We're nearing the end of the dual class cards - tomorrow will have the first individual class review!
If you have any complaints about our reviews, remember to let us know in the comments! We are of course never wrong, and have 100% correctly predicted every meta the game has ever had, but that's no reason not to get involved - who knows, we might mistake what set a card is in or something.
Adopted from the old Cullinary School at Stratholme.
Quote From Noxious Not the most interesting card, but they can't all be interesting, right? Looking at this card, my first thought goes to Aeroponics, but translated to Warrior/Rogue. Both classes have decent card draw options, each with their own little gimmick. The condition of this card (to reduce its cost) is a bit restrictive and pushes decks that want to run it to contain weapons with decent Attack, but the condition itself is very easy to make full use of.
Warriors, of course, can just equip and Arcanite Reaper and draw 2 cards for free. With its arsenal of decent-damage weapons, it can still get the cost of this card down to 2-3, which already makes it worth using, especially in a bind.
Rogues might have a harder time to "dryly" discount Cutting Class to 0, but it has much easier access to weapon buffing spells such as Deadly Poison, or even just discounting it to 3 mana with Plague of Madness. Having access to a 1-mana discount through the Hero Power is also a good bonus, if luck runs out and no weapons are coming in from the deck. Self-Sharpening Sword also seems to have been made for slowly discounting this card if you can't find a good moment to play it in a particularly heated mid-game.
Additionally, it does get discounted through weapon buffs from minions. While most of those minions are now in Wild, Captain Greenskin is still around, as well as the Doctor Krastinov, who provides a direct buff to this card's discount.
I can see this card making an appearance in any deck with a decently-sized arsenal of weapons, and even preferred over some of the more traditional card draw options like Shiv and Battle Rage. On its own, without the discount, it's likely not worth playing.
Debate club first meeting: "Does it matter how you won the argument?"
Quote From FearGralex This card is either an overcosted Execute (weak but still passable) or a 3-mana Assassinate (very strong). I doubt many decks would ever be interested in running this card if they can't reliably trigger the Combo, but fortunately there are plenty of decks in both Rogue and Warrior that can. Galakrond Rogue in particular might be interested in this, as Rogue has been a bit lacking in hard removal recently and triggering Combo has never been easier what with all the Lackeys running around. As for Warrior, I'm a little less optimistic. Pirate Warrior would likely be the best fit, but they don't usually want to hold on to their 1-drops for too long. Perhaps this could slot into an old-school control deck alongside cheap removal spells like Shield Slam, or some sort of Tempo Warrior shell that runs cards like Livewire Lance. The power is certainly there, and it is an exciting removal spell for the decks that can make it work reliably.
Watch out for her stilettos - all four of them.
Quote From Noxious This is the kind of RNG card that I most enjoy. You don't know what you'll get, but you can sort of try to push the randomness in your favor. On its own, Steeldancer is bland. With a low-Attack weapon, it'll provide some temporary cannon fodder. With a Gorehowl, things can get scary.
Right off the top, let me say this card seems quite useful for both classes, while "barring" each class for making use of it too soon, and waking up with a 4-mana 7/7 on the board on turn 4.
Warriors will have a hard time buffing their weapon to dish out a high-cost minion early in the game, but will more easily find their way to a high-cost minion later on, with weapons such as Arcanite Reaper and Gorehowl providing easy access (especially when improved by Doctor Krastinov or Captain Greenskin. As a bonus, Warriors have weapons that are strong from the get-go. We will see where this is a direct, completely opposite disadvantage for Rogues.
Rogues don't have inherently high-Attack weapons, but are however able to take advantage of more, cheap weapon buffs in the form of spells such as Deadly Poison. This enables Rogues to hit a higher Attack value on weapons earlier on than Warriors, enabling them to potentially summon a high-cost minion much earlier on than Warriors. The drawback to this is that there's less space for other cards in the deck. While a card like Gorehowl takes up one spot, reaching the same Attack value on a Rogue weapon might require 2-4 cards. If you're running a deck fully tailored to buffing weapons (extra spicy in Wild), Steeldancer looks to be an auto-include. In Standard, however, this will become a balancing game. Is Steeldancer strong enough to push through its RNG that it would be worth dedicating a chunk of your deck to buffing its effect? Only time will tell.
