wild and it activated 2 out of 3 times, so the quest seems to make a big difference compared to two months ago when I couldn't find a single opponent playing Nozdormu.
When I first got the Omu deck I thought it would be the best, but there is an even crazier deck out there, with a completed Quel'Delar, a passive that starts you at 10 mana and a hero power that gives your hero windfury. If you draw any burn, it's a first turn kill. The only times I didn't get an OTK is when the opponent played a taunt and when I went second in the mirror match.
At least it was a quick way to complete the 10 Shaman games for the Fire Festival questline.
They made the people who usually make new Brawls work on Mercenaries instead, which is why we're seeing a lot of repeats. Let's hope for more new Brawls after Mercenaries releases.
I've had good results with the following deck. It seems to confuse opponents; read the deck guide for details.
A bit late in the week, but if you just got the "Win 5 times in Arena, Battlegrounds, Duels or Tavern Brawl" weekly quest, this is a nice way to complete it.
I managed to OTK with Demon Hunter once, when my opponent didn't manage to OTK me and was at 26 health instead of 30 when I got my turn. I think you can get 30 damage in turn 1 if you draw both copies of Inner Demon, but I wasn't that lucky.
The main problem I ran into is the popularity of Druid, which has enough healing and armor to exceed the total amount of damage in my deck.
I have had games where I just didn't have enough life left to do crazy things, so Drain Soul makes sense. And for early board control of course.
I've also been playing the Frost Giant version, but the demon version feels more consistent. Tamsin was a bit clumsy in the Giants version: I often spent my whole turn clearing minions, while Hysteria could do that for less mana, so I'm not sure she's worth risking a low roll on Free Admission. Of course Hysteria doesn't heal, but if you can play it earlier it might save you from taking face damage instead.
Here is a version with Flesh Giants and a big Soul Fragment package:
It's not as refined as the other deck, but it should be a decent starting point if you want to try this archetype.
I made a first version of the Flesh Giants deck.
You're not the only one who likes Flesh Giant. I wrote a rather lengthy reply to that suggestion on the deck page, please give it a read.
Fire Breather is probably one of the less consistent cards: it is good against Rogue and Paladin, but less so against decks that don't play many minions. Depending on the meta, you might be able to cut it.
Midway Maniac is not much of a threat, especially without Felosophy. In a low-aggro meta you could cut Maniac, but against Hunter a high-health taunt is pretty useful.
I'm not sure how useful Flesh Giant would be in this deck: against aggro you want interact with the board on turn 2 instead of tapping, which means it will be hard to get the Giant discounted early enough for it to matter. Against slower decks the Giant eventually becomes free, which is great for a reload after a board clear, but with Stealer of Souls + draw on turn 6/7 you probably already have enough reload capability.
I do like Flesh Giant as a card, but it's already difficult to get it to work when you build the deck around it, let alone if you try to slot it into a deck that it only partially fits into.
You could go for a larger Soul Fragments package, using Luckysoul Hoarder, Bloodmage Thalnos, Mortal Coil and Tour Guide for card draw, School Spirits for AoE and add Tamsin Roame and Lord Jaraxxus as well, while cutting Matron + Hand and most of the demon synergies. It would be a different deck by then, but maybe one in which Flesh Giants would fit better, as there would be more control tools and more frequent healing (many small heals from Soul Fragments vs a few big heals from Man'ari Mosher). I might actually try that out later.
If you don't have a full set of Wild commons yet, you'll get 5 new cards per pack, instead of half the packs being 40 dust. On the other hand, there are a lot of unplayable legendaries in Wild, so that part of the bundle is not guaranteed to work out well.
I saw Regis go super greedy with this card in Standard and while that does lead to some spectacular highlights, it is not very consistent. I made a lower-curve deck instead which doesn't go all-in on the Stealer of Souls, but does take advantage of the power spikes while rarely falling flat. Give it a try before this card gets nerfed.
As an initiative from LGBT+ employees, I think it is good that they managed to get this published. As a product of a company the size of Blizzard, it feels a bit underwhelming though. I'd rather see something showcasing their LGBT+ characters like Tracer or Varden.
It's an artistic interpretation of ultraviolet ;)
Which Uldum meta though? The early Uldum meta was one of the best ever, in my opinion, but after the Doom in the Tomb event it became stale very quickly.
Where did you find those subtitles? All I can get is auto-generated subtitles and those obviously only contain the words spoken in the trailer (except for errors like "Barrens" being transcribed as "barons").
I put Clockwork Giant in a Watch Posts + N'Zoth deck earlier in the expansion and it felt pretty good in the few games I played with it. But then the Watch Posts got nerfed and I disenchanted Kargal Battlescar and the deck fell apart.
For more potassium, you could even put Plagiarize in the deck and then copy your opponent's bananas as they are played. It's not even cheating: bananas are clones anyway. And then add Blackjack Stunner to deny your opponent the benefits of the bananas.