Infested Goblin does sound like a good pick to add cheap buff targets to your hand. Even better, it has taunt, so it helps you make it past turn 5, when your deck starts to shine. I was using Drygulch Jailor before, but neither that card itself nor the tokens have taunt, while getting three tokens instead of two can be a down side in the early game, since you might overdraw if you suddenly have 3 more cards in hand.
Lifesteal and handbuff go very well together. You of course already have Zilliax, but other cards you could consider are Paragon of Light, Vicious Scalehide and Chillblade Champion. I would recommend running one copy of Chillblade Champion for emergency heal, removal and surprise lethal. You could consider replacing Blessed Champion with this: while Chillblade is less explosive, it is more flexible.
I'm using Loot Hoarder instead of Meanstreet Marshal myself. It is less mana-efficient, but you can play it on turn 2 and not feel bad about it, while playing Marshal without a buff feels bad and using a buff before filling up your hand feels bad as well (to me, in any case).
Fight Promoter as draw is interesting. I assume she also triggers herself? If so, it wouldn't be too hard to get the battlecry, but still there is a risk that it will be a dead card if you draw your cards in the wrong order, which is exactly when you want to draw more. I'm using Acolyte of Pain at the moment, which can often draw multiple cards when buffed, but is still likely to draw at least one when not buffed. Like Loot Hoarder, it is a card you can play on the early board without hurting your game plan. Maybe one of each would be worth trying though.
I'd rather run Righteous Protector than Brazen Zealot, since it's more sticky. You're not looking to push a lot of damage early and once you do make your big push onto the board, a divine shield can be really annoying for an opponent to deal with.
It seems hard to get value from Barista Lynchen until the very late game, since if your minions stick around for a turn, you are probably already winning.
While Sally + Umbra is a nice combo, it is a combo of two one-of cards that aren't all that great when you play them individually. Sally really needed charge or rush to be any good and unfortunately Paladin doesn't have lackeys.
I have Sunkeeper Tarim in my deck, which at first glance seems to go counter to what the deck is trying to do, but he is great equalizing a board when an opponent is getting ahead of you, by dumping a few unbuffed 1-drops on the board and then setting everything to 3/3.
Not running mountain giant in deck with this much Hand presence is a a criminal offense
I tried Mountain Giant before in handbuff and while it should be good in theory, in practice your hand is often not completely full and while playing a giant for 5 or 6 mana is good stats-wise, you often want to be doing other things in those turns. Twilight Drake might actually be a better pick, since it can be drawn by Salhet's Pride. Turn 4 is a relatively weak turn for handbuff, since you have few 4-mana cards and you don't want to play multiple minions ahead of your buff turn, so having the Drake to play on curve would be useful.
Yeah, either remove Bronze Herald or put more dragons and Dragon Speaker.
In my experience Dragon Speaker is pretty bad even if your deck is half dragons. You want buffs to land on cheap minions and most dragons aren't cheap. Which is also the reason Bronze Herald is bad: while it adds more handbuff targets to your hand, at 4 mana each these aren't great to play.
Ysera is good if you don't have to pay full mana for her, such as in Shaman decks built around Eureka! and Muckmorpher.
Ysera is also OK in decks with dragon synergy, since those require having a dragon in hand to activate cards like Firetree Witchdoctor, so having one expensive dragon in your hand is still useful even though you may not be able to play it until much later.
Brightwing I don't have in my collection yet, but seems like an OK card to add to decks that don't have a super tight game plan. Especially when you have a pretty small collection right now, you probably have plenty of holes to fill and Brightwing is a good generic card to fill them with.
With the name "Three Wishes", they probably give you 3 copies of Zephrys in your hand. Maybe at the start of the game, or perhaps one at a time on turn 2, 5 and 8 or something like that.
We have Tortollan Pilgrim, Naga Sand Witch and King Phaoris now, so expensive spells are more playable than they were before. But there will be a lot more decks against which you cannot afford to play it at its full cost, especially if mid-range decks return to the meta after the Boom nerf.
