It's weird that this is a card reveal, since filler is usually kept for the card dump after the final reveal stream. Maybe it had rush earlier and they dropped that late in development?
I did re-read it several times, both before posting and now. I really don't see how Owl would be of any help here, since by the time you can actually target Magtheridon with a silence effect it is too late.
I think Power Word: Shield is worse in an Gadgetzan Auctioneer deck now: while a cost of zero can make the cycling be more powerful, the risk of drawing the Auctioneer itself too late increases when there is fewer other card draw. It was quite common for a Priest to play Shield on an opponent's minion just to be able to draw and that option no longer exists after the change.
In the early turns it's not a question of withholding, as you may simply not have the mana yet to use the AoE. In later turns, you may have the choice between clearing the most imminent threats with trades and single-target removal or using AoE; you'll probably want to cash in on those trades before blowing up the entire board.
I think Vilefiend waking up after Twisting Nether is more of a pre-paid removal than a tempo swing: since the opponent gets a full turn to rebuild their board after Nether, you'll probably be behind in tempo, just less so than if you had to start from nothing.
In Wild, you mean? Because Northshire Cleric is headed for the Hall of Fame.
I think they want Priest to rely on generating cards for additional value instead of drawing. See for example Galakrond's hero power and the buff to Thoughtsteal.
I think this might be good in Control Warlock in particular, since you can play it a turn before you're going to AoE the board. Warlock AoE tends to hit friends and foes, but not dormant minions. So it sets up nicely for Dark Skies, Crazed Netherwing, Twisting Nether etc.
Doubling Imp and Omega Agent are from Boomsday and therefore rotating; there isn't much support in the Year of the Dragon sets. But if they'd make something like a Doubling Imp with taunt like the pre-nerf Saronite Chain Gang, I think it's possible to recover from the tempo loss. And there is of course already Faceless Corruptor.
Secrets are only 2 mana on average and it's a discover effect so you can lower that average by skipping the 3-mana Mage secrets unless a really good one is offered. That makes it easier to chain this effect than Whirlkick Master's.
I think the only problem with Oondasta is that it doesn't curve well: if you have an Amani War Bear or Winged Guardian in your hand, you want to play that when you reach 7 mana, not keep it in your hand until you can play Oondasta. Marsh Hydra on the other hand supports your curve.
Even with Strength in Numbers, curve is important: if Oondasta is great when summoned from the deck but not when summoned from hand, it improves those games where you are already doing well, aka "win more".
Edit: Also, after this attacks is easier to satisfy than overkill: you can run the Hydra into Evasive Drakonid or a Tirion from Zephrys and still get the effect.
The main reason it's gotten more expensive is that they release more cards per year: they went from expansions and adventures as separate seasons to every season an expansion and now an expansion plus adventure each season. While it costs more time/money per year to keep up, you do get more game in return.
The switch from one to two class legendaries per expansion is one change that does make things more expensive while not delivering a lot in terms of content. I mean, it's nice that there can be two archetypes per set supported by a legendary, but they could also support the second archetype without including a legendary for it.
On the plus side, they added more events where you can get free packs, have frequent sales (bundles) and the announced duplicate protection for all rarities is very welcome.
I think this is overall a good direction to go in. Priest always had the problem that the good decks weren't fun and the fun decks weren't good. Also for a class that's supposed to be good at healing minions, in practice that healing was used more for side effects like drawing cards off Northshire Cleric or buffing Lightwarden than for keeping your minions alive.
The announcement says that for the DoD season, if you have the pack perks, you'll get the new perks as well. But for the Outland season I can only interpret "players will no longer have to purchase card packs in order to unlock Battlegrounds Perks" as "players can no longer unlock Battlegrounds Perks by purchasing card packs." The inclusion of the Tavern Pass in the Mega Bundle seems to support this, as that would be redundant if packs unlocked perks.
I understand that they don't want to lose money on people playing nothing but Battlegrounds, but $20 every four months seems a bit much unless you're a huge Battlegrounds fan.