His friends call him Barry.
Quote From Demonxz95 This is simply a better Captain Greenskin. That's actually the best way to put it.
Captain Greenskin is a card that occasionally sees play in decks that can use its effect. Now you just run this card instead because it's just better, and it's available in the two classes that would actually consider running it. It's pretty much the perfect Warrior/Rogue card. The trade-off of -1 Attack for Rush is more than worth it, and sometimes you might actually get a second trigger of the effect. Now you could theoretically run both this AND Greenskin, but you're going to prioritize running this more, so just run this. It even has synergy with Steeldancer, another Warrior/Rogue card.
Okay, so that was a very strange way to review the card, but the point is, if you ever ran Greenskin in any of your decks, now you have better Greenskin. The fact that it's restricted to Warrior and Rogue is pretty much negligible since you'd never find Greenskin outside of those two classes anyway.
Comments
I think pretty much every card in this dual class is going to be really useful and I'm looking forward to seeing how aggro will utilize Doctor Krastinov and Captain Greenskin
Just want to mention that Captain Greenskin has a slight niche over the doctor in that you dont need a minion on your opponent's end to upgrade your weapon. So if theres no minions, or if the only minion is big, then Doctor Krastinov would just be straight up worse than greenskin.
Also greenskin's a pirate, so there's that too.
Indeed, good catch. I'm always surprised to see Captain Greenskin's transformation every time an expansion comes out. His usefulness seems to wildly fluctuate depending on what each expansion brings to the table, moreso/more often than other Classic legendaries.
I have a complaint. Why no mentioning of wild? Cause saying its a better Captain Greenskin is quite wrong if u analyze the potential of kingsbane rogue. The draw pirate and weapon card has great synergy with greenskin and not doctor krastinov. Pirate warrior also prefers greenskin cause of ancharr drawing it
Personally I don't like how these cards were mostly pigeonholed into only weapon support cards. Was that the only direction to take these class cards? Another reason I'm glad I play wild, I don't have to only play one archtype when a new expansion comes out.
Aside from weapons (and by extension pirates), warrior and rogue really don't have very much in common. Warrior has lots of taunt, armour, AoE, and an interest in minions being damaged, while rogue is expressly given none of these (having an interest in undamaged minions for the last of them). Similarly warrior has little in common with rogue's main mechanics. So it is little surprise that the rogue/warrior cards focused on the one thing they actually overlap on.
Even then though, it is not as though the 3 weapon-based rogue/warrior cards mean the whole set revolves around weapons for the two classes. Accounting for all 14 cards each class gets, they both have 9 that have nothing to do with weapons, which would almost constitute an entire set of class cards in a normal expansion.
To circle around while piggybacking on a bounce-off of your point, it would have been neat if they explored that damaged/undamaged dichotomy with one of these Warrior/Rogue cards. I can understand why they didn't, since many of the Warrior/Paladin cards dealt with similar themes, but something like Flesh Giant, which combined two classes' opposite sides of the same coin, would have been very neat. Or something like Runic Carvings, with different effects for damaged and undamaged minions.
They kind of did with Coerce, where the combo effect doesn't do anything unless the target is undamaged.
I would love it if they'd have spun the card that way, using Combo as an alternate effect rather than something you'd always want, but I don't think that's how Coerce works currently - the combo effect should kill any minion, damaged or undamaged.
The passage about Steeldancer got me thinking about Spectral Cutlass - would the dual class cards count as a card from another class? I think I recall that the MSoG triple-class cards did?
I believe they said that dual-class cards count as simply class cards for the purpose of the class you put them in. It was i think in regard to Pure Paladin, the question was, if the deck would work with dual-class cards in it and the answer was yes.
So any rogue-warrior or rogue-mage cards would not buff Cutlass.
No, for example Coerce won't affectSpectral Cutlass or Vendetta because it's still a rogue card. Think dual class cards as 2 separate cards but with the same name and effect.