What you're saying doesn't match my experiences, but you're probably played a lot more games with this deck than I have with Warlock recently.
I'm wondering what aspects of the current meta don't match well with Magic Carpet. It makes your 1-drops a lot better in the late game, so maybe you consider longer games unwinnable and therefore a boost there is unimportant? But if you're going all-in for a short game, then Neferset Thrasher should be great, because it's good tempo and high-rolling with Thrasher on turn 3 and Vulture on turn 4 is often game-winning.
Did you use a deck tracker? It would be interesting to see if your results differ from HSReplay's and in particular for which matchups. It would also be interesting to see win/loss plotted versus game length, to know which turns could be improved and which turns are hopeless and therefore better ignored.
I thought the main idea of zoo is to have small minions and buff them, but there aren't all that many buff cards in this list. I guess Eager Underling is unplayable, but what about Defender of Argus? It's no Fungalmancer, but it used to be a signature card of zoo decks.
I'm also surprised there is no removal and silence at all in the list. Usually there is at least Soulfire or Ironbeak Owl. Or with the current sets, Spirit Bomb for Vulture synergy or Demonbolt to take advantage of a wide board. Taunts like Zilliax and Khartut Defender are in a lot of decks.
Finally a brawl where Splitting Axe will shine?? :-)
I haven't seen anyone play this yet, but it seems like a great idea. Ectomancy is very useful in my Warlock deck and Splitting Axe is both cheaper and gives you a weapon.
Unfortunately I don't have it in my collection and as it's an epic, it's a bit too expensive to craft for a brawl (I don't think it will see much play outside the brawl). I did craft a second Golakka Crawler that I was missing; that was dust well-spent in my opinion.
The current algorithm for selecting decks on the front page seems to be to sort by votes and then decide tie breakers in favor of the oldest deck. This leads to the same decks being shown for a long time. Even more so since the decks that are on the front page get more views and therefore more votes.
This is not ideal for visitors, since they have to go digging deeper into the site to discover other decks. And it's a bit discouraging for people submitting decks, since it is hard to get visibility.
My suggestion would be to show random decks, weighted by votes. So a deck with 20 votes would show up more often than a deck with 2 votes, but both have a chance of being displayed. It also means that every time a visitor loads the front page, they're likely to see at least some new decks.
This might be my favorite brawl of all time. So many different tactics, love the early removal and counter play. Here's what I've been using successfully, it relies on Conceal and Cannon Barrage for big damage:
I took your cannons + conceal idea and took it in a different direction by adding lots of minions that summon other minions, to maximize the number of shots fired:
I'm using only one copy of Cannon Barrage because often the game is already decided on turn 6. Conceal is super useful even without Barrage, so I kept two copies of that.
I had to replace some cards since I don't have all of them in my collection. The ones that worked really well are The Curator and Ramkahen Wildtamer, so maybe you could consider those as well.
The main problem I have is that if I lose the board due to my opponent having one Crab/Crawler/Dragonslayer more than I had, there is no way to get back into the game. That's a general weakness of Hunter though, so I'm not sure it is fixable.
I should try that later. I have three copies of Tip the Scales but I don't usually enjoy murloc decks, so they wouldn't see much play otherwise. Would you like to share your deck?
Don't know if it counts as spectacular, but Shaman has some good tribal synergies and is a good choice for this brawl. Scargil in particular makes all your minions cost 1 mana, there must be some good stuff possible with this.
I ran into an opponent who managed to get Scargil and Underbelly Angler on the board at the same time; I didn't win that game.
if you are trying to counter the meta, you could also run a Dragonslayer, it is not as good as any of the crabs, but if you are looking for more cheap removal she will do.
For the Warlock deck I don't think more hate cards are necessary and it's more efficient to run the cheapest ones. It might be useful for other classes though.
As for possible crazy combos, there are some echo minions that cost two mana, so in combination with double Mechwarper they can be free. Could be useful with Ship's Cannon. In particular Squashling, which can double as damage with Auchenai Phantasm or [Hearthstone Card (Embrace the Shadows) Not Found], and Hunting Mastiff, which can run into the opponent's minions to free up board space.
