Xeno_Wild has revealed two new Rogue cards on his YouTube channel - Private Eye & Sticky Situation.
In case you (like us) missed it, the earlier card reveal already showed another Rogue Secret (awaiting for official translation).
Reveal Video
More Murder at Castle Nathria Card Reveals
Reveal season is here and as usual, we have an expansion guide to help you follow along with all the fun! Use it to see all the card reveals, organized by class.
Comments
I hate this card already. Secrets go home.
Fun fact: Private Eye and Perdition's Blade are the only two cards in the entire game that have Battlecry and Combo on the same card.
How they went nearly 10 years without printing a second one is beyond me since this design dynamic seems extremely obvious, has some easy design space, and is perfectly functional and intuitive to understand.
Since combo seems overwrites the battlecry, they only really work together for scaling effects, meaning we kinda have seen it lots of times with all the Edwin-eqsue cards, including the 2 we got this expansion.
The alternative is to use combo to completely switch up the effect and effectively turn it into a choose one card, which I suspect they have avoided so druid continues to feel special.
You could also argue any spell which scales with combo (e.g. Eviscerate, Cold Blood and maybe something like Swindle) is exactly the same thing. After all, what is a battlecry if not a spell on a stick? Plus any minion or weapon whose combo gains stats is really just scaling the base 'battlecry' version (I'm being very liberal with the use of battlecry there, I know).
So while yes, they technically haven't touched the obvious battlecry + combo... erm, combo, they also arguably have.
And I use this exact argument in HS groups to support why Battlecry/Combo cards should be fine.
They are definitely fine together. I wonder if the biggest reason they don't generally do it is because they want to strongly incentivise combo activation as the core part of rogue gameplay, and having a half-strength version as a battlecry means players would often not need to.
When looking through the combo spells, even they don't typically scale with combo, with the closest since Classic being tutoring an extra card type. (With Swindle you often didn't pay too much attention to the fact you got a spell and a minion, hence why I counted it above. But it feels more significant with, say, Raiding Party.) So there must be some design preference to make combo activate truly new effects.
I have to say, I really like the diverse support classes are getting this expansion. Rogue is getting some funky miracle/spam support plus hefty secret support to build on top of undersupported archetypes from the past, Pally is going back to its roots with Silver Hand Recruits, a playstyle that hasn't seen success in a long while, Mage is getting a brand new mechanic with skellies... I like it. Here's hoping none of this ends up disgustingly overpowered so that we can actually experiment with these things, rather than get mauled from day 1 by the same 2-3 broken decks.
Sticky Situation will see play even in non secret decks. Having a 3/4 that cannot be interacted for 2 mana early on is fairly good. At very least it'll likely deal 3 damage, or take a value trade.
Private Eye however, is iffy. There's likely 3 secrets, which makes it 6 cards. In other words, the moment you draw more than 2, and that is fairly likely given that rogue can actually draw cards, then the second copy is just a liability, and that's if you decide to play all 6 of them. Of course, this can change if the secrets are particularly good (disruption secrets like Counterspell or Ice Trap would do), but Im not holding my breath.
Well you can always discover some secrets and shuffle them to the bottom with finley
Cat Trick