The content of a pack is determined when you open it.
Yes and no: there was a server problem some years ago that led to pack openings being rolled back. People who re-opened the packs after the servers were restored reported that the packs had the same rarity distributions the second time around (same packs contained epics and legendaries), but the exact cards they got were different. So it seems Blizzard has an RNG seed for each account (or possibly one per account per set) that determines the rarities in a pack and upon opening they pick the cards you get using a different RNG while looking at your collection to avoid duplicates.
But I agree that the no-duplicate rule most likely depends on the time you're opening the pack and not the time you got the pack, since they wouldn't go through the trouble of complicating their server software by having two versions of the card selection algorithm just to give you worse pack openings.
I think team5 purposefully created the sidequests in such a way that they dont synergize well with one another and that's my impression with druid sidequests.
They created sidequests with different synergies, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're in conflict.
In the case of Druid, getting 3 copies of Claw is very flexible, since you can use it as removal or as burn depending on what you need in a particular game.
I have made a few attempts at a Sidequest Mage deck today, but that was a big disappointment. Part of the problem is the current elementals aren't good enough in this rush-heavy meta: for example Fire Hawk often becomes 7/3, but I wasn't able to do any face damage with it. But another part is in the sidequests themselves: Elemental Allies works best with cheap spells (because of their abilities and because it's easier to keep the elemental chain going if you can play more than one card per turn) while Learn Draconic works best with more expensive spells. So for Mage, I do think the sidequests are difficult to fit into the same deck.
I have some ideas for a Sidequest Beast Hunter, but I don't really want to craft a second Toxic Reinforcements since if the idea fails I may never play that card again.
For Paladin, maybe Air Raid is the card that brings both sidequests together.
In this case, I'm particularly worried that the entire deck can be taken down with nothing more than a Faerie Dragon on 2, and Evasive Feywing on 4, both are currently in two of the top tier decks, hence the Scaleriders.
Maybe remove the Escaped Manasabers for Oasis Surgers, or Evasive Feywings? Remove alex + 1x ferocious howl for 2x Winged Guardian. At least with this there's a good chance you can steamroll rogue, and have a decent chance against dragon hunter.
Meta is a weird thing. Last week I encountered mostly Rogue, Mage and Priest, while today I got five Hunters in a row. None of them were playing Dragon Hunter though (one Quest, one Mech, one Face and two different Beast variants).
I agree that Alex and Howl are candidates for replacement. I don't want to lose the Manasabers though: being able to ramp into Emerald Explorer or Evasive Wyrm can really decide games.
I made up a side quest hunter deck and tried it out a little.
It feels like I've made a slightly confused deck. But it is reasonably fun to play.
Nice!
The deck does indeed look a bit confused about its identity, with the rush minions, face damage and dragons all in there. There doesn't seem to be a lot of synergy between those packages.
I'm not sure Alexstrasza really should be in the deck. She's useful if you haven't been able to get your opponent's life total down enough because of armor or Zilliax, but there have been games where I was above 15 health and my opponent below 15 by the time I could play her, and even more games that were over on turn 7/8.
Faceless Corruptor is a great card if you have a small minion on board, but that's not often the case with this deck. Oasis Surger might be a good addition; I chose to include more dragons instead but I'm not sure what's better. Scalerider would add another low roll to the sidequest; maybe it's good enough to make that an acceptable risk, similar to Questing Explorer and Licensed Adventurer, but so far I haven't really missed it: many decks seem to either go so wide that you need Swipe or they don't play anything significant until turn 5.
I think its best to rework the deck to fit Gonk, the Raptor. But dont let me stop you, I would be interested to know your win rate with this list.
I like Gonk, but for a Gonk combo you need a lot of support cards, which means the combo would dictate the entire deck. Maybe just having Gonk and the sidequest could work, but in practice the Claw damage often goes face, so I have some doubts about Gonk's added value.