The problem is what to do when you don't draw Mechwarper: there aren't many long games in this meta at the moment; I've only played Bloodreaver Gul'dan once so far in over a dozen games. One Mechwarper might be enough, but even then you need a lot of card draw to reliably find it. You could tutor it, but then you could only run a very select few minions.
I'm really enjoying this brawl so far. I must admit that I got my pack like most players, with a token deck (Even Shaman variation). But after that I tried to make a counter-meta deck and it is doing great for me so far: (6-1 if I counted correctly)
Other deck ideas where I feel like I'm a genius who had an epiphany get trounced and I immediately realize it was a flawed concept so I move on after 4-6 games.
The other day I thought I had a great idea with combining Ironhide Direhorn and BEEEES!!!. However, when I actually played the combo, it turned out that the dead bees stay on the board until after all four have attacked, so there is no board space to summon lots of Runts. A 7/3 and two 5/5s is not that great for a 10-mana 2-card combo; I had hoped for a slightly weaker but easier to set up version of Chef Nomi.
One thing to look at is whether the deck defeats itself or the opponent defeats it. If an interaction just doesn't work or is too difficult to set up, there is no shame in abandoning the concept early. I usually create a small text file to record my experience and the deck code, just in case cards from a future expansion make the deck more viable.
If the deck itself works, but is not powerful enough to win games, you can try tuning it. I tend to play at least 5 games if it feels like the concept has some promise. But I know the feeling of rage-deleting decks; it can be frustrating to have your own creation be crushed by a netdeck. It also depends on whether it's a meme deck or a regular ladder deck that I'm trying to make: I don't mind if I have a 20% win rate with a Mogu Cultist deck, as long as I can get the combo off sometimes, but with a generic mid-range deck it feels bad if my win rate stays below 40%.
It might help to log your plays, either manually or with a deck tracker, and then evaluate some properties after a game. Which cards were stuck in your hand for a long time? Did you have too little or too much card draw? Which played cards felt powerful and which felt underwhelming? By analyzing you can get something positive out of the game rather than focusing on the loss.
If you haven't already, watch Firebat's Deck Doctor videos. He typically tries tuning a deck for about an hour before settling on a version or declaring the patient deceased. It doesn't happen often that he gives up on a deck; usually he can make a deck work somewhat decently, although it requires pretty large changes in some cases.
One thing I learned from his videos is not to try and do too many different things in a single deck. Not only does that make it hard to have the right synergies at the right time, it also makes it difficult to tune the deck, since there are few free slots for cards that can get you through the turns when you cannot play your synergies.
Ethereal Peddler. If they started printing more cards like this, Thief Rogue would become scary even in Wild.
Efficient generators and efficient synergies.
The problem so far is that most generators and most synergies have been value-oriented, without enough Tempo.
But interesting cards are slowly stacking up...
Peddler is a bit slow though: first you have two gather cards to discount, then you have to play a 5-mana minion that doesn't immediately impact the board. While it has decent stats for its cost, it doesn't have rush or taunt, so the opponent is free to ignore it and go face, or to value-trade. Leyline Manipulator had the same issue. I think for a card like this to be good, it needs to be cheaper (so you can play discounted cards in the same turn) or have taunt (so you won't be dead the next turn or forced to make awkward plays to stay alive).
I think Vendetta is the kind of card that makes the archetype work: a powerful pay-off that's cheap to use.
Adding random cards to your hand from a large pool is never going to be consistent, I think. Stonehill Defender was consistent in Odd Paladin because there were two great class cards it could discover, but in Wild I now count 6 options and while most are decent, they're not at the same level as Tarim and Tirion. Mana Cyclone is somewhat consistent, but it operates on a relatively small pool of only class cards of reasonable quality; if Glacial Mysteries were still in Standard, I think Cyclone would be less popular.
When you're tuning a quest deck and finally get it working, there is that moment when you wonder "wouldn't this deck be better without the quest?" And too often, the answer is "yes".
