Mage and burst damage go hand and hand, and with Sorcerer's Gambit, we can dial that up to 11 with an extra 3 damage on every spell. That raises the question though, is this extra 3 damage overkill and more importantly, is it reasonable to complete the quest in a meaningful timeframe? It’s time to figure that out!
Parameters for the Statistics
Before jumping into the breakdown, I would first like to give the conditions behind a lot of the calculations you will see in this article and almost all the future ones. In every scenario, I assume the player goes first and hard mulligans everything but the questline to find the key cards to accomplish the quest, and then prioritizes completing the questline with the hypothetical opponent not applying much pressure. In addition to that, unless a percentage is stated, assume that the given scenario will happen 50% of the time. With this out of the way, let us dive into this questline!
Decklist
Quest Completion Breakdown
Before we go into the expected turn completions, we need to address the elephant in the room for this quest, that being card generation. The two culprits in this deck are the second step of the quest, Runed Orb, and Evocation. Let’s take a look at discover first. Of the 38 mage spells, with 9 fire spells, 8 frost spells, and 14 arcane spells. This means that whenever we discover, we have a 57% chance to hit a fire spell, a 47% chance for a frost spell, and a 76% chance for an arcane spell, giving us a 95% chance to hit one of the three types. As for Evocation, we are going to assume we create 8 spells off of it. Off of this, we can expect on average to get 1-2 frost and fire spells, and then 3 arcane spells. As for the average mana cost of these cards, frost spells will average out to be around 2.75, fire spells being around 4.55, and arcane spells average to around 2.15, which means that more often than not, fire spells will be significantly harder to cast off Evocation than the rest. Something else that needs to be addressed before diving into the individual quest steps is how drawing affects the expected completion turn. For every additional card you draw, you can lower the expected turn count by roughly 1, except for the quest step as I have included that in my calculations. This does not take mana into account, and will often result in completing the quest on the same turn as the calculated expected one.
Now onto the actual quest steps. The chance we have a frost spell by turn 1 is a fairly solid 56%, while fire spells have a strong showing of 67% while arcane spells, not including Evocation since casting it early is pointless, has a 62% chance. All of this looks promising to complete the quest early, but unfortunately the odds become severely worse when you look at getting all three types, dropping to a miserable 23%. We can expect to have hit all three of them around turn 3. Given that most of the frost and fire spells cost 3 mana or more, we can assume that on average, we will be done by the first step of the quest by turn 4.
As for the second and third steps, it is important to note how powerful First Flame If we were to save Second Flame for the second part of the quest, we would be able to complete the second step of the quest around 55% of the time by turn 6. For comparison, without the help of first flame, we would only be able to complete the quest 46% of the time on turn 6, resulting in completing this step of the questline turn 7 significantly more often. The effect of First Flame only becomes more drastic for the last step of the quest.
The final step of the Sorcerer’s Gambit has the chance of being completed almost right out of the gate, depending on the lead up to it. If we are able to discover a frost or arcane spell, and have a Second Flame kicking around from either the first or second step, we can expect to either have the last arcane spell, which will also include Evocation, 54% of the time on turn 7, or the last frost spell 51% of the time on turn 8. If we missed both off of the discover, we can expect to have them by turn 9 a little bit under half the time. If we used the Second Flame earlier on, our chances drop a bit more, being able to complete the quest 56% of the time by turn 10. As you might be able to guess, the completion rate drops even more when we have never cast First Flame, taking an extra turn in order to complete it about half the time.
Reward
Given the nature of the questline rewards, more often than not the only ‘real’ reward we get is just Arcanist Dawngrasp. I say real because more often than not, we want to use the other 2 steps to help speed up the completion of the questline. While Arcanist is undoubtedly a powerful card, 3 extra damage per spell is definitely nothing to scoff at, Mage has never really suffered from a lack of burst damage to begin with. As a result, the biggest payoff you will get from Arcanist is on tools like Fire Sale, which scales excellently with it. However, there is an even bigger factor that can make Sorcerer’s Gambit see play, which is the relative ease to complete it. A good chunk of the fire and arcane spells played in this deck are already being played in traditional spell mage, meaning that there is a relatively small commitment cost. I’m still not sold on the questline being worth running, but it already has a decent home for itself in a slightly tinkered spell mage.
What do you think about the Mage Questline? I'm so split between it being an essentially free option to power up the rest of the spells in your arsenal, and it being complete overkill when you can realistically just burn the opponent by the time this questline is done and you've played Arcanist. It definitely feels like the type of card that you have to play with for a bit to truly understand how impactful it is. Once again, if you have any questions about the math behind any of the calculations done here, just let me know and I'll explain it when I can. Hope you enjoyed and I'll see you all in the next one!
