Introduction
Whispers of the Old Gods is coming to an end, not a literal end since the expansion will be here until the early months of 2018, but because a new expansion is just around the corner as it will be announced tomorrow.
As such, I decided it was timely ideal to make the final WOG article a Power Rankings one, since we can finally look back at everything that happened and tell which of the cards in the expansion had the most impact in the game.
Power Rankings is a series of articles that I put in hibernation not some time ago that talked about the best cards in the game, ranking them from 1 to 10. This idea was taken from competitive “Magic: The Gathering” websites and was well accepted here in the Hearthstoneplayers community.
So, with no more delays let’s start talking about the WOG cards that had the best impact on the game!
rank 1 – Flamewreathed Faceless
So I had quite the trouble deciding which card was going to make it to the first place of the Power Rankings, because all the top 3 cards were super valuable to their archetypes.
Another important thing to note is that all the top-5 cards listed here have a best-friend card, which is that other one card that complemented this card’s existence. In flamewreathed-faceless’s case, the one that gave it extra firepower was thing-from-below, which ultimately joined forces with Aggro Shaman, making the deck a powerful Hybrid of Aggro and Midrange, and the strongest version by far.
Now, to Flamewreathed Faceless, it is so uniquely overpowered that it actually make Shaman possible! Not that Aggro Shaman wouldn’t be playable without it, since it already had so many overpowered cards added to the class in the previous expansions, but our Flamewreathed friend actually made it possible for Shamans to maintain a top tier-1 strategy, and is the reason why we decided to ultimately put it in the top of our expansion Power Rankings.
Rank 2 – Darkshire Councilman
Another card that had quite the impact since day 1 and managed to keep a whole archetype at the top of the metagame charts for a whole expansion was Darkshire Councilman.
The card, combined with its best friends forbidden-ritual and possessed-villager, managed to make Zoo once again the archetype of choice for competitive Warlocks all over the globe, giving the deck a 3-drop that could snowball into the late game generating so much tempo that the opponents would be desperate to remove it even if it only had 1 attack.
Darkshire Councilman is Zoo’s new face, and is the reason why we decided to keep it as the Rank 2 of our ultimate WOG Power Rankings.
Rank 3 – Fandral Staghelm
Staghelm is a guy that I surely wanted to put in the top of our Power Rankings, when measuring his power and the number of cards he made viable I really came close to putting him in our #1 spot, but ultimately I wouldn’t be giving real credit to the best WOG cards, the ones that actually managed to keep their archetypes in the top of the metagame charts for a whole expansion.
Staghelm, however, found the druid class completely changed, with the huge amount of nerfs the class suffered it was quite hard to make new decks out of nowhere, and that is possibly the reason why it took so long for the perfect Druid builds to be made.
However, there is no denying how much Mr. Staghelm made druids viable. Not only viable as a class, but Staghelm himself made a lot of previously unplayable or fringe cards such as nourish and raven-idol to become archetype staples in a lot of different Druid builds, ultimately making a very powerful build – The token druid – appear and become a top build in the final weeks of WOG.
Rank 4 – Ravaging Ghoul
Another card that ultimately was added to every single archetype of its class was ravaging-ghoul. The card started being used in decks who aimed to both have extra whirlwind effects as well as dealing with the growing threat of Zoo, however, the card ultimately was deemed powerful enough to be a part of every warrior build, as it is nowadays.
This happens because the card had way too many interactions with Warrior cards, it even made fringe cards such as frothing-berserker better, ultimately being a 3-drop of choice in more midrange versions of Warrior together with the Ghoul, not to mention the card’s interaction with acolyte-of-pain, execute, battle-rage and so on.
The card got the Rank 4 slot of our ultimate Power Rankings because it is the sole WOG reason why so many Warrior archetypes were successful, as none of the would’ve been so without this card.
Rank 5 – Call of the Wild
And so the obviously Overpowered card from the expansion makes a cut in our top-5 cards. Despite being obviously broken, Call of the Wild wasn’t enough to push Hunters into the best cards in the game neither to make other cards viable, mostly given its high mana cost.
Call of the Wild is indeed one of the bests, if not THE best, 8-drop cards in the game, but given Hunter’s weak standard early game curves, forcing the deck to have sub-par meta-oriented cards in their composition as early game drops, the class couldn’t become an all-star amongst the uncontested classes at the top, and ultimately made Call of the Wild not reach a higher ranking in our Power Ranks.
The card is still very powerful, as it made Midrange Hunter powerful enough to keep competing with strong late game decks if built right, but wasn’t enough to justify a higher Power Rankings spot.
Ranks 6 through 10
Rank 6 – cthun.
Rank 7 – nzoth-the-corruptor.
Rank 8 – malkorok.
Rank 9 – cult-sorcerer.
Rank 10 – yogg-saron-hopes-end.
Closing
I wanted to rank cthun higher but in the end it wouldn’t have been fair with the other cards, so C’Thun took the 6th spot, which isn’t bad.
The whole Power Ranking system was based on how much the cards influenced in making their decks successful, followed by how powerful was the new archetypes they created. I think this was the correct ranking and I think it is ok if you disagree, just don’t forget to post your opinion in the comments!
With this article, all the WOG articles come to an end (at least mine, i’ll be theorycrafting on the next expansion as soon as it’s out though, so you probably won’t miss me), I loved this expansion and our ride through awesome articles, hope you guys also enjoyed everything we had in WOG and we’re good to go to our next expansion!
Hope you guys enjoyed this article too, we’ll be seeing each other again with content about the next expansion!
Love you guys,
Nuba
Published: Jul 27, 2016 03:45 pm