I added an Earthquake to my Muckmorpher Shaman deck and I've been quite happy with it. That is a very top-heavy deck though, so having an additional board clear on top of two Hagatha's Schemes is useful there.
I'm not playing at high ranks though; I imagine that if the meta you're facing is mostly Control Warrior and Conjurer Mage, Earthquake is not so useful. So its poor performance in the stats might say more about the meta than about the card itself.
I haven't watched the video yet but I still am doubtful over the whole premise of new metas being more expensive than old metas debate. The amount of epics & legendaries do not really increase and there is no guarantee that any legendary or epic is going to actually stick for long in a given 'top tier deck'.
Comparing the end of a meta would be more representative than the start. But I remember a time when expensive decks were 10k dust, while currently half the meta decks are over 10k dust, with Highlander Mage even close to 20k.
Although, in a slightly digressing tone, I will say that again this goes to show why standard is much more expensive and flawed in this aspect than wild will ever be. If you bite the initial short term bullet and craft more cards for only a few decks in wild (or just kept your cards & never mass dusted them in the first place) then new expansions are less likely to completely overhaul/overthrow the decks you already have that are viable in wild. This means that new expansions do not pressure you into that whole proverbial carrot-on-a-stick situation that is always present in standard. Standard players 'have to' dust their entire collections AND spend more money just to stay competitive every 3-6ish months while in wild the costs of new metas is often times able to be ignored because you don't have to chase new shinies every single expansion.
I think the root cause is the 1:4 disenchant/craft dust ratio. Dusting rotating cards only gives players a 25% discount on new crafts, so it doesn't do much to make Standard more affordable. Giving up Wild for such a small return doesn't look like a good deal to me.
As for Blizzard addressing the cost issue, what I'd really like to see is a no-triplicate rule for epics, like the no-duplicate rule for legendaries. I always feel really bad when I open the third copy of an epic, since it's worth only 100 dust while crafting an epic that I didn't get will cost 400. It also means I'm very reluctant to craft epics early on, since I might get them from a pack later.
I don't know about that. I got a lot of epic extras on opening day for Saviors and it gave me enough dust to almost have the Highlander Mage deck (I don't have SIamat; I traded in the golden Hunter Quest for Zephrys).
You'd still have the option to disenchant epics you don't want to use: it's never worse to get a new epic over an extra copy.
I'm surprised Siamat is getting a lot of play. I've subbed in a number of cards for it (getting some play for the golden High Inquisitor Whitemane I opened for Quest Control Priest and Highlander Warrior; I use the Ragnaros summoning card for mage).
Siamat is a decent card in many decks, but he's not essential to any archetype. He's also not so strong that you'd want him in decks even when there is no significant synergy, unlike Zilliax. I did craft Siamat, not for any particular deck but because it's a good neutral filler for the 7-mana slot and likely useful for elemental synergy in Wild.
But at this stage I've already spent the dust I got from my packs. Can't check out Quest Paladin. It was two months or so that I spent the dust I earned from the last expansion's opening day.
I still have quite a bit of dust left, but my wish list is longer than the number of cards I can afford to craft. One of the reasons is that there are a lot of playable cards in Uldum, which is actually a good thing. But it does make it more difficult to decide what is worth crafting and what is not.
While Quest Paladin looks like fun, since it's specific to reborn minions, a significant part of the deck is effectively fixed. I don't expect we'll see the reborn keyword used for new cards any time soon, so it might not age as well as the other quests.
Infested Goblin does sound like a good pick to add cheap buff targets to your hand. Even better, it has taunt, so it helps you make it past turn 5, when your deck starts to shine. I was using Drygulch Jailor before, but neither that card itself nor the tokens have taunt, while getting three tokens instead of two can be a down side in the early game, since you might overdraw if you suddenly have 3 more cards in hand.
Lifesteal and handbuff go very well together. You of course already have Zilliax, but other cards you could consider are Paragon of Light, Vicious Scalehide and Chillblade Champion. I would recommend running one copy of Chillblade Champion for emergency heal, removal and surprise lethal. You could consider replacing Blessed Champion with this: while Chillblade is less explosive, it is more flexible.