Learn More About Stormwind's Other Questlines
We have a whole series of articles planned for the questlines. Here's everything published so far:
- Demon Hunter's Final Showdown Legendary Questline
- Druid's Lost in the Park Legendary Questline
- Hunter's Defend the Dwarven District Legendary Questline
- Mage's Sorcerer's Gambit Legendary Questline
- Paladin's Rise to the Occasion Legendary Questline
- Priest's Seek Guidance Legendary Questline
- Rogue's Find the Imposter Legendary Questline
- Shaman's Command the Elements Legendary Questline
- Warlock's The Demon Seed Legendary Questline
- Warrior's Raid the Docks Legendary Questline
Comments
I think unfortunately for several of the suggested cards, simply having the card and mana to cast it isn't enough. You can't cast the second Oasis Ally if the first hasn't triggered yet, and you don't have much minion generation to make triggering it likely. You can't cast the 7 (3x1 + 1x1) spells that only target minions if there are no minions to target.
The Oasis Ally stuff is true, when deckbuilding I had an oversight and forgot that Flurry (Rank 1) existed. If I were to play this deck, I would swap the two.
As for the spells that target minions, while also true that they cannot be cast if there are no minions to target, I think its pretty safe to assume that the opponent is going to play some minions at some point that can be targeted. While this can mess up the application of the math against some decks that do not play many minions, it is a bit unreasonable that the opponent will not have play anything on the board. All of these articles assume a hypothetical 'ideal scenario', where the opponents aren't applying much pressure, but do have creatures on board if there needs to be some targeting.
The reward is strong but the main question is the consistency in playing the required cards for each step within a reasonable time frame. If it is too slow to complete consistently then it's better to just use regular spell damage minions (like Imprisoned Phoenix). If it isn't too slow to complete then it's possible that it will allow Spell Damage Mage to cut some slower cards (Phoenix is pretty slow) for more early game tempo. I think the quest will work fine with or without minions if it isn't too slow. The main problem are the frost spells which are pretty underwhelming. I'm playing with a Spell Damage Mage deck and it is pretty decent but i'm not really using any frost spells. They can be useful when discovered but adding them directly to the deck isn't really worth it imo.
Yeah frost spells are definitely the main limiters for this quest right now. Brain Freeze is very solid, and Cone of Cold and Oasis Ally can be playable, but the rest are either too slow or too low impact to make them feel worth running. As more frost spells get added to mage, I can see this quest becoming significantly better since there already is a rather healthy pool of arcane and fire spells for it.
I think it's terribile. Assuming that you are going to use this in an aggro deck, just like hunter and warrior quests, they're basically giving an almost free late game opportunity to already oppressive decks. It Is going to be a tough time for all control players like me.
There might be some big brained decklist out there that will actually play quest mage with minions. Because I'm absolutely convinced that spell mage doesn't need the quest.
Spell mage already does pretty well on its own, with its only weakness being that it can actually run out of gas to kill, just as long as it doesn't get overrun by minions, and since Ignite happily allows near infinite amounts of damage and pretty much negates any fatigue issue, even against control I'd say that its just good enough without the quest.
Im not really sure whyd anyone would want to play the quest unless the point is to play the quest itself. Maybe the first and second tier rewards are good enough that people just run it because mage traditionally skips their first turn anyway.
Also, I think I'd swap Oasis Ally with Flurry (Rank 1). Secrets are too expensive, and if you are jamming the quest you'd rather be finishing it as soon as possible, and 0 mana freeze are almost always better than a secret.
Oasis Ally over Flurry (Rank 1) is definitely an oversight on my part, so thanks for pointing that out to me.
As for the whole big brained decklist existing out there, that definitely wouldn't surprise me. Mage has legitimately strong minions that just don't see play because Refreshing Spring Water and Incanter's Flow are two very nice cards. But running them also means running what could be staples like Wand Thief and Jandice Barov just not possible. The decklist here being just raw Spell Mage is almost entirely the fact that I couldn't come up with a list that felt good on its own, and thus just decided to use an already proven 'engine' for the deck.
As for the archetype not needing the quest, I feel like its not that bad of a thing to try out since it effectively does just cycle itself, and later on discovers some more damage. I did not touch up much upon the first two rewards in the article since the whole series is mainly just "how fast is each quest on average", but the cantrip and discover are definitely two decent parts if you aren't trying to turbo through it. I'm very interested in seeing how this quest turns out since it's one of the few that I don't think needs to rely 100% on the final reward to get meaningful value out of.
I see Sorcerer’s Gambit as a positive thing, except for the rare chance of me actually getting Font of power in opening hand, spell mage often has nothing to do turn one, so the Quest will always afford me something to drop on turn one. Next he's a 7/7 body for 5 mana, once completed, and that nothing to scoff at, and the battlecry of permanent "spell damage +3" is just a nice bonus. As you had said, "However, there is an even bigger factor that can make Sorcerer’s Gambit see play, which is the relative ease to complete it.", you don't have to try and make it work... is just does.