I haven't been keeping stats, plus I don't play at highly competitive ranks anyway (currently at rank 13) since I only play a handful of games per day and most of what I play is experimental and off-meta decks.
It's weird that this is a card reveal, since filler is usually kept for the card dump after the final reveal stream. Maybe it had rush earlier and they dropped that late in development?
I think this is worse than Icehowl: since it cannot attack immediately, it's not even good as removal.
I did re-read it several times, both before posting and now. I really don't see how Owl would be of any help here, since by the time you can actually target Magtheridon with a silence effect it is too late.
How is Owl going to help here? Dormant minions are untargetable, as far as I know, looking at how Sherazin, Corpse Flower works.
I think Power Word: Shield is worse in an Gadgetzan Auctioneer deck now: while a cost of zero can make the cycling be more powerful, the risk of drawing the Auctioneer itself too late increases when there is fewer other card draw. It was quite common for a Priest to play Shield on an opponent's minion just to be able to draw and that option no longer exists after the change.
In the early turns it's not a question of withholding, as you may simply not have the mana yet to use the AoE. In later turns, you may have the choice between clearing the most imminent threats with trades and single-target removal or using AoE; you'll probably want to cash in on those trades before blowing up the entire board.
I think Vilefiend waking up after Twisting Nether is more of a pre-paid removal than a tempo swing: since the opponent gets a full turn to rebuild their board after Nether, you'll probably be behind in tempo, just less so than if you had to start from nothing.
In Wild, you mean? Because Northshire Cleric is headed for the Hall of Fame.
I think they want Priest to rely on generating cards for additional value instead of drawing. See for example Galakrond's hero power and the buff to Thoughtsteal.
I think this might be good in Control Warlock in particular, since you can play it a turn before you're going to AoE the board. Warlock AoE tends to hit friends and foes, but not dormant minions. So it sets up nicely for Dark Skies, Crazed Netherwing, Twisting Nether etc.
Doubling Imp and Omega Agent are from Boomsday and therefore rotating; there isn't much support in the Year of the Dragon sets. But if they'd make something like a Doubling Imp with taunt like the pre-nerf Saronite Chain Gang, I think it's possible to recover from the tempo loss. And there is of course already Faceless Corruptor.
Secrets are only 2 mana on average and it's a discover effect so you can lower that average by skipping the 3-mana Mage secrets unless a really good one is offered. That makes it easier to chain this effect than Whirlkick Master's.
I think the only problem with Oondasta is that it doesn't curve well: if you have an Amani War Bear or Winged Guardian in your hand, you want to play that when you reach 7 mana, not keep it in your hand until you can play Oondasta. Marsh Hydra on the other hand supports your curve.
Even with Strength in Numbers, curve is important: if Oondasta is great when summoned from the deck but not when summoned from hand, it improves those games where you are already doing well, aka "win more".
Edit: Also, after this attacks is easier to satisfy than overkill: you can run the Hydra into Evasive Drakonid or a Tirion from Zephrys and still get the effect.
The main reason it's gotten more expensive is that they release more cards per year: they went from expansions and adventures as separate seasons to every season an expansion and now an expansion plus adventure each season. While it costs more time/money per year to keep up, you do get more game in return.
The switch from one to two class legendaries per expansion is one change that does make things more expensive while not delivering a lot in terms of content. I mean, it's nice that there can be two archetypes per set supported by a legendary, but they could also support the second archetype without including a legendary for it.
On the plus side, they added more events where you can get free packs, have frequent sales (bundles) and the announced duplicate protection for all rarities is very welcome.
I think this is overall a good direction to go in. Priest always had the problem that the good decks weren't fun and the fun decks weren't good. Also for a class that's supposed to be good at healing minions, in practice that healing was used more for side effects like drawing cards off Northshire Cleric or buffing Lightwarden than for keeping your minions alive.
But there is a card for it: Shut up, Priest.