I'm using Loot Hoarder instead of Meanstreet Marshal myself. It is less mana-efficient, but you can play it on turn 2 and not feel bad about it, while playing Marshal without a buff feels bad and using a buff before filling up your hand feels bad as well (to me, in any case).
Fight Promoter as draw is interesting. I assume she also triggers herself? If so, it wouldn't be too hard to get the battlecry, but still there is a risk that it will be a dead card if you draw your cards in the wrong order, which is exactly when you want to draw more. I'm using Acolyte of Pain at the moment, which can often draw multiple cards when buffed, but is still likely to draw at least one when not buffed. Like Loot Hoarder, it is a card you can play on the early board without hurting your game plan. Maybe one of each would be worth trying though.
I'd rather run Righteous Protector than Brazen Zealot, since it's more sticky. You're not looking to push a lot of damage early and once you do make your big push onto the board, a divine shield can be really annoying for an opponent to deal with.
It seems hard to get value from Barista Lynchen until the very late game, since if your minions stick around for a turn, you are probably already winning.
While Sally + Umbra is a nice combo, it is a combo of two one-of cards that aren't all that great when you play them individually. Sally really needed charge or rush to be any good and unfortunately Paladin doesn't have lackeys.
I have Sunkeeper Tarim in my deck, which at first glance seems to go counter to what the deck is trying to do, but he is great equalizing a board when an opponent is getting ahead of you, by dumping a few unbuffed 1-drops on the board and then setting everything to 3/3.
I tried Mountain Giant before in handbuff and while it should be good in theory, in practice your hand is often not completely full and while playing a giant for 5 or 6 mana is good stats-wise, you often want to be doing other things in those turns. Twilight Drake might actually be a better pick, since it can be drawn by Salhet's Pride. Turn 4 is a relatively weak turn for handbuff, since you have few 4-mana cards and you don't want to play multiple minions ahead of your buff turn, so having the Drake to play on curve would be useful.
In my experience Dragon Speaker is pretty bad even if your deck is half dragons. You want buffs to land on cheap minions and most dragons aren't cheap. Which is also the reason Bronze Herald is bad: while it adds more handbuff targets to your hand, at 4 mana each these aren't great to play.
Ysera is good if you don't have to pay full mana for her, such as in Shaman decks built around Eureka! and Muckmorpher.
Ysera is also OK in decks with dragon synergy, since those require having a dragon in hand to activate cards like Firetree Witchdoctor, so having one expensive dragon in your hand is still useful even though you may not be able to play it until much later.
Brightwing I don't have in my collection yet, but seems like an OK card to add to decks that don't have a super tight game plan. Especially when you have a pretty small collection right now, you probably have plenty of holes to fill and Brightwing is a good generic card to fill them with.
With the name "Three Wishes", they probably give you 3 copies of Zephrys in your hand. Maybe at the start of the game, or perhaps one at a time on turn 2, 5 and 8 or something like that.
We have Tortollan Pilgrim, Naga Sand Witch and King Phaoris now, so expensive spells are more playable than they were before. But there will be a lot more decks against which you cannot afford to play it at its full cost, especially if mid-range decks return to the meta after the Boom nerf.
What you're saying doesn't match my experiences, but you're probably played a lot more games with this deck than I have with Warlock recently.
I'm wondering what aspects of the current meta don't match well with Magic Carpet. It makes your 1-drops a lot better in the late game, so maybe you consider longer games unwinnable and therefore a boost there is unimportant? But if you're going all-in for a short game, then Neferset Thrasher should be great, because it's good tempo and high-rolling with Thrasher on turn 3 and Vulture on turn 4 is often game-winning.
Did you use a deck tracker? It would be interesting to see if your results differ from HSReplay's and in particular for which matchups. It would also be interesting to see win/loss plotted versus game length, to know which turns could be improved and which turns are hopeless and therefore better ignored.
I thought the main idea of zoo is to have small minions and buff them, but there aren't all that many buff cards in this list. I guess Eager Underling is unplayable, but what about Defender of Argus? It's no Fungalmancer, but it used to be a signature card of zoo decks.
