So uhhh.... that happened. Polygon came at us with a spoiler a full day before the new expansion, and it had a hell of a lot of implications, not just for the game as a whole but for us Fan Creations types too.
This week's Conversation will be all about that, as well as the Priest Prophets.
Top of the Totem Pole
The winner of this week's WCDC was thepowrofcheese, with their Psychic Override card! Congratulations!
They'll be in charge of next week's theme, so look forward to that!
Spoiler Warning
We got a big ol' leak pertaining to the new expansion earlier today, and it is rife with interesting implications for the Fan Creations community.
Firstly - and certainly most interestingly - we're getting an entirely new class; the Demon Hunter!
Seeing how Blizzard implements the class into the game will be a very interesting learning experience for creators who enjoy making Custom Classes. While I'm sure many will continue to create classes in the vein of assuming that it has existed since the game's inception, and including all the necessary cards that come with that interpretation, some may prefer to see how Blizzard approaches it.
We've already seen, for example, 12 Demon Hunter cards from the upcoming expansion - 5 Commons, 4 Rares and 3 Epics - which shows that their way of counteracting the imbalanced number of cards Demon Hunters will have in Standard seems to be to simply print more cards for them than normal. This doesn't even take into consideration the fact that we've seen 7 Basic cards and no Classic cards for them, meaning there's plenty more to come.
A few of my favourites of the ones revealed so far
Beyond the insight into the actual design process of a new class, there's several interesting implications for the established 'rules' of creating classes. Demons, for example, are often seen as an exclusively Warlock thing; with Demon Hunter, we can see that any Custom Class could have them and not go against some unspoken Blizzard design directive. Their Hero Power is 1 mana, another 'rule' that seems not as set in stone as we may have thought.
Soul Cleave is a Basic card which features the Lifesteal keyword, a choice I am a huge fan of and something that's great to see making its way to the Core Set. Similarly, Coordinated Strike is a Basic card with Rush, another delightful addition which I'd love to see appear in future reworks.
Speaking of reworks...
In the past month or so we've featured two separate Priest Core Set reworks in our Fan Community Spotlight series - my own, and one by CheeseEtc. Blizzard, clearly inspired by us, decided to have their own crack at the idea.
Look at all these new cards!
I find it simply fascinating to see how different both my and Cheese's approaches were to Blizzard's approach. Where we took cards from future expansions and slotted them in where appropriate in many cases, every new introduction by Blizzard is a completely new design. Both Cheese and I were also far more conservative with buffing or nerfing cards than Blizzard was.
While we don't know what cards have been removed to make way for these new cards yet (beyond Prophet Velen, a prediction both Cheese and I made), I'll be very interested to see the state of the new Priest Core Set come this new expansion. It certainly looks like the focus is different, moving away from explicit damage combos, but with an interesting amount of spells with reduced mana costs, perhaps indicating a greater focus on spell synergies in the future?
Suffice to say, this new expansion looks to be great already. I for one can't wait to see the full breadth of Demon Hunter cards, so I can start coming up with my own ideas to backdate them.
Two Tribes Go To War
As always, we'll end on our notice that the next WCDC is underway! Stick those tribes together and make them play nice.
Comments
I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the leak yesterday (and it wasn't even the biggest of the day for me). They actually did it! They changed Priest's core set! Nice timing. Since I pretty much won 2 weeks of holiday that means I will have time to work on other class core sets.
The first thing I noticed: Blizzard went into the same direction as Shadows and I for Priest's primary identity: A class that seeks to win through
The second thing I noticed, besides the fact that they didn't reverse-HoF anything is how redundant the new cards are. That is a lot of the cards have very similar effects and only varies in their numbers. Redundancy isn't a bad in and of itself as more redundancy = more consistency and more viability. However this is done at the expense of internal diversity. I don't see any "Razakus-like" combo synergies, any resurrect cards, or any Deathrattle cards. I can understand their design choices for the first two but it's also very limiting. It means they will have to print new cards for each of those themes every time they want to push them...I guess it makes sens from a €€€ perspective.
As for DH, I think the reason why we didn't see any Classic DH cards is because...they don't exist. My guess is that DH is not a true 10th class but a yearly class that will rotate alongside the Year of the Phoenix.
Inner Fire - Divine Spirit will still the main priest win condition (FML).
Will Velen and Cleric pass away?
There's no confirmation yet that the new dhunter cards are from the next expansion, is there? Since there's 3 epics, I naturally assumed its going to be part of the classic set. After all, the class got to have an evergreen classic set.
The one mana hp going to be a problem at some point, I'm sure.
All 12 of the non-Basic cards feature a previously unseen watermark, presumably the one for the upcoming expansion.
As far as I can tell, we haven't seen any of their Classic cards yet, which is very exciting.
maybe they're overhauling the classic set in some regard and DHs don't even get one