The announcement says that for the DoD season, if you have the pack perks, you'll get the new perks as well. But for the Outland season I can only interpret "players will no longer have to purchase card packs in order to unlock Battlegrounds Perks" as "players can no longer unlock Battlegrounds Perks by purchasing card packs." The inclusion of the Tavern Pass in the Mega Bundle seems to support this, as that would be redundant if packs unlocked perks.
I understand that they don't want to lose money on people playing nothing but Battlegrounds, but $20 every four months seems a bit much unless you're a huge Battlegrounds fan.
Yes and no: there was a server problem some years ago that led to pack openings being rolled back. People who re-opened the packs after the servers were restored reported that the packs had the same rarity distributions the second time around (same packs contained epics and legendaries), but the exact cards they got were different. So it seems Blizzard has an RNG seed for each account (or possibly one per account per set) that determines the rarities in a pack and upon opening they pick the cards you get using a different RNG while looking at your collection to avoid duplicates.
But I agree that the no-duplicate rule most likely depends on the time you're opening the pack and not the time you got the pack, since they wouldn't go through the trouble of complicating their server software by having two versions of the card selection algorithm just to give you worse pack openings.
I was hoping for them to do this for epics, but having it for all rarities is even better, especially for new players.
They created sidequests with different synergies, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're in conflict.
In the case of Druid, getting 3 copies of Claw is very flexible, since you can use it as removal or as burn depending on what you need in a particular game.
I have made a few attempts at a Sidequest Mage deck today, but that was a big disappointment. Part of the problem is the current elementals aren't good enough in this rush-heavy meta: for example Fire Hawk often becomes 7/3, but I wasn't able to do any face damage with it. But another part is in the sidequests themselves: Elemental Allies works best with cheap spells (because of their abilities and because it's easier to keep the elemental chain going if you can play more than one card per turn) while Learn Draconic works best with more expensive spells. So for Mage, I do think the sidequests are difficult to fit into the same deck.
I have some ideas for a Sidequest Beast Hunter, but I don't really want to craft a second Toxic Reinforcements since if the idea fails I may never play that card again.
For Paladin, maybe Air Raid is the card that brings both sidequests together.
Meta is a weird thing. Last week I encountered mostly Rogue, Mage and Priest, while today I got five Hunters in a row. None of them were playing Dragon Hunter though (one Quest, one Mech, one Face and two different Beast variants).
I agree that Alex and Howl are candidates for replacement. I don't want to lose the Manasabers though: being able to ramp into Emerald Explorer or Evasive Wyrm can really decide games.
Nice!
The deck does indeed look a bit confused about its identity, with the rush minions, face damage and dragons all in there. There doesn't seem to be a lot of synergy between those packages.
Maybe beasts instead of dragons would work? The rush package already consists of beasts and Phase Stalker and Kill Command would synergize with the other sidequest. Revenge of the Wild would also be good with Sky Gen'ral Kragg.
I think you'd probably want two copies of Tracking, so that if you don't get a sidequest in your opening hand, you can go fish for it.
I'm not sure Alexstrasza really should be in the deck. She's useful if you haven't been able to get your opponent's life total down enough because of armor or Zilliax, but there have been games where I was above 15 health and my opponent below 15 by the time I could play her, and even more games that were over on turn 7/8.
Faceless Corruptor is a great card if you have a small minion on board, but that's not often the case with this deck. Oasis Surger might be a good addition; I chose to include more dragons instead but I'm not sure what's better. Scalerider would add another low roll to the sidequest; maybe it's good enough to make that an acceptable risk, similar to Questing Explorer and Licensed Adventurer, but so far I haven't really missed it: many decks seem to either go so wide that you need Swipe or they don't play anything significant until turn 5.
I like Gonk, but for a Gonk combo you need a lot of support cards, which means the combo would dictate the entire deck. Maybe just having Gonk and the sidequest could work, but in practice the Claw damage often goes face, so I have some doubts about Gonk's added value.
I haven't been keeping stats, plus I don't play at highly competitive ranks anyway (currently at rank 13) since I only play a handful of games per day and most of what I play is experimental and off-meta decks.