I'm also surprised there is no removal and silence at all in the list. Usually there is at least Soulfire or Ironbeak Owl. Or with the current sets, Spirit Bomb for Vulture synergy or Demonbolt to take advantage of a wide board. Taunts like Zilliax and Khartut Defender are in a lot of decks.
Nope, must be a different fan of Slayers
Good to know it is already on your minds. I understand it will take time to build up the site to where you want it to be.
I haven't seen anyone play this yet, but it seems like a great idea. Ectomancy is very useful in my Warlock deck and Splitting Axe is both cheaper and gives you a weapon.
Unfortunately I don't have it in my collection and as it's an epic, it's a bit too expensive to craft for a brawl (I don't think it will see much play outside the brawl). I did craft a second Golakka Crawler that I was missing; that was dust well-spent in my opinion.
The current algorithm for selecting decks on the front page seems to be to sort by votes and then decide tie breakers in favor of the oldest deck. This leads to the same decks being shown for a long time. Even more so since the decks that are on the front page get more views and therefore more votes.
This is not ideal for visitors, since they have to go digging deeper into the site to discover other decks. And it's a bit discouraging for people submitting decks, since it is hard to get visibility.
My suggestion would be to show random decks, weighted by votes. So a deck with 20 votes would show up more often than a deck with 2 votes, but both have a chance of being displayed. It also means that every time a visitor loads the front page, they're likely to see at least some new decks.
I took your cannons + conceal idea and took it in a different direction by adding lots of minions that summon other minions, to maximize the number of shots fired:
I'm using only one copy of Cannon Barrage because often the game is already decided on turn 6. Conceal is super useful even without Barrage, so I kept two copies of that.
I had to replace some cards since I don't have all of them in my collection. The ones that worked really well are The Curator and Ramkahen Wildtamer, so maybe you could consider those as well.
The main problem I have is that if I lose the board due to my opponent having one Crab/Crawler/Dragonslayer more than I had, there is no way to get back into the game. That's a general weakness of Hunter though, so I'm not sure it is fixable.
I should try that later. I have three copies of Tip the Scales but I don't usually enjoy murloc decks, so they wouldn't see much play otherwise. Would you like to share your deck?
I ran into an opponent who managed to get Scargil and Underbelly Angler on the board at the same time; I didn't win that game.
For the Warlock deck I don't think more hate cards are necessary and it's more efficient to run the cheapest ones. It might be useful for other classes though.
As for possible crazy combos, there are some echo minions that cost two mana, so in combination with double Mechwarper they can be free. Could be useful with Ship's Cannon. In particular Squashling, which can double as damage with Auchenai Phantasm or [Hearthstone Card (Embrace the Shadows) Not Found], and Hunting Mastiff, which can run into the opponent's minions to free up board space.
The problem is what to do when you don't draw Mechwarper: there aren't many long games in this meta at the moment; I've only played Bloodreaver Gul'dan once so far in over a dozen games. One Mechwarper might be enough, but even then you need a lot of card draw to reliably find it. You could tutor it, but then you could only run a very select few minions.
I'm really enjoying this brawl so far. I must admit that I got my pack like most players, with a token deck (Even Shaman variation). But after that I tried to make a counter-meta deck and it is doing great for me so far: (6-1 if I counted correctly)
Did anyone do anything really crazy? I have the feeling that some non-obvious combos should exist, but I haven't seen anything spectacular yet.
The other day I thought I had a great idea with combining Ironhide Direhorn and BEEEES!!!. However, when I actually played the combo, it turned out that the dead bees stay on the board until after all four have attacked, so there is no board space to summon lots of Runts. A 7/3 and two 5/5s is not that great for a 10-mana 2-card combo; I had hoped for a slightly weaker but easier to set up version of Chef Nomi.
One thing to look at is whether the deck defeats itself or the opponent defeats it. If an interaction just doesn't work or is too difficult to set up, there is no shame in abandoning the concept early. I usually create a small text file to record my experience and the deck code, just in case cards from a future expansion make the deck more viable.
If the deck itself works, but is not powerful enough to win games, you can try tuning it. I tend to play at least 5 games if it feels like the concept has some promise. But I know the feeling of rage-deleting decks; it can be frustrating to have your own creation be crushed by a netdeck. It also depends on whether it's a meme deck or a regular ladder deck that I'm trying to make: I don't mind if I have a 20% win rate with a Mogu Cultist deck, as long as I can get the combo off sometimes, but with a generic mid-range deck it feels bad if my win rate stays below 40%.
It might help to log your plays, either manually or with a deck tracker, and then evaluate some properties after a game. Which cards were stuck in your hand for a long time? Did you have too little or too much card draw? Which played cards felt powerful and which felt underwhelming? By analyzing you can get something positive out of the game rather than focusing on the loss.
If you haven't already, watch Firebat's Deck Doctor videos. He typically tries tuning a deck for about an hour before settling on a version or declaring the patient deceased. It doesn't happen often that he gives up on a deck; usually he can make a deck work somewhat decently, although it requires pretty large changes in some cases.
One thing I learned from his videos is not to try and do too many different things in a single deck. Not only does that make it hard to have the right synergies at the right time, it also makes it difficult to tune the deck, since there are few free slots for cards that can get you through the turns when you cannot play your synergies.
Peddler is a bit slow though: first you have two gather cards to discount, then you have to play a 5-mana minion that doesn't immediately impact the board. While it has decent stats for its cost, it doesn't have rush or taunt, so the opponent is free to ignore it and go face, or to value-trade. Leyline Manipulator had the same issue. I think for a card like this to be good, it needs to be cheaper (so you can play discounted cards in the same turn) or have taunt (so you won't be dead the next turn or forced to make awkward plays to stay alive).
I think Vendetta is the kind of card that makes the archetype work: a powerful pay-off that's cheap to use.
Adding random cards to your hand from a large pool is never going to be consistent, I think. Stonehill Defender was consistent in Odd Paladin because there were two great class cards it could discover, but in Wild I now count 6 options and while most are decent, they're not at the same level as Tarim and Tirion. Mana Cyclone is somewhat consistent, but it operates on a relatively small pool of only class cards of reasonable quality; if Glacial Mysteries were still in Standard, I think Cyclone would be less popular.
When you're tuning a quest deck and finally get it working, there is that moment when you wonder "wouldn't this deck be better without the quest?" And too often, the answer is "yes".
I added an Earthquake to my Muckmorpher Shaman deck and I've been quite happy with it. That is a very top-heavy deck though, so having an additional board clear on top of two Hagatha's Schemes is useful there.
I'm not playing at high ranks though; I imagine that if the meta you're facing is mostly Control Warrior and Conjurer Mage, Earthquake is not so useful. So its poor performance in the stats might say more about the meta than about the card itself.
Comparing the end of a meta would be more representative than the start. But I remember a time when expensive decks were 10k dust, while currently half the meta decks are over 10k dust, with Highlander Mage even close to 20k.
I think the root cause is the 1:4 disenchant/craft dust ratio. Dusting rotating cards only gives players a 25% discount on new crafts, so it doesn't do much to make Standard more affordable. Giving up Wild for such a small return doesn't look like a good deal to me.
You'd still have the option to disenchant epics you don't want to use: it's never worse to get a new epic over an extra copy.
Siamat is a decent card in many decks, but he's not essential to any archetype. He's also not so strong that you'd want him in decks even when there is no significant synergy, unlike Zilliax. I did craft Siamat, not for any particular deck but because it's a good neutral filler for the 7-mana slot and likely useful for elemental synergy in Wild.
I still have quite a bit of dust left, but my wish list is longer than the number of cards I can afford to craft. One of the reasons is that there are a lot of playable cards in Uldum, which is actually a good thing. But it does make it more difficult to decide what is worth crafting and what is not.
While Quest Paladin looks like fun, since it's specific to reborn minions, a significant part of the deck is effectively fixed. I don't expect we'll see the reborn keyword used for new cards any time soon, so it might not age as well